A hallmark of former President Joe Biden's tenure in office was his notoriously lax enforcement of federal laws on border security and illegal immigration, which quite predictably resulted in a historically massive surge of migration into the U.S. and almost certainly contributed to President Donald Trump's re-election last year.

That was the somewhat surprising recent summation from David Leonhardt, the new editorial director for the opinion section of The New York Times, who acknowledged that Biden's "unpopular" immigration policies were "never what most American voters wanted," according to Fox News.

The unexpected admission came as part of a dire warning from the left-leaning journalist for the Democratic Party to moderate its policy positions on the migration issue, lest they find themselves lost in the political wilderness for multiple election cycles.

Biden's policies resulted in mass illegal immigration

In a December op-ed for The New York Times, Leonhardt crunched the numbers from multiple official sources and wrote, "Annual net migration -- the number of people coming to the country minus the number leaving -- averaged 2.4 million people from 2021 to 2023, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people."

While some of those migrants entered the U.S. legally, around 60% entered illegally, and of those, more than half a million were known to be convicted criminals or had pending criminal charges, yet had not been detained or deported.

"Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office. Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies -- including the separation of families at the border -- Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach," Leonhardt said, including loosening asylum rules, making illegal entry easier, and granting some legal status while their cases were pending.

And, while there were an assortment of international reasons for the surge in migration to the U.S., the journalist admitted the "biggest" reason was Biden's policies, and noted, "But the Biden administration’s policy appears to have been the biggest factor: After Mr. Biden tightened enforcement in June, the number of people crossing the border plummeted."

Illegal immigration a big reason why Trump won

Fast-forward to a recent interview with Leonhardt for The New Yorker, in which he asserted that Democrats "lost their way" on the immigration issue under former President Biden, which he surmised was a top three reason why President Trump was victorious in November, joining issues like price inflation and Biden's advanced age and declining health.

"And under President Biden, we had the largest surge of immigration over a short period in American history. The pace was even faster than the peak pace of the Ellis Island years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century," Leonhardt explained. "We had eight million net immigrants come into the country. It appears that about five million of them entered illegally, a vastly faster pace than under Trump or Obama."

"You had Biden telling people during the 2020 campaign that he wanted more people to come to the country and then loosening a whole bunch of policies. Almost immediately, immigration surged," he continued. "And it was never what most American voters wanted. It particularly was not what lower-income voters across races wanted. It was unpopular from the beginning. And it happened in large part -- not exclusively, but in large part -- because of the policies they enacted."

A message and advice for Democrats

Leonhardt went on to suggest that Democrats should return to the "balanced approach" under former President Barack Obama, which combined relatively tough border security and deportations for criminal aliens with an otherwise welcoming attitude toward legal migrants and opportunities for legal status and citizenship for non-criminal illegals -- all of which was cast to the side by the party in the 2016 through 2024 elections.

He went on to discuss how rhetoric from progressive politicians played a big role in turning off a majority of voters and acknowledged that mass migration has a somewhat negative effect on wages for native-born Americans but surmised that the rapid pace of cultural change and increased burdens on social services was even more impactful.

As for the idea that Democrats could wait for societal opinions and the right-wing media to change in their favor, Leonhardt warned, "If the Democratic Party basically says, Well, we’re not going to moderate our position, which has clearly been unpopular on this issue, until we’ve repealed Citizens United and got rid of Fox News, I think they’re going to spend a lot of time out of power."

After sharing his prediction that President Trump would "overreach" on immigration enforcement and create an "opportunity" for Democrats to retake power, he concluded, "I don’t know exactly what a winning message on immigration is, but it’s going to have to be one that is more moderate than what the Party’s has been and one that acknowledges the complications that immigration has huge benefits both for immigrants and for the country but it also has meaningful downsides."