Can Kamala Harris ‘Smash the Gangs’?

It is one of the most urgent political dilemmas facing Vice President Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate: How can she counter Republican attacks on her border security record?

The answer — or part of it — may lie in a 31-page report sitting online, camouflaged by a British URL and an academic-sounding title, and largely unnoticed by American eyes.

The paper, “Migration in the Age of Insecurity,” is a penetrating political document published early this year by Labour Together, a think tank closely aligned with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. Its recommendations helped define Labour’s message in the recent U.K. election: a head-on attack on the Conservatives’ immigration record, joined with a broad vision for immigration reform and showy rhetoric about destroying criminal networks that smuggle people into the country.

That last point was delivered with vigor by Starmer himself, a career prosecutor before entering electoral politics. “Smash the gangs” became a signature campaign pledge.

This front-foot messaging was new for Labour. American Democrats have nothing like it. They do not really have a message on immigration at all.

That is a common mistake for parties on the center-left, the Labour Together report noted. Left-leaning coalitions “have often tried to move the political conversation onto other topics” rather than addressing the immigration issue directly, the authors said, calling this a grievous error.

“The consequences of disengaging have been great,” they warned. “To the public, it looks like evasion. In the void, more extreme voices have dominated.”

This assessment can apply without modification to the Biden administration.

Much of Harris’ vulnerability on immigration comes from the Biden administration’s aversion to engaging the issue in full. For most of Joe Biden’s presidency, he attempted to brush off Republican attacks as just so much nativist rhetoric, while taking enforcement measures quietly to avoid angering progressives. There was no sustained project to refute anti-immigrant arguments or to reassure voters about the border. Predictably, this approach was a failure.

Biden pushed off a reckoning again and again, eventually issuing strict new border control measures just weeks before his campaign unraveled. Harris, too, resisted taking ownership of immigration; when Biden charged her with managing the troubled Northern Triangle countries in Central America, Harris bristled at the implication that she had a direct role to play in fixing the border.

The result has been just what the Labour Together report described: Democrats have been losing a battle over immigration for years, in part because their leaders have declined to fight it with any creativity or stamina. A Marquette Law School poll this week that found Harris slightly leading former President Donald Trump also showed her trailing him on the issue of immigration by 18 percentage points.

“They’re so far behind on it and it could cost them the whole thing,” observed Will Somerville, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and an author of the Labour Together document.

I’m told Labour Party strategists closely followed Biden’s struggles earlier in his presidency, viewing them as a cautionary tale about mismanaging immigration. Part of the purpose of designing a confident message on immigration was to avoid Biden’s fate.

Labour consulted an American strategist who is an experienced immigration policy advocate, Frank Sharry, as it prepared for the election, according to two people who worked with him directly. Sharry, who is now advising the Harris campaign, declined to comment when I contacted him.

I don’t know whether Sharry has directed any of his new colleagues to the Labour Together report. But “Migration in the Age of Insecurity” might be useful reading for the Harris campaign.

In the paper, Somerville and co-authors Christabel Cooper and Sarah Mulley proposed a three-part policy shift on immigration, aimed at discrediting the British right while establishing political support for center-left policies. They identified three characteristics of the British immigration system that make voters uncomfortable: dismay that it appears to be in a state of chaos; worry that migrants undermine economic opportunities; and fear that migrants do not “integrate in their new home.”

A responsible center-left policy, they argued, had to address all three concerns. That meant taking steps like clearing a massive backlog of asylum claims, cracking down on exploitation of migrant workers and investing in strained public services that voters fear cannot support growing immigrant communities.

The paper recommended additional policies to build public confidence in the immigration system, including a “world-leading scheme for local and community sponsorship of refugees and other vulnerable groups.” That could help new arrivals find a welcoming environment — and make voters less likely to see them as foreigners adrift in Britain.

Cooper, a political strategist for Labour Together, said her opinion research found room for center-left leaders to make the case for inclusive immigration policy. Most voters, she said, were open to viewing immigration as a helpful thing for the economy and responded warmly to the idea of foreign-born people becoming British citizens. (The Labour Together report held up American-style naturalization ceremonies as a proud ritual that British voters would likely embrace.)

Cooper stressed that openness depended on voters trusting that Labour was serious about bringing order to the system overall.

“The center-left needs to project a message of something like control and compassion,” Cooper said. “The feeling that migration is out of control is a really strong one, and just kind of dismissing it is not a good thing to do.”

In Britain, the “smash the gangs” message was easy to deliver. “It has no tradeoff,” Cooper said. “If you smash the gangs, everybody is happy.”

By the time British voters cast their ballots on July 4, Labour had effectively achieved a draw or even a modest advantage in the immigration debate, according to polls . They did not win the election on the popularity of their immigration policies, and violent civil unrest in Britain is already testing Starmer’s credibility on law and order. But Labour also did not suffer with swing voters because its candidates were perceived as indifferent to border enforcement.

That is the very threat that now confronts Harris as a presidential candidate.

Cooper and Somerville cautioned that immigration policy was tougher in the United States than in Britain, most significantly because of the sheer number of people entering the United States from Mexico. American voters are not exercised about people overstaying visas or slipping in on small boats; they are alarmed by uncontrolled mass migration across one of the world’s longest borders. There is no equivalent challenge in Britain.

Still, we have started to hear the Harris campaign play some Starmer-like notes, whether as a matter of coincidence or conscious mimicry.

In the first joint appearance of the Harris-Walz ticket, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz included in a litany of Harris achievements that she “took down the transnational gangs” as attorney general of California. A campaign ad released on Friday branded Harris as “a border-state prosecutor” who cracked down on organized crime.

The vice president has been a national political figure for most of a decade, and taking on people smugglers as a state attorney general has never been a regular feature of her stump speech. Voters hearing about it now might reasonably wonder where Harris’ interest in this problem has been since she left Sacramento.

But if Harris is going to overcome Trump, Somerville suggested Labour’s strategy might help — by recasting the Democratic agenda in more disciplined terms and drawing a contrast with Republicans’ raw hostility to migrants.

“I don’t see why Kamala Harris couldn’t do something similar,” he said. “Say: ‘My main goal is to smash the gangs, not to punish the migrants.’”

The point, he added, was not to win a border-control debate outright but to make the issue somewhat less damaging.

“If you’re on the center left,” Somerville said, “and you get even to parity, you’re winning — big time.”