On March 5, the mayors of Boston, Chicago, Denver, and New York City testified to the House Oversight Committee at the request of Republican members about their refusal to coordinate fully with U.S. immigration officials in the deportation of undocumented immigrants. On April 28, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that targets these “sanctuary cities” by pursuing “all necessary legal remedies and enforcement measures” against them. The heated exchanges in Congress and the executive order prompt a basic question: Does immigration law wall off outsiders or define local communities?
If the physical border is central, then immigration law is readily cast as serving to protect “us” on the inside from “them” on the outside. It can become natural to see migrants as invaders, to use wartime measures such as the Alien Enemies Act to deport people, and to disregard what the Constitution requires by way of due process.
A different view is that immigration law defines communities inside the United States. Some people welcome newcomers, and others want to keep them out. Immigration law emerges from debates among many groups of “us” here. Some of us think that newcomers have a place in the future of their communities. Others disagree. But that’s the debate.
It matters which view of immigration law wins out—one focused on border enforcement or one focused on community building. The current moment reflects the dominance of the border-focused view. How did this happen? The answer requires seeing how immigration debates have evolved over the past forty years.
The 1980s and 1990s: The Undocumented at Center Stage
Immigration politics in the United States today aren’t what they were forty years ago, when the focus was the undocumented. The 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) reflected a political compromise. It allowed for both stiffer enforcement of immigration laws and offered ing legal status to many noncitizens without lawful status. This legislation had bipartisan support and opposition in Congress, and Republican president Ronald Reagan signed it into law.
Among IRCA’s provisions were sanctions on employers who hired undocumented workers. The increase in the unauthorized population in the 1970s and 1980s prompted calls for an end to tolerance of immigration outside the law, and stiffer enforcement inside the country reflected that mood. IRCA also increased funding for enforcement inside the United States and on the border.
The other half of the compromise in IRCA was legalization, which emerged from immigrants’ rights advocacy that reflected the civil rights movement before it. Many of the people who asserted claims to belonging in the United States were the undocumented. They had no lawful status, but many had lived in the United States for years. The amnesty that they won in 1986 as part of IRCA made several million undocumented people eligible to become lawful permanent residents in two years, and then to become U.S. citizens five years later.
The 1986 law didn’t do much to fix the mismatch between an economy with a great need for workers and an immigration system that made it very hard to come to work. Migration patterns persisted. The undocumented population grew, as did concerns in the 1990s in both Democratic and Republican parties. One side of debates pressed for stiffer immigration enforcement. The other side urged expansion of lawful pathways or legalization of the undocumented, or both.
In the 1990s, enforcement won out. The political focus remained the undocumented. In 1994, Californian voters approved Proposition 187, which tried to cut off public education and public benefit payments to the undocumented. Though federal courts struck down Proposition 187 as inconsistent with federal law, the same political energy led to stiffer federal enforcement. First came border control initiatives from Democratic president Bill Clinton. Legislation made many more noncitizens deportable and expanded immigration detention.
The 2000s: (Re)Debating Enforcement Against the Undocumented
As immigration politics evolved into the twenty-first century, the debate centered on the 1996 enforcement laws and the undocumented. Much of the immigrants’ rights movement tried to “fix ’96,” coalescing around demands for the fair treatment of undocumented people. Advocates pushed for due process and legalization and against the deportation of noncitizens. Comparable demands sought to help temporary workers inside the United States who were marginalized by an immigration regime that offered few labor protections and made their lives precarious.
In spite of these efforts, federal politics in the 2000s continued the pro-enforcement orientation of the 1990s. This trend became more pronounced in 2008. As presidential candidate, Republican John McCain called for strict enforcement against the undocumented, even though as a senator he had co-authored a broad legalization bill.
In parallel with these federal developments, some states and localities tried to intensify immigration enforcement inside the United States. For example, a local law in Hazleton, Pennsylvania, tried to keep undocumented noncitizens from getting jobs or renting housing. Arizona enacted a law that required state and local police to get directly involved in immigration arrests.
The 2010s: The Ground Shifts
During the 2010s, immigration politics shifted away from the undocumented. The recession of 2008 led to a drop in their numbers. The dominant images of migrants shifted. They were no longer day laborers in Home Depot parking lots. Instead, they were people from Central America in “caravans” heading north to the southern border of the United States. The U.S.- Mexico border came to dominate the news.
This shift was steady, driven by structural and regional—and even worldwide—migration trends that reflected armed conflict, environmental crises, and civil disorder. Transportation became more accessible, and information about migration options became much more broadly available.
The combined effects of these shifts caught the Democratic Party and the immigrants’ rights community flat-footed. They continued to rely on the civil rights rhetoric that they had deployed to argue that the undocumented belonged and deserved lawful status, not deportation.
But migration politics had shifted from the undocumented to refugees. Arguments and coalitions that previously had political traction in support of civil rights for the undocumented didn’t work when advocates urged protection for forced migrants who had never been in the United States.
2015: Immigration Policy Becomes Border Policy
Trump entered a politics ripe for his rhetoric. Along with parallel actors worldwide, he steered politics away from debates over whether the undocumented or other noncitizens are part of communities in the United States who deserve recognition. Instead, Trump cast immigration policy as a matter of national self-defense against hordes of invaders climbing over fences.
The debate continued as Trump defined it, as protection against outsiders. Advocates for immigrants countered that a 30-foot wall was a waste. But they were on the defensive, even if they didn’t always realize it. Even when advocates scored points on border enforcement, they lost the fight to say that immigration debates go beyond what happens the border.
At this point, these political messages combined to turn immigration policy into border policy:
- that immigration policy is a matter of self-defense, protecting “us” from “them”; the language of “invasion” took hold among immigration skeptics;
- that self-defense requires a unilateral strategy of national sovereignty; asylum came to be labeled as a scam;
- that responding to migration requires quick action and immediate results; if the visible problem is people on the border, then build a higher wall;
- that long-term solutions are too complex to support with money or patience; and
- that addressing root causes of migration is vague idealism at best.
The 2020s: Serious Solutions Become Third Rails
This messaging turned immigration policy almost entirely into border policy and an area for quick political gain for politicians like Trump. Immigration policy offered much less traction for former vice president Kamala Harris, for whom immigration became a matter of damage control rather than a way to win votes.
Take the program introduced by former president Joe Biden that offered migrants fleeing dire circumstances in Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela permission to come to the United States in a temporary status called “parole.” Presidents of both parties going back to Dwight Eisenhower have paroled in large groups of forced migrants until their long-term needs could be assessed.
By granting protection based on applications filed in the applicant’s home region, parole takes pressure off the physical border and offers a way to rethink how to address migration. Parole moves toward transnational cooperation with transit countries and with migrants’ countries of origin. Parole prompts rethinking the notion of “capacity” by mobilizing private sponsors and letting newcomers leave border areas for parts of the country where they might be more welcome.
In short, parole could lead to meaningful change in humanitarian protection. But parole requires looking at immigration policy as more than border policy. The Trump administration’s opposition to parole reflects its determination to make immigration policy about the border.
Doing something about the border alone is much too a narrow way to think about immigration policy. To debate the height and technology of a border wall is like thinking about international relations by arguing over military strategies and how many airplanes to fly and bombs to drop.
A Way Forward: Immigration Policy as Community Building
Allowing the immigration debate to be just a border debate doesn’t match reality. Immigration is much more about the roles that newcomers play in communities. It’s about education, both to boost economic prosperity for all, and to help immigrants participate in American society. It’s about how to build the best communities inside the United States.
Redefining immigration policy around community building has tremendous potential to restore bipartisanship to immigration locally, in initiatives to revitalize local and regional economies and shift the debate from quick fixes to a plan for harnessing immigration for the long-term good of the country. A community-based view allows serious steps to share—including with immigration skeptics—the overall prosperity that immigration can bring to communities. A community-based view also allows honest discussion of why over 11 million live in the United States without lawful status and whether the reasons for their arrival or the contributions that they have since coming here are enough to justify full inclusion.
State and local policies can play a key role as a crucial arena for creative thinking and meaningful, bipartisan steps forward. Some of these policies have come to be called “sanctuary” policies. But fundamentally, they are policies to build inclusive communities, sometimes by spending local revenues for local needs rather than for federal immigration enforcement, and sometimes by including noncitizens through ID cards, driver’s licenses, medical services, discounted resident tuition, and in other ways. When we think of immigration law as how we build communities, then local debates and local decisionmaking make perfect sense.
Hiroshi Motomura is the author of Borders and Belonging: Toward a Fair Immigration Policy, published in January 2025 by Oxford University Press.
