The Golden Door
How a Texas Democrat and a California Republican made the case for immigration
LBJ at the Harbor
In October 1965, Lyndon Johnson stood at the foot of the Statue of Liberty and signed a bill that did something the United States had refused to do for four decades.
It reopened the country.
The Immigration Act of 1924 had slammed the door on most of the world. For forty years, three countries were allowed to supply seventy percent of all immigrants to the United States. Italians, Greeks, Poles, Jews, Asians, Africans, turned away because they had been born in the wrong place. By the 1960s, the foreign-born share of the American population had been ground down to five percent.
Then Johnson, the master of the Senate, the man from a Stonewall, Texas farmhouse without electricity, took out a pen.
Here is what he said as he signed:
The fact is that for over four decades the immigration policy of the United States has been twisted and has been distorted by the harsh injustice of the national origins quota system… Families were kept apart because a husband or a wife or a child had been born in the wrong place. Men of needed skill and talent were denied entrance because they came from southern or eastern Europe or from one of the developing continents.
This system violated the basic principle of American democracy—the principle that values and rewards each man on the basis of his merit as a man. It has been un-American in the highest sense.
Un-American.
That’s the word Johnson used. Not unkind. Not unfair. Not suboptimal from a policy standpoint. Un-American.
He didn’t apologize for the bill. He didn’t pre-buffer it with appeasement of nativists. He told the country that the old system was a betrayal of America itself, and that he was ending it because it was beneath us.
He kept going:
Our beautiful America was built by a nation of strangers… The land flourished because it was fed from so many sources—because it was nourished by so many cultures and traditions and peoples.
Over my shoulders here you can see Ellis Island, whose vacant corridors echo today the joyous sound of long-ago voices. And today we can all believe that the lamp of this grand old lady is brighter today—and the golden door that she guards gleams more brilliantly in the light of an increased liberty for the people from all the countries of the globe.
A liberal politician, standing under Lady Liberty, saying immigration makes America great, and meaning it.
Now ask yourself when you last heard a Democrat speak this way.
Reagan’s Last Word
A quarter-century later, a very different president gave a speech that should, by all rights, get the Democrats to rethink their approach to talking about immigration.
As a Democrat myself, I was not a fan of Ronald Reagan’s policies, but in his final speech as president—delivered at a Medal of Freedom ceremony the day before he left office—he chose to talk about immigration in a way that truly stood out.
In 1986, 49 percent of Americans wanted immigration reduced. Only seven percent wanted more of it. The political climate was even harder, by a country mile, than it is today.
Reagan signed an amnesty for nearly three million people, mostly Hispanic, who had entered the country illegally before 1982. One of the most sweeping progressive immigration measures in modern American history. Signed by a Republican.
And on his way out the door, here is what he chose to say:
A man wrote me and said: “You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.”
Read that line again. A conservative Republican told the country, on his way out of office, that America’s defining magic was that it could absorb anyone, from anywhere, and make them one of us.
He kept going:
While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas… If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.
He didn’t sell immigration as charity. He didn’t sell it as obligation. He sold it as strength. As national greatness. As the engine that makes us better than every country we are supposedly in competition with.
And then he said the part that should be tattooed on the inside of every Democratic strategist’s eyelids:
They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world—the last, best hope of man on Earth.
Immigrants as renewers of national pride.
That’s the line. That’s the move. That’s the thing today’s Democrats cannot bring themselves to say.
What today’s Democrats do instead
What is the modern Democratic message on immigration?
We rightly hear about ICE criminality. We hear about ICE’s massive, unmonitored budget. We hear that immigrants are being attacked. We hear that the system is broken. We hear about humanitarian crises and family separations and asylum backlogs.
This language is important, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough.
We do not hear that immigrants are makers of the nation. We do not hear that immigration is what makes the American economy outpace the world. We do not hear that immigrants renew our pride in our own country.
We hear, on alternate days, that calls for border security are coded racism, and then, on the other days, we back our own crackdowns that look like appeasement of nativists.
What we never hear is the simple, confident, patriotic case that Johnson and Reagan made in plain English. The case that says: We are the country that takes the bold and the hungry from every corner of the Earth and turns them into Americans. That is why we are the greatest nation on Earth. And anyone who wants to slam that door shut is betraying what makes America great.
That case is sitting on a shelf. The polling supports it. The history supports it. The economics support it. The country wants it.
Democrats have yet to pick it up.
The Vacuum
In 1986, when Reagan signed his amnesty, public opinion was hostile. Forty-nine percent wanted less immigration. Seven percent wanted more.
Since then the numbers became dramatically friendlier than they were when Reagan won his fight—until Trump’s nativist attacks took hold.
In the absence of a serious liberal counternarrative, Trump’s hideous story about immigrants “poisoning the blood of our country” took hold. In June 2021, 69 percent of Americans favored increasing immigration or sustaining it at present levels, while just 31 percent favored reducing immigration. In June 2024, an astonishing 55 percent favored reducing it and just 41 percent wished to increase it or maintain current levels (Gallup, June 2024). Trump remade public consciousness, while the Democrats were left scurrying furiously to cope with the rotten fruits of Trump’s anti-American handiwork.
Support for Trump’s immigration policies has collapsed in the wake of ICE abuses. But the Democrats have yet to push their advantage for a longer-term win. That has been our pattern for years. Even when the polling has gone our way, we have spent the last quarter century unable to pass anything close to what Reagan passed, including the DREAM Act, which is less ambitious than Reagan’s amnesty and has supermajority support.
Why?
Because the rhetorical case Johnson and Reagan made—that immigration is America at its best, that the golden door is what makes us the greatest nation on Earth—has been ceded by Democrats to nobody. It just sits there, vacant. Trump has filled the vacuum with his sewage about “poisoning the blood of our country.” And Democrats have responded by triangulating, hedging, and asking voters not to think about the issue too hard.
A handful of Democrats have broken with that approach. When Trump threatened mass deportation raids and even floated denaturalizing Mamdani, the New York mayor didn’t fact-check or plead; he drew the line. In his victory speech, he declared:
New York will remain a city of immigrants, a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants—and as of tonight, led by an immigrant. So hear me, President Trump, when I say this: to get to any of us, you will have to get through all of us.
Mamdani cast himself and his city as the wall between Trump’s agents and the immigrants who built New York. That’s how you go on offense on immigration: not by ceding the issue or softening the edges, but by daring the bully to come through you first.
Newsom is another example. In a bold, brilliant minute-long viral video posted shortly after the Los Angeles protests, Newsom declared that California’s dominance in innovation and status as the world’s fourth largest economy is due to the fact that 27 percent of the state’s population is foreign-born. He was unequivocal about the source of California’s strength:
It’s because of immigrants! It’s because people from all around the world want to come and live their lives out loud in California, in the most diverse state in the world’s most diverse democracy… That’s what’s made America great!
Immigrants as renewers of national pride.
Mamdani and Newsom aren’t just following polls or fretting over how Trump turned many Americans against immigration and clobbered Harris with the issue. Instead, they are going on offense and working to undo what Trump did by owning the narrative and remaking Americans’ opinions.
The Takeaway
There is a Reagan speech and a Johnson speech sitting on a shelf, gathering dust, waiting for a Democrat with the nerve to walk over and pick them up.
Anyone running for anything should do exactly this:
Stand in front of an American flag. Tell the story of one immigrant—by name, by face, by hometown. Then say, in plain words, that this person is what makes America the greatest country on Earth. Say that closing the golden door would be a betrayal of every generation that came before. Say that the people who want to slam the door shut are the ones who don’t actually love this country.
Then say it again the next week.
We do not need a new policy. We do not need a new slogan. We need to tell the American story of immigration, the one we have neglected for decades.
Lady Liberty is still standing in the harbor.
Her lamp is still lit.
Pick it up.