Democrats Need a Reset on Immigration, Crime, and Social Order

During the Trump era, the Democratic Party has stumbled on a number of issues, perhaps none more than immigration and crime. Back in February, I outlined how the party has shifted markedly leftward on the former topic in recent years, shedding the more moderate, balanced approaches of presidents like Bill Clinton and Barack Obama in favor of one that was more in vogue with advocacy groups. Many high-profile Democrats essentially endorsed, tacitly or explicitly, an open-borders policy.

But as the country faced an unprecedented surge in migration under Joe Biden’s presidency, Americans swiftly rebelled against this thinking. Polling showed that after decades of growing support for increasing immigration levels and waning support for decreasing them, each trendline reversed—hard—during Biden’s term. His handling of immigration was ultimately a key reason why Trump won last year, and voters today say they overwhelmingly trust Republicans over Democrats on the issue.

Though Americans typically do not consider crime and public safety to be as big a problem as immigration, it has become yet another albatross for Democrats under Trump’s reign. As he has ramped up an anti-crime push in cities and states across the country, they have found themselves in the position of defending relatively lower levels of crime—levels that still are not acceptable to many people. Americans today trust Republicans over Democrats to handle crime to an even greater degree than they do immigration.

All this points to a broader issue for team blue: they’ve lost the confidence of the public on issues related to social order. This reflects a similar struggle in recent years for governing parties in Europe. New analysis from political economist Laurenz Guenther suggests that while voters and mainstream politicians have often been aligned on tax-and-spend economic issues—favoring more spending and broadened public programs—there has been a growing gap on sociocultural issues like criminal justice and immigration. According to a review of the research from the Financial Times’ John Burn-Murdoch:

Western publics have long desired greater emphasis on order, control and cultural integration. Their politicians have tilted in the opposite direction, favouring more inclusive and permissive approaches.

The result is the opening up of a wide “representation gap”—a space on the political map with large numbers of voters but few mainstream politicians or parties—into which the populist right is now rapidly expanding as cultural issues rise in salience.

Burn-Murdoch notes that his own updated analyses of this question shows these same dynamics at play in the United States, “where the average voter’s preferences on immigration are close to those of Republican politicians, but far more conservative than those of Democratic party elites.” He adds, “A similar pattern is clear with crime, where rates of arrest and prosecution have fallen in several countries and lower-level disorder is on the rise. Sustained failure to curb these trends under governments of both the centre left and centre right has signalled to the public that the political class either doesn’t see this as a problem or is incapable of addressing it.”

To wit: this perception is a substantial problem for Democrats, as these issues strike at the core of voters’ anxieties about the state of the country and their communities in what feels to many of them like an increasingly unstable time. If Democrats aren’t willing or able to offer more reassuring answers, they can’t be surprised by Americans’ continued openness to supporting Trump and others like him.

The party is thus in urgent need of a new approach to issues like immigration and crime. And there are some good examples from the recent past of what this path forward could look like.

Denmark

Two weeks after my February immigration piece came out, the estimable David Leonhardt published a lengthy treatise examining how Denmark has managed to avoid the fate of other European countries where a populist, nativist right is surging. Leonhardt he zeroed in on a clear cause: the Danish center-left party, the Social Democrats, chose to use their power to tackle the immigration issue before the right could weaponize it.

Leonhardt notes that Denmark’s liberals have succeeded in pursuing much of their domestic agenda, including continuing to provide a generous welfare state for its people, expanding worker protections, combatting climate change, and more. But simultaneously, they took a very different approach to immigration:

Nearly a decade ago, after a surge in migration caused by wars in Libya and Syria, [Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen] and her allies changed the Social Democrats’ position to be much more restrictive. They called for lower levels of immigration, more aggressive efforts to integrate immigrants and the rapid deportation of people who enter illegally. While in power, the party has enacted these policies. Denmark continues to admit immigrants, and its population grows more diverse every year. But the changes are happening more slowly than elsewhere.

These policies made Denmark an object of scorn among many progressives elsewhere. Critics described the Social Democrats as monstrous, racist and reactionary, arguing that they had effectively become a right-wing party on this issue. To Frederiksen and her aides, however, a tough immigration policy is not a violation of progressivism; to the contrary, they see the two as intertwined…[S]he described the issue as the main reason that her party returned to power and has remained in office even as the left has flailed elsewhere.

Leftist politics depend on collective solutions in which voters feel part of a shared community or nation, she explained. Otherwise, they will not accept the high taxes that pay for a strong welfare state…High levels of immigration can undermine this cohesion, she says, while imposing burdens on the working class that more affluent voters largely escape, such as strained benefit programs, crowded schools and increased competition for housing and blue-collar jobs.

Frederiksen added, as if speaking directly to the Democrats, “Working-class families know this from experience. Affluent leftists pretend otherwise and then lecture less privileged voters about their supposed intolerance.”

Burn-Murdoch’s data confirms that mainstream parties in Denmark have remained much closer to the public’s views on immigration—specifically, its desire for migrants to “adapt to the customs of this country”—than they have in other countries that have witnessed the rise of a populist right.

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Finally, Leonhardt offers this important observation:

Immigration has often been chaotic, extralegal and more rapid than voters want. The citizens of Europe, the United States and other countries were never directly asked whether they wanted to admit millions more people, and they probably would have said no if the question had appeared on a ballot. Instead, they revolted after the fact…

For progressives in the United States, Denmark may not be an especially comfortable exemplar. The cruel aspects of Trump’s immigration policy have understandably outraged many people. But…Denmark offers a glimpse at what a different version of the left can look like—more working-class, more community-focused and more restrictive on immigration. Frederiksen and her Social Democrats have confronted their peers elsewhere with a question: In the modern age, is a restrictionist border policy a prerequisite for successful modern progressivism?

Though Denmark continues to admit a modest level of immigrants each year, it is clear that the ruling Social Democrats believe their rethinking of immigration policy is not just be a matter of good politics—though it is certainly one consideration—but also the right thing to do by the nation’s citizens.

Poland

Since Denmark set the example for how center-left parties in Western democracies can responsibly tackle the immigration issue, others have begun to follow suit, including Poland. Like other European countries, Poland has experienced a severe backlash over its immigration levels. Writing recently for

Persuasion

, Leo Greenberg examined how the country’s centrist governing coalition has tried to navigate this moment:

The new liberal coalition faced two border crises, public sentiment that had moved sharply against non-Western migrants, the ever-present threat of the [populist-right party] PiS’s return to power, and the need to repair Poland’s relationship with European institutions. Their response was the 2025–30 Migration Strategy, issued in late 2024. The Strategy outlined a points-based system to attract economic migration and promised to construct integration centers to help immigrants learn Polish and navigate social services…

Poland’s former Justice Minister, Adam Bodnar, justifies the policy by arguing: “if you are not controlling the border, it means that you are not effective…the effectiveness of the government should be cherished in defending liberal democracy, or you create a chance for voices against liberal democracy to create a fully illiberal project.” The government’s limitation of human rights, in his eyes, was a necessary tool to keep populists out of power.

Crucially, though, Duszczyk does not see the moves solely as concessions to political necessity. Rather, he sees them as part of the necessary work of statecraft to preserve a sense of social cohesion. Change that is too fast or too unpopular—especially for a country with a history of foreign exploitation, painful lockdowns during COVID, and a war on its border—risks failing the first test of government: providing people with a strong sense of security.

Sound familiar?

Poland’s Danish-like approach highlights two core pieces of any sensible immigration policy in the West. The first is measures supporting the assimilation and integration of new migrants to help bolster social cohesion. The desire for such a policy is illustrated in Burn-Murdoch’s survey data, which shows that no less than 60 percent of people in six different European countries said this should be a requirement. And the second is an affirmative belief that controlling a country’s borders and the flow of people across them is good.

Representative Jake Auchincloss

There are certainly some notable Democrats, like Senator Ruben Gallego, who have vocally urged the party to pivot to the center on issues like immigration and crime and promoted reasonably tenable reform plans to achieve this. But one who seems to be grappling with the bigger picture—with the broader stakes of social disorder—is Congressman Jake Auchincloss, who represents Massachusetts’ Fourth District.

At the core of Auchincloss’s theory is what he calls “cost disease”—the seemingly never-ending rise of costs in sectors like housing, utilities, and healthcare. As certain routine expenses become more difficult for Americans to pay, many feel that their lives—and perhaps by extension the world the round them—are becoming less stable and more disorderly. Auchincloss identified the inflation that plagued the second half of Biden’s presidency as a driver of Americans’ sense of social disorder and has argued that Democrats lost because “we were not perceived as upholding social order.”

Auchincloss has also taken aim at his party for its action—or inaction—on recent, related issues, such as some Democratic-run cities and states keeping schools closed during the Covid pandemic even after public health authorities said it was safe to re-open them. He believes these decisions were “too focused on process, not enough on outcomes that mattered, which was getting kids back in schools. And there was a condescending attitude to parents who were rightfully frustrated watching kids atrophy at home.” The pandemic itself precipitated a stronger sense of social disorder for many people, and the indefinite restrictions on public life did not seem to make them feel otherwise but may have in fact achieved the reverse.

The congressman has also taken to task public officials who tolerate other forms of public disorder as a fact of life, including homelessness and crime, criticizing his party for not being “muscular” enough on these issues and arguing that, for example, cities “should be able to clear…open air encampments.” It wasn’t long ago that such sentiments were not only uncontroversial but widely shared in the Democratic Party.

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At present, Americans don’t seem to buy that Democrats have substantively shifted in a new direction on these issues, likely a lingering effect of Biden’s tenure. Take immigration. During his term, voters sensed an apparent lack of desire to crack down on the surge of border crossings until it became a political liability. At the eleventh hour, Biden and Kamala Harris pushed for a legislative fix, but even after Trump derailed bipartisan congressional negotiations and Democrats cried foul, voters still blamed Biden more for the border woes than they did Trump.

Moreover, as my colleague Ruy Teixeira highlighted last week, the writer Josh Barro recently observed that while some in the party have sought much-needed fixes to broken aspects of the immigration system such as the asylum process, there still isn’t much of an appetite for addressing harder questions about deportations and illegal immigration other than denouncing Trump. And this likely adds to the public’s continued skepticism that the party has really changed.

On crime, the decision of several “progressive prosecutors” in major American cities to begin decriminalizing certain offenses toward the end of the previous decade also seems to have turned some voters off to the Democratic Party, especially after the subsequent rise in violent crime during the early years of the pandemic. Though research suggests a complicated causal link between these prosecutorial changes and the crime trends, voters nonetheless delivered swift blowback to those politicians and continue to view crime as a serious problem—and trust Republicans more.

Democrats needn’t align themselves wholly behind Trump’s policies or rhetoric to demonstrate they take Americans’ concerns seriously and are making real changes to address them. Indeed, voters also have issues with some of his policies as well. But the party also can’t avoid hard conversations or party shibboleths if they want to regain voters trust.

Any path forward must include convincing evidence of a shift from the past, including a clear intolerance for social disorder, an acknowledgement that Americans have a right to be concerned about their borders and the pace of immigration without being labeled as xenophobic, and an understanding that building a more progressive society requires high levels of trust—and order.