With Dems in Control of Congress, What Comes Next on Immigration?

Even with votes remaining to be counted, it’s safe to say GOP candidates at all levels — national, state, and even local councils — got demolished, shellacked, and were folded, spun, and mutilated on Election Day 2026. The question now is what comes next on immigration — and how will it shape the 2028 presidential election?

“A Complete Collapse”

Let’s start with the following tweet from Sean Trende at RealClear Politics, one of the best and most-even handed pollsters around:

You can quibble at the margins with Trende’s points, but that seems like a fairly apt description of what occurred overall.

“The Public Still Wants the Law Enforced”

Interestingly, on election day, outgoing Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) appeared on “Straight Shooter” with erstwhile (or sometime) sports analyst Stephen A. Smith, and he made many insightful points.

In the interest of full disclosure, I served as staff director to DeSantis for about 20 months when he was the chairman of the House Oversight Committee’s Subcommittee on National Security, but I have not spoken to him in years.

Let’s just say, however, that he’s a man who speaks his mind plainly, and has rare political instincts.

The governor has an almost uncanny ability to identify issues that matter to his constituents, even if they seem minor or outré. If you want proof, just listen to his exchanges with Smith (and keep in mind that visceral honesty is coming when he looks off and takes a deep breath before answering).

Start at the 34:25 mark, with this: “This idea on immigration, you have an open border, or even on legal immigration, I don’t want to bring a foreign worker if an American worker [can] get that job, I want to put our own people first.”

Then this, beginning around 35:39, when Smith says:

You look at ICE and how they were conducting themselves in the streets. Now listen, we understand people have to be deported. No question. Obama deported 3.1 million. Okay, we get that part. The flip side is how you go about doing it matters. And a lot of people thought they would do things, they should do things differently than what Trump was doing. But very few if any Republicans spoke up for it. How does that transfer to those same Republicans looking for support from the American people when you had so many people who were abhorred by how he elected to conduct himself as the president?

To which DeSantis responded:

So, on the DHS stuff, look, that was obviously an important subject, right? … I mean we had 11 million people come in illegally under Biden. It was one of the top issues. [Y]ou know I had experience up in Martha’s Vineyard with all this. ... But it caused the issue to be one of, if not the top issue of the 2024 election.

I just think having Kristi Noem be the secretary ... was a mistake. She wanted to be, you know, like get on a horse and do this. She wanted these conflicts. I think she wanted because it created news and created conflict. That’s not the way you do it.

In Florida, I got legislation, our local law enforcement are going to cooperate. If they have somebody that’s been, say, brought up on charges of burglary and they’re here illegally, they are going to notify DHS. And that person should be sent back to their home country. And it works in a more seamless fashion rather than doing some of those things. So, I think it created a lot of static. I think the public still wants the law enforced, and many Latinos do, by the way.

But I think that was unnecessary in terms of how it happened. But that’s going to be an issue, right? When you’re looking at [2028], there’s going to be things that obviously Republicans are going to want to emulate, you know, with President Trump. If there are things that the public wants a different direction on, then how do you thread that needle, right? Because if you are taking different positions, I think he’s going to have some choice words on Truth Social.

Three Key Points

Again, DeSantis is arguably one of the canniest politicians of current times, and a governor reelected in a 2022 landslide in one of the most diverse and immigrant-dense states in the Union while pushing the immigration-enforcement envelope, and three main points stick out.

First, the American people strongly support immigration policies that put American workers first — both U.S. citizens and lawful permanent resident aliens. Immigration giveaways to corporate interests (and he says a lot elsewhere in that interview about “corporatism”, none of it positively) are going to draw political ire, for reasons I will discuss below.

Second, border security is paramount for voters, and any party or candidate that proposes returning to the migrant policies of the Biden administration is committing political suicide.

That includes not enforcing the immigration laws in the interior, a touchstone of the ICE enforcement restrictions implemented by Biden’s DHS secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, including for many clearly removable criminal aliens.

Third, how DHS enforces the immigration laws is every bit as important as whether those laws are enforced at all.

As I told the Washington Post in early March (for an opinion piece ultimately headlined “Kristi Noem was a nightmare for immigration hawks”): “Most Americans favor immigration enforcement. …They just don’t want to see or hear much about it.”

Don’t read DeSantis’s points on cooperation between local law enforcement in Florida and ICE following burglary arrests as suggesting that the governor believes non-criminal aliens should be left alone — especially given his belief that “the public still wants the law enforced”.

How it’s enforced, though, is key and “threading that needle” between enforcement and questionable compassion is the biggest immigration issue that now confronts not only beleaguered and diminished Republicans but also freshly empowered Democrats.

“Amnesty”

Soon, I will be entering my 35^th year in immigration, and I have seen a lot of policy shifts and changes in that time.

Regardless of the subject, course corrections in politics are inevitable, but when it comes to immigration the sweet spot is almost always elusive, leading to pendular swings in policies, from an overhyped “crackdown” under Trump I to near abandonment of enforcement under Biden (and to a lesser degree in the last years of “deporter-in-chief” Obama).

Amnesty — for some, most, or all of those here unlawfully — usually polls well in the abstract but has been elusive for the last four decades, for a simple DeSantian reason: “the public still wants the law enforced”, and when aliens benefit from violating our laws and trampling our sovereignty, Americans by and large feel like they’re being played for suckers.

That’s especially true given that the last major amnesty, under Reagan in 1986, was supposed to be a trade-off between “legalization” — which was granted to millions — and enforcement that 40 years later has yet to come to fruition.

As George W. Bush once famously quipped in his idiosyncratic manner: “Fool me once, shame on ... shame on you. Fool me ... you can't get fooled again.”

American voters have come to understand that powerful but unseen forces rigged the ’86 amnesty against them and won’t be fooled again. But that doesn’t mean the Democrats who soon will control Congress won’t try, and possibly succeed, in getting it passed.

Or that Trump, won’t accede to such an effort.

Few remember that Trump I released a proposal titled “White House Framework on Immigration Reform & Border Security”.

The administration promised therein to: “Provide legal status for DACA recipients and other DACA-eligible illegal immigrants, adjusting the time-frame to encompass a total population of approximately 1.8 million individuals”, and while the framework never used the term, my colleague Jessica Vaughan referred to that offer for what it was: “amnesty”, with a “10-year path to citizenship”.

Settling the Country’s Issues

Pull back and you’ll see that the term-limited (and now extremely lame-duck) president operates like Michael Corleone in the “baptism scene” from the 1972 classic, The Godfather, but instead of settling all of the “family’s business”, he wants to resolve the country’s major challenges in the time he has left.

A nuclear-armed Iran poses an existential threat to the world, so he wants to ensure the Islamic Republic never gets “the bomb”. Globalism has hollowed out small towns and communities across the country, and he wants to bring industries back using tariffs. D.C. was — in many respects — a blight for years and he wants to spruce the nation’s capital up before he departs on Marine One.

And given that many argue that DHS can’t deport millions of illegal aliens through conventional means, maybe unconventional ones — including amnesty and the “clean slate” it promises — are required before the clock strikes noon on January 20, 2029.

The question then becomes what sorts of reforms a Democratic party with a hammerlock on Congress is willing to offer the White House in exchange for legalization, and how large that amnesty would be — and how much damage a poorly executed amnesty plan would inflict on our economic and immigration systems, to say nothing of incumbents across the board.

Just take a look at Obamacare, passed in May 2010 on a party-line vote with no Republicans in support, and you will see that the Party of Jackson has few qualms with short-term electoral pain in exchange for a major policy victory.

The question then becomes whether Trump thinks that amnesty and the clean immigration slate will burnish, or further diminish, his legacy.

The Working-Class Blowoff

Even while the votes are being counted, I would (clearly prematurely) contend that the 2026 midterms were a “working-class blowoff”, driven by a refusal of otherwise Trump-friendly wage-earning voters to cast their ballots for the GOP in an expression of frustration over what they saw as the administration’s misplaced priorities and refusal to listen to their own concerns.

DeSantis went on at length with Smith about the impact high gas prices and the Iran War were having on workers’ pocketbooks and lives, and consequently on their willingness to vote for Republicans.

Look at this map from the Times (UK), and you will see that the places with the most pronounced shifts from Republicans to Democrats occurred in the most rural and working-class counties across the Ohio Valley and Midwest, and throughout the South.

Those voters weren’t likely new converts to “DEI” or "transing" children or any other liberal issue — they were just tired of not having those in power listen to their concerns.

Although 57 percent of voters polled by NBC News after they cast their ballots “said Trump’s immigration enforcement actions have gone too far”, 22 percent “said the crackdowns have been about right”, and an equal percentage believed “they have not gone far enough”.

And then there’s a different NBC News poll conducted on October 31, three days before the election.

The GOP held an 11-point edge in that survey over Democrats on immigration, with 45 percent of those polled stating that Republicans would do a better job of “dealing with” the subject compared to 34 percent who favored Democratic handling of migration-related issues.

Put the two polls together and you arrive back at the key points that DeSantis made about DHS’s failings under Noem and Americans’ desire to have “the law enforced”. Democrats haven’t been willing to do it, and even though DHS under its last GOP-appointed secretary overstepped, Americans prefer the current mix to the alternative.

How many working-class Americans who are concerned about inflation and foreign wars (and voted accordingly) do you think are going to be placated instead by a massive amnesty of millions of unlawfully present aliens? Perhaps we’ll find out the answer when the Democrat controlled 120^th Congress convenes in January.

On to 2028

The 2028 presidential election starts in earnest today, with DeSantis likely to vie with Vice President J.D. Vance and possibly others (including Secretary of State Marco Rubio) for the GOP nomination.

If there is a wide-ranging amnesty (or any legalization at all), Vance and Rubio will likely feel conservative voters’ wrath in any primary efforts, while a certain former governor is sure to cast aspersions against everybody’s houses for failing to heed workers’ concerns. The great thing about elections is that there’s usually another one, with fresh issues, every two years.