Immigration Article of the Day: Immigration, Liberalism, and Project 2025 by David Abraham

Immigration, Liberalism, and Project 2025 by David Abraham,
Project 2025 and Beyond, Stephen Eric Bronner and John Ehrenberg, eds (New Press 2026)

Abstract

This paper is an earlier shorter, non-copyrighted, version of a chapter on Immigration to appear in Stephen Eric Bronner and John Ehrenberg, eds., Project 2025 and Beyond (New York: New Press, 2026)

Immigration has always been a nettlesome question for the American political left.  While consistently defending immigrants of all sorts against state repression, the left has never developed a uniform and consistent program or even view on migration.  The authoritarianism and cruelty of the Trump administrations and of the Immigration Agenda announced in Project 2025 have, however, awakened a newfound energy. Yet, it is not possible to understand the immigration program of Project 2025 without understanding the liberal immigration regime it intends to topple. 

The Trump administration has stayed true to the immigration agenda propounded in Project 2025.  Together, they identified the weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and injustices in the previously regnant liberal regime and in the late stage globalism that so increased the immigrant and undocumented population. The motivations for their own regime are multiple, both grand and petty. On the one hand, the State Department can claim abstractly that “mass migration poses an existential threat to Western civilization” while the President himself can simply evoke and invoke the basest of racist and xenophobic sentiments toward non-white, non-Christian peoples.

The U.S. has certainly witnessed periods of exclusionary immigration policy and brutal internal repression in the past.  Racism, anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism, anti-Communism, economic and cultural anxiety, and political opportunism have all animated policy from the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) to the Palmer Raids (1919) and Johnson-Reed Immigration Act (1924) to the McCarran-Walter Act (1952).  The former two followed periods of massive immigration; the last aimed to prevent its reoccurrence after the horrors of WWII. The Hart-Celler Immigration Act (1965) installed the far more liberal regime under which we are nominally governed.  What we have now discovered in Project 2025 and the Trump administration is that the immense powers of a dedicated Executive branch, acting via enforcement and ukase, can triumph over the law itself.  For how long remains to be seen.