Americans of all stripes want the problem fixed.
One of the most remarkable things about the 2024 election is how the Democratic Party managed to get on the wrong side of an 80-20 issue — uncontrolled illegal immigration — in an election year while pitted against the American politician most associated with a hard line on border enforcement.
Back in February 2024, the Pew Research Center reported that only 18 percent of Americans (!) assessed that the Biden administration was doing a satisfactory job handling the migrant influx swamping the border.
According to Pew, a full 80 percent of Americans said the feds were doing a bad job, “including 45% who say it is doing a very bad job.”
The situation was so out of control and politically toxic for Democratic politicians that even 73 percent of self-declared Democrats gave the Biden administration negative marks on the issue.
In our polarized era, such a shocking divide is hard to fathom, and harder still to engineer. It’s actually an amazing (and perverse) political accomplishment that the Joe Biden and Kamala Harris Democrats allowed themselves to become associated with such an unpopular set of policies.
Donald Trump of course, didn’t fail to recognize the opportunity, nor did he fail to capitalize politically. Along with the inflation of the Biden years, the feds’ open-border policies and the sense of uncontrolled chaos around immigration were the two key factors that allowed Trump to be seen by a plurality of Americans as the better option in November 2024. The issue had broken through into the mainstream. Democrats could no longer pretend that dissatisfaction around illegal immigration was limited to Republican strongholds or the demographic segment that regularly tuned in to Fox News prime time.
Normal people coast to coast had started to revolt over the deleterious effects of Biden’s policies that they were seeing all around them. And even big-city mayors and blue-state governors had started to grumble about the ramifications they were seeing in their own neighborhoods and on their own streets. No matter one’s political party or ideological priors, most people simply wanted the border fixed. And they were willing to give Trump a chance at fixing it.
Fast forward to the summer of 2025, and I think we’re seeing what could be the beginning of Donald Trump’s next 80-20 issue: cleaning up the rise of tent cities, vagrancy, and homelessness across America.
The problem, much like illegal immigration, is one that breaks through political affiliations and ideological priors. Americans from small towns to big cities, from rural areas to the suburbs, in New England and the Mountain West and everywhere in between are seeing a rise in vagrancy, open-air drug use, tent cities, and homeless encampments.
Anecdotally, many people will note that the problem — a problem that has always been with us, of course — seems to have gotten worse since the pandemic era. But the data prove they’re right: Research has shown that the population of the homeless in America has increased each of the last three years, including up to a 30 percent increase in 2024.
Americans have grown accustomed to seeing parks and subways, underpasses, and greenbelts become the living spaces for our society’s most destitute. They’ve grown accustomed to seeing those suffering from psychiatric conditions or high out of their minds on drugs wandering the streets. They’ve grown accustomed to having to explain to their children why they see people defecating in public. And they’ve grown accustomed to dealing with aggressive panhandling, harassment, and even violence that comes from the vagrant population.
But while they’ve become accustomed to it, Americans don’t like this state of affairs. And a politician who makes a cause célèbre of cleaning up American streets will find sympathy and broad public support for policies that attempt to deal with the problem.
Donald Trump, of course, is a talented politician who can see the opportunity. I expect him to seize the issue as we approach the 2025 midterms. His attempt to clean up Washington, D.C., is, in my view, a test run of such policies, and the politics around them. He is also, shall we say, not a man inclined to focus on the inherent dignity of people who get in his way. Trump will vilify with his rhetoric those who he deems as his opponents, even if those opponents are his own destitute countrymen.
That’s not to say that the president will be wrong to highlight this issue. Americans ought to embrace a different paradigm on vagrancy and homelessness that cleans up our neighborhoods and our parks, and increases the quality of life for not only ourselves and our families, but also those who are currently living at the lowest ebb of their lives on our streets. While doing so, we must ensure that we respect the fundamental rights and dignity of all people, especially those who are, like us, citizens of this great country.
How exactly to do all that? I’ll be the first to tell you that I am unsure. This issue is complicated and thorny. Simply clearing out the tent cities won’t solve the underlying problems of mental illness, drug addiction, and poverty, of course.
But what I am sure of is that Americans want the problem fixed. And if Donald Trump seizes the issue of vagrancy and homelessness that has swept America in the last decade, he may just find that he has his next 80-20 issue that will attract broad bipartisan support.