Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is not a fascist, he told Biden repeatedly he needed to take executive action first before Trump even weighed in over a month later. The reason Biden waited until May five months later to quietly restart Remain in Mexico is because Johnson was correct, it was up to him. Basic facts are more helpful than calling people fascist or communist.
What a ridiculous sentence if taken seriously. It has aged like milk out in the sun. If it's true that enforcing borders is the thing fascists are doing, and if it's true voters are electing fascists now, why should liberals adopt this stance? It doesn't follow at all from their view of justice. Accordingly, Frum's vote for Biden from this perspective was clearly a mistake. Democrats took none of Frum's advice because they genuinely hold a populist view of immigration as the rightful entry of the forgotten masses against a tiny xenophobic and fiscally conservative elite. This was all apparent in the 2020 Dem primary before Biden even took office.
The issue that Trump entered politics on produced next to zero clarity for liberal policymakers, and this "eat your vegetables but don't say vegetables are good" rhetorical pivot from Frum is a perfect example. If you want to stop liberals from doing bad ideas, you either have to tell them on the merits their ideas are bad for the country or elect right-wing politicians to make them lose power for a bit so they learn the hard way. This cop-out position of "uhh excuse me, you might not like this but your stance might technically reduce your chances of winning an election versus a fascist" yielded the Biden administration's executive hijinks, not any substantive commitment to letting Congress say no to more immigration and leaving it at that. Frum went along with calling Trump fascist, and it got him the stupidest Democratic admin on immigration in a generation. How did that work out for him?
If you would prefer for America to not elect "fascists", why do you repeat, and presumably believe, false things like "The Biden admin did not enforce borders?"
There's probably a complex way you came to think this was a socially acceptable thing to say, which is even more true for less politically interested people who don't read blogs, but get their understanding of the world from other, more inaccurate media sources. The problem of why people vote for who they do, probably has more to do with that perception.
Personally, I'm old enough to remember when the "compassionate conservatives" had a different understanding of how immigration should work, and news coverage about America being a refuge for the rest of the world to best live their life and thrive was rampant.
Tbh I don't know why dems went to the mat for asylum claims, tbh seems more like negative polarization than a firm commitment to right of movement (though some will stem from first principles type reasoning).
Cause when you actually talk to people on an individual basis, their stories are horrifying and you come away thinking "oh yeah, that actually makes sense." Nobody walks from Central America to the US border for fun.
Yes, a lot of bad situations people are fleeing from don’t meet the technical definition of asylum, but treating that as the end of the conversation is corrosive to the soul.
It is the end of the conversation as far as current law goes.
If you want a different outcome, we have a process for that. Congress should pass a new law and the president should sign it.
The problem is that no matter how sympathetic individual stories are (and I agree most of them have very sympathetic stories)
It's quite clear that Americans don't want that level of immigration. Note that's a sentiment I agree with.
I think the total legal level should be a bit higher than it is currently, and should be focused on high skilled immigrants and people that get educated in our universities in STEM fields.
But the total level should still be WAY below what it was during the Biden administration (legal + illegal + asylum)
Stolen base politics. If growing the population rapidly is an important objective, and you can't do it through congress, it's a straightforward workaround.
To be clear, I'm all for the US growing rapidly and increasing immigration. "Staving off demographic collapse" by using the asylum loophole is perhaps wise policymaking, if politically unpopular.
I don't think there was much thought or strategy behind Biden-era asylum loopholes other than "I don't want to piss off young staffers and/or The Groups."
But Frum's 2019 essay did not prevent Trump from winning in 2020. COVID and Trump's inability to stop doing the Donny from Queens show when people wanted stoic guidance during a crisis prevented Trump from winning in 2020. The immigration issue was Trump's favor, as in 2016 and 2024, it just wasn't an issue at the time of the pandemic shutdown of movement and he did reduce legal immigration a bit prior to that satisfying his voters. What Frum was suggested here is liberals could pivot on immigration by identifying their opponents as a fascist threat, and he was clearly wrong about that.
I mean, he failed to convince the democrats who were managing this within the Biden administration to change course...which is bad...but I don't see how that damages the underlying critique? It seems like you agree with him that if the Biden administration had listened to Frum and prioritized controlling/reducing immigration flows that would have been better (at least politically)? So your problem is that he failed to win an argument, even though he was making a true statement (we need to moderate on this, or the voters will elect Trump to be extreme on it)?
Or, is your argument since there is now a party which represents this view, there is no need to moderate on it at all and Democrats should simply represent the broadly permissive position? That's not crazy, but I think the response is that we need to detach a view which is popular and not going anywhere (immigration should be restricted) from a position which isn't and has to be crushed (peronist authoritarianism is fine, so long as Trump is the man on top!).
The specific problem is Frum decided treating Trump as an existential threat would inform better liberal governance. That's really the heart of the quote I'm replying to; voters are electing fascists to enforce borders, so that's why liberals will have to pivot rightward on borders. This was Frum's intellectual gambit, and it didn't work. Liberals spent more time than ever discussing Trump as fascist and making excuses for Biden's immigration policy. Frum incorrectly saw the former observation as disciplining the latter, hence the quote summing up his essay thesis in 2019.
I'd need to reread his piece, but I don't think that was his prediction. I think it was 'we need to moderate on this or Trump/fascists will be elected' which is exactly what happened?
It's true that there are first-mover advantages, but the race is not always to the swift. Sometimes posts from later in the morning move right up the leaderboard if they make a good point or shed new light on the issue.
Furthermore, the very top post is often some inconsequential bullshit -- a pointless quip or wry non-sequitur. People "like" it the way that they like a palate-cleanser between courses -- a brief diversion between Matt's post and the serious work of hashing out the issues in the comments further down.
You just have to have the boldness to ignore that you're late. 50% of the time if you drop a four paragraph monster as a top level comment you'll get likes. Of course, the other half the time no one sees it. But that's okay, I take swings in the batting cage even when no one is around to see them.
One can play skillfully, even from the West Coast. Indeed, the hardness and skill vectors sheer one another because sleep may increase skill. It’s not just two coefficients!
As someone entering later in the day from the West Coast, I've realized that the object is not the number of likes but rather the quality of likes.
Those discerning readers who click "like" on my comments are the creme de la creme of the SB commentariat and I happily concede all those other, non-discerning like-clickers to the vapid and obvious clickbait that attracts the hoi polloi.
It is especially pleasing to me when I get a single "like" because I know that represents a meeting of the minds, reflecting the appreciation of that one true reader who totally *gets* what I'm saying.
The only better outcome is when I get zero likes because that shows how deeply the best, the most discerning readers have read and understood the value of what I'm saying.
"...better outcome is when I get zero likes because...."
That comment by Robbins -- it was so profound, so life-changing, that I wandered off in a daze, forgetting even to "like" it, before I switched off my laptop and entered a monastery.
You should have told us directly, this was written by David Frum, and was a bad faith argument to begin with, that can apply to any number of other issues you can swap in. "Liberals" are not insisting "only fascists" will enforce borders. There are a variety of other reasons why conservatives will scapegoat a faction of populace that doesn't have political reputation, and there's no amount of it that will satisfy them into recanting on this narrative.
This is a key point: "Part of the reason for the gap is probably that M.P.s have to think more concretely about tradeoffs. It’s a lot easier to tell a pollster you want harsher sentences or tweet about how we could end crime by locking up repeat offenders and throwing away the key than it is to specifically write down what taxes you want to raise or what spending you want to cut in order to accomplish that."
Apply this to immigration, too. You want less... but are you willing to pay the cost?
If the median voter wants to make it harder to emigrate to Germany, the United States, and most everywhere else. But what about the tradeoffs incurred? Does the average voter also want more expensive healthcare and longer wait times? How about food-price inflation? Maybe they'd be less happy if their local elementary school closed? Remember when everyone was freaking out that "nobody wants to work anymore?" Y'all ain't seen nothin yet!
These effects and immigration only seem unrelated because people still aren't contending with the fact that the *only* reason that populations haven't been in free-fall across the Western world for years now is immigration. And that everything they consider "normal" is extremely sensitive to the working-age population and labor supply. Places like Japan have been foreshadowing our future my while life, but they actually adapted to their new reality in ways that I don't think the American system (or psyche) is really prepared for.
But maybe we'll all learn fast because the US population has just shrank for the first time in its history. Note that the American population didn't shrink during the Civil War, either of the World Wars, or the Great Influenza. But now it has. For. The. First. Time. Ever. And almost entirely due to the MAGA immigration policy (plus decades of below-replacement birthrates).
It takes people a while to notice the knock-on effects of something so catastrophic, but they will. You say it "wouldn't be the end of the world." But people were OUTRAGED that they couldn't get their McDonald's or Starbucks in a timely fashion during COVID. And, already, Trump got a little wobbly with the obvious acute effect of his immigration raids on the food production sector and reversed. And anti-immigration is his whole thing! How quickly will the MAGA diehards among the votership suddenly notice the upsides of having a bunch of erstwhile undesirable Haitians and Venezuelans around? I'd wager sometime before 2028 at this rate...
People in Germany and Italy don't have to wait so long. The shrinkage is happening now. And so are its deleterious effects. But they still want less immigration. So who's going to tell everyone that you can't have your cake and eat it too? Maybe I'm wrong and motivated reasoning and propaganda inure everyone from the truth that not having babies and not having immigrants is when we can't have nice things, anymore. But we're recovered from spats of xenophobic populism before when everyone feels the concrete effect of fewer people.
Matt sort of alluded to it in this post, but it's pretty likely that a lot of people who decided to vote for Trump due to immigration or voted for AFD in Germany are not hardcore restrictionists but rather just people who want somebody to take the idea of restricting immigration even somewhat seriously.
I think it's alarming that Matt spoke to voters who didn't seem put off from voting for AFD even when told they have some Nazi ties. But that's different from these same voters endorsing the hardcore rightwing views of the AFD.
It's a huge part of why populist parties do so much better out of power. It's extremely difficult for these parties to deliver on their promises once in power. As Matt and this commentator alluded to, one reason more traditional center left and center right parties don't "go there" with immigration is they're aware that this would involve making promises they have no hope of delivering on.
To make you a little less hopeful, this is likely part of the reason why these extreme right parties are particular anti-democratic. Part of this is just a general antipathy towards democracy itself given it empowers people that extreme right wingers think are not their equals. But I suspect part of it is there is a pretty big electoral backlash once voters see the practical consequences of implementing the right wing populist party agenda. So what better way to ensure you're success than by putting your thumb on the scale with elections to minimize or even eliminate said backlash. Just another reason why I think we should take more seriously the idea that Trump is going to make moves to limit how free and fair elections will be in 2026 and 2028.
One of the problems too is the “downside” of these tradeoffs are often not immediate.
I’m thinking specifically about the recent news out of Florida that vaccinations will no longer be required to attend school. I don’t think it’s a mistake that this announcement was made after the school year started or the very least after kids had to be registered for school. Meaning the incoming class of kids is likely vaccinated. Meaning the long term effects of this decision likely won’t be felt until earliest a year from now (and likely longer given most students and adults will still have been vaccinated against stuff like polio). Meatball Ron is not an idiot and is probably aware of the science behind vaccinations (which makes his endorsement of these actions all the more gross). A year from now he gets to take a “victory lap” about how he stood up for “freedom” and how all the “elite” experts said he was wrong to do this but look how great everything turned out.
That was my exact reaction when I saw the headlines yesterday! Living in Miami I normally feel like the clown show in the state government is unfortunate but its effects manageable. I've got a two-year-old who'll be in public schools in a couple years, and this is the first thing that makes me feel like I ought to bite the bullet on finding a job out of state. I can be diligent about brushing her teeth to deal with the end of fluoridation but there's nothing I can do if her unvaccinated classmates give her measles.
You see that all the time with Trumpian politics. Just look at his first-term tax cuts that actually raised taxes on the middle class… several years later. Anyone talking about that still? Nah!
Or the BIG ONE: the national debt! Big problem for those of us under 50. Not a problem for Trump or most of the extremely elderly Republicans in Congress. When that ticking time-bomb explodes, it will perversely be blamed on the future president in power. Just like Clinton and Obama and Biden were left cleaning up the economic mess of their predecessors, without getting much credit for it.
Clinton was pretty concerned with deficit reduction (albeit with the benefit of the peace dividend), but I don't think Obama or Biden really get many points there. Less bad than Trump, perhaps, but that's a pretty low bar.
Clinton’s economic problem was distinct from Obama’s. Obama faced an FDR-following-Hoover situation.
The time for deficit reduction isn’t when the entire world economy is in a free-fall Great Depression 2.0. That’s a lesson that the austerity-minded Europeans learned the hard way, suffering a Lost Decade after 2008 only improving right in time for COVID.
As for Biden? He had his own Great Depression 3.0 issue inherited from Trump’s mismanagement. And his initial instinct was good.
But after that? I don’t think his approach was in the second half of his tenure was as good. He tried to do too much and “not let a good crisis go to waste.” He would have been better off just stopping after resolving the COVID crisis.
Instead, he was trying to solve some other geopolitical and structural economy problems, belatedly, but he definitely pushed the Keynes button too hard and fell for collation management when he made ill-advised moves like pushing for student loan forgiveness.
Why did he do that? My theory is that he was operating on a common but flawed assumption that Trumpism came from an economic anxiety cause, ultimately, that could be treated with an FDR state-building approach. So he was kind of trying to do a 21st Century Reconstruction to MAGA-proof our battered polity. That was a mistake.
One of the things I don't think gets discussed enough with the thousand "what went wrong with Biden" takes is there seems to be not enough reporting that Biden's passion and focus his entire career was and is on foreign policy. He was on the senate foreign relations committee after all. But from what I've read, there seems to be a decent amount of evidence that Biden was super focused on his foreign policy legacy especially the latter half of his term.
I think this is perhaps where the substantive problem of Biden's cognitive decline was probably most acute. Setting aside the optics that likely turned off swing voters (it's silly, but Biden just acted older than Trump even though Trump if you look even somewhat carefully is clearly in decline himself), I think the real substantive impact was attention and time. One of the problems with the dishonest Fox News reporting (like that video they showed where they deliberately cropped off where it looked like Biden just wandered off after watching parachutists do a jump when in fact he was greeting a parachutists just off screen) is it actually distracted from what were likely very real consequences of cognitive decline. And from reporting, it seems like the substantive impact was that his time was more limited. And for Biden I think that meant that domestic concerns likely fell too much to the wayside and why "The Groups" likely gained too much influence.
That’s a really astute point, and one that I hadn’t considered.
Unfortunately, foreign policy is both glamorous and important for a statesman, but completely at the bottom of the agenda for voters (until discrete moments of crisis where it isn’t).
So if you focus on building up industrial capacity to take on Russia and China in near-peer competition… but then stuff gets more expensiver at home…. Well, then you lose to Trump.
I also think you can't understand Biden's presidency without understanding that he was fading in both energy and mental sharpness over time. He may have started the ship moving in the "Keynsian response to covid" direction early and not had the spoons to turn the ship in a different direction later on.
Even if he wasn’t fading, initial success often lulls us into thinking the same tool works for everything else. Biden found that stimulus and industrial policy helped during COVID and people around him became intoxicated with the generational possibility of change. And they overreached.
It’s not specific to Biden: Look at how insistently Trump is trying the same tariff shakedown to solve every geopolitical issue, even after the bluff stops working. At this point, it’s getting pathetic how much it’s not working.
We may not give the Administration around a President enough power when we say Biden did this or Clinton did that. Many people in Biden’s administration were left over from Obama’s. However Obama was more pragmatic than Biden especially as he slowed down. Voters felt that the Biden administration continued to push leftist Progressive policies and social values. It appeared that the people in that administration wouldn’t change much if Kamala were elected even though it was apparent the voters had moved more to the right. A large number of people just didn’t vote. IMO Pragmatism works.
Clinton benefited from Ross Perot making a big deal about the debt and deficit in the general. In the primaries he opposed a balanced budget amendment and said he would cut taxes on the middle class. Early in his term he failed to get a stimulus bill through congress and decided to focus on deficit reduction after Alan Greenspan talked him into it.
Both parties were concerned about deficit reduction because Ross Perot ran with an almost single-issue-candidate about the problems with the deficit and got a substantial portion of the vote (sometimes coming in second place in some states).
The man was a loon in many ways, but he changed the common knowledge on the ground, and everyone had a lot of room to make deficit reduction a major component of their platforms, without having to argue against a "hey why don't we just try free money forever?" populist.
My own country, the UK, does not have vaccination mandates. I don't think it's a big driver of vaccination rates, and potentially does more harm than good. Isolating cranks into crank bubbles makes them even more crank-orientated! Forcing them to interact with normal institutions is a good thing!
1/ The UK has the NHS (which is to say that almost every British resident interacts frequently with the health system, regardless of means). Easier to do a carrot over sticks approach with that.
2/ It’s also crucial to note that, unlike in the UK or Europe, the United States essentially lacks the whole state function of public health. So not only due huge swaths of the population have no healthcare access, but also there’s no coordinate state function for collective health.
There is definitely coordination on public health matters in the United States. Sometimes it's patchy, but to say there is no coordination between the states is quite an overstatement.
I think you're missing how many gaps are actually covered by our patchy but multi-layered systems. Between state programs, federal programs, military programs, Indian Health Service Programs, Insurer-run programs, Employer-run programs, Education-run programs and volunteer-run Programs the vast majority of Americans also interact or have access to the health care system.
There are “systems of systems,” but that’s very different from having coordination. The CDC, for example, can issue guidance… that state health agencies are free to ignore. And the functions within these agencies are extremely underfunded relative to other advanced democracies.
That’s a description of our “healthcare system,” too, which isn’t a system as all.
Or our education system which had very little coordination before the Department of Education (and now is essentially being marched back to its extremely decentralized state).
In the US it definitely makes a difference. You can see it in the state by state variation on vaccination rates. The state with the least ability to opt out is the one with the highest vaccination rate.
I think this thread has changed my mind. In the UK the school gives vaccines (once the kid is in school), if parents consent. Maybe without vaccine mandates a lot of parents would just forget.
I think COVID vaccination rates lagging in the United States vis a vis the rest of the developed world is an important variable here.
As someone noted below, UK NHS is certainly a factor here why even absent mandates, vaccination rates would remain high. But the real issue is the culture war turn against vaccines themselves. And this is one of those cases where "orange man bad" is part of the story here. One of the few redeeming parts of his first term was he was pro vaccine, but he also was a huge part of why there was right wing turn against covid restrictions and downplaying COVID generally. And now of course he's fully thrown in with being anti-vaccine by embracing RFK Jr.
Point being, unlike with immigration, the rightward turn against vaccinations generally is a very American phenomenon. And yes if you look at polling, there is clearly a turn against vaccinations of all kinds among Republicans. https://news.gallup.com/poll/648308/far-fewer-regard-childhood-vaccinations-important.aspx. And Florida has very clearly become a "red" state the last 10 years.
The upshot is, there is a strong liklihood that childhood vaccinations will plummet absent a vaccine mandate in a way that just wouldn't occur in UK, Germany, Holland etc.
I don't think it's the case that there's a big constituency of anti-vax parents who only vax to get their kids into state schools. Typically parents feel quite strongly about this issue!
Oddly, I'd argue parents typically don't have strong feelings on required vaccines. Is about like people having strong feelings on required seat belts. Most people don't think about it, at all.
My evidence on this is that compliance is really only high among people that have a natural audit in place. Constantly doing trips that require you stay up to date on vaccines? Probably up to date. Don't have a natural check point to know when the last time you were vaccinated was? Then you probably have no idea. If you are lucky, you regularly see a doctor that has it on a chart.
That is, people generally trust experts on things. And it can be truly frustrating to be asked to care about specific specialty advice you get from someone. I remember doctors offering a choice of pig or cadaver skin for a required graft a family member needed. I had to ask why I would care between the options.
I think you're probably right. The NHS and schools will offer and chase you if you forget to vaccinate. Not sure how it works in the US. In addition we want people to view it like seatbelts and just do it (although vaccine mandates could go against that somewhat - you have to think about it and demonstrate compliance)
yeah, I think vaccination rates will go down because it'll be *easier* to not vax your kids, but you can get a religious or personal exemption from school vaccination requirements in 45/50 states already. parents who really strongly believe that their children will get autism or time traveling nanopatticles from the vaccine already have an out.
So, is it true that first-generaton Syrian refugees are *as* employable as native-born Germans? No. And that's important! It's probably also a social problem that Syrian women aren't employed formally and may suffer social exclusion and a lack of integration.
But that's very different than "the majority of the million plus Syrian refugees are on welfare and many will never work." Which is absolutely not true.
Well, I’ll give them the credit of taking them seriously: they have different values and a distinct decision matrix.
Remember “fuck business”? That’s genuine for many. If they’re willing to pay the cost for a principled stand, then I do respect that.
The problem, for me, is the magical thinking. Like how people have been claiming for two generations that supply-reside economics is real and tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. But maybe, instead, you could be honest like some anti-tax warriors and say, “I don’t care if the tax cuts don’t pay for themselves—so want the government to have less money or even to collapse.” That’s honest.
And if the honest truth is that people don’t like having immigrants around and want the United States to become the ethno-state it never was, challenges be damned—then, cool. I very much disagree with you, but I do respect people who make clear-eyed value judgements.
You might think that the low LFP rate of refugee women would be popular among people with conservative social views, given the statistics Matt cites, but only if you were overly credulous.
Conservatives are confused about what they actually want when it comes to women.
There’s a disturbing parallel to be drawn between fundamentalist (and specifically Wahhabist) Islam and Evangelical Christianity or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. But don’t tell them that! Because here was have The Narcissism of Small Differences where your enemy is basically a mirror image of you, “but not like that!” When you hear what the (far-right, Neo-Nazi) “Swedish Democrats” want in terms of pushing back against feminists and re-imposing “traditional values,” it sure sounds a lot like the Taliban, though. And though not all of MAGA is focused on social conservatism or the Manosphere, there’s a distinct plurality of it who would ironically love to have a harem of sister-wives.
So to resolve this dilemma of hating the Islamists but also wanting to be Christian Islamists themselves, they resort to tortured and often cynical narratives about “defending our women against misogyny,” even when they are espousing misogyny right out of the other side of their mouth. I’ve even heard some very unconvincing defense of abortion and using anti-abortion beliefs among refugees or minorities as a cudgel to beat them with. (But also they think abortion is a problem). Misogyny is only bad when “they” do it, you see.
Ditto with sexual assault or rape: One moment the same national conservative is breathlessly defending their ideologically-favored local sex-offender and condemning the harpies out to get him. Or they’re even doing the incel thing and telling women it’s not their right to withhold sex from perfectly suitable (if under-sexed) patriots like themselves. But, yeah, when the immigrants get their slimy fingers on “our women,” we suddenly hear them sounding like they’re at a Take Back The night Rally.
Some of this is just cynicism, but I think a lot of it is a failure to reconcile that their whole worldview is centered around objectifying and controlling women—and not letting other men who aren’t like them do the same. The “females” are a resource to be jealously guarded.
And things get even more warped when it comes to the “trad wife” influencers or far-right girlies who are talking all day about how they want to be subservient to men and spend all their time minding the home… except that they have a full-time career in politics or media and often don’t even have kids or a husband. It’s cosplay!
But the actual position of conservative voters in the US and Europe is not Christian Wahhabism, but that immigration should be more tightly restricted. At least in the US, there is no confusion here because Republican working age men do often have working wives. This is not only different from what the Taliban think society should do, it is pretty broadly compatible with postwar liberal thought as it actually existed up until a decade ago.
John Rawls often assumed republics with borders in most of his thought, because why wouldn't he?[1] That's what a 1970s liberal political theorist would assume. George McGovern was more of an immigration hawk than I am and thus opposed the settling of Vietnamese refugees in the United States.[2] He was candidate of bleeding heart liberals in the 1972 landslide for Nixon. Many old school Republicans believed Barack Obama poison-pilled immigration legislation in 2007 after Lindsey Graham begged him not to, though the specific motives of legislative maneuvers are contested and hard to pin down.[3] At any rate, we know as recently as 2007, there were still some immigration hawks in the Dem caucus.
The detours into the psychological are amusing, but they lead to historical illiteracy. There is basically no evidence conservatives in the US have gained views radically out of step with the ones they held twenty years ago if you survey the data as thoroughly as George Hawley has.[4] My guess is Yglesias is telling the truth about former CSU voters who approved of 90s German conservative governance. The radicalization on the immigration issue is far more of a liberal voter story. Unfortunately, this latest post by Yglesias once again focuses on the conservative side of opinion instead, when the evolution of immigration views on the left side of the aisle is the far more curious story.
This confusion tracks with broader trends among those opposing immigration in Europe. In the anti-immigration riots in the UK last summer, ostensibly protesting violence against women and children by immigrants, it was found that 41% of those arrested had been reported for domestic abuse.
It appears that for many of the most aggressive supporters of immigration restrictions, protecting women is only a pretext for anti-immigration sentiment rather than a firmly held value.
I find it hard to believe that German social insurance policies cannot be reformed in such a way that all but a tiny minority of Syrian refugees _will_ work.
But whatever, that is irrelevant to US illegal immigration.
According to the economist, two thirds of the 2015 immigrant wave are employed, which isn’t far off the native-born population. Where do you get your numbers from?
"The employment rate of refugees has also increased significantly over time. On average, 32% of all Syrian refugees who moved to Germany from the beginning of 2013 to 2018 were employed as of the second half of 2018.
Among employed Syrian refugees, 63% worked full-time or part-time; 19% were in paid training; and 18% were marginally employed in the second half of 2018."
I think also there needs to be some sort of way of saying “yes it’s healthy to be skeptical of experts. But experts are experts are experts for a reason and it’s because they’ve intensely studied a topic”.
In a way this post is kind of a credit to politicians (at least in Europe given this focus of this post). Yes the median MP support for immigration is in part class bias; the benefits of high skilled immigration are more acutely felt by people in middle and higher classes for example. But I’m sure it’s also because the median MP is aware that giving in to the far right demands to close borders carries a lot of negative long term consequences. I’m sure in private some MP is like “how many of you are going to like it in 5 years time when we have to massively cut down on pensions because we don’t have enough working age labor and can no longer fund pension costs through tax revenue or borrowing?”
The thing is our expert class got very ideological and the public noticed it. That 2020 BLM protest open letter is the gift that keeps on giving for the Right.
Who are we talking about? It’s easy to make sweeping statements about a whole group of potentially millions of people when it has narrative utility. (I’m guilty of that in my own comments here—I know!)
But things get really problematic when we talk about “experts.” How do you define that group? Are they coordinated? What’s the governance structure when “they” all decide to do something outrageous?
In many cases, we cherry pick one “Progressive” or a smaller group of people who got carried away and extrapolate to the entire Democratic-coded half of the American population of 340 million people. Or the opposite, attributing everything any MAGa-adjacent nut to anyone who ever voted Republican. This “those people” logic is useful if you’re condemning them, but it’s a trap to let yourself get defined by it.
The thing is if you are smart enough to be an expert at something you should be smart enough to NEVER whore your expertise out for your ideology.
But we have a whole class of academics and scientists who think the purpose of their endeavors is to force the public to enact left wing social change, and the public quite reasonably responds to that by thinking they are a bunch of dishonest ideologues.
*Should* sure. But here are just a few examples of Conservative experts doing just that culled from the news this week:
1/ RFK, Jr. be-clowning himself by opining on everything public health, vaccines, etc. that he has zero academic or professional background in. A Kennedy!
2/ The Surgeon General of Florida, Joseph Ladapo, a *very* well-educated doctor and Nigerian-American immigrant success story who has been going WAY outside his lane (to embarrassing effect) since COVID. Thanks to the good doctor, we're about to have a whole generation of wholly preventable outbreaks in Florida's schools and beyond.
3/ Elon Musk says so much dumb shit publicly it's a whole industry trying to figure out when he's serious or just shitposting. A lot of his critics square this dual-personality of the genius and the child by discarding the whole man and dismissing any intellect or talent he may have been credited for in his actual domains of expertise. But I think it's just another example of being so smart and successful and rich that you overestimate your own ability everywhere else, especially when you've surrounded yourself with yes-men. In any case, I wish he would reign it in: He's so much much better at EVs, batteries, and rockets than he is at public policy or anything else (including social media and AI) and America does need him for the former.
I frankly cannot fathom how these three men could become so foolish before my very eyes. Add to their number people like the late Ben Carson, perhaps the most lauded neurosurgeon of his age, who thought the Egyptian pyramids were granaries "because the Bible said so" and other kooky stuff like that that had far more impact on American policy. Wouldn't he have been much better still pushing innovation in brain surgery rather than being a Conservative Culture Warrior, the irrelevant Secretary of HUD, and sometime mediocre media personality?
Intelligent people often lack intellectual humility and they over-estimate their ability to lean right over into another area and be the smartest guy in the room. Behind many of these stories you see other psychological causes as well: childhood trauma, elite-outsider insecurity, professional and personal setbacks that require vainglorious contrarianism to preserve the ego, etc.
But one factor that unites all? The extremely perverse incentive structure of our society that now makes ideological grifting a viable career play. Why be a merely-very-successful UCLA medical professor when you can catch the eye of Governor DeSantis and become the Florida Surgeon General by saying wild shit! If you're a striver in America today, it's no longer good enough to just be wealthy or esteemed in your field. You must be FAMOUS! And LOVED by your fans! You must be the HERO of your own story! If that means you are rejected by your colleagues, family, and friends, so be it. They never fully appreciated you, anyway! Your new fans love you with an intensity that fills that existential hole that you quietly nursed the years before.
Frankly, I think there's a lot of that going on behind the left-liberal "woke" self-righteousness, too. We have similar stories of well-educated, conventionally-successful people for whom that's not enough. They need to be MORE. Even more commonly, they're the kind of "surplus elites" who did all the right things and don't have the trappings of conventional success they were sold, and they feel entitled and wounded and ANGRY. They tell themselves that their righteous fury is on behalf of the oppressed. But they are the real oppressed. And surfing the next wave of whatever arouses maximum enthusiasm is a great way to feel vindicated.
Unfortunately this is very true. I read the Dispatch to keep myself honest and that damn letter comes up constantly - and I think the people there are 95% operating in good faith! (Doesnt mean I think the argument is all that good)
The vast majority of signers of the open letter were less part of the "expert class" than low level dingbats loosely attached to the healthcare system. Yes, there were some on the list who should have known better, but by far the biggest group was comprised of the kind of idiots you'd expect.
I don't think it's purely, "In this house we follow Econ 101" There are plenty of anti-economic and even anti-science positions EU MP's follow- anti-GMO regulations anyone?
It's a class based adherence to cosmopolitanism that isn't shared by many voters. Evidence that contradicts the pro-immigration stance is inherently given more scrutiny than the more amenable info.
The anti-GMO stuff and the anti-nuclear stuff is just EU MPs responding to what their constituents want. And that's something that I don't see taken very seriously in political critiques, especially from outside. If you're a politician, you are elected to represent your constituents, including all their stupid beliefs. If you don't, you don't get elected. It's that simple. How to square this with the point that Matt is making in this essay about MPs being oftentimes out-of-sync with their publics? See the third paragraph for the explanation.
But first, let's bring this idea home: I get it that Trump clearly isn't naturally anti-abortion, but felt compelled to lean hard into that anyway because of the large Pro Life leg of the GOP's Conservative stool. He probably thinks they're dumb, but he needs their votes. Most Americans, in fact, think the Pro Life position that's being implemented in states like Florida is dumb and wrong. So why doesn't Trump adopt that majority "yes-abortion-but-less" position? Because the majority of Americans didn't elect Trump. Only 76 million of them did. And they were the *right* 76 million, located in the right districts in the right states at the right time. That's what he needed. And Trump wouldn't have been elected without them and he knows it.
European MPs are also even more beholden to the outlier fringe of their constituency for similar and important structural reason: almost nobody votes for the EU Parliament election. So, it's a lot like American primaries or off-cycle special elections: the insiders and high-propensity voters have the most sway. And their beliefs are to the right or left of the general electorate, respectively.
Even when it comes to national governments, the national MPs can be reacting to the same incentive-structure. In a low-turnout election where the public isn't following the actual position of the candidates much, the zealots hold more sway. They're the marginal voter. Center-left and center-right voters are "meh" about politics but the far-right CARES A LOT. They are building their entire personality around this stuff, the same way MAGA voters are. So even if they're the 20-30% minority, they lead the herd.
Matt focused on immigration but the mix of unrepresented values is more than just immigration, so maybe it is possible to “take a dive” on “gender is biology” and “tough on crime” and then just be more tough on “no *illegal* immigration” and “we have to fix the system” than going all the way right on shutting the border.
I think upstream of that, it is absolutely critical that we fix housing supply. Because during Biden people saw house prices surging, and a giant wave of illegal immigration at the same time, and the result was migrant refugee camps. I think that’s why the backlash was so intense.
I don't think "shut the border" is a majority position at least not in America. Probably not even amongst republicans.
Eliminate illegal immigration is definitely a majority position. And make sure that people coming in share western values and assimilate is also a majority position.
Lowering housing prices should allow Americans to put a substantially larger share of their income into capital markets--which is how they *should* be wealth building--though I don't have a clever answer as to how we get there as a society.
The "no one wants to work" was clearly tied to "because the government is paying people to do nothing, so of course no one wants to work."
"Give the voters what they want*" has the obvious asterisk of "sometimes what the voters want is very stupid." You are trying to frame any restriction of immigration as very stupid, but other very stupid things the public wants are
- unlimited government services combined with no debt and low taxes
- very good social safety net that never discourages work
- super low interest rates with no inflation
- print money like mad with no inflation
- huge tariffs on everything to "bring jobs home" without any industrial policy to make sure business can plan for it
If it's important to keep the public stupidity in check -- and it is -- then you need to constantly be listening to what the public wants. If immigration is essential to a country's long-term survival, then you need to make sure the public doesn't turn away from it. If you want the country to not enact insane protectionist policies, then you need to offer some moderate protectionist policies. And in places where what the people want doesn't genuinely ruin the country, you need to just give the public what they want on cultural issues, so you can spend your political capital where it's needed.
Some policies can shatter in unfixable ways if they're done too wrong. A year or two of too many or too few abortions, whatever the single-issue voters on the topic say, won't break the country. Too high or too low speed limits won't matter. You can fix those things and be done.
Other policies have patterns of breaking if things going too far, and it's often not symmetrical.
Too few immigrants for a few years can cause problems, but it's easy to remedy by loosening the restictions. Too many immigrants can be unfixable, as deporting people is very expensive, or requires fascist policies to undo. Firing the head of BLS too slowly isn't going to be break things. Firing them too fast blows up trust in the government in a way that will take a generation to fix. Too much crime can lead to a tipping point that is hard to recover from while too little crime is easier to undo. Undoing basic vaccine requirements so that measles returns can be something that takes 50 years to fix.
Where did I say anywhere that restricting immigration is stupid?
There are, as you say, many stupid things that a majority of people want. However, people are smarter about tradeoffs when you make them clearer.
Unlimited government services? Sure! Pay 25% VAT and 40% income tax! No? Alright, let’s talk about what you actually want to pay for, then…
Everything you listed as “stupid” *could* be smart *in certain contexts* with a lot of caveats. The stupid thing about what goes for political debate now is false-binaries and a lack of nuance.
I can also make the smart argument for tariffs. Probably not “huge” and “on everything,” but there’s definitely a steelman argument for their selective and strategic use.
So let’s make that argument! Tell us when they make sense and don’t. This is too much to ask right now, though. So we get GO BIG ON TARIFFS FOR EVERYTHING or NO TARIFFS EVER AND ONLY FREE TRADE BROS!!!!
Ditto with immigration. You’ve assumed I’m against restrictions on immigration. I’m not. I’m against “no immigration fixes everything.” I’m for, “Decide why we want immigration and for what outcomes and optimize for that.”
> Where did I say anywhere that restricting immigration is stupid?
Does the average voter also want more expensive healthcare and longer wait times? How about food-price inflation? Maybe they'd be less happy if their local elementary school closed? Remember when everyone was freaking out that "nobody wants to work anymore?" Y'all ain't seen nothin yet!
These effects and immigration only seem unrelated because people still aren't contending with the fact that the *only* reason that populations haven't been in free-fall across the Western world for years now is immigration.
Let me be more clear in countering your point: where did I say that *any* restrictions on immigration is stupid?
Immigration is something that we need. Unlimited immigration isn’t desirable. Both truths exist simultaneously.
I’m arguing for an *optimal* immigration, both in volume and type. But that’s hard to achieve, obviously, like any other form of social engineering. The immigrants themselves, get a vote, for one thing. So you can’t just press the “More of The Good Immigrants I Want, Only” Button. The rocket scientists and oncologists might not want to come and only the economic migrants or people from war torn countries are eager! So you end up with more of the latter than the former.
And you have unintended consequences or necessary tradeoffs to any policy, restricting or opening. Restricting “chain migration” as policy also means that people like my Swedish wife can’t easily import her non-Swedish husband to Sweden. Or that I can’t bring my mother to live with me if she’ll ill or infirm. Many people—even skeptics of immigration—would say that’s bad. But how do you open the door for me without also opening the door for the whole extended family of Afghan refugees who you might want less? The devil is in the details.
Also, illegal immigration is a thing that is nearly impossible to stop. You can reduce it, sure. But even North Korea can’t keep everyone in. And European countries and the United States have tried like hell to prevent people from sneaking over borders, to little effect.
So, what we end up with is a series of semi-effective but not perfect policy tools to try and effectuate the immigration outcome you want. Nobody is overjoyed with the results. Unintended events (like the Syrian Civil War or COVID) completely muck up whatever you do design, forcing you back to the drawing table. And it’s just a continual process of *management* instead of a “solution.” But that’s life! I’m advocating for people to be adults and face that reality and the dilemmas involved in trying to manage it. That’s all.
In the real world, perhaps. But there’s no normative such thing as “too little crime.” Assuming you got rid of bad laws and ceteris paribus (that is, assuming you didn’t get to “no crime” by crazy police brutality or isolating every human in solitary, etc.), less crime is always better.
I'm sort of skeptical that immigration as a solution to population decline will become a popular viewpoint anytime soon. Matt's One Billion Americans isn't terribly popular on the right or left.
On the left plenty of people see a declining population as a good thing. Some of this is for environmental reasons. On the right people are more concerned with their share of the overall population than absolute numbers. An increasing population that was increasingly foreign would be considered a loss.
Of course immigration isn't a long term solution to population decline because global birth rates are or will soon be below replacement, but that's a little out of scope of this discussion.
Agreed the lack of fertility in developed countries is a real problem. But immigration is at best only a temporary band aid that doesn't address the real problem, and can cause more problems than it fixes. This is doubly true in European countries where the immigrants don't seem to assimilate well.
Couple things to consider.
1. Fertility rates are dropping world wide, so while it's possible to prop up developed countries populations through immigration NOW, that won't last long term, because in a couple of decades there won't be excess people in those other countries either.
2. Who is immigrating, and how well do they assimilate. If the people immigrating don't hold traditional western values and/or are not willing to adopt them, then what happens to Western society and values like equality for women, free speech, sexual freedom etc.
A the end of the day a culture that can't sustain itself by at least keeping a stable population is a failed culture. And that culture will be replaced by a different culture that can reproduce itself.
So the question is can Western cultures with liberal values such as equality for women reproduce itself?
If the answer is no, it will be replaced by different cultures that don't respect women.
>>But maybe we'll all learn fast because the US population has just shrank for the first time in its history.<<
The US grew at the slowest pace in its history in the 2010s (yes, that's accounting for immigration, and yes, that's even slower than during the 1930s). The aughts similarly saw a massive slowdown in population growth from the 1990s (2000-2009 ended up being the second slowest decade in history at that time). Oh, and we're on pace in the 2020s to easily beat the 2010s. If that holds true, then three of the four slowest population growth decades in US history will have occurred since the year 2000. To be sure, there's a bit of an air of inevitability in all this: every time countries get rich, women and their partners opt for smaller families. But still, the trend is powerful enough to not need an assist from draconian immigration restrictionism.
Turns out America isn't immune from the powerful demographic forces affecting other rich countries!
People who erroneously tout the great "benefits" that will flow from a reduction in our hitherto supposedly "massive" rate of population growth are very badly misinformed. In fact, what immigration has been doing is helping us avoid going from mere demographic "decline" to full-on South Korean-style demographic "collapse."
Also, a higher rate of population growth used to be one of America's advantages in the competition with its principal geopolitical rival. "Hey, at least we're not shrinking like the Chi-Coms!" Well, that's yet ANOTHER national strength being destroyed by MAGA.
I think, like you say, it’s a demographic super trend that was inevitable, and unfair to blame on any single policymaker—including Trump.
Only China did a massive self-own demographically with the One Child Policy. And that was down to one man: Mao.
Everyone else is dealing with the same problem at a slower speed. I think there are likely good policies that work to some degree to slow the rate of decline or offset it somewhat or else just adapt. Even if it doesn’t get you back to replacement rate, increasing the birth rate just by fractions of a percent gives you vital time to adapt, keeps economic vitality for longer, and blunts the negative effects.
I mostly agree with that, but I'll concur with others here that it will take a while for the immigration crackdown to filter down to the economy and voters won't necessarily connect the dots.
There are likely few people here that are more pro immigration than I am, but I think you are missing a key point. Asylum claims and illegal immigration are the worst possible way to way to get the public on board with more immigration. Orderly, selected immigration is very possible.
Speaking of trade offs, something that really stood out to me was the success that Texas Governor Abbott had in making Democratic politicians eat their words with his campaign of bussing immigrants from the border to sanctuary cities. It was low cost for the politicians in these places to say they were pro asylum seekers so long as those seekers were not coming to their town and creating significant costs for local governments. Once they faced the trades offs involved, you saw many of them backtrack quickly.
1. It is true that quite a lot of voters feel animus toward immigrants once there are enough of them about.
2. However, it is also true that a clear majority of voters are to the left of, say, Stephen Miller on this issue.
3. Restrictionist policy is bad for the country and bad for the economy. And in the long run it doesn't do you any favors politically to run a bad economy. People will sour on you for that, even if they're unable to trace it back to restrictionism or any other underlying policy.
4. But because people can't trace back that line, there is no way to tell them straight out that they need to accept more immigrants for their own good, like eating their vegetables.
5. Instead, what needs to be done is essentially that you *negotiate* with the voters. You try to meet them halfway on the immigration numbers, and you enact targeted immigration policies that are least likely to cause backlash. You push the numbers up as much as you can while remaining politically viable, but you don't go further. And most of all, you focus on doing everything you can to run good macroeconomic policy overall, so that people don't have as few grievances as possible to blame immigrants for.
I don’t want to play devil’s advocate too hard because I think you’re generally right, but it’s possible that native birth rates would rebound and help fill these jobs.
I don’t think that’s likely though because birth rates are declining everywhere around the world. If anything in a few decades we might be lamenting the .8 birth rates in Haiti or Guatemala because there are no longer immigrants to pick fruit or DoorDash for us.
"If mainstream parties won’t give it to them, they vote for extreme parties."
"If all the elites who favor democratic institutions also refuse to supply the policy options on immigration and crime that the voters want, then voters will ultimately get those policies from more sinister types."
"If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened."
I have a very specific memory of working my tutoring job at UConn in 2013 or so and there being chatter in the group of us working about immigration. I was and am a pretty liberal guy. But among those to my left (which was a lot of my peers) they were already arguing for decriminalizing border crossings, and when I started the pretty banal "countries have a right to enforce their borders and manage immigration in ways that they feel is beneficial to them" I got the "migration is a human right" schtick with a side of "and this is true because climate change/imperialism/instability in the third world is our fault".
I think a part of why Bernie 2016 was popular was yes, he was a progressive outsider, but he was also genuinely anti-immigration and pro-gun for most of his political life in ways that read as authentic among those who were genuinely anti-immigration and pro-gun. Who among the current prospective democratic bench can communicate that view authentically today? No one really comes to mind.
I don't think this can be dismissed simply as "schtick." If I am born in El Paso, I get all the benefits of US citizenship. Someone born 1/4 mile away in Cuidad Juarez gets none. It is hardly obvious why that is just.
Yes it does. Justice cannot be abstracted away from the use of force and the current model of a just society is based around a state which has a monopoly on the use of force on the territory over which it is sovereign. We can't pretend that eroding sovereignty doesn't risk the erosion of practical provision of justice. As someone mentioned below, the citizens of Cd Juarez have the benefits of Mexican citizenship which Americans do not have.
What then is the gap in justice? Differences in rights afforded to Mexicans vs Americans? Economic opportunities? Restitutions for past injustices perpetrated on Mexico by the United States? I think there are valid arguments to be made on all of those fronts that justice would demand actions from the US. But none of them require necessarily that borders be abolished and sovereignty abjured.
This is another way of saying nation states supersede individual rights which is very anti-liberal and a rejection of the core founding principle of the United States.
Thank you, but it's rather basic really. You responded to gdanning's hypothetical by asserting that nation states are sovereign over a geographic area implying this takes precedence over an individual's right to travel and live where they choose. Championing individual rights and civil liberties is the definitional basis of liberalism so it's fair to say your claim stands in contrast to liberal ideals.
The founding document of the United States is about as explicitly pro-liberal as it gets: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." It goes on to say that the people have the right to abolish and institute a new government should the preceding state fail to guarantee those rights (which makes sense considering that's literally what they're doing by revolting against British rule). What you're expressing is something more akin to Thomas Hobbes's social contract theory.
How so, THE founding document of our nation asserts that Rights are inalienable, they exist whether there is or isn't a nation state to enforce them, and they exist in the face of a nation state actively abridging them.
This seems to be a claim that they are natural. But natural != just. Ethnicentricity and other types of outgroup bias seem to be natural, but that doesn’t make them just.
Natural or not, they are a necessity. Any governance structure must have demarcation of its authority. That can be geographical but it can also be defined in terms of populations, or both. In that sense, legal residency is a type of border. The only system that matches your ideals would be a single world government. Good luck in achieving that.
It is not just, but correcting that injustice would require an unimaginable amount of disruption and a level of coordination (and/or coercion) for which we lack the capability or desire.
Open borders is a mirage and its intractability makes it a damaging distraction.
I mean, is it "an injustice not to spend the entire US welfare state budget on helping poor people in Africa because they are so much poorer than people in the US"? Is it not possible because *we lack the desire to correct an injustice*? If it wouldn't solve poverty in Africa, would it at least solve 80%? Or 50%?
At some point one becomes so detached from the reality of what a sovereign, democratically-accountable state can accomplish. Sure the US could "correct" merely 5% of the "injustice" of non-US-citizenship by just opening the doors to 390 million people tomorrow. How would voters react, and what kind of politicians would they be drawn to in the aftermath of this? How would state governments (in places like, say, Texas) react? Would the world be better off? Maybe a bit more justice though?
Yes, considering all those factors could go a long way towards answering my question. Perhaps the status quo is the most just of numerous bad options. But, perhaps not.
My point is merely that the default position is simply to assume that the status quo is just.
I also do not like this and think we should try really hard to help other countries improve but allowing illegal immigration is clearly not the right solution. Again, see where this has gotten us in both the US and Europe.
I know you are trolling, but there is nothing inherently wrong with that, IMHO. Though of course that would just create a new border, replicating the original problem.
The world used to be primarily organized into empires, where bloody conflict over territory was a regular part of life and domination by a foreign ruler was commonplace.
We replaced that system with a world divided into sovereign states built on the principle of self determination. There are problems with this system too, ethnic and national conflicts, borders, etc. But overall a liberal order built on the sovereignty of states within their boundaries has produced a more stable world than the world of empires did.
This order is worth protecting. We are already seeing a breakdown in this order in Ukraine with the invasion of Russia. Advocating for similar attitudes by the US, previously the fiercest defender of this liberal order, is a disaster.
Remember: the primary beneficiaries of the principles you espoused are each state's elites, not the common folk.
And you are overstaying the relative degree of stability of the two systems. Empires can be quite stable, and the principle of self-determination (which again benefits local elites) has led to a great deal of conflict, including genocide and other types of mass atrocities.
The ability to be secure that your city would not be invaded by a foreign military is a benefit of common people, not just the elite.
And yes the world is much more stable now than 120 years ago. The transition from empire to states was conflict ridden and bloody, but states have endured and created a more peaceful and prosperous world order than empire did.
And the reason countries provide benefits to their citizens is because they view themselves as a community that they trust and have social solidarity with. That’s especially how democracies work. A nation where anyone is welcome to come in, claim citizenship and receive benefits is much less likely to provide benefits for its citizens. And an empire generally views territory it acquires as a way to extract value for its own people rather than for the benefit of the conquered.
"There's nothing inherently wrong with using government force/guns to seize territory from a sovereign nation" is NOT a sentiment I expected to see in the SB comment section, yet here we are!
Note my use of the term, "inherently." If the outcome is better lives for the actual human beings living there, then on balance it might be perfectly fine. Possible example: women in Afghanistan 2001-2021.
Even in a best-case scenario in which the US is able to seize Juarez with relatively little fighting and this is popular with the people of Juarez, there would be significant harmful second and third order effects.
-The US would lose international credibility and face sanctions and expulsion for international organizations.
-Mexico would spend more on its military and militarize its northern border to prevent another invasion.
-Other countries would militarize due to fear of a grabby USA: Canada, Bahamas, Greenland (Denmark).
-Countries near the US might form defensive alliances against the US or align with nations like China and Russia.
Totally agree with your point re: Bernie and am frustrated it’s under-understood on the left.
I became politically conscious around the time Bernie launched his 2016 campaign, and his A rating from the NRA was a feature for me, not a bug. I was more pro-immigration that he was at the time, but it’s not a stretch at all to think that the reason he cleaned up vs. Clinton in West Virginia, etc. was because of his immigration-skepticism, pro-gun stances, and general respect for rural/conservative-coded “vibes.”
What was most frustrating though was when Bernie 2020 supporters continually told me he’d “never changed his mind on anything/has had consistent views through his entire career” despite the swing to the left to try and lock up the most progressive wing of the party.
Are you still in touch with any of those peers and if so, have they reflected on how US immigration policy and politics more generally has been adopted since the type of views you describe rose to prominence?
These views have always been prominent, I saw them a lot in my college days. Most importantly, they are correct and anyone applying the veil of ignorance concept would agree, just impractical to implement due to still being a minority view. What is the point, people with those views should shut up even in private because there might be electoral backlash? That’s creating a stifling air of self-censorship. MAGA (and gay marriage) shows that you can mainstream unpopular ideas over the long run and censorship/self-censorship just keeps you outside the Overton window. Politicians shouldn’t run on it, but it’s good for study groups to talk about it and try to convert more people to it.
Didn’t the US basically have open borders for a long time though? I am thinking up through say 1900. Waves of immigrants. Obviously not without conflict, but it worked out—probably because there was plenty of space for them to just go west. Today, this doesn’t work because there’s not enough low hanging fruit.
The US has never had open borders. There has never been a period of time where the immigration policy was “you can enter the United States and settle no questions asked”. Even in the ellis Island period there were severe limits to Chinese immigration.
There have been periods of harder and easier immigration, absolutely. But there's always been a legal process and violating that legal process always subjected one to explusion from the country.
I'm not saying this as someone who is anti-immigration! I am very pro-immigratkon. I just think if you are pro immigration you can't play dumb about the need for a legal immigration process, and charging headlong against concepts like borders and national sovereignty is counter productive.
Am I correct that most voters on the left don't want increased legal immigration? As in if we decide 700,000 immigrants a year is ideal then we have a system of application and 700,000 arrive with their visas and the government aggressively deports anyone here without authorization. What they want is our current immigration system and very weak enforcement .
I say this because I see a ton or anti-enforcement rhetoric and no talk of dramatically increasing legal immigration numbers.
There was a huge strain on the left, most predominately represented by Bernie Sanders, that saw increased immigration as a corporatist plot to undermine blue collar workers. But then woke happened, immigration enforcement became right-wing coded and democrats lost any credibility on the issue.
A more charitable explanation of what happened is through education polarization Democrats authentically came to have a more positive view of immigration (both culturally and economically).
And Bernie is wrong on the economics of immigration enforcement, but being wrong here is convenient because it allows you to favor more enforcement without wading into the cultural questions.
Also to be clear, I’m quite in line with the more woke position on immigration and think the pre-2016 Bernie position is not backed by any good evidence. But as this article points out, some parts of the general public are not!
"...quite in line with the more woke position...."
To show your Weberian cred on this blog you have to indicate that your ethics of responsibility comes at an actual cost to your ethics of conviction. If you don't even have the opposing inclination, how can we be sure that you are really motivated by duty?
A less charitable explanation would be that the party's positions reflect those of the PMC and upper middle class, who like immigration (even illegal immigration to an extent) because the downsides aren't their problem and the upsides are cheaper housekeepers and more construction workers.
In the United States the downsides aren't that significant... it's just that uneducated people think food comes from the store, electricity from the wall, etc...
The educated believe food comes from poor immigrants working under the table in conditions they themselves would never accept. This is true, but it's always struck me as odd that it's considered the liberal position.
I dunno that it's the liberal position; it is the realist position and in exchange their kids get to be lazy useless Americans like the rest of us. Progressives would be horrified if they acknowledge it.
I expect that ultimately the economic outcomes are better on net with lots of immigration than without, but I don't think this is an obvious slam-dunk. In particular, there are whole kinds of work that, in my youth, were done by people born in the US, and now are like 90%+ people born outside the US. It's not hard to see why a guy who is competing with a lot of (maybe legal, maybe not) immigrants for jobs hanging drywall feels more of a pinch than a guy who's in a job unlikely to be challenged by (at least) low-skill immigrants.
Whether you consider an increase in immigration to have cultural problems is not really something that can be resolved by any evidence so is not worth debating. But clearly liberals need to tack right because people do not like having more immigrants.
What happens when all of the illegal immigrants are legalized and become subject to minimum wage laws and are eligible for benefits they currently pay into but don't draw from, including things like social security disability?
But there must be SOME people who object less to plain vanilla illegal immigration than to the Biden policy of economic assistance to people "awaiting" their asylum adjudication.
That’s because the downsides are fake. And it’s not the PMC areas that are going to stop having essential services as all the smart people born there move out and go into death spirals without immigration.
The downsides aren't fake. They are overstated and outweighed by the massive economic amd cultural benefits of immigration. But, e.g. MS-13 isn't actually fake, nor are some of the crime and assimilation concerns in Europe.
I mean MS13 was literally a US gang that got exported to El Salvador. In a very real sense MS13 is a consequence of American culture not our immigration policy.
I think some of the downsides are also based on personality type and education and intelligence.
I find interacting with people from different cultures interesting and fun, I like different cuisines, I speak Spanish, etc., so the cost of interacting with the large immigrant communities where I live is relatively lower for me than for some other people. I also work in a very high-education, high-intelligence job where much of my competition is immigrants, but they're not guys who payed a coyote to slip them across the border, they're guys who came here for grad school and found a way to stick around.
I genuinely think the uncharitable view is closer to reality here. Progressives became very aggressive across all enforcement issues and the threat of cultural cancellation kept PMC liberals who controlled institutions quiet about it despite many of them admitting privately that they didn't think abolishing the police or ICE was a good idea or that decriminalizing border crossings was wise. That's how Democrats lost credibility on the issue and it's what we need to regain if we have any hope of recovering in a durable way politically.
I think this is a big part of the story of politics over the last 15 years in many areas. Social media created mechanisms for converging on and enforcing elite consensus that were very powerful, and that made it possible to suppress some discussions and questions from public view for quite awhile. See the recent stuff from Malcolm Gladwell and Megan McArdle about transwomen in sports for some examples of this, but really, it was everywhere, and it poisoned discourse on all kinds of topics.
I think it's odd to blame the disparate components of the Democratic coalition for this stuff when Trump got 46% of the vote in 2016 (I think the Obama administration is essentially the populist lodestar, so it would be odd for Dems to have lost credibility at this point). All the "abolish ICE" stuff was in 2017-19... Trump got a whole 47% of the vote in 2020.
I would personally just blame the Biden administration for Democrats losing credibility here. Biden was the one who ran on the most moderate immigration platform in the 2020 primary, and Democrats nominated him for it. Then he just had no plan for the asylum issues in '22-23.
I think the Biden administration lost credibility because it was staffed with a mix of people who genuinely believed in anti-enforcement and those worried about being called out/censured for disagreeing with that position.
You can't understand liberal culture in the US without understanding the worst possible thing for an American liberal is to be called a bigot. That's what drives cancel culture and gives the bad actors power- they have no compunctions about making false accusations of bigotry to gain power.
I think the cultural affinity dominates. Lefty leaning academics publish all sorts of pro-rent control nonsense, suspect environmental regulation cheering, left NIMBY stuff, heterodox monetary theories and so on. They don't have a problem going off the economics reservation, but the cultural stuff is another matter.
Although I'd argue that some of the Left wing trans attempted consensus post-2014 had its share of nonsense (certainly the claim that there was no advantage in sports, for instance, and also some of the claims about how strong the data was for youth gender medicine).
Perhaps also through social class/education polarization, Democrats became more the party of people who get a larger set of the benefits of immigration and a smaller set of the costs than Republicans.
A lot of the discussion in this thread is abstracted away from the actual history of Congress on this topic for the past 20 years and instead complaining about intellectuals.
yes. Small right wing factions tanked good immigration bills in 2007 and 2013. Democrats engaged in good faith negotiations and conceded security measures without any promise of additional legalization measures in 2024. A number of Democrats (though not a majority) signed off on the Laken Riley act in 2025 which was a dumb and pretty much unworkable immigration hawk bill but some Democrats signed off on it because it would provide hawk credibility. Democrats have been trying to get a workable legislative solution for a long time.
The key thing that has to be noted is that the Reagan amnesty wasn't actually followed up with strict enforcement, and many of its strong supporters were key in crippling enforcement by the states (notably Prop 187 in CA).
And ever since, the restrictionist position ahs been that there has to be a visible, widespread decrease in non-preapproved immigration before any additional amnesty.
The 2013 bill got 68 senate votes (14 republicans)... that level of consensus is just unheard of in post 2010 politics. It was a good bill that Republican leadership cynically tanked because of extremist objections, not because they thought it was bad.
Right - but Republicans at that point weren't uniformly immigration restrictionists, particularly in the Senate. The Buchanan-Trump faction was complaining loudly that it amounted to another amnesty bill.
This is the most important comment in the thread. I really wish Slow Borers followed the actual comings and goings of congress instead of thinking the world started in 2016.
Seriously fuck the War on Terror as far as that goes... Karl Rove's "natural conservatives" was a promising way forward.
I despise "cultural conservatism" despite trending more rightward in recent years but I'm willing to put up with a lot of that nonsense in exchange for more doctors and cheaper produce. That much of the right doesn't understand that immigrants have more in common with them than a college-educated white atheist is utterly ridiculous.
My pet theory on immigration has been that there is, even amongst groups like climate change deniers and people who don't pay attention to geopolitics, a growing sense of a big global shift slowly happening that is leading to the displacement of many, many people and the concerns with immigration reflect a belief that "there won't be enough to go around" and if the doors are wide open, then people will find themselves competing for resources even more heavily in their home nation. Combine that with a feeling that cultural identity will be lost and you have an emotional anti-immigration soup going.
Matt's column is outstanding, one of his best. Ben's point here is excellent and maybe belonged in the column. That said, I've just scanned ~50 replies and there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on. Matt's point is an identity threat for a significant fraction of his own audience, let along progressives.
There's still an opening on the left to correctly call Trump a pushover on immigration because when Big Agriculture and the hotel industry told him they need illegal labor, he caved.
Don't know if they can stomach doing that though...
He's obviously correct, no American wants to do those jobs at the wages offered. I'm fairly open to immigration, but at the end of the day, we're going to have an immigration policy that says "yes" to some people and "no" to others. In general, since public patience for immigration is limited, I think we should focus on taking in the most skilled immigrants because the economic benefits are large and I think it will provoke the smallest amount of backlash. So, given that, that means the spinach pickers in Arizona will either have to raise wages, automate, or go out of business. And at the end of the day, that's what it means to have an immigration policy. Sometimes we tell people and their prospective employers "no."
The alternative is that maybe we make some sort of carve out for agriculture because... status quo bias I guess?
Another cliche with some merit here is "Democrats have tons of solutions but will never say anything is a problem, Republicans say everything is a problem but will never propose a solution" or some similar formulation.
Isn't it just the opposite? The caricature of Democrats is they say everything (except crime) is a problem and have tons of "solutions" -- DEI, NEPA, OSHA, NRC, IRA.
don't want to buy insurance and can't pay cash - let em die. Grumble grumble - I don't really want to let someone die.
You're in favor of open borders. I most certainly am not - how dare you suggest such a thing. Ok, so if someone does happen to sneak in we need to make them go home. Grumble grumble - I don't really want to make people go home.
I think what's happened is that for occasional talk about economics immigration has become understood as a human rights issue, rather than a public policy dial for optimizing and that reasonable people can come to different conclusions about.
And Progressives are at fault for that framing or at least for not pushing back against that framing. Immigration ought to be an economic issue like trade. Heck, _crime_ ought to be an economic issue in the sense of it occasioning "costs" to the victims that can be reduced by enforcement.
Right, this is why I roll my eyes to the point of detaching my retinas at the routine assertion, "No one is in favor of open borders." If you systematically oppose all or nearly all forms of enforcement of immigration laws *and* combine that with an expansive interpretation of asylum law, then functionally that is an "open borders" position, you're just lying about it! (I will note that I am personally a 100% open borders supporter -- if you can push, pull, or drag yourself onto US soil and find someone willing to rent you living space and/or hire you, that's great -- but I think it should be done honestly.)
a. Some people are offended by the disorder and lawlessness of people coming here and staying for decades illegally. I guess they want most illegal immigration shut down.
b. Some people are upset by the way immigration law and visa programs seem like they're optimized more for the needs of particular businesses than for the good of the country. Like, we all agree we want the Terrence Taos and John von Neumanns allowed in, but how much is the marginal H1B employee making the country better off vs just saving an employer a few thousand dollars a year on payroll costs?
c. Some people are unhappy with the volume of all immigration because of the changes it is making to the country, in demographics, religious makeup, politics, culture, etc. They want less of that in the future, and perhaps to reverse some of the previous immigration.
Different immigration restrictionists have different mixes of those three, AFAICT.
The first choice should be increasing legal immigration but the bigger blocker to that is the law can’t really be changed given Congressional gridlock and this isn’t worth risking nuking the filibuster over. Republicans make things a LOT harder for legal immigration too; you can follow some immigration lawyers on LinkedIn and Twitter to learn about this.
Yeah, most of the comments above basically ignore that the immigration reform efforts of the Bush and Obama years failed in Congress, so everything everyone has done since then has been downstream of the fact that there are enough restrictionists in Congress to block any attempt at increasing legal immigration.
Efforts failed under Bush and Obama because they always tried the Comprehensive approach. There was much higher support for legal immigration in the Congress in both parties then.
A comprehensive approach pairing enforcement with something that resolves the status of long-settled undocumented/illegal immigrants is necessary because providing a path to legalization is generally popular, but you need to step up enforcement in tandem to avoid a moral hazard issue.
There’s nothing necessary about it. You can choose to enforce border security and create conditions for those who’re already here illegally to self deport. These are policy choices. The original comment was about legal, not illegal immigration.
True. Typically you need to sneak an increase in legal immigration into the larger framework though because it's not that popular despite the fact that it's objectively a good idea.
1. I want a de facto open borders policy because I feel bad for people who have to live in unpleasant countries.
2. Open borders would be hideously unpopular with voters so I can't openly support that.
3. I'll just leave the current legal immigration system mostly unchanged while doing everything in my power to obstruct enforcement of immigration laws.
Anti-prags don’t care about resolving the immigration issue. They want to signal moral superiority by claiming to protect X oppressed group. Allowing more people to legally immigrate shrinks the “oppressed” group.
On immigration, I wonder if the idea of screening immigrants for "American-ness" (i.e. wanting to be American, sharing our values, liking college football, etc.) would have any constituency at all.
Rightists would hate it because they hate foreigners, and leftists would hate it because they hate America. But maybe there's a silent majority of normies who would support that (or maybe not, idk).
Immigrants to the United States are, in my experience at least, among the most starry-eyed and patriotic people in the country. They swallowed the American Dream without chewing.
That hasn't seemed to have helped ease the cultural panic among the MAGA minority.
And, again, you always have the paradox that the people furthest away from actual immigrants are the ones who have anti-immigrant views. Immigration is just a specter to them.
Come on, the immigrant's love of America is common but hardly universal.
I'm not sure screening for it would be effective or even a good idea, but it would be a concession to the right.
The fact that right-wingers don't appreciate the positive bias in their attitudes tells us nothing about whether something like Allan's proposal would grease the wheels for a more generous immigration regime.
I agree that's true for the majority, But certainly not true of all of them. And there are definitely segments that don't seem to share all of these Americans values are be assimilating very well.
Matt proposed this in 1 billion Americans on the theory that any way to increase the number of green cards would be good. If the objection is English proficiency perhaps lifting the cap on people who are native English speakers would work? But I doubt unlimited migration from Jamaica and Nigeria would attract much support from the right.
The best way to target specific categories is ad hoc. There's no single factor, not language, not race, not religion, not the nation's income, etc. that determines how welcome any given nationality is.
The single biggest factor might be socio-economic class of the immigrants themselves, and that could change drastically if you removed any cap on a nation like Nigeria - which as far as I understand is currently sending over a disproportionate number of engineers and doctors who aren't facing a particularly high amount of backlash.
College football is a plague, but I'll admit it's got higher approval than most American institutions. Asking Ethiopian doctors, Indian biochemists, etc if they like football is excluding the nerdy EHCs from the country, and they're the ones that we most need.
I work with many Indian data scientists and engineers who play fantasy football just to be more enmeshed in our culture. I want that ethos in our immigrants.
These two are inherently incompatible. Personal freedom means that you can like or dislike anything. I think you need to learn how to become an American first.
Who in your opinion are not assimilating well? By the second generation, pretty much everyone speaks English and assimilates well culturally. The Americans who don't assimilate well are not even recent immigrants and you can't kick them out.
I think the easiest thing to test is just English language skills. I was always a little sympathetic to the argument that the remain in Mexico policy was a good idea because people have a better shot of finding employment and integrating into the community in a country where they're fluent in the language.
Could we even agree on what the criteria is? I imagine if a Republican were president one of the criteria might be that they are Christian, which sounds anathema to the left.
A relatively easy way to do this would be to give each country an "american culture compatibility" score and give citizens from those countries a leg up in any queues. This would probably result in making it easier for Europeans to get here and harder for Indians/Chinese, which also sounds like something the GOP would favor.
Doing it in an individual basis would probably lead to it being gamed.
Each year, US colleges screen about 13 million personal statement essays from 3 million applicants, which is just as prone to ambiguous criteria and gaming the system. Meanwhile, the US only gets half a million asylum applicants each year. If we wanted to set up a screening system, we could.
Interviews with neighbors and coworkers, surveillance of public speech, requiring demonstration of civic knowledge, requirements for volunteering for civic and pro social activities. I'm not in favor of any particular one of these, but it's not hard to envision a process.
What you described is a completely unworkable process, with some exceptions like scanning SM. FBI does some of this stuff for national security clearance checks. I was the neighbor once when I used to live in MD. It’s a complete joke.
It's actually very workable. What do you think asylum investigations look like? It's a dive into someone's social circumstances by the authorities. We interview people about their friends and neighbors all the time for criminal investigations, background checks, jobs, etc. We do the same for TANF/SSDI etc. it's actually not hard, and the bar doesn't have to be sky high, it just needs to keep out people who do not want to assimilate or have behaviors we do not tolerate (define as you want).
I'm not talking about asylum claims, I'm talking about a process for prospective citizens. Second, the asylum process has been intentionally corrupted and exploited and the glut of applicants has been encouraged by the tacit admission that simplycoming from a poor place qualifies you to get to the front of the line. Third, you are simply saying we don't currently have the resources, and that's totally subject to change. You aren't arguing it won't work, you're arguing that we can't do it today.
Elite political opinion firmly believes that immigration is a net economic positive. But finance ministries in Denmark and the Netherlands publish official figures showing non-western immigrants are a significant fiscal cost. Germany publishes less but all the signs point to immigration being a very significant net negative.
The studies I have seen going around on Twitter seem to count the fiscal "cost" of educating the children of immigrants but do not count the tax revenue contributed by those children when they become workers which seems like an interesting choice.
Even if you disregard accounting it seems very odd that adding on average younger people to a generally aging population would harm the structure of the economy or workforce.
Germany refugee law seems to have a lot of rules that might prevent beneficiaries from working though which would make things much different.
"Even if you disregard accounting it seems very odd that adding on average younger people to a generally aging population would harm the structure of the economy or workforce."
The tax revenues of lower income working people can be pretty small, and if the rate of going to prison is at all frequent that can eat up the benefits pretty fast. I forget if it's in the linked post or another one on that guy's site, but the rate of eventual incarceration for some categories of Danish immigrants was in the 1/4 or 1/3 territory if I remember correctly.
I did review and it seems you are correct and I did find one that shows a negative fiscal impact to the US treasury.
That said most Americans probably have a "negative" impact on the US treasury, but in the macro sense would attempting to drive down the birth rate or do a mass deportation result in a healthier economic structure? The benefits of immigration are more about limiting inflation while allowing more growth.
This is like you say largely a result of progressive taxation.
This depends strongly on the nature of the immigrants, right? If we let in a bunch of researchers and tech workers, I just wouldn’t trust an economic analysis that finds a negative budgetary response.
I also don't know how you are supposed to model a 75 year fiscal impact of something. Tax policy changes all the time. How do you model what's going to happen when the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted?
The government could cut benefits, it could raise payroll taxes, it could fund SS with general fund revenue, it could raise the retirement age or it could just let the cuts go into effect. These would all have very different fiscal impacts. But I know the tradeoffs would be a lot harder with less workers.
I think we really need to be separating Western European vs. North American immigration concerns for what it's worth. They're fundamentally different issues (Arabic-speaking Muslims vs. Spanish-speaking Christians, though the Iberian Peninsula is kind of in a weird place because of the Muslim conquests).
I think you also see this in the differences is assimilation. Broadly speaking America seems to assimilate people pretty well. Though too much immigration too fast can still be a problem.
The large muslim populations in Europe, much less so.
Are there ways to slice the fiscal costs of certain things such that they are negative? Probably. But if the economy is growing fiscal policy can be tweaked to resolve these issues. If you let the working age population shrink, there's no population that's going to allow old people to retire and get healthcare without immigrating other people.
A lot of European countries made the mistake of having fairly generous allowances for bringing dependents with you on the visas, partially out of a belief it was needed to get people and partially because the Right to a Family Life is enshrined at a fairly high level of law in most European nations making it easy for politicians to just give the allowance. Now that for the most part this has been undone and afaik there haven't been successful legal challenges it would be interesting to see if the numbers change.
These figures can't tell you if not having the immigrants would be better for the economy or even the general fiscal situation of the government, because the immigrants are part of the overall economy (this is a point that Matt makes all the time). One way to see that is to note that roads are purely a fiscal cost to the government but getting rid of them would not lead to better government fiscal health. Another is to know that growth, both of the economy and the money supply, is necessary to keep the economy functioning in a modern society.
Yes, often people try to do that, but it's very challenging (what was the fiscal impact of the Erie Canal?). I don't read Danish, but the reading the internet racist you linked to doesn't indicate that the reports mentioned do that at all.
"...publish official figures showing non-western immigrants are a significant fiscal cost...."
In the US, lots of people on both the left and the right claim that (whatever the cultural issues may be) immigration is a net economic positive for the country.
Do you think the economic picture in the US is being misrepresented, or is there something about economic/political/cultural structures in the US that allows us to benefit economically from the influx of immigrants, and something about the economic/political/cultural structures in Denmark, Netherlands, etc., that prevents them from benefiting?
I suspect its apples to oranges. The US doesn't have the social programs that Europe does, the area low skilled immigrants tend to go has a particular form of agriculture that is very expensive to automate, most of them are culturally more similar to the average American (central and south America are still European cultures) and they're generally more willing to go home when the season ends. Europe is the opposite, lots of government spending per head on things that will go up for migrants (especially settled migrants), non-medium to high skill industries are generally easy automatable (many European nations have seen major decline in automatic car washes as its cheaper to pay a group of migrants to hand wash it) or service, MENA and sub-saharan culture is very different to standard European and they generally want to make a life for themselves in the rich, stable western country.
I could easily believe that its generally a cost in Europe and a gain in the USA. There is also the caveat that it is *much* harder to be majorly productive in a country that doesn't speak a language you. Anglophone countries may have an advantage. I also assume that high skill non-western immigrants are always a fiscal positive. I believe stats in Britain showed that the big wave of Hong Kong refugees after the CCP clampdown were net positive.
There are important differences in welfare and who comes to America. But mainly it it just lumping tech workers with low skilled workers you can get a much positive effect even if the net effect of the low skilled workers is highly negative.
Yeah, as with free trade, the net effect on the economy is positive, but there are also distributive effects that can end up making me better off and you worse off, and that's pretty reliably going to get my support and your opposition.
I don't see it as that similar to free trade. The equivalencecy doesn't work. Free trade is simply good for the economy, immigration has lots of complicated reactions.
Free trade and immigration both have distributive effects--they move well-being around within your economy, independently of their effect on the whole economy. If the economy gets better overall, but you lose your job, you probably aren't going to be a fan, whether you lose your job to imports or foreign competition.
The US has historically done *really well* with immigrants, assimilating them into generic productive Americans in a generation or two. It wouldn't be a shock if this extended into us being better at getting an economic benefit from immigrants than other countries.
I am not sure it is a net gain, but it is definitely very different, if someone is a top engineer in India or China they are going to go to the US or Australia. In Europe a lot of people who ostensibly comes as high skilled workers/students do minimum wage jobs or get on welfare.
The proposed solution doesn't seem to match the problem, though - unless Democrats adopt the *most extreme* voter position on crime and immigration, the representation gap persists. Simply matching the right wing party view on these issues doesn't address the representation gap at all.
I would say that the *size* of the gap matters a lot. Many people who wanted more enforcement of immigration laws were unhappy about the policies in the 1990s and 2000s, but were not sufficiently upset to make them prioritize that question over other concerns. Then as enforcement went from lax to very lax, things shifted, and the people who used to be moderately unhappy become willing let their anger at uncontrolled immigration override their hesitation about Trump / AfD / Reform / Marine Le Pen / ...
Yeah just look at the growing calls for "remigration" among the European right which is basically ethnic cleansing. Most voters obviously do not want to ethnically cleanse their countries but they may very well choose a party with a disturbing number of members calling for it if their preferred solution of more controlled immigration doesn't occur. If the sectarian dam breaks as it seems to be starting to in places like Britain you will see Northern Irish style voting for extremist parties with these overtly extreme positions because they feel they have to too. I would rather avoid that.
I hope you are right about "most voters". But take a look at things like the Eric Schmitt speech at the National Conservatism Conference. It is hard to understand that as anything other than advocacy of ethnic cleansing or, frankly, to attribute very much of its origin to a concern about undue absorption of public resources and benefits by immigrants, illegal or legal.
What in people’s direct experience actually informs them of the rate of illegal immigration? I suspect what they are experiencing is a higher foreign-born share of population in their area, which is going to happen mechanically even under low levels of legal immigration.
Matt’s description of the CSU supporters who switched their votes to AfD shows that to be untrue. They wanted CSU to move closer to their viewpoint so they wouldn’t need to choose the AfD
Excellent as usual. So of course my mind naturally goes to “why is this the case”. A while ago, someone asked Matt where he disagrees with conventional wisdom the most, and he chose to focus on the prevalence of zero some thinking. I think this nails it.
The higher your relative status in society, the more likely you are to escape the clutches of zero sum thinking and the mentality of scarcity. Politicians are definitionally higher status than the median voter and certainly below median voter. They are more able to view the world in growth mindset terms.
Which makes the question what happened recently that this manifested itself if this was always true. And this is where the Ross Douthat theory of the world may come in. “ we broke a bad world in the 50s and 60s, and didn’t replace it with anything, destroying the social fabric of life for a whole bunch of lower status citizens”. Liberty and flexibility for you and me, chaos and uncertainty for the rest.
It absolutely kills me that the self proclaimed moral high ground liberal voices refuse to look at the mirror and own up to their responsibility.
but who is "we?" The government can't and shouldn't force people to go to church and stuff. Political parties definitionally cannot replace the "social fabric" of a community.
I don't see where anybody said it should. But it is true that the social fabric (flimsy and exclusionary as it might have been) has been torn asunder with nothing to replace it for decades. Social media in the last few years has been the closest thing to a community church or diner and look where that has gotten us.
"we broke a bad world in the 50s and 60s, and didn’t replace it with anything"
The "We" here are long-dead people like LBJ, JFK and the Warren Court, and to a lesser extent the vast majority of the American public who supported them at the time. Today it might include any of their their intellectual descendants, who are perhaps a bit guilty of not fully reflecting on the legacy of the changes that the 60s brought about.
obviously everyone bears a bit of the blame but I believe it was Pat Buchanan who said "we'll break the country in 2 and the right will have the bigger half." I don't like the guy but it was pretty prescient.
What do you mean we didn't replace it with anything? We replaced it with small-l liberal democracy!
Expecting the government to provide you with meaning in life is a category error. In a free society, as a free citizen, not a subject, you make your own meaning. The kind of government that provides "meaning" is a totalitarian government that demands unquestioning obedience, worship of the one true state-approved religion, etc. Is that what you want?
The way I see it, government exists to help solve collective action problems, provide things people can't buy for themselves (like infrastructure), and protect people from certain certain forms of suffering (health care for the sick, financial support for the disabled and elderly, etc.) All this helps free people to seek meaning along with their families and communities.
And yes, our society is very unequal, and someone who is lower educated and poorer will struggle a lot more, but realistic solutions involve more heavy-handed government intervention, which conservatives tend to reject.
We had previously elevated marriage as a foundational aspect of the social order and expected that children should be raised with two legally married parents. Of course it had never been illegal to be unmarried with children, but it was practically much harder.
In the 60s we made it substantially easier to be an unmarried parent, and wouldn't you know it, the percentage of unmarried mothers and fathers took off!
In a somewhat analogous vein, it was much harder to simply not work, at least for me, so consequently the employment rate was higher for men was higher. Now men retire earlier or go on disability more frequently, spend longer periods of time willingly in-between jobs, etc..
There were a host of other social norms and aspects of culture that had formal or informal support in laws and interpretations of laws - for example pornography, homelessness, mental illness were all treated more as communal problems, but after the Warren Court era they began to be viewed as individual problems or even individual rights.
Whether this maps to a prior or current expectation of the government supplying you with meaning is hard for me to say because I'm not looking at it that way.
I will say, though, that the government operated in a way where the de facto expectation was that men would take value from work, children would take value from two parent households and society had a larger say in individual behaviors that might upset the community.
Obviously there are trade-offs with all of these things, and I'm not looking to turn back the clock, but I think left-wing people should think deeper about both sides of the trade-offs.
"Expecting the government to provide you with meaning in life is a category error."
+1000, superlike.
But we did not create small-l liberal democracy in the 50s and 60s (and, per your own excellent quote, that isn't even relevant to the domain Douthat's talking about), so I cannot like the comment.
Americans have an extremely high relative status in the world, yet have the worst case of zero-sum thinking. If it’s about relative status maybe we should just try to get people to think of the world as a single society more, then people are comparing themselves to peasants in India (those peasants in India are comparing themselves to you!) and will feel better about themselves and be less zero-sum?
Not necessarily. The fact that people’s own ranking of their life satisfaction is strongly correlated with their country’s GDP per capita suggests they are comparing themselves to people globally: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
"A simpler explanation is that a significant minority of the public in most Western countries agrees with right-wing cultural politics."
I agree but a caveat. I think _lots of people on the Left_ honestly conflate anti-crime, anti-immigration with old fashioned racism/"not like me"-ism. Therefore if you want to think well of your opponents, that they are just uninformed, not "bad people," you want to attribute their voting to understandable "economic" reasons. And even if you reasonably think it is a mixture, you want to emphasize "economics." Combine this with _lots of people on the Left_ thinking that their opponents ARE bad people, that it would be wrong to pander to their "racism," and you get to the same place, focus on "economics."
This is problematic when _lots of people on the Left_ get the economics wrong.
Most anti-immigrationism is racism. We know this because most of them are also pro-natalist even though all the non-racist arguments against immigration (strain on public services, wage competition, overcrowding) apply to locally born people too.
I mean, there's "I don't like people with a different color of skin" and there "I don't have many experiences interacting with people different set of experiences, and it makes me uncomfortable to have them." Both of these can lead to people not wanting to have to deal with a bunch of people with different customs and languages as part of their every-day lives.
I think the highly-politically-engaged underrate the convenience/familiarity piece when it comes to subjects like immigration and crime. Normies mostly want more of what they're used to, and from my middle-aged perspective, it's obvious that the country is far more multicultural than it was when I was a child. For many folks a generation older than me, that makes it more challenging to interact with, and they don't like it.
I think you are right about that, and I also think that maintaining the type of "multicultural democracy" where all comers are given equal weight and no culture is dominant is a lot harder (maybe impossible given well documented human nature on this) than a lot of activists would like to think. Is that racist? I dunno, but IMO it's clearly true that significant numbers of the population will base their votes on it.
The thing is, the monocultural democracy isn't some panacea against all social disagreement, people just find new things to fight over. Of course, voters are so removed from that, that they don't recognize it.
No, of course not. But it's easier to see yourself in even a heated conversation with someone who has a similar cultural background than with someone who doesn't, and IMO that makes it easier to come to consensus. My Norwegian friend likes to point out the higher social trust and cohesion seen in his country, while I think a lot of that is just that Norway has five million people mostly of Nordic heritage all named variations of Sven (I'm exaggerating for effect but you get the point, and yes I know immigration has ramped up there in recent years as well). It's a lot easier to trust when everyone looks like you and has similar cultural touchstones.
It depends on what you mean by “culture.” There should be a political culture that accepts pluralism (and the average immigrant is WAY better than the average MAGA on that count). But different cultures in the sense of different food, festivals, activities, etc. should be encouraged.
These are the easy things. It's things like language, religion, work habits, certain cultural habits, ie female circumcision, or tolerance of homosexuality, for example, where it gets tricky.
"Should" is a loaded word and what "should" be is often pie in the sky.
Even the average Republican pre-MAGA would agree that foreign food, music, etc is beneficial to the US. It's delicious and fun and demands no political power in return.
Pre-Trump, yes, but remember when the Trump campaign surrogate went on national TV and threatened “taco trucks on every corner”? Now they are against the foreign food.
The case of left wingers ignoring 'the experts' that I am most personally familiar with is that cybersecurity researchers have done a *lot* of work on trying to understand foreign online disinformation and election influence campaigns, especially in the wake of Russia's high profile role in various campaigns since 2016. And that work has almost uniformly come to the same basic conclusion, which is that these interventions are actually terrible on a cost-benefit basis. They are incredibly expensive to run, often requiring the full attention of many highly skilled intelligence operatives, the cultivation of foreign media assets, and payments to a large number of professional internet trolls. Meanwhile, the benefits are very limited and completely swamped by professional domestic election campaigns. There are a couple of edge cases here, where small countries with very immature media ecosystems will have difficulty resisting the sheer volume of information a professional Russian campaign can put out, but that is more of an issue for small Eastern European and Central Asian countries than anything a large democracy has to worry about.
Despite this, huge numbers of people are convinced that voters are only anti-immigration and worried about crime because of media manipulation by foreign actors and their allies in the domestic media. There's no evidence of this at all! The people are authentically very anti-migration and authentically very worried about crime.
Now, I myself am deeply unsympathetic to the public here, as usual, because the public doesn't really know anything and the idea that they are worried about something gives me no information about whether that issue actually matters in reality. In the United States, at least, immigrants are a huge benefit and while we could certainly improve our handling of crime, the measures voters want (like harsher sentences and the death penalty) are more about emotional satisfaction than reducing the crime rate. But the problem for the liberal elites, as is often the case, is that they sort of regret the fact that we live in a democracy. You can't believe democracy is good and also believe pandering to the slobbering masses is bad. The two things are coterminous.
Democracy is about how we select leaders, not what those leaders can do. Leaders are always constrained by laws (both literally and in the sense of “laws of economics”) and external actors. States have no constitutional power to regulate immigration from other states yet no one would claim that turns states into non-democracies.
This doesn't make any sense as a response. The point is that if you want to win elections in a democracy, you have to pander to the masses, even if what they want is something that is kind of dumb. Even if we were to assume there is literally *nothing* legally within the power of the German government to slow migration (I am skeptical, to say the least) it is still possible to do more or less pandering to voters on the issue, or for parties to put more or less pressure on affiliated MEPs, etc.
It isn't just that immigration in Europe is unpopular, there is also very much an idea amongst the elite that immigration should be done in an expensive, inefficient and dishonest way, often made worse by the welfare system.
The problem in many European countries is similar to the problem in the United States: the immigration "system" isn't a system. It's an ad hoc accumulation of different policies and slapped-together reactions to previous social problems that have now outlived their usefulness.
I'll give a concrete example from Sweden, where I was and am an immigrant on the other side of this system. I am American, married to a Swede. I'm elite-university educated, work in tech, and have never lacked for job offers from firms operating in European countries where I lived, including first Ireland and then Sweden. I have a Swedish-born son and am the furious convert to the Swedish Dream. An "ideal immigrant," right?
Not according to the Swedish Migration Authority, who made my migration process extremely lengthy, frustrating, and seemingly-at-times, impossible. In despair of guidance, I consulted lawyers and joined all manner of groups catering to people like myself, married to native born locals, pursuing work permits from local employers who'd like to hire them, etc. And the sad experiences they all shared never failed to shock Swedes whom I told them to. Families divided for years just awaiting their processing. High-value employees summarily deported because their HR team made a simple clerical error on holiday leave tracking or something.
Swedes I speak with have no idea that their official government policy and process has been rejecting thousands of candidates a year who just wanted to move back to Sweden with their families, pursue a PhD, work for Google or the local hospital, or whatever. The height of absurdity is that even people who are *native-born Swedish* can't always move back to their own country because of the Kafka-esque nightmare of migration policies! If you leave the country for even a short time, you're "de-registered" and then you're an outsider like the rest, sent to the back of a long and opaque line to come back home.
Some of us in our despair wondered darkly why it seemed "easy" for a bunch of uneducated men from Afghanistan or Somalia who didn't know the first thing about Sweden (or even like the place) to just come on in, when a Swede couldn't even easily bring their spouse or child!? That's an unhelpful comparison, but the optics weren't great. And, frankly, I don't think anyone in Sweden today would have consciously designed a policy where refugees so exponentially outnumbered more educated or employable immigrants. Sweden basically has the opposite immigration policy to Canada's or Australia's "points system," in that way.
Did anyone in Sweden decide that this is what the immigration policy should be? That we efficiently deport or prohibit elite international graduates of the best Swedish schools after their graduation or the husbands and wives of native-born Swedes? But not some high profile criminals or terrorists or people who snuck in illegally? Or that the very people who are most likely to integrate and contribute to the society are the ones we make life hard for? No. The policy-makers decided by not deciding. And the same is true at the EU level, since these debates are so fraught. So we get left with default processes held over from decades ago, designed for yesterday's concerns and opportunities (and even insufficient then).
It's not politically salient to fix any of this because immigrants aren't a voting constituency. Immigration is constantly talked about as a "problem" (the only solution being "less") rather than something necessary that should be engineered and optimized. And it's obvious to all of us that we're also a "problem" to our host country until proven otherwise, too, so we tend to keep our heads down and not complain about intolerable issues. After many years in Sweden, I'm a citizen now and so I "matter" politically, but generally even immigrants who form a life here and become permanent residents or citizens are less likely to join political parties, vote, run for office or otherwise engage in civic and social life as fully as native-born Swedes. And you can understand why, given the cold shoulder they get all the way through! Many of us who have other options just leave after a few years, despairing of ever feeling at home. And that's Sweden's loss as much as ours, really.
You make a couple of statements that I think are worth exploring:
"That's an unhelpful comparison, but the optics weren't great". Why is it an unhelpful comparison?
"And the same is true at the EU level, since these debates are so fraught." Why are they so fraught?
My answer to those questions, though I'm interested in yours, is that our normal discourse has been curtailed by the view that anyone who expresses affinity for one culture over another is racist.
One doesn't even need to talk about culture to favor one type of immigrant over another (although it's also a valid point to raise). Economic reasons also suffice.
Thanks for sharing this very interesting story. “Deciding by not deciding” is, I think, a recurring theme in governance over the last few decades. At least in the US, politicians have largely avoided discussion of choices and tradeoffs, and when they haven’t, they’ve been punished by voters (see Bush senior/“read my lips, no new taxes” as one example). So on hard issues like these, we’ve drifted along without grappling directly, and here we are.
This is where I’m partial to the argument that the increasing democratization of politics has been a problem, actually. It started maybe with the introduction of C-SPAN and has now entered a completely toxic phase where people are just posturing and shitposting instead of governing—because that’s what the incentives of this Attention Economy feedback loop are rewarding.
Most people just don’t have the time, education; or attention span to engage rigorously with policy. Policy is hard! It’s inherently disappointing to everyone as you have to cut compromises or engage with real dilemmas that have no win-win solution. And you make mistakes because every policy action produces and equal and opposite and (usually unexpected) reaction. So you need to be able to retreat and optimize as you go without everyone dunking on you.
So, though the smoke-filled-rooms of yore weren’t ideal, at least you had people who could make tough calls together without the cameras watching and emails trumpeting their every move. Look what it took to get the Civil Rights or Voting Rights Act passed!
I'm with you, the disengaged just shouldn't be engaging... unlike Nixon said, don't put down your beer bongs and your crack pipes, inhale the soma and let people who sort of know what they're doing get about things.
>Some of us in our despair wondered darkly why it seemed "easy" for a bunch of uneducated men from Afghanistan or Somalia who didn't know the first thing about Sweden (or even like the place) to just come on in, when a Swede couldn't even easily bring their spouse or child!?
This sentiment is why legal immigrants turned American are some of the most zealot pro-strong borders Americans out there.
Australia is an interesting counter point, with an extremely generous welfare state, huge amounts of immigration yet very little blowback compared to AfD, FN and Stephen miller. My current working theory is that Australia courts skilled immigrants and aggressively protects against the literal unwashed asylum seeker masses who try to come in by boat.
Australians are certainly not immune to racial strife and have a real housing affordability crisis but the profile of its modal immigrant is different and hard to attack as a job stealer or welfare queen that you would find characiatures or elsewhere.
Right, for geographically obvious reasons Australia has far less of an issue with illegal immigration than other countries, so there's understandably less blowback.
That’s true but the context I took the OP was Europe and welfare, which doesn’t have the same challenges of illegal vs legal that happens in the US. You get all the blowback in Europe even with legal immigration.
I feel like Americans don't really understand. In most of Europe immigrants are given full access to the welfare system, in England they are given housing in Central London that locals can't afford and the right to bring to the over 5 "relatives" with no check to see how closely they are related. Also no expectation that they will learn English.
And the UK only deports people to Brazil, Romania and Albania. People from other places are never deported, no matter the situation.
The end of this post moves too quickly to critique of the left side of the spectrum, when it's clear from the rest of the post that it's conservative parties that are not representing conservative voters. That's what happened in Germany with Merkel, that's what happened recently in the UK, that's why Trump took over the Republican party.
Why this is is an interesting question (mostly I think it's because the people who lead conservative parties know things their voters don't) but it's not something that the left can fix.
More importantly, they need to tell their voters that they're wrong. Matt regularly makes the point that the people politicians can persuade are their own base. That's what is needed here.
When fascists have taken over it's been because the centre right hasn't held... dunno how that applies to communists but wouldn't be surprised if it also proved true.
I don't think this is typically true of Communist regimes. The Bolsheviks led a coup against more moderate socialists. In China, Cuba, and many other places the communists successfully fought and won a revolution against an entrenched right wing regime. In Eastern Europe the Soviets imposed communist leadership.
I’m fascinated by the fact that zero Western liberal parties have tried to outflank the right on immigration even though (a) it’s not incoherent with historical left positioning on the issue and (b) it’s such an obvious way to accomplish the things you purportedly really care about.
I guess I’ve accepted that the Democrats have committed to a hard left stance on all cultural issues, but why couldn’t Labour try this? Or the parti socialiste? Why do these parties care about immigration to the detriment of priorities on Climate Change and wealth distribution (let alone Democracy issues)? Is it just that the far right is so odious about it that the left can’t bring themselves to agree with it?
Oh you should try some. The dough is layered with butter and repeatedly folded and rolled out. And then these thin layers are pushed apart when baked creating an airy, crisp texture. They also come in a variety of fillings like cream cheese, and various fruit preserves. Pair it with your morning coffee for a great start to the day.
It is of course necessary for Democrats to moderate on cultural issues to win elections, and particularly to have any chance of competing in the senate.
That said, if the goal is "crank suppression" you need to have both parties committed to the goal. Even if you win 75% of the time (something of course Democrats aren't really close to) if the cranks have control of one of the parties the damage to the country will be really quite bad.
So is this really advice to the Republican establishment to try to tack further right on immigration to take back the party from Trump? Because there have been a lot of attempts at Trump impersonators in the post-Trump era and none of them have any juice with the Republican base.
I can’t help but notice that most of the people calling for the Republicans to surpress their cranks are people who would almost certainly vote for Democrats even if the cranks somehow were driven out of the Republicans. In which case, the right is simply not going to care what they think
I agree with you, but it is not possible for Democrats to win every election forever, so what's the alternative except for the conservative elites to try to fix their side before everything goes to shit?
The post is mostly about immigration, but very much the same scenario plays out with respect to trans issues where the majority of the public is not in favor of biological males competing in women’s sports or in hormones being prescribed to children but there are few in the Democratic party who will openly advocate for these common-sense positions. And to what end? To elect Trump and bring our country to its knees.
To the end of not having the government manage sports or medical treatments? “My body my choice” has been a longstanding position of liberals and applies to trans issues every bit as much as abortion and sex.
Trans issues are something that impact <1% of the population; even if you’re against it personally this is not a reason for a federal government takeover of issues that should be between sports leagues and parents.
I agree, personal choice is the principle to uphold. However, I think women should be able to choose to compete in sports leagues with fair competition. I also believe that promoting unproven and irreversible medical treatments for children to treat a condition without an onjective diagnosis is irresponsible, and is nowhere else practiced except in this one highly polticized domain.
Your body your choice doesn’t apply to shared spaces. You cannot have sex or poop in public. Men cannot decide to participate in women’s sports unilaterally. They need permission.
Trans issues are *not* confined to trans people themselves. Every trans athlete affects every other player in that division, let alone team or locker room, just to name a single example.
"If liberals insist that only fascists will enforce borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals refuse to do."
https://archive.ph/PXfd2
Unfortunately if liberals try to pass border enforcement bills, the fascists will block them.
Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson is not a fascist, he told Biden repeatedly he needed to take executive action first before Trump even weighed in over a month later. The reason Biden waited until May five months later to quietly restart Remain in Mexico is because Johnson was correct, it was up to him. Basic facts are more helpful than calling people fascist or communist.
Frum is one of those guys with a low batting average but a lot of power. When he gets a hit, it's often a home run.
Punditry’s Jim Thome!
Three True Outcomes poster
Maybe more Dave Kingman
Seems like a nicer guy than Kingman at least!
What a ridiculous sentence if taken seriously. It has aged like milk out in the sun. If it's true that enforcing borders is the thing fascists are doing, and if it's true voters are electing fascists now, why should liberals adopt this stance? It doesn't follow at all from their view of justice. Accordingly, Frum's vote for Biden from this perspective was clearly a mistake. Democrats took none of Frum's advice because they genuinely hold a populist view of immigration as the rightful entry of the forgotten masses against a tiny xenophobic and fiscally conservative elite. This was all apparent in the 2020 Dem primary before Biden even took office.
The issue that Trump entered politics on produced next to zero clarity for liberal policymakers, and this "eat your vegetables but don't say vegetables are good" rhetorical pivot from Frum is a perfect example. If you want to stop liberals from doing bad ideas, you either have to tell them on the merits their ideas are bad for the country or elect right-wing politicians to make them lose power for a bit so they learn the hard way. This cop-out position of "uhh excuse me, you might not like this but your stance might technically reduce your chances of winning an election versus a fascist" yielded the Biden administration's executive hijinks, not any substantive commitment to letting Congress say no to more immigration and leaving it at that. Frum went along with calling Trump fascist, and it got him the stupidest Democratic admin on immigration in a generation. How did that work out for him?
Odd I think it aged quite well. The Biden admin did not enforce borders, and America elected a fascist to do so.
And congress passed Lachlyn Riley — a bad immigration bill, that was also very good politics
Laken* Riley
As evidenced by the twelve Senate Democrats who voted in the affirmative on that bill.
If you would prefer for America to not elect "fascists", why do you repeat, and presumably believe, false things like "The Biden admin did not enforce borders?"
There's probably a complex way you came to think this was a socially acceptable thing to say, which is even more true for less politically interested people who don't read blogs, but get their understanding of the world from other, more inaccurate media sources. The problem of why people vote for who they do, probably has more to do with that perception.
Personally, I'm old enough to remember when the "compassionate conservatives" had a different understanding of how immigration should work, and news coverage about America being a refuge for the rest of the world to best live their life and thrive was rampant.
Tbh I don't know why dems went to the mat for asylum claims, tbh seems more like negative polarization than a firm commitment to right of movement (though some will stem from first principles type reasoning).
Cause when you actually talk to people on an individual basis, their stories are horrifying and you come away thinking "oh yeah, that actually makes sense." Nobody walks from Central America to the US border for fun.
But they still aren't valid asylum claims
Yes, a lot of bad situations people are fleeing from don’t meet the technical definition of asylum, but treating that as the end of the conversation is corrosive to the soul.
It is the end of the conversation as far as current law goes.
If you want a different outcome, we have a process for that. Congress should pass a new law and the president should sign it.
The problem is that no matter how sympathetic individual stories are (and I agree most of them have very sympathetic stories)
It's quite clear that Americans don't want that level of immigration. Note that's a sentiment I agree with.
I think the total legal level should be a bit higher than it is currently, and should be focused on high skilled immigrants and people that get educated in our universities in STEM fields.
But the total level should still be WAY below what it was during the Biden administration (legal + illegal + asylum)
I think it's underrated how much Biden's Catholic sensibility affected his judgement on the issue of asylum claims.
Earnest moral convictions do seem a bit inconvenient for the political arena.
And yet they're an awfully good heuristic for picking (or not picking) actual leaders.
I agree asylum is not a program you want to end for those reasons, doesn't flow from that, imo, how to run the program ig.
Stolen base politics. If growing the population rapidly is an important objective, and you can't do it through congress, it's a straightforward workaround.
The United States hasn't been growing "rapidly" since at least the 1990s, perhaps earlier, depending on how one defines that term.
"Staving off demographic collapse" is a better candidate for your "workaround" claim.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/03/us-news/us-population-could-shrink-for-first-time-ever-in-2025-alarming-data-shows/
To be clear, I'm all for the US growing rapidly and increasing immigration. "Staving off demographic collapse" by using the asylum loophole is perhaps wise policymaking, if politically unpopular.
I don't think there was much thought or strategy behind Biden-era asylum loopholes other than "I don't want to piss off young staffers and/or The Groups."
I mean, it prevented Trump from winning in 2020 and the moderate choice on the Democratic side did win, even if he didn't govern like it?
But Frum's 2019 essay did not prevent Trump from winning in 2020. COVID and Trump's inability to stop doing the Donny from Queens show when people wanted stoic guidance during a crisis prevented Trump from winning in 2020. The immigration issue was Trump's favor, as in 2016 and 2024, it just wasn't an issue at the time of the pandemic shutdown of movement and he did reduce legal immigration a bit prior to that satisfying his voters. What Frum was suggested here is liberals could pivot on immigration by identifying their opponents as a fascist threat, and he was clearly wrong about that.
I mean, he failed to convince the democrats who were managing this within the Biden administration to change course...which is bad...but I don't see how that damages the underlying critique? It seems like you agree with him that if the Biden administration had listened to Frum and prioritized controlling/reducing immigration flows that would have been better (at least politically)? So your problem is that he failed to win an argument, even though he was making a true statement (we need to moderate on this, or the voters will elect Trump to be extreme on it)?
Or, is your argument since there is now a party which represents this view, there is no need to moderate on it at all and Democrats should simply represent the broadly permissive position? That's not crazy, but I think the response is that we need to detach a view which is popular and not going anywhere (immigration should be restricted) from a position which isn't and has to be crushed (peronist authoritarianism is fine, so long as Trump is the man on top!).
The specific problem is Frum decided treating Trump as an existential threat would inform better liberal governance. That's really the heart of the quote I'm replying to; voters are electing fascists to enforce borders, so that's why liberals will have to pivot rightward on borders. This was Frum's intellectual gambit, and it didn't work. Liberals spent more time than ever discussing Trump as fascist and making excuses for Biden's immigration policy. Frum incorrectly saw the former observation as disciplining the latter, hence the quote summing up his essay thesis in 2019.
I'd need to reread his piece, but I don't think that was his prediction. I think it was 'we need to moderate on this or Trump/fascists will be elected' which is exactly what happened?
Oh man! You beat me to it!
If you want to play hard, you have to start at 6:02. Mornings when I sleep in I mainly respond to top level comments.
"... to play hard, you have to start at...."
It's true that there are first-mover advantages, but the race is not always to the swift. Sometimes posts from later in the morning move right up the leaderboard if they make a good point or shed new light on the issue.
Furthermore, the very top post is often some inconsequential bullshit -- a pointless quip or wry non-sequitur. People "like" it the way that they like a palate-cleanser between courses -- a brief diversion between Matt's post and the serious work of hashing out the issues in the comments further down.
You just have to have the boldness to ignore that you're late. 50% of the time if you drop a four paragraph monster as a top level comment you'll get likes. Of course, the other half the time no one sees it. But that's okay, I take swings in the batting cage even when no one is around to see them.
"...have to have the boldness to ignore that you're late...."
Those who cannot wake at 6aEST must arm themselves with that steadfastness of heart which can brave even the crumbling of all hopes....
I sometimes read the columns and comments days later, so know that SOMEONE is around to see them.
One can play skillfully, even from the West Coast. Indeed, the hardness and skill vectors sheer one another because sleep may increase skill. It’s not just two coefficients!
Totally agree.
As someone entering later in the day from the West Coast, I've realized that the object is not the number of likes but rather the quality of likes.
Those discerning readers who click "like" on my comments are the creme de la creme of the SB commentariat and I happily concede all those other, non-discerning like-clickers to the vapid and obvious clickbait that attracts the hoi polloi.
It is especially pleasing to me when I get a single "like" because I know that represents a meeting of the minds, reflecting the appreciation of that one true reader who totally *gets* what I'm saying.
The only better outcome is when I get zero likes because that shows how deeply the best, the most discerning readers have read and understood the value of what I'm saying.
"...better outcome is when I get zero likes because...."
That comment by Robbins -- it was so profound, so life-changing, that I wandered off in a daze, forgetting even to "like" it, before I switched off my laptop and entered a monastery.
I was _this_ close to liking and then realized "fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again"
Quippiness levels must be kept below 5% to avoid secular Redditification
"Furthermore, the very top post is often some inconsequential bullshit -- a pointless quip or wry non-sequitur."
[Pitch Meeting Guy voice] Oohh, fishing for likes by making self-deprecating comments is TIGHT!
"If you want to play hard, you have to start at 6:02."
This sounds surprisingly badass in my head.
You should have told us directly, this was written by David Frum, and was a bad faith argument to begin with, that can apply to any number of other issues you can swap in. "Liberals" are not insisting "only fascists" will enforce borders. There are a variety of other reasons why conservatives will scapegoat a faction of populace that doesn't have political reputation, and there's no amount of it that will satisfy them into recanting on this narrative.
This is a key point: "Part of the reason for the gap is probably that M.P.s have to think more concretely about tradeoffs. It’s a lot easier to tell a pollster you want harsher sentences or tweet about how we could end crime by locking up repeat offenders and throwing away the key than it is to specifically write down what taxes you want to raise or what spending you want to cut in order to accomplish that."
Apply this to immigration, too. You want less... but are you willing to pay the cost?
If the median voter wants to make it harder to emigrate to Germany, the United States, and most everywhere else. But what about the tradeoffs incurred? Does the average voter also want more expensive healthcare and longer wait times? How about food-price inflation? Maybe they'd be less happy if their local elementary school closed? Remember when everyone was freaking out that "nobody wants to work anymore?" Y'all ain't seen nothin yet!
These effects and immigration only seem unrelated because people still aren't contending with the fact that the *only* reason that populations haven't been in free-fall across the Western world for years now is immigration. And that everything they consider "normal" is extremely sensitive to the working-age population and labor supply. Places like Japan have been foreshadowing our future my while life, but they actually adapted to their new reality in ways that I don't think the American system (or psyche) is really prepared for.
But maybe we'll all learn fast because the US population has just shrank for the first time in its history. Note that the American population didn't shrink during the Civil War, either of the World Wars, or the Great Influenza. But now it has. For. The. First. Time. Ever. And almost entirely due to the MAGA immigration policy (plus decades of below-replacement birthrates).
It takes people a while to notice the knock-on effects of something so catastrophic, but they will. You say it "wouldn't be the end of the world." But people were OUTRAGED that they couldn't get their McDonald's or Starbucks in a timely fashion during COVID. And, already, Trump got a little wobbly with the obvious acute effect of his immigration raids on the food production sector and reversed. And anti-immigration is his whole thing! How quickly will the MAGA diehards among the votership suddenly notice the upsides of having a bunch of erstwhile undesirable Haitians and Venezuelans around? I'd wager sometime before 2028 at this rate...
People in Germany and Italy don't have to wait so long. The shrinkage is happening now. And so are its deleterious effects. But they still want less immigration. So who's going to tell everyone that you can't have your cake and eat it too? Maybe I'm wrong and motivated reasoning and propaganda inure everyone from the truth that not having babies and not having immigrants is when we can't have nice things, anymore. But we're recovered from spats of xenophobic populism before when everyone feels the concrete effect of fewer people.
This comment oddly made me feel hopeful. Maybe republicans will realize they can’t trad wife there way out of population decline.
Matt sort of alluded to it in this post, but it's pretty likely that a lot of people who decided to vote for Trump due to immigration or voted for AFD in Germany are not hardcore restrictionists but rather just people who want somebody to take the idea of restricting immigration even somewhat seriously.
I think it's alarming that Matt spoke to voters who didn't seem put off from voting for AFD even when told they have some Nazi ties. But that's different from these same voters endorsing the hardcore rightwing views of the AFD.
It's a huge part of why populist parties do so much better out of power. It's extremely difficult for these parties to deliver on their promises once in power. As Matt and this commentator alluded to, one reason more traditional center left and center right parties don't "go there" with immigration is they're aware that this would involve making promises they have no hope of delivering on.
To make you a little less hopeful, this is likely part of the reason why these extreme right parties are particular anti-democratic. Part of this is just a general antipathy towards democracy itself given it empowers people that extreme right wingers think are not their equals. But I suspect part of it is there is a pretty big electoral backlash once voters see the practical consequences of implementing the right wing populist party agenda. So what better way to ensure you're success than by putting your thumb on the scale with elections to minimize or even eliminate said backlash. Just another reason why I think we should take more seriously the idea that Trump is going to make moves to limit how free and fair elections will be in 2026 and 2028.
I think it's also clear though that voters are not going to accept immigration at a level high enough to replace that loss of native fertility.
So what to do?
Building a lot more housing would certainly help, bringing down the cost would help family formation.
But what if that's not enough?
Then there will need to be a cultural change.
One of the problems too is the “downside” of these tradeoffs are often not immediate.
I’m thinking specifically about the recent news out of Florida that vaccinations will no longer be required to attend school. I don’t think it’s a mistake that this announcement was made after the school year started or the very least after kids had to be registered for school. Meaning the incoming class of kids is likely vaccinated. Meaning the long term effects of this decision likely won’t be felt until earliest a year from now (and likely longer given most students and adults will still have been vaccinated against stuff like polio). Meatball Ron is not an idiot and is probably aware of the science behind vaccinations (which makes his endorsement of these actions all the more gross). A year from now he gets to take a “victory lap” about how he stood up for “freedom” and how all the “elite” experts said he was wrong to do this but look how great everything turned out.
Yeah, the vaccination thing is just nuts. WTF?
Forget it, Jake. It's . . . Florida.
Unfortunately, I think it's extremely likely that FL is just the first domino to fall across all states that have GOP governing trifecta.
That was my exact reaction when I saw the headlines yesterday! Living in Miami I normally feel like the clown show in the state government is unfortunate but its effects manageable. I've got a two-year-old who'll be in public schools in a couple years, and this is the first thing that makes me feel like I ought to bite the bullet on finding a job out of state. I can be diligent about brushing her teeth to deal with the end of fluoridation but there's nothing I can do if her unvaccinated classmates give her measles.
You see that all the time with Trumpian politics. Just look at his first-term tax cuts that actually raised taxes on the middle class… several years later. Anyone talking about that still? Nah!
Or the BIG ONE: the national debt! Big problem for those of us under 50. Not a problem for Trump or most of the extremely elderly Republicans in Congress. When that ticking time-bomb explodes, it will perversely be blamed on the future president in power. Just like Clinton and Obama and Biden were left cleaning up the economic mess of their predecessors, without getting much credit for it.
Clinton was pretty concerned with deficit reduction (albeit with the benefit of the peace dividend), but I don't think Obama or Biden really get many points there. Less bad than Trump, perhaps, but that's a pretty low bar.
Clinton’s economic problem was distinct from Obama’s. Obama faced an FDR-following-Hoover situation.
The time for deficit reduction isn’t when the entire world economy is in a free-fall Great Depression 2.0. That’s a lesson that the austerity-minded Europeans learned the hard way, suffering a Lost Decade after 2008 only improving right in time for COVID.
As for Biden? He had his own Great Depression 3.0 issue inherited from Trump’s mismanagement. And his initial instinct was good.
But after that? I don’t think his approach was in the second half of his tenure was as good. He tried to do too much and “not let a good crisis go to waste.” He would have been better off just stopping after resolving the COVID crisis.
Instead, he was trying to solve some other geopolitical and structural economy problems, belatedly, but he definitely pushed the Keynes button too hard and fell for collation management when he made ill-advised moves like pushing for student loan forgiveness.
Why did he do that? My theory is that he was operating on a common but flawed assumption that Trumpism came from an economic anxiety cause, ultimately, that could be treated with an FDR state-building approach. So he was kind of trying to do a 21st Century Reconstruction to MAGA-proof our battered polity. That was a mistake.
One of the things I don't think gets discussed enough with the thousand "what went wrong with Biden" takes is there seems to be not enough reporting that Biden's passion and focus his entire career was and is on foreign policy. He was on the senate foreign relations committee after all. But from what I've read, there seems to be a decent amount of evidence that Biden was super focused on his foreign policy legacy especially the latter half of his term.
I think this is perhaps where the substantive problem of Biden's cognitive decline was probably most acute. Setting aside the optics that likely turned off swing voters (it's silly, but Biden just acted older than Trump even though Trump if you look even somewhat carefully is clearly in decline himself), I think the real substantive impact was attention and time. One of the problems with the dishonest Fox News reporting (like that video they showed where they deliberately cropped off where it looked like Biden just wandered off after watching parachutists do a jump when in fact he was greeting a parachutists just off screen) is it actually distracted from what were likely very real consequences of cognitive decline. And from reporting, it seems like the substantive impact was that his time was more limited. And for Biden I think that meant that domestic concerns likely fell too much to the wayside and why "The Groups" likely gained too much influence.
That’s a really astute point, and one that I hadn’t considered.
Unfortunately, foreign policy is both glamorous and important for a statesman, but completely at the bottom of the agenda for voters (until discrete moments of crisis where it isn’t).
So if you focus on building up industrial capacity to take on Russia and China in near-peer competition… but then stuff gets more expensiver at home…. Well, then you lose to Trump.
I also think you can't understand Biden's presidency without understanding that he was fading in both energy and mental sharpness over time. He may have started the ship moving in the "Keynsian response to covid" direction early and not had the spoons to turn the ship in a different direction later on.
Even if he wasn’t fading, initial success often lulls us into thinking the same tool works for everything else. Biden found that stimulus and industrial policy helped during COVID and people around him became intoxicated with the generational possibility of change. And they overreached.
It’s not specific to Biden: Look at how insistently Trump is trying the same tariff shakedown to solve every geopolitical issue, even after the bluff stops working. At this point, it’s getting pathetic how much it’s not working.
We may not give the Administration around a President enough power when we say Biden did this or Clinton did that. Many people in Biden’s administration were left over from Obama’s. However Obama was more pragmatic than Biden especially as he slowed down. Voters felt that the Biden administration continued to push leftist Progressive policies and social values. It appeared that the people in that administration wouldn’t change much if Kamala were elected even though it was apparent the voters had moved more to the right. A large number of people just didn’t vote. IMO Pragmatism works.
Well, that plus the Democrats lost the House in 2022 and all meaningful legislation ground to a halt.
Interestingly, in the 1932 campaign FDR promised a balanced budget. He threw that out the window once elected, thought.
Clinton benefited from Ross Perot making a big deal about the debt and deficit in the general. In the primaries he opposed a balanced budget amendment and said he would cut taxes on the middle class. Early in his term he failed to get a stimulus bill through congress and decided to focus on deficit reduction after Alan Greenspan talked him into it.
Both parties were concerned about deficit reduction because Ross Perot ran with an almost single-issue-candidate about the problems with the deficit and got a substantial portion of the vote (sometimes coming in second place in some states).
The man was a loon in many ways, but he changed the common knowledge on the ground, and everyone had a lot of room to make deficit reduction a major component of their platforms, without having to argue against a "hey why don't we just try free money forever?" populist.
I think the national debt will be a problem sooner than a lot of people think.
We are now spending more on interest on the debt than on the military.
My own country, the UK, does not have vaccination mandates. I don't think it's a big driver of vaccination rates, and potentially does more harm than good. Isolating cranks into crank bubbles makes them even more crank-orientated! Forcing them to interact with normal institutions is a good thing!
Important context here, though:
1/ The UK has the NHS (which is to say that almost every British resident interacts frequently with the health system, regardless of means). Easier to do a carrot over sticks approach with that.
2/ It’s also crucial to note that, unlike in the UK or Europe, the United States essentially lacks the whole state function of public health. So not only due huge swaths of the population have no healthcare access, but also there’s no coordinate state function for collective health.
There is definitely coordination on public health matters in the United States. Sometimes it's patchy, but to say there is no coordination between the states is quite an overstatement.
I think you're missing how many gaps are actually covered by our patchy but multi-layered systems. Between state programs, federal programs, military programs, Indian Health Service Programs, Insurer-run programs, Employer-run programs, Education-run programs and volunteer-run Programs the vast majority of Americans also interact or have access to the health care system.
There are “systems of systems,” but that’s very different from having coordination. The CDC, for example, can issue guidance… that state health agencies are free to ignore. And the functions within these agencies are extremely underfunded relative to other advanced democracies.
That’s a description of our “healthcare system,” too, which isn’t a system as all.
Or our education system which had very little coordination before the Department of Education (and now is essentially being marched back to its extremely decentralized state).
What is the point of the fantastically expensive CDC?
Is this a serious question? Do you think CDC is actually fantastically expensive?
Isn't it? I mean I'm sure it's money well spent, but t's still a lot more than any other country spends.
In the US it definitely makes a difference. You can see it in the state by state variation on vaccination rates. The state with the least ability to opt out is the one with the highest vaccination rate.
I think this thread has changed my mind. In the UK the school gives vaccines (once the kid is in school), if parents consent. Maybe without vaccine mandates a lot of parents would just forget.
I think COVID vaccination rates lagging in the United States vis a vis the rest of the developed world is an important variable here.
As someone noted below, UK NHS is certainly a factor here why even absent mandates, vaccination rates would remain high. But the real issue is the culture war turn against vaccines themselves. And this is one of those cases where "orange man bad" is part of the story here. One of the few redeeming parts of his first term was he was pro vaccine, but he also was a huge part of why there was right wing turn against covid restrictions and downplaying COVID generally. And now of course he's fully thrown in with being anti-vaccine by embracing RFK Jr.
Point being, unlike with immigration, the rightward turn against vaccinations generally is a very American phenomenon. And yes if you look at polling, there is clearly a turn against vaccinations of all kinds among Republicans. https://news.gallup.com/poll/648308/far-fewer-regard-childhood-vaccinations-important.aspx. And Florida has very clearly become a "red" state the last 10 years.
The upshot is, there is a strong liklihood that childhood vaccinations will plummet absent a vaccine mandate in a way that just wouldn't occur in UK, Germany, Holland etc.
I don't think it's the case that there's a big constituency of anti-vax parents who only vax to get their kids into state schools. Typically parents feel quite strongly about this issue!
Oddly, I'd argue parents typically don't have strong feelings on required vaccines. Is about like people having strong feelings on required seat belts. Most people don't think about it, at all.
My evidence on this is that compliance is really only high among people that have a natural audit in place. Constantly doing trips that require you stay up to date on vaccines? Probably up to date. Don't have a natural check point to know when the last time you were vaccinated was? Then you probably have no idea. If you are lucky, you regularly see a doctor that has it on a chart.
That is, people generally trust experts on things. And it can be truly frustrating to be asked to care about specific specialty advice you get from someone. I remember doctors offering a choice of pig or cadaver skin for a required graft a family member needed. I had to ask why I would care between the options.
I think you're probably right. The NHS and schools will offer and chase you if you forget to vaccinate. Not sure how it works in the US. In addition we want people to view it like seatbelts and just do it (although vaccine mandates could go against that somewhat - you have to think about it and demonstrate compliance)
yeah, I think vaccination rates will go down because it'll be *easier* to not vax your kids, but you can get a religious or personal exemption from school vaccination requirements in 45/50 states already. parents who really strongly believe that their children will get autism or time traveling nanopatticles from the vaccine already have an out.
The effects are likely to be felt immediately if enough parents don’t vaccinate their infants. School isn’t the only vector.
In Germany the majority of the million plus Syrian refugees are on welfare and many will never work.
Well, why let reality get in the way of a good story! But, strictly speaking, that's not true, and there's robust research on it.
According to official German government statistics (see here: https://home-affairs.ec.europa.eu/whats-new/publications/institute-employment-research-iab-syrian-workers-germany_en), after 7 years, 61% of the bumper crop of 2015 Syrian refugees were employed. It's now 63% as of EOY 2024. And it would have been much higher except for the very low rate of female labor participation among Syrian migrants (only 29%).
So, is it true that first-generaton Syrian refugees are *as* employable as native-born Germans? No. And that's important! It's probably also a social problem that Syrian women aren't employed formally and may suffer social exclusion and a lack of integration.
But that's very different than "the majority of the million plus Syrian refugees are on welfare and many will never work." Which is absolutely not true.
I was using slightly older figures.
https://www.dw.com/en/germany-half-of-refugees-find-jobs-within-five-years/a-52251414?fbclid=IwY2xjawMmVKJleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFaRnBFbkZXcnhodXd1bEpmAR7jSsiAss0-S9CbmOQZjcnSmYLHWhDqQfxqMVi2zsR7mkwJGXcgSHgiSu1R3w_aem_n-VDidion-8epx7Q0kR9aQ
https://www.euractiv.com/section/politics/short_news/most-syrian-adult-refugees-in-germany-depend-on-social-welfare/
Immigration restrictionists tend to not be concerned with what’s true - it’s all vibes to them.
Why be like this, feel free to engage in the actual substantive discussion.
As an immigrant to the UK, I’m not interested in what a British immigration restrictionist has to say.
An unwillingness to understand your opponent will likely lead to your loss.
Well, I’ll give them the credit of taking them seriously: they have different values and a distinct decision matrix.
Remember “fuck business”? That’s genuine for many. If they’re willing to pay the cost for a principled stand, then I do respect that.
The problem, for me, is the magical thinking. Like how people have been claiming for two generations that supply-reside economics is real and tax cuts pay for themselves. They do not. But maybe, instead, you could be honest like some anti-tax warriors and say, “I don’t care if the tax cuts don’t pay for themselves—so want the government to have less money or even to collapse.” That’s honest.
And if the honest truth is that people don’t like having immigrants around and want the United States to become the ethno-state it never was, challenges be damned—then, cool. I very much disagree with you, but I do respect people who make clear-eyed value judgements.
Do you think it's unreasonable for any restrictions to be put on immigration to the UK at all?
You might think that the low LFP rate of refugee women would be popular among people with conservative social views, given the statistics Matt cites, but only if you were overly credulous.
Conservatives are confused about what they actually want when it comes to women.
There’s a disturbing parallel to be drawn between fundamentalist (and specifically Wahhabist) Islam and Evangelical Christianity or Ultra-Orthodox Judaism. But don’t tell them that! Because here was have The Narcissism of Small Differences where your enemy is basically a mirror image of you, “but not like that!” When you hear what the (far-right, Neo-Nazi) “Swedish Democrats” want in terms of pushing back against feminists and re-imposing “traditional values,” it sure sounds a lot like the Taliban, though. And though not all of MAGA is focused on social conservatism or the Manosphere, there’s a distinct plurality of it who would ironically love to have a harem of sister-wives.
So to resolve this dilemma of hating the Islamists but also wanting to be Christian Islamists themselves, they resort to tortured and often cynical narratives about “defending our women against misogyny,” even when they are espousing misogyny right out of the other side of their mouth. I’ve even heard some very unconvincing defense of abortion and using anti-abortion beliefs among refugees or minorities as a cudgel to beat them with. (But also they think abortion is a problem). Misogyny is only bad when “they” do it, you see.
Ditto with sexual assault or rape: One moment the same national conservative is breathlessly defending their ideologically-favored local sex-offender and condemning the harpies out to get him. Or they’re even doing the incel thing and telling women it’s not their right to withhold sex from perfectly suitable (if under-sexed) patriots like themselves. But, yeah, when the immigrants get their slimy fingers on “our women,” we suddenly hear them sounding like they’re at a Take Back The night Rally.
Some of this is just cynicism, but I think a lot of it is a failure to reconcile that their whole worldview is centered around objectifying and controlling women—and not letting other men who aren’t like them do the same. The “females” are a resource to be jealously guarded.
And things get even more warped when it comes to the “trad wife” influencers or far-right girlies who are talking all day about how they want to be subservient to men and spend all their time minding the home… except that they have a full-time career in politics or media and often don’t even have kids or a husband. It’s cosplay!
Comparing the Swedish Democrats to the Taliban just damages your argument.
And more generally so does saying conservatives favor sexual assault.
Fine. I’m being provocative.
They’re actually more like the Muslim Brotherhood.
But the actual position of conservative voters in the US and Europe is not Christian Wahhabism, but that immigration should be more tightly restricted. At least in the US, there is no confusion here because Republican working age men do often have working wives. This is not only different from what the Taliban think society should do, it is pretty broadly compatible with postwar liberal thought as it actually existed up until a decade ago.
John Rawls often assumed republics with borders in most of his thought, because why wouldn't he?[1] That's what a 1970s liberal political theorist would assume. George McGovern was more of an immigration hawk than I am and thus opposed the settling of Vietnamese refugees in the United States.[2] He was candidate of bleeding heart liberals in the 1972 landslide for Nixon. Many old school Republicans believed Barack Obama poison-pilled immigration legislation in 2007 after Lindsey Graham begged him not to, though the specific motives of legislative maneuvers are contested and hard to pin down.[3] At any rate, we know as recently as 2007, there were still some immigration hawks in the Dem caucus.
The detours into the psychological are amusing, but they lead to historical illiteracy. There is basically no evidence conservatives in the US have gained views radically out of step with the ones they held twenty years ago if you survey the data as thoroughly as George Hawley has.[4] My guess is Yglesias is telling the truth about former CSU voters who approved of 90s German conservative governance. The radicalization on the immigration issue is far more of a liberal voter story. Unfortunately, this latest post by Yglesias once again focuses on the conservative side of opinion instead, when the evolution of immigration views on the left side of the aisle is the far more curious story.
EDITED: For clarity.
[1] https://thepointmag.com/politics/stretching-the-veil/
[2] see final paragraph: https://www.commentary.org/articles/charles-horner/america-five-years-after-defeat/
[3] https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/140915-gop-blames-obama-for-failure-of-last-senate-push-on-immigration/
[4] book review: https://fusionaier.org/2025/getting-the-right-right/
This confusion tracks with broader trends among those opposing immigration in Europe. In the anti-immigration riots in the UK last summer, ostensibly protesting violence against women and children by immigrants, it was found that 41% of those arrested had been reported for domestic abuse.
It appears that for many of the most aggressive supporters of immigration restrictions, protecting women is only a pretext for anti-immigration sentiment rather than a firmly held value.
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/jul/26/two-in-five-arrested-for-last-summers-uk-riots-had-been-reported-for-domestic-abuse
I find it hard to believe that German social insurance policies cannot be reformed in such a way that all but a tiny minority of Syrian refugees _will_ work.
But whatever, that is irrelevant to US illegal immigration.
According to the economist, two thirds of the 2015 immigrant wave are employed, which isn’t far off the native-born population. Where do you get your numbers from?
"The employment rate of refugees has also increased significantly over time. On average, 32% of all Syrian refugees who moved to Germany from the beginning of 2013 to 2018 were employed as of the second half of 2018.
Among employed Syrian refugees, 63% worked full-time or part-time; 19% were in paid training; and 18% were marginally employed in the second half of 2018."
https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2021/02/10/syrian-refugees-in-the-german-labor-market/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
That’s old data. 2025 data are different: https://www.ainvest.com/news/syrian-immigrants-catalyst-germany-labor-market-long-term-economic-growth-2508/
I think also there needs to be some sort of way of saying “yes it’s healthy to be skeptical of experts. But experts are experts are experts for a reason and it’s because they’ve intensely studied a topic”.
In a way this post is kind of a credit to politicians (at least in Europe given this focus of this post). Yes the median MP support for immigration is in part class bias; the benefits of high skilled immigration are more acutely felt by people in middle and higher classes for example. But I’m sure it’s also because the median MP is aware that giving in to the far right demands to close borders carries a lot of negative long term consequences. I’m sure in private some MP is like “how many of you are going to like it in 5 years time when we have to massively cut down on pensions because we don’t have enough working age labor and can no longer fund pension costs through tax revenue or borrowing?”
The thing is our expert class got very ideological and the public noticed it. That 2020 BLM protest open letter is the gift that keeps on giving for the Right.
Who are we talking about? It’s easy to make sweeping statements about a whole group of potentially millions of people when it has narrative utility. (I’m guilty of that in my own comments here—I know!)
But things get really problematic when we talk about “experts.” How do you define that group? Are they coordinated? What’s the governance structure when “they” all decide to do something outrageous?
In many cases, we cherry pick one “Progressive” or a smaller group of people who got carried away and extrapolate to the entire Democratic-coded half of the American population of 340 million people. Or the opposite, attributing everything any MAGa-adjacent nut to anyone who ever voted Republican. This “those people” logic is useful if you’re condemning them, but it’s a trap to let yourself get defined by it.
The thing is if you are smart enough to be an expert at something you should be smart enough to NEVER whore your expertise out for your ideology.
But we have a whole class of academics and scientists who think the purpose of their endeavors is to force the public to enact left wing social change, and the public quite reasonably responds to that by thinking they are a bunch of dishonest ideologues.
*Should* sure. But here are just a few examples of Conservative experts doing just that culled from the news this week:
1/ RFK, Jr. be-clowning himself by opining on everything public health, vaccines, etc. that he has zero academic or professional background in. A Kennedy!
2/ The Surgeon General of Florida, Joseph Ladapo, a *very* well-educated doctor and Nigerian-American immigrant success story who has been going WAY outside his lane (to embarrassing effect) since COVID. Thanks to the good doctor, we're about to have a whole generation of wholly preventable outbreaks in Florida's schools and beyond.
3/ Elon Musk says so much dumb shit publicly it's a whole industry trying to figure out when he's serious or just shitposting. A lot of his critics square this dual-personality of the genius and the child by discarding the whole man and dismissing any intellect or talent he may have been credited for in his actual domains of expertise. But I think it's just another example of being so smart and successful and rich that you overestimate your own ability everywhere else, especially when you've surrounded yourself with yes-men. In any case, I wish he would reign it in: He's so much much better at EVs, batteries, and rockets than he is at public policy or anything else (including social media and AI) and America does need him for the former.
I frankly cannot fathom how these three men could become so foolish before my very eyes. Add to their number people like the late Ben Carson, perhaps the most lauded neurosurgeon of his age, who thought the Egyptian pyramids were granaries "because the Bible said so" and other kooky stuff like that that had far more impact on American policy. Wouldn't he have been much better still pushing innovation in brain surgery rather than being a Conservative Culture Warrior, the irrelevant Secretary of HUD, and sometime mediocre media personality?
Intelligent people often lack intellectual humility and they over-estimate their ability to lean right over into another area and be the smartest guy in the room. Behind many of these stories you see other psychological causes as well: childhood trauma, elite-outsider insecurity, professional and personal setbacks that require vainglorious contrarianism to preserve the ego, etc.
But one factor that unites all? The extremely perverse incentive structure of our society that now makes ideological grifting a viable career play. Why be a merely-very-successful UCLA medical professor when you can catch the eye of Governor DeSantis and become the Florida Surgeon General by saying wild shit! If you're a striver in America today, it's no longer good enough to just be wealthy or esteemed in your field. You must be FAMOUS! And LOVED by your fans! You must be the HERO of your own story! If that means you are rejected by your colleagues, family, and friends, so be it. They never fully appreciated you, anyway! Your new fans love you with an intensity that fills that existential hole that you quietly nursed the years before.
Frankly, I think there's a lot of that going on behind the left-liberal "woke" self-righteousness, too. We have similar stories of well-educated, conventionally-successful people for whom that's not enough. They need to be MORE. Even more commonly, they're the kind of "surplus elites" who did all the right things and don't have the trappings of conventional success they were sold, and they feel entitled and wounded and ANGRY. They tell themselves that their righteous fury is on behalf of the oppressed. But they are the real oppressed. And surfing the next wave of whatever arouses maximum enthusiasm is a great way to feel vindicated.
There are many more liberal and lefty experts than conservative ones, which makes this more of a problem for our side.
Unfortunately this is very true. I read the Dispatch to keep myself honest and that damn letter comes up constantly - and I think the people there are 95% operating in good faith! (Doesnt mean I think the argument is all that good)
How many actual voters remember that?
A lot of them I think. It REALLY enflamed a lot of people.
It was super dumb, but I think we overestimate voters’ memories
The vast majority of signers of the open letter were less part of the "expert class" than low level dingbats loosely attached to the healthcare system. Yes, there were some on the list who should have known better, but by far the biggest group was comprised of the kind of idiots you'd expect.
I don't think it's purely, "In this house we follow Econ 101" There are plenty of anti-economic and even anti-science positions EU MP's follow- anti-GMO regulations anyone?
It's a class based adherence to cosmopolitanism that isn't shared by many voters. Evidence that contradicts the pro-immigration stance is inherently given more scrutiny than the more amenable info.
The anti-GMO stuff and the anti-nuclear stuff is just EU MPs responding to what their constituents want. And that's something that I don't see taken very seriously in political critiques, especially from outside. If you're a politician, you are elected to represent your constituents, including all their stupid beliefs. If you don't, you don't get elected. It's that simple. How to square this with the point that Matt is making in this essay about MPs being oftentimes out-of-sync with their publics? See the third paragraph for the explanation.
But first, let's bring this idea home: I get it that Trump clearly isn't naturally anti-abortion, but felt compelled to lean hard into that anyway because of the large Pro Life leg of the GOP's Conservative stool. He probably thinks they're dumb, but he needs their votes. Most Americans, in fact, think the Pro Life position that's being implemented in states like Florida is dumb and wrong. So why doesn't Trump adopt that majority "yes-abortion-but-less" position? Because the majority of Americans didn't elect Trump. Only 76 million of them did. And they were the *right* 76 million, located in the right districts in the right states at the right time. That's what he needed. And Trump wouldn't have been elected without them and he knows it.
European MPs are also even more beholden to the outlier fringe of their constituency for similar and important structural reason: almost nobody votes for the EU Parliament election. So, it's a lot like American primaries or off-cycle special elections: the insiders and high-propensity voters have the most sway. And their beliefs are to the right or left of the general electorate, respectively.
Even when it comes to national governments, the national MPs can be reacting to the same incentive-structure. In a low-turnout election where the public isn't following the actual position of the candidates much, the zealots hold more sway. They're the marginal voter. Center-left and center-right voters are "meh" about politics but the far-right CARES A LOT. They are building their entire personality around this stuff, the same way MAGA voters are. So even if they're the 20-30% minority, they lead the herd.
Matt focused on immigration but the mix of unrepresented values is more than just immigration, so maybe it is possible to “take a dive” on “gender is biology” and “tough on crime” and then just be more tough on “no *illegal* immigration” and “we have to fix the system” than going all the way right on shutting the border.
I think upstream of that, it is absolutely critical that we fix housing supply. Because during Biden people saw house prices surging, and a giant wave of illegal immigration at the same time, and the result was migrant refugee camps. I think that’s why the backlash was so intense.
I don't think "shut the border" is a majority position at least not in America. Probably not even amongst republicans.
Eliminate illegal immigration is definitely a majority position. And make sure that people coming in share western values and assimilate is also a majority position.
There's a lot of disagreement among Western white people what are "western values."
“Fixing housing” requires contending with some serious dilemmas: housing as investment vs. housing as social good.
How to square that circle when such a majority of middle class Americans use housing as their primary source of wealth building?
Lowering housing prices should allow Americans to put a substantially larger share of their income into capital markets--which is how they *should* be wealth building--though I don't have a clever answer as to how we get there as a society.
The "no one wants to work" was clearly tied to "because the government is paying people to do nothing, so of course no one wants to work."
"Give the voters what they want*" has the obvious asterisk of "sometimes what the voters want is very stupid." You are trying to frame any restriction of immigration as very stupid, but other very stupid things the public wants are
- unlimited government services combined with no debt and low taxes
- very good social safety net that never discourages work
- super low interest rates with no inflation
- print money like mad with no inflation
- huge tariffs on everything to "bring jobs home" without any industrial policy to make sure business can plan for it
If it's important to keep the public stupidity in check -- and it is -- then you need to constantly be listening to what the public wants. If immigration is essential to a country's long-term survival, then you need to make sure the public doesn't turn away from it. If you want the country to not enact insane protectionist policies, then you need to offer some moderate protectionist policies. And in places where what the people want doesn't genuinely ruin the country, you need to just give the public what they want on cultural issues, so you can spend your political capital where it's needed.
Some policies can shatter in unfixable ways if they're done too wrong. A year or two of too many or too few abortions, whatever the single-issue voters on the topic say, won't break the country. Too high or too low speed limits won't matter. You can fix those things and be done.
Other policies have patterns of breaking if things going too far, and it's often not symmetrical.
Too few immigrants for a few years can cause problems, but it's easy to remedy by loosening the restictions. Too many immigrants can be unfixable, as deporting people is very expensive, or requires fascist policies to undo. Firing the head of BLS too slowly isn't going to be break things. Firing them too fast blows up trust in the government in a way that will take a generation to fix. Too much crime can lead to a tipping point that is hard to recover from while too little crime is easier to undo. Undoing basic vaccine requirements so that measles returns can be something that takes 50 years to fix.
Where did I say anywhere that restricting immigration is stupid?
There are, as you say, many stupid things that a majority of people want. However, people are smarter about tradeoffs when you make them clearer.
Unlimited government services? Sure! Pay 25% VAT and 40% income tax! No? Alright, let’s talk about what you actually want to pay for, then…
Everything you listed as “stupid” *could* be smart *in certain contexts* with a lot of caveats. The stupid thing about what goes for political debate now is false-binaries and a lack of nuance.
I can also make the smart argument for tariffs. Probably not “huge” and “on everything,” but there’s definitely a steelman argument for their selective and strategic use.
So let’s make that argument! Tell us when they make sense and don’t. This is too much to ask right now, though. So we get GO BIG ON TARIFFS FOR EVERYTHING or NO TARIFFS EVER AND ONLY FREE TRADE BROS!!!!
Ditto with immigration. You’ve assumed I’m against restrictions on immigration. I’m not. I’m against “no immigration fixes everything.” I’m for, “Decide why we want immigration and for what outcomes and optimize for that.”
> Where did I say anywhere that restricting immigration is stupid?
Does the average voter also want more expensive healthcare and longer wait times? How about food-price inflation? Maybe they'd be less happy if their local elementary school closed? Remember when everyone was freaking out that "nobody wants to work anymore?" Y'all ain't seen nothin yet!
These effects and immigration only seem unrelated because people still aren't contending with the fact that the *only* reason that populations haven't been in free-fall across the Western world for years now is immigration.
Let me be more clear in countering your point: where did I say that *any* restrictions on immigration is stupid?
Immigration is something that we need. Unlimited immigration isn’t desirable. Both truths exist simultaneously.
I’m arguing for an *optimal* immigration, both in volume and type. But that’s hard to achieve, obviously, like any other form of social engineering. The immigrants themselves, get a vote, for one thing. So you can’t just press the “More of The Good Immigrants I Want, Only” Button. The rocket scientists and oncologists might not want to come and only the economic migrants or people from war torn countries are eager! So you end up with more of the latter than the former.
And you have unintended consequences or necessary tradeoffs to any policy, restricting or opening. Restricting “chain migration” as policy also means that people like my Swedish wife can’t easily import her non-Swedish husband to Sweden. Or that I can’t bring my mother to live with me if she’ll ill or infirm. Many people—even skeptics of immigration—would say that’s bad. But how do you open the door for me without also opening the door for the whole extended family of Afghan refugees who you might want less? The devil is in the details.
Also, illegal immigration is a thing that is nearly impossible to stop. You can reduce it, sure. But even North Korea can’t keep everyone in. And European countries and the United States have tried like hell to prevent people from sneaking over borders, to little effect.
So, what we end up with is a series of semi-effective but not perfect policy tools to try and effectuate the immigration outcome you want. Nobody is overjoyed with the results. Unintended events (like the Syrian Civil War or COVID) completely muck up whatever you do design, forcing you back to the drawing table. And it’s just a continual process of *management* instead of a “solution.” But that’s life! I’m advocating for people to be adults and face that reality and the dilemmas involved in trying to manage it. That’s all.
"Also, illegal immigration is a thing that is nearly impossible to stop."
Agreed, but we can surely slow it to a trickle.
Also things like e-verify would help.
Too little crime?
It's a policy choice and you can have overzealous police where the proper course of action is to just relax and allow more.
the ideal amount of fraud is non-zero https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fraud/
In the real world, perhaps. But there’s no normative such thing as “too little crime.” Assuming you got rid of bad laws and ceteris paribus (that is, assuming you didn’t get to “no crime” by crazy police brutality or isolating every human in solitary, etc.), less crime is always better.
A++ this exactly, people magically want low immigration levels AND cheap produce and plentiful construction/nursing home workers.
humanoid robots to the rescue !
WALL-EEEEEE…
I demand to afford labor-intensive personal services that are provided by my socioeconomic peers!
I'm sort of skeptical that immigration as a solution to population decline will become a popular viewpoint anytime soon. Matt's One Billion Americans isn't terribly popular on the right or left.
On the left plenty of people see a declining population as a good thing. Some of this is for environmental reasons. On the right people are more concerned with their share of the overall population than absolute numbers. An increasing population that was increasingly foreign would be considered a loss.
Of course immigration isn't a long term solution to population decline because global birth rates are or will soon be below replacement, but that's a little out of scope of this discussion.
Plenty on the right see population decline as good, too. Malthusian instincts know no partisan divide
"Of course immigration isn't a long term solution to population decline because global birth rates are or will soon be below replacement,"
this
Sadly politics tends to be about not telling people the truth about trade-offs or consequences. Look at France for Pete's sake. Lol
Agreed the lack of fertility in developed countries is a real problem. But immigration is at best only a temporary band aid that doesn't address the real problem, and can cause more problems than it fixes. This is doubly true in European countries where the immigrants don't seem to assimilate well.
Couple things to consider.
1. Fertility rates are dropping world wide, so while it's possible to prop up developed countries populations through immigration NOW, that won't last long term, because in a couple of decades there won't be excess people in those other countries either.
2. Who is immigrating, and how well do they assimilate. If the people immigrating don't hold traditional western values and/or are not willing to adopt them, then what happens to Western society and values like equality for women, free speech, sexual freedom etc.
A the end of the day a culture that can't sustain itself by at least keeping a stable population is a failed culture. And that culture will be replaced by a different culture that can reproduce itself.
So the question is can Western cultures with liberal values such as equality for women reproduce itself?
If the answer is no, it will be replaced by different cultures that don't respect women.
>>But maybe we'll all learn fast because the US population has just shrank for the first time in its history.<<
The US grew at the slowest pace in its history in the 2010s (yes, that's accounting for immigration, and yes, that's even slower than during the 1930s). The aughts similarly saw a massive slowdown in population growth from the 1990s (2000-2009 ended up being the second slowest decade in history at that time). Oh, and we're on pace in the 2020s to easily beat the 2010s. If that holds true, then three of the four slowest population growth decades in US history will have occurred since the year 2000. To be sure, there's a bit of an air of inevitability in all this: every time countries get rich, women and their partners opt for smaller families. But still, the trend is powerful enough to not need an assist from draconian immigration restrictionism.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_United_States
Turns out America isn't immune from the powerful demographic forces affecting other rich countries!
People who erroneously tout the great "benefits" that will flow from a reduction in our hitherto supposedly "massive" rate of population growth are very badly misinformed. In fact, what immigration has been doing is helping us avoid going from mere demographic "decline" to full-on South Korean-style demographic "collapse."
Also, a higher rate of population growth used to be one of America's advantages in the competition with its principal geopolitical rival. "Hey, at least we're not shrinking like the Chi-Coms!" Well, that's yet ANOTHER national strength being destroyed by MAGA.
I think, like you say, it’s a demographic super trend that was inevitable, and unfair to blame on any single policymaker—including Trump.
Only China did a massive self-own demographically with the One Child Policy. And that was down to one man: Mao.
Everyone else is dealing with the same problem at a slower speed. I think there are likely good policies that work to some degree to slow the rate of decline or offset it somewhat or else just adapt. Even if it doesn’t get you back to replacement rate, increasing the birth rate just by fractions of a percent gives you vital time to adapt, keeps economic vitality for longer, and blunts the negative effects.
But the secular trend is there nonetheless.
I mostly agree with that, but I'll concur with others here that it will take a while for the immigration crackdown to filter down to the economy and voters won't necessarily connect the dots.
I agree they won't like the results though.
Where MPs thinking of the tradeoffs during the Boris Wave when 1 million immigrants came per year?
There are likely few people here that are more pro immigration than I am, but I think you are missing a key point. Asylum claims and illegal immigration are the worst possible way to way to get the public on board with more immigration. Orderly, selected immigration is very possible.
Speaking of trade offs, something that really stood out to me was the success that Texas Governor Abbott had in making Democratic politicians eat their words with his campaign of bussing immigrants from the border to sanctuary cities. It was low cost for the politicians in these places to say they were pro asylum seekers so long as those seekers were not coming to their town and creating significant costs for local governments. Once they faced the trades offs involved, you saw many of them backtrack quickly.
Here's the way I see it.
1. It is true that quite a lot of voters feel animus toward immigrants once there are enough of them about.
2. However, it is also true that a clear majority of voters are to the left of, say, Stephen Miller on this issue.
3. Restrictionist policy is bad for the country and bad for the economy. And in the long run it doesn't do you any favors politically to run a bad economy. People will sour on you for that, even if they're unable to trace it back to restrictionism or any other underlying policy.
4. But because people can't trace back that line, there is no way to tell them straight out that they need to accept more immigrants for their own good, like eating their vegetables.
5. Instead, what needs to be done is essentially that you *negotiate* with the voters. You try to meet them halfway on the immigration numbers, and you enact targeted immigration policies that are least likely to cause backlash. You push the numbers up as much as you can while remaining politically viable, but you don't go further. And most of all, you focus on doing everything you can to run good macroeconomic policy overall, so that people don't have as few grievances as possible to blame immigrants for.
I don’t want to play devil’s advocate too hard because I think you’re generally right, but it’s possible that native birth rates would rebound and help fill these jobs.
I don’t think that’s likely though because birth rates are declining everywhere around the world. If anything in a few decades we might be lamenting the .8 birth rates in Haiti or Guatemala because there are no longer immigrants to pick fruit or DoorDash for us.
"If mainstream parties won’t give it to them, they vote for extreme parties."
"If all the elites who favor democratic institutions also refuse to supply the policy options on immigration and crime that the voters want, then voters will ultimately get those policies from more sinister types."
"If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened."
The Frum conditional, theme and variations.
I was surprised not to see a more express acknowledgement in the post of Frum's statement.
Substack needs better formatting of quotes
I have a very specific memory of working my tutoring job at UConn in 2013 or so and there being chatter in the group of us working about immigration. I was and am a pretty liberal guy. But among those to my left (which was a lot of my peers) they were already arguing for decriminalizing border crossings, and when I started the pretty banal "countries have a right to enforce their borders and manage immigration in ways that they feel is beneficial to them" I got the "migration is a human right" schtick with a side of "and this is true because climate change/imperialism/instability in the third world is our fault".
I think a part of why Bernie 2016 was popular was yes, he was a progressive outsider, but he was also genuinely anti-immigration and pro-gun for most of his political life in ways that read as authentic among those who were genuinely anti-immigration and pro-gun. Who among the current prospective democratic bench can communicate that view authentically today? No one really comes to mind.
>I got the "migration is a human right" schtick
I don't think this can be dismissed simply as "schtick." If I am born in El Paso, I get all the benefits of US citizenship. Someone born 1/4 mile away in Cuidad Juarez gets none. It is hardly obvious why that is just.
Because nations are sovereign over specific geographic areas
That doesn't explain why it is just.
Yes it does. Justice cannot be abstracted away from the use of force and the current model of a just society is based around a state which has a monopoly on the use of force on the territory over which it is sovereign. We can't pretend that eroding sovereignty doesn't risk the erosion of practical provision of justice. As someone mentioned below, the citizens of Cd Juarez have the benefits of Mexican citizenship which Americans do not have.
What then is the gap in justice? Differences in rights afforded to Mexicans vs Americans? Economic opportunities? Restitutions for past injustices perpetrated on Mexico by the United States? I think there are valid arguments to be made on all of those fronts that justice would demand actions from the US. But none of them require necessarily that borders be abolished and sovereignty abjured.
>But none of them require necessarily that borders be abolished and sovereignty abjured.
No one said otherwise.
This is another way of saying nation states supersede individual rights which is very anti-liberal and a rejection of the core founding principle of the United States.
Incredible reasoning
Thank you, but it's rather basic really. You responded to gdanning's hypothetical by asserting that nation states are sovereign over a geographic area implying this takes precedence over an individual's right to travel and live where they choose. Championing individual rights and civil liberties is the definitional basis of liberalism so it's fair to say your claim stands in contrast to liberal ideals.
The founding document of the United States is about as explicitly pro-liberal as it gets: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights..." It goes on to say that the people have the right to abolish and institute a new government should the preceding state fail to guarantee those rights (which makes sense considering that's literally what they're doing by revolting against British rule). What you're expressing is something more akin to Thomas Hobbes's social contract theory.
Yes. I really encourage people to read the article I posted previously. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=291661
He explicitly addresses the issue of nation states supersede individual rights. He might be wrong, but his arguments can't simply be waved away.
How so, THE founding document of our nation asserts that Rights are inalienable, they exist whether there is or isn't a nation state to enforce them, and they exist in the face of a nation state actively abridging them.
Aren’t nation states, at least in democratic countries, standing in for the individual rights of millions?
Not when they're prioritizing social cohesion over individual autonomy.
Borders are abitrary yes, but they matter, and they have always mattered. Heck, borders matter amongst wolves and chimps!
This seems to be a claim that they are natural. But natural != just. Ethnicentricity and other types of outgroup bias seem to be natural, but that doesn’t make them just.
Natural or not, they are a necessity. Any governance structure must have demarcation of its authority. That can be geographical but it can also be defined in terms of populations, or both. In that sense, legal residency is a type of border. The only system that matches your ideals would be a single world government. Good luck in achieving that.
But, a necessity for what, exactly? And "borders" can have many dimensions. It isn't necessarily all or nothing. Eg the Trump Administration has ended all visas for Palestinians, including for medical treatment for kids. That is a hardening of the border. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/31/world/middleeast/us-palestinian-visa-suspensions.html
It's just to be able to decide who can or cannot come into your country.
I mean, there are people still alive who remember when the Mexican/US border especially in rural areas basically didn't exist for all purposes.
What do you mean the resident of Ciudad Juarez gets none? She gets the benefits of Mexican citizenship, which the El Paso resident doesn’t get.
I meant none of the benefits of US citizenship, obviously.
>She gets the benefits of Mexican citizenship, which the El Paso resident doesn’t get.
Right. I get awesome benefits, and she gets crap benefits. That is my point.
It is not just, but correcting that injustice would require an unimaginable amount of disruption and a level of coordination (and/or coercion) for which we lack the capability or desire.
Open borders is a mirage and its intractability makes it a damaging distraction.
Well, "we lack the desire to correct an injustice" is hardly a legitimate reason for not doing so.
As for lack of capability, perhaps we can't correct 100% of the injustice, but what about 80%? Or 50%?
I mean, is it "an injustice not to spend the entire US welfare state budget on helping poor people in Africa because they are so much poorer than people in the US"? Is it not possible because *we lack the desire to correct an injustice*? If it wouldn't solve poverty in Africa, would it at least solve 80%? Or 50%?
At some point one becomes so detached from the reality of what a sovereign, democratically-accountable state can accomplish. Sure the US could "correct" merely 5% of the "injustice" of non-US-citizenship by just opening the doors to 390 million people tomorrow. How would voters react, and what kind of politicians would they be drawn to in the aftermath of this? How would state governments (in places like, say, Texas) react? Would the world be better off? Maybe a bit more justice though?
Yes, considering all those factors could go a long way towards answering my question. Perhaps the status quo is the most just of numerous bad options. But, perhaps not.
My point is merely that the default position is simply to assume that the status quo is just.
I also do not like this and think we should try really hard to help other countries improve but allowing illegal immigration is clearly not the right solution. Again, see where this has gotten us in both the US and Europe.
and Juarez and El Paso had relatively seamless back and forth all the way up until the border was hardened after 9/11.
I agree, the United States should invade Jaurez and put it under American control.
Imagine the Jack Nicholson smiling and nodding animated GIF here, but, instead of Jack Nicholson, it's William Walker.
I know you are trolling, but there is nothing inherently wrong with that, IMHO. Though of course that would just create a new border, replicating the original problem.
An outrageous position.
The world used to be primarily organized into empires, where bloody conflict over territory was a regular part of life and domination by a foreign ruler was commonplace.
We replaced that system with a world divided into sovereign states built on the principle of self determination. There are problems with this system too, ethnic and national conflicts, borders, etc. But overall a liberal order built on the sovereignty of states within their boundaries has produced a more stable world than the world of empires did.
This order is worth protecting. We are already seeing a breakdown in this order in Ukraine with the invasion of Russia. Advocating for similar attitudes by the US, previously the fiercest defender of this liberal order, is a disaster.
And yet surely there are some limits to the sanctity of state sovereignty. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=291661
Remember: the primary beneficiaries of the principles you espoused are each state's elites, not the common folk.
And you are overstaying the relative degree of stability of the two systems. Empires can be quite stable, and the principle of self-determination (which again benefits local elites) has led to a great deal of conflict, including genocide and other types of mass atrocities.
The ability to be secure that your city would not be invaded by a foreign military is a benefit of common people, not just the elite.
And yes the world is much more stable now than 120 years ago. The transition from empire to states was conflict ridden and bloody, but states have endured and created a more peaceful and prosperous world order than empire did.
And the reason countries provide benefits to their citizens is because they view themselves as a community that they trust and have social solidarity with. That’s especially how democracies work. A nation where anyone is welcome to come in, claim citizenship and receive benefits is much less likely to provide benefits for its citizens. And an empire generally views territory it acquires as a way to extract value for its own people rather than for the benefit of the conquered.
"There's nothing inherently wrong with using government force/guns to seize territory from a sovereign nation" is NOT a sentiment I expected to see in the SB comment section, yet here we are!
We will be greeted as liberators!
😵💫
Note my use of the term, "inherently." If the outcome is better lives for the actual human beings living there, then on balance it might be perfectly fine. Possible example: women in Afghanistan 2001-2021.
It seems like a bad thing for the US to use military force to change its borders.
Not if it leads to better outcomes for the actual human beings involved, which it might.
Even in a best-case scenario in which the US is able to seize Juarez with relatively little fighting and this is popular with the people of Juarez, there would be significant harmful second and third order effects.
-The US would lose international credibility and face sanctions and expulsion for international organizations.
-Mexico would spend more on its military and militarize its northern border to prevent another invasion.
-Other countries would militarize due to fear of a grabby USA: Canada, Bahamas, Greenland (Denmark).
-Countries near the US might form defensive alliances against the US or align with nations like China and Russia.
-USMCA collapses.
-Mexico and Canada might build nuclear weapons.
Who decides if those outcomes are 'better', and with what metric (which is universally agreed upon by both sides)?
Mic drop.
Totally agree with your point re: Bernie and am frustrated it’s under-understood on the left.
I became politically conscious around the time Bernie launched his 2016 campaign, and his A rating from the NRA was a feature for me, not a bug. I was more pro-immigration that he was at the time, but it’s not a stretch at all to think that the reason he cleaned up vs. Clinton in West Virginia, etc. was because of his immigration-skepticism, pro-gun stances, and general respect for rural/conservative-coded “vibes.”
What was most frustrating though was when Bernie 2020 supporters continually told me he’d “never changed his mind on anything/has had consistent views through his entire career” despite the swing to the left to try and lock up the most progressive wing of the party.
Are you still in touch with any of those peers and if so, have they reflected on how US immigration policy and politics more generally has been adopted since the type of views you describe rose to prominence?
These views have always been prominent, I saw them a lot in my college days. Most importantly, they are correct and anyone applying the veil of ignorance concept would agree, just impractical to implement due to still being a minority view. What is the point, people with those views should shut up even in private because there might be electoral backlash? That’s creating a stifling air of self-censorship. MAGA (and gay marriage) shows that you can mainstream unpopular ideas over the long run and censorship/self-censorship just keeps you outside the Overton window. Politicians shouldn’t run on it, but it’s good for study groups to talk about it and try to convert more people to it.
The one who does is going to be the next President of the United States.
Gallego
Didn’t the US basically have open borders for a long time though? I am thinking up through say 1900. Waves of immigrants. Obviously not without conflict, but it worked out—probably because there was plenty of space for them to just go west. Today, this doesn’t work because there’s not enough low hanging fruit.
The US has never had open borders. There has never been a period of time where the immigration policy was “you can enter the United States and settle no questions asked”. Even in the ellis Island period there were severe limits to Chinese immigration.
There have been periods of harder and easier immigration, absolutely. But there's always been a legal process and violating that legal process always subjected one to explusion from the country.
I'm not saying this as someone who is anti-immigration! I am very pro-immigratkon. I just think if you are pro immigration you can't play dumb about the need for a legal immigration process, and charging headlong against concepts like borders and national sovereignty is counter productive.
"reducing the volume of immigration"
Am I correct that most voters on the left don't want increased legal immigration? As in if we decide 700,000 immigrants a year is ideal then we have a system of application and 700,000 arrive with their visas and the government aggressively deports anyone here without authorization. What they want is our current immigration system and very weak enforcement .
I say this because I see a ton or anti-enforcement rhetoric and no talk of dramatically increasing legal immigration numbers.
There was a huge strain on the left, most predominately represented by Bernie Sanders, that saw increased immigration as a corporatist plot to undermine blue collar workers. But then woke happened, immigration enforcement became right-wing coded and democrats lost any credibility on the issue.
A more charitable explanation of what happened is through education polarization Democrats authentically came to have a more positive view of immigration (both culturally and economically).
And Bernie is wrong on the economics of immigration enforcement, but being wrong here is convenient because it allows you to favor more enforcement without wading into the cultural questions.
Also to be clear, I’m quite in line with the more woke position on immigration and think the pre-2016 Bernie position is not backed by any good evidence. But as this article points out, some parts of the general public are not!
"...quite in line with the more woke position...."
To show your Weberian cred on this blog you have to indicate that your ethics of responsibility comes at an actual cost to your ethics of conviction. If you don't even have the opposing inclination, how can we be sure that you are really motivated by duty?
A less charitable explanation would be that the party's positions reflect those of the PMC and upper middle class, who like immigration (even illegal immigration to an extent) because the downsides aren't their problem and the upsides are cheaper housekeepers and more construction workers.
In the United States the downsides aren't that significant... it's just that uneducated people think food comes from the store, electricity from the wall, etc...
The educated believe food comes from poor immigrants working under the table in conditions they themselves would never accept. This is true, but it's always struck me as odd that it's considered the liberal position.
I dunno that it's the liberal position; it is the realist position and in exchange their kids get to be lazy useless Americans like the rest of us. Progressives would be horrified if they acknowledge it.
Blue-collar workers have a better understanding of how things are made.
This is a very romantic view that does not fit my experience hanging around blue collar workers.
I expect that ultimately the economic outcomes are better on net with lots of immigration than without, but I don't think this is an obvious slam-dunk. In particular, there are whole kinds of work that, in my youth, were done by people born in the US, and now are like 90%+ people born outside the US. It's not hard to see why a guy who is competing with a lot of (maybe legal, maybe not) immigrants for jobs hanging drywall feels more of a pinch than a guy who's in a job unlikely to be challenged by (at least) low-skill immigrants.
"In the United States the downsides aren't that significant"
Americans disagree.
The economic downsides are very slight if they exist at all. The "PMC" just has the correct view on this. https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2017/6/23/15855342/immigrants-wages-trump-economics-mariel-boatlift-hispanic-cuban
Whether you consider an increase in immigration to have cultural problems is not really something that can be resolved by any evidence so is not worth debating. But clearly liberals need to tack right because people do not like having more immigrants.
What happens when all of the illegal immigrants are legalized and become subject to minimum wage laws and are eligible for benefits they currently pay into but don't draw from, including things like social security disability?
The _net_ benefit to non-immigrants goes down but remains positive. If immigrants are working and not committing crimes they are a net benefit.
What happens to that child your family gave birth to grows up and becomes subject to minimum wage laws and are eligible for benefits?
It's called growing the labor population?
I guess I am talking more about changes in the levels of immigration (or levels of deportations).
An amnesty for people here illegally would certainly have some fiscal costs if it made beneficiaries eligible for government benefits.
However it seems unlikely their wages would increase all that much since undocumented immigrants don't actually make all that much less https://www.bakerinstitute.org/research/how-granting-amnesty-undocumented-immigrants-could-boost-us-labor-market
But there must be SOME people who object less to plain vanilla illegal immigration than to the Biden policy of economic assistance to people "awaiting" their asylum adjudication.
What policy of economic assistance was that? Because this says assistance is generally state and locality dependent. https://www.rescue.org/article/what-happens-once-asylum-seekers-arrive-us
That’s because the downsides are fake. And it’s not the PMC areas that are going to stop having essential services as all the smart people born there move out and go into death spirals without immigration.
The downsides aren't fake. They are overstated and outweighed by the massive economic amd cultural benefits of immigration. But, e.g. MS-13 isn't actually fake, nor are some of the crime and assimilation concerns in Europe.
I mean MS13 was literally a US gang that got exported to El Salvador. In a very real sense MS13 is a consequence of American culture not our immigration policy.
As America has gotten more Hispanic, it's gotten safer.
True but it's also true that there aren't many downsides.
I think some of the downsides are also based on personality type and education and intelligence.
I find interacting with people from different cultures interesting and fun, I like different cuisines, I speak Spanish, etc., so the cost of interacting with the large immigrant communities where I live is relatively lower for me than for some other people. I also work in a very high-education, high-intelligence job where much of my competition is immigrants, but they're not guys who payed a coyote to slip them across the border, they're guys who came here for grad school and found a way to stick around.
What you have just said is that you enjoy interacting with people from different cultures as long as they are fundamentally like you.
I genuinely think the uncharitable view is closer to reality here. Progressives became very aggressive across all enforcement issues and the threat of cultural cancellation kept PMC liberals who controlled institutions quiet about it despite many of them admitting privately that they didn't think abolishing the police or ICE was a good idea or that decriminalizing border crossings was wise. That's how Democrats lost credibility on the issue and it's what we need to regain if we have any hope of recovering in a durable way politically.
I think this is a big part of the story of politics over the last 15 years in many areas. Social media created mechanisms for converging on and enforcing elite consensus that were very powerful, and that made it possible to suppress some discussions and questions from public view for quite awhile. See the recent stuff from Malcolm Gladwell and Megan McArdle about transwomen in sports for some examples of this, but really, it was everywhere, and it poisoned discourse on all kinds of topics.
I think it's odd to blame the disparate components of the Democratic coalition for this stuff when Trump got 46% of the vote in 2016 (I think the Obama administration is essentially the populist lodestar, so it would be odd for Dems to have lost credibility at this point). All the "abolish ICE" stuff was in 2017-19... Trump got a whole 47% of the vote in 2020.
I would personally just blame the Biden administration for Democrats losing credibility here. Biden was the one who ran on the most moderate immigration platform in the 2020 primary, and Democrats nominated him for it. Then he just had no plan for the asylum issues in '22-23.
I think the Biden administration lost credibility because it was staffed with a mix of people who genuinely believed in anti-enforcement and those worried about being called out/censured for disagreeing with that position.
You can't understand liberal culture in the US without understanding the worst possible thing for an American liberal is to be called a bigot. That's what drives cancel culture and gives the bad actors power- they have no compunctions about making false accusations of bigotry to gain power.
I think the cultural affinity dominates. Lefty leaning academics publish all sorts of pro-rent control nonsense, suspect environmental regulation cheering, left NIMBY stuff, heterodox monetary theories and so on. They don't have a problem going off the economics reservation, but the cultural stuff is another matter.
Although I'd argue that some of the Left wing trans attempted consensus post-2014 had its share of nonsense (certainly the claim that there was no advantage in sports, for instance, and also some of the claims about how strong the data was for youth gender medicine).
Perhaps also through social class/education polarization, Democrats became more the party of people who get a larger set of the benefits of immigration and a smaller set of the costs than Republicans.
I'm not sure that started with "woke" though. George Bush couldn't convince the GOP to even look at reform 20 years ago.
A lot of the discussion in this thread is abstracted away from the actual history of Congress on this topic for the past 20 years and instead complaining about intellectuals.
yes. Small right wing factions tanked good immigration bills in 2007 and 2013. Democrats engaged in good faith negotiations and conceded security measures without any promise of additional legalization measures in 2024. A number of Democrats (though not a majority) signed off on the Laken Riley act in 2025 which was a dumb and pretty much unworkable immigration hawk bill but some Democrats signed off on it because it would provide hawk credibility. Democrats have been trying to get a workable legislative solution for a long time.
The last 20 years is the wrong timeframe.
The key thing that has to be noted is that the Reagan amnesty wasn't actually followed up with strict enforcement, and many of its strong supporters were key in crippling enforcement by the states (notably Prop 187 in CA).
And ever since, the restrictionist position ahs been that there has to be a visible, widespread decrease in non-preapproved immigration before any additional amnesty.
The 2013 bill got 68 senate votes (14 republicans)... that level of consensus is just unheard of in post 2010 politics. It was a good bill that Republican leadership cynically tanked because of extremist objections, not because they thought it was bad.
Right - but Republicans at that point weren't uniformly immigration restrictionists, particularly in the Senate. The Buchanan-Trump faction was complaining loudly that it amounted to another amnesty bill.
This is the most important comment in the thread. I really wish Slow Borers followed the actual comings and goings of congress instead of thinking the world started in 2016.
Seriously fuck the War on Terror as far as that goes... Karl Rove's "natural conservatives" was a promising way forward.
I despise "cultural conservatism" despite trending more rightward in recent years but I'm willing to put up with a lot of that nonsense in exchange for more doctors and cheaper produce. That much of the right doesn't understand that immigrants have more in common with them than a college-educated white atheist is utterly ridiculous.
My pet theory on immigration has been that there is, even amongst groups like climate change deniers and people who don't pay attention to geopolitics, a growing sense of a big global shift slowly happening that is leading to the displacement of many, many people and the concerns with immigration reflect a belief that "there won't be enough to go around" and if the doors are wide open, then people will find themselves competing for resources even more heavily in their home nation. Combine that with a feeling that cultural identity will be lost and you have an emotional anti-immigration soup going.
Matt's column is outstanding, one of his best. Ben's point here is excellent and maybe belonged in the column. That said, I've just scanned ~50 replies and there is a lot of cognitive dissonance going on. Matt's point is an identity threat for a significant fraction of his own audience, let along progressives.
There's still an opening on the left to correctly call Trump a pushover on immigration because when Big Agriculture and the hotel industry told him they need illegal labor, he caved.
Don't know if they can stomach doing that though...
John McCain was correct when he said you don't really want to go pick spinach in Yuma in June.
So, a few things about that.
He's obviously correct, no American wants to do those jobs at the wages offered. I'm fairly open to immigration, but at the end of the day, we're going to have an immigration policy that says "yes" to some people and "no" to others. In general, since public patience for immigration is limited, I think we should focus on taking in the most skilled immigrants because the economic benefits are large and I think it will provoke the smallest amount of backlash. So, given that, that means the spinach pickers in Arizona will either have to raise wages, automate, or go out of business. And at the end of the day, that's what it means to have an immigration policy. Sometimes we tell people and their prospective employers "no."
The alternative is that maybe we make some sort of carve out for agriculture because... status quo bias I guess?
an iron law of modern american politics is that the right has no coherent position on healthcare and the left has no coherent position on immigration
Another cliche with some merit here is "Democrats have tons of solutions but will never say anything is a problem, Republicans say everything is a problem but will never propose a solution" or some similar formulation.
I've never heard this one, but it sure does resonate.
Isn't it just the opposite? The caricature of Democrats is they say everything (except crime) is a problem and have tons of "solutions" -- DEI, NEPA, OSHA, NRC, IRA.
And it's the same dynamic. If people
don't want to buy insurance and can't pay cash - let em die. Grumble grumble - I don't really want to let someone die.
You're in favor of open borders. I most certainly am not - how dare you suggest such a thing. Ok, so if someone does happen to sneak in we need to make them go home. Grumble grumble - I don't really want to make people go home.
I think what's happened is that for occasional talk about economics immigration has become understood as a human rights issue, rather than a public policy dial for optimizing and that reasonable people can come to different conclusions about.
And Progressives are at fault for that framing or at least for not pushing back against that framing. Immigration ought to be an economic issue like trade. Heck, _crime_ ought to be an economic issue in the sense of it occasioning "costs" to the victims that can be reduced by enforcement.
And yet they voted for the Lankford bill.
Right, this is why I roll my eyes to the point of detaching my retinas at the routine assertion, "No one is in favor of open borders." If you systematically oppose all or nearly all forms of enforcement of immigration laws *and* combine that with an expansive interpretation of asylum law, then functionally that is an "open borders" position, you're just lying about it! (I will note that I am personally a 100% open borders supporter -- if you can push, pull, or drag yourself onto US soil and find someone willing to rent you living space and/or hire you, that's great -- but I think it should be done honestly.)
I think there are multiple threads of this:
a. Some people are offended by the disorder and lawlessness of people coming here and staying for decades illegally. I guess they want most illegal immigration shut down.
b. Some people are upset by the way immigration law and visa programs seem like they're optimized more for the needs of particular businesses than for the good of the country. Like, we all agree we want the Terrence Taos and John von Neumanns allowed in, but how much is the marginal H1B employee making the country better off vs just saving an employer a few thousand dollars a year on payroll costs?
c. Some people are unhappy with the volume of all immigration because of the changes it is making to the country, in demographics, religious makeup, politics, culture, etc. They want less of that in the future, and perhaps to reverse some of the previous immigration.
Different immigration restrictionists have different mixes of those three, AFAICT.
The first choice should be increasing legal immigration but the bigger blocker to that is the law can’t really be changed given Congressional gridlock and this isn’t worth risking nuking the filibuster over. Republicans make things a LOT harder for legal immigration too; you can follow some immigration lawyers on LinkedIn and Twitter to learn about this.
Yeah, most of the comments above basically ignore that the immigration reform efforts of the Bush and Obama years failed in Congress, so everything everyone has done since then has been downstream of the fact that there are enough restrictionists in Congress to block any attempt at increasing legal immigration.
Efforts failed under Bush and Obama because they always tried the Comprehensive approach. There was much higher support for legal immigration in the Congress in both parties then.
A comprehensive approach pairing enforcement with something that resolves the status of long-settled undocumented/illegal immigrants is necessary because providing a path to legalization is generally popular, but you need to step up enforcement in tandem to avoid a moral hazard issue.
There’s nothing necessary about it. You can choose to enforce border security and create conditions for those who’re already here illegally to self deport. These are policy choices. The original comment was about legal, not illegal immigration.
True. Typically you need to sneak an increase in legal immigration into the larger framework though because it's not that popular despite the fact that it's objectively a good idea.
First you actually have to fix the illegal immigration problem before there can be a look at increasing legal immigration.
1. I want a de facto open borders policy because I feel bad for people who have to live in unpleasant countries.
2. Open borders would be hideously unpopular with voters so I can't openly support that.
3. I'll just leave the current legal immigration system mostly unchanged while doing everything in my power to obstruct enforcement of immigration laws.
Anti-prags don’t care about resolving the immigration issue. They want to signal moral superiority by claiming to protect X oppressed group. Allowing more people to legally immigrate shrinks the “oppressed” group.
I suspect normal interest-group politics is a better model for understanding this.
On immigration, I wonder if the idea of screening immigrants for "American-ness" (i.e. wanting to be American, sharing our values, liking college football, etc.) would have any constituency at all.
Rightists would hate it because they hate foreigners, and leftists would hate it because they hate America. But maybe there's a silent majority of normies who would support that (or maybe not, idk).
Immigrants to the United States are, in my experience at least, among the most starry-eyed and patriotic people in the country. They swallowed the American Dream without chewing.
That hasn't seemed to have helped ease the cultural panic among the MAGA minority.
And, again, you always have the paradox that the people furthest away from actual immigrants are the ones who have anti-immigrant views. Immigration is just a specter to them.
Come on, the immigrant's love of America is common but hardly universal.
I'm not sure screening for it would be effective or even a good idea, but it would be a concession to the right.
The fact that right-wingers don't appreciate the positive bias in their attitudes tells us nothing about whether something like Allan's proposal would grease the wheels for a more generous immigration regime.
I agree that's true for the majority, But certainly not true of all of them. And there are definitely segments that don't seem to share all of these Americans values are be assimilating very well.
Do rightists hate foreigners - if Karl and Heidi from Zurich moved in next door they'd be all enraged? I think it's a lot about class.
"... I think it's a lot about class...."
Could be. Depends in part on what happens when the wealthy oil executives from Nigeria, Obechukwu and Ayofemi, move in next door.
Yep, read what people are saying about Indians on Twitter.
“H1Bs are bringing down wages!”
“Actually they make $300,000.”
“They’re just giving those $300,000 jobs to Indians for no reason when I could be getting them instead!”
I think the modal H1B works for WITCH and makes about as much as an American new grad.
Yeah they’re more hostile to Ukrainian refugees too. Even before the war: https://www.cspicenter.com/p/partisanship-and-support-for-immigration. Left-wingers are more likely to support even white right-wing refugees than right-wingers are.
Or lack of shared culture, language. immigrants from Canada, Australia, UK etc will assimilate a lot easier than from some other places.
Interesting hypothetical, but I don’t think this is the case. See DT’s comment.
Matt proposed this in 1 billion Americans on the theory that any way to increase the number of green cards would be good. If the objection is English proficiency perhaps lifting the cap on people who are native English speakers would work? But I doubt unlimited migration from Jamaica and Nigeria would attract much support from the right.
The best way to target specific categories is ad hoc. There's no single factor, not language, not race, not religion, not the nation's income, etc. that determines how welcome any given nationality is.
The single biggest factor might be socio-economic class of the immigrants themselves, and that could change drastically if you removed any cap on a nation like Nigeria - which as far as I understand is currently sending over a disproportionate number of engineers and doctors who aren't facing a particularly high amount of backlash.
College football is a plague, but I'll admit it's got higher approval than most American institutions. Asking Ethiopian doctors, Indian biochemists, etc if they like football is excluding the nerdy EHCs from the country, and they're the ones that we most need.
I work with many Indian data scientists and engineers who play fantasy football just to be more enmeshed in our culture. I want that ethos in our immigrants.
The problem is defining “American-ness”. What values? Should I renounce my citizenship because I don’t like college football?
the college football thing was cheeky but I'd define Americanness as:
-- a belief in small-l liberalism
-- not viewing women or minorities as second-class citizens
-- support for free speech, freedom of religion, etc.
-- entrepreneurial / wanting to work hard to earn a living rather than being on the dole
This seems like a pretty important list.
I would probably also add "doesn't want to kill all the Jews"
yes and I wouldn't oppose other criteria like "can speak English" and "will pay more in taxes than will receive in benefits"
"sharing our values, liking college football"
These two are inherently incompatible. Personal freedom means that you can like or dislike anything. I think you need to learn how to become an American first.
I don't literallly want to use college football fandom as a criterion for immigration.
Just want to make the point that assimilation is good and ability/willingness to assimilate should be considered.
Who in your opinion are not assimilating well? By the second generation, pretty much everyone speaks English and assimilates well culturally. The Americans who don't assimilate well are not even recent immigrants and you can't kick them out.
I think the easiest thing to test is just English language skills. I was always a little sympathetic to the argument that the remain in Mexico policy was a good idea because people have a better shot of finding employment and integrating into the community in a country where they're fluent in the language.
Doing any kind of screening would significantly help.
Could we even agree on what the criteria is? I imagine if a Republican were president one of the criteria might be that they are Christian, which sounds anathema to the left.
A relatively easy way to do this would be to give each country an "american culture compatibility" score and give citizens from those countries a leg up in any queues. This would probably result in making it easier for Europeans to get here and harder for Indians/Chinese, which also sounds like something the GOP would favor.
Doing it in an individual basis would probably lead to it being gamed.
Each year, US colleges screen about 13 million personal statement essays from 3 million applicants, which is just as prone to ambiguous criteria and gaming the system. Meanwhile, the US only gets half a million asylum applicants each year. If we wanted to set up a screening system, we could.
A big factor behind the anti-Indian sentiment is religion, after old school skin color racism.
How would you do that in practice? Once the criteria for screening is known, people will lie in interviews or questionnaires.
Interviews with neighbors and coworkers, surveillance of public speech, requiring demonstration of civic knowledge, requirements for volunteering for civic and pro social activities. I'm not in favor of any particular one of these, but it's not hard to envision a process.
What you described is a completely unworkable process, with some exceptions like scanning SM. FBI does some of this stuff for national security clearance checks. I was the neighbor once when I used to live in MD. It’s a complete joke.
It's actually very workable. What do you think asylum investigations look like? It's a dive into someone's social circumstances by the authorities. We interview people about their friends and neighbors all the time for criminal investigations, background checks, jobs, etc. We do the same for TANF/SSDI etc. it's actually not hard, and the bar doesn't have to be sky high, it just needs to keep out people who do not want to assimilate or have behaviors we do not tolerate (define as you want).
Are you aware of the backlog for asylum claims? No, it’s not workable.
I'm not talking about asylum claims, I'm talking about a process for prospective citizens. Second, the asylum process has been intentionally corrupted and exploited and the glut of applicants has been encouraged by the tacit admission that simplycoming from a poor place qualifies you to get to the front of the line. Third, you are simply saying we don't currently have the resources, and that's totally subject to change. You aren't arguing it won't work, you're arguing that we can't do it today.
Did you mean asylum seekers or everyone (legal) but those?
I have no idea what to do on asylum. I support it in theory but it does seem like a system that has really been gamed this last decade.
Elite political opinion firmly believes that immigration is a net economic positive. But finance ministries in Denmark and the Netherlands publish official figures showing non-western immigrants are a significant fiscal cost. Germany publishes less but all the signs point to immigration being a very significant net negative.
The studies I have seen going around on Twitter seem to count the fiscal "cost" of educating the children of immigrants but do not count the tax revenue contributed by those children when they become workers which seems like an interesting choice.
Even if you disregard accounting it seems very odd that adding on average younger people to a generally aging population would harm the structure of the economy or workforce.
Germany refugee law seems to have a lot of rules that might prevent beneficiaries from working though which would make things much different.
The writeup I've read on this does seem to account for the tax revenue of the children when they become workers?
https://inquisitivebird.xyz/p/the-effects-of-immigration-in-denmark
"Even if you disregard accounting it seems very odd that adding on average younger people to a generally aging population would harm the structure of the economy or workforce."
The tax revenues of lower income working people can be pretty small, and if the rate of going to prison is at all frequent that can eat up the benefits pretty fast. I forget if it's in the linked post or another one on that guy's site, but the rate of eventual incarceration for some categories of Danish immigrants was in the 1/4 or 1/3 territory if I remember correctly.
I did review and it seems you are correct and I did find one that shows a negative fiscal impact to the US treasury.
That said most Americans probably have a "negative" impact on the US treasury, but in the macro sense would attempting to drive down the birth rate or do a mass deportation result in a healthier economic structure? The benefits of immigration are more about limiting inflation while allowing more growth.
This is like you say largely a result of progressive taxation.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Gz3q-L_WMAAWGuq.jpg?name=orig
This depends strongly on the nature of the immigrants, right? If we let in a bunch of researchers and tech workers, I just wouldn’t trust an economic analysis that finds a negative budgetary response.
sure. and also hilariously our budget deficit was 27% of federal expenditures last year according to this. https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/national-deficit/#:~:text=The%20following%20year%20will%20be,end%20of%20the%20fiscal%20year.&text=In%20FY%202024%20total%20government,from%20the%20previous%20fiscal%20year.
So we were all contributing roughly 27% less than we received in benefits.
I also don't know how you are supposed to model a 75 year fiscal impact of something. Tax policy changes all the time. How do you model what's going to happen when the Social Security Trust Fund is exhausted?
The government could cut benefits, it could raise payroll taxes, it could fund SS with general fund revenue, it could raise the retirement age or it could just let the cuts go into effect. These would all have very different fiscal impacts. But I know the tradeoffs would be a lot harder with less workers.
I would expect the rate of incarceration for Danish inmates to be 100%!
immigrants, my bad! edited
Surely some escape!
I think we really need to be separating Western European vs. North American immigration concerns for what it's worth. They're fundamentally different issues (Arabic-speaking Muslims vs. Spanish-speaking Christians, though the Iberian Peninsula is kind of in a weird place because of the Muslim conquests).
I think you also see this in the differences is assimilation. Broadly speaking America seems to assimilate people pretty well. Though too much immigration too fast can still be a problem.
The large muslim populations in Europe, much less so.
That is not my understanding of the official statistics. I am happy to be corrected.
Are there ways to slice the fiscal costs of certain things such that they are negative? Probably. But if the economy is growing fiscal policy can be tweaked to resolve these issues. If you let the working age population shrink, there's no population that's going to allow old people to retire and get healthcare without immigrating other people.
Care workers schemes in the West generally seem to worsen the dependency ratio and have a negative fiscal impact.
how does that work?
A lot of European countries made the mistake of having fairly generous allowances for bringing dependents with you on the visas, partially out of a belief it was needed to get people and partially because the Right to a Family Life is enshrined at a fairly high level of law in most European nations making it easy for politicians to just give the allowance. Now that for the most part this has been undone and afaik there haven't been successful legal challenges it would be interesting to see if the numbers change.
Because under care worker visas people can bring in their elderly relatives.
These figures can't tell you if not having the immigrants would be better for the economy or even the general fiscal situation of the government, because the immigrants are part of the overall economy (this is a point that Matt makes all the time). One way to see that is to note that roads are purely a fiscal cost to the government but getting rid of them would not lead to better government fiscal health. Another is to know that growth, both of the economy and the money supply, is necessary to keep the economy functioning in a modern society.
Won't a good fiscal analysis of road building include increases in tax revenue from the benefits of road building?
Yes, often people try to do that, but it's very challenging (what was the fiscal impact of the Erie Canal?). I don't read Danish, but the reading the internet racist you linked to doesn't indicate that the reports mentioned do that at all.
I haven't linked to anyone in this thread.
My apologies, that was Wigan. Really sorry about that.
"...publish official figures showing non-western immigrants are a significant fiscal cost...."
In the US, lots of people on both the left and the right claim that (whatever the cultural issues may be) immigration is a net economic positive for the country.
Do you think the economic picture in the US is being misrepresented, or is there something about economic/political/cultural structures in the US that allows us to benefit economically from the influx of immigrants, and something about the economic/political/cultural structures in Denmark, Netherlands, etc., that prevents them from benefiting?
I suspect its apples to oranges. The US doesn't have the social programs that Europe does, the area low skilled immigrants tend to go has a particular form of agriculture that is very expensive to automate, most of them are culturally more similar to the average American (central and south America are still European cultures) and they're generally more willing to go home when the season ends. Europe is the opposite, lots of government spending per head on things that will go up for migrants (especially settled migrants), non-medium to high skill industries are generally easy automatable (many European nations have seen major decline in automatic car washes as its cheaper to pay a group of migrants to hand wash it) or service, MENA and sub-saharan culture is very different to standard European and they generally want to make a life for themselves in the rich, stable western country.
I could easily believe that its generally a cost in Europe and a gain in the USA. There is also the caveat that it is *much* harder to be majorly productive in a country that doesn't speak a language you. Anglophone countries may have an advantage. I also assume that high skill non-western immigrants are always a fiscal positive. I believe stats in Britain showed that the big wave of Hong Kong refugees after the CCP clampdown were net positive.
There are important differences in welfare and who comes to America. But mainly it it just lumping tech workers with low skilled workers you can get a much positive effect even if the net effect of the low skilled workers is highly negative.
Yeah, as with free trade, the net effect on the economy is positive, but there are also distributive effects that can end up making me better off and you worse off, and that's pretty reliably going to get my support and your opposition.
I don't see it as that similar to free trade. The equivalencecy doesn't work. Free trade is simply good for the economy, immigration has lots of complicated reactions.
Free trade and immigration both have distributive effects--they move well-being around within your economy, independently of their effect on the whole economy. If the economy gets better overall, but you lose your job, you probably aren't going to be a fan, whether you lose your job to imports or foreign competition.
But there are lots of non-economic effects of immigration and the economic effects of immigration are highly disputed.
The US has historically done *really well* with immigrants, assimilating them into generic productive Americans in a generation or two. It wouldn't be a shock if this extended into us being better at getting an economic benefit from immigrants than other countries.
Non-western European immigration looks very different than non-western US immigration though. I'd bet in the US it is a net gain.
I am not sure it is a net gain, but it is definitely very different, if someone is a top engineer in India or China they are going to go to the US or Australia. In Europe a lot of people who ostensibly comes as high skilled workers/students do minimum wage jobs or get on welfare.
The proposed solution doesn't seem to match the problem, though - unless Democrats adopt the *most extreme* voter position on crime and immigration, the representation gap persists. Simply matching the right wing party view on these issues doesn't address the representation gap at all.
I would say that the *size* of the gap matters a lot. Many people who wanted more enforcement of immigration laws were unhappy about the policies in the 1990s and 2000s, but were not sufficiently upset to make them prioritize that question over other concerns. Then as enforcement went from lax to very lax, things shifted, and the people who used to be moderately unhappy become willing let their anger at uncontrolled immigration override their hesitation about Trump / AfD / Reform / Marine Le Pen / ...
Yeah just look at the growing calls for "remigration" among the European right which is basically ethnic cleansing. Most voters obviously do not want to ethnically cleanse their countries but they may very well choose a party with a disturbing number of members calling for it if their preferred solution of more controlled immigration doesn't occur. If the sectarian dam breaks as it seems to be starting to in places like Britain you will see Northern Irish style voting for extremist parties with these overtly extreme positions because they feel they have to too. I would rather avoid that.
I hope you are right about "most voters". But take a look at things like the Eric Schmitt speech at the National Conservatism Conference. It is hard to understand that as anything other than advocacy of ethnic cleansing or, frankly, to attribute very much of its origin to a concern about undue absorption of public resources and benefits by immigrants, illegal or legal.
What in people’s direct experience actually informs them of the rate of illegal immigration? I suspect what they are experiencing is a higher foreign-born share of population in their area, which is going to happen mechanically even under low levels of legal immigration.
Matt’s description of the CSU supporters who switched their votes to AfD shows that to be untrue. They wanted CSU to move closer to their viewpoint so they wouldn’t need to choose the AfD
Excellent as usual. So of course my mind naturally goes to “why is this the case”. A while ago, someone asked Matt where he disagrees with conventional wisdom the most, and he chose to focus on the prevalence of zero some thinking. I think this nails it.
The higher your relative status in society, the more likely you are to escape the clutches of zero sum thinking and the mentality of scarcity. Politicians are definitionally higher status than the median voter and certainly below median voter. They are more able to view the world in growth mindset terms.
Which makes the question what happened recently that this manifested itself if this was always true. And this is where the Ross Douthat theory of the world may come in. “ we broke a bad world in the 50s and 60s, and didn’t replace it with anything, destroying the social fabric of life for a whole bunch of lower status citizens”. Liberty and flexibility for you and me, chaos and uncertainty for the rest.
It absolutely kills me that the self proclaimed moral high ground liberal voices refuse to look at the mirror and own up to their responsibility.
but who is "we?" The government can't and shouldn't force people to go to church and stuff. Political parties definitionally cannot replace the "social fabric" of a community.
I don't see where anybody said it should. But it is true that the social fabric (flimsy and exclusionary as it might have been) has been torn asunder with nothing to replace it for decades. Social media in the last few years has been the closest thing to a community church or diner and look where that has gotten us.
"we broke a bad world in the 50s and 60s, and didn’t replace it with anything"
The "We" here are long-dead people like LBJ, JFK and the Warren Court, and to a lesser extent the vast majority of the American public who supported them at the time. Today it might include any of their their intellectual descendants, who are perhaps a bit guilty of not fully reflecting on the legacy of the changes that the 60s brought about.
obviously everyone bears a bit of the blame but I believe it was Pat Buchanan who said "we'll break the country in 2 and the right will have the bigger half." I don't like the guy but it was pretty prescient.
What do you mean we didn't replace it with anything? We replaced it with small-l liberal democracy!
Expecting the government to provide you with meaning in life is a category error. In a free society, as a free citizen, not a subject, you make your own meaning. The kind of government that provides "meaning" is a totalitarian government that demands unquestioning obedience, worship of the one true state-approved religion, etc. Is that what you want?
The way I see it, government exists to help solve collective action problems, provide things people can't buy for themselves (like infrastructure), and protect people from certain certain forms of suffering (health care for the sick, financial support for the disabled and elderly, etc.) All this helps free people to seek meaning along with their families and communities.
And yes, our society is very unequal, and someone who is lower educated and poorer will struggle a lot more, but realistic solutions involve more heavy-handed government intervention, which conservatives tend to reject.
I look at it totally differently than that.
We had previously elevated marriage as a foundational aspect of the social order and expected that children should be raised with two legally married parents. Of course it had never been illegal to be unmarried with children, but it was practically much harder.
In the 60s we made it substantially easier to be an unmarried parent, and wouldn't you know it, the percentage of unmarried mothers and fathers took off!
In a somewhat analogous vein, it was much harder to simply not work, at least for me, so consequently the employment rate was higher for men was higher. Now men retire earlier or go on disability more frequently, spend longer periods of time willingly in-between jobs, etc..
There were a host of other social norms and aspects of culture that had formal or informal support in laws and interpretations of laws - for example pornography, homelessness, mental illness were all treated more as communal problems, but after the Warren Court era they began to be viewed as individual problems or even individual rights.
Whether this maps to a prior or current expectation of the government supplying you with meaning is hard for me to say because I'm not looking at it that way.
I will say, though, that the government operated in a way where the de facto expectation was that men would take value from work, children would take value from two parent households and society had a larger say in individual behaviors that might upset the community.
Obviously there are trade-offs with all of these things, and I'm not looking to turn back the clock, but I think left-wing people should think deeper about both sides of the trade-offs.
"Expecting the government to provide you with meaning in life is a category error."
+1000, superlike.
But we did not create small-l liberal democracy in the 50s and 60s (and, per your own excellent quote, that isn't even relevant to the domain Douthat's talking about), so I cannot like the comment.
Americans have an extremely high relative status in the world, yet have the worst case of zero-sum thinking. If it’s about relative status maybe we should just try to get people to think of the world as a single society more, then people are comparing themselves to peasants in India (those peasants in India are comparing themselves to you!) and will feel better about themselves and be less zero-sum?
Unfortunately, our conception of the in group within which we measure status is far more localized than that.
Not necessarily. The fact that people’s own ranking of their life satisfaction is strongly correlated with their country’s GDP per capita suggests they are comparing themselves to people globally: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-vs-happiness
Life satisfaction is not the same thing as status.
"A simpler explanation is that a significant minority of the public in most Western countries agrees with right-wing cultural politics."
I agree but a caveat. I think _lots of people on the Left_ honestly conflate anti-crime, anti-immigration with old fashioned racism/"not like me"-ism. Therefore if you want to think well of your opponents, that they are just uninformed, not "bad people," you want to attribute their voting to understandable "economic" reasons. And even if you reasonably think it is a mixture, you want to emphasize "economics." Combine this with _lots of people on the Left_ thinking that their opponents ARE bad people, that it would be wrong to pander to their "racism," and you get to the same place, focus on "economics."
This is problematic when _lots of people on the Left_ get the economics wrong.
Most anti-immigrationism is racism. We know this because most of them are also pro-natalist even though all the non-racist arguments against immigration (strain on public services, wage competition, overcrowding) apply to locally born people too.
Locally born people, or "citizens" , are already members of the Republic and the State has a duty to them which is not extended to the world at large.
And once we can classify it as the unforgivable sin of "racism" there's no need to do anything about it
I mean, there's "I don't like people with a different color of skin" and there "I don't have many experiences interacting with people different set of experiences, and it makes me uncomfortable to have them." Both of these can lead to people not wanting to have to deal with a bunch of people with different customs and languages as part of their every-day lives.
I think the highly-politically-engaged underrate the convenience/familiarity piece when it comes to subjects like immigration and crime. Normies mostly want more of what they're used to, and from my middle-aged perspective, it's obvious that the country is far more multicultural than it was when I was a child. For many folks a generation older than me, that makes it more challenging to interact with, and they don't like it.
I think you are right about that, and I also think that maintaining the type of "multicultural democracy" where all comers are given equal weight and no culture is dominant is a lot harder (maybe impossible given well documented human nature on this) than a lot of activists would like to think. Is that racist? I dunno, but IMO it's clearly true that significant numbers of the population will base their votes on it.
The thing is, the monocultural democracy isn't some panacea against all social disagreement, people just find new things to fight over. Of course, voters are so removed from that, that they don't recognize it.
No, of course not. But it's easier to see yourself in even a heated conversation with someone who has a similar cultural background than with someone who doesn't, and IMO that makes it easier to come to consensus. My Norwegian friend likes to point out the higher social trust and cohesion seen in his country, while I think a lot of that is just that Norway has five million people mostly of Nordic heritage all named variations of Sven (I'm exaggerating for effect but you get the point, and yes I know immigration has ramped up there in recent years as well). It's a lot easier to trust when everyone looks like you and has similar cultural touchstones.
Norway is also extremely rich, because of oil. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_Pension_Fund_of_Norway I would think that makes social cohesion a lot easier
"people just find new things to fight over"
They do sometimes, but less often than when cultural differences create splits of their own accord.
It depends on what you mean by “culture.” There should be a political culture that accepts pluralism (and the average immigrant is WAY better than the average MAGA on that count). But different cultures in the sense of different food, festivals, activities, etc. should be encouraged.
"food, festivals, activities"
These are the easy things. It's things like language, religion, work habits, certain cultural habits, ie female circumcision, or tolerance of homosexuality, for example, where it gets tricky.
"Should" is a loaded word and what "should" be is often pie in the sky.
Even the average Republican pre-MAGA would agree that foreign food, music, etc is beneficial to the US. It's delicious and fun and demands no political power in return.
Pre-Trump, yes, but remember when the Trump campaign surrogate went on national TV and threatened “taco trucks on every corner”? Now they are against the foreign food.
I do remember that, yes, but I took that comment as proxy rather than an indictment of tacos per se.
The case of left wingers ignoring 'the experts' that I am most personally familiar with is that cybersecurity researchers have done a *lot* of work on trying to understand foreign online disinformation and election influence campaigns, especially in the wake of Russia's high profile role in various campaigns since 2016. And that work has almost uniformly come to the same basic conclusion, which is that these interventions are actually terrible on a cost-benefit basis. They are incredibly expensive to run, often requiring the full attention of many highly skilled intelligence operatives, the cultivation of foreign media assets, and payments to a large number of professional internet trolls. Meanwhile, the benefits are very limited and completely swamped by professional domestic election campaigns. There are a couple of edge cases here, where small countries with very immature media ecosystems will have difficulty resisting the sheer volume of information a professional Russian campaign can put out, but that is more of an issue for small Eastern European and Central Asian countries than anything a large democracy has to worry about.
Despite this, huge numbers of people are convinced that voters are only anti-immigration and worried about crime because of media manipulation by foreign actors and their allies in the domestic media. There's no evidence of this at all! The people are authentically very anti-migration and authentically very worried about crime.
Now, I myself am deeply unsympathetic to the public here, as usual, because the public doesn't really know anything and the idea that they are worried about something gives me no information about whether that issue actually matters in reality. In the United States, at least, immigrants are a huge benefit and while we could certainly improve our handling of crime, the measures voters want (like harsher sentences and the death penalty) are more about emotional satisfaction than reducing the crime rate. But the problem for the liberal elites, as is often the case, is that they sort of regret the fact that we live in a democracy. You can't believe democracy is good and also believe pandering to the slobbering masses is bad. The two things are coterminous.
Democracy is about how we select leaders, not what those leaders can do. Leaders are always constrained by laws (both literally and in the sense of “laws of economics”) and external actors. States have no constitutional power to regulate immigration from other states yet no one would claim that turns states into non-democracies.
This doesn't make any sense as a response. The point is that if you want to win elections in a democracy, you have to pander to the masses, even if what they want is something that is kind of dumb. Even if we were to assume there is literally *nothing* legally within the power of the German government to slow migration (I am skeptical, to say the least) it is still possible to do more or less pandering to voters on the issue, or for parties to put more or less pressure on affiliated MEPs, etc.
It isn't just that immigration in Europe is unpopular, there is also very much an idea amongst the elite that immigration should be done in an expensive, inefficient and dishonest way, often made worse by the welfare system.
The problem in many European countries is similar to the problem in the United States: the immigration "system" isn't a system. It's an ad hoc accumulation of different policies and slapped-together reactions to previous social problems that have now outlived their usefulness.
I'll give a concrete example from Sweden, where I was and am an immigrant on the other side of this system. I am American, married to a Swede. I'm elite-university educated, work in tech, and have never lacked for job offers from firms operating in European countries where I lived, including first Ireland and then Sweden. I have a Swedish-born son and am the furious convert to the Swedish Dream. An "ideal immigrant," right?
Not according to the Swedish Migration Authority, who made my migration process extremely lengthy, frustrating, and seemingly-at-times, impossible. In despair of guidance, I consulted lawyers and joined all manner of groups catering to people like myself, married to native born locals, pursuing work permits from local employers who'd like to hire them, etc. And the sad experiences they all shared never failed to shock Swedes whom I told them to. Families divided for years just awaiting their processing. High-value employees summarily deported because their HR team made a simple clerical error on holiday leave tracking or something.
Swedes I speak with have no idea that their official government policy and process has been rejecting thousands of candidates a year who just wanted to move back to Sweden with their families, pursue a PhD, work for Google or the local hospital, or whatever. The height of absurdity is that even people who are *native-born Swedish* can't always move back to their own country because of the Kafka-esque nightmare of migration policies! If you leave the country for even a short time, you're "de-registered" and then you're an outsider like the rest, sent to the back of a long and opaque line to come back home.
Some of us in our despair wondered darkly why it seemed "easy" for a bunch of uneducated men from Afghanistan or Somalia who didn't know the first thing about Sweden (or even like the place) to just come on in, when a Swede couldn't even easily bring their spouse or child!? That's an unhelpful comparison, but the optics weren't great. And, frankly, I don't think anyone in Sweden today would have consciously designed a policy where refugees so exponentially outnumbered more educated or employable immigrants. Sweden basically has the opposite immigration policy to Canada's or Australia's "points system," in that way.
Did anyone in Sweden decide that this is what the immigration policy should be? That we efficiently deport or prohibit elite international graduates of the best Swedish schools after their graduation or the husbands and wives of native-born Swedes? But not some high profile criminals or terrorists or people who snuck in illegally? Or that the very people who are most likely to integrate and contribute to the society are the ones we make life hard for? No. The policy-makers decided by not deciding. And the same is true at the EU level, since these debates are so fraught. So we get left with default processes held over from decades ago, designed for yesterday's concerns and opportunities (and even insufficient then).
It's not politically salient to fix any of this because immigrants aren't a voting constituency. Immigration is constantly talked about as a "problem" (the only solution being "less") rather than something necessary that should be engineered and optimized. And it's obvious to all of us that we're also a "problem" to our host country until proven otherwise, too, so we tend to keep our heads down and not complain about intolerable issues. After many years in Sweden, I'm a citizen now and so I "matter" politically, but generally even immigrants who form a life here and become permanent residents or citizens are less likely to join political parties, vote, run for office or otherwise engage in civic and social life as fully as native-born Swedes. And you can understand why, given the cold shoulder they get all the way through! Many of us who have other options just leave after a few years, despairing of ever feeling at home. And that's Sweden's loss as much as ours, really.
You make a couple of statements that I think are worth exploring:
"That's an unhelpful comparison, but the optics weren't great". Why is it an unhelpful comparison?
"And the same is true at the EU level, since these debates are so fraught." Why are they so fraught?
My answer to those questions, though I'm interested in yours, is that our normal discourse has been curtailed by the view that anyone who expresses affinity for one culture over another is racist.
One doesn't even need to talk about culture to favor one type of immigrant over another (although it's also a valid point to raise). Economic reasons also suffice.
Thanks for sharing this very interesting story. “Deciding by not deciding” is, I think, a recurring theme in governance over the last few decades. At least in the US, politicians have largely avoided discussion of choices and tradeoffs, and when they haven’t, they’ve been punished by voters (see Bush senior/“read my lips, no new taxes” as one example). So on hard issues like these, we’ve drifted along without grappling directly, and here we are.
This is where I’m partial to the argument that the increasing democratization of politics has been a problem, actually. It started maybe with the introduction of C-SPAN and has now entered a completely toxic phase where people are just posturing and shitposting instead of governing—because that’s what the incentives of this Attention Economy feedback loop are rewarding.
Most people just don’t have the time, education; or attention span to engage rigorously with policy. Policy is hard! It’s inherently disappointing to everyone as you have to cut compromises or engage with real dilemmas that have no win-win solution. And you make mistakes because every policy action produces and equal and opposite and (usually unexpected) reaction. So you need to be able to retreat and optimize as you go without everyone dunking on you.
So, though the smoke-filled-rooms of yore weren’t ideal, at least you had people who could make tough calls together without the cameras watching and emails trumpeting their every move. Look what it took to get the Civil Rights or Voting Rights Act passed!
Could not agree more!
I'm with you, the disengaged just shouldn't be engaging... unlike Nixon said, don't put down your beer bongs and your crack pipes, inhale the soma and let people who sort of know what they're doing get about things.
>Some of us in our despair wondered darkly why it seemed "easy" for a bunch of uneducated men from Afghanistan or Somalia who didn't know the first thing about Sweden (or even like the place) to just come on in, when a Swede couldn't even easily bring their spouse or child!?
This sentiment is why legal immigrants turned American are some of the most zealot pro-strong borders Americans out there.
Australia is an interesting counter point, with an extremely generous welfare state, huge amounts of immigration yet very little blowback compared to AfD, FN and Stephen miller. My current working theory is that Australia courts skilled immigrants and aggressively protects against the literal unwashed asylum seeker masses who try to come in by boat.
Australians are certainly not immune to racial strife and have a real housing affordability crisis but the profile of its modal immigrant is different and hard to attack as a job stealer or welfare queen that you would find characiatures or elsewhere.
Right, for geographically obvious reasons Australia has far less of an issue with illegal immigration than other countries, so there's understandably less blowback.
That’s true but the context I took the OP was Europe and welfare, which doesn’t have the same challenges of illegal vs legal that happens in the US. You get all the blowback in Europe even with legal immigration.
I feel like Americans don't really understand. In most of Europe immigrants are given full access to the welfare system, in England they are given housing in Central London that locals can't afford and the right to bring to the over 5 "relatives" with no check to see how closely they are related. Also no expectation that they will learn English.
And the UK only deports people to Brazil, Romania and Albania. People from other places are never deported, no matter the situation.
The end of this post moves too quickly to critique of the left side of the spectrum, when it's clear from the rest of the post that it's conservative parties that are not representing conservative voters. That's what happened in Germany with Merkel, that's what happened recently in the UK, that's why Trump took over the Republican party.
Why this is is an interesting question (mostly I think it's because the people who lead conservative parties know things their voters don't) but it's not something that the left can fix.
Traditional conservative parties tried to protect their voters from touching the stove. We need to just let those voters touch the stove.
More importantly, they need to tell their voters that they're wrong. Matt regularly makes the point that the people politicians can persuade are their own base. That's what is needed here.
When fascists have taken over it's been because the centre right hasn't held... dunno how that applies to communists but wouldn't be surprised if it also proved true.
I don't think this is typically true of Communist regimes. The Bolsheviks led a coup against more moderate socialists. In China, Cuba, and many other places the communists successfully fought and won a revolution against an entrenched right wing regime. In Eastern Europe the Soviets imposed communist leadership.
I’m fascinated by the fact that zero Western liberal parties have tried to outflank the right on immigration even though (a) it’s not incoherent with historical left positioning on the issue and (b) it’s such an obvious way to accomplish the things you purportedly really care about.
I guess I’ve accepted that the Democrats have committed to a hard left stance on all cultural issues, but why couldn’t Labour try this? Or the parti socialiste? Why do these parties care about immigration to the detriment of priorities on Climate Change and wealth distribution (let alone Democracy issues)? Is it just that the far right is so odious about it that the left can’t bring themselves to agree with it?
Didn't the more mainstream parties in Denmark adopt the outflanking approach in the past few years to some electoral success?
There’s my anti-Danish bias shining through once again
"...my anti-Danish bias...."
I'm still pissed off about 865.
Oh you should try some. The dough is layered with butter and repeatedly folded and rolled out. And then these thin layers are pushed apart when baked creating an airy, crisp texture. They also come in a variety of fillings like cream cheese, and various fruit preserves. Pair it with your morning coffee for a great start to the day.
It happened to some degree in Denmark.
I got the impression that Starmer is half-assing it, pleasing no one while the Tories try the whole Reform-lite thing.
It is of course necessary for Democrats to moderate on cultural issues to win elections, and particularly to have any chance of competing in the senate.
That said, if the goal is "crank suppression" you need to have both parties committed to the goal. Even if you win 75% of the time (something of course Democrats aren't really close to) if the cranks have control of one of the parties the damage to the country will be really quite bad.
So is this really advice to the Republican establishment to try to tack further right on immigration to take back the party from Trump? Because there have been a lot of attempts at Trump impersonators in the post-Trump era and none of them have any juice with the Republican base.
I can’t help but notice that most of the people calling for the Republicans to surpress their cranks are people who would almost certainly vote for Democrats even if the cranks somehow were driven out of the Republicans. In which case, the right is simply not going to care what they think
I agree with you, but it is not possible for Democrats to win every election forever, so what's the alternative except for the conservative elites to try to fix their side before everything goes to shit?
The post is mostly about immigration, but very much the same scenario plays out with respect to trans issues where the majority of the public is not in favor of biological males competing in women’s sports or in hormones being prescribed to children but there are few in the Democratic party who will openly advocate for these common-sense positions. And to what end? To elect Trump and bring our country to its knees.
To the end of not having the government manage sports or medical treatments? “My body my choice” has been a longstanding position of liberals and applies to trans issues every bit as much as abortion and sex.
Trans issues are something that impact <1% of the population; even if you’re against it personally this is not a reason for a federal government takeover of issues that should be between sports leagues and parents.
I agree, personal choice is the principle to uphold. However, I think women should be able to choose to compete in sports leagues with fair competition. I also believe that promoting unproven and irreversible medical treatments for children to treat a condition without an onjective diagnosis is irresponsible, and is nowhere else practiced except in this one highly polticized domain.
Your body your choice doesn’t apply to shared spaces. You cannot have sex or poop in public. Men cannot decide to participate in women’s sports unilaterally. They need permission.
Are you suggesting we repeal Title IX and disband the FDA?
It is very bemusing that the left has taken the exact same rhetoric on trans issues that the right has taken on vaccines.
Trans issues are *not* confined to trans people themselves. Every trans athlete affects every other player in that division, let alone team or locker room, just to name a single example.