G Elliott Morris tried dunking on Matt for an April 2025 tweet where Matt cautioned against raising the salience of immigration in the context of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. I wonder why people have such a hard time understanding tactical vs strategic advice. In April 2025 Trump was still trusted on immigration and Garcia, just beneath the surface, had some legitimately unsavory aspects to his case. A focus on due process was appropriate, but not a focus on immigration.
Then DHS goons started shooting white Minnesotans and now it's immigration enforcement that's incinerating public trust of Trump on immigration.
This is not a hard needle to thread at a high level (sane enforcement, secure borders) but I do worry that progressives are going to take this shift in sentiment to start messaging things like "no one is illegal on stolen lands" because they think lenient enforcement is popular now. What's a pithier/better reflection of the politics than ABOLISH ICE?
I’ve increasingly found G Elliott Morris to be less of a credible source of political strategy and more of just a guy who is pandering to the heather cox Richardson/blusky crowd. Sometimes that means he has interesting posts! But his goal seems to be giving them data that satisfies their preconceived political narratives
His data analysis also seems to have become shakier to me over recent months. He's a more sophisticated statistician than I am, certainly, but it's very clear the bar for 'things Morris agrees with' is much lower and more flexible than the bar for other issues and positions. Categories get combined on assumption, everything people say that isn't 'economy' is suddenly evidence against the effectiveness of economic messaging, just way out over his skis on stuff.
Yeah, his conduct in the WAR Wars and unwillingness to clearly state “moderation (on average) leads to over performance” without excessive throat clearing has led me to this opinion of him
Yea I think MY really understates the degree to which the whole 'sanctuary city' concept and adoption of the related NGO rhetoric has been a kind of brinkmanship, daring a conservative government to do something like this. It's part of the larger set of cultural values that have rendered Democrats unelectable in huge swathes of the country. There's also a very real way in which fomenting crisis is bad for democracy. That's exactly why Trump wants it so bad. In terms of preserving our form of government, being able to win Senate seats in Ohio is millions of times more valuable than being able to win media cycles involving dead activists and dumb, undisciplined law enforcement.
Now of course we are where we are and I'm glad that Americans seem rightly disgusted by these shootings. The one over the weekend really has me seething and as a gun rights person myself I'm glad there's been at least some push back from those quarters, particularly given how craven they usually are in the face of abusive law enforcement. To the extent these can be used to get the administration to back off its most outrageous enforcement tactics I'm all for it. But it isn't a long term strategy and taken too far it risks feeding the same kind of cultural alienation thats made the Democrats a rump party run by geriatrics and clueless kids from the ivy league. If I were influential at the national level for the Democratic party I'd still be pushing for a big and total leadership shake up before going into the midterms. We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them.
"We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them."
Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists. In 2019, Movimiento Cosecha crashed his events and demanded he promise to end all deportations. He never went there but he eventually partially renounced the Obama immigration record for deporting too many people. Cut to: His incompetent border policy, include him joining the media pile-on of CBP agents who looked scary because they were shooing Haitians back over the Rio Grande on horseback.
Trump's been very successful at getting Democrats to react to an extreme restrictionist position by indulging an extreme sanctuary position. I see Dems like Ruben Gallego who are tougher than Biden - he gets screamed at for voting for the Laken Riley Act but doesn't apologize for it. But in 2028 they'll need to convince people that electing a Democrat doesn't put a "OPEN" sign on the border, and this will involve getting yelled at and being accused of being Trump 2.0.
He had limited energy. He made a bargain with the Warren wing for support and votes. It was all internal party and coalition management. The problem is that much of coalitions' interests and priorities were misaligned with public sentiments and values. Maybe it's the Harvardization of Democratic leadership and their staffers? (And by Harvardization I mean the elitist and well off selection effect of party staffers and progressive leaders outside of the party.)
Agree completely. I think the biggest risk right now is riding thermostatic forces, plus general backlash to Trump's madness, plus Democrats now dominating among reliable, off cycle election voters, to a really strong midterm showing, and convincing themselves that all of their problems are solved for 2028. They aren't, not by a long shot.
Lack of moderates in the Dem coalition and lack of influence of moderate Rs in Trump admin appears to mean this will continue to be a seesaw issue towards both extremes. The rest of us are stuck watching the extremes with horror.
The Democratic coalition is overwhelmingly filled with moderates, on the whole substantially more moderate than the GOP one.
The issue is that the moderates are generally upper-middle and professional class, educated people of high conscientiousness, and as such they are** very vulnerable to being shamed into allowing the (much smaller than in the GOP coalition) faction of extremists to drive policy and rhetoric.
** The outcomes of 2026 and 2028 will hinge on whether they've learned their lesson and we can start using the word "were" here or not.
Your interpretation is depressingly common, pretty much universal, but dead wrong. Biden's immigration policy was 1) an economic policy and 2) very effective. I'm not sure why they just let the idea it was done for "woke" reasons flap out in the breeze, or for that matter, why people who know better are not acknowledging it was the key policy for immaculate disinflation, and instead self-flagellating on behalf of our "out of touch" party.
Harsh immigration enforcement from 2021-2024 results in Biden losing decidedly on the economy. Hard stop.
The problem is, it was both economic policy and socially liberal, if not “woke.” People on the left tend to be conflicted about this aspect, that having illegal/undocumented migrants lowers labor costs, because that’s “exploitation” even if the people being exploited eagerly embrace it. As far as the effectiveness of Biden’s policy is concerned, it may have been effective for the upward bar of the K shaped economy and good for growth/the stock market, but it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side. The sudden influx of people worsened housing scarcity, the key economic issue for working people.
"it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side."
This is pretty vibe-y. Low end real wages went up under Biden...
And immigration doesn't worsen housing scarcity as much labor scarcity does.
Agreed that there is a cultural aspect. And we struggle a lot with it because we fundamentally do not believe in the legitimacy of the grievance. Which I'm not even saying as a slam on us, just pointing out it's a challenge. It's so hard for liberals to appreciate the conservative POV on this when WE ARE THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY LIVE WITH IMMIGRANTS and WE KNOW THEY ARE FINE. So it's hard to put yourself in the mind of somebody who has no fucking idea what they are talking about, but is passionate about it anyway, because the nice man on TV told them to be.
>Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists<
I've said it once and I'll say it a million times: people understandably talk about The Debate, and that is indeed the event that made the scales fall from their eyes. But it was letting the inmates run the asylum that was the true calling card of Joe Biden's decline. Would the Joe Biden of 1997 have been that susceptible to getting rolled by people who gave so little heed to the necessity of competing in elections? Probably not. We certainly never saw that kind of epic, damaging cluelessness from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
I strongly disagree with this. Goading actions like we saw in Minneapolis is precisely how we smash immigration enforcement. We cannot accept a quiet, neat, polite ethnic cleansing.
What’s happening is definitely a lawless and horrifying assault on immigrant communities, but I think it’s wrong to call it an ethnic cleansing and actually a disservice to those who have actually undergone ethnic cleansings
US citizens are being detained for their ethnicity. Trump wants to "denaturalize" people. The administration has at times casually expressed a desire to deport every Latino in the country. It's on the spectrum, Ben. There's no point between "here" and "cattle cars" where things have suddenly changed. Every inch they advance from here on out is just another little step, and then another, and then another, until you're 10 feet off the edge of the cliff.
I think it’s too soon to say what we’re in the midst of. The administration’s actions have not screamed “we intend to color in between the lines”, and they’re building a lot of detention facilities while being very casual about how they intend to avoid detaining citizens. Not to mention the assault on birthright citizenship.
Drawing a parallel between immigration enforcement and "ethnic cleansing" is why people don't trust Dems on immigration in the first place. Ridiculous comparison.
The trump admin has deployed a federal force 5x the size of the city police department in Minneapolis, and by all accounts they’re detaining people without due process based on skin color.
What trump is doing with ICE is closer to familial cleansing really, find one guy you're looking for and arrest everyone else around them who is related or looks close enough like them.
But that's the point, it's not normal immigration enforcement. It's notable because it's abnormally cruel. Pretending that ALL immigration enforcement is equal to ethnic cleansing cheapens both the severity of the current issue and claims of ethnic cleansing in the future.
Who said “all” immigration enforcement is ethnic cleansing? I think people are saying that about the current administration’s policy because of the way they are carrying out deportations (as well as denials of entry and attempts to “denaturalize”). Official asylum policy is now that only white South Africans qualify, I think that’s a sign of something. Nobody said Obama’s deportation policy was “ethnic cleansing,” though many on the left detested it and thought calling Obama “deporter in chief” was enough of an insult.
It's absolutely not substantially the same. The truth is this stance muddies the waters between normal processes and what were seeing Trump do with ICE now. It cheapens both immigration enforcement debate and ethnic cleansing conversations.
The normal processes are vastly worse than what Trump is doing now. They could quietly, neatly, gently deport millions of people. They are not. Pray they never decide to be effective.
People are terrible with large numbers. Yes, a million people stolen away from their homes and deported really is so much worse than two people dead. What martyrs give us is an opening to break the system. They are not, in and of themselves, all that bad. I expect there will be more martyrs, if the protestors are doing their job and aggravating ICE.
Is there any morally acceptably way for the US or any other country to deport people who are in the country illegally, say by overstaying a visa? Or is it all ethnic cleansing?
No. No visas, no borders, no immigration controls. Nothing. Ever.
Previously, we did not have a shot of actually resisting the policy of immigration enforcement. Now we do, because they have been so spectacularly brutish.
I think this policy proposal is both bad on the merits and also is the path to Republican control of the white house and both houses of Congress for the next couple decades.
Right, which is why this must never be Democratic policy! Instead, they only have to talk tough, avoid bad optics at the border, and simply not actually enforce the law on many people. There is more than enough room for well-meaning incompetence to allow people to stay and work.
Dems have the same problem today that they did in 2024. There's no viable alternative to the current leadership willing to step up and challenge them in a real way. You can't beat someone with noone. As a rank and file Democratic voter, I'm endlessly frustrated by that. Competing for leadership positions is exactly how the party moves forward, and they seem to have decided in 2020 that they're not going to allow that anymore.
I don't see this changing in 2026, at least on a leadership level. I think it'll take a presidential primary in 2028, which will actually be truly contested, for anything to change. I hope rank and file Dem voters don't feel the same pressure to fall in line behind one candidate as they did in 2020.
Yea I also worry about the primary process being a repeat of 2020 and making things even worse. The Biden presidency turned out to be a disaster in significant part due to his age but in the moment I think it was the key to him winning. He was so old, and had been around so long as a 'moderate' that you could plausibly believe that he was different from most of the other candidates who were lining up to say the craziest shit possible. There won't be anyone like that in the wings next time and even if there was we cannot have another septuagenerian at the top of the ticket and even someone in their 60s is probably a really bad idea.
Whatever you thought about sanctuary cities before, you can’t comply with the current version of ICE. Trump is making that impossible. The question is whether the 2016-2024 public view of immigration enforcement continues, or if we’re in a new paradigm where the public sees that ICE isn’t doing the job they expected.
But I do also want to push back, neighbor, against all the terror of the left seizing the narrative. This fundamentally misunderstands what has happened in the last two years: the left activist crowd is no longer running the show, has had their electoral theories thoroughly discredited; and what remains is actually a pretty sane PSA/Beutlerian faction who are simply agitating for (1) a house-cleaning of party leadership that has been strategically failing for a straight decade despite a handful of tactical victories, and (2) seizing a very real opportunity for strategic initiative at a critical moment when history has bequeathed it to us.
Yes, we need sane slogans. But it is genuinely dangerously wasting a strategic window that can VERY easily close on us before we get our shit together, if we just keep obsessing over boxing out the left internally instead of actually going on offense.
I think that both Trump's drop on the issue overall, and polling on specifics showed that that approach of ceding all action on a broad issue constellation, like immigration, is dumb. Morris was poking holes in an unthinking heuristic that only ended up egging the right on, and as others have pointed out, made about as much sense as Democrats in 2006 not wanting to talk about Iraq.
It was a bad call then, and I think that past events have strengthened that case.
Yes, the big test is going to be who wins the nomination in 2028. I could see say Shapiro or Beshear trying to "thread the needle" to an actually sustainable political equilibrium over immigration while a AOC or even Newsome might be all Leeroy Jenkins (ie stolen land) which as we saw under Biden is a recipe for major political headaches for the Dems.
Matt was wrong about that advice. The Garcia case was the one that really collapsed Trump’s approval rating on this issue. Compared to that initial collapse, two dead bodies have only been moving him around 5 percentage points. Maybe this movement will accelerate, I sure hope so.
We see that the protests are working to a certain extent: a majority of Americans are disturbed by what's going on in Minneapolis and Trump is losing support. But it's clear that this is far from a deadly blow to Republicans' prospects.
I say this as someone who's horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis. Once this episode passes, with three years to go until the next presidential election, it might be better for people left of center to focus on the question "Why are we so weak? Why can't we decisively defeat them?" rather than questions of small-ball electoral tactics that might help in the short term (pivot to healthcare? a new immigration policy proposal?).
The issue, I think, is about values more than specific policy. Strikingly, there's one thing left and right seem to agree on: enforcement of immigration law is going to require morally reprehensible actions. The right is basically ok with this, whereas the left isn't. Most people therefore correctly understand that right now there are just two options: mass violations of civil rights or open borders, even if politicians don't explicitly say this. (Biden didn't "run on" open borders, but the borders were open!) Liberals correctly point out that there *exist* policies that would be more humane, but voters probably suspect this is just a cudgel -- when a moderate liberal gets into power, will they actually implement these?
I think that to break this dynamic and decisively win, liberals are going to have to take a look at themselves and ask how they've gotten here. My take is that liberals don't have a good answer to the question "Who are we?" Egalitarianism has such a strong hold over the left that immigrants are held in higher moral esteem than most of our countrymen.
Liberals can talk all they want about wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration law, but people understand this dynamic. Until values change, commitments to future enforcement will ring hollow. Now would be a good time for people left of center to sit down, talk with one another, and do some introspection about why their values don't resonate with most Americans. We could chalk it up to Americans being a bunch of Nazis, but actually, most Americans are responding admirably to what's happening. I think there's still some hope, but winning will require more than poring over the latest poll numbers.
Scott galloway keeps pointing out thar going after the employers would be the most effective tactic, and it has the benefit of not being morally reprehensible. Why not do that? As Matt points out in the article, the most efficient use of resources would be to go after criminals in cooperating jurisdictions.
I agree with this, but again I feel like when Democrats raise this point, it's just a cudgel. Democrats used to attack Romney over how inhumane e-verify would be!
Perfectly enforce e-verify, so that millions of undocumented immigrants are out of work? How will their kids eat?
Until the left's values change, I don't think this will happen.
I think your problem here is thinking that consequences of enforcement are negative for those affected. They are! They also broke the law. Every single undocumented migrant knows there's a chance, no matter how long they are here and how established they become, that one day they will be deported. Enforcing the law is not morally reprehensible. Promises of employment by shady business
owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible. But being deported even though you have native born kids? I mean. That's the consequences of your own actions.
Until the left understands that what I described is the median voter position they'll never get the politics of this right.
Conservative friend I was talking to about the "stop separating families!" chant put it this way: We "separate families" all the time, we put dads in jail if they commit wire fraud or drive drunk. "Stop separating families" was one of the tools in the 2013 immigration reform toolbox, then Stephen Miller assiduously pursued family separation as a way to discourage more immigration, and Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position.
As a former Democratic voter, I actually doubt Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position. I think Democrats sort of drifted toward soft nullification (hence on precisely one level, contra Yglesias, the sanctuary policy is a kind of nullification of federal law enforcement. But there are other levels to pursue.)
They drifted into this disposition of soft nullification on drug laws, prostitutes walking the block, illegal handgun possession, a whole host of "men with guns" going after someone not immediately hurting another person in the TV frame actually. Not just immigration! It happened across a range of topics in the 2010s.
Chris Caldwell has written about this, albeit with too deterministic a view of Civil Rights law. But he's right that it's a kind of merger of 60s left-wing people power with bourgeois middle class property holding. Now a sort of memory of the 60s is the defining bourgeois moral. Which means everything is permitted, nothing is forgiven, and as Yglesias has written wisely on before, you can retreat to your priced up suburb while public quality of life enforcement falls out.
This sort of legalism is unpersuasive to me. Somebody crossing a border and then living a productive life, minding their own business is far less threatening than someone recklessly endangering others by driving drunk.
A more sustainable legal status quo would be a large benefit for everyone, I agree. However the Trump administration has illegalized over a million people residing in the US, as has been pointed out elsewhere. They've been snatching people doing required check-ins and no criminal record (being in the country illegally is a civil offense). There is a vast upending of an imperfect and evolving, but still present, status quo. That is cruel. It is illogical. It will make American citizens worse off, no matter what the Senate math says. I reject the notion that sheepishly pretending it isn't is an electoral winner for Democrats, anyway.
The problem is that the public has a rough idea of who should be allowed to come here and why and who should and shouldn’t be deported, but it’s poorly aligned with who the law says should be allowed to come here. Fixing that alignment would go a long way towards addressing the issue
I mean, I agree with this. I think the left has to get to a place where they recognize that failure to enforce immigration law is a moral evil. It’s a subversion of “Our Democracy,” which they otherwise value so much.
I just think that when push comes to shove, they won’t have what it takes to enforce the law given their current values. The problem is even bigger: the whole world now knows that it’s probably a good idea to show up at the gates the second a Democrat gets elected, and the Democrat might just say “Yes, we have to let you in because that’s International Law” (which, of course, supersedes domestic law because it’s more cosmopolitan).
What international laws are you referencing? Congress has incorporated the treaties you're probably thinking of directly into US law. So when Democrats say that immigrants have the right to make an asylum claim they're basing it on US law, not international law. It's not about being more cosmopolitan.
Mostly agree, but it is notable Trudeau and Johnson also oversaw enormous waves of immigration after COVID as well that wracked their domestic politics. It sort of reduces the causal theory of Democrats have a unique ideology; I think Anglophone societies have actually done such a good job partially assimilating people around the world to speaking English that the cultural barrier to immigration falls a bit. So immigration to deal with pent-up COVID savings pursuing more goods and services than ever becomes a much more enticing option.
“Promises of employment by shady business owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible.
Isn’t that just how those business tacitly need to function? I don’t hear anyone talking about how cheap food is currently, so increasing labor costs seems problematic.
Yeah the options for a handful of industries (e.g. agriculture, hospitality) are basically
1. Explicit carve-outs from mandatory e-verify and accept that they’ll still use a ton of undocumented labor
2. Massively expand guest worker or other visa programs to legalize the cheap immigrant labor they currently use
3. Accept that costs are going to go up bigly in the short term, and either (a) accept that prices will go up too or (b) provide massive subsidies in exchange for price controls
My preferred policy here would be 2. We will probably get 3(b).
There are no caps on H2A temporary work visas for agriculture. For other jobs, the H2B temporary work visa is capped at 66,000 per year, but this can be administratively increased - last fiscal year, they nearly doubled it due to demand (the cap was still hit after a few more months).
I think the median voter position is a bit more nuanced as to the desirability of deporting non-criminal illegal immigrant parents of citizen children.
This is true, but also, I think there is a legitimately hard question about how to deal with people who came here illegally but since have built a reasonable life and been productive members of society, or who came here as kids and have been here their whole lives.
You can show mercy to deserving people, but only if you can couple that with being willing to actually enforce the laws. Otherwise, everyone just knows that if they hide out long enough they get to stay.
Which is why you don’t endorse this view. You say something entirely different. Then you come into power, allow millions of people to enter (I wish it were 30 million!) and make it impossible for the next administration to unwind it. Some things are more important than winning or losing elections.
If one were looking at it from a Rawlsian, behind the veil of ignorance perspective, it’s so obvious that one would not only support open borders but treat it as one of the most important political issues out there.
Even from a non-veiled perspective it seems like the Golden Rule should apply, I value my right to travel wherever I want with my US passport giving me visa-free access to most places and visas being pretty easy to get for a lot of the remainder, and would want to have the right to immigrate whenever I want, so others should have the same right.
I'm kind of astonished the regime Bryan Caplan praises (United Arab Emirates) for accomplishing more freedom of association for workers and employers is just straightforwardly more anti-liberal rights than any MAGA Republican I've met. Do you know of any libertarian writer who has criticized Caplan for this?
No, I think this is reasonable. In practice, allowing people the ability to come and go at all is much better than full rights to a selected few. Second, one is, obviously, bound to be concerned that immigrants and their children might eventually vote to restrict immigration and other socialistic measures. For that reason, restricting voting rights is reasonable. I would suggest putting the bar at a 1500 SAT or 34 ACT score.
They should just fake it till they make it. As soon as someone actually takes the step it will all start rolling (and people may be surprised where the opposition comes from)
Or what if the right’s value change so that they see all people as the same? If your argument is premised on voters being fixed compromise makes sense but if you want to change values anyway why not change the other side’s?
One big reason Republicans don't want to go after employers is because many of them are those employers themselves or at least the employers are big donors.
Prior to Trump, most Republican leadership avoided talking about the most effective employer focused strategies precisely because they could be effective and would hurt corporate profits.
Traditional Republicans preferred to cynically ignore effective solutions so they could use immigration as a red-meat issue to keep the base fired up while ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor for themselves and their donors.
It's still morally reprehensible. Those people are trying to run a business in the economic system they were given, which means hiring undocumented people. And shutting them down screws their employees anyway.
We kind of reflexively think "employer = big evil corporation = victimless crime" but if you game out in your head how that kind of enforcement would go, it's not something you're doing to big evil corporations (who have the resources to avoid illegal hires) and not a victimless crime.
This and the policy of only deporting undocumented people who have NOT been here long (say, less than 3 or 5 years). This would not destabilize society, as Trump is doing, AND would send a clear message that we are no longer going to tolerate illegal immigration in the future.
E-verify sounds good in theory but the issue is how it applies to small businesses and households. It could turn pretty authoritarian if you tried to apply it to family restaurants or people trying to hire babysitters or house cleaners… If you just want to apply it to big companies, fine, but I imagine those are already screening everybody.
You can negotiate the scale at which it would apply based on what would be the most efficient use of resources, but why would it be authoritarian? Obviously you don't want the companies to be paying for the verification process.
I-9 verification rules already apply to anyone hiring employees or 1099 workers, but auditing compliance would be a huge effort. Automating verification through e-verify would help. Making it harder to allow false documentation would also help.
The business lobby is always the answer whenever this question comes up.
I think we need to do better than just trotting out this tired centrist suggestion.
For instance, perhaps we do “mandatory e verify + a grace period”. I dunno; the point is, we need realistic suggestions that the business lobby won’t just tank immediately.
the problem is that it would be too effective. promising to sabotage the economy can be good on campaign but is politically damaging in the long run, cf. tariffs
Yes, I thought this article was spot-on in terms of its diagnosis.
What I think liberals need to think about now is the normative part. Is this commitment to egalitarianism a good thing?
When Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates get together and say “We basically agree on almost all of our objectives, so let’s debate strategy,” is this what we want? Or is Coates’ worldview its own form of evil that can’t have a place in government?
We’re having a discussion initiated by the murder of two peaceful American citizens, and the SB commentariat is discussing whether Coates’ commitment to civil justice is the real evil.
Aside from laughing about the ridiculousness of this response: someone up above asked “why are we here” and my simple answer is: our presence here is God’s punishment because we stopped being decent.
I think there are two separate axes here - big/small tent politics and woke/normie politics.
I think it's valid to say small tenters like Coates are not allowed in the big tent because they spoil the fun. But it's not valid to say that Coates doesn't belong in the tent because of wokeness. If there are any people willing to practice anti-racism in a big tent way, they should be welcome.
> The notion that Trump, if he took office, would be willing and perhaps even eager to do something horrifying in the name of border security is part of his electoral appeal.
I don't think enforcement of immigration law will require morally reprehensible actions. First term Obama is gold standard for enforcement. Enforcement now means reforming the asylum process, rapidly processing the Biden era asylum claims, and stepped up enforcement on employers, all of which is eminently doable without brutalizing anyone.
This will probably sound kind of wild to many people, but I sincerely believe that deterring future irregular migrants should be added to the equation when weighing morality.
I've read a lot of stories on how systematic the abuse of migrants is as they travel through Mexico and attempt to cross. As an outsider, it's of course truly hard to say what's in the best interest of another person, especially when these other persons number in the millions.
But I can safely say that if you're living in, say, Guatemala, and saved up 8 or 9,000 dollars to make the trip up north and you either a) get deported shortly after b) get abducted and abused / extorted / held for ransom along the way c) die while crossing the desert then you would have been better doing something else with your money and time. And yes, many people live in dire circumstances in these countries, but 8 or 9k can also buy a lot of safety and economic potential closer to home.
Maybe. Even that amount of money may not buy a better life if you're constantly extorted. It's too bad we can't set up manufacturing in these countries to try to stabilize the economy and make predation less of a choice for income.
I think what he's saying is that this doesn't constitute enforcement of immigration law because it doesn't expel illegal immigrants who aren't otherwise committing crimes. The only way to expel those people is to take morally reprehensible actions, and therefore, we should steel ourselves to taking morally reprehensible actions.
But I don’t think it’s really possible to deport all the illegal immigrants who have been here a long time, and I don’t think the public actually wants that anyway. They want a controlled flow and a sense of order at the border, and that violent criminal illegal immigrants will be deported.
I think that is a correct assessment of what a majority of the public wants. I would also add that if your laws require you to take morally reprehensible actions in order to enforce them, then that is probably a good sign that your laws ought to be changed. But I wasn't talking about my personal views. I was just explaining the logic of the original comment, which argued that Democrats should change their values and embrace the need to take morally reprehensible actions in order to achieve the goal of deporting 100% of illegal immigrants.
Or maybe we just enforce border crossings and let society absorb the people who are here. Let them have kids and become taxpayers and contribute to our society, which sure as hell needs the labor.
This is one of the many ways Democrats lose on immigration. The idea that it's "morally reprehensible" to enforce immigration law implies it's morally acceptable to break it, so there's something "morally reprehensible" about immigration law. Not enforcing ANY immigration law because of the "morally reprehensible" parts of it flies in the face of any definition of democratic law.
The people's representatives voted for existing immigration law. Arguing that parts of it are wrong so none of it should be enforced says the people don't get the ultimate vote on the law.
In a democracy, the response to "morally reprehensible" law must be to change the "morally reprehensible" parts.
Many Americans see deliberate tolerance of law-breaking as creating moral hazard (rewarding undesirable behavior). Some of those Americans are legal immigrants who resent the suggestion that they shouldn't have followed the legal process.
No. Sorry, but that's bad reading comprehension. Sometimes in life you may have a goal that is not morally reprehensible in theory, but that in practice can only be achieved through morally reprehensible means. In that situation, you have to make a choice. You either decide that the goal is so indispensable that it justifies any morally reprehensible means that are necessary to achieve it, or you decide the opposite.
i doubt that Obama only deported illegal immigrants who had committed a crime or that there was zero force involved in arresting and deporting every illegal immigrant.
The humane option is just to turn away people at the border without visas but make it easier to get them, and then deporting convicted criminals (who are in custody anyway so no civil rights violations are needed) from the interior but leaving peaceful people alone. We didn’t have open borders—that’s a frankly insulting claim to millions of people who have had their visas or family members’ visas denied.
Also, I imagine it would be a difficult choice if you had to do something morally reprehensible to save millions of lives. Doing something morally reprehensible just to keep peaceful people born in a different place out of the country? I mean okay if someone’s standard for “willing to do morally reprehensible things” is that low I don’t see how you could really trust or have a society with them and the key issue ought to just be how to disempower them.
It doesn't matter what a good system looks like. Politically, all that is possible right now is the status quo, because it's what works best for Republicans - allow the immigrants in, reap the economic benefits, and also hold it as an unassailable culture war advantage.
Any amount of disruption in the immigration system or border security is going to be blamed on Democrats, no matter who is responsible. And it'll be that way forever, because we are unwilling to argue our position and instead try to pretend the issue doesn't exist.
Democrats' most likely 2028 nominee right now (Newsom) signed a bill giving undocumented immigrants publicly funded healthcare (Medi-Cal). So, it's not obvious the party has moderated at all in response to losing all power at the federal level. Voters seem to detest politicians who are unresponsive to their concerns. It's a pretty scary prospect. Like, what does the GOP have to do for Democrats to start abandoning some of their policy planks that are unpopular either nationwide or in swing states they need to win to start winning elections again?
Sounds like a good thing for an electability focused candidate to use to beat Newsom over the head with.
Don't forget Democrats overwhelmingly selected the electability candidate in 2020. Our voters are far less dumb than our online activist base is. (And that's speaking as a member of that online base who was desperately pulling for Bernie.)
IMO this is a really bad outcome of this whole conflict. Both the right and the left are now invested in getting everyone to accept this idea that the only way to do immigration enforcement is masked goons and terror, and this is just not true. A likely outcome of all this is that Americans end up convinced that you have to have brutality and terror to enforce immigration law, and either decide it's not worth it or decide that they won't believe it's being enforced without the shows of force and masked goons. Both outcomes are pretty bad.
What we want is ultimately some kind of competent, non-brutal immigration enforcement. There is nothing morally bad about sending back people trying to come to the US illegally, deporting people who have overstayed their visa, fining employers for having a bunch of illegal immigrants working for them, or deporting people here illegally who get in trouble with the law. And while sometimes that (like all other policing) will look cruel and make people sad, it can be done without masked goons or standoffs on the streets or any of that. Ideally, the folks who have been here 10+ years without getting into any trouble or requiring public assistance can then get some kind of path to legal residency, we can just grant the DACA people permanent residency, etc.
As with policing, I feel like there are crazy activist demands that voters rightly will not support, and those get in the way of sensible reform of policing that could actually do some good, while keeping police around since we actually need them.
If he hadn't run on it, he would've lost. Not sufficient but necessary to his strategy. However you want to break it down, it's hard to argue that he didn't reap gigantic political advantage by calling a roughly functioning (if with duct tape) immigration system broken.
Which should have some bearing on how much we accept "immigration" as a material, non-vibes issue, because clearly the way people feel about immigration, like crime, has nothing to do with facts.
My genuine suggestion is that Democrats say a lot of tough, serious-sounding things and then basically change nothing. If the tough things piss off leftist activists that everyone hates, all the better. Biden saw his economically-driven immigration policy's jibing with the cultural left's preference for open borders as a good thing, because it kept the issue uncontroversial within the coalition. It turns out it was a weakness and a distinction he should have drawn.
Maybe I’m stuck on fighting the last war, but isn’t the humane solution Comprehensive Immigration Reform? Create a real pathway to citizenship and couple it with tough border security, e-Verify, and a reasonable level of internal enforcement. Most people on the left would fall in line and support that, however hot tempers are running now.
Partly right. But the borders were not open under Biden, not even close. It was still hard to get into this country. And wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration are in place and work but only to a limited extent.
Ultimately, there's no way to make generalized obedience to immigration law incentive compatible while practicing just proportionality and respecting human rights. Illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and the incentives to do it are very strong.
They were open in the sense that you could show up, get yourself paroled into the country on a highly dubious asylum claim, then take your chances with a far out court date, and maybe also hope in the interim to be deemed a 'long settled American' deserving of amnesty and protection in a blue jurisdiction.
In some ways, the 2021-24 situation was basically the same "anarcho-tyranny" that was rampant in municipal governance at the time; the law was enforced on those who are willing to abide by it.
Plenty of people followed the process, and very few of them were permitted into the country. Those who did not follow the process were given a "hack" that would let them in for an indeterminate period of time, something that the advocates helping them short-circuit asylum law were clearly hoping would lead to them becoming sympathetic enough to be given a more permanent pass by the time the court system wended its way to them in two decades.
The main point of protest is to affect public opinion, not necessarily to make Trump stop. If it doesn't affect public opinion it's pointless, but if does affect public opinion, then it is not pointless. If Trump refuses to stop even as the protests are causing his popularity to decrease, then his refusal to stop will hurt his popularity even more.
This is just not true. There are many examples. Family separation (or at least the official incarnation of it) was an example of trump changing course in response to public opinion shifting.
This Substack is obsessed with borders. The number of border crossings was high during Biden’s term! But it had already started dropping by the time Trump was elected. It’s entirely possible to tighten the border up enough that this stops being an issue, and pursue an enforcement policy that primarily focuses on criminals. You do not need masked military police murdering protesters in cities.
Some of the more obsessive far lefties won't talk, their minds are always already made up. There is seemingly no end to how much they can bleed their hearts or try to patch the inevitable failings of duality. I would ignore them and focus on the left to center crowd, people with at least some sense of when it's time to cut their losses and regroup. I know a lot of Democrats who would support this move if there were a leader in this regard. It's an unenviable position in that even if you win you're still stuck with a gigantic federal deficit and chaotic world order undermining progress going forward.
The Democrats have been holding out for the Comprehensive Immigration Deal for a generation. I suspect many versions of it poll above 50%, but the outer wings of both parties have always been opposed nearly any compromise and willing to play brinkman.
In the meantime the 20 year limbo state of non-legal residents with quasi-non enforcement, especially with regards to work has been bad. It encourages all sorts of ID fraud, under the table payments and exploitation and precarity for the immigrants.
Actual E-verify enforcement even if strategic is probably the only way to get back to the table for the Comprehensive deal, but then something has to be given on qualifications and probably the path to citizenship.
"I say this as someone who's horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis. Once this episode passes, with three years to go until the next presidential election, it might be better for people left of center to focus on the question 'Why are we so weak? Why can't we decisively defeat them?'"
This is literally the only thing liberals have talked about since 2016. Maybe it's time for some positive thinking.
Something I've wondered about Matt's obsession with Republicans generically maintaining a trust advantage over Democrats on immigration even as Trump's numbers have cratered (which, to his credit, he's at least partially adjusted as the situation has changed) is if this might be a little like how in 2006-2008, Republicans would still poll as more trusted on "national security", even as Bush overall and the Iraq War specifically were becoming more and more unpopular.
In both cases, I think that Republicans as a whole maintained some residual "we trust the right-wing party more to be tough" sentiment. But ultimately, it was the specific politics of the current president that mattered. Like on Bush and the Iraq War, Trump started with a strong political hand but the actual results of his decision-making have been transparently disastrous. And like with Bush, because of ambient discontent with the economy and this same bad decision making impacting other areas too, fence sitters are no longer inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, even on an issue where they were previously willing to.
The other reason I bring this up is that in 2006-2008, there was still some residual anxiety from the "you're with us or with the terrorists" dynamic of 2002-2004 among certain types of Democratic pundits who were too slow to recognize the changing situation. But ultimately, Democrats were on solid political ground nominating an anti-Iraq War candidate in 2008. (McCain actually was a better opportunity for the GOP to reclaim their default trust on the issue than Republicans are likely to seek in 2028, but at the end of the day, he supported the war and was associated with a discredited political party.)
I will give MY credit for understanding the issue is now "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it" and not "what is the ideal immigration enforcement regime?" Both of the people shot in Minnesota were American citizens. Six prosecutors resigned rather than try to go after the widow of one of the victims for no reason.
We're way past this being an immigration issue. A decent number of people on this board are still trying to relitigate the Biden administration or 2020. Meanwhile, local 2A groups in Minnesota are coming out against the shooting.
It's also worth noting that we haven't merely stumbled into a controversy over the issue of "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it." There is a real constituency in this country for the "yes" side of that argument, and they are well represented.
There are people who support it, but I doubt it's 30%. Much less if you don't count people who blindly accepted what they were told and didn't review video evidence.
I'm not sure if you could find any Trump administration policy that is less popular. Tariffs are close. I guess withholding Epstein docs, but they've managed to avoid framing that as "policy" so far.
I agree that only a minority go that far. But (a) politics and policy do respond to constituencies that comprise 20% (or whatever) of the electorate - that's a lot of people, and they move the center of gravity, (b) one of the many problems with that ideology is that the whole idea behind it is to achieve the ability to exercise power with or without majority support - i.e. to just hold onto power once you get it. Not saying that public opinion doesn't matter in authoritarian countries. It still does, to a degree, as we can see from e.g. Vladimir Putin's reluctance to do a general mobilization. But Putin wouldn't bat an eyelash if his approvals were in the 40% range.
I never imagined I’d see the day when the Dems were the “security” party and the GOP were the “education” party. And yet we’re heading that way. The current moment is like watching 2 soccer teams trading own-goals.
I think an interesting question here is what it means for winning back the senate. Lots of senators were haunted by voting yes on the Iraq war. Will senators be haunted for voting yes on ICE funding? Or will all of the blowback be limited to Trump who is on his way out in 3 years anyway? I'm worried that congress is going to escape without the blame they deserve.
I don't understand the shot Matt takes at Robert Hur. Hur is a patriotic hero who tried to tell the truth about President Biden's decrepitude and was attacked by lying partisan Democrats for doing it.
He's a partisan hack telling us what anyone with a brain already knew: Biden is a touch senile. Not good obviously, but presidential senility seems to be the preference.
Except that a bunch of actual partisan hacks on the Democratic side attacked him for saying the truth. Josh Marshall called him a prostitute for saying it!
Biden's decrepitude was a lie perpetrated by SV donors. He had a speech impediment that was worsening due to normal age-related slowing of cognition. Period. He was never senile. Hur can get fucked. I don't have to call him a liar, he called himself a liar. He contradicted himself.
Besides all the process violations, Trump/Noem/Miller are violating 2 principles of common-sense conservatism that are much easier for average people to understand:
1) Competence matters in using deadly force. Most people understand panic, and that's one reason most people don't want everyone carrying a gun. Regardless of your political beliefs, police are supposed to be better at this, and the folks running ICE show no interest in that half of the bargain.
2) Local matters. Our ancestors resisted a street-level federal police force in part because it's easier to resist an us-vs.-them mentality when you live in the community you're policing.
Right, local police have a much better handle on local gun laws etc. The minneapolice police chief said in a press conference that past year they confiscated 900 (i think) firearms and arrested hundreds of violent criminals, all without shooting anyone.
Any one-to-one comparison is going to be a little glib, so forgive me, but I want to riff on this point: "Outsmarting your opponents with disciplined behavior is a move that you are allowed to make in politics."
There are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course. The one I covered most myself was Tea Party organizing that made life difficult for elected Democrats until they scaled back or voted against the Affordable Care Act. There were protests on the Capitol lawn, raucous town hall meetings, elected officials getting yelled at when they went to work. Democrats didn't like this, but it was generally understood as a part of politics, and they were frustrated that Obama's movement went to sleep, creating space for the Tea Party to mobilize.
More recently, there were conservative protests of COVID restrictions and school gender identity and race policies under Joe Biden. It was a major scandal when the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Merrick Garland's DOJ, comparing the disruption of school board meetings by parents who opposed liberal gender or race policies to "domestic terrorism." Garland announced that the FBI would look into it: "The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate." Fair to say that Republicans/conservatives saw an attack on free assembly. They spent years investigating the DOJ over this, and my cards on table, I think Garland and the NSBA were crazy to do it.
Obviously, Stephen Miller et al now talk about disruptive liberal protesters the way the NSBA talked about those angry parents, and the Bondi DOJ is dusting off Civil War-era codes to try to charge Democratic politicians with conspiracy to overthrow the government. There's a permission structure for this, which you can read about in the 2024 book "Unhumans," blurbed by JD Vance: The left is dangerous and you must do whatever it takes to keep them from power.
But there's a more traditionally American principle, that you're allowed to tell the government to fuck off sometimes.
<i>here are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course.</i>
I can't think of even one where the government substantively changed course, though. The ACA was passed and remains in force, school policies on gender issues are getting pressure from the administration but not changing substantively.
The analogy that I'd keep in mind is the 1950's-1960's; the pro-stability South was at least as well organized as the anti-ICE forces, and a combination of federal troops, federal police, and federal financial pressure completely won against it. Sure, it got pictures of active-duty troops attacking schoolchildren with fixed bayonets, but the media didn't care so it didn't really matter.
I don't have a Free Press subscription, but feel it is worth pointing out they have an editorial entitled "Kristi Noem's reckless lies". Anyone know what their stance on this is?
Typo: "But blanket prohibition of cooperation is an activist demand that arose in Biden’s second term and was adopted in many blue jurisdictions, often without sufficient consideration."
This was probably supposed to say Obama's second term.
Disappointed MY didn't point to "sharpening the contradictions" as a counterpoint to "slow boring of hard boards". Seems the former is the winning hand here.
Substantively, though, many commenters here are still putting this in context of immigration. It should be thought of rather in the context enforcing authoritarian rule in general and is part and parcel of legal harassment of Jack Smith, Jerome Powell and any number of other actors.
Right, all the "Biden lied too about the border being secure" talk here feels like such a bizarre preoccupation to me in a context where the people ICE has killed were natural-born American citizens as far as possible from "the border" (unless we're deciding that the lack of toughness on the Canada border is discrediting Democrats now).
SB came about at a time in 2020 where centrists needed to yell at people on the left to stop being crazy. Too many people here live in a perpetual 2020, in part because they're fundamentally motivated by their disappointment in Biden more than dealing with the specifics of the challenges of American life in 2026.
Matt mentioned this in passing, but I think we should spend a bit more time on how quickly the vibes in the Minesotta story changed from "holy shit immigrants stole billions of dollars, what a cluster" to "they are killing innocent Americans in the streets".
Sending in ICE has been such a narrative loser for Trump, they could have continued milking the fraud story all the way to the elections.
In retrospect voters in general received the "defending democracy" stuff by Biden and then Harris as cover for unpopular policies of the administration.
I think the problem also is that it just doesn't work as a point of persuasion. There was a lot of churn in the electorate that probably did reflect conservatives voting for Harris because they thought Trump was a fundamental threat, but those people didn't need convincing, and people who didn't already think that Trump was an authoritarian threat weren't going to be convinced by a campaign.
Not to fall victim to hypocrisy murder-suicide myself, but it is funny that Lowry is all about federalism and states' rights until Minnesota is okay with having more immigrants than he is.
Eh, I agree Lowry is a hypocrite on many things (which is why I liked your comment), but the response there would be that states cannot constiturionally restrict immigrants from moving across borders once they are in the country, which makes that distinguishable from gun rights or abortion.
"It’s Noem, Lewandowski, and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino who’ve pushed for creating these dramatic scenes. Which I bring up not to paint Homan and Lyons for sainthood, but as a reminder that this really is a choice that Trump made. He has unleashed chaos, deliberately, by choosing to side with the pro-chaos faction of his administration over the advice offered by more seasoned professionals. Contra Lowry, this is not a question of nullification or left-wing self-radicalization; it’s Trump making a choice."
This is right. And it's worth asking, why is he making that choice? The reason is that for him, and especially for Vance, their foremost enemies aren't immigrants at all. Immigrants are a means to an end. Their foremost enemies are liberals, and liberal-ism - not just the progressive left-liberalism of the last decade, but the whole tradition of classical liberalism that goes back to the Founders. Just as in foreign policy, it's now crystal clear that their #1 foreign enemy was never China. Their #1 foreign enemies are NATO, the EU, and the liberal governments behind them.
I'll take the affirmative case for the 2nd Amendment here. It is correct and valuable that outrageous government misconduct results in intolerable deadly violence in a free country. The Feds are not, in fact, supposed to be able to act like the Gestapo and the fact that we have an armed populace dramatically increases the barriers to doing so. It's resource intensive. It's a huge political problem. It's bad for would be authoritarians in all sorts of ways to have to regularly execute citizens in the streets to get their policy preferences. Liberals of all stripes should always have recognized this but I'm happy to welcome the recently enlightened.
Yes, government agents should definitely be held accountable for summarily executing civilians and patriots like Pretti should strive to be more combat effective when assaulted by lawless thugs.
Government agents are the primary authorized user of force in any modern country. Which means it they should have the highest obligation of anyone for responsible behavior while armed.
I think Matt misunderstands what Lowry means by nullification, and ends up agreeing with him. If smart and disciplined protesting works to make it impossible to enforce immigration law, that is the nullification. Think about how you would feel if, before Roe was overturned, groups of protesters with help from red state government made it impossible to get an abortion. Would that be ok?
I've voted against Trump every time on fitness and rule of law grounds, and always felt like I was voting for the lesser of two evils. People on the left need to think more seriously about why democracy isn't a winning issue for them. Ignoring and undermining the law when you don't like it is very bad for democracy. People who just watch Fox News could honestly believe the left is the more undemocratic faction.
In the past I'd have said this as the start of an argument for persuasion. Now I'm saying this as an argument against escalation. If this question is settled by violence, you will probably lose, and that will be horrible for the country. Trump holds the reigns of power, there are people on the right who just as sincerely believe you are trying to undermine democracy and destroy the country, law enforcement and the military people are more likely to be right wing.
Trump is very bad and we have a good chance of winning through the courts and elections. If it has to become a question of violence, it would be really bad if the violence comes from people trying to stop the Federal Government from enforcing the law. Protesting ICE is a horrible idea.
But it only works as “nullification” because it reveals the enforcement as being politically unpopular. This is why abortion protests never worked; most people support legal abortion. Whereas here, we’re finding that most American want border security but also do not want mass deportation of long-term, non-violent illegal immigrants.
Not really. (Noting that I knew one of the people Trump pardoned for FACE violations quite well.)
The big thing with anti-abortion protests was that doing anything that actually hindered access to abortion was criminal, and Democrats enforced those laws vigorously. A half-dozen people blockading doorways could have shut down any clinic, and there were plenty of people who would have done that if it wasn't that you could get multiple years of prison for doing so.
(It will be interesting to see if the anti-ICE protest during a church service gets the same kind of aggressive FACE Act prosecution as the anti-abortion blockades. I'm betting against.)
It’s legitimate for ICE to use reasonable force to prevent people from interfering with their duties. It’s also legitimate for people to record them or engage in civil disobedience to make a point. If voters are more sympathetic to the people engaging in civil disobedience, well that’s democracy.
And ICE is doing itself no favors; they’re not using *reasonable* force. They’re often menacing peaceful bystanders recording their actions. There have been cases of them beating protesters and, as we’ve seen, killing two of them.
Even beyond that, they’re inserting themselves into the lives of law abiding citizens in ways that feel invasive.
Imagine if, in response to abortion clinic protestors, blue state police were beating the protestors, menacing those peacefully holding songs, and raiding churches on Sunday to try to apprehend people who have protested clinics. Most people would have found this appalling, even if the abortion clinic protestors had been barricading clinics.
“… reasonable force to prevent people from interfering with their duties. It’s also legitimate for people to record them or engage in civil disobedience…”
Both sides seem to have a misunderstanding of where the boundaries are. Tragically poor understanding on the part of a large contingent of protesters.
This keeps reminding me of 2020 but from the other side. The anti-anti-ICE line of "well, these activists are provoking these confrontations with ICE and it's not very smart of them and they could get themselves killed" reminds me of "Kyle Rittenhouse shouldn't have been there." Like ok, sure. If my son is 17 or 18, and there's some bullshit going on in Portland (there probably will be), I will not be encouraging him to go down there and get involved in the chaos out of concern for his safety. But at the same time, this is a free country and we have a first amendment and a second amendment. It is your God-given right as an American to scream "F U" at police, federal agents, pretty much anybody in the government, and your right to film them too, and in... more states than I realized, your right to open carry. It's on the government agents not to respond. They're not bears. There's no rule that you can't taunt them.
"and in... more states than I realized, your right to open carry"
It's not intuitive these days, but allowing open carry is actually the historical norm in American jurisdictions if firearms aren't otherwise banned, whereas concealed carry was overwhelmingly prohibited even in jurisdictions with little to no other restrictions on gun ownership.
A little surprised by this take from you but again, I wouldn't advise it, I certainly wouldn't want my son doing that, but this was the line people threw out to deflect from the more obvious reality that the people who REALLY shouldn't have been there were the rioters.
G Elliott Morris tried dunking on Matt for an April 2025 tweet where Matt cautioned against raising the salience of immigration in the context of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. I wonder why people have such a hard time understanding tactical vs strategic advice. In April 2025 Trump was still trusted on immigration and Garcia, just beneath the surface, had some legitimately unsavory aspects to his case. A focus on due process was appropriate, but not a focus on immigration.
Then DHS goons started shooting white Minnesotans and now it's immigration enforcement that's incinerating public trust of Trump on immigration.
This is not a hard needle to thread at a high level (sane enforcement, secure borders) but I do worry that progressives are going to take this shift in sentiment to start messaging things like "no one is illegal on stolen lands" because they think lenient enforcement is popular now. What's a pithier/better reflection of the politics than ABOLISH ICE?
I’ve increasingly found G Elliott Morris to be less of a credible source of political strategy and more of just a guy who is pandering to the heather cox Richardson/blusky crowd. Sometimes that means he has interesting posts! But his goal seems to be giving them data that satisfies their preconceived political narratives
His data analysis also seems to have become shakier to me over recent months. He's a more sophisticated statistician than I am, certainly, but it's very clear the bar for 'things Morris agrees with' is much lower and more flexible than the bar for other issues and positions. Categories get combined on assumption, everything people say that isn't 'economy' is suddenly evidence against the effectiveness of economic messaging, just way out over his skis on stuff.
1. The HCR / Bluesky crowd drive me nuts
2. The former are an important faction of the Democratic electorate
Yeah, his conduct in the WAR Wars and unwillingness to clearly state “moderation (on average) leads to over performance” without excessive throat clearing has led me to this opinion of him
You should listen to the Nate Silver episode of Central Air w Josh Barro, they talk about Morris…
In Morris's case and others, being a star statistician and having any clue about political strategy appear to be mutually exclusive.
Yea I think MY really understates the degree to which the whole 'sanctuary city' concept and adoption of the related NGO rhetoric has been a kind of brinkmanship, daring a conservative government to do something like this. It's part of the larger set of cultural values that have rendered Democrats unelectable in huge swathes of the country. There's also a very real way in which fomenting crisis is bad for democracy. That's exactly why Trump wants it so bad. In terms of preserving our form of government, being able to win Senate seats in Ohio is millions of times more valuable than being able to win media cycles involving dead activists and dumb, undisciplined law enforcement.
Now of course we are where we are and I'm glad that Americans seem rightly disgusted by these shootings. The one over the weekend really has me seething and as a gun rights person myself I'm glad there's been at least some push back from those quarters, particularly given how craven they usually are in the face of abusive law enforcement. To the extent these can be used to get the administration to back off its most outrageous enforcement tactics I'm all for it. But it isn't a long term strategy and taken too far it risks feeding the same kind of cultural alienation thats made the Democrats a rump party run by geriatrics and clueless kids from the ivy league. If I were influential at the national level for the Democratic party I'd still be pushing for a big and total leadership shake up before going into the midterms. We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them.
"We need people who can articulate a vision and we still don't have them."
Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists. In 2019, Movimiento Cosecha crashed his events and demanded he promise to end all deportations. He never went there but he eventually partially renounced the Obama immigration record for deporting too many people. Cut to: His incompetent border policy, include him joining the media pile-on of CBP agents who looked scary because they were shooing Haitians back over the Rio Grande on horseback.
Trump's been very successful at getting Democrats to react to an extreme restrictionist position by indulging an extreme sanctuary position. I see Dems like Ruben Gallego who are tougher than Biden - he gets screamed at for voting for the Laken Riley Act but doesn't apologize for it. But in 2028 they'll need to convince people that electing a Democrat doesn't put a "OPEN" sign on the border, and this will involve getting yelled at and being accused of being Trump 2.0.
He had limited energy. He made a bargain with the Warren wing for support and votes. It was all internal party and coalition management. The problem is that much of coalitions' interests and priorities were misaligned with public sentiments and values. Maybe it's the Harvardization of Democratic leadership and their staffers? (And by Harvardization I mean the elitist and well off selection effect of party staffers and progressive leaders outside of the party.)
Agree completely. I think the biggest risk right now is riding thermostatic forces, plus general backlash to Trump's madness, plus Democrats now dominating among reliable, off cycle election voters, to a really strong midterm showing, and convincing themselves that all of their problems are solved for 2028. They aren't, not by a long shot.
“Complacency and hubris.”
They rely too much on the stick of Republican abuses rather than the carrot of Democratic polcies.
Lack of moderates in the Dem coalition and lack of influence of moderate Rs in Trump admin appears to mean this will continue to be a seesaw issue towards both extremes. The rest of us are stuck watching the extremes with horror.
The Democratic coalition is overwhelmingly filled with moderates, on the whole substantially more moderate than the GOP one.
The issue is that the moderates are generally upper-middle and professional class, educated people of high conscientiousness, and as such they are** very vulnerable to being shamed into allowing the (much smaller than in the GOP coalition) faction of extremists to drive policy and rhetoric.
** The outcomes of 2026 and 2028 will hinge on whether they've learned their lesson and we can start using the word "were" here or not.
Your interpretation is depressingly common, pretty much universal, but dead wrong. Biden's immigration policy was 1) an economic policy and 2) very effective. I'm not sure why they just let the idea it was done for "woke" reasons flap out in the breeze, or for that matter, why people who know better are not acknowledging it was the key policy for immaculate disinflation, and instead self-flagellating on behalf of our "out of touch" party.
Harsh immigration enforcement from 2021-2024 results in Biden losing decidedly on the economy. Hard stop.
The problem is, it was both economic policy and socially liberal, if not “woke.” People on the left tend to be conflicted about this aspect, that having illegal/undocumented migrants lowers labor costs, because that’s “exploitation” even if the people being exploited eagerly embrace it. As far as the effectiveness of Biden’s policy is concerned, it may have been effective for the upward bar of the K shaped economy and good for growth/the stock market, but it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side. The sudden influx of people worsened housing scarcity, the key economic issue for working people.
"it was not so good for the lived experience of those on the downward side."
This is pretty vibe-y. Low end real wages went up under Biden...
And immigration doesn't worsen housing scarcity as much labor scarcity does.
Agreed that there is a cultural aspect. And we struggle a lot with it because we fundamentally do not believe in the legitimacy of the grievance. Which I'm not even saying as a slam on us, just pointing out it's a challenge. It's so hard for liberals to appreciate the conservative POV on this when WE ARE THE ONES WHO ACTUALLY LIVE WITH IMMIGRANTS and WE KNOW THEY ARE FINE. So it's hard to put yourself in the mind of somebody who has no fucking idea what they are talking about, but is passionate about it anyway, because the nice man on TV told them to be.
I love it when Matt’s like “more conservative people might say…” and then it turns out his entire comment section is conservative.
>Biden did a lot of damage to Democratic credibility by being so easily worked by activists<
I've said it once and I'll say it a million times: people understandably talk about The Debate, and that is indeed the event that made the scales fall from their eyes. But it was letting the inmates run the asylum that was the true calling card of Joe Biden's decline. Would the Joe Biden of 1997 have been that susceptible to getting rolled by people who gave so little heed to the necessity of competing in elections? Probably not. We certainly never saw that kind of epic, damaging cluelessness from Bill Clinton or Barack Obama.
I strongly disagree with this. Goading actions like we saw in Minneapolis is precisely how we smash immigration enforcement. We cannot accept a quiet, neat, polite ethnic cleansing.
What’s happening is definitely a lawless and horrifying assault on immigrant communities, but I think it’s wrong to call it an ethnic cleansing and actually a disservice to those who have actually undergone ethnic cleansings
US citizens are being detained for their ethnicity. Trump wants to "denaturalize" people. The administration has at times casually expressed a desire to deport every Latino in the country. It's on the spectrum, Ben. There's no point between "here" and "cattle cars" where things have suddenly changed. Every inch they advance from here on out is just another little step, and then another, and then another, until you're 10 feet off the edge of the cliff.
I think it’s too soon to say what we’re in the midst of. The administration’s actions have not screamed “we intend to color in between the lines”, and they’re building a lot of detention facilities while being very casual about how they intend to avoid detaining citizens. Not to mention the assault on birthright citizenship.
Say that to the people torn away from their families. Every kidnapping is a crime.
“A crime” does not necessarily mean “ethnic cleansing”
If your family includes people in the country illegally, it is in fact not a "crime" to "tear them away" but an enforcement of the law.
Maybe you'd like to change the law in question because you think it's bad. Fair play—have at it.
For the same reasons I would reject a democratically elected holocaust, I reject this too.
Drawing a parallel between immigration enforcement and "ethnic cleansing" is why people don't trust Dems on immigration in the first place. Ridiculous comparison.
In fairness, Nicholas is a *die-hard* libertarian, not a Democrat or anything like it.
The trump admin has deployed a federal force 5x the size of the city police department in Minneapolis, and by all accounts they’re detaining people without due process based on skin color.
It’s not not ethnic cleaning.
What trump is doing with ICE is closer to familial cleansing really, find one guy you're looking for and arrest everyone else around them who is related or looks close enough like them.
But that's the point, it's not normal immigration enforcement. It's notable because it's abnormally cruel. Pretending that ALL immigration enforcement is equal to ethnic cleansing cheapens both the severity of the current issue and claims of ethnic cleansing in the future.
Who said “all” immigration enforcement is ethnic cleansing? I think people are saying that about the current administration’s policy because of the way they are carrying out deportations (as well as denials of entry and attempts to “denaturalize”). Official asylum policy is now that only white South Africans qualify, I think that’s a sign of something. Nobody said Obama’s deportation policy was “ethnic cleansing,” though many on the left detested it and thought calling Obama “deporter in chief” was enough of an insult.
Is it really better when they burst into a workplace and round up the employees?
None of the first paragraph means the second one is true
I am sorry I cannot tell you what you want to hear. I prefer the truth.
It's absolutely not substantially the same. The truth is this stance muddies the waters between normal processes and what were seeing Trump do with ICE now. It cheapens both immigration enforcement debate and ethnic cleansing conversations.
The normal processes are vastly worse than what Trump is doing now. They could quietly, neatly, gently deport millions of people. They are not. Pray they never decide to be effective.
People are terrible with large numbers. Yes, a million people stolen away from their homes and deported really is so much worse than two people dead. What martyrs give us is an opening to break the system. They are not, in and of themselves, all that bad. I expect there will be more martyrs, if the protestors are doing their job and aggravating ICE.
Is there any morally acceptably way for the US or any other country to deport people who are in the country illegally, say by overstaying a visa? Or is it all ethnic cleansing?
No. No visas, no borders, no immigration controls. Nothing. Ever.
Previously, we did not have a shot of actually resisting the policy of immigration enforcement. Now we do, because they have been so spectacularly brutish.
You must really like living in a right wing authoritarian state if you’re pushing these goals
I think we should do what is necessary to have Democrats elected.
I think this policy proposal is both bad on the merits and also is the path to Republican control of the white house and both houses of Congress for the next couple decades.
Right, which is why this must never be Democratic policy! Instead, they only have to talk tough, avoid bad optics at the border, and simply not actually enforce the law on many people. There is more than enough room for well-meaning incompetence to allow people to stay and work.
Perfidia?
There is no constituency for 'smash[ing] immigration enforcement' and deporting foreign nationals illegally in the country is not ethnic cleansing.
Really? Explain sanctuary cities then. There’s a constituency, just not a majority.
Excuse me while I LMAO.
Sanctuary cities doesn't mean wanting avoiding ethnic cleansing
Dems have the same problem today that they did in 2024. There's no viable alternative to the current leadership willing to step up and challenge them in a real way. You can't beat someone with noone. As a rank and file Democratic voter, I'm endlessly frustrated by that. Competing for leadership positions is exactly how the party moves forward, and they seem to have decided in 2020 that they're not going to allow that anymore.
I don't see this changing in 2026, at least on a leadership level. I think it'll take a presidential primary in 2028, which will actually be truly contested, for anything to change. I hope rank and file Dem voters don't feel the same pressure to fall in line behind one candidate as they did in 2020.
Yea I also worry about the primary process being a repeat of 2020 and making things even worse. The Biden presidency turned out to be a disaster in significant part due to his age but in the moment I think it was the key to him winning. He was so old, and had been around so long as a 'moderate' that you could plausibly believe that he was different from most of the other candidates who were lining up to say the craziest shit possible. There won't be anyone like that in the wings next time and even if there was we cannot have another septuagenerian at the top of the ticket and even someone in their 60s is probably a really bad idea.
Whatever you thought about sanctuary cities before, you can’t comply with the current version of ICE. Trump is making that impossible. The question is whether the 2016-2024 public view of immigration enforcement continues, or if we’re in a new paradigm where the public sees that ICE isn’t doing the job they expected.
“Fire ICE” is my current favorite.
But I do also want to push back, neighbor, against all the terror of the left seizing the narrative. This fundamentally misunderstands what has happened in the last two years: the left activist crowd is no longer running the show, has had their electoral theories thoroughly discredited; and what remains is actually a pretty sane PSA/Beutlerian faction who are simply agitating for (1) a house-cleaning of party leadership that has been strategically failing for a straight decade despite a handful of tactical victories, and (2) seizing a very real opportunity for strategic initiative at a critical moment when history has bequeathed it to us.
Yes, we need sane slogans. But it is genuinely dangerously wasting a strategic window that can VERY easily close on us before we get our shit together, if we just keep obsessing over boxing out the left internally instead of actually going on offense.
I think that both Trump's drop on the issue overall, and polling on specifics showed that that approach of ceding all action on a broad issue constellation, like immigration, is dumb. Morris was poking holes in an unthinking heuristic that only ended up egging the right on, and as others have pointed out, made about as much sense as Democrats in 2006 not wanting to talk about Iraq.
It was a bad call then, and I think that past events have strengthened that case.
Yes, the big test is going to be who wins the nomination in 2028. I could see say Shapiro or Beshear trying to "thread the needle" to an actually sustainable political equilibrium over immigration while a AOC or even Newsome might be all Leeroy Jenkins (ie stolen land) which as we saw under Biden is a recipe for major political headaches for the Dems.
I have already seen pretty much the exact messaging you have in your last paragraph.
Matt was wrong about that advice. The Garcia case was the one that really collapsed Trump’s approval rating on this issue. Compared to that initial collapse, two dead bodies have only been moving him around 5 percentage points. Maybe this movement will accelerate, I sure hope so.
We see that the protests are working to a certain extent: a majority of Americans are disturbed by what's going on in Minneapolis and Trump is losing support. But it's clear that this is far from a deadly blow to Republicans' prospects.
I say this as someone who's horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis. Once this episode passes, with three years to go until the next presidential election, it might be better for people left of center to focus on the question "Why are we so weak? Why can't we decisively defeat them?" rather than questions of small-ball electoral tactics that might help in the short term (pivot to healthcare? a new immigration policy proposal?).
The issue, I think, is about values more than specific policy. Strikingly, there's one thing left and right seem to agree on: enforcement of immigration law is going to require morally reprehensible actions. The right is basically ok with this, whereas the left isn't. Most people therefore correctly understand that right now there are just two options: mass violations of civil rights or open borders, even if politicians don't explicitly say this. (Biden didn't "run on" open borders, but the borders were open!) Liberals correctly point out that there *exist* policies that would be more humane, but voters probably suspect this is just a cudgel -- when a moderate liberal gets into power, will they actually implement these?
I think that to break this dynamic and decisively win, liberals are going to have to take a look at themselves and ask how they've gotten here. My take is that liberals don't have a good answer to the question "Who are we?" Egalitarianism has such a strong hold over the left that immigrants are held in higher moral esteem than most of our countrymen.
Liberals can talk all they want about wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration law, but people understand this dynamic. Until values change, commitments to future enforcement will ring hollow. Now would be a good time for people left of center to sit down, talk with one another, and do some introspection about why their values don't resonate with most Americans. We could chalk it up to Americans being a bunch of Nazis, but actually, most Americans are responding admirably to what's happening. I think there's still some hope, but winning will require more than poring over the latest poll numbers.
Scott galloway keeps pointing out thar going after the employers would be the most effective tactic, and it has the benefit of not being morally reprehensible. Why not do that? As Matt points out in the article, the most efficient use of resources would be to go after criminals in cooperating jurisdictions.
I agree with this, but again I feel like when Democrats raise this point, it's just a cudgel. Democrats used to attack Romney over how inhumane e-verify would be!
Perfectly enforce e-verify, so that millions of undocumented immigrants are out of work? How will their kids eat?
Until the left's values change, I don't think this will happen.
I think your problem here is thinking that consequences of enforcement are negative for those affected. They are! They also broke the law. Every single undocumented migrant knows there's a chance, no matter how long they are here and how established they become, that one day they will be deported. Enforcing the law is not morally reprehensible. Promises of employment by shady business
owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible. But being deported even though you have native born kids? I mean. That's the consequences of your own actions.
Until the left understands that what I described is the median voter position they'll never get the politics of this right.
Conservative friend I was talking to about the "stop separating families!" chant put it this way: We "separate families" all the time, we put dads in jail if they commit wire fraud or drive drunk. "Stop separating families" was one of the tools in the 2013 immigration reform toolbox, then Stephen Miller assiduously pursued family separation as a way to discourage more immigration, and Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position.
As a former Democratic voter, I actually doubt Democrats woke up with a "never make any immigrant unhappy" position. I think Democrats sort of drifted toward soft nullification (hence on precisely one level, contra Yglesias, the sanctuary policy is a kind of nullification of federal law enforcement. But there are other levels to pursue.)
They drifted into this disposition of soft nullification on drug laws, prostitutes walking the block, illegal handgun possession, a whole host of "men with guns" going after someone not immediately hurting another person in the TV frame actually. Not just immigration! It happened across a range of topics in the 2010s.
Chris Caldwell has written about this, albeit with too deterministic a view of Civil Rights law. But he's right that it's a kind of merger of 60s left-wing people power with bourgeois middle class property holding. Now a sort of memory of the 60s is the defining bourgeois moral. Which means everything is permitted, nothing is forgiven, and as Yglesias has written wisely on before, you can retreat to your priced up suburb while public quality of life enforcement falls out.
This sort of legalism is unpersuasive to me. Somebody crossing a border and then living a productive life, minding their own business is far less threatening than someone recklessly endangering others by driving drunk.
A more sustainable legal status quo would be a large benefit for everyone, I agree. However the Trump administration has illegalized over a million people residing in the US, as has been pointed out elsewhere. They've been snatching people doing required check-ins and no criminal record (being in the country illegally is a civil offense). There is a vast upending of an imperfect and evolving, but still present, status quo. That is cruel. It is illogical. It will make American citizens worse off, no matter what the Senate math says. I reject the notion that sheepishly pretending it isn't is an electoral winner for Democrats, anyway.
The problem is that the public has a rough idea of who should be allowed to come here and why and who should and shouldn’t be deported, but it’s poorly aligned with who the law says should be allowed to come here. Fixing that alignment would go a long way towards addressing the issue
I mean, I agree with this. I think the left has to get to a place where they recognize that failure to enforce immigration law is a moral evil. It’s a subversion of “Our Democracy,” which they otherwise value so much.
I just think that when push comes to shove, they won’t have what it takes to enforce the law given their current values. The problem is even bigger: the whole world now knows that it’s probably a good idea to show up at the gates the second a Democrat gets elected, and the Democrat might just say “Yes, we have to let you in because that’s International Law” (which, of course, supersedes domestic law because it’s more cosmopolitan).
What international laws are you referencing? Congress has incorporated the treaties you're probably thinking of directly into US law. So when Democrats say that immigrants have the right to make an asylum claim they're basing it on US law, not international law. It's not about being more cosmopolitan.
Mostly agree, but it is notable Trudeau and Johnson also oversaw enormous waves of immigration after COVID as well that wracked their domestic politics. It sort of reduces the causal theory of Democrats have a unique ideology; I think Anglophone societies have actually done such a good job partially assimilating people around the world to speaking English that the cultural barrier to immigration falls a bit. So immigration to deal with pent-up COVID savings pursuing more goods and services than ever becomes a much more enticing option.
“Democracy” doesn’t have the right to restrict the rights of people who are outside the community because they never got to vote for those laws.
“Promises of employment by shady business owners and farmers who know better and take advantage of poor migrants for cheap labor? That's morally reprehensible.
Isn’t that just how those business tacitly need to function? I don’t hear anyone talking about how cheap food is currently, so increasing labor costs seems problematic.
Yeah the options for a handful of industries (e.g. agriculture, hospitality) are basically
1. Explicit carve-outs from mandatory e-verify and accept that they’ll still use a ton of undocumented labor
2. Massively expand guest worker or other visa programs to legalize the cheap immigrant labor they currently use
3. Accept that costs are going to go up bigly in the short term, and either (a) accept that prices will go up too or (b) provide massive subsidies in exchange for price controls
My preferred policy here would be 2. We will probably get 3(b).
There are no caps on H2A temporary work visas for agriculture. For other jobs, the H2B temporary work visa is capped at 66,000 per year, but this can be administratively increased - last fiscal year, they nearly doubled it due to demand (the cap was still hit after a few more months).
I think the median voter position is a bit more nuanced as to the desirability of deporting non-criminal illegal immigrant parents of citizen children.
This is true, but also, I think there is a legitimately hard question about how to deal with people who came here illegally but since have built a reasonable life and been productive members of society, or who came here as kids and have been here their whole lives.
You can show mercy to deserving people, but only if you can couple that with being willing to actually enforce the laws. Otherwise, everyone just knows that if they hide out long enough they get to stay.
Enforcing immigration law is reprehensible, in and of itself. This is our best opportunity to break immigration enforcement for a decade.
Endorsing this view is the path to losing future elections and the median voter
Which is why you don’t endorse this view. You say something entirely different. Then you come into power, allow millions of people to enter (I wish it were 30 million!) and make it impossible for the next administration to unwind it. Some things are more important than winning or losing elections.
I’m not sure if you’re insane, baiting, or just hate whites.
On the contrary, I love white people. The free movement of labor is just that good.
If one were looking at it from a Rawlsian, behind the veil of ignorance perspective, it’s so obvious that one would not only support open borders but treat it as one of the most important political issues out there.
Even from a non-veiled perspective it seems like the Golden Rule should apply, I value my right to travel wherever I want with my US passport giving me visa-free access to most places and visas being pretty easy to get for a lot of the remainder, and would want to have the right to immigrate whenever I want, so others should have the same right.
I reject the idea that we have ti justify it through appeals to fairness. It would beneficial to us right this very second.
I'm kind of astonished the regime Bryan Caplan praises (United Arab Emirates) for accomplishing more freedom of association for workers and employers is just straightforwardly more anti-liberal rights than any MAGA Republican I've met. Do you know of any libertarian writer who has criticized Caplan for this?
No, I think this is reasonable. In practice, allowing people the ability to come and go at all is much better than full rights to a selected few. Second, one is, obviously, bound to be concerned that immigrants and their children might eventually vote to restrict immigration and other socialistic measures. For that reason, restricting voting rights is reasonable. I would suggest putting the bar at a 1500 SAT or 34 ACT score.
They should just fake it till they make it. As soon as someone actually takes the step it will all start rolling (and people may be surprised where the opposition comes from)
California made it illegal for municipalities to mandate e-verify.
Or what if the right’s value change so that they see all people as the same? If your argument is premised on voters being fixed compromise makes sense but if you want to change values anyway why not change the other side’s?
One big reason Republicans don't want to go after employers is because many of them are those employers themselves or at least the employers are big donors.
Prior to Trump, most Republican leadership avoided talking about the most effective employer focused strategies precisely because they could be effective and would hurt corporate profits.
Traditional Republicans preferred to cynically ignore effective solutions so they could use immigration as a red-meat issue to keep the base fired up while ensuring a steady flow of cheap labor for themselves and their donors.
All the more reason for democrats to push for this
Agreed. Use it as a wedge between MAGA xenophobes and traditional pro-business republicans.
Divide Oppo on dividable ffronts & Win.
It's still morally reprehensible. Those people are trying to run a business in the economic system they were given, which means hiring undocumented people. And shutting them down screws their employees anyway.
We kind of reflexively think "employer = big evil corporation = victimless crime" but if you game out in your head how that kind of enforcement would go, it's not something you're doing to big evil corporations (who have the resources to avoid illegal hires) and not a victimless crime.
This and the policy of only deporting undocumented people who have NOT been here long (say, less than 3 or 5 years). This would not destabilize society, as Trump is doing, AND would send a clear message that we are no longer going to tolerate illegal immigration in the future.
E-verify sounds good in theory but the issue is how it applies to small businesses and households. It could turn pretty authoritarian if you tried to apply it to family restaurants or people trying to hire babysitters or house cleaners… If you just want to apply it to big companies, fine, but I imagine those are already screening everybody.
You can negotiate the scale at which it would apply based on what would be the most efficient use of resources, but why would it be authoritarian? Obviously you don't want the companies to be paying for the verification process.
Big companies and (crucially) their contractors are not screening everyone, at least not effectively.
They are, but there are gaps that make it too easy for the applicant to use false documents and that make it too hard to audit the records.
I-9 verification rules already apply to anyone hiring employees or 1099 workers, but auditing compliance would be a huge effort. Automating verification through e-verify would help. Making it harder to allow false documentation would also help.
Authoritarian?
The business lobby is always the answer whenever this question comes up.
I think we need to do better than just trotting out this tired centrist suggestion.
For instance, perhaps we do “mandatory e verify + a grace period”. I dunno; the point is, we need realistic suggestions that the business lobby won’t just tank immediately.
Then ask them to come up with legalization/visa schemes to go along with it. What does it mean, 'tank it immediately'? They are, as you say, a lobby.
Mandatory eVerify... starting the week before inauguration of the next Republican president.
the problem is that it would be too effective. promising to sabotage the economy can be good on campaign but is politically damaging in the long run, cf. tariffs
This comment makes me think of a Slow Boring piece from two years ago!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-rise-of-cosmopolitanism-and-the
Yes, I thought this article was spot-on in terms of its diagnosis.
What I think liberals need to think about now is the normative part. Is this commitment to egalitarianism a good thing?
When Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates get together and say “We basically agree on almost all of our objectives, so let’s debate strategy,” is this what we want? Or is Coates’ worldview its own form of evil that can’t have a place in government?
We’re having a discussion initiated by the murder of two peaceful American citizens, and the SB commentariat is discussing whether Coates’ commitment to civil justice is the real evil.
Aside from laughing about the ridiculousness of this response: someone up above asked “why are we here” and my simple answer is: our presence here is God’s punishment because we stopped being decent.
I think there are two separate axes here - big/small tent politics and woke/normie politics.
I think it's valid to say small tenters like Coates are not allowed in the big tent because they spoil the fun. But it's not valid to say that Coates doesn't belong in the tent because of wokeness. If there are any people willing to practice anti-racism in a big tent way, they should be welcome.
That was a great, prescient piece:
> The notion that Trump, if he took office, would be willing and perhaps even eager to do something horrifying in the name of border security is part of his electoral appeal.
I don't think enforcement of immigration law will require morally reprehensible actions. First term Obama is gold standard for enforcement. Enforcement now means reforming the asylum process, rapidly processing the Biden era asylum claims, and stepped up enforcement on employers, all of which is eminently doable without brutalizing anyone.
This will probably sound kind of wild to many people, but I sincerely believe that deterring future irregular migrants should be added to the equation when weighing morality.
I've read a lot of stories on how systematic the abuse of migrants is as they travel through Mexico and attempt to cross. As an outsider, it's of course truly hard to say what's in the best interest of another person, especially when these other persons number in the millions.
But I can safely say that if you're living in, say, Guatemala, and saved up 8 or 9,000 dollars to make the trip up north and you either a) get deported shortly after b) get abducted and abused / extorted / held for ransom along the way c) die while crossing the desert then you would have been better doing something else with your money and time. And yes, many people live in dire circumstances in these countries, but 8 or 9k can also buy a lot of safety and economic potential closer to home.
Maybe. Even that amount of money may not buy a better life if you're constantly extorted. It's too bad we can't set up manufacturing in these countries to try to stabilize the economy and make predation less of a choice for income.
I think what he's saying is that this doesn't constitute enforcement of immigration law because it doesn't expel illegal immigrants who aren't otherwise committing crimes. The only way to expel those people is to take morally reprehensible actions, and therefore, we should steel ourselves to taking morally reprehensible actions.
But I don’t think it’s really possible to deport all the illegal immigrants who have been here a long time, and I don’t think the public actually wants that anyway. They want a controlled flow and a sense of order at the border, and that violent criminal illegal immigrants will be deported.
I think that is a correct assessment of what a majority of the public wants. I would also add that if your laws require you to take morally reprehensible actions in order to enforce them, then that is probably a good sign that your laws ought to be changed. But I wasn't talking about my personal views. I was just explaining the logic of the original comment, which argued that Democrats should change their values and embrace the need to take morally reprehensible actions in order to achieve the goal of deporting 100% of illegal immigrants.
I think the OP had several good points but turned it into a strawman argument that assumed america wants 100 per cent deportations.
Or maybe we just enforce border crossings and let society absorb the people who are here. Let them have kids and become taxpayers and contribute to our society, which sure as hell needs the labor.
This is one of the many ways Democrats lose on immigration. The idea that it's "morally reprehensible" to enforce immigration law implies it's morally acceptable to break it, so there's something "morally reprehensible" about immigration law. Not enforcing ANY immigration law because of the "morally reprehensible" parts of it flies in the face of any definition of democratic law.
The people's representatives voted for existing immigration law. Arguing that parts of it are wrong so none of it should be enforced says the people don't get the ultimate vote on the law.
In a democracy, the response to "morally reprehensible" law must be to change the "morally reprehensible" parts.
Many Americans see deliberate tolerance of law-breaking as creating moral hazard (rewarding undesirable behavior). Some of those Americans are legal immigrants who resent the suggestion that they shouldn't have followed the legal process.
No. Sorry, but that's bad reading comprehension. Sometimes in life you may have a goal that is not morally reprehensible in theory, but that in practice can only be achieved through morally reprehensible means. In that situation, you have to make a choice. You either decide that the goal is so indispensable that it justifies any morally reprehensible means that are necessary to achieve it, or you decide the opposite.
If it was bad reading comprehension, no apology would be necessary. However, you seem to be committing the "ends justify means" fallacy.
If the law is morally reprehensible, in a democracy we must make an argument to so persuade voters, not tell voters "the ends justify the means."
Otherwise, we undermine the rule of law, which is one reason so many voters dislike the idea of tolerating "illegal" immigration.
i doubt that Obama only deported illegal immigrants who had committed a crime or that there was zero force involved in arresting and deporting every illegal immigrant.
The humane option is just to turn away people at the border without visas but make it easier to get them, and then deporting convicted criminals (who are in custody anyway so no civil rights violations are needed) from the interior but leaving peaceful people alone. We didn’t have open borders—that’s a frankly insulting claim to millions of people who have had their visas or family members’ visas denied.
Also, I imagine it would be a difficult choice if you had to do something morally reprehensible to save millions of lives. Doing something morally reprehensible just to keep peaceful people born in a different place out of the country? I mean okay if someone’s standard for “willing to do morally reprehensible things” is that low I don’t see how you could really trust or have a society with them and the key issue ought to just be how to disempower them.
It doesn't matter what a good system looks like. Politically, all that is possible right now is the status quo, because it's what works best for Republicans - allow the immigrants in, reap the economic benefits, and also hold it as an unassailable culture war advantage.
Any amount of disruption in the immigration system or border security is going to be blamed on Democrats, no matter who is responsible. And it'll be that way forever, because we are unwilling to argue our position and instead try to pretend the issue doesn't exist.
Democrats' most likely 2028 nominee right now (Newsom) signed a bill giving undocumented immigrants publicly funded healthcare (Medi-Cal). So, it's not obvious the party has moderated at all in response to losing all power at the federal level. Voters seem to detest politicians who are unresponsive to their concerns. It's a pretty scary prospect. Like, what does the GOP have to do for Democrats to start abandoning some of their policy planks that are unpopular either nationwide or in swing states they need to win to start winning elections again?
Sounds like a good thing for an electability focused candidate to use to beat Newsom over the head with.
Don't forget Democrats overwhelmingly selected the electability candidate in 2020. Our voters are far less dumb than our online activist base is. (And that's speaking as a member of that online base who was desperately pulling for Bernie.)
IMO this is a really bad outcome of this whole conflict. Both the right and the left are now invested in getting everyone to accept this idea that the only way to do immigration enforcement is masked goons and terror, and this is just not true. A likely outcome of all this is that Americans end up convinced that you have to have brutality and terror to enforce immigration law, and either decide it's not worth it or decide that they won't believe it's being enforced without the shows of force and masked goons. Both outcomes are pretty bad.
What we want is ultimately some kind of competent, non-brutal immigration enforcement. There is nothing morally bad about sending back people trying to come to the US illegally, deporting people who have overstayed their visa, fining employers for having a bunch of illegal immigrants working for them, or deporting people here illegally who get in trouble with the law. And while sometimes that (like all other policing) will look cruel and make people sad, it can be done without masked goons or standoffs on the streets or any of that. Ideally, the folks who have been here 10+ years without getting into any trouble or requiring public assistance can then get some kind of path to legal residency, we can just grant the DACA people permanent residency, etc.
As with policing, I feel like there are crazy activist demands that voters rightly will not support, and those get in the way of sensible reform of policing that could actually do some good, while keeping police around since we actually need them.
"What we want is ultimately some kind of competent, non-brutal immigration enforcement"
We had it from 2009-2016 and the result was a candidate winning by running on instituting brutal immigration enforcement.
If that had been all he was running on, he would have lost.
If he hadn't run on it, he would've lost. Not sufficient but necessary to his strategy. However you want to break it down, it's hard to argue that he didn't reap gigantic political advantage by calling a roughly functioning (if with duct tape) immigration system broken.
Which should have some bearing on how much we accept "immigration" as a material, non-vibes issue, because clearly the way people feel about immigration, like crime, has nothing to do with facts.
My genuine suggestion is that Democrats say a lot of tough, serious-sounding things and then basically change nothing. If the tough things piss off leftist activists that everyone hates, all the better. Biden saw his economically-driven immigration policy's jibing with the cultural left's preference for open borders as a good thing, because it kept the issue uncontroversial within the coalition. It turns out it was a weakness and a distinction he should have drawn.
Maybe I’m stuck on fighting the last war, but isn’t the humane solution Comprehensive Immigration Reform? Create a real pathway to citizenship and couple it with tough border security, e-Verify, and a reasonable level of internal enforcement. Most people on the left would fall in line and support that, however hot tempers are running now.
Partly right. But the borders were not open under Biden, not even close. It was still hard to get into this country. And wonky policy ideas to enforce immigration are in place and work but only to a limited extent.
Ultimately, there's no way to make generalized obedience to immigration law incentive compatible while practicing just proportionality and respecting human rights. Illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and the incentives to do it are very strong.
They were open in the sense that you could show up, get yourself paroled into the country on a highly dubious asylum claim, then take your chances with a far out court date, and maybe also hope in the interim to be deemed a 'long settled American' deserving of amnesty and protection in a blue jurisdiction.
In some ways, the 2021-24 situation was basically the same "anarcho-tyranny" that was rampant in municipal governance at the time; the law was enforced on those who are willing to abide by it.
Plenty of people followed the process, and very few of them were permitted into the country. Those who did not follow the process were given a "hack" that would let them in for an indeterminate period of time, something that the advocates helping them short-circuit asylum law were clearly hoping would lead to them becoming sympathetic enough to be given a more permanent pass by the time the court system wended its way to them in two decades.
Protesting is pointless. What policy has Trump backed away from as a result of progressive protest?
It's a long time ago, but the airport protests over the original "Muslim ban" were somewhat effective.
Yep you can see its impact in the Trump approval numbers.
No, Trump’s approval is on par with Biden and to some extent Obama.
It went to SCOTUS and Trump prevailed. Protesting is pointless.
It took them, what, three tries before it finally was allowed by the courts?
The main point of protest is to affect public opinion, not necessarily to make Trump stop. If it doesn't affect public opinion it's pointless, but if does affect public opinion, then it is not pointless. If Trump refuses to stop even as the protests are causing his popularity to decrease, then his refusal to stop will hurt his popularity even more.
This is just not true. There are many examples. Family separation (or at least the official incarnation of it) was an example of trump changing course in response to public opinion shifting.
This Substack is obsessed with borders. The number of border crossings was high during Biden’s term! But it had already started dropping by the time Trump was elected. It’s entirely possible to tighten the border up enough that this stops being an issue, and pursue an enforcement policy that primarily focuses on criminals. You do not need masked military police murdering protesters in cities.
Some of the more obsessive far lefties won't talk, their minds are always already made up. There is seemingly no end to how much they can bleed their hearts or try to patch the inevitable failings of duality. I would ignore them and focus on the left to center crowd, people with at least some sense of when it's time to cut their losses and regroup. I know a lot of Democrats who would support this move if there were a leader in this regard. It's an unenviable position in that even if you win you're still stuck with a gigantic federal deficit and chaotic world order undermining progress going forward.
The Democrats have been holding out for the Comprehensive Immigration Deal for a generation. I suspect many versions of it poll above 50%, but the outer wings of both parties have always been opposed nearly any compromise and willing to play brinkman.
In the meantime the 20 year limbo state of non-legal residents with quasi-non enforcement, especially with regards to work has been bad. It encourages all sorts of ID fraud, under the table payments and exploitation and precarity for the immigrants.
Actual E-verify enforcement even if strategic is probably the only way to get back to the table for the Comprehensive deal, but then something has to be given on qualifications and probably the path to citizenship.
Broadly agreed except i would say it is possible to do interior enforcement without breaking civil rights laws.
A focus on workplace raids is a great a place to start.
"I say this as someone who's horrified by what's going on in Minneapolis. Once this episode passes, with three years to go until the next presidential election, it might be better for people left of center to focus on the question 'Why are we so weak? Why can't we decisively defeat them?'"
This is literally the only thing liberals have talked about since 2016. Maybe it's time for some positive thinking.
Something I've wondered about Matt's obsession with Republicans generically maintaining a trust advantage over Democrats on immigration even as Trump's numbers have cratered (which, to his credit, he's at least partially adjusted as the situation has changed) is if this might be a little like how in 2006-2008, Republicans would still poll as more trusted on "national security", even as Bush overall and the Iraq War specifically were becoming more and more unpopular.
In both cases, I think that Republicans as a whole maintained some residual "we trust the right-wing party more to be tough" sentiment. But ultimately, it was the specific politics of the current president that mattered. Like on Bush and the Iraq War, Trump started with a strong political hand but the actual results of his decision-making have been transparently disastrous. And like with Bush, because of ambient discontent with the economy and this same bad decision making impacting other areas too, fence sitters are no longer inclined to give the president the benefit of the doubt, even on an issue where they were previously willing to.
The other reason I bring this up is that in 2006-2008, there was still some residual anxiety from the "you're with us or with the terrorists" dynamic of 2002-2004 among certain types of Democratic pundits who were too slow to recognize the changing situation. But ultimately, Democrats were on solid political ground nominating an anti-Iraq War candidate in 2008. (McCain actually was a better opportunity for the GOP to reclaim their default trust on the issue than Republicans are likely to seek in 2028, but at the end of the day, he supported the war and was associated with a discredited political party.)
I will give MY credit for understanding the issue is now "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it" and not "what is the ideal immigration enforcement regime?" Both of the people shot in Minnesota were American citizens. Six prosecutors resigned rather than try to go after the widow of one of the victims for no reason.
We're way past this being an immigration issue. A decent number of people on this board are still trying to relitigate the Biden administration or 2020. Meanwhile, local 2A groups in Minnesota are coming out against the shooting.
It's also worth noting that we haven't merely stumbled into a controversy over the issue of "can masked government agents shoot American citizens in the street and lie about it." There is a real constituency in this country for the "yes" side of that argument, and they are well represented.
There are people who support it, but I doubt it's 30%. Much less if you don't count people who blindly accepted what they were told and didn't review video evidence.
I'm not sure if you could find any Trump administration policy that is less popular. Tariffs are close. I guess withholding Epstein docs, but they've managed to avoid framing that as "policy" so far.
I agree that only a minority go that far. But (a) politics and policy do respond to constituencies that comprise 20% (or whatever) of the electorate - that's a lot of people, and they move the center of gravity, (b) one of the many problems with that ideology is that the whole idea behind it is to achieve the ability to exercise power with or without majority support - i.e. to just hold onto power once you get it. Not saying that public opinion doesn't matter in authoritarian countries. It still does, to a degree, as we can see from e.g. Vladimir Putin's reluctance to do a general mobilization. But Putin wouldn't bat an eyelash if his approvals were in the 40% range.
I never imagined I’d see the day when the Dems were the “security” party and the GOP were the “education” party. And yet we’re heading that way. The current moment is like watching 2 soccer teams trading own-goals.
This is some pretty reckless extension of trend lines.
I think an interesting question here is what it means for winning back the senate. Lots of senators were haunted by voting yes on the Iraq war. Will senators be haunted for voting yes on ICE funding? Or will all of the blowback be limited to Trump who is on his way out in 3 years anyway? I'm worried that congress is going to escape without the blame they deserve.
I don't understand the shot Matt takes at Robert Hur. Hur is a patriotic hero who tried to tell the truth about President Biden's decrepitude and was attacked by lying partisan Democrats for doing it.
I agree. If anything Hur showed a great deal of restraint
He lied. He said Biden was sharp and then changed his story later for political reasons.
He's a partisan hack telling us what anyone with a brain already knew: Biden is a touch senile. Not good obviously, but presidential senility seems to be the preference.
Except that a bunch of actual partisan hacks on the Democratic side attacked him for saying the truth. Josh Marshall called him a prostitute for saying it!
Yeah the only problem is that it wasn't the fucking truth. It was narrative setting.
Please be more careful with the term "senile."
Biden's decrepitude was a lie perpetrated by SV donors. He had a speech impediment that was worsening due to normal age-related slowing of cognition. Period. He was never senile. Hur can get fucked. I don't have to call him a liar, he called himself a liar. He contradicted himself.
Besides all the process violations, Trump/Noem/Miller are violating 2 principles of common-sense conservatism that are much easier for average people to understand:
1) Competence matters in using deadly force. Most people understand panic, and that's one reason most people don't want everyone carrying a gun. Regardless of your political beliefs, police are supposed to be better at this, and the folks running ICE show no interest in that half of the bargain.
2) Local matters. Our ancestors resisted a street-level federal police force in part because it's easier to resist an us-vs.-them mentality when you live in the community you're policing.
Right, local police have a much better handle on local gun laws etc. The minneapolice police chief said in a press conference that past year they confiscated 900 (i think) firearms and arrested hundreds of violent criminals, all without shooting anyone.
And this is why the people of Minneapolis have always loved and been so respectful towards the MPD.
Different police chief. "We have learned the hard way and don't want you to come in and fuck it all up" is a strong incentive.
Any one-to-one comparison is going to be a little glib, so forgive me, but I want to riff on this point: "Outsmarting your opponents with disciplined behavior is a move that you are allowed to make in politics."
There are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course. The one I covered most myself was Tea Party organizing that made life difficult for elected Democrats until they scaled back or voted against the Affordable Care Act. There were protests on the Capitol lawn, raucous town hall meetings, elected officials getting yelled at when they went to work. Democrats didn't like this, but it was generally understood as a part of politics, and they were frustrated that Obama's movement went to sleep, creating space for the Tea Party to mobilize.
More recently, there were conservative protests of COVID restrictions and school gender identity and race policies under Joe Biden. It was a major scandal when the National School Boards Association sent a letter to Merrick Garland's DOJ, comparing the disruption of school board meetings by parents who opposed liberal gender or race policies to "domestic terrorism." Garland announced that the FBI would look into it: "The Department takes these incidents seriously and is committed to using its authority and resources to discourage these threats, identify them when they occur, and prosecute them when appropriate." Fair to say that Republicans/conservatives saw an attack on free assembly. They spent years investigating the DOJ over this, and my cards on table, I think Garland and the NSBA were crazy to do it.
Obviously, Stephen Miller et al now talk about disruptive liberal protesters the way the NSBA talked about those angry parents, and the Bondi DOJ is dusting off Civil War-era codes to try to charge Democratic politicians with conspiracy to overthrow the government. There's a permission structure for this, which you can read about in the 2024 book "Unhumans," blurbed by JD Vance: The left is dangerous and you must do whatever it takes to keep them from power.
But there's a more traditionally American principle, that you're allowed to tell the government to fuck off sometimes.
<i>here are many recent cases of a liberal government making a decision, backed by the full force of the state, and conservatives protesting until the government gives up and changes course.</i>
I can't think of even one where the government substantively changed course, though. The ACA was passed and remains in force, school policies on gender issues are getting pressure from the administration but not changing substantively.
The analogy that I'd keep in mind is the 1950's-1960's; the pro-stability South was at least as well organized as the anti-ICE forces, and a combination of federal troops, federal police, and federal financial pressure completely won against it. Sure, it got pictures of active-duty troops attacking schoolchildren with fixed bayonets, but the media didn't care so it didn't really matter.
I don't have a Free Press subscription, but feel it is worth pointing out they have an editorial entitled "Kristi Noem's reckless lies". Anyone know what their stance on this is?
Essentially, this is bad, emphasizing the hypocrisy re: 2nd Amendment Support and that there’s clear video evidence that they’re lying
The Apple News link: https://apple.news/A-c-m3AaeRuiWnNeGq3Hq9w
Typo: "But blanket prohibition of cooperation is an activist demand that arose in Biden’s second term and was adopted in many blue jurisdictions, often without sufficient consideration."
This was probably supposed to say Obama's second term.
Disappointed MY didn't point to "sharpening the contradictions" as a counterpoint to "slow boring of hard boards". Seems the former is the winning hand here.
Substantively, though, many commenters here are still putting this in context of immigration. It should be thought of rather in the context enforcing authoritarian rule in general and is part and parcel of legal harassment of Jack Smith, Jerome Powell and any number of other actors.
Right, all the "Biden lied too about the border being secure" talk here feels like such a bizarre preoccupation to me in a context where the people ICE has killed were natural-born American citizens as far as possible from "the border" (unless we're deciding that the lack of toughness on the Canada border is discrediting Democrats now).
SB came about at a time in 2020 where centrists needed to yell at people on the left to stop being crazy. Too many people here live in a perpetual 2020, in part because they're fundamentally motivated by their disappointment in Biden more than dealing with the specifics of the challenges of American life in 2026.
Matt mentioned this in passing, but I think we should spend a bit more time on how quickly the vibes in the Minesotta story changed from "holy shit immigrants stole billions of dollars, what a cluster" to "they are killing innocent Americans in the streets".
Sending in ICE has been such a narrative loser for Trump, they could have continued milking the fraud story all the way to the elections.
In retrospect voters in general received the "defending democracy" stuff by Biden and then Harris as cover for unpopular policies of the administration.
I think the problem also is that it just doesn't work as a point of persuasion. There was a lot of churn in the electorate that probably did reflect conservatives voting for Harris because they thought Trump was a fundamental threat, but those people didn't need convincing, and people who didn't already think that Trump was an authoritarian threat weren't going to be convinced by a campaign.
Not to fall victim to hypocrisy murder-suicide myself, but it is funny that Lowry is all about federalism and states' rights until Minnesota is okay with having more immigrants than he is.
Eh, I agree Lowry is a hypocrite on many things (which is why I liked your comment), but the response there would be that states cannot constiturionally restrict immigrants from moving across borders once they are in the country, which makes that distinguishable from gun rights or abortion.
"It’s Noem, Lewandowski, and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino who’ve pushed for creating these dramatic scenes. Which I bring up not to paint Homan and Lyons for sainthood, but as a reminder that this really is a choice that Trump made. He has unleashed chaos, deliberately, by choosing to side with the pro-chaos faction of his administration over the advice offered by more seasoned professionals. Contra Lowry, this is not a question of nullification or left-wing self-radicalization; it’s Trump making a choice."
This is right. And it's worth asking, why is he making that choice? The reason is that for him, and especially for Vance, their foremost enemies aren't immigrants at all. Immigrants are a means to an end. Their foremost enemies are liberals, and liberal-ism - not just the progressive left-liberalism of the last decade, but the whole tradition of classical liberalism that goes back to the Founders. Just as in foreign policy, it's now crystal clear that their #1 foreign enemy was never China. Their #1 foreign enemies are NATO, the EU, and the liberal governments behind them.
I'll take the affirmative case for the 2nd Amendment here. It is correct and valuable that outrageous government misconduct results in intolerable deadly violence in a free country. The Feds are not, in fact, supposed to be able to act like the Gestapo and the fact that we have an armed populace dramatically increases the barriers to doing so. It's resource intensive. It's a huge political problem. It's bad for would be authoritarians in all sorts of ways to have to regularly execute citizens in the streets to get their policy preferences. Liberals of all stripes should always have recognized this but I'm happy to welcome the recently enlightened.
“…affirmative case for the 2nd Amendment here”
I think rights come with obligations; that includes the obligation to responsible behavior while armed.
Yes, government agents should definitely be held accountable for summarily executing civilians and patriots like Pretti should strive to be more combat effective when assaulted by lawless thugs.
Government agents are the primary authorized user of force in any modern country. Which means it they should have the highest obligation of anyone for responsible behavior while armed.
I think Matt misunderstands what Lowry means by nullification, and ends up agreeing with him. If smart and disciplined protesting works to make it impossible to enforce immigration law, that is the nullification. Think about how you would feel if, before Roe was overturned, groups of protesters with help from red state government made it impossible to get an abortion. Would that be ok?
I've voted against Trump every time on fitness and rule of law grounds, and always felt like I was voting for the lesser of two evils. People on the left need to think more seriously about why democracy isn't a winning issue for them. Ignoring and undermining the law when you don't like it is very bad for democracy. People who just watch Fox News could honestly believe the left is the more undemocratic faction.
In the past I'd have said this as the start of an argument for persuasion. Now I'm saying this as an argument against escalation. If this question is settled by violence, you will probably lose, and that will be horrible for the country. Trump holds the reigns of power, there are people on the right who just as sincerely believe you are trying to undermine democracy and destroy the country, law enforcement and the military people are more likely to be right wing.
Trump is very bad and we have a good chance of winning through the courts and elections. If it has to become a question of violence, it would be really bad if the violence comes from people trying to stop the Federal Government from enforcing the law. Protesting ICE is a horrible idea.
But it only works as “nullification” because it reveals the enforcement as being politically unpopular. This is why abortion protests never worked; most people support legal abortion. Whereas here, we’re finding that most American want border security but also do not want mass deportation of long-term, non-violent illegal immigrants.
That’s democracy.
Not really. (Noting that I knew one of the people Trump pardoned for FACE violations quite well.)
The big thing with anti-abortion protests was that doing anything that actually hindered access to abortion was criminal, and Democrats enforced those laws vigorously. A half-dozen people blockading doorways could have shut down any clinic, and there were plenty of people who would have done that if it wasn't that you could get multiple years of prison for doing so.
(It will be interesting to see if the anti-ICE protest during a church service gets the same kind of aggressive FACE Act prosecution as the anti-abortion blockades. I'm betting against.)
It’s legitimate for ICE to use reasonable force to prevent people from interfering with their duties. It’s also legitimate for people to record them or engage in civil disobedience to make a point. If voters are more sympathetic to the people engaging in civil disobedience, well that’s democracy.
And ICE is doing itself no favors; they’re not using *reasonable* force. They’re often menacing peaceful bystanders recording their actions. There have been cases of them beating protesters and, as we’ve seen, killing two of them.
Even beyond that, they’re inserting themselves into the lives of law abiding citizens in ways that feel invasive.
Imagine if, in response to abortion clinic protestors, blue state police were beating the protestors, menacing those peacefully holding songs, and raiding churches on Sunday to try to apprehend people who have protested clinics. Most people would have found this appalling, even if the abortion clinic protestors had been barricading clinics.
“… reasonable force to prevent people from interfering with their duties. It’s also legitimate for people to record them or engage in civil disobedience…”
Both sides seem to have a misunderstanding of where the boundaries are. Tragically poor understanding on the part of a large contingent of protesters.
This keeps reminding me of 2020 but from the other side. The anti-anti-ICE line of "well, these activists are provoking these confrontations with ICE and it's not very smart of them and they could get themselves killed" reminds me of "Kyle Rittenhouse shouldn't have been there." Like ok, sure. If my son is 17 or 18, and there's some bullshit going on in Portland (there probably will be), I will not be encouraging him to go down there and get involved in the chaos out of concern for his safety. But at the same time, this is a free country and we have a first amendment and a second amendment. It is your God-given right as an American to scream "F U" at police, federal agents, pretty much anybody in the government, and your right to film them too, and in... more states than I realized, your right to open carry. It's on the government agents not to respond. They're not bears. There's no rule that you can't taunt them.
"and in... more states than I realized, your right to open carry"
It's not intuitive these days, but allowing open carry is actually the historical norm in American jurisdictions if firearms aren't otherwise banned, whereas concealed carry was overwhelmingly prohibited even in jurisdictions with little to no other restrictions on gun ownership.
That's right I've heard about that. It used to be a norm that if you WERE carrying, you were expected to open carry so everybody knew you were armed.
Rittenhouse shouldn’t have been there. His actions were reckless and foolhardy.
A little surprised by this take from you but again, I wouldn't advise it, I certainly wouldn't want my son doing that, but this was the line people threw out to deflect from the more obvious reality that the people who REALLY shouldn't have been there were the rioters.