What Can We Expect From Either Presidential Candidate?

Election Day will be over by the time that this essay posts, but Americans may not know for days who the next President of the United States will be. Whoever wins the election will determine the border and immigration policy for the next four years.

Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at The Heritage Foundation, gave his best “educated guesses as to what border and immigration policy would look like under either a Trump or Harris administration,” but he qualified his guesses by stating “but nothing is certain.” Hankinson “looked at what the candidates and parties actually said.” 

The Republican Party platform of 2024, written after Trump was the party’s nominee and with his obvious input, stresses “the interests of American workers … over the claims of foreign nationals seeking the same jobs.”

In its one-page Chapter 2 (of 10), the platform says the priority should be to “secure our borders and all ports of entry and to enforce our immigration laws.” For those who break those laws, it continues, “we oppose any form of amnesty.”

Republicans believe the U.S. has been and remains “a haven of refuge” but want to limit asylum to “cases of political, ethnic, or religious persecution.” The platform warns that “refugees who cannot be carefully vetted cannot be admitted to the country.”

In a second term, Trump likely would pursue the same strategy as in his first term, albeit with improved tactics, given some hard lessons learned in the first term….

Trump is often criticized by Harris for opposing a supposedly bipartisan Senate border bill earlier this year. Most Republicans rejected the bill because it would have locked into law controversial Biden administration mass parole programs then allow up to 1.8 million inadmissible aliens to be released into the country each year while they await their immigration hearings, which could be years down the road. (A tougher Secure the Border Act of 2023 passed the House in May 2023 but was not taken up by the Senate.) Here is Trump’s probable agenda for border action, in three key points:

1. Reinstate the Migrant Protection Protocols (also known as “Remain in Mexico”) and Safe Third Country agreements….

2. Resume and ramp up enforcement of immigration laws in the interior of the country. Trump has spoke of the “largest deportation program in American history.” …

3. Prioritize “merit-based immigration,” meaning that the U.S. should select legal immigrants based on factors like youth, job skills, and education and what they can contribute to the United States rather than merely family relationships.

The Democratic Party platform states, “We must secure our border and fix a broken immigration system,” but credits President Joe Biden’s executive actions that “created innovative legal pathways that … have decreased illegal border crossings.” This is a reference, among other things, to Biden’s parole programs that allow specific countries and classes of aliens to arrive illegally at U.S. borders and airports, where they are then paroled in by Customs and Border Protection.

The party platform states Democrats want to “reform the asylum system” by making the process quicker…. It also proposes to “expand legal immigration” and supports a “pathway [to legalization] for long-term undocumented individuals.”

As for Harris, she has slowly clarified her stance on the border during her campaign. It is difficult to distinguish her positions materially from the Biden administration policies of the past four years….

Here is Harris’s probable agenda for border action, in three key points:

1. At the border – Current “lawful pathways,” including mass parole and mass release into the country, would remain the policy at and between ports of entry, presenting marginal impediments to illegal entry. Alternate methods like the Welcome Corps of bringing in additional migrants – whether they qualify as refugees or not – would likely be ramped up.

2. Limited interior enforcement – Once aliens enter and claim asylum, Harris (and current administration talking points) both say that “those who are determined not to have a legal basis to remain should be quickly removed.” But evidence from the past four years suggests that few aliens, once allowed to enter, would be deported.

3. Amnesty – Passing a law to legalize some or all illegal aliens is her clear policy goal. If that is not possible, a Harris administration would fall back on deferred or non-prosecution. Either way, most foreign nationals living here illegally would be permitted to remain. An amnesty bill could contain some procedural requirements, such as proving payment of taxes or proving no criminal record, but a lack of these would not mean automatic deportation.

No one knows for sure what either of the candidates would do if elected to be President of the United States. However, we can look at their records and make educated guesses. I expect a re-elected President Trump to do much the same as he did during his first term, while expecting a President Harris to continue most of the policies of the Biden-Harris administration.