The major political transformation flying under the radar at the DNC

On the third night of the Democratic National Convention four years ago, immigration was front and center. Americans heard a series of personal stories about how Trump-era policies had scrambled immigrants’ and their families’ lives.

An 11-year-old girl read a letter to then-President Donald Trump; the Trump administration had deported her mother two years before. An undocumented mother recounted how she crossed the border illegally to seek better medical care for her baby daughter — “When we got to the river, I raised her above the water and we crossed,” she said on national TV. She wasn’t the first undocumented immigrant to address the DNC, but she was the first non-DREAMer — more controversially, someone who crossed the border as an adult.

Four years later, the DNC sounds a lot different, reflecting how public opinion toward immigration in general has soured as concerns over how secure the border is have risen. Gone are the heartfelt testimonies from undocumented immigrants, the repudiation of Trump-era policies, and the calls for better treatment of migrants and expansion of asylum protections. Instead, Wednesday evening’s speakers embraced tougher policies for asylum seekers, praised President Joe Biden’s attempts to negotiate a bipartisan border security bill, and conceded the changed reality of immigration politics since the pandemic’s dawn.

In other words, Democrats’ speeches on immigration and the border were drastically different than the ones at the conventions of 2012, 2016, or 2020 — because reality and the public’s feelings have changed drastically too.

Migrant hardships don’t seem to be much of a concern this year

Unlike at the GOP’s convention in Milwaukee last month, no one in Chicago this week is waving “Mass Deportations Now” placards, nor talking about an “invasion” or a “bloodbath” at the southern border. But given that party’s often extreme rhetoric and its consistently anti-immigrant positions in the past two decades, it can be easy to miss the Democrats’ own right-ward shift in recent years.  

In past party conventions, Democrats made significant attempts to highlight the plight of young immigrants and immigrant families — be they families split apart because of immigration policy, young DREAMers struggling and succeeding in America despite not having documentation, or activists working toward immigration reform.

In 2012, for example, Benita Veliz, a DREAMer from San Antonio, Texas, became the first undocumented person to address a national party’s political convention — telling millions of viewers how she graduated as a top student and earned a double major in college before nearly being deported over a traffic violation. A DREAMer, she praised the Obama plan to roll out deportation protections in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Four years later, another DREAMer would join first lady Michelle Obama and Sen. Bernie Sanders as keynote speakers during Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s convention. Astrid Silva would tell her story of coming to the US as a 4-year-old with her mother, climbing into a raft to cross the Rio Grande, with just “a little doll.”

And 2020 was all about contrasts with Trump, and the human suffering he had caused during his presidency.

Wednesday night, speakers balanced two messages: that Democrats are not the same flavor of anti-immigrant as Republicans — they value diversity and believe in the humane treatment of migrants — but they understand the need for reform and bolstered security. They’re starting to sound like the fictional vice president from HBO’s Veep, who once described a need to “reform, reaffirm, and repel” immigration.

On Wednesday night, some DREAMers did get a 50-second chance to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris and push for DACA protections. And in just about every biographical clip of Harris, or biographical mention of Harris’s upbringing, her parents’ immigrant life stories take center stage. But there was hardly any wholehearted embrace of immigration in general this week, rarely a welcoming of economic migrants seeking “a better life,” as in past conventions. And that’s because reality has changed.

Public sentiment is now turning sharply against all kinds of immigration. As I’ve explained before, the shift has been quick but sustained:

Since 2020, the share of Americans wanting the level of all immigration to decrease has shot up, from 28 percent in the middle of 2020 to 55 percent as of June 2024, according to Gallup polling data.

Those analysts note that 2024 is the first time since 2005 that the majority of the American public has wanted less immigration and that this anti-immigration sentiment is at its highest point since 2001, when the country was going through another bout of anti-immigrant fervor after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Those shifts are also happening across all sectors of the electorate. It’s not just white voters. Nonwhite voters and especially Latino voters are more likely than in the past to want less immigration, and anti-immigrant sentiment is rising across all partisan groups, including among Democrats.

That changed reality also explains the DNC’s immigration programming choices. 

Latino Democrats tried to paint Republicans as being weak on the border

Though it didn’t fall exclusively to them, a handful of Latino Democrats got the task of pushing the Democrats’ new tough-on-the-border image. California Rep. Pete Aguilar, the highest-ranking Latino in Congress, described Harris as both pro-immigrant and pro-border security: “Under President Harris, we can and will do both. As a prosecutor, she took on transnational gangs and cartels. As president, she will fight for pathways to citizenship.”

Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto leaned into this message too, extolling Harris’s past prosecuting drug smugglers and human traffickers. And it was Texas’s Bexar County Sheriff Javier Salazar who criticized Trump for sabotaging Biden’s border deal, saying Trump “just made our jobs harder.”

These lines likely foreshadow how Harris will keep positioning herself as moderate voters, swing voters, and less tuned-in voters consider her. Immigration policy and border security are some of her biggest vulnerabilities, and Republicans have been quick to lean into misleading attacks about her role in handling diplomatic relations with Latin American countries as a way to blame her for the surge in border crossings during the Biden administration’s first three years (though those surges have slowed down significantly in recent months.)

Still, the direction the party is heading was evident throughout the night: Gone are the Obama- and Clinton-era days of casting the Democratic Party as the unequivocal pro-immigrant party. The differences in the convention platforms make that clear as well. The 2024 party platform supports quicker deportations of economic migrants and stricter asylum rules — including the ability to stop processing those asylum claims. It’s not clear that those policies would help deter or slow the rate of future immigration, either legal or not, but for the time being, Democrats can report some results. After historically high numbers of migrant encounters at the southern border, crossings have been declining every month for the past five months, according to US Customs and Border Protection statistics provided to USA Today this week. The Department of Homeland Security attributes part of this to the administration’s tougher asylum and deterrence efforts — but it’s unclear that the public is aware of these trends yet. 

In the meantime, 2024’s Democrats sound very different from 2020 — when none of these kinds of stricter proposals appeared in the party’s platform.