ARIANNA NEVAREZ
Staff Writer
Two of the nation’s leading experts in immigration, migration and asylum policy opened Week Three’s Chautauqua Lecture Series theme “The 2026 Election: What’s at Stake?” by analyzing how public opinion affects policy, looking at past approaches to immigration and future pathways for reform for legal migration.
Marcela Escobari, senior fellow in the Global Economy and Development program at Brookings Institution, most recently served in the White House National Security Council as special assistant to the president and coordinator for the Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection.
Charles Lane is a nonresident senior fellow at American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on U.S. politics, culture and asylum policy. He is a columnist for The Free Press and has held several positions at The Washington Post, where he was a staff writer covering the Supreme Court of the United States, an editorial board member and columnist.
Lane opened with how public perception of immigration has swung from one extreme to another in response to “shocks.” He said between 2021 and 2024, the first “shock” occurred in response to a surge of migration across the U.S. border, which the American public widely perceived as unplanned. This also contributed to the election of President Donald Trump, according to Lane.
The second “shock” is currently happening due to the mass deportation drive that the Trump administration has undertaken, Lane said. He said Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s killing of citizens in Minneapolis and, most recently, an immigrant in Houston, has led to backlash. Trump’s approval ratings on immigration, which were once his strong suit, are now falling, according to Lane.
“We are seeing this kind of swing in public opinion in response to the negative impact of real-world events, which raises the question: What do people actually want? And to summarize a lot of public opinion data in a very crude way, but — I think — a realistic way, it would be: Illegal immigration, bad; legal immigration, good. And within legal immigration: Random immigration, bad; optimized planned immigration, good,” Lane said.
He said the U.S. should develop a system that optimizes for attributes, not necessarily skills, that will facilitate integration of the economy and reduce the cultural friction of immigration.
Lane said polarization is now occurring on this issue, where some Democrats are calling for the abolition of ICE, while the Trump administration is ramping up the dispatch of ICE agents into various cities.
“November is going to be another reality check for both political parties on how the public feels about either what their performance has been or what they’re promising, and depending on that fresh input from the electorate, there’s a chance they will adjust their policies once again,” Lane said. “I think the public is actually very broadly supportive of immigration in a general sense. They want it to be beneficial to the country as a whole. They don’t want disturbing and chaotic shocks from either political extreme.”
While Lane analyzed the public opinion affecting immigration policy, Escobari analyzed the past and how those models can help America move forward most productively.
She said immigration is one of the most emotional topics in American politics because it touches on identity, security, fairness, the rule of law and economics. But it also poses the questions of “Who is us?” and “Who is them?”
Escobari talked about a lesser-known statistic from December 2023 to December 2024: The number of migrants encountered at the United States’ southwestern border was down more than 80% before the Trump administration took over. She said this happened because three policies started to work together: expansion of lawful pathways allowing migrants to come and work, increased border security and regional responses that helped stabilize migrants in other countries closer to home.
She said this combination of policies has worked in the past in the 1990s with mass migration from Cuba, and in 2022, when Ukrainians fled, they applied legally from Europe and were vetted before moving to the U.S.
“Lawful pathways never need to match the total demand of people wanting to come into the U.S. They just need to be real enough and credible enough that a person weighing whether to pay a smuggler or risk their lives to make it to our border decides that a chance at a legal option is a better bet,” Escobari said. “This combination actually is what decongests our border and allows our border to work as the deterrent that it should be.”
Escobari said almost every legal pathway in the U.S. has been eliminated, and now there is a rise in the strategy of enforcement tactics, such as ICE, that are “costing us.” Escobari said this is affecting jobs, and in the long term, she said the U.S. is closing the pipeline of talent that includes workers, students, entrepreneurs and innovators who could create the jobs of the future.
Lastly, she mentioned the rule of law as a threat. Trump’s administration has detained people despite standing orders preventing their removal and has transferred detainees without criminal records to high-security prisons in El Salvador or South Sudan, according to Escobari.
“The main point that I want you to take from these remarks is to reject directly this narrative that actually has taken hold of both ends of our politics, that we have to choose between a secure border and a country that welcomes opportunity and contribution for others,” Escobari said. “There are policies that get us both, and they have four elements that work when they’re implemented together, and none of them are either new or radical.”
