How immigration shaped the US political agenda in 2024

Few issues dominated the U.S. political agenda in 2024 as immigration did. In large part, because it was an election year in which the candidate who won the presidency, Donald Trump, made the issue the central axis of his campaign. It is undeniable that the Republican monopolized the political and public debate around the issue, with his insults against the migrant community and his promises to close the border and deport millions of people. But 2024 was also a decisive year for the Democratic Party on immigration. President Joe Biden opted to adopt a tougher stance: he restricted the right to asylum at the border and deported the highest number of migrants in a decade.

2024 was also a year in which it became known that foreign immigration contributed to the largest population growth in the United States in more than 20 years; that undocumented migrants have contributed billions of dollars in taxes to the American economy; and that only the arrival of more of them will allow for the growth of the country’s workforce in the coming years. Yet for all the ways in which migration has been shown to be — and will continue to be — beneficial to the country, the past 12 months have seen a notable shift to the right in American immigration policy. Here are the keys to how it happened, and how that shift will also influence 2025 under a second Trump administration.

“They’re eating the dogs”: an electoral campaign based on migration

One of the moments that best sums up the 2024 election campaign was when Trump said during the only debate between the two presidential candidates [there was a previous one between the Republican magnate and Joe Biden] that Haitian migrants who have arrived in the Ohio town of Springfield to work in recent years are eating their neighbors’ pets. “They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what’s happening in our country, and it’s a shame,” the Republican said on September 10.

Although Trump had already been saying outrageous things about the immigrant community before the debate, in a way that comment summed them all up. The baseless claim emphasized his belief that migrants are criminals who cross into the United States to harm native communities, either by stealing their jobs or — as he insisted about Springfield despite his assertions being debunked on multiple occasions — by eating their pets. The comment, which went viral on social media, fueled racist hatred toward migrants not only in the Midwestern state, but throughout the country.

Trump took advantage of the anti-immigration sentiment brewing among the population — including among some immigrants — to push through his most radical immigration proposals, including his flagship policy, the mass deportation of 11 million people, and to ensure his return to power. After winning the November 5 election, the Republican consolidated a team of anti-immigration hawks to carry out his agenda on the matter starting January 20, when he takes office as president.

Democrats harden their stance

With the election just months away, as Trump gained momentum by criticizing the Biden administration for not doing enough to address the migration crisis, the Democratic president was forced to act, announcing in June that he would deny asylum to migrants who applied for it while the border with Mexico was saturated. First, Biden made the right to asylum conditional on the number of apprehensions at the border averaging 2,500 people a day over seven days. Then, he lowered the magic number even further: starting in September, arrests must be below 1,500 a day on average for 28 consecutive days for the suspension of asylum applications to be lifted. With that last change, the president made it virtually impossible for the restrictions to be revoked before Trump returns to the White House.

The move has since, unsurprisingly, significantly reduced the number of illegal border crossings, after they reached historic highs during the first three years of the Biden administration. However, the restrictions marked a 180-degree turn in the immigration policies of the president, who as a candidate during the 2020 elections in which he defeated Trump promised to create a roadmap to citizenship for the same irregular migrants that Trump now promises to deport.

While it remains to be seen whether Trump will ultimately carry out mass deportations, given the numerous challenges he will face — from economic and logistical to legal — what is clear is that Biden deported the highest number of migrants in a decade in 2024. In his last year of government alone, the Democrat expelled 271,484 non-citizens from the country, above Trump’s record (267,260 in 2019) and the highest number of deportations recorded by a president since Barack Obama in 2014.

The battle over SB4 in Texas: states rebel on immigration

Immigration not only dictated policy at the federal level in 2024, but also set the agendas of some states. Tired of the Biden administration’s immigration policies and encouraged by Trump, several Republican governors and state legislatures attempted to enact their own laws to directly address the migration crisis. One such example is the controversial anti-immigrant law that Texas tried to push through in March, which led to a long legal battle between the state and the federal government that has yet to be resolved.

Under the so-called SB4 law, which Texas Governor Greg Abbott signed in December last year and was set to go into effect on March 5, state law enforcement agencies could request anyone’s papers in order to detain and deport them to Mexico. The law is not in force because a few days before it was set to take effect, a federal judge blocked it, triggering a lengthy process of legal challenges that continues to this day. The law was briefly activated on March 19, but was halted hours later until further notice.

But even though it remains blocked pending the outcome of a legal challenge, the law has served to inspire other similar legislation in different states. Since SB4 was stopped, at least six states have passed their own versions of the law: Georgia, Iowa, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Arizona. Like SB4, these laws create new offenses that punish the act of crossing into a state without legal status and either authorize local authorities to detain and deport those who commit this crime, or require them to cooperate with federal authorities in doing so.

So far, all of these laws remain blocked. But if the Texas law were to go into effect, it would pave the way for the others. At least two of these laws — Louisiana’s and Arizona’s — included a provision stating that the rules should only go into effect when the Texas law does. At the moment, only the federal government can deport people, something that the Texas law would change by opening the door for this power to be left to the states as well. The future of these laws will be decided during the next Trump administration.

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