The left has lost the American public’s trust on immigration and the border. We haven’t just got it wrong with white working-class voters. Donald Trump increased his support among Latino, Black, and Asian American voters, including in Hispanic-majority counties. Anti-immigration ads apparently tipped the scales with some male and Latino voters.

We have failed to respond adequately to a national and global political climate increasingly skeptical of immigration and unsympathetic to the reasons driving people to come to wealthier nations. We haven’t done enough to respond to upset Americans who believe there’s an extralegal backdoor into the United States and fear diminished opportunities in their own country.

We can regain our footing—but it won’t be easy. We need to offer a pragmatic vision that recognizes our economic and national security imperative to foster an orderly, secure, and fully functional immigration system without giving up on humanitarian ideals.

Trump’s election, coupled with Republican control over Congress, means his Administration will, if it can carry out his campaign promises, operationalize an immigration agenda couched in language about security and the rule of law but rooted in a dangerous ideology that has only become more extreme.

Never mind that Trump’s boasts about security don’t match the reality of his record on immigration. His Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was roiled by chaos and dysfunction. By diverting billions of dollars appropriated for military and counternarcotics funding toward his ineffective border wall, he put Americans’ national security at risk. His anti-immigrant obsession undermined the federal government’s response to the threat of domestic terrorism and to the opioid crisis, for which he falsely blamed immigrants while threatening low-income Americans’ access to treatment.

During Trump’s first term, up to eight million immigrants became priorities for deportation. Enforcement resources that should have been used to make America safer were instead used to deport the mothers of American children—mothers who posed no threat. We can expect even greater cruelty from a second Trump term. Assuming he follows through on his promises, DHS will again serve his political interests at the expense of national security; deeply rooted undocumented family members of Americans will be deported; and lawful migration pathways will be shut down. The mass deportation of workers will rip families and communities apart, leave vegetables rotting in farm fields, shutter neighborhood storefronts, raise prices, and shrink the economy.

The Opportunity Ahead

Americans came together to push back against Trump’s most egregious immigration policies during his first term. Public pressure forced him to back down from his disastrous family separation policy, and by the end of his presidency, public support for his immigration policies was low.

Should Trump’s inhumanity on immigration create a similar backlash this time around, it could present an opportunity for the left to offer a smarter, more humane path to the American people. But first we have to show the public that we understand their concerns. While a lot of hostility toward immigrants is fueled by racism and disinformation, we should also acknowledge that Americans are justifiably frustrated by a longstanding extralegal and insufficiently accountable immigration system baked into the American economy. People across the political spectrum know our immigration system doesn’t work. What the left needs to do is convince the American public that there is a way to fix it without resorting to cruelty.

First, we must acknowledge that much more needs to be done to enhance security and accountability at our land, sea, and air borders to ensure the safe, lawful, and orderly entry of people and goods into the United States. Our laws must be followed by—and administered fairly for—all who enter and exit the country. We should advance and support strong, evidence-based border security measures, just as we support robust oversight and accountability for the agencies carrying out these functions.

At the same time, we can’t ignore the broken asylum system’s ballooning usage as a substitute for the alternate legal pathways Congress has failed to create. The left shouldn’t ever be happy with government failing in its basic functions, which is where we’ve landed with asylum: The immigration court backlog now exceeds 3.7 million pending cases with only approximately 700 judges to hear them. Currently, some who meet the statutory criteria to qualify for asylum may never even have the chance to make their case before a U.S. official. Meanwhile, others who lack a realistic statutory claim have used the backlogged system to stay in the United States for years absent alternate legal migration pathways.

Our refugee and asylum programs should be geared toward protecting the most vulnerable. We need to continue to support new legal pathways and strengthen protections for victims of persecution around the world while also recognizing that our current asylum system needs drastic reform and accountability to survive beyond Trump and retain voters’ support. In addition, we need to acknowledge that not every displaced person in the world will qualify for a pathway into the United States. We should work toward scaling up U.S. involvement and investments in global and regional initiatives to address the reasons why people seek to leave their home nations, building on the success of the multicountry Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection, which called for countries across the Americas to work collaboratively to better manage migration in the region.

Another key issue in need of attention is immigrant integration—that is, how immigrants adapt to life in the United States. We need to renew our empathy toward Americans’ anxieties about insufficient integration if we want to reduce social conflict and avoid losing more support for immigration. Immigration reform advocacy has often been focused on people’s entry into the United States and securing or maintaining their immigration status. We’ve not paid enough attention to how to better integrate immigrants, even though integration accelerates their path to self-sufficiency and greater contributions to their local communities. Federal immigration integration resources are modest and largely focused on permanent residents seeking to become U.S. citizens; they should be scaled up and made available to other immigrants as well. But much more needs to be done at the state and local level too to ensure that immigrants have access to the basic resources needed to succeed, like driver’s licenses, English language learning opportunities, and information about American laws and customs—which also would help improve perceptions of immigration among Americans.

We also need to address the perception that the left sees legal immigration as less of a priority than legalization for undocumented immigrants. This perception disadvantages us with native-born Americans and legal immigrants alike. Instead, we should embrace opportunities to meaningfully improve the entire legal immigration system.

Ideally, the solution would include reform legislation to authorize more legal immigration pathways and clear existing backlogs. But in its absence, we should work strategically to support resource-based solutions—like ensuring sufficient funding for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the immigration courts, and our embassies and consulates abroad to tangibly benefit millions of immigrants and their U.S. families and employers.

Lastly, legalization for long-term undocumented immigrants is a humane policy outcome that would also better advance our national security and economic interests than the status quo. But ever since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, we’ve been waiting in vain for the passage of an ambitious new legalization bill, and now that dream seems even less attainable. Even after Trump is no longer President, we won’t succeed in this effort if we don’t get the American public on our side.

Prioritize Fairness and Be Credible

We must win the broader case that legalization is good policy not just for immigrants but for native-born Americans too. We need to recognize the difficult compromises successful legalization legislation will involve. To convince voters of the benefits of a new, ambitious legalization bill, we have to first address concerns about fairness—for example, concerns over rewarding previous violations of the law in entering or remaining unlawfully, or about jumping the line over people waiting for legal immigration.

We should take heed of recent experiences in other wealthy receiving nations—like Australia, Canada, and the UK—where liberal governments ultimately adopted the types of drastic cuts to legal immigration favored by the right, revealing what could happen here if we fail to regain robust public support for immigration.

We have the opportunity to lead from a position of strength rather than perpetually playing defense. We care about workers, and our advocacy should reflect that, rather than accepting the status quo of an immigration system that serves corporations over immigrants and U.S. workers. We care about safety and security, evidence-based solutions, and the rule of law. So, why shouldn’t we lead with that, instead of shying away from a public-safety-minded approach to issues like sanctuary cities or border security? We care about justice, fairness, and accountability. So, why shouldn’t we acknowledge that the asylum system is not always an appropriate path to the United States—which would allow us to credibly build support to strengthen protections for victims of persecution.

Legislative change is necessary to bring order, justice, and economic benefit to our immigration system, and it will occur only when a sufficient congressional majority recognizes that change is in their political interest. We don’t have to give up our humanitarian ideals to accept that what we’ve been saying and doing has, at best, not been working as we hoped it would. Rebutting the cruelty and chaos of Trumpism will require going beyond opposing his policies to offer a robust, credible, responsive alternative.