What Poland Can Teach The Democrats About Immigration
Small concessions on immigration are insufficient if the fundamental position is deemed wrong by the majority of the electorate.
The first phase of the Trump administration’s mass deportations has been targeting “the worst first”—violent criminals including murderers, rapists, and cartel members. Arrests now hover at around 900 per day, having doubled since January 20. However, President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda had launched well before Inauguration Day. The newly sworn-in Republican-controlled House of Representatives fired the warning shot by passing a bill for detaining and deporting illegal immigrants who committed nonviolent crimes. Forty-eight House Democrats voted for the measure. A second bill targeting migrant sex offenders also passed with the support of sixty-one House Democrats. Are these the first signs of the Democratic Party changing course on immigration?
Apart from the two votes, there are strong signs that some Democrats have grudgingly acknowledged that the Trump administration’s policies cannot be opposed on the broad scale. Even the leaders of some sanctuary jurisdictions made noteworthy concessions. For example, the mayor of Denver, Mike Johnston, recently told CNN about ICE, “If they’re targeting violent criminals, we’ll support that and we’ll collaborate.” The same politician proposed mobilizing local law enforcement to block ICE from entering his city last November.
Yet, in Los Angeles, massive protests erupted against Trump’s deportation plans, prompting the city council to introduce new legislation shielding immigrant communities from the crackdown. Circling back to the House votes, there is another way to look at it: the majority of the Democratic caucus opposed removing criminal aliens. One wonders how Democratic leaders will react once federal authorities run out of gang members and other violent criminal aliens to deport. The Trump administration already signaled that it is going to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans in the coming months, a move that would remove the legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants.
While some Democrats supported deporting criminals, others already signaled that deporting aliens who haven’t committed any crime—except for immigration violation, of course—is a red line. For example, in Illinois, both Governor JB Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson vowed to shield law-abiding noncitizens from federal enforcement actions. Pritzker said on Inauguration Day: “And we’re going to stand up for them in the state of Illinois and do everything we can to protect them.” The Justice Department has already sued the state of Illinois and the city of Chicago over its lax immigration enforcement.
According to a January Ipsos survey, a majority of Americans appear to support mass deportations as a general concept. A recent report published on the state of the Democratic party by the centrist think tank Third Way highlights that a harder line on immigration has strong support in traditionally Democratic voter blocs. For example, in California, another poll found that 63 percent of Latinos now consider illegal immigrants a “burden.”
Democratic leaders need to ask themselves: is illegal immigration the hill that they want to die on (again)? Incremental changes to policy—like support for deporting violent criminals—will not do. It is clear from the House votes that some Democrats have realized that the progressive-humanitarian narrative regarding migration has to go. But how can you move to the right on immigration without a break with the progressive flank of your party?
The political evolution of Polish prime minister Donald Tusk might serve as an inspiration. Tusk was President of the European Council during the 2015 European migrant crisis. Alongside then German chancellor Angela Merkel, he called for the mandatory redistribution of asylum seekers and hailed the decision of the centrist Polish government—headed by his party—to endorse the plan. This was a highly controversial choice that contributed to their rout at the polls by conservative forces a few weeks later.
During the summer and fall of 2021, Belarusian strongman Alexander Lukashenko tried to engineer a migration crisis on the Polish border by flying in would-be asylum-seekers from the Middle East and ferrying them to the Polish border. The conservative Polish government responded by restricting the right to apply for asylum once inside the country and announcing the construction of a permanent border wall. Now back home and leading the biggest opposition party, Tusk lambasted the government for allegedly allowing women and children to suffer and die in the forest. He ridiculed the proposed wall, falsely claiming that the fence built by Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban in 2015 didn’t stop anyone.
When Tusk became the prime minister of Poland in October 2023, however, he embraced the previous conservative government’s restrictionist agenda. Instead of just limiting access to international protection, he proposed to suspend the right to apply for asylum temporarily. He greenlit additional infrastructure projects on the border with Belarus, reinforcing the steel barrier put in place by his conservative predecessor, adding night vision and thermal cameras, and constructing a new road to patrol the frontier. Tusk vowed to seal off the border completely, arguing that if it is impassable for illegal migrants, then no one will die there—a familiar argument for immigration hardliners in the United States.
In February, Tusk announced that “Poland will not implement the [EU’s] Migration Pact in a way that would introduce additional quotas of immigrants in Poland.” The pact, which binds all EU member states, is scheduled to go into force in 2026. This is quite a reverse; Tusk was one of the masterminds behind the idea of relocating asylum seekers in the first version of the pact.
Similar to the dozens of Democrats during the recent House votes, Tusk understood that he was wrong, and conservatives were right as Polish public opinion rallied behind the latter’s policies. However, in order to move his whole ruling coalition away from the paralysis of humanitarianism, it was crucial to reframe the issue of migration. During a press conference in October, Tusk described the situation as a war between Polish law enforcement and the hybrid threat created by Belarus, framing border policy as a national security issue and part of Poland’s self-defense against aggression from the east.
His left-wing coalition partners loudly objected. However, apart from a few individual defections, they didn’t leave the governing coalition. Although dissenting voices from the Left still continue to sound, the vocabulary of securitization was key in enabling Tusk to carry out a volte face on immigration without jeopardizing overall political unity. Maciej Duszczyk, Poland’s deputy minister for migration, succinctly summed up the government’s narrative: “Security is more important than migration.”
Democrats should study this example closely. Small concessions on immigration are insufficient if the fundamental position is deemed wrong by the majority of the electorate. Tusk embraced the position that he previously despised: the restrictionist agenda championed originally by Viktor Orban in 2015. Rephrasing the issue was a crucial step in carrying out his U-turn. Democrats should follow the Polish example, and start looking for new narratives before enforcement operations reach non-criminal aliens.
Kristof Gyorgy Veres is an Andrassy National Security Fellow at the Center for the National Interest, and the international director of the Danube Institute
Image: Shutterstock.com.