Prominent liberal think tank warns Democrats that open borders messaging only helps Trump

A prominent liberal think tank came out with a report warning Democrats that going too far to the left on immigration could cause people to side with President Donald Trump.

What think tank said this?

This report came from the Center for American Progress. One of the largest and most influential liberal think tanks, the Center for American Progress was founded and run for years by Hillary Clinton's campaign chief of staff, John Podesta (the same Podesta who would click on a phishing link in an email, opening the campaign up to hackers).

This report was written by Tom Jawetz, the Center for American Progress's vice president of immigration policy.

What did the report say?

The Center for American Progress report's overview stated:

Policymakers must break free of the false dichotomy of America as either a nation of immigrants or a nation of laws, and advance an immigration system that is fair, humane, and actually works.

The report said that current immigration debates ignore the fact that "America is, and has always been, both a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws."

America's immigration system, the report argued, "can, and must, recognize both the need for movement and the need for defined borders; it must have clear guidelines but also clear guardrails; and it must live up to the best of the nation's past while working for its present and future."

The report then lays out a version of immigration reform that is decidedly liberal, but more moderate than the open borders version pushed by some of the 2020 candidates. It called for changes to the legal immigration system, allowing refugees in actual "need of humanitarian protection" into the country, and a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, but also emphasized the importance of the "rule of law."

While the report in no way supported Trump's immigration policies (which it saw as "degrading the rule of law through official acts of cruelty"), it stressed that America's immigration system needed rules to defend it that "support clear, consistent, and fair enforcement."

The report worried that liberals were "at risk of allowing them [supporters of Trump's immigration policies] to wrongly define us as supporting an open-border policy rather than a system of rules that is tailored to meet the needs and interests of the country and that can be realistically and humanely be followed and enforced."