Democrats Learned that Voters Don’t Like Border Chaos

How Chaos Theory Explains the Public’s Turn Against Immigration and What to Do About It

Democrats, liberals, and Never Trumpers are filling opinion pages of major magazines and newspapers with explanations of why Kamala Harris lost the 2024 presidential election to Donald Trump. Those writers primarily focus on the policy issues of inflation, wokeness, and immigration, but the last is garnering intense attention because there's a false perception that President Biden intentionally ushered in years of border chaos. On the other hand, inflation is an unintended consequence of bad spending and monetary policy that started in the Trump administration that Biden worsened. Wokeness was down the list of issues American voters cared about, but more important than climate change.

Harris-sympathetic voters who blame immigration are rarely specific enough in their criticisms, typically blaming immigration rather than the border chaos that has dominated the deadline for four years. David Leonhardt writes that the level of legal and illegal immigration during the Biden Administration was unprecedented in American history. Perhaps inspired by anti-immigrant turns in very different electorates in Europe and Canada, Leonhardt argues that Biden intentionally loosened immigration policy and started an inundation that angered the electorate.

Leonhardt ignores Biden’s numerous actions on the border, from maintaining Title 42, reinstating Remain in Mexico, curtailing asylum, boosting deportations and removals over the level of Trump, and over 100 other actions to shut illegal immigration. Leonhardt blames Biden’s campaign statements that imply immigrants should come to the United States. Still, Leonhardt ignores his numerous statements to the contrary since the election – such as in March 2021 when he said, “I can say quite clearly: Don’t come.”

President Biden even sent his VP and eventual Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris to Central America to repeat the message “Do not come” in 2021 – a tour that primarily highlighted the administration’s inability to stop illegal immigration. Leonhardt has no explanation for why Biden’s words mattered when they seemed to encourage illegal immigration, and they didn’t matter when he sought to more clearly and forcefully persuade people not to come.

Biden changed some policies on the border that may have contributed to the chaos, but he can't take the blame for everything that happened. The main culprit was the labor market. The number of job openings in the US explains the surge in illegal immigration better than anything else. After all, wages for identical workers in the US labor market are more than four-fold higher here than in the developing world, and an abundance of employment opportunities only incentivized more to come. Leonhardt credits the decline in border crossers being apprehended by Border Patrol on harsher Biden policies started in June 2024, but what do you notice about the figure from his piece?

Leonhardt's thesis doesn't survive contact with the facts. He picks a policy enacted months after the decline in border crossings began and credits it for the decrease in border crossers. How does a policy enacted in June 2024 explain the collapse in border crossers from 250,000 in December 2023 to 118,000 in May 2024? June was lower at about 84,000 and the months after stabilized at roughly 50,000-60,000. There's more evidence that Biden's June border actions halted the decline in border crossers if you're merely looking at the numbers.

The job market reached unprecedented heights during the Biden years, demanding labor that Americans couldn't supply – so migrants did. Border crossings began to come down slowly in 2023 and then rapidly in early-to-mid 2024 as the labor market began to cool and the number of job openings declined. The figure below is the monthly number of job openings and Southwest border encounters since the Great Recession began. Simple economics explain the border surge better than reading the entrails of convoluted policy changes or Biden's statements from years earlier. To be clear, some changes in immigration policy contributed but the flow of illegal immigrants across the US border is affected by more than policy no matter how tempting it is for American commentators to blame everything on DC.

Cecilia Muñoz and Frank Sharry have a somewhat different explanation. They argue that the Democratic Party moved further left on immigration by listening to activists and ignoring the old Obama administration’s focus on enforcement (Obama broke deportation records) that coincided with targeted legalization through DACA and attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform to expand legal immigration, legalize most illegal immigrants, and boost enforcement. They convincingly note:

Democrats need to insist on more control and more compassion; more order and more immigration; strict limits and wider legal pathways. This stands in stark contrast to both right and left. The right argues to kick out and keep out all immigrants. The left argues to let all comers stay. Both amount to overreaches that will eventually backfire. Voters want a middle way, but if they’re forced to choose between those who promise control and those who seem indifferent to chaos, they will choose the former.

Muñoz and Sharry have the best explanation in a major publication, but they unnecessarily complicate the reason why voters turned against immigration in 2024. Voters turned against immigration because of the chaos it produced on the border and in some American cities. I call this driver of public opinion about immigration “chaos theory.”

Chaos theory in immigration politics means that chaos, real or perceived, drives broader public opinion about immigration. Most of this chaos occurs on the border, which is where most Americans focus their immigration attention, but it isn't entirely confined there. For years, I've written about chaos theory and how border disorder, real and perceived, drives American views about immigration. The more chaos, the more opposition to immigration. Broadly put, nobody likes chaos, and citizens want government control and restrictions to prevent outbreaks.

Voters aren't social scientists - they aren't running regression discontinuity designs to identify the causes and mechanisms of chaos. But they see chaos, they hate it, and they vote for politicians who want to punish it and reduce anything associated with the disorder. On the flip side, a lack of chaos dramatically lessens opposition to immigration.

The public’s perception of border chaos is driven by the number of Border Patrol encounters with illegal border crossers – the best available metric of border chaos – but their negative opinion isn't confined to just illegal immigrants; it spreads to dissatisfaction with legal immigration. That’s why positive views of immigration, in general, drop as border encounters rise. Other agents of chaos and destruction affect immigration opinions, such as terrorism and crime. Still, those are often perceptually inseparable from border chaos in the minds of Americans when they perceive the border to be out of control. In short, any problem that arises related to immigrants is viewed through the lens of border chaos if people think the border is out of control.

A president who wants to increase legal immigration in a politically sustainable way should strive to make immigration boring again through targeted liberalizations instead of presiding over a chaotic border outside of his control. More enforcement could make a difference, too, but the effect would ambiguously affect perceptions of chaos. If the government built a wall along the border and Border Patrol only encountered 50,000 people in 2024 instead of over 1.5 million, every crosser would have been recorded and identified. In that case, the perception of chaos could be higher even though the number of encounters would be down by 97 percent.

In the summer after President Biden took office, Gallup found that 35 percent of Americans wanted immigration to stay at its current levels, 33 percent wanted it increased, and 31 percent wanted less. Later in 2024, after Border Patrol encountered over 7.2 million illegal immigrant border crossers and reporters were covering the chaotic border daily, support for maintaining the present level of immigration and increasing it cratered while those favoring decreased immigration shot up to 55 percent – a level of support for restriction that hasn’t been seen since the chaotic border of the late Clinton and early Bush years.

President Trump didn’t focus on stories about immigrants taking jobs in a throwback to left-wing populist economics; he and his supporters focused on border chaos, terrorism, and crime. The current Republican Party can be accused of much, but not subtlety. Calls for “Build the wall” weren’t a coded dog whistle for less labor market competition; they were calls for building the wall to stop chaotic illegal border crossings and all the bad things associated with them.

Just look at the journalism careers that were made during the Biden years. Bill Melugin and Ali Bradley are two prominent reporters who cover immigration and garnered huge followings by setting their cameras down on the border and showing illegal border crossers coming across. Night after night after night. They showed the same disturbing images of chaos for years, and Americans watched because it bothered them – and rightly so. The new nativist media industry is a reaction to chaos.

Chaos theory doesn’t just affect immigration – it also explains why the rise in crime, homelessness, and public drug-fueled disorder has set back criminal justice reform, muted compassion for the homeless, and pumped the brakes on public support for drug legalization. A raft of corporate accounting scandals in the early 2000s led to Sarbanes-Oxley and other laws to control firm behavior, often in maladaptive and expensive ways. Chaos undermines classical liberalism, free markets, and any policy designed to loosen government control.

Democrats made border chaos worse for themselves in major cities with counterproductive policies like the right to shelter that gave a tremendously valuable handout to illegal immigrants. Texas governor Greg Abbott’s brilliant political move of busing illegal immigrants from Texas to New York replicated the chaos his state saw at the border in that city, knowing that they would have no way to support themselves legally because federal law prohibits them from working. Nationally, illegal immigrants are less likely to be criminals than native-born Americans, and they use less welfare, on average, too. Still, the perception of immigration chaos is squared when illegal immigrants living in local government-funded hotels paid for by taxpayers are arrested for committing crimes and sometimes released back on the streets.

Imagine the 2024 election without the over 7.2 million border encounters during Biden’s administration. Imagine a lack of shocking videos of thousands of migrants streaming across the Rio Grande, rushing Border Patrol agents, or turning themselves in to law enforcement in the desert. There are no images of barbed wire, fortifications that look like they’re being stormed, soldiers, tear gas, or smugglers dropping children off on the US side of the river.

Imagine, instead, 7.2 million more legal immigrants and temporary migrant workers flying into the US on lawful visas to live, work, and start businesses during Biden's administration (encounters and individuals aren't the same, but work with me). They mostly came from a dozen Latin American countries and arrived in hundreds of locations across the US as families or as individual workers. No dramatic bussing by Texas’ governor, no mass chaos at the border. Just millions of more people orderly entering through a legal immigration system simplified and expanded by Congress and an administration seeking more order and legal immigration.

No reporters would be making their careers filming border chaos because there wouldn’t be much to film. Calls to build a wall would sound like fanciful calls to build a giant space laser to ward off space aliens. Immigration would have dropped from a top-tier issue to third or fourth-tier – at best. Inflation or another issue might have still cost Harris the election, but it would have been closer, and Democratic cities wouldn’t have moved nearly so far right.

The lesson for those who support immigration reform, whether Democrats or others, is simple: avoid chaos. When considering an immigration policy, every proponent of liberalizing immigration should ask themselves, “Would this increase border chaos or the perceptions of chaos?” If the answer is yes, they should shelve it. If the answer is no, they should do it.

This means expanding legal immigration from abroad through more work visas, parole, green cards, and other means to channel would-be illegal immigrants into the legal system. This means focusing on excluding and deporting criminals, national security threats, and those who harm others.

Border enforcement should also focus on channeling people into those legal pathways as far from the border as possible and excluding those who are criminals or national security threats. Peaceful illegal immigrants in the country should be able to correct their status—creating visuals of their willingness to comply and be vetted by law enforcement. They should be allowed to contribute more than they already do in terms of economic output and to continue to pay more taxes than they receive in benefits. It means cutting off welfare to new immigrants entirely by building a higher wall around the welfare state instead of around the country.

To the Biden administration’s credit, they experimented with this. In January 2023, they created a unique path for 30,000 Cubans, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Haitians (CVNH) a month to enter the US lawfully with a sponsor. Combined with other programs, CVNH reduced the flow of illegal immigrants from those countries by 99 percent. That reduced the chaos – but it was too little, too late. Immigrants from more countries should have been eligible, and the numbers should have been greater, and the program adjusted in other ways. Activists and those who support immigration need to focus on expanding legal pathways, in combination with smart enforcement, to guide migrants into the legal system.

For over 15 years, I've worked on reforming the immigration system by expanding visas, opposing the most destructive forms of enforcement, and legalizing peaceful illegal immigrants. Expanding legal immigration was always the most critical component because it would eventually diminish illegal immigration and increase the economic gains for Americans and migrants the most. Legal immigration crushes illegal immigration – the fewer legal pathways there are, the more illegal immigrants would come – so long as the US economy demands them. Still, I used to think we could separate expanding legal immigration for skilled workers and border control of mostly lower-skilled illegal crossers. I haven’t thought that for years. They are logically different but politically linked.

It is very difficult or impossible to legally expand skilled immigration without border control – voters won’t accept expanded legal immigration without order. Border chaos is an ally of ideological immigration restrictionists like Stephen Miller, who use it to support restrictions on legal immigration. Reducing legal immigration was the greatest achievement of the Trump administration's immigration policy from Miller's perspective, and it will be again. The president has control over legal immigration; he doesn't have nearly so much power over illegal immigration, which is outside of his control and mainly varies due to US labor demand anyway.

This is the Catch-22 of expanding legal immigration. Border chaos is caused by restrictive US immigration laws that make legal immigration impossible for most, but border chaos prevents liberalization because voters are understandably repelled by disorder. More enforcement reduces illegal immigration, but only temporarily and at high costs. With the economic benefits of migration as high as they are, it’s truly incredible that the government is able to reduce immigration as much as it currently is able to, but it will always look like an utter failure.

Public dissatisfaction over immigration was a major reason why the public turned away from supporting immigration in 2024 and voted for Trump. The election's outcome may have been the same without immigration as an issue because there were many points of dissatisfaction with the Biden administration, but the margin would have been closer, and the pro-immigration side wouldn’t be buried in such a deep popularity hole with the public. Border chaos and immigration disorder more broadly explain that shift. Coming back from it requires taking chaos theory seriously and adapting immigration policy to account for it by implementing reforms that reduce chaos by expanding legal immigration, deporting criminals, and blocking welfare for non-citizens.