Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) gave Democrats some unexpected advice on immigration, but there is little indication that they will take it in the 2026 or 2028 elections.
While discussing his new book Fight Oligarchy on comedian Tim Dillon’s podcast, Sanders uncharacteristically gave President Donald Trump some credit.
“Trump did a better job,” Sanders said of the border. “I don’t like Trump, but we should have a secure border. It ain’t that hard to do. [Former President Joe] Biden didn’t do it.”
In perhaps his most Trumpian flourish, Sanders said, “If you don’t have any borders, you don’t have a nation.”
It was a return to form for Sanders, who has in the past derided open borders as a delusion of the libertarian Right. The socialist appeared to agree with the iconic free-market economist Milton Friedman that unregulated immigration was incompatible with a welfare state, but for opposite reasons.
“Open borders?” Sanders interjected incredulously during a 2015 interview with the liberal columnist Ezra Klein. “No, that’s a Koch brothers proposal. … That’s a right-wing proposal that says essentially there is no United States.”
The Wall Street Journal editorial page under the leadership of the late Robert Bartley also occasionally advocated an open-borders amendment to the Constitution. This has definitely fallen out of favor among conservatives in the Trump era.
When Klein argued that increasing immigration levels or even opening the U.S. border entirely would help the global poor, Sanders shot back, “It would make everybody in America poorer, you’re doing away with the concept of a nation-state, and I don’t think there is any country in the world which believes in that. If you believe in a nation-state or a country called the United States or U.K. or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation, in my view, to do everything we can to help poor people.”
The Vermont senator, who was then seeking the Democratic presidential nomination for the first time, added, “What right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.”
There is a tradition of labor and civil rights leaders favoring some immigration restrictions for the benefit of their domestic constituents and U.S. workers more generally. This includes A. Philip Randolph, Cesar Chavez, and the late Texas congresswoman Barbara Jordan, who chaired former President Bill Clinton’s immigration-reform commission.
“Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave,” Jordan memorably said back in the 1990s. “The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process.”
By the time Sanders started running for president, however, even before the Great Awokening, this was too provocative for many progressive Democrats. Another writer at Klein’s publication Vox penned an article headlined, “Bernie Sanders’s fear of immigrant labor is ugly — and wrongheaded.”
Sanders reiterated his opposition to open borders during his second presidential campaign. “Oh my god, there’s a lot of poverty in this world, and you’re going to have people from all over the world,” he said while on the trail in Iowa in 2019. “And I don’t think that’s something that we can do at this point. Can’t do it.”
Daniel Denvir protested in Jacobin at the time, “Bernie must conceive of immigrant rights as workers’ rights, breaking with a dominant liberal moralism that appeals to sympathy with immigrant victims instead of calling for solidarity with immigrant workers.”
But Sanders did largely go with the Democratic flow on immigration when he unsuccessfully ran against Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016. He also undoubtedly doesn’t like the Trump deportations or interior immigration enforcement, which probably influences his negative view of the Biden border crisis. The large influx of illegal immigrants aided Trump’s return to the White House and increased public support for an immigration crackdown.
Sanders remains an important figure on the Left. Ascendant Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Zohran Mamdani, the front-running Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City, are proteges. Sanders is a top booster of Graham Platner, the embattled progressive Maine Senate candidate in what could be one of the toughest Democratic primaries next year.
But it is unlikely that the 84-year-old Sanders, who is older than Biden or Trump, will run for president again. He no longer needs to worry about what younger left-wing activists think about borders and national sovereignty.
If Democrats want to compete with a more populist GOP rather than simply engage in anti-Trump Resistance, they might listen to what Sanders has to say about the border.
