One of the arguments most often made in favor of Beto O’Rourke’s presidential run, which he formally announced Thursday, is that O’Rourke — a former Congress member from El Paso, Texas, who excited Democrats across the country while losing his Senate race to Ted Cruz — is naturally strong on the issues of immigration and the US-Mexico border.
O’Rourke’s leadership on immigration was a theme of the press coverage around his campaign announcement — kicked off with a cover profile in Vanity Fair that treated it as a foregone conclusion: “His biggest strength, of course, is his unique credibility as a voice on immigration,” wrote Joe Hagan.
And when he drew some criticism from the left over his first few days on the trail, immigration was the strength he fell back on, pointing out to NBC’s Chuck Todd on Sunday:
I’ll tell you I also happen to be the only candidate from the United States–Mexico border at a time that that dominates so much of our national conversation and legislative efforts and the things that the president talks about. There’s one candidate who’s there who can talk about the profoundly positive impact that immigrants have had on our safety and our security, as well as our success and our strength.
That is, of course, a bit of an overstatement. Other candidates in the 2020 race are the children of immigrants (including California Sen. Kamala Harris, born to two immigrant parents, and South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg, whose father was an immigrant).
But it’s easy to see why O’Rourke wants to use his border rep to claim that he’s the field’s natural leader on the immigration issue. It makes him a natural counterbalance to President Trump, who is widely assumed to run the same immigration-panic-centric playbook in 2020 that he did (successfully) in 2016 and (unsuccessfully) in 2018. That could be a powerful way to distinguish O’Rourke from the rest of the Democratic field.
As an immigration reporter who’s been following O’Rourke’s career from the beginning, I’ve often had trouble with the assumption that immigration is Beto’s natural strong suit — and his path to victory in the 2020 Democratic primary campaign. It’s not inaccurate, but it’s necessarily accurate in the way people might assume it is.
O’Rourke definitely understands the realities of the US-Mexico border as well as any member of Congress, and better than anybody else running for president right now. And he’s always been able to talk about immigration in a compelling way, weaving together the nuts and bolts of everyday life at the border with a compelling story about the importance of immigration to American identity — which is a central theme of the progressive resistance to Trump.
But the role of immigration in the 2020 presidential race, so far, isn’t that no one but Beto is talking about it. It’s that so far, Democrats have embraced immigration as a rhetorical theme, using it as a shorthand for a pluralistic American legacy in which Donald Trump is an embarrassing step backward.
So far, there hasn’t been the same attention to immigration as a policy issue: actual proposals for what a more humane system would look like, addressing not only the Trump administration’s innovations but parts of the immigration regime run by Barack Obama that today’s Democrats are no longer sanguine about.
Beto O’Rourke can change that — and maybe push the rest of the Democratic field to have as substantive a discussion of immigration policy as it’s currently having over Medicare-for-all or even the Green New Deal. But it’s not a foregone conclusion that he will.
Why Beto’s border experience matters
The first time I noticed Beto O’Rourke as a member of Congress was during a delightfully wonky (and, unsurprisingly, under-attended) 2013 hearing of the House Subcommittee on Immigration and Border Security on the statistics the Homeland Security Department calculates to measure border security.
In a five-minute question period, O’Rourke, then a sophomore member of Congress representing the western tip of Texas (including El Paso), channeled wonky frustration with existing metrics of border security, hammered home that the border was as secure as it had ever been (in concert with Kevin McAleenan, now Trump’s head of Customs and Border Protection), aired complaints about processing times into El Paso from Ciudad Juarez, and called for comprehensive immigration reform. And he did it (mostly) in the guise of actual questions.
It was an impressive performance, balancing constituent services, oversight, and the bully pulpit. That’s a good encapsulation of O’Rourke’s performance in Congress more generally.
It isn’t just that O’Rourke can talk credibly about the shared economy and history of El Paso and Ciudad Juarez, and about how El Paso is the “safest city in America.” Representing a border district meant that understanding the current immigration system was a simple matter of constituent work — a district office priority as much as a Washington office one.
O’Rourke and his staff knew as much about the ins and outs of border management as anyone else in Congress. They understood business concerns about facilitating trade at ports of entry, because they could end up on the wrong end of a phone call from an angry exporter.
After Trump began his tenure, O’Rourke’s office, like many others, was involved in immigration casework for people in their districts. But they also kept an eye on the Trump administration’s attempts to limit how many asylum seekers could enter the US at ports of entry. They communicated with El Paso nonprofits about what was happening to immigrant families once the government released them from detention. While other members of Congress expressed outrage about the “tent city” for unaccompanied children in Tornillo, O’Rourke pressured the contractor to limit involvement with Trump’s immigration enforcement regime.
El Paso is the epicenter of the current border crisis, the result of unprecedented flows of migrant families meeting a system not designed for them. It’s also a key spot in the US-Mexico relationship, and a city where many immigrants themselves settle. It’s easy to see why someone from El Paso — even a white man without the immediate immigrant family history of other candidates in the field —would be a compelling foil for Trump in 2020.
The question is whether that will be a sufficient way for O’Rourke to distinguish himself from the other candidates, some of whom are also plenty comfortable talking about immigration, as the primaries get underway.
The Democratic field’s weakness on immigration is O’Rourke’s weakness generally
Immigration is a central issue in the campaign against Trump. Pretty much all the Democrats mentioned it in their launch speeches. And it’s usually talked about the same way: as a symbol of the moral bankruptcy of the Trump administration. The common motif is that what the US government is doing now is not who Americans are.
But immigration isn’t just an abstract story that Americans tell about themselves. It’s a vast government system that includes everything from law enforcement’s stance toward the existing unauthorized immigrant population to efforts to address the current flow of asylum seekers into the US, the regulation of temporary work visas, the processing of citizenship applications, and global refugee policy.
In some of these areas, Trump’s restrictive approach has departed from that of his predecessors, and a Democratic alternative could just be to restore the pre-Trump status quo. But in other areas — especially when it comes to enforcement — Trump’s policies are harder to distinguish from actions taken by Obama. A future Democratic president will have to decide whether simply returning to the pre-Trump status quo on immigration is enough — and what an alternative path forward would look like.
And though we’re still quite early in the cycle, several candidates have released detailed plans in various policy areas, and immigration isn’t among them.
There are a few likely reasons for this. One is that the Democratic field is heavy on senators, and so far, much of the policy debate is being driven by Senate bills that double as candidates’ policy proposals. Because immigration is an administrative issue as much as a legislative one, it’s harder to turn into a bill than a proposal for universal child care or Medicare-for-all. (To the extent that there is an immigration policy that every major Democratic candidate agrees on, it’s the DREAM Act — a legislative proposal, but one that has been a matter of Democratic consensus for a decade.) Part is probably that the people who are the most direct targets of immigration enforcement can’t vote.
And one factor is likely that the Democratic base has moved substantially to the left on the question of when (or if) immigration enforcement is acceptable at all — and the party’s leadership is still trying to figure out how to satisfy that shift while retaining their self-image as the party of responsible governance.
So far, candidates have generally fallen back on the same talking points — comprehensive immigration reform with a path to citizenship for the 11 million unauthorized immigrants currently in the US, a special need to attend to the status of DREAMers, the importance of expanding legal immigration — that Democrats have used for the past several cycles. No one has called out the gap between vintage-2013 policies and a vintage-2018 base. Maybe it’s in no one’s interest to.
O’Rourke could be in the best position to push the rest of the field on this. The other obvious candidate is Julián Castro, who is also from Texas and also not currently a senator. (Castro, obviously, has the added interest of running as the would-be first Latinx major-party presidential nominee.) But while Castro has some other signature policy experience to his name, immigration is supposed to be O’Rourke’s wheelhouse. If someone wants to stand out as the candidate with big ideas about immigration, it could be him.
The problem is that this would mean cutting against type. O’Rourke’s self-styled appeal, in his Senate race against Cruz and now in his presidential campaign, is grounded in his rhetorical style more than his policy substance. In the months after his Senate run, he’s floundered on the specifics of his views on everything from health care to, yes, immigration.
When a Washington Post reporter asked in January what should be done to address visa overstays (which O’Rourke and other Democrats like to point out account for a larger share of unauthorized migration over the past decade than illegal border crossings), O’Rourke paused and said, “I don’t know.” The reporter’s premise might have been questionable — visa overstays may have accounted for more unauthorized migration than illegal crossings, but since the unauthorized population hasn’t changed for the past decade, it might be fair to say they’re not an urgent problem — but O’Rourke didn’t question it.
There’s no rule that says a Democrat has to have an alternative policy vision to run on an issue. It’s not guaranteed that Democrats will even hash out an immigration agenda before November 2020, though they’ll almost certainly continue to talk about the issue in broad terms. If anyone’s going to force the field (and the party) to do that, it would probably be O’Rourke. But whether he wants to — or can — remains to be seen.