Progressives are pleading with Kamala Harris to celebrate and champion mass migration, but she is following the advice of her calculating corporate backers: Downplay the migration inflow that supercharges voter support for President Donald Trump.
“Harris and other Democrats have tactical incentives to avoid a full-on confrontation with those sentiments in the final weeks before next month’s election,” author Ron Brownstein wrote on October 10 for the Atlantic. “But the history of America’s experience with xenophobia indicates that Trump’s lurid attacks will only find a larger audience unless Harris, and others who believe in a more inclusive [globalist] society, challenge them more directly than they have so far.”
“There has been such a desire to tamp down the border debate [that] there’s been less of an ability to pivot to other parts of the immigration debate that could be helpful,” Carlos Odio, senior vice president for research at the polling firm Equis, told The Atlantic.
“Ignoring racist dog whistles … only makes them more potent … [and] voter sentiment about immigrants to grow more toxic,” progressive advocate Anat Shenker-Osorio complained in an October 20 article for Rolling Stone.
“Many left-learning immigrant advocacy groups have been calling for a media blitz or change in polling questions to help Americans see how mass deportations would devastate families,” Axios.com reported on October 22. “We have to tell that story, and not let Trump define immigration for our country,” activist Maria Rodriguez told Axios.
Harris’s Silence Strategy
Harris has built her campaign on women’s support for abortion, and she directly endorses radical pro-abortion policies, including opposition to rules that allow religious employees at medical centers to avoid participation in abortions:
Let’s just start with a fundamental fact, a basic freedom has been taken from the women of America: the freedom to make decisions about their own body. And that cannot be negotiable, which is that we need to put back in the protections of Roe v. Wade. And that is it.
But Harris is minimizing and mumbling her public advocacy for her unpopular pro-migration policies, even in interviews with Spanish-language media.
In media appearances, she deflects questions about her border policies by touting her support for the 2024 border bill drafted by Senate leaders and Sen. James Lankford (R-OK). “A typical sentence on immigration for Harris is Noun, verb, Lankford,” Brownstein said.
For example, she told NBC News on October 22:
What the immigration system needs, is it needs to be fixed, and it needs to be fixed in a number of ways that include bringing forth a bill that conservative members of Congress, along with others, pulled together, that we supported actively, that would put 1500 more border agents at the border
…
My proposal includes strengthening what we must do to ensure that we have an orderly and humane immigration system and that we fix what has been bro- broken for a long time. It has transcended administrations, and it needs to be fixed.
But Harris is not touting migration and migrants in her bully pulpit speeches, and not using her campaign funds for a media blitz that portrays migrants in a favorable light. She’s not touting studies that claim economic benefits from migration, nor showcasing migrant children rescued from humanitarian disasters.
She has not even given swing voters even a token apology for her tacit support of Biden’s border breakdown, said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. That apology might bring over a few voters, he added.
Her media allies also shield her from the public. For example, the media routinely describe the Lankford bill as “tough.” But the bill funded only minor border improvements. Worse, the supposed border security bill actually loosened asylum rules to give easy entry to millions of economic migrants, plus quick work permits and fast-track citizenship. “The border never closes,” boasted a leading Democrat senator.
Similarly, the media has said little about Harris’s renewed support for a 2021 mass-migration bill that never even got a vote in the Democrat-majority Congress. “The first [2021] bill … is a priority for us as a nation and for the American people,” Harris told Fox News on October 16.
Her support for the 2021 bill shows that Harris is escalating her pro-migration policies despite the huge national shift against those policies, Krikorian noted:
She used to just be talking about the [2024 Senate border] bill as the solution, but now she’s talking about the amnesty bill that they introduced in 2021 as the solution. That had no [border] enforcement in it at all. It was just a straight amnesty [and] increased immigration bill … She’s not only not met the public concern halfway, she’s doubled down on this [2021] bill that was even too extreme for the Democratic Congress in 2021 to even consider in committee
The 2021 bill would have amnestied many millions of illegal migrants, imported millions of additional contract workers for blue-collar and white-collar jobs sought by Americans, and opened the borders to many millions of chain-migration job-seekers, consumers, and renters.
Likewise, her media allies do not mention her migration record in the Senate, the high migration levels in her economic plans, her likely inflow of 12 million migrants, or the contradictions between her plan to build more homes for Americans and to import more migrants who want the same houses.
Tha migration silence strategy is working: 60 percent of Americans say Harris “hasn’t clearly explained her policies” on illegal immigration, according to a poll by the Pew Research Center. Her 60 percent is twice the 30 percent who say Trump has not explained his plans.
Moreover, polls show the public underestimates the inflow of economic migrants — largely because the media hides the numbers.
Her silence is welcomed by corporate-backed advocacy groups, the Washington Post reported October 6:
“The threat that Trump represents is existential, so the first order of business is to make sure that he gets defeated,” said Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of the immigration advocacy group America’s Voice. “And come January, February of next year, we can have a conversation about the kind of policy interventions we’ll need, hopefully under a Harris administration.”
“We know, based on where she’s been in the past, that her policies are probably going to be aligned with UnidosUS’ policies,” said Carmen Feliciano, the advocacy chief for UnidosUS, a pro-migration group formerly named LaRaza.
“She can’t afford to look weak on the border if she wants to win,” Vox reported.
Harris’s only concession to popular opinion has been theatrical. “She just grudgingly went and had a picture of herself in front of Trump’s border fence,” Krikorian said. The clips from that brief event are being used in campaign ads that tout her supposedly “tough” border policies.
Meanwhile, her resentful progressive allies are ramping up the hate against Trump. The U.K. newspaper, the Guardian, for example, posted this claim about Trump’s plan to deport migrants:
It is a terrifying, horrifically immoral, and contemptibly bigoted proposal; racist, indifferent to humanity, and hostile to the principles of pluralism and equality. If it was enacted, it would be among the worst human rights catastrophes of all time.
The GOP, however, is keeping its popular migration policies in the news by forcing pro-migration journalists to cover the crises in cities, such as Springfield, Ohio, the toll of migrant crime, the economic burdens on Americans, the role of migration in housing costs, and the establishment’s legal contortions to favor migrants above Americans.
“What Donald Trump has proposed doing is we’re going to stop doing mass parole,” Sen. JD Vance said in Arizona on October 22, according to the New York Times. “We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status … Of course, you’re going to have people fleeing from tyranny, but that happens on a case-by-case basis, not by waving the magic government wand.”
The Democratic Base
Harris’ silent strategy exists because Democrats cannot even pretend to move towards the center on immigration, Krikorian said, because the rank-and-file progressives and the major donors viscerally oppose the existence of Americans’ national borders:
De facto open[-borders] immigration is a litmus test issue now on the left. It is an irreducible value. Every interest group or constituency group on the left sacrifices its ostensible interests [once] they conflict with unlimited immigration. They can’t even compromise when the election outcome depends on it … [because] I it is unacceptable in the activist class on the left to have any doubts about mass immigration.
[For donors and CEOs] I don’t think it’s just a matter of investors figuring “This is good for my bottom line.” Yes, it is. But those those guys at the top of big companies are emotionally and psychologically post-American already. Both their financial interest and their broader [post-American] worldview overlap here, so they think they’re doing good and they are happy they’re also doing well [economically].
“They see themselves as citizens of the world — [so they believe] immigration control is an atavistic and evil thing,” he added.
There is also much evidence that pro-migration investors have a tight hold on Harris’s campaign.
Harris’s campaign manager is David Plouffe, who took the Harris job while he was the chairman of the board at the nation’s most powerful pro-migration advocacy group, FWD.us.
The group was formed in 2013 by West Coast investors — led by Mark Zuckerberg — to push for the “Gang of Eight” amnesty bill. The lobbying is very rational because investors gain about $20 on the stock market for every $1 in profit generated by the government’s Extraction Migration policy of importing millions of wage-cutting workers, government-aided consumers, and apartment-sharing renters from poor countries.
The breadth of investors who founded and funded FWD.us was hidden from casual visitors to the group’s website sometime in 2021. But copies exist at other sites.
Once the Gang of Eight bill was defeated in 2014 by the GOP’s primary voters in Virginia’s seventh district, FWD.us developed a long-term campaign to double the nation’s population growth via migration. The group prefers to downplay the alternative policy of doubling productivity via corporate investments.
It funded and boosted many state-level advocacy groups, pro-DACA demonstrations, law firms, media influencers, and PR campaigns by university officials and a business group for construction, retail, and energy companies. It helped elect Biden and put their ally Alejandro Mayorkas into the top job at the Department of Homeland Security — where he imported at least 10 million migrants from 2021 to 2024 amid a dramatic rise in migrants’ deaths, sex trafficking. and colonialism-like brain drains.
FWD.us also pushed the 2021 and 2024 bills that Harris is supporting.
The group’s top lobbyist, Andrea Flores, is now working for Plouffe in Harris’s campaign, according to Vox.
In an article for Foreign Affairs magazine, Flores urged Washington to quietly import millions of migrants via government-managed pathways:
With both the demand for and the number of immigrants set to remain extraordinarily high, the only way to reduce unauthorized migration is to … make legal immigration easier by increasing pathways for entry into the United States,
The public gets alarmed by images of migration at the border, so the government should also set up a network to quietly transport migrants to U.S. towns and workplaces, and also to support them until they are established.
Images of disorder in border towns … as well as the increased presence of new arrivals lacking housing or work permits in U.S. cities, escalated public concern about the visible disarray of the U.S. immigration system … leading to major operational challenges and political discord
Public disclosures and debates are making it difficult to bring in new migrants, she noted:
Years of chaos at the border have amplified xenophobia at a time when the U.S. economy needs immigrants more than ever. Around 55 percent of Americans now support curbing immigration to the United States.
That game plan matches Harris’s say-little campaign strategy in the 2024 election. It also shows who has the true power in the Democrats’ coalition of loud progressives and quiet investors.
