Very late to this party and I'm not going to wade through 400+ comments but it seems like the way to go for the Biden Admin is to do strict enforcement and send most* of these migrants back home, but do it humanely, which means spending a buttload of $$$ to build humane non-punitive facilities and bring on lots and lots of staff. The fact that this will require throwing money and jobs at Americans who live near the border seems to me like a feature more than a bug.
* This is based on the assumption that most of the migrants claiming asylum don't have meritorious claims, but that could be wrong. Any asylees with meritorious claims obviously need to be let in.
Asylum is granted for fleeing government prosecution. Asylum is not for fleeing gang violence. IE almost all the people claiming asylum aren't actually eligible.
Also, if you really want to stop all the violence and corruption they are fleeing, you are going to have to end the war on drugs. The violence and corruption are caused by the black market, and people fighting over turf.
Legal markets use lawyers and advertising not bullets.
Immigration is one of those things I probably the most radical, political non-starter-est take on. I think for me it's a fundamental thing about what the fundamental ideas of what the nations of the United States and Canada functionally are
Who else here actually works with a lot of highly skilled/educated foreigners? I do, and watching them--STEM PhDs from fancy schools, etc.--struggle with visa issues has totally radicalized me. They're amazing, and dithering about keeping them when they would otherwise be in China or wherever but they want to be here is the most unbelievably self-destructive thing I have ever observed. I do not need the US government protecting my job from my brilliant colleagues. My brilliant colleagues are the reason my job is fun and prestigious in the first place. Chasing them out so people like me have less competition is the definition of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
I am a US national who has had to obtain work visas in Tanzania, India and Kenya, and those experiences similarly radicalized me on immigration policy. It's crazy the amount of documentation to collect, hoops to jump through, money to pay, and capriciousness throughout the process in order to get permission to work. I would love the US to make it MUCH easier for people to obtain visas and for that to serve as a model in other countries.
I am in constant awe of the amount of s**t they go through to live and work here, not to mention up-ending their lives and giving up practically everything and everyone they know. I didn't even want to move across the country! Yet we just take it for granted that the world's best and brightest will always want to come here. I'm afraid we will realize too late if and when it comes to pass that that's no longer true.
I'm a university student in Canada, but I've had a similar feeling. Maybe they're technically competition, but I think that this country would simply be a worse places without my foreign friends.
Since we're here and I'm feeling puckish and immigration threads are always a trash fire anyway, I'd like to share a thought that's been percolating in my head for a while. It's a daft little idea that I call:
The Worst Possible Solution To The Immigration Crisis (that a lot of people might be able to live with)
There's a "small, awful and annoying" version of this and a "bigger, awfuler and even more hugely unlikely" version. The small version is just:
1. Stop looking for immigration status violations. Just stop. If someone's convicted of a felony and don't live here ship them back, but otherwise treat them all like British tourists: people with funny accents who are probably not doing anything shady. Lay off most of ICE to make sure nobody gets it in their head to freelance and the next administration can't just countermand orders. Set up a giant warehouse somewhere in northern Virginia to archive incoming I-9 forms and never look at them except for felony cases.
2. Don't change _anything_ about federal immigration law.
And that's it. And it's all administrative actions inside the executive branch only.
Staying in the US as a non-citizen is still, technically illegal. You're not eligible for federal benefits of any sort, so people who worry about that sort of thing can ease their brows. Local municipalities can decide what if any benefits they want to give. You can ask for a prevailing wage because your boss can't get you deported so you'll both exert less downward pressure on any loose labor markets, and in fact you can and should join the local union so that's another group of people happy. Rape and murder surprisingly remain illegal, and we can still deport you for that. And we can furlough like 90% of the personnel of CBP/ICE so hey honey we've shrunk the size of the government!
Now to make it bigger and more annoying to a ton of people, you need to change a few laws:
3. Make being present without a visa a "federal civil infraction", punishable by a fine of $1000/adult and $300/child, chargable no more than one per year. Make deputization to local law officers for enforcement automatic via the states.
4. Make citizenship automatic based on proving -- by filing an IRS form 1040 -- that you would have 2X paid more to the government in taxes than you would have in visa violation fines.
The "advantage" to #3 is that it satisfies a certain clear desire for active punishment and harrassment of immigrants in our country. Once per year, Sherriff Maximus will get the joy of going to your house and saying "papers, please" and writing you that ticket.
And the advantage to #4 is obvious: for people who worry incessantly about immigrants becoming public charges, only the ones who have settled down with a proper job will be getting papers. Even better, high-skill professionals can take advantage of this instantly: if you're already here on an H1B and you don't have an American passport within a year, are you even trying?
Now of course there are all sorts of obvious objections to this, starting with "haven't you just created a for-pay second-class citizenship?" to which the answer is a sheepish yes. And as our host has noted in multiple places, you'd probably see some even worse pressure on the housing markets of high-demand cities unless there were some careful channeling of allowed destinations and it would be hard to do that while operating in the spirit of this proposal. There's definitely some tension around public school mandates that would have to be resolved. And of course any solution that "allows" harassment by law enforcement intentionally will have a boatload of bad unintended consequences.
...but the status quo is a moral obscenity which we pay billions of dollars a year to perpetuate so maybe we could start getting creative?
Increasing / improving legal immigration is an area where I see a strong, elite cross-party consensus. I know elite, coastal types with different ideas on tax policy. I know VERY few of my peers who think we should have less legal immigration, in part because so many of my peers are immigrants themselves.
This issue comes up all the time and has a long history, but I do think that the Biden and post-Biden re-boringification of politics could make the grand bargain on immigration possible. Having the most revanchist and populist elements of the right heavily focused on this issue makes it hard to do anything. When it gets quiet again, I could see it going like marijuana or gay marriage. Social support magically goes up. Republicans walk away from a dead issue that ultimately harms the economy they love to idolize.
I'd vote no for an edit button. I think typos are fine - maybe endearing - and we get to maintain thread reply consistency. Not being able to collapse threads is a problem. So is how hard it is to find your posts.
I know right? It's the little things. Now if only it would stop doing the weird thing on my phone where if I click on the "my comment" link from Gmail, it opens up the page in a browser then jumps to the wrong spot in the comments. Is that just me?
That also happens to me and I have yahoo, so it's not a gmail issue. Also I have trouble figuring out which comment is under which one sometimes. I'll get to the bottom of a stack and can't figure out who the person is replying to.
The commenting software in general here lives a great deal to be desired. Disqus it ain't. (I know a lot of people slag the latter, but, in my view it's the best product available).
I have trouble with this issue b/c when I look back to the 70s and 80s, liberals fought for 'asylum' and 'sanctuary cities' for political dissidents. During the Reagan years, many came from South and Central America when a key features of US foreign policy support for overthrowing the overthrowing legitimate governments and arming dictators trying to crush dissent. That was a separate issue from immigration or non-authorized entry into the US, which are largely driven by economics (and other factors in poor living standards) in the home country. This is a sea change. Expanding immigration, better enforcement of the official system for lawful entry and more flexible temporary worker rules would are needed improvements. But I can't see how stemming the tide of migrants rushing the border will be solved without changes tightening the asylum laws themselves and who qualifies under them. Politically, it's a pipe dream to think the US could engineer change in Central America that materially changed the lives of the poor enough to dampen the allure of America. And anti-immigration sentiment is driven by resentment among Americans to highly-skilled emigres but rather by jobs and resources thought to be depleted by the unskilled. And, please, those advocating more open borders should consider whether they are helping or hurting those thousands of kids stranded at the border, scare, hungry and tired.
The problem with the Meeedeeya is that they're looking for ratings. All their ratings are down - cable (MSNBC/CNN/Faux - ABC/CBS/NBC) and the traditional ones -- ABC/CBS/NBC -- are down the worst, followed by CNN and Faux, with MSNBC's lowering coming back to more like their normal ratings. That's because nobody wakes up now dreading the news will tell them that Presidunce Asswipe blew up the world at 0200 that morning. So the news bid'nezz has to find a way to get them eyeballs back. As was pointed out last night by both Rachel and Lawrence on MSNBC, the "border crisis" isn't a crisis, it's an endemic situation that ebbs and flows with the seasons and planting and such, and has done so since we stole Northern Mexico. But "endemic situation" doesn't grab eyeballs - as Rachel said, it's on page 10 inside, maybe 4 column inches. But a CRISIS - hey, it's the perfect "shiny object" for the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable asswipes of the Meee-dia to go yelling about and get them some of them eyeballs back. It's like that Hollywood scumbag Zucker (I met him once when all he was doing was fucking up movies; it took about 30 seconds for the "asswipe warning" to start wailing in my mind) at CNN back in 2016 defending them giving Candidate Asswipe all that free time - "We get such great ratings."
I remember back when "Network" came out, someone asked Paddy Chayevsky if he was delivering a warning about the future. His reply was "No, I was writing about right now, today."
I disagree, I think it would have been improved if it was longer so he could have included a section entitled "Immigrants are really good" that would address a lot of the very real concerns of commenters here.
He literally did have a section called "Immigrants are really good" -- Maybe most of us skipped it bc his post was too long and we were eager to check out the comments :D
This argument is persuasive, but living in California it's hard not to notice that legalizing lots of undocumented immigrants in the 1980's was very beneficial for our economy and our cultural vitality and it has indelibly marked our state for the better, and so I understand why there is a desire to try that approach again. Provide a path to citizenship for the intrepid and risk tolerant migrants who will walk here from Central America and Mexico because they will be similarly hard working and entrepreneurial when they are provided legal status, and their US born children, like every other generation of immigrant children, become our future teachers, and doctors, and law enforcement etc.
I think, without changing any immigration laws or requirements, you could make a huge improvement to the US immigration system by just making the bureaucracy adequate to the job.
Process everything faster, don't make people sit around waiting weeks for visas, make it less hostile and stressful for applicants, give people the confidence that they can go home to visit family and still get their permits renewed.
Right now it's a totally dysfunctional system, I think perhaps deliberately screwed up by the Trump administration.
I have no idea how ordinary citizens can advocate for this, though.
I think that U.S. immigration experts on the left are too wrapped up in asylum law to see clearly that this is a political issue. So many of the statements come down to what the U.S.'s obligation under international law, etc. are. Of course these are crucially important, but outside of the Ne0liberal types, you rarely see affirmative cases for more immigration being a win/win. Looking at statements from immigration activists you could be mistaken for thinking that opening up to more immigrants and improving the U.S. economy are ideas that exist in tension, when this is clearly not the case!
Do most Slow Boring readers consider themselves liberal because I feel like the comment section is always really conservatives. Are SB readers just conservatives that like that MY wants to reduce housing regulation?
One of the weirdest things to me when I step back and think, is how many topics are lumped together in ideological frameworks that have very little to do with each other. Being pro-abortion, union supporting, social democratic/socialists, gun control, environmentally conscious, etc. So many of these are unrelated, yet if you agree or disagree with any one of them, you are labeled a particular way.
It also shows how strong partisanship is that people who would otherwise start with one opinion will often change it based on party signaling.
My intuition is, like most of Substack's user base, we're here and willing to pay money to participate in comment threads because there aren't a lot of other options for thoughtful conversation that challenges conventional thinking on the left (and not a lot of thinking on the right--ok that was untrue/mean-ish). So we're mostly disaffected NPR listeners who feel like the liberal side of the argument has already been well-hashed and we're here to dissect the other factors.
I would say liberal. But I'm pretty far from the people, who really seem to sincerely believe, that we can abolish the police and prisons if we have a really generous safety net.
I'm not big on rigid self-identification, which is why I'm here in the first place. But if I had to pick, liberal for sure. Probably not progressive by today's definition. Never conservative.
I really struggle with my place along a liberal - conservative dimension. I felt left of Obama in 08 but now feel right of Biden. But then I have pretty extreme single issue views that seem orthogonal (e.g., Chomsky-esc anti-interventionist, more conservative views on monetary policy that debt levels matter, probably radical views on anti tax fraud). Landscape seems every shifting so it’s hard to assess how much I’ve changed too.
Before I found Matt Y I was a hard conservative. Listen to Rush and Hannity in my car every day. 6 months of reading Matt Y in Moneybox on Slate and I was a moderate Democratic on most issues I voted McCain in 2008 and Obama in 2012. I still see value in having a 0 immigration. Cultural cohesion forcing elites to deal with the people already here rather than import better people etc. But I am basically as open boarders as Matt Y is at this point and I am that way for economic reasons.
I'm a traditional liberal according to hiddentribes.us and in 2021 that means I'm too left-wing in general for the GOP, and too right-wing for the Democratic Party rhetoric dominating social media. It feels politically homeless, but I vote for Democrats.
I would say that a lot of folks in the comments of SB are heterodox in their thinking. Unfortunately that reads as “conservative” to some folks because politics is increasingly become an “either you’re with us or against us” endeavor for many people.
I think a lot of SB readers self conceive as heterodox but it feels like there is a lot more traditional social conservativism than people would admit.
That is true but I feel like you would find more socially liberal ones as well. Social conservatism seems to be close to consensus here on many issues.
How do you think about "social conservatism"? What would be some issue defining views? When I hear social conservatism ... I immediately think about the Christian right. But maybe this is up for interpretation.
I’m pretty libertarian. Very YIMBY, very pro-immigration. Matt is a little too economically left-wing for me, but spot on on “social” issues. But the Republicans all seem crazy to me (they nominated Trump?!), so I vote Democrat.
Depends on what you mean by liberal. I am a classical liberal, meaning that I believe in small government and the freedom of all to believe what they want, and live their lives as they want as long as they are not directly harming others - basically the opposite of Authoritarianism.
On a political scale, which is better measured as Progressive (wanting to make changes) vs. Conservative (conserving the status quo) I am an independent. I look at each argument based on it's merits, rather than the political ideology of those proposing it. This means that I side with the Republicans at times, and the Democrats at others. I am thinker, rather than a follower.
I am a fiscal conservative, and as you can imagine I agree with very little of what Matt writes in that category. But I like to read his stuff anyway because I think of it as representing the most reasonable and well-articulated case for progressive fiscal policies. If I tried to read an NYT op-ed on the same subject (or, god forbid, some activist's tweetstorm) I doubt I would be able to even get through it.
I would personally like to hear from you and other right-of-center people more on this substack. There are only a few people I can think of that regularly respond who seem to be right-of-center fiscally. I like reading the debate and hearing both sides. Sometimes it feels like there are great ideas that I support but there is never enough of, "ok so how do we pay for this?" This is not my field of expertise at all so I like hearing both sides.
Yes! I can get very nervous about some of Matt's fiscal policy prescriptions, but I don't have good counter-arguments. I would love to read some well-reasoned alternative takes on them.
Very late to this party and I'm not going to wade through 400+ comments but it seems like the way to go for the Biden Admin is to do strict enforcement and send most* of these migrants back home, but do it humanely, which means spending a buttload of $$$ to build humane non-punitive facilities and bring on lots and lots of staff. The fact that this will require throwing money and jobs at Americans who live near the border seems to me like a feature more than a bug.
* This is based on the assumption that most of the migrants claiming asylum don't have meritorious claims, but that could be wrong. Any asylees with meritorious claims obviously need to be let in.
Asylum is granted for fleeing government prosecution. Asylum is not for fleeing gang violence. IE almost all the people claiming asylum aren't actually eligible.
Also, if you really want to stop all the violence and corruption they are fleeing, you are going to have to end the war on drugs. The violence and corruption are caused by the black market, and people fighting over turf.
Legal markets use lawyers and advertising not bullets.
Of course all of this is impossible with a filibuster and a GOP determined to keep migrants out
Immigration is one of those things I probably the most radical, political non-starter-est take on. I think for me it's a fundamental thing about what the fundamental ideas of what the nations of the United States and Canada functionally are
Who else here actually works with a lot of highly skilled/educated foreigners? I do, and watching them--STEM PhDs from fancy schools, etc.--struggle with visa issues has totally radicalized me. They're amazing, and dithering about keeping them when they would otherwise be in China or wherever but they want to be here is the most unbelievably self-destructive thing I have ever observed. I do not need the US government protecting my job from my brilliant colleagues. My brilliant colleagues are the reason my job is fun and prestigious in the first place. Chasing them out so people like me have less competition is the definition of cutting off one's nose to spite one's face.
I am a US national who has had to obtain work visas in Tanzania, India and Kenya, and those experiences similarly radicalized me on immigration policy. It's crazy the amount of documentation to collect, hoops to jump through, money to pay, and capriciousness throughout the process in order to get permission to work. I would love the US to make it MUCH easier for people to obtain visas and for that to serve as a model in other countries.
I am in constant awe of the amount of s**t they go through to live and work here, not to mention up-ending their lives and giving up practically everything and everyone they know. I didn't even want to move across the country! Yet we just take it for granted that the world's best and brightest will always want to come here. I'm afraid we will realize too late if and when it comes to pass that that's no longer true.
I'm a university student in Canada, but I've had a similar feeling. Maybe they're technically competition, but I think that this country would simply be a worse places without my foreign friends.
Smart people coming here to get educated and then us forcing them to leave is one of the sillier elements of our policies.
Since we're here and I'm feeling puckish and immigration threads are always a trash fire anyway, I'd like to share a thought that's been percolating in my head for a while. It's a daft little idea that I call:
The Worst Possible Solution To The Immigration Crisis (that a lot of people might be able to live with)
There's a "small, awful and annoying" version of this and a "bigger, awfuler and even more hugely unlikely" version. The small version is just:
1. Stop looking for immigration status violations. Just stop. If someone's convicted of a felony and don't live here ship them back, but otherwise treat them all like British tourists: people with funny accents who are probably not doing anything shady. Lay off most of ICE to make sure nobody gets it in their head to freelance and the next administration can't just countermand orders. Set up a giant warehouse somewhere in northern Virginia to archive incoming I-9 forms and never look at them except for felony cases.
2. Don't change _anything_ about federal immigration law.
And that's it. And it's all administrative actions inside the executive branch only.
Staying in the US as a non-citizen is still, technically illegal. You're not eligible for federal benefits of any sort, so people who worry about that sort of thing can ease their brows. Local municipalities can decide what if any benefits they want to give. You can ask for a prevailing wage because your boss can't get you deported so you'll both exert less downward pressure on any loose labor markets, and in fact you can and should join the local union so that's another group of people happy. Rape and murder surprisingly remain illegal, and we can still deport you for that. And we can furlough like 90% of the personnel of CBP/ICE so hey honey we've shrunk the size of the government!
Now to make it bigger and more annoying to a ton of people, you need to change a few laws:
3. Make being present without a visa a "federal civil infraction", punishable by a fine of $1000/adult and $300/child, chargable no more than one per year. Make deputization to local law officers for enforcement automatic via the states.
4. Make citizenship automatic based on proving -- by filing an IRS form 1040 -- that you would have 2X paid more to the government in taxes than you would have in visa violation fines.
The "advantage" to #3 is that it satisfies a certain clear desire for active punishment and harrassment of immigrants in our country. Once per year, Sherriff Maximus will get the joy of going to your house and saying "papers, please" and writing you that ticket.
And the advantage to #4 is obvious: for people who worry incessantly about immigrants becoming public charges, only the ones who have settled down with a proper job will be getting papers. Even better, high-skill professionals can take advantage of this instantly: if you're already here on an H1B and you don't have an American passport within a year, are you even trying?
Now of course there are all sorts of obvious objections to this, starting with "haven't you just created a for-pay second-class citizenship?" to which the answer is a sheepish yes. And as our host has noted in multiple places, you'd probably see some even worse pressure on the housing markets of high-demand cities unless there were some careful channeling of allowed destinations and it would be hard to do that while operating in the spirit of this proposal. There's definitely some tension around public school mandates that would have to be resolved. And of course any solution that "allows" harassment by law enforcement intentionally will have a boatload of bad unintended consequences.
...but the status quo is a moral obscenity which we pay billions of dollars a year to perpetuate so maybe we could start getting creative?
Increasing / improving legal immigration is an area where I see a strong, elite cross-party consensus. I know elite, coastal types with different ideas on tax policy. I know VERY few of my peers who think we should have less legal immigration, in part because so many of my peers are immigrants themselves.
This issue comes up all the time and has a long history, but I do think that the Biden and post-Biden re-boringification of politics could make the grand bargain on immigration possible. Having the most revanchist and populist elements of the right heavily focused on this issue makes it hard to do anything. When it gets quiet again, I could see it going like marijuana or gay marriage. Social support magically goes up. Republicans walk away from a dead issue that ultimately harms the economy they love to idolize.
Do other commenters feel like the comment nesting and lack of an edit button makes the comment section a mess.
If substack wants to be the go-to publishing platform I feel like they should work on that.
I'd vote no for an edit button. I think typos are fine - maybe endearing - and we get to maintain thread reply consistency. Not being able to collapse threads is a problem. So is how hard it is to find your posts.
I learned you CAN collapse threads! Click the gray line on the left! Life-changing. (My life is boring.)
Woah!! This changes everything!
I know right? It's the little things. Now if only it would stop doing the weird thing on my phone where if I click on the "my comment" link from Gmail, it opens up the page in a browser then jumps to the wrong spot in the comments. Is that just me?
That also happens to me and I have yahoo, so it's not a gmail issue. Also I have trouble figuring out which comment is under which one sometimes. I'll get to the bottom of a stack and can't figure out who the person is replying to.
I have the same issue. It looks like it jumps to the right spot initially and then it loads a bunch more comments or something and gets totally lost.
Same. They have some tech debt to work through for sure.
Finally, something I can agree with you on!
The commenting software in general here lives a great deal to be desired. Disqus it ain't. (I know a lot of people slag the latter, but, in my view it's the best product available).
Open borders, there.
I have trouble with this issue b/c when I look back to the 70s and 80s, liberals fought for 'asylum' and 'sanctuary cities' for political dissidents. During the Reagan years, many came from South and Central America when a key features of US foreign policy support for overthrowing the overthrowing legitimate governments and arming dictators trying to crush dissent. That was a separate issue from immigration or non-authorized entry into the US, which are largely driven by economics (and other factors in poor living standards) in the home country. This is a sea change. Expanding immigration, better enforcement of the official system for lawful entry and more flexible temporary worker rules would are needed improvements. But I can't see how stemming the tide of migrants rushing the border will be solved without changes tightening the asylum laws themselves and who qualifies under them. Politically, it's a pipe dream to think the US could engineer change in Central America that materially changed the lives of the poor enough to dampen the allure of America. And anti-immigration sentiment is driven by resentment among Americans to highly-skilled emigres but rather by jobs and resources thought to be depleted by the unskilled. And, please, those advocating more open borders should consider whether they are helping or hurting those thousands of kids stranded at the border, scare, hungry and tired.
The problem with the Meeedeeya is that they're looking for ratings. All their ratings are down - cable (MSNBC/CNN/Faux - ABC/CBS/NBC) and the traditional ones -- ABC/CBS/NBC -- are down the worst, followed by CNN and Faux, with MSNBC's lowering coming back to more like their normal ratings. That's because nobody wakes up now dreading the news will tell them that Presidunce Asswipe blew up the world at 0200 that morning. So the news bid'nezz has to find a way to get them eyeballs back. As was pointed out last night by both Rachel and Lawrence on MSNBC, the "border crisis" isn't a crisis, it's an endemic situation that ebbs and flows with the seasons and planting and such, and has done so since we stole Northern Mexico. But "endemic situation" doesn't grab eyeballs - as Rachel said, it's on page 10 inside, maybe 4 column inches. But a CRISIS - hey, it's the perfect "shiny object" for the over-educated, under-intelligent, otherwise-unemployable asswipes of the Meee-dia to go yelling about and get them some of them eyeballs back. It's like that Hollywood scumbag Zucker (I met him once when all he was doing was fucking up movies; it took about 30 seconds for the "asswipe warning" to start wailing in my mind) at CNN back in 2016 defending them giving Candidate Asswipe all that free time - "We get such great ratings."
I remember back when "Network" came out, someone asked Paddy Chayevsky if he was delivering a warning about the future. His reply was "No, I was writing about right now, today."
The Mee-dia has only gotten worse since.
You should aim to make your posts about a third shorter. We all have a lot to read.
I disagree, I think it would have been improved if it was longer so he could have included a section entitled "Immigrants are really good" that would address a lot of the very real concerns of commenters here.
He literally did have a section called "Immigrants are really good" -- Maybe most of us skipped it bc his post was too long and we were eager to check out the comments :D
This argument is persuasive, but living in California it's hard not to notice that legalizing lots of undocumented immigrants in the 1980's was very beneficial for our economy and our cultural vitality and it has indelibly marked our state for the better, and so I understand why there is a desire to try that approach again. Provide a path to citizenship for the intrepid and risk tolerant migrants who will walk here from Central America and Mexico because they will be similarly hard working and entrepreneurial when they are provided legal status, and their US born children, like every other generation of immigrant children, become our future teachers, and doctors, and law enforcement etc.
I think, without changing any immigration laws or requirements, you could make a huge improvement to the US immigration system by just making the bureaucracy adequate to the job.
Process everything faster, don't make people sit around waiting weeks for visas, make it less hostile and stressful for applicants, give people the confidence that they can go home to visit family and still get their permits renewed.
Right now it's a totally dysfunctional system, I think perhaps deliberately screwed up by the Trump administration.
I have no idea how ordinary citizens can advocate for this, though.
I think that U.S. immigration experts on the left are too wrapped up in asylum law to see clearly that this is a political issue. So many of the statements come down to what the U.S.'s obligation under international law, etc. are. Of course these are crucially important, but outside of the Ne0liberal types, you rarely see affirmative cases for more immigration being a win/win. Looking at statements from immigration activists you could be mistaken for thinking that opening up to more immigrants and improving the U.S. economy are ideas that exist in tension, when this is clearly not the case!
Do most Slow Boring readers consider themselves liberal because I feel like the comment section is always really conservatives. Are SB readers just conservatives that like that MY wants to reduce housing regulation?
I feel like we should do a poll.
One of the weirdest things to me when I step back and think, is how many topics are lumped together in ideological frameworks that have very little to do with each other. Being pro-abortion, union supporting, social democratic/socialists, gun control, environmentally conscious, etc. So many of these are unrelated, yet if you agree or disagree with any one of them, you are labeled a particular way.
It also shows how strong partisanship is that people who would otherwise start with one opinion will often change it based on party signaling.
My intuition is, like most of Substack's user base, we're here and willing to pay money to participate in comment threads because there aren't a lot of other options for thoughtful conversation that challenges conventional thinking on the left (and not a lot of thinking on the right--ok that was untrue/mean-ish). So we're mostly disaffected NPR listeners who feel like the liberal side of the argument has already been well-hashed and we're here to dissect the other factors.
I'm going cold turkey for a week now on my 24 hr a week NPR habit.
I would say liberal. But I'm pretty far from the people, who really seem to sincerely believe, that we can abolish the police and prisons if we have a really generous safety net.
I'm not big on rigid self-identification, which is why I'm here in the first place. But if I had to pick, liberal for sure. Probably not progressive by today's definition. Never conservative.
I really struggle with my place along a liberal - conservative dimension. I felt left of Obama in 08 but now feel right of Biden. But then I have pretty extreme single issue views that seem orthogonal (e.g., Chomsky-esc anti-interventionist, more conservative views on monetary policy that debt levels matter, probably radical views on anti tax fraud). Landscape seems every shifting so it’s hard to assess how much I’ve changed too.
We could do a poll but need more than 2 options.
Before I found Matt Y I was a hard conservative. Listen to Rush and Hannity in my car every day. 6 months of reading Matt Y in Moneybox on Slate and I was a moderate Democratic on most issues I voted McCain in 2008 and Obama in 2012. I still see value in having a 0 immigration. Cultural cohesion forcing elites to deal with the people already here rather than import better people etc. But I am basically as open boarders as Matt Y is at this point and I am that way for economic reasons.
I'm a traditional liberal according to hiddentribes.us and in 2021 that means I'm too left-wing in general for the GOP, and too right-wing for the Democratic Party rhetoric dominating social media. It feels politically homeless, but I vote for Democrats.
I would say that a lot of folks in the comments of SB are heterodox in their thinking. Unfortunately that reads as “conservative” to some folks because politics is increasingly become an “either you’re with us or against us” endeavor for many people.
I think a lot of SB readers self conceive as heterodox but it feels like there is a lot more traditional social conservativism than people would admit.
Maybe, definitely possible. I also think that one would find socially conservative views in a batch of folks that are genuinely heterodox.
Define social conservatism
That is true but I feel like you would find more socially liberal ones as well. Social conservatism seems to be close to consensus here on many issues.
On what issues? That’s not my impression.
Immigration for starters. Policing, Race, anything more cultural than the fed setting interest rates.
How do you think about "social conservatism"? What would be some issue defining views? When I hear social conservatism ... I immediately think about the Christian right. But maybe this is up for interpretation.
I think point 2 is very true. I think that is an issue with forums that form from dissatisfaction with existing ones.
I’m pretty libertarian. Very YIMBY, very pro-immigration. Matt is a little too economically left-wing for me, but spot on on “social” issues. But the Republicans all seem crazy to me (they nominated Trump?!), so I vote Democrat.
Depends on what you mean by liberal. I am a classical liberal, meaning that I believe in small government and the freedom of all to believe what they want, and live their lives as they want as long as they are not directly harming others - basically the opposite of Authoritarianism.
On a political scale, which is better measured as Progressive (wanting to make changes) vs. Conservative (conserving the status quo) I am an independent. I look at each argument based on it's merits, rather than the political ideology of those proposing it. This means that I side with the Republicans at times, and the Democrats at others. I am thinker, rather than a follower.
We often see people who are pro immigration but also NIMBY but here we get to see the YIMBYers who are anti immigration.
I am a fiscal conservative, and as you can imagine I agree with very little of what Matt writes in that category. But I like to read his stuff anyway because I think of it as representing the most reasonable and well-articulated case for progressive fiscal policies. If I tried to read an NYT op-ed on the same subject (or, god forbid, some activist's tweetstorm) I doubt I would be able to even get through it.
I would personally like to hear from you and other right-of-center people more on this substack. There are only a few people I can think of that regularly respond who seem to be right-of-center fiscally. I like reading the debate and hearing both sides. Sometimes it feels like there are great ideas that I support but there is never enough of, "ok so how do we pay for this?" This is not my field of expertise at all so I like hearing both sides.
Yes! I can get very nervous about some of Matt's fiscal policy prescriptions, but I don't have good counter-arguments. I would love to read some well-reasoned alternative takes on them.