In an interview with The New Yorker, the editorial director of The New York Times opinion section railed against former President Joe Biden’s immigration policy, saying it was “never what most American voters wanted.”
David Leonhardt, who has been running the Times’ “The Morning” newsletter for the last five years, told The New Yorker’s Isaac Chotiner that the Biden administration’s historically lax immigration standards were one of the top three reasons the Democratic Party lost the 2024 election to President Donald Trump.
“It was unpopular from the beginning. And it happened in large part—not exclusively, but in large part—because of the policies they enacted,” Leonhardt said.
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As Leonhardt reported for The New York Times in December, the years 2021 through 2023 saw the highest pace of migrant arrivals to the United States in the entire country’s history.
“Annual net migration — the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving — averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people,” Leonhardt wrote, adding around 60 percent of these migrants have entered illegally.
In The New Yorker interview, Leonhardt listed this influx of immigrants along with Biden’s age and inflation as the major reasons that former Vice President Kamala Harris did not win.
“And under President Biden, we had the largest surge of immigration over a short period in American history. The pace was even faster than the peak pace of the Ellis Island years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,” he said, echoing what he had written in previous months.
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“We had eight million net immigrants come into the country. It appears that about five million of them entered illegally, a vastly faster pace than under Trump or Obama.”
He acknowledged that this immigration record was sought after by Biden, telling The New Yorker that Biden was saying during his 2020 campaign that “he wanted more people to come to the country.” He then began “loosening a whole bunch of policies” once in office.
“Almost immediately, immigration surged,” the journalist said, noting that “it was never what most American voters wanted. It particularly was not what lower-income voters across races wanted.”
Leonhardt said this loose immigration policy was different from former President Barack Obama’s, who at least held up the importance of border security and deporting criminals.
“Under Obama, in 2012, it’s this really balanced approach. It brags about having the border be more secure than at any point in the previous decades. It talks about deporting criminals who endanger our communities. It also, of course, talks about this being a nation of immigrants and needing to provide a citizenship pathway for undocumented people who follow the law. And it celebrates Dreamers and all of that stuff.”
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“And by 2020, there’s not a single sentence in the Democratic Party platform on immigration that is about border security,” Leonhardt continued, adding that there is “no evidence” in any polling ever that Americans supported doing away with border security.
He said Biden pushed the policy “to follow the wishes of very progressive, largely affluent members,” but noted that Obama’s “moderation is much more popular than Biden’s more radical position” among voters.
Later in the interview, he declared that the party’s immigration message should become “one that is more moderate than what the Party’s has been and one that acknowledges the complications that immigration has huge benefits both for immigrants and for the country but it also has meaningful downsides.”
