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South Carolina is choosing more than Lindsey Graham’s successor. It is deciding which Lindsey Graham it wants to remember.
There was the Graham who became one of Donald Trump’s most reliable congressional defenders. But before that, there was another Graham: a conservative willing to tell Republican audiences that border enforcement and compassion were not opposites, that undocumented immigrants could earn legal status, and that Americans repeatedly mistake future citizens for present dangers.
As South Carolina’s special election process moves forward, the candidates seeking Graham’s seat should be asked whether they will preserve the most courageous part of his record—or the part he ultimately abandoned.
On immigration, Lindsey Graham knew better. In 2007, while the Senate debated comprehensive immigration reform, Graham recalled the Dillingham Commission, which Congress created nearly a century earlier to investigate the supposed dangers posed by immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. Those immigrants were accused of crime, illiteracy and refusing to assimilate. They were described as culturally incompatible and incapable of becoming real Americans.
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Graham’s answer was devastatingly simple: The immigrants accused of ruining America became the parents of America’s “greatest generation.” Their children fought in World War II, defeated fascism, liberated Europe, built the postwar economy and became symbols of American sacrifice and patriotism. Graham understood a pattern that Americans repeatedly fail to recognize. Each generation convinces itself that the newest immigrants are uniquely dangerous. The Irish, Italians, Jews and Eastern Europeans were all portrayed as criminal, alien and unassimilable.
Then their children and grandchildren became part of the American story.
Graham did more than deliver a memorable speech. He took political risks on the principle behind it. He supported comprehensive immigration reform under President George W. Bush. When that effort collapsed, Graham issued a remarkably prescient warning. In his 2007 statement after the Senate bill failed, he predicted that leaving the broken system untouched would increase unlawful immigration and intensify public anger. He was right about the anger. He was also right that refusing to legislate would not solve the problem.
Six years later, Graham joined John McCain, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake and four Democratic senators in the Gang of Eight. Graham described the bipartisan framework as an opportunity to finally solve the country’s immigration problems, rather than merely campaign on them.
Their legislation was not an open-borders proposal. It strengthened border enforcement, expanded employment verification and required undocumented residents to register with the government, undergo background checks, pay penalties and wait years before becoming eligible for permanent status. The Senate passed the bill by a 68–32 vote, with support from both parties. The House never brought it to the floor. That failure did not preserve the status quo. It preserved the problem.
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Congress continued enforcing an immigration system that no longer reflected the country it governed. A person may now have lived in the United States for 25 years, married an American, raised U.S.-citizen children, paid taxes, bought a home, created a business or become essential to an employer—and still have no realistic way to become a permanent resident. That is partly the result of people violating immigration law. It is also the result of Congress refusing, for more than a generation, to create laws capable of addressing the families, workplaces and communities that actually exist.
Graham once accepted two truths simultaneously: A sovereign nation must control its borders, and it cannot deport its way out of decades of legislative failure. Both truths still matter.
The disorder at the southern border was real. The asylum system became overwhelmed. The federal government often appeared incapable of enforcing its own rules. Americans had legitimate reasons to demand control, competence and consequences. But anger is not an immigration policy.
Donald Trump understood how to convert that anger into political power. Immigrants became the “worst of the worst,” an invading force and a collective threat. During the 2024 presidential campaign, he repeated the false claim that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.
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His administration later transformed the method into official government messaging. An official White House website built around the word “aliens” declares that “they walk among us,” describes immigration arrests as “alien abductions” and encourages Americans to report “suspicious aliens.”
The sarcasm carries a serious message. Immigrants are not presented as workers, parents, spouses, neighbors or potential Americans. They are depicted as creatures concealed inside the country but standing outside its human community. No senator was better equipped than Graham to recognize the danger—and the historical familiarity—of that rhetoric. He had already studied the accusations once directed at supposedly criminal and unassimilable European immigrants. He knew how badly those warnings had aged. He knew that the immigrants condemned in one era often raise the soldiers, entrepreneurs, workers and citizens celebrated in the next.
Yet as Trump remade the Republican Party, Graham increasingly stopped defending the balance he had once championed. He was entitled to reconsider particular policies as circumstances changed. He could support stronger border enforcement, narrower asylum rules or additional consequences for unlawful entry without betraying his earlier principles. But he did not merely adjust the enforcement side of his position. He largely abandoned the other side.
The Graham who had insisted that enforcement must be paired with earned legalization became one of Trump’s closest congressional allies. The Graham who had warned against demonizing future Americans rarely used his influence to resist a politics built on precisely that demonization. His political adaptation helped him remain influential in a transformed Republican Party. It also diminished what had once been one of the most courageous parts of his record.
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That matters now because South Carolina is choosing more than a replacement senator. It is deciding what kind of conservatism it wants to send to Washington. The next senator should support secure borders, effective enforcement and a functioning asylum system. But seriousness requires acknowledging that enforcement alone is not reform.
South Carolina’s farms, hotels, construction companies, universities and international manufacturers operate in an economy shaped by immigration. Families throughout the state include naturalized citizens, permanent residents, temporary workers and people trapped in legal limbo by laws Congress has refused to modernize.
Every candidate seeking Graham’s seat should be asked some basic questions. Should someone who has lived here for decades, passed background checks, paid taxes and raised American children ever have an opportunity to earn legal status? Should Congress create workable legal channels for the workers, employers and families the economy already relies upon? Can the country enforce its immigration laws without treating every immigrant as a danger? And will South Carolina’s next senator try to solve the immigration problem—or conclude, as too many politicians have, that preserving it is more politically useful?
Graham once gave South Carolina an honorable answer. He argued that border control and compassion could coexist. He understood that immigrants vilified in one generation might raise the heroes of the next.
The tragedy of his immigration legacy is not that he never saw the problem clearly. It is that he described it, predicted the backlash — and eventually stopped fighting for the solution.
South Carolina’s next senator should begin where the better Lindsey Graham left off.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Richard T. Herman has practiced immigration law in Ohio for over 30 years. He is the founder of Herman Legal Group and co-author of Immigrant, Inc.: Why Immigrant Entrepreneurs Are Driving the New Economy. He writes frequently on immigration law and economic development, and is regularly quoted by The New York Times, The Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, Forbes, and numerous international media.
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