The language from Republican candidates in ads and speeches is clear and negative, using the 2,000-mile border between the United States and Mexico as a stark partisan dividing line.
President Biden’s policies, they argue, have led to unchecked borders and allowed immigrants, crime and fentanyl to pour into cities, turning every state into a border state.
Democratic candidates have a far murkier message, either avoiding the issue or leaning into tough talk that often addresses immigration on Republican terms. In Ohio, Representative Tim Ryan, the party’s nominee for Senate, said a border wall could be “a piece” of the solution. In Arizona, Senator Mark Kelly has called for more border enforcement officers and “physical barriers where they make sense.”
In the final stretch of this year’s midterm elections, the longtime struggle by Democrats to build a cohesive approach to immigration has become newly urgent for the party as it confronts a wave of attacks in Republicans’ closing pitch to the country.
The emotional stakes of the issue are higher, too. Democrats were enraged, and Republicans thrilled, when two conservative governors seeking re-election — Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida — paid for efforts to bus and fly migrants to New York, Massachusetts and other Democratic-leaning areas. While the deliberately provocative moves came with risks, including that moderate voters would reject the use of migrants to score political points, they called attention to Democrats’ enduring defensive stance on the border.
“There is no topic more frustrating for me than immigration, because it cannot be distilled into 30 seconds,” said Representative Veronica Escobar, a Democrat from Texas, who added that Republicans were “very good” at “making it sound like one quick and easy action will change everything.”
Adding to the challenge for Democrats, many of the immigrants rights’ groups and progressive organizations that have often done frontline work for the party are under financial strain and battling burnout.
Top donors to these groups have sat on the sidelines or turned their attention to other efforts focused on threats to democracy. And the groups say many of their organizers and volunteers are fatigued, after firing on all cylinders through the Trump years and weathering a pandemic that grounded their operations and took a toll on their communities.
“It’s like turning your car back on after not running it for a while,” said Montserrat Arredondo, the interim executive director of Arizona Wins, a coalition of progressive groups and labor unions. “The need is huge now,” she added, “but the resources haven’t necessarily caught up.”
The State of the 2022 Midterm Elections
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 8.
Leaders of several groups with operations in Arizona, Nevada, Texas, Georgia and North Carolina say their dwindling money has forced them to make tough choices on advertising and delayed efforts to hire people to knock on doors, engage voters and combat misinformation.
“These are the people who are in the community, who are a part of the community and who can talk about how immigration is a good thing,” said Kristian Ramos, an adviser to Way to Win, a national progressive network that has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in key congressional races.
For years, immigration has been a thorny issue for Democrats, who have highlighted its benefits for trade and the economy even as they call for tough border security. But in this year’s tough midterm environment, they have often joined Republicans in calling for aggressive measures and putting more boots on the ground.
In Texas, Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, Democrats in hotly contested border districts, have often sounded more like Republicans on the issue, drawing criticism from progressives and immigrant rights groups. Mr. Cuellar has said migrants are pouring into the country because they believe “the border is open.” Mr. Gonzalez has promoted a proposal to process asylum seekers in Guatemala. “This is an idea that I pitched to President Trump, when he was in office, and he liked it,” he told Fox News in September.
Mr. Cuellar and Mr. Gonzalez have defended an approach that they see as governing from the middle. Mr. Gonzalez said in a statement that “solutions to our broken immigration system require a common-sense approach.”
But progressive Democrats like Michelle Vallejo, who is running in another competitive House race in South Texas, say the party’s moderates have spent too much time focused solely on enforcement.
“What we’ve had is a Band-Aid approach to the problems we’ve been experiencing, and we’re seeing those consequences,” Ms. Vallejo said.
A spokeswoman with Mr. Kelly’s campaign said Mr. Kelly has sought to prioritize the needs of Arizonans ahead of either political party on the issue, while expressing support to provide legal pathways to citizenship and in-state tuition for immigrants brought into the country as children.
A representative for Mr. Cuellar did not respond to a request for comment, and a representative for Mr. Ryan did not respond in time for publication.
For Democrats, the balance on immigration became tougher with Donald J. Trump’s rise.
His administration kept the issue front and center, with hard-line measures that included barring travel from several predominantly Muslim countries; ending protections for young immigrants brought into the country illegally as children; and separating migrant parents from their children at the border to deter crossings. During the pandemic, Mr. Trump also used an old public health rule to quickly expel asylum seekers.
Outrage over these policies seemed to push Democrats to the left on the issue, and Mr. Biden entered office promising to reverse Mr. Trump’s approach. But as record numbers of undocumented immigrants arrive at the border, moderate and progressive Democrats have been bitterly divided on how to respond. Mr. Biden’s proposal to overhaul immigration laws has stalled in Congress, and his administration has struggled to carry out a concerted enforcement strategy.
The president’s attempt to overturn the pandemic-era health rule drew criticism from congressional Democrats facing tough re-election fights, including Mr. Cuellar and Mr. Gonzalez as well as Senators Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, Raphael Warnock of Georgia and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. The rollback remains blocked under a court order.
The administration has since sought to steer clear of immigration issues, and Democratic candidates have distanced themselves from progressive slogans popularized in the Trump era, like abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Doug Heye, a longtime G.O.P. strategist, said that Democrats and Republicans were talking about the issue in fundamentally different ways. “So much of what Democrats talk about are illegal immigrants who are already here,” he said. “Republicans are talking about the border and what are the images Americans see every day on TV — images of people streaming across the border.”
For voters, immigration has taken a back seat to the economy and inflation, with only 5 percent calling it the nation’s most important problem, according to an October poll by The New York Times and Siena College. But 12 percent of Republicans called immigration their top issue.
In the past month, Republicans have poured nearly $38.3 million into more than 380 television ads focused on border security and immigration, according to AdImpact, a media-tracking firm. Democrats have spent only $5.5 million.
About half of that $5.5 million — roughly $2.7 million — came from Senator Kelly in Arizona, who is in a tight race for re-election. A further $1 million was from Katie Hobbs, a Democrat vying to become the state’s next governor.
It is in Arizona where Democrats have both the biggest challenge and the greatest opportunity to develop a strong response to Republican attacks on immigration.
In 2010, the state became ground zero for the nation’s immigration debate when its Republican leadership passed a law that set off a sweeping criminal crackdown on undocumented immigrants. The measure required immigrants to carry federal registration papers to prove their legal status and allowed the police to demand the documents from anyone they believed to be in the country illegally.
Latino civic leaders called the legislation a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. Young activists held vigils and walkouts in protest, and pushed President Barack Obama and members of Congress to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws.
The grass-roots movement that emerged led to successful legal challenges to the law and mobilized Latino voters who have helped turn Arizona into a swing state. In 2016, this coalition ousted Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who had built a national reputation for his mistreatment of immigrants. In 2018, it helped Kyrsten Sinema become the state’s first Democratic senator in decades, and in 2020, it helped power the victories of President Biden and Mr. Kelly.
But this year, as Republican attacks depicting a lawless border have filled the airwaves in the state’s races for Senate and governor, Mr. Kelly and Ms. Hobbs have focused on casting themselves as the best candidates to protect the border.
In one ad, Ms. Hobbs walks with law enforcement officials along the metal barricades and strikes a tough stance. In another, Mr. Kelly says that it bothers Arizonans when politicians from other states “come here and tell us how to secure our border.”
Some Latino and progressive activists in Arizona find Democrats’ lack of a more forceful response to such visceral attacks on immigrant communities disheartening.
“I would say there’s an emotional fatigue,” said Alejandra Gomez, a co-executive director of the advocacy organization Living United for Change in Arizona, or LUCHA.
At the same time, the top Republicans on the ballot in Arizona — including Kari Lake, a former newscaster facing Ms. Hobbs in the governor’s race — are courting Latino voters with messages centered on the economy, even as they ratchet up their language on immigration. They also have spread false claims of voter fraud and a stolen 2020 election, which organizers and activists see as veiled attacks on their efforts to turn out more voters of color to the polls.
At an October rally in Mesa attended by Mr. Trump, Blake Masters, who is challenging Mr. Kelly and has echoed the specious theory that Western elites are helping immigrants replace white Americans, said Mr. Kelly and Mr. Biden were setting out “the welcome mat” for immigrants who are “resettling America.”
Carolina Rodriguez-Greer, the Arizona state director of the voter outreach group Mi Familia Vota, said the coming election would test the foundation that organizations like hers have built.
“We have the opportunity to move forward this election or to move backward,” she said.
Maggie Astor contributed reporting from New York, and Blake Hounshell from Washington.
