Trump, Immigration, and the Borders: A Consequential Moment or Just a Step to the Right?
Image: Robert P. Alvarez / Shutterstock
By Seth M.M. Stodder
As Barack Obama famously said, “Elections have consequences.” Few things show this more starkly than the sharply nativist “U-Turn” President Trump has made on U.S. immigration and border policy. In his Inaugural Address, and in the flurry of executive orders and presidential proclamations issued on January 20, 2025, President Trump said his administration will seal the U.S.-Mexico border against asylum seekers and other migrants, start a “mass deportation” of millions of undocumented people, end “birthright” citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants and temporary visitors, pause all refugee admissions, and restrict legal pathways to the U.S. President Trump’s new direction is best summed up by Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s border and immigration policy: “America is for Americans and Americans only.”
This isn’t America’s first “U-Turn” on immigration. When President Biden took office, he reversed many Trump policies on “day one” of his administration - and Trump similarly turned away from President Obama’s policies. These kinds of post-election policy zig-zags aren’t new.
But every once in a while, a “U-Turn” becomes more consequential. For most of America’s history since Independence, we had open borders – through which millions entered the country, creating the “Nation of Immigrants” that America is today. This included the Irish who escaped the Potato Famine in the 1840s-1850s, the Chinese who came to build the Transcontinental Railroad in the 1860s, and the Italians, Poles, Russian Jews, and others who came to escape poverty and persecution starting in the 1880s - building to a wave that brought 14.5 million immigrants into the country between 1900-1919, the largest immigration surge in U.S. history. This provoked a right-wing nativist backlash, fueled in part by the Ku Klux Klan and the racist pseudoscience of eugenics, whose adherents produced “scientific” papers purportedly showing that white people from Northern and Western Europe were racially and intellectually superior to Southern and Eastern Europeans, Jews, Asians, and Africans. After World War I, this movement fused with America’s post-war turn to isolationism and produced the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924, which imposed racist quotas slamming the “Golden Door” shut to most immigrants from outside Northern and Western Europe for two generations. So, 1924 was one of those consequential years.
Another big shift came in 1965, at the height of the Civil Rights Era, when President Lyndon Johnson and Congress repealed the Johnson-Reed Act and re-opened America to immigrants from all over the world, transforming the country in the decades that followed through waves of immigration from Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
Will Trump’s 2025 “U-Turn” Be Another Historically Consequential Shift?
President Trump and his die-hard “MAGA” supporters clearly want to turn the clock back to make America look something more like the seemingly impregnable fortress against immigrants that it became for the decades after the Johnson-Reed Act of 1924. Will they succeed?
It is hard to know, but as Mark Twain might say, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” As happened in the years before 1924, America has experienced a truly historic wave of immigration. According to a recent analysis by the New York Times, the immigration surge we experienced during President Biden’s four years in office has been the largest and fastest in U.S. history, with a net migration of 8 million people into the country in just the four years since 2021 - a bigger and quicker wave than what America saw even in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. And approximately 60 percent of these migrants – 5 million people – entered the country illegally, mostly across the U.S.-Mexico border. This wave of illegal immigration across the border during the Biden years, and the sense that the Biden Administration was either unable or unwilling to stop it, was extremely unpopular with the majority of Americans, and this was a key factor fueling President Trump’s victory over Vice President Harris last November.
But will the backlash against this recent immigration wave allow President Trump to shift the country in a profoundly anti-immigrant direction that could last for generations, like what happened in the decades after the Johnson-Reed Act in 1924? Time will tell, but President Trump will face significant resistance. He may well succeed in solidifying and expanding border control measures already implemented by President Biden and in blocking the flow of asylum seekers into the country - at least for a time. Many of these border security measures will have bipartisan support, and will likely be bolstered by substantial funding and statutory changes enacted by the new Congress.
But, in all likelihood, most of President Trump’s other initiatives - in particular, his “mass deportation” effort and his goal of ending “birthright citizenship” - will be stymied by popular opposition, legal constraints, business community resistance, and state/local pushback, thereby preventing him from realizing a truly transformational and lasting nativist shift in direction for the country.
Border Security - Bipartisan Consensus and Economic Realism
In June 2024, after more than three years of mass migration across the U.S.-Mexico border and perhaps sensing dire political peril, the Biden Administration finally cracked down on the border between the official Ports of Entry (POEs) by blocking most illegal border crossers from being able to claim asylum protection as a way of being allowed into the country. These steps, together with increased Mexican enforcement, brought greater control to the border, with migrant apprehensions between the POEs sinking to four-year lows. Although Border Patrol Agents still apprehended over 47,000 illegal border crossers between the POEs in December 2024, this was less than one-fifth the number apprehended in December 2023 (249,740).
Unfortunately for the Harris-Walz campaign, the tightening of the borders came too late to change the result of the presidential election. But tighter borders are here to stay, and will only get tighter. On his first day in office, President Trump proclaimed a “National Emergency” at the U.S.-Mexico border, saying that “America’s sovereignty is under attack,” and that “our southern border is overrun by cartels, criminal gangs, known terrorists, human traffickers, smugglers, unvetted military-age males from foreign adversaries, and illicit narcotics that harm Americans.” Consistent with the emergency declaration, President Trump has directed the U.S. military to be available to support the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) - both through providing additional manpower to support U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and through assistance in building the so-called “Wall” President Trump has wanted to construct along the U.S.-Mexico border.
In separate orders, President Trump also has directed the Secretary of Defense to add the territorial defense of the U.S. borders to the mission of the U.S. Northern Command and has further ordered 1,500 troops to the border - a number that may be expanded to 10,000. President Trump’s border security efforts will, no doubt, be bolstered by specific statutory authorizations and increased appropriations from Congress - which seems set to fund the hiring of more CBP Border Patrol Agents and ICE officers, as well as more fences and technology to build more of Trump’s “Wall.”
While it is possible that Democrats could attempt to resist Trump’s effort to secure the border, this would likely be politically perilous, given the public’s current mood. Moreover, both President Biden and Vice President Harris during the campaign emphasized their support for stricter border controls and additional border security funding from Congress. Indeed, the bipartisan border security bill negotiated in 2024 and supported by the Biden Administration (but then blocked for political reasons by President Trump), would have also provided substantial new funding for border security and expanded presidential authority to control the border. It is hard to see Democrats backing away from that position, given the current political climate.
At the end of the day, Democrats are no doubt chastened by their political defeat in 2024, which to a substantial degree was fueled by public anger at the out-of-control border. If even the New York Times Editorial Board is calling for Democrats to, “embrace the need to control who enters the country,” you know there is now likely a lasting bipartisan consensus favoring stricter border control.
As a matter of practical reality, will this surge of border security resources really stem the flow of migrants across the border? Maybe, although some realism is warranted. The basic structural realities of immigration remain - people south of the border and around the world desperate for a better life for their families, a U.S. economy starving for labor that will become even more ravenous for it if President Trump’s “mass deportation” succeeds, and well-funded human smuggling organizations able to move people wherever they want to go, facilitated by corrupt government officials. Migrants who had been using the asylum system or one of the “lawful pathways” created by the Biden Administration as an easy way of getting into the country will now face a more difficult pathway. But at the right price paid to a human smuggling organization, the most determined migrants - or criminals - will still find a way to sneak in.
At the end of the day, the laws of supply and demand are hard to defy - especially with a U.S. economy still struggling with labor shortages and inflationary pressures. As recently noted by Stephanie Ferguson Melhorn, the Senior Director for Workforce & International Labor Policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: “We hear every day from our member companies - of every size and industry, across nearly every state - that they’re facing unprecedented challenges trying to find enough workers to fill open jobs. Right now, the latest data shows that we have 8 million job openings in the U.S. but only 6.8 million unemployed workers.” The millions of migrants who entered the country during the Biden years - especially those who came through “lawful pathways” and were able to obtain work authorization - filled many of those jobs, which helped hold down inflation and, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, spur further job growth in the U.S. economy.
Ultimately, the U.S. needs immigrants and foreign guest workers to fill jobs to keep our economy growing - and America’s native-born population cannot meet that need. The opposite is true, in fact, with the Congressional Budget Office assessing that the U.S. fertility rate has now sunk to 1.67 births per woman - well below the 2.1 rate of replacement. By 2040, absent immigration, the U.S. population will begin shrinking. So, the longer they last, Trump’s tight border restrictions will eventually force Americans to choose between having a high-inflation, slow-growth economy starved of workers - or figuring out a way of getting America’s employers the workers they desperately need, ideally through lawful channels (such as expanded work visa categories). But if those lawful channels do not open up, the human smuggling gangs will inevitably find a way to meet that demand. And at that point, the tight border controls will come under enormous pressure.
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Seth Stodder is a Member of the Pacific Council, teaches national security law at the University of Southern California Law School, and is a nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. He served in the Obama Administration as Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Borders, Immigration & Trade, and as Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Threat Prevention and Security. Previously, he served in the Bush Administration as Director of Policy for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The views and opinions expressed here are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Pacific Council.
