On March 12, Foundation of Inheritance has been published six words on X: “We have the law the immigration problem.” That judgment would not immediately come from a mainstream conservative establishment. And Heritage is not alone in breaking taboos. Last break, Vice President Vance he told the crowd at the University of Mississippi that the United States needs to get legal immigration numbers “way, way down” and attack high-skilled H-1B cases by lowering American wages. Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee has proposed legislation that would completely eliminate the H-1B visa program, as well as the diversity visa lottery. Analysts at the National Foundation for American Policy estimates that the Trump administration’s policies will reduce legal immigration by 33 to 50 percent over four years, translating from 1.5 to 2.4 million foreign-born legal residents.
For years, a steadfast principle held in American politics: You can favor legal immigration while still opposing illegal immigration. The two were fundamentally different, the thinking went, and supporting one while opposing the other was a consistent, normal position. That norm is now in danger of collapsing—under pressure not just from the right, but from left-leaning immigration advocates and academics who have coalesced around the idea. all of them immigration restrictions cannot be protected, leaving the legal/illegal distinction in the process.
As long as both sides accepted the difference, legal immigration was considered good for the country. Without that shared foundation, every legal immigration facility is at risk. Understanding how both parties contributed to the breakdown of the old norm is the first step toward rebuilding it and reviving the bipartisan coalition for effective immigration reform.
For decadesA common line from anti-immigration activists was some version of “I support legal immigration; I only oppose illegal immigration.” Whether they meant it or not, they felt compelled to say it. The basic idea that immigration was good was almost as uncontroversial as the idea that racism was bad. This usually meant that programs such as H-1B visas, family sponsorships, and refugee resettlement were considered legitimate. Even nativist politicians who privately wanted fewer foreign-born people in the country, at the time, had to frame their proposals around enforcement, not a reduction in legal admissions.
For ordinary voters, meanwhile, the distinction between legal and illegal immigration reflected the belief that illegal activity should be opposed as a matter of principle. Political scientists shown that when Americans evaluate illegal immigration, they shift from measuring the characteristics of individual immigrants to making categorical moral judgments based on the rule of law. In their 2020 book, Immigration and the American EthosMorris Levy and Matthew Wright found that civil rights, not racial concerns, were the main considerations on which most Americans evaluated immigration.
Many of my fellow scholars felt differently, however. To them, “I’m just protesting.” against the law immigration” was a socially acceptable way of expressing opposition to foreigners in general—xenophobia dressed up in procedural language. I’ve been guilty of dismissing popular attitudes myself; lecturing about, say, the H-1B visa backlog or refugee processing times, I’ve found myself annoyed by audiences who stop to ask why I haven’t gone out of my way to denounce illegal immigration.
Over the years, many scholars and advocates came to see the distinction as illegitimate. For some, the US immigration system is already unfair and restrictive—to say the least 1 percent of people who want to migrate can do so legally—that saying “Just follow the law” can feel cruel. Others go further: Crossing the border without permission is a victimless violation of regulation, they argue, and any law that restricts free movement is unjust.
In migration scholarship, a large body of work began to emphasize the “narrowness” of legal status—how people move between documented and undocumented status, how visa categories create security even for “legal” immigrants, how enforcement itself creates illegality. This function is important for strength. But the political implication, sometimes bluntly stated, was that the legal/illegal binary is a fiction only used to divide immigrant communities.
The notion that legal immigration is already settled, that only unauthorized immigration deserves serious attention, is prevalent in the field. When Michelangelo Landgrave and I presented the study to test whether informing voters about the difficulties of legal immigration could change their views on it, one reviewer recommended rejecting the paper because, they argued, we should try to increase support for against the law immigration instead.
Nor did this change apply to academic journals. Over the past dozen or so years, major media organizations (including the Associated Press, the Los Angeles Times, USA Todayand Atlantic) left time illegal immigrants from their style guides. Advocacy organizations were renamed throughout undocumented as the only acceptable word. The practical effect was to make the legal/illegal distinction itself sound ludicrous—something only restrictionists would beg for.
This helps explain why, when the first Trump administration began cutting legal immigration, pro-immigration organizations scrambled to respond. Major advocacy groups had built their message and donor bases around the rights of illegal immigrants. Policies such as repealing Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and family separation sparked widespread protests. But when the administration quietly raised H-1B denial rates and expanded the “public charge” rule to discourage legal applicants, there was no organized constituency to fall back on.
In his book, Radical Justice Reformpolitical scientist Vicente Valentim points out that the recent surge in extreme right-wing political behavior does not reflect a change in what people believe, but rather a change in what they feel comfortable expressing. As norms weaken, often after far-right politicians gain electoral success, long-silenced private views gain public acceptance. Valentim’s work focuses on Europe, but his analysis applies to America as well. Over the past two decades, voters with conservative views have flocked to the GOP, making that preference high within the party. President Trump did not create this constituency, but he recognized and served it more than any modern president before him. Every immigration taboo he broke made it even easier for him and his followers to cross borders.
And so, in Trump’s second term, under the new influence of Stephen Miller, the elimination of the legal/illegal distinction has been more firmly formalized into policy. The result: the administration is now publicly attacking legal channels of immigration, including by targeting refugee visas and skilled workers and implementing visa freezes in 75 countries. Like most of Trump’s agenda, these attacks are not very popular — in fact, voting suggests that support for legal immigration has never been higher—but they are appealing to a few, albeit powerful, nativists who don’t feel constrained and who make up an important part of Trump’s grand coalition.
The Republican Party is responsible for indulging in total nativism. But the American left unwittingly made that change more possible by breaking down the conceptual categories that had blocked it. By dismissing the legal/illegal distinction as false, advocates signaled that they would not defend it. When one side dismisses the norm as irrelevant and the other realizes that it no longer needs to pretend to respect that norm, it erodes from both sides.
If migration is to live In the current political moment, advocates will need to admit what they have spent a decade denying: that illegal immigration has negative consequences and that people have a right to oppose it. Political scientists Omer Solodoch and Ryan Briggs have found that when Americans see immigration as orderly and controlled by the government, they support higher levels of it. of Solodoch preliminary research in Europe showed a similar pattern: Policy responses that restored the status of asylum controls or other irregular flows reduced public opposition to immigration. My own work shows that opposing illegal immigration is not the same as hating people who are forced to move illegally. It’s about challenging a broken system that harms those people by leaving them in vulnerable situations, fueling the resistance that plagues all immigrants, and destroying the political support needed to bring people in through legal channels. The policy objective should be to channel this drive towards building a legal system that works.
Any effective coalition for immigration reform must include voters who oppose illegal immigration but support legal means. The union cannot be formed if the distinction between the two is abolished. The next time someone attending one of my talks insists that I separate legal and illegal immigration, I’ll try to tone down the offense, even if the question isn’t particularly important. They defend a dead state which, if lost, will be very difficult to rebuild.
