Caitlin Dickerson

Look at the calculation on the Democratic side.

So Democrats aren't sticking their neck out for a population of people who by nature cannot vote, cannot vote for them.

And I think not only can this constituency not vote, but Americans generally tend to really underestimate, I think, how interconnected we all are with the immigration system.

That is being challenged right now.

Because—

People are seeing that they personally are affected by this deportation campaign, even if it's not someone in their family who's being arrested because their kid is scared because their kid's friend got arrested or their kid's friend's parent got arrested.

Their church, you know, people aren't showing up for church.

Their employees aren't showing up for work.

Their patrons aren't showing up to buy things from them.

So the interconnectedness is becoming more clear now.

But generally speaking, I think what holds Democrats back is if you have—

two years or four years or maybe six years, depending on how long you might have the advantage in Congress, to push forward just a couple of priorities.

Why are you going to focus on one that Americans tend to think of as for those people over there, not for us?

Even if the public is sympathetic to the issue, it's not going to be number one or number two on their list of concerns.

So actually, something that Gallego has been one of the few people to talk about, I think, is largely absent from the conversation and is pretty key to how stuck we are, which is that we don't have a lot of legal pathways to the United States.

And we especially don't have legal pathways to the United States for the jobs that we tend to rely on undocumented workers for.

So construction, restaurant work, hospitality, domestic work, these jobs are dominated by immigrant workers and, by and large, do not have visas available to do them.

I mean, we now have a couple hundred thousand guest worker visas for agriculture.

We have millions of agriculture workers in the United States.

And so he actually has talked at different times about a need for legal pathways and balancing that work.