View / How Trump’s ‘big, beautiful’ immigration door got a lot smaller

You don’t hear much about the “big, beautiful door” anymore. During Donald Trump’s first presidential campaign, when some Republicans were queasy about building a 1954-mile border wall, he liked to add a caveat. There would be a wall, but it would have a door — big, beautiful, and sometimes even “fat” — for the people “coming in legally.”

That never happened in Trump’s first term. Running again in 2024, after the Biden-era backlash to millions of new asylum-seekers, Trump never mentioned the “door.” The closest he came was an interview on the “All In” podcast, when co-host Jason Calacanis asked if Trump would “promise” to “import the best and brightest around the world” once he closed the border. Trump agreed. “You graduate from a college,” he said, “I think you should get automatically, as part of your diploma, a green card to be able to stay in this country.”

The campaign walked most of this promise back, limiting it to the “most skilled graduates who can make significant contributions to America.” But that didn’t happen, either. Right now, any aspiring foreign student who didn’t already have a visa can’t get one; the president, conducting an ad hoc war on Harvard, is spitballing potential caps for how many foreign students the private university should be allowed to take. Eventually.

In the elite media, tech, and business conversations, this is an obvious outrage, totally self-defeating, a threat to an American advantage that everybody took for granted. In Republican politics, it just makes sense: There is no issue that doesn’t cut their way if framed as a choice between American citizens and non-citizens.

They’re selling the “big, beautiful bill” around its impact on immigration: Half a billion dollars in new immigration law enforcement, and cuts to Medicaid funding in states whose plans cover non-citizens. They’re delighted to see Democrats defending Rep. LaMonica McIver after she was charged for allegedly assaulting ICE officers. Most of the DOGE cuts that the administration will ask Congress to approve next month were to foreign aid, another fight Republicans love having.

To mass confusion from Democrats, Republicans are offering both zero-sum scarcity and endless abundance. In that story, Chuck Schumer’s party wants to keep you poor. Every dollar, job, or university spot that doesn’t go to a non-citizen can go to an American — and Democrats don’t like that. Cryptocurrencies will create endless wealth for Americans with zero downsides or risk — and Democrats don’t like that, either. This is all more popular than the wall-with-a-door compromise Trump used to run on. Democrats, unsure how to counter this, are waiting for it to stop being so politically effective.