In Competing Hearings, Democrats and Republicans Seek to Shape Immigration Narrative

Hundreds of illegal immigrants line up outside of the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City on June 6, 2023. (David Dee Delgado/Getty Images)

On-screen, a clip from the movie “Sound of Freedom” shows Department of Homeland Security special agent Tim Ballard, played by Jim Caviezel, rescuing a scared little boy from a trafficker at the border.

As the scene ends, the real Tim Ballard speaks: “This scene depicts a moment from my real life I'll never forget.”

Mr. Ballard was testifying before the Homeland Security Committee in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. He was one of four witnesses who appeared at a hearing on what the committee described as “the devastating human costs of the Biden–Mayorkas border crisis.”

Others who spoke included Mayra Cantu, the wife of a U.S. Border Patrol agent, and Sandy Snodgrass, the mother of a young Alaskan—Robert Bruce Snodgrass—who died of fentanyl poisoning.

“Alaska’s being targeted by the drug cartels,” she testified. Ms. Snodgrass recommended that the cartels and their partners be designated as terrorist organizations.

A cartel scout’s campsite can be seen below a tree on the Mexican side of the border wall near Naco in Cochise County, Ariz., on Dec. 6, 2021. (Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times)

Elsewhere in the nation’s capital, the Democrat-controlled Senate’s budget committee was holding a very different hearing on immigration.

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Its title, “Unlocking America’s Potential: How Immigration Fuels Economic Growth and Our Competitive Advantage,” cast the immigration debate in a different light.

“Research has shown that an influx of migrants and refugees leads to firm-level onshoring of investment,” Britta Glennon, an assistant professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said in her testimony before that committee.

“When we restrict immigration, we lose, and other countries gain instead,” Ms. Glennon said.

In another House hearing, this one titled “The Impact of Biden’s Open Border on the American Workforce,” the Center for Immigration Studies’ Steven Camarota spoke about some of the economic costs of the open border, particularly for Americans who compete against illegal entrants working for low wages.

“While having access to illegal immigrant workers may be desirable from the point of view of business owners, there is evidence that illegal immigration reduces the wages and employment of working-class Americans,” Mr. Camarota stated in his written testimony.

After returning from recess earlier this month, lawmakers have wasted little time driving competing narratives on an ongoing border crisis that has seen illegal immigrants pour across the southwest border and into sanctuary cities across the country.

The three hearings, scheduled for roughly the same time on Sept. 13, underscored the significance of the border, and immigration more generally, as the 2024 election approaches.

They also reaffirmed how deep the partisan divide on the issue runs, at least in today’s Washington.

Where many Republicans see a crisis, many Democrats see an opportunity.

Public Opinion and Immigration Realpolitik

Not so very long ago, the two major parties were more united on immigration—for better or for worse.

The Secure Fence Act of 2006, which helped fund hundreds of miles of border fencing, passed the Senate 80–19. Future President Barack Obama, then the junior Democratic senator from Illinois, was among its supporters.

A generation before that, the 1990 Immigration Act, which expanded legal immigration and created the “temporary protected status” category, among other moves, passed that same chamber 81–17.

With the exception of the late Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and a few others, all Senate Republicans voted for the bill.

So did most Senate Democrats, though not Tennessee’s Al Gore.

Although the bill met with more Republican opposition in the House, it passed there too.

A Republican president, George H.W. Bush, then signed it into law.

Former U.S. President George Bush visits a tent camp for earthquake survivors on the outskirts of Islamabad on Jan. 17, 2006. (John Moore/Getty Images)

In recent years, the immigration issue has become more polarized along partisan lines.

Opinion polling could offer some insight into why.

According to Gallup’s numbers, opposition to more immigration has broadly trended down since the mid-1990s. Support for additional immigration generally rose over roughly the same period.

Pew Research and the Center for Immigration Studies report that the percentage of foreign-born Americans increased significantly over the past half-century, rising to 14.6 percent in September 2022 from 4.7 percent in the early 1970s.

The Center for Immigration Studies’ 2022 analysis projected that the percentage could have hit 14.9 percent by now, higher than at any point in the nation’s history.

Immigrants who can vote tend to favor Democrats over Republicans.

Asian and Hispanic Americans, who make up an overwhelming majority of recent immigrants, also break Democratic.

Thus, for Democrats, more immigration may be the formula for electoral success.

In just the past few years, however, Americans have sharply pivoted in the direction of wanting less immigration, per Gallup’s figures—and Republicans have made gains among at least some Hispanic voters, including in the 2020 presidential election.

The latest influx of migrants into major American cities far from the southern border, busload after teeming busload, may be making its mark on U.S. politics too.

New York City Mayor Eric Adams, a Democrat, said earlier this month that events now unfolding “will destroy New York City.”

Odd Bedfellows

Opposition to immigration, or at least illegal immigration, is currently associated with Republicans.

Yet, some libertarian and conservative think tanks that are aligned with the GOP on many, if not most issues can be counted on to advocate more immigration, including of low-skilled workers.

“A thriving economy will need people of all types. Immigration isn’t the singular answer, but it helps,” David J. Bier of the Cato Institute said in the Senate hearing.

In the House hearing on the open border and the workforce, Douglas Holtz-Eakin of the American Action Forum, which describes itself as center-right, pointed out that employers may find some of the dynamics created by illegal immigration advantageous.

“The lower pay for illegal workers can permit firms to produce more, sell more, and create more jobs,” he stated in written testimony.

“More generally, nobody should favor illegal immigration,” he stated in that same testimony, while also outlining what he presented as the benefits of making highly skilled illegal immigrants citizens.

On the other hand, at least one unexpected figure backstopped some common conservative co-complaints about the economic effect of the U.S. immigration system.

Ronil Hira, a professor of public policy at Howard University in Washington whose CV states that he served on Democrat House staff, described how Big Tech firms have used guest worker programs to replace Americans in the information technology sector.

An entrance sign near the main gate at Howard University in Washington on Oct. 25, 2021. (Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

“The firm ships as many jobs overseas as possible, but a sizable share of the work cannot be offshored because certain tasks and jobs are geographically sticky, requiring workers to have physical proximity to the client in the United States.

“This is why roughly 30 [percent] of the work remains onshore. Rather than hire U.S. workers to perform the onshore work, these firms hire large numbers of H-1B (and L-1) visa workers to fill the jobs in America,” he stated in his written testimony.

While Mr. Bier told senators that immigrants are needed to fill record job openings across various industries, the Center for Immigration Studies’ Mr. Camarota highlighted the fact that the labor force participation rate among working-age Americans has plummeted, helping to spur what he described as “enormous negative consequences for society”—“crime, drug overdose, social isolation, welfare dependency, and suicide.”

“Illegal immigration is not the only reason for this decline in work,” he said in his testimony before the House. “However, using immigration to keep down wages makes work less attractive.”