By now, the contours of the immigration issue are clear to most voters. Former President Donald Trump supports immigration restrictions, represented by building a wall. In contrast, the Biden-Harris administration’s loose border policy resulted in a record surge of illegal immigrants entering the United States. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data show that the “non-detained docket of removable aliens has skyrocketed in the past three years, increasing 90 percent since FY 2020,” according to Andrew Arthur of the Center for Immigration Studies.

Trump overstates the influx when he suggests 20 million illegal immigrants have entered the U.S., but even Biden-Harris defenders admit to “more than 2.4 million migrants allowed into the country” since January 2021. 

Whatever the numbers, the result has been the “largest border crisis in U.S. history — probably the largest such event in human history,” according to Mark Krikorian of CIS.

Secondary effects have been equally prominent. Customs and Border Protection data indicate the arrests of those with criminal convictions grew sevenfold between 2020 and 2024. High-profile crimes allegedly committed by migrants, such as the slaying of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley, punctuate that data. The New York Post in September cited police sources indicating that 75% of recent arrests in Midtown Manhattan involved migrants. 

Republican vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has argued runaway immigration contributes to rising rents, a key inflation factor. Meanwhile, taxpayers bear the growing costs of border enforcement plus significant welfare benefits paid to households headed by parents who are in the U.S. illegally.

A recent Harvard University Center for American Politics/Harris poll (not affiliated with the Harris campaign) displays immigration’s high priority to voters. Conducted in mid-October, the survey finds inflation is voters’ top concern (39%) followed closely by immigration (35%), above even the economy (29%). On each topic, Trump is perceived as “likely to do a better job” than Harris, including by a 51% to 40% margin on immigration, his widest advantage.

The Harvard poll also finds that 62% of voters oppose open borders and believe Trump (82%) is far more likely than Harris (23%) to share that view. 

Those huge margins reinforce a mid-August Fox News poll, which found that across an array of issues, Trump’s biggest margins over Harris were on “immigration” and “border security” — on which he held a 58% to 39% advantage.

You would expect both campaigns to focus on key voter priorities. Indeed, the priorities in the Republican platform exactly match voters’ top three issues in a decidedly Trumpian fashion. First, Trump’s campaign wants to “defeat inflation and quickly bring down all prices.” Second, it wants to “seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion.” And third, it wants to “build the greatest economy in history.” 

But the same synchronicity is not reflected in the Democratic platform, approved days before President Joe Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July. “Lowering costs” is its third priority, while “growing our economy” is first. Immigration is the platform’s seventh of nine priorities, right behind promoting “arts and the humanities.”

But that’s far more than one can say for Kamala Harris’s “policy book.” The de facto Harris platform lists 13 distinct priorities under the twin headings of “lower costs” and “build an opportunity economy.” But not one of her 13 policy priorities has anything to do with immigration. In fact, Harris’s 82-page policy book fails to mention the words “immigration,” “immigrants,” “migrants,” or “aliens” at all. Its sole mention of “borders” involves Harris’s support for $160 billion spent to address drugs “crossing our borders.”

For a document released on Sept. 8, that’s an extraordinary omission, especially given Harris’s Aug. 10 “pivot” to take a supposedly firmer stance on immigration. 

That omission may help explain Harris’s nonanswers and shifting of blame when pressed on immigration during an Oct. 17 interview with Fox News’s Bret Baier. Perhaps Harris knows she has no good answers. 

But it’s telling that Biden’s July platform at least discusses immigration policy, while Harris’s September policy book doesn’t even mention it. That’s probably not the kind of separation from a deeply unpopular president that voters are looking for.  

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Matt Weidinger is a senior fellow and Rowe scholar for the American Enterprise Institute.