Can Kamala Harris Defeat the Gangs?

It’s one of the most pressing political dilemmas facing Vice President Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate: How can she counter Republican attacks on her border security record?

The answer – or part of it – may lie in a 31-page report that sits online, camouflaged by a British URL and an academic-sounding title, and goes largely unnoticed by American eyes.

The document, “Migration in the Age of Insecurity,” is a searing political document published earlier this year by Labour Together, a think tank closely aligned with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Its recommendations helped define Labour’s message in the recent British election: a full-on assault on the Conservatives’ immigration policies, combined with a sweeping vision of immigration reform and flashy rhetoric about destroying the criminal networks that smuggle people into the country.

That last point was made forcefully by Starmer himself, a career prosecutor before entering electoral politics. “Smash the gangs” became a signature campaign promise.

This front-foot messaging was new to Labour. US Democrats have nothing to do with it. They have no message on immigration at all.

That’s a common mistake made by centre-left parties, the Labour Together report noted. Left-leaning coalitions “have often tried to shift the political conversation to other issues” rather than addressing the immigration issue head-on, the authors said, calling it a serious error.

“The consequences of the withdrawal have been great,” they warned. “To the public, it looks like evasion. In the void, more extreme voices have dominated.”

This assessment can be applied to the Biden administration without modification.

Much of Harris’ vulnerability on immigration stems from the Biden administration’s aversion to fully engaging with the issue. For most of Joe Biden’s presidency, he has tried to dismiss Republican attacks as so much nativist rhetoric while quietly taking enforcement action to avoid angering progressives. There was no sustained project to counter anti-immigrant arguments or reassure voters about the border. Predictably, this approach has failed.

Biden repeatedly postponed a reckoning, finally enacting tough new border controls just weeks before his campaign fell apart. Harris, too, resisted taking responsibility for immigration; when Biden put her in charge of managing the troubled Northern Triangle countries in Central America, Harris chafed at the implication that she had a direct role in fixing the border.

The result is exactly what the Labor Together report described: Democrats have been losing a battle over immigration for years, in part because their leaders refuse to fight it with any creativity or stamina. A Marquette Law School poll out this week that showed Harris with a narrow lead over former President Donald Trump also showed her trailing him on immigration by 18 percentage points.

“They are so far behind that it could cost them the whole thing,” said Will Somerville, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and author of the Labour Together paper.

I’ve heard that Labor Party strategists closely followed Biden’s struggles earlier in his presidency, viewing them as a cautionary tale about immigration mismanagement. Part of the goal in crafting a confident message on immigration was to avoid Biden’s fate.

Labour consulted a US strategist and veteran advocate on immigration policy, Frank Sharry, in preparation for the election, according to two people who worked directly with him. Sharry, who is now advising Harris’ campaign, declined to comment when contacted.

I don’t know if Sharry has referred any of his new colleagues to the Labour Together report. But “Migration in the Age of Insecurity” could be useful reading for Harris’ campaign.

In the article, Somerville and co-authors Christabel Cooper and Sarah Mulley proposed a three-part immigration policy overhaul aimed at discrediting the British right and building political support for center-left policies. They identified three features of the British immigration system that make voters uneasy: dismay that it appears to be in a state of chaos; concern that migrants undermine economic opportunities; and fear that migrants will not “integrate into their new home.”

A responsible centre-left policy, they argued, had to address all three concerns. That meant taking measures such as clearing a huge backlog of asylum applications, cracking down on the exploitation of migrant workers and investing in overstretched public services that voters fear are unable to support growing immigrant communities.

The document recommended additional policies to boost public confidence in the immigration system, including a “world-leading programme of local and community sponsorship of refugees and other vulnerable groups”. This could help newcomers find a welcoming environment – ​​and make voters less likely to see them as foreigners wandering around Britain.

Cooper, a political strategist for Labour Together, said her poll provided a space for centre-left leaders to make the case for inclusive immigration policies. Most voters, she said, were open to immigration as beneficial to the economy and warmed to the idea of ​​foreign-born people becoming British citizens. (The Labour Together report cited US-style naturalisation ceremonies as a proud ritual that British voters were likely to embrace.)

Cooper stressed that openness depends on voters’ confidence that Labour is serious about bringing order to the system as a whole.

“The centre-left needs to send a message of something like control and compassion,” Cooper said. “The sense that migration is out of control is very strong and to just ignore it is not a good thing to do.”

In Britain, the message of “smash the gangs” was easy to deliver. “There’s no downside,” Cooper said. “If you smash the gangs, everybody’s happy.”

By the time British voters cast their ballots on July 4, Labour had effectively won a tie or even a modest lead in the immigration debate, according to polls. It didn’t win the election on the popularity of its immigration policy, and violent civil unrest in Britain is already testing Starmer’s law-and-order credentials. But Labour also didn’t suffer from a swing vote because its candidates were seen as indifferent to border control.

That is exactly the threat Harris now faces as a presidential candidate.

Cooper and Somerville warned that immigration policies in the United States are stricter than in Britain, largely because of the large number of people entering the United States from Mexico. American voters are not concerned about people overstaying their visas or arriving on small boats; they are alarmed by uncontrolled mass migration across one of the world’s longest borders. There is no comparable challenge in Britain.

Yet we are beginning to hear more and more Starmer-like tones in Harris’ campaign, whether by coincidence or by deliberate imitation.

In the first joint appearance of the Harris-Walz ticket, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz included in a litany of Harris’ accomplishments that she “took down the transnational gangs” as California’s attorney general. A campaign ad released Friday branded Harris as “a border state prosecutor” who cracked down on organized crime.

The vice president has been a national political figure for nearly a decade, and tackling human trafficking as state attorney general has never been a regular part of her campaign speech. Voters hearing about it now may rightly wonder where Harris’s interest in the issue has gone since she left Sacramento.

But if Harris wants to beat Trump, Somerville believes Labor’s strategy could help. He believes the Democratic agenda could be cast in more disciplined terms and contrasted with Republicans’ sheer hostility to migrants.

“I don’t see why Kamala Harris can’t do something similar,” he said. “Say, ‘My primary goal is to crush the gangs, not to punish the migrants.’”

The point, he added, was not to win the border control debate outright, but to make the issue less damaging.

“If you’re left center,” Somerville said, “and you get even, you win — and you win by a lot.”