Not even Bernie

by Michael Barone, for The Daily Signal

Who said this? “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.” The speaker went on, “Trump did a better job. I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. Biden didn’t do it.”

It was Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, in characteristic candor. If, as Milton Friedman argued, you can’t have open borders and a generous welfare state, Sanders, as a self-described socialist, prefers the welfare state.

The facts at this point are not in much doubt. The Pew Research Institute, not an anti-immigration outfit, estimated that there were 10.2 million “unauthorized” immigrants (members of groups not approved for legal immigration) in the United States in 2019, the year before former President Joe Biden was elected, and 10.5 million in 2021, the year he took office.

That number, as Pew’s Jeffrey Passel and Jens Manuel Krogstad wrote, grew to 14 million in 2023, “the largest two-year increase in more than 30 years of our estimates.”

The illegal population probably peaked at about 14.5 million in early 2024, when the Biden Democrats, who said they had no alternative to their open-border policies without new legislation, suddenly decided they actually could clamp down using existing legislation.

Let’s put that in a longer perspective. Pew estimated that the illegal immigration population increased from 3.5 million in 1990 to a peak of 12.2 million in 2007-08, the years housing prices and financial markets crashed. Suddenly, net migration from Mexico turned negative, and the illegal population fell through attrition until Biden took office. Then it rose from 10.5 million to 14.5 million.

That number has trended downward since President Donald Trump took office last January. Earlier this month, in a report for the Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes illegal immigration and favors lower legal immigration, analysts Steven Camarota and Karen Zeigler estimated, based on multiple government statistics, that the foreign-born population declined by 2.2 million since Trump was inaugurated in January. Presumably, almost all of this change can be attributed to illegal immigrants.

This provides some backing for the Trump Department of Homeland Security’s claim that it removed 527,000 illegal immigrants and that 1.6 million “have voluntarily self-deported.”

That’s obviously an estimate, but it’s not improbable. If 4 million additional illegal immigrants were incentivized to arrive in the first three-plus years of the Biden administration, as compared to a net decline in the 12 years from 2008 to 2020, it’s plausible that 2 million were compelled or decided to leave due to the highly publicized and aggressive actions in 2025.

That’s not an uncontroversial process, of course. Government is a blunt instrument, and no doubt Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have wrongfully detained some genuine citizens and legal immigrants. Some people who have lived quietly and constructively, though illegally, for many years have had their lives overturned. There’s an argument that Trump officials have acted too aggressively and in disregard of the limited rights that illegal immigrants have.

But if some of the moral opprobrium for the harm done belongs to the Trump administration for arguably enforcing the law too vigorously, some moral opprobrium is owed also to the Biden administration, which deliberately refused to enforce the law in a way that left millions of people vulnerable to severe disruption.

My guess is that the current policy will disincentivize illegal immigration long after Trump, as he has conceded this week, leaves office in January 2029. Who will want to make long-term plans that can be ruined by sudden deportation or hurried self-deportation?

Much of the drama around the Trump administration’s enforcement of the law comes from opposition, sometimes forcible, of Democrat governors and mayors who promised, in the tradition of John C. Calhoun, to nullify federal law within their jurisdictions. And from self-starting liberals who use “ICE trackers” to violently impede the agency’s operations.

These people perhaps see themselves in the position of Northern opponents of the Fugitive Slave Act, who joined former Sen. William Seward in proclaiming, “There is a higher law.” But what is the higher law here? Barring people from entering the U.S. is not thrusting them into slavery.

The nullifiers’ legal position is similarly weak. In Arizona v. U.S., the Supreme Court in 2012 overturned parts of a state law that purported to strengthen immigration enforcement, saying federal law was controlling, even when officials were using discretion (as the government often does) to only partially enforce the statute. Much stronger is the argument that, under the Constitution’s supremacy clause, the states lack the power to prevent federal agencies from enforcing federal law.

In his 2020 campaign, Biden did not promise to reverse a dozen years of policy and welcome in 4 million unauthorized immigrants. He did not argue that every person in the world has a right to move to the U.S. Yet he did those things, and most elected Democrats continue to support them. As those “in this house we believe” signs say, “no human being is illegal.”

“Immigration is a blind spot where Democrats focus first on the needs of migrants rather than the needs of Americans,” Democrat analyst Josh Barro wrote. Democrats need to “firmly say ‘no’ and deny access to our country, even to people who stand to gain a lot by coming here—and part of saying ‘no’ requires having an effective government apparatus that deports people who are here without authorization.”

Instead, blue-state Democrats seem stuck in denial. They point to polls showing less insistence on reducing illegal immigration without realizing that, as Republican pollster Patrick Ruffini pointed out, “that may have something to do with the fact that illegal border crossings have plummeted to zero.” As for dismay at Trump administration enforcement tactics, that’s real, but, as Ruffini noted, voters of all education levels prefer “a party that’s better at getting things done, even if its views are sometimes extreme.”

This gets back, doesn’t it, to Sanders’ words: “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.”