In general I think a lot of liberals are sincerely clueless as to how tough other countries are—yes, including rich democratic ones—when it comes to enforcing immigration laws.
I honestly don't begrudge Eastern Hemisphere countries for not having it, because most of those countries are historically some form of ethnostate (not always one ethnicity - sometimes it's more than one - but an ethnostate all the same). While a lot of them are liberal democracies now by law, you can't really expect them to go whole hog on birthright citizenship. But this is America.
Yeah, I don't begrudge a small country that has never really had a modern massive empire and is relatively homogenous for having strict immigration laws. But trying to graft the experience of a "minnow surrounded by whales" onto the US context would just be a gigantic disruption to how people have actually lived.
Of course it can matter in a myriad of ways. If we're trying to understand why many peer countries deal with immigration differently it's very useful to take things like this into account.
I still think birthright citizenship is the right framework for the United States. When I look at the issues, say, Germany has had with guest workers and their children and now their children's children all I can think is absolutely nope, we do not want that here.
Our problems while serious aren't nearly as intractable. Most importantly we can still solve them with serious front end enforcement. The last thing we want is a large and growing group of people who aren't Americans but who have no relationship with any country in which they might be able to claim citizenship.
That's fine. I was more reacting to the response to KateLE's initial comment which I think was totally fine and reasonable. People who are talking about our immigration and citizenship relative to the rest of the world should at least be expected to understand what the rest of the world is like.
Otherwise you get people making silly "we should be more like Sweden" statements without realizing what that would actually mean.
"Germany has had with guest workers and their children and now their children's children all I can think is absolutely nope, we do not want that here."
Asian countries have solved this by kicking out any guest workers that have children.
Maybe some countries can manage that but I don't see it as viable and it may make things worse instead of better. One of the reasons our immigration issues are more manageable is that as long as we can dampen down new illegal arrivals and deter more lawbreaking the people born here and their children will be assimilated into our polity without issue, whatever the status of their parents or grandparents was. Birthright citizenship is an important part of making that work, it only becomes an issue when no one is minding the door.
When I lived abroad, locals were not shy about telling me how terrible it was that I put our kids in a bilingual school. The reason: they assumed birthplace citizenship was a thing in Europe and I could not disabuse them of that notion! My take: if you won't give my kids citizenship why should I raise them in your culture and language? Their take: WTF are you talking about, people get citizenship based on where they are born, everyone knows that!
Yes, that's right. They take for granted that they are deriving citizenship from their parents' citizenship and just assume that every country works the way the US does because American birthplace citizenship is so well-known. (There are a lot of "accidental Americans" in Europe.)
Natural citizens are remarkably, but understandably, ignorant of their own laws regarding immigration and citizenship because they never had to deal with them. Ask an American how USCIS works and they'll probably ask you what USCIS is.
To get our kids' citizenship recognized, we had to travel to the consulates with proof that we were, in fact, not just citizens of our respective countries of birth, but that we had lived there long enough to transmit our citizenship legally. That is actually a non-trivial task when you've been abroad for a decade. And we had to repeat it de novo for each kid; no re-use of paperwork.
When we returned from a trip to the US to show of our first-born to the family, border agents asked for a residence permit... for a six-month old. The Man does not mess around with this stuff.
Not only did people not believe me when I told them birthplace citizenship isn't a thing, they were deeply skeptical of the true fact that is true that, in most European countries, you have to renounce your existing citizenship to acquire theirs.
That experience made me even more appreciative of birthplace citizenship and the remarkable ability of the US to assimilate and integrate immigrants. "Your kids should learn English because they are American" makes far more sense than "Your kids should learn our weird language because they were born here but don't have our citizenship and have to renounce their American citizenship if they want to get it which they can only do when they're 14 and in the meantime they'll need to apply for residence permits periodically to live here."
That's true, but the core identity of most other countries is different than America. The now-popular Reagan quote goes: "...A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American."
That was in a different era when immigrants were encouraged to assimilate and think of themselves as American. The cultural winds have shifted significantly - especially over the last 15 years or so. Popular culture encourages ethnonarcissism and discourages assimilation.
That is just rhetoric, America is better at assimilation than most other countries (although that could just be selection effects), but there is no fundamental divide between America and non-America there are people who assimilate well in Europe and some degree of ghettoisation in America.
I roll my eyes at my friends casually speculating about where they're going to move to. Yeah, no you're not. New Zealand is beautiful, but you'd better have some skill they really need and be prepared to jump through a zillion hoops. Oh, and don't be sick; if you have multiple sclerosis or something, well, sorry honey. Go back to America.
"I hate those racist Republicans and their anti-immigrant rhetoric. I'm going to move to a country that is more white and has even stricter immigration policies!"
I'm an American who is a resident of NZ, and will soon be a citizen. What you've said is substantially true, but it is also true of the sanctioned pathways to American residency and citizenship. As a positive, in NZ I am able to fully participate in society (sans a passport, which I will get once I become a citizen) once I am a resident. This means voting, buying property, serving on juries, etc.
Immigration is likely the hardest thing that most immigrants will ever do, and we shouldn't forget this.
I wasn't really criticizing NZ for its policies. It was more a comment on the blithe ignorance of many Americans. "Of course this other country would simply love to have us!"
This is why I've been more realistic: who will take us? What skills do we have that are portable? How bad will the decrease in our standard of living be?
Still looking into it, but "Let's just move overseas!" isn't an easy out.
It depends on what aspects you’re talking about. The really controversial stuff that Trump is doing like illegally renditioning people to foreign prisons, monitoring visa applicants’ social media, or imprisoning foreigners for speech is not something other rich democratic countries do. Heck communist China doesn’t even do that. US visa processing times and requirements also way exceed all the other countries’ I’ve applied for.
That's true, but it's largely downstream of labor law. The US is one of the very few countries where it's feasible to work without an national ID card. (The UK is another.) There's a reason that the issue with irregular immigrants in Germany is not lower wages.
In fairness our geography and types of labor requirements have no convenient parallels. That changes a lot, though I doubt many of the "No one is illegal" types take that into account.
I think Matt is vaguely right about how the Dems need to approach this but he's horribly misguided about how easy it'll be. You absolutely cannot transform Stephen Miller's ICE into a genuine law enforcement agency by putting a few dozen well meaning bureaucrats in charge. The immigration enforcement build out they're doing is an extrajudicial paramilitary group from the very roots that can only rightly be purged by a genuine liberal-democratic leadership. These people they've hired cannot be allowed to retain government powers beyond the Trump administration.
Carrying out the utterly essential turn over of personnel, within the larger context of Matt's strategic redeployment, is going to be a massive logistical and political challenge.
Restoring Obama era ICE leadership seems possible.
My understanding is that a lot of the exrraduciual activity is downstream of the fact that ICE is being deployed into blue cities with the explicit mandate of causing chaos. Change the leadership and the orders, and have more robust oversight of any lawless agents, and it seems like there’s a path to reform.
This agency has been around for 20 or so years, it’s not like Trump just created it overnight.
Leadership is going to be a huge part of this. Having worked as a cop for 15+ years, I can tell you that leadership is one of both the most easily controllable (easy to positively impact) and most important factors in law enforcement performance. Good leadership smooths out the political excesses and negative rhetoric that can cause some of the demoralization that leads to poor performance, and it also has an inordinate impact on addressing poor job performance or, worse, employees who are unsuited for law enforcement.
However, it is an open question whether Democrats will be able to overcome the anti-law enforcement creep that has been created by the "groups" and associated power centers of the democratic party. Tradeoffs, state violence (yes, real violence), and unfortunate outcomes for people who are in all other aspects of their lives good people are things that occur when law enforcement occurs, as Matt alludes to when talking about how even well-targeted enforcement for criminals can sweep up people whose only "crime" is being here illegally. Decrying this to the point of labeling, catastrophizing, and deeming "police" as a common enemy - along the lines of the great untruths seen in "The Coddling of the American Mind" - is something that has given Democratic politicians in too many urban areas too much pause, and impacted their ability to actually be seen as serious towards public safety. This will have to be corrected (maybe the book I'm writing will help with that!)
ICE professionalism was an issue even back in the Obama era when they were genuinely concerned with quality hiring standards. Now they're tripling the number of the enforcement agents by hiring groypers and have purged anyone who's insufficiently extremist. Apparently, if recent reporting is true, even Tom Homan is to much of a cuck for this operation.
Institutional culture matters and this one is poisonous way beyond anything even close to reformable.
This is ridiculous. The Camden police department has about 600 employees. ICE has over 20,000!!!
You are not going to fire 20 thousand federal agents and make them reapply. If you do, it will cause a massive immigration crisis as traffickers rush to get people across the border while there is no enforcement.
While perhaps the solution in an ideal world, this would be fodder for republicans to claim that the Democrats are back to a no-enforcement policy on immigration. These ideas are what has given us Trump 2.0.
Republicans are gonna say that no matter what. The test is gonna be what actions the new admin can proactively show they are taking that seem credible. How they restructure ICE is going to be secondary to whether or not they can be credible in their own right and simply, "Leave the R secret police in place." doesn't do anything to show the public that they have their own ideas about addressing immigration and crime.
Decide on the level of internal immigration enforcement you want, and match the numbers to it. If what you want is to find criminals who are illegal immigrants than you don't need the number of agents necessary to carry out wholesale deportations.
If you want greater numbers of federal law enforcement officers than take the funding from ICE, and spend it on new federal agents in other agencies. If, and only if, current ICE agents can qualify under the higher standards of the other agencies, then they can make the transition.
That includes close scrutiny of their actions under today's administration. If they were willing to be overly aggressive in their actions than that is disqualifying. We don't want or need those folks to be able to act under color of law. They won't behave properly under new leadership, and they'll be right there ready and waiting if there's a change back towards something similar to today.
To the best of our ability we need to recognize how badly things can go, and inoculate our institutions against that.
This seems a little wild eyed to me. Mostly it’s people who want a paycheck. Feels like you can raise standards and fire trouble makers when they, in fact, make trouble.
Making them *useful* given the lax hiring standards so far will be a little challenging but that is a different problem than “it is essential we purge these scary monsters!”
That's why it's going to be hard. Credibly embracing border/law enforcement is going to require very ambitious, highly visible action to cover for dismantling the Stasi at the same time. It's a bad situation.
Ok Chief, your position is border wall mile post 418.2 about 100 miles west of El Paso. Need you there every morning at 6:00 AM. Grab a couple bottles of water. Someone will be by around noon with an MRE.
Human traffickers respond to conditions at the border and the immediate treatment of those apprehended there. Word gets back home very quickly if crossings are unsuccessful.
It was primarily the broken asylum system that left the opening for traffickers driving the Biden era surge.
Take some of the ICE money and invest it in more immigration admin law courts so that we don't need to either detain or release people caught, and make the system swift and smooth.
Advertising is straight out of Helldivers and they've got too many fat asses that can't pass their own fitness standards that aren't particularly high to begin with. Is a high school degree even required?
Definitely needs to be a purge... Early steps are to figure out who the fascists purged from ICE, DHS, Border Patrol, particularly if they're Republicans who nonetheless were professionals and said no to doing stuff outside their remit and put them in places of responsibility (alongside Democrat bureaucrats) or guys like Michael Fanone.
Improve fitness standards, educational requirements, lack of criminal records etc to easily justify purging the thugs.
None of it would be magic, just obvious steps to take.
As someone who wants it to happen, how do you distinguish the next President's mass-firing and re-hiring of ICE with the current President's firing of civil servants for wrongthink?
I'm probably broadly less sympathetic to civil service protections than most. "The President can basically fire anyone he wants" is the most compelling part of unitary executive theory stuff to my mind. If Congress wants to shelter things like the Fed and such from presidential dismissal they really have to dot their i's and cross their t's about locating their powers outside the executive branch in a compelling way.
"it’s really helpful to have a strong image in the eyes of the public as a politician or a political party that sincerely believes that crime is bad and that criminals should be punished."
The Groups and activists believe that criminals are victims, and that crime is not bad, it is instead justice for the criminals. The leniency and apathy with which some heavily Democratic jurisdictions treat crime and criminals because they are beholden to The Groups are why CVS puts deodorant behind glass, criminals who have been arrested dozens of times are freed without bail, and why public-transit is losing ridership. And this matters outside the cities that are suffering from quality-of-life crimes, because people see videos and photos everything happening and then vote for Republicans. If Democrats don't want to be underwater on crime (and immigration), they need to actually address visible evidence and consequences of crime.
Yes, if you wanted to kill every brick and mortar store that wasn't already killed by Amazon, this is the way to do it. I'm not going to stand around begging an employee for a box of Tide. I'll order it from Amazon or Walmart.
Oh my god, the world is ending, God forbid i have to talk with an employee to get an High value item off of the shelf in a major metro area, How so verry terrible for the country we totally don't have any actual pressing issue we need to face, and should focus on people not liking inconvenience when shopping
Having to press a stupid button for a guy to unlock a glass box so I can get a toothbrush really is terrible and a high stakes issue. I am in a gentrifying neighborhood with a liquor store that doesn't have everything behind bullet proof glass. I *way* prefer going there to the older liquor stores with everything behind the bullet proof glass. It is an immense quality of life concern
I don’t belive you, there this awesome buisness called Amazon that sells literally everything there is almost no reason you need to go to the Packie to get a toothbrush WTF?
Yes and asking any employee for assistance getting an item is one of the most minor inconveniences imaginable, it’s also not government policy it’s store policy from private buisness
"How so verry terrible for the country we totally don't have any actual pressing issue we need to face, and should focus on people not liking inconvenience when shopping"
Yes this is actually very bad. It is bad that we have people walking around that will openly steal from others. It is bad that everyone else in society has to face a tax (both literal and mental tax) in the form of daily annoyances because we refuse to enforce basic laws around petty crime. It is very, very bad.
There are really no excuses. The bottom 10% in the US has higher disposable income than the bottom 10% in Japan.
No it’s not very bad, these are minor inconveniences experienced by a specific subset of the population living in a few metro areas. Has anybody in power actually said don’t arrest people who steal shit, Or again is this just the vibes we’re getting from so lefties on Twitter? If local politicians are saying that fuckem the dem party should not support them, but like nobody wants people to be openly stealing shit from stores; that is a GOP propaganda narrative we need to stop contributing to.
You’re arguing a strawman. Nobody needs a mayor to literally say “don’t arrest shoplifters” for incentives to flip. When the operational reality is consistent downgrades and slow-or-no follow-through the expected cost of theft = ~zero.
Behavior responds to that, not to press releases or politicians waxing poetic.
“Minor inconvenience in a few metros” also misses the economics. Concentrated externalities still scale: locked shelves, store exits, shorter hours, fewer competitors, higher prices, worse service, etc.. That’s a transfer from rule-abiding customers and workers to a small group of repeat offenders. Call it “vibes” if you want, but retailers don’t spend millions hardening stores (and creating tons of friction) because of Twitter.
One of the biggest findings in criminology is, in deterrence, certainty and speed beat severity. If the system delivers a quick, predictable consequence (fine that actually gets collected, ban, community service that actually happens, escalation for repeaters, etc, etc.), petty theft decreases. Progressives fight against this TOOTH AND NAIL.
Compare littering - NYC to famously socialist Vienna:
NYC moved littering to low-dollar civil tickets under the CJRA, typically $50, plus an option to swap for community service. No criminal record and no jail backstop. EVEN then ~30% don't pay and ignore their ticket and literally nothing happens.
Vienna’s WasteWatcher issues an on-the-spot €50 "organstrafmandat"; if you don’t pay, it automatically escalates into a formal administrative fine with a ceiling of €1,000-€2,000 depending on the conduct, and, most critically, substitute custody up to 4–8 days if the fine isn’t collected. That’s hard enforcement with a jail backstop.
Again, people don't realize how INSANELY soft the American left is on crime. It does not have an international comparison. That's why there is so much open disorder in American cities.
Talks about straw men proceeds to invest arguments I’ve never made nice. Have I ever said don’t enforce crime? No I haven’t I’m saying it’s more of a perceived problem than an actual one, especially with the amount of coverage it gets. Yes it’s very visible to the average person and that is why it gets people animated.
Like I think the automated solution are based, a huge problem is that we have cops tied up on stupid shit like tragic enforcement that could largely be automated or given to a civil law enforcement agency not policy officers we want responding to and trying to prevent actual crimes like. Like we should have camera on every traffic light and hidden speed traps that just auto mail tickets to people, same for other minor infraction so cops can deal with real crimes.
Like I agree with most of what you say, all I’m saying is that in the grand scheme of national politics this isn’t really that big of an issue
Nice vote for the sum-human degenerates that’s fantastic for this country why not just do it in the federal level to and stay consistent their chief? Ticket splitting is the dumbest shit, like in what world does it make sense?
Oh no whatever will I do, it’s not like there are grocery stores that also sell toiletries and you know Amazon exists, you can literally have almost any necessity delivered to your home? But you know let’s implement bad policy because people are slightly inconvenienced and we need to humor them a little bit so they don’t make the horrendously moronic choice of putting the GOP in power because the democrats are slightly annoying
1: I’m an asshole, I talk like a sarcastic prick on occasion, is it the best but at this point I’m done with being nice about politics because the voters have clearly stated they don’t care anymore about character in regards to politics.
The CVS lockbox experience sucks and makes you feel like you’re being accused of being a criminal and that obviously crime must be rampant why else would they lock up half the store?
And the vast majority of the time you are able to do this, it’s a problem in specific stores in certain large metro areas where the organized retail theft and locking up items in a problem. Like this is not an issue at all for most people
I blame this on Trump. He normalized selfish amoral behavior and criminality to a whole generation of children. Then with TikTok and generally lax enforcement (because shoplifting was alway low priority), all these teens learned they could steal with impunity because the whole shopping system relied on trust.
Republicans are also incredibly lenient on crime by international standards, there seems a general vibe in the Anglosphere that tolerating crime is good and that popular or technocratic policies to lower crime are somehow illegitimate. It is far worse on the far left because they blame impersonal forces for crime.
Famously socialist Vienna issued 10,000 tickets (for a population of 2 million) for littering in 2022. When DeBlasio became mayor of NYC he told the NYPD and DAs to completely stop enforcing and issuing fines for littering other than by businesses (dumping trash). I don't think people realize how extreme and insane American leftists are about excusing petty crime. It's just completely insane relative to international standards.
I think the Anglosphere thinks of everyone else as an NPC and that only they are the main character. How else can you listen to "Bulls on Parade" and think you're standing up to power when you're actually just listening to your iPod in your bedroom. And you quickly wind up with "rules for thee, but not for me."
One alternative is the kind of anarchism in "The Disposessed" where everyone is a main character. People treat their neighbors well because they recognize their fundamental main characterness, and there's no need to enforce the rules because everyone follows them.
The other alternative is that everyone is an NPC. I felt this distinctly traveling to Shanghai, realizing that I was just an insignificant little speck, and so was everyone around me.
I'd prefer the anarcho-utopia if I had my choice, but the American version where everyone thinks they're the center of the universe is insufferable. And it might be at its worst in Silicon Valley, where I've spent my entire career.
Holy Strawman there chief. What elected democrats believe "criminals are victims" and that crime is not bad. Can we stop pretending that 5 follower twitter accounts aren't the democratic party for Christ's sake. If you wanna engage in using the GOP framing opf the issue just go grift a C-PAC you can make bank, Just look at Lindy Li.
"The groups and activists", not "elected democrats".
Even then, I live in a +34 Harris city and have attended city council meetings where discussions of crime have been first dominated and then derailed by discussion of the difficult circumstances the perpetrators face.
There's an attentional tax you must pay to talk about or address many kinds of crime (with a few obvious exceptions), an obligation to spend at least 3x as much time addressing root causes as practical, near-term policy solutions.
And the democratic party is suppose to stop this by.....? I don't care what some voters who show up to your city council think, and neither do the republicans who claim to. Stop contributing to the problem republicans are intentionally causing by conflating Elected democrats and the part broadly with random left wing people.
Democrats are supposed to stop this by... adopting more forceful rhetoric and policy positions that demonstrate to the electorate that they take the threat, and reality, of crime seriously. And, yes, that means being outraged that shoplifting by some small number of criminals is now creating inconveniences for everyone else (i.e., their law-abiding constituents) when buying underwear and deodorant at Target. The "conflation" of elected Democrats with annoying, attention-seeking online lefties is tough, but it is real-- we can't just wish it away.
That being said--murder is way down! Violent crime is way down! The salience of the issue is down, which certainly helps Dems and also makes the task for elected Dems easier--more one of adopting forceful "I'm tough on crime" rhetoric than actually changing any policies in the crime-is-dropping areas, at least for the time being.
I don’t give a fuck about our rhetoric, it pails in comparison to anything the gop messages, voters being too stupid to understand that isn’t the problem of democrats it’s the problem that voters are morons who vote against their own interests on a routine basis and then get mad at the people trying to help for “lecturing them” or being elitist.
And no the conflation isn’t just a tough luck problem it’s literally an existential rial crisis destroying the country. Like there is basically no reason for anyone to vote for the gop outside of being ultra wealthy or for cultural reasons. Like by every metric the country is better when run by democrats but the collective goldfish memory of the country keeps putting the GOP back in power. Anyone on our own side contributing to that conflation are criminally retarded.
As you say be all the metric things are fine, Americans are just too dumb to see it so cut off their nose to spite their face. I want good policy not to be diluted because we had to appease the concerns of people who have no idea what they’re talking about and don’t even know how to achieve their preferred political goals
I should have been clearer: voters were concerned about crime, elected officials were doing the derailing.
But really, the obsessive attempt to focus on elected officials is just a palpable, ridiculous dodge. As I said the other day, when Nick Fuentes, Fred Phelps or random Twitter jackasses scare people away from the Republican party, no one here is protesting. That's because "who supports this politician" is a useful heuristic, even if it's incomplete.
What do we do about it? ESB1980's response is excellent, so maybe start there.
Except Nick Fuentes isn’t scaring anybody away from the Republican Party, what views does he hold that are substantially different than the mainstream GOP right now, besides antisemitism and even that is pretty popular among the right.
And secondly the reason people harp so much on elected officials is because for some strange reason voter judge the democrats by what left’s on titter say and give passes to elected GOP officials because the other side. When actual Republican politicians are degenerate sub-human pieces of garbage, and people complain about what self identified leftists with no power are doing it’s a huge problem.
The Democrats in my city are closing public spaces to the public rather than clear out junkies (who are allowed to continue ruining these spaces with filth and dangerous behavior). All these officials have (D) next to their name.
Yeah the Jacob Blake stuff was cringe, he was not a sympathetic case that should have been supported, don’t know why you bring this up? I have countless more actually substasive things republicans have done and advocated for. Like what is the policy harm of the president showing up when? Also quick question, who was the president of the United States when Jacob Blake was shot in August of 2020? I’m pretty sure it was Donald Trump, so it was bad for democrats that a Republican president flew to stand beside Jacob Blake when he was shot, or do you just screw up the timeline?
I'm sorry, I do the common thing of referring to a past president as President, because they were the President. It's extremely common, and in this case relevant because he's an elected Democrat.
Well, Defund the Police was supported by some Democratic politicians, like AOC and the Squad. Even Harris supported defund in 2020. And every Dem nominee in 2020 said they would decriminalize border crossing.
It’s often teenagers who raid store shelves. It’s why they got rid of shopping baskets and have those weird sliding things that prevent people from swiping the whole shelf and running out.
There have been activists pushing the narrative that holding children in cells,
even temporarily, has broadly negative effects on later outcomes. Of course this is plausibly a selection effect (I do not trust criminal science researchers to address that), but that is the argument towards leniency/impunity.
Then bring back public beatings. Seriously. If we are squeamish about putting people behind bars and they don't have anything valuable that can be fined, beat them with sticks and send them on their way. Letting criminals get away with crime just invites more crime.
Calling for public beatings might be a bit edgelordy but I do think the Eighth Amendment is legitimately part of the problem. One of the reasons we can’t get a handle on the petty crime problem is that our options for what to do with the perps are catch and release, hit them with a fine they won’t pay or community service they won’t show up for, or spend a ton of taxpayer money (usually far more than the value of what they stole/damaged) locking them up for some length of time, during which they will network with other criminals and after which they will be locked out of most gainful employment, none of which are really satisfying solutions. If there were some public humiliation-based punishment we could apply that would be cheap and unpleasant enough that they won’t want to go through it again but won’t massively reduce their chances of reintegrating into society after it’s over I think that would be a much better solution for everyone involved.
Then we have must have a zero tolerance three strikes law. Third strike and its life imprisonment. Doesn't have to be LWOP, but it will be life with parole.
The fact that you don't have an effective punishment for petty crime is a problem, but escalating isn't the solution to that, because disproportionate punishment is always going to generate political pushback (Eighth Amendment or no Eighth Amendment).
You need a punishment that is both a meaningful deterrent and an effective rehabilitation measure. Prisons in other countries achieve that goal (by spending more per-prisoner, they reduce the number of prisoners long-term); so do community punishments with the threat of prison for not turning up.
But if prison is "during which they will network with other criminals and after which they will be locked out of most gainful employment" then my recommendation is that you fix your prison system and also that you make it a lot easier for ex-prisoners to get a job.
I think a lot of America's crime problems are downstream of the fact that America's prison system sucks so badly it makes the UK's look good by comparison.
If your courts had a sentence that represented meaningful deterrence and rehabilitation without completely wrecking the convict's life, then that would make a big difference in terms of the ability to address petty crime.
It's funny, this reminded me of back when I used to debate politics on a now long defunct forum associated with the Baltimore Sun. This was during Obama's first term and I remember debating immigration hawks then, in defense of the Obama administration, in essentially the same terms described in this piece. You keep the border secure and you focus on serious crime in the interior. If an illegal alien who hasn't done anything serious gets caught up in that tough, that person gets deported, but you don't prioritize it nor do you engage in big, showy authoritarian stunts.
I agree with MY's broader contours but unfortunately I don't think it will be good enough. Mike Johnston isn't going to convince anyone in an environment where everyone believes that the priority of Democrats is to avoid deporting anyone, ever, unless that person has done something so bad they have no choice (and even then they kinda wish they didn't have to).
This doesn't mean I think some sort of legislative compromise should be abandoned that involves significant amnesty for long settled people. However until that day comes, and in spite of resource reallocation and stopping with the stunts, the message needs to be 'If you get on our radar, and are not here legally you are gone. It doesn't matter how long you've been here. It doesn't matter whether you've paid taxes or haven't committed serious crimes. You will be removed in accordance with the law.'
Only then can the pivot actually happen. The Democrats cannot appear to be squeamish about it either. That way leads us right back to where we are.
Yeah, I think this is probably right. I am slightly more hopeful about the prospects of legal immigration reform and expansion if Dems can team up with business groups. But the terms have to be primarily tailored to US interests and normie sensibilities.
One example could be a expanded student visa program with a direct path to permanent residency, only for colleges with acceptance rates higher than 25%, English proficiency requirement, maybe aspirational civics test and graduation and maybe a GRE score to get permanent residency.
One there is a true zero sum competition for slots at prestigious schools and it would likely mess with the politics of passing it (also a some schools currently game their stats to look more selective for prestige, so this pushes the other way either expand seats or not game stats). Two currently the demographics are going to be tough for many schools with fewer young people and it's the less selective who will need the extra students.
Also the selective schools are way over indexed in conversations in any case, the entire Ivy League is smaller than Texas A&M, and nothing says those kids can't go on to research at more prestigious places in grad school.
Personally I think we probably need Aggie engineers more than Harvard English majors. I would use the visas for specific skills rather than a broad brush.
Unless I am misinformed, Texas A&M is a pretty decent engineering school.
Our working age to retiree ratio projections look pretty bad, going from 3.5 workers per retiree down to 2.5. Getting above average educated kids (whose education is going to be paid by their foreign parents) right at the beginning of their working career seems like a clear win.
I am not opposed to H1B type programs, or industry specific programs. But, I don't love the idea of the government picking winners and losers between industries.
Unemployed people aren’t workers and cannot support retirees. I am not suggesting picking by industry - I am saying pick skills that we have a shortage of, across industries, and don’t pick skills where we have an oversupply already. Also, where possible, train our own people first.
We have a shortage of advanced AI people, healthcare people, engineers, manufacturing experts, robotics technicians, etc.
We do not have a shortage of underemployed English majors.
On top of that, we currently have a crop of new graduates struggling to find jobs in a changing job market.
Productivity growth, if it proceeds as projected, is likely to offset a shrinking worker to retiree ratio.
We are projected to use a 1/3 to 1/2 of productivity growth just to offset the dependency ratio growth, which would be bad.
Also, it's odd to worry that foreign students are going to major in English. They are much more likely to enter technical fields. And, again, if their family is paying for their education, I would let them decide what they want to study and career to pursue rather than have a government quota do it.
The dependency ratio is currently at 2.7. It’s expected to change 25-33% over the next 25 years. Gradually, not overnight.
It is not expected to use 1/2 to 1/3 of productivity growth to offset the dependency ratio in any projection I have seen that takes current trends in automation in account. Read the article I linked to.
“We have seen very rapid productivity growth over the last year, with an increase of 2.9 percent. It is at least plausible that artificial intelligence and other new technologies could sustain a faster rate of productivity growth going forward.
Suppose that we see the growth rate increase by 0.5 percentage points above the 1.6 percent rate projected by the Trustees to 2.1 percent. This is still well below the rates of close to 3.0 percent that we saw in the post-war boom and the 1995-2005 speed up.
In that case, the average wage will be 72 percent higher in 2050 than it is today. And, if we leave the tax rate at 20 percent, the average retiree will have a benefit that is more than 40 percent higher than retirees get today, even assuming no increase in taxes. Where’s the horror story?”
I am not worrying about foreign students majoring in English. I am pointing out that visas with a path to citizenship should be targeted to who benefits the US. That is a different concern. In fact, most foreign students major in practical things.
Imo a lot of issues the Democratic party has right now happened post 2014 and certainly post 2020 when we started listening to the social progressives about crime and illegal immigration. Body cams on cops and stringent police accountability for violence against suspects? Absolutely. But everything else has done far more reputational and societal harm than good for Democrats.
The big problem with the US immigration system is that you have a large population of relatively well-settled illegal immigrants.
This just doesn't exist elsewhere.
Mass deportation, which is what the law technically requires, would have very substantial, negative, economic impacts. There's a reason that ICE aren't doing raids on farms or meat-packing plants.
I can absolutely understand why a lot of Americans don't want a mass amnesty - they don't trust that there won't be a mass of new illegal immigrants arriving immediately after the amnesty and then they'll have the same problem all over again in a decade or two. That's what happened with the Reagan amnesty, after all.
The battle you have is that if you clamp down in an effective way on the mass of illegal immigrants, you'll have devastating impacts on individuals who are well-established in communities and there will be lots of pushback from their community - but, without those mechanisms, I can't see how you'll ever get popular consent for the amnesty that is the only long-term solution.
But if your clampdown is effective, then future illegal immigrants won't be able to get well-established in the community in the first place, so their deportation won't be as controversial.
Effective clampdown has to mean the federal government issues right-to-work documentation to every citizen and legal non-citizen worker and it's both illegal and impossible to work without it (ie employers get prosecuted for not checking it). It also means separate right-to-study documentation (student visa holders will have RTS but not RTW) and requiring all educational institutions to check that too - and I note that California currently has policies requiring the opposite and enabling illegal immigrants to study, but that's in a context where there are lots of illegal immigrants who would be legal under any sensible immigration regime.
" You keep the border secure and you focus on serious crime in the interior. If an illegal alien who hasn't done anything serious gets caught up in that tough, that person gets deported, but you don't prioritize it nor do you engage in big, showy authoritarian stunts."
My issue with this is that it creates a lot of luck in the system.
Ok cool. 0 low skill immigration and only elite high skill immigration. Guest workers fill low skill role but their children don't get birthright citizenship rights. Guest workers that become pregnant / have their spouses become pregnant are kicked out immediately.
This series unfortunately has ended without discussing what I think is one of the central questions: what should the policy be for someone who presents themselves to US border authorities and claims a "well-founded fear of persecution". In the past Matt has suggested that he thinks this should be limited in some way, but actual details seem very important here.
For example, we could have a number of blanket bright line rules for determining asylum status and hold the relevant hearing immediately at the border. Or we could detain everyone who claims asylum in refugee camps. Or we could have a policy like the current one. Or we could abandon asylum altogether. But these are very different.
Do they have a well-founded fear of persecution in Mexico/in Canada/in a country with direct flights to the US that allowed them to board a plane?
Because barring the odd boat refugee or maybe a Russian who swam the Bering Strait, any legitimate asylee needs to demonstrate why the last country they passed through wasn't a safe refuge. That's not an impossible standard; someone flying in from China, several Arab states, or probably a few African ones could meet it. But unless someone crossing the southern border can credibly demonstrate that Claudia Sheinbaum wants them dead, most every claim from a land arrival is prima facie invalid.
Okay, I checked and I was wrong about "first safe country" - it's a common standard for countries to adopt and it's compliant with international standards, but it's not current US law.
I do think that at a practical level, the fact that virtually no asylees passing through Mexico even try to get asylum there puts the lie to their persecution narrative. It's a liberal democracy. There are regions with awful gang problems, but that's not true of the whole country. Most would-be-refugees speak the language and have a much closer cultural background than they would in the US. But it also has ~1/5 the GDP per capita of the US. This *strongly* suggests that economic opportunities rather than safety motivates the vast majority of asylum claimants.
I agree that economic issues factor into where people try to seek asylum. But that doesn't mean the people aren't being persecuted, it just means that given that they are fleeing, they want to flee to a richer place. I don't think that's so bad -- it would be much more challenging for Mexico to integrate all those people because of their smaller economy.
My point is that if someone is genuinely fleeing persecution, they might also think the US is a better place to flee to than Mexico for a variety of reasons.
This is a really important point about "first safe country" rules--one of the problems is that it means neighbor countries to countries in crisis get even more overwhelmed (and they still get overwhelmed, there are far more Venezuelan refugees in Colombia than in the US).
This is a fair point and I think an under-discussed dimension of all of this is diplomacy and the stability situation in South and central American. At minimum I'd like to think some kind of constructive arrangement could be reached with Mexico that isn't based on Trump-esque bullying or threats. Having huge numbers of people, and particularly non-Mexican nationals crossing through their territory isn't doing them any favors either.
The Hague Convention says that you have to travel to the country you are seeking asylum in "directly" - but note that was adopted before the mass availability of direct flights and has been repeatedly interpreted by courts in many countries to mean that you can pass through another country as long as you take no action in that country "indicating your intention to stay".
Applying for asylum in Mexico is such an action "indicating intent to stay" which means that your travel to the US was not "direct" and therefore (whether granted or rejected) makes you ineligible for asylum in the US.
This is a really stupid piece of international law, because it makes countries want to play stupid games to get asylum-seekers to pass through their country without applying so they can pass the problem to another country. Mexico deliberately tries to encourage them not to apply and points out that if they do that they make themselves ineligible for US asylum - because the Mexican government doesn't want to have them all living permanently in Mexico.
The front-line countries (like Mexico for Central America or Turkey for Syria and Iraq) will not accept a system where they have to deal long-term with nearly everyone who crosses their border: the sheer numbers will overwhelm their capacity to cope. At one point in the Syrian Civil War, there were approaching ten million Syrians living in Türkiye. Since they obviously couldn't be sent back to Syria at that time, they had to go somewhere. Far better if they could be granted status in Türkiye or Mexico and then dispersed as refugees elsewhere - but the front-line states will only accept that if the dispersal numbers come somewhere close to the numbers coming in.
My inclination is that the country that an individual applied for asylum in should have no impact on where they would end up, and also no impact on whether they are likely to get refugee status granted or not.
To achieve that, you'd need a new treaty that would work something like this: an asylum-seeker applies anywhere for asylum. They are assessed by an international refugee authority (a new agency, nominally under the UN, but where voting rights depend on the number of refugees your country accepted) and that makes a determination of whether they are granted refugee status or not. If not, then they are turned over to local immigration authorities (who can then deport them). If they are granted status, then there's some sort of agreed allocation system where countries agree what percentage of refugees they will each take and then the refugee prioritises where they'd like to end up and where they want to avoid and then the system does its best to allocate people to countries they will be least unhappy (also you'd have to do things like making sure that LGBT+ refugees don't end up in Saudi Arabia, etc)
By allocating votes by the number of refugees a country accepts, you avoid the usual UN problems of one-country-one-vote where a bunch of poorer countries in Africa and Asia seek to use their votes to impose costs on the rich minority of countries - burdens that those countries aren't prepared to take on themselves. If the agency starts granting status too easily, then the US and EU countries will have a sufficient majority to force rules changes or personnel changes to ensure that asylum is only granted to people that really need it.
It really should be US law though. The state department maintains a list of countries US citizens shouldn't visit. why not a list of countries where we believe the government is sufficiently likely to kill their citizens that we will give them a trial to determine if they deserve asylum? If they are not from countries on the list, no judge needed, rule them out without needing a trial.
Surely the other way around? Anyone from the known-dangerous countries gets asylum without need for any further checks. People from the other countries might be in a specific group that is endangered, or the situation there might have changed, or they might be a political dissident - and resolving "might" to yes or no is what trials are for.
If you're a political dissident from China, you probably are entitled to asylum; if you're a random Chinese person, you should go through the normal immigration system.
I think the US Department of State can pre-vet countries that are threatening groups of their citizens. In how many countries around the world are the governments able to credibly threaten the lives of their citizens without the United States being aware this is happening?
I think the idea that a trial with a judge is needed to decide if your home government is planning to kill you is based on the world being much less interconnected than it is now. I will admit there are edge cases, if you are on opposition lawmaker from Mexico (a bordering nation of the United States, meaning the person applying for asylum is not forum-shopping and thus transforming themselves into an economic migrant) and you say you have a thumb drive of Claudia Sheinbaum threatening to have you executed for some reason, you need a full trial with a judge to decide this. But that sounds incredibly unlikely.
If you are some ordinary citizen coming from some country in Central or South America and we know your government isn't sending out death squads (and it's the CIA's job to know this sort of thing) then I don't see why that person can't be told they are ineligible to apply for asylum by whoever is manning the border.
I feel like Matt has talked about this in depth. There is a fundamental difficulty in that most asylum claims are sympathetic situations but do not truly have a "well founded fear of persecution" unless you draw that line so loosely as to allow almost everyone to have such a fear. But its really hard to turn sympathetic people away, so despite people not having a valid claim there are lots of pro immigration people who want to find a way to let them stay anyway. This is very similar to the way people feel about many criminals - that they are victims that deserve our sympathy.
But you have to draw the line in a sustainable way. If you won't enforce it, then the public will find someone who will. This has been demonstrated across the Western world...
Its not? The answer is that you have to enforce the rule and turn away people who don't meet the criteria. If you do that consistently, then the number of people attempting to claim asylum will fall back to its historic norms of being an overall small number.
To start with, the big problem is that people do not have their case decided immediately. Which means either they go in a camp (has serious problems), or they get released into the US (different problems), or they have to stay in Mexico until their case is decided (this is the remain in Mexico policy which requires agreement from Mexico among other things). Which of these are you suggesting? Which is Matt suggesting? Is the current rate at which people actually get asylum after the process is over appropriate to the goals? Can people work while they are waiting? There are a lot of questions here that make a really big difference.
This is primarily an issue because of the surge. If you brought asylum claims back to normal levels, then you could handle them fairly quickly.
Nor do I see *inherent* problems in housing them in a border camp. The way the Trump is doing it is problematic, because they are trying to be cruel. But people who have traveled to escape persecution are going to be okay sitting in a basic camp for a week/month while a determination is being made. If that's not acceptable to them, they should probably have not come in the first place...
Right but our bilateral relationship with Mexico is important, and also this still hasn't answered the original question about what our policy should be.
During the Biden years, the fundamental problem with asylum claims was that the surge overwhelmed the number of judges we had to adjudicate the claims so people could stay in the country for years before they had to appear before a judge.
My solution is -- bear with me here -- use AI to judge, or at least triage, the claims. Hey, if we're going to (probably soon) use AI to review your scans for cancer and other diseases, why can't it fairly judge asylum cases? At least, use it to identify the most bogus cases immediately and say, sorry, you're out of here. And with access to all asylum case information, I'd argue that such AI judges would do *better* than human ones.
Lastly, because these folks are not American citizens, they do not have the same right to due process including appearing before a human judge.
And lastly, lastly, just using it for triage, and getting rid of the ~50% of the claims that are prima facie totally bogus will take away a lot of the backlog and allow us to process the rest a lot faster.
I'm very doubtful that AI would make anyone happy in this situation. Depending on your opinion, you'll think that the AI rules are too strict or not strict enough. And I think you'll have some groups working out the language need to game the AI such that it requires constant adjusting.
I think AI would be very bad at this, but also would not pass constitutional muster at the supreme court. A better approach would be to have more judges and to have bright line rules about what is acceptable as a cause.
Why not turn away without trial anyone on the southern border trying to claim asylum who can't prove their application for asylum in Mexico has been rejected?
I’m not sure I buy the idea that the public’s aversion to immigration is all about crime. So even if the Democrats could somehow commit to it, I don’t think pairing (1) harsh measures against criminal illegal immigrants and stricter border control with (2) vastly expanded legal immigration is going to please voters who are unhappy with the current situation.
Consider the following thought experiment. The US vets 100 million immigrants from poor countries, removes all of those who would’ve committed crimes, and lets the rest in. Would voters be happy? I think cosmopolitan Democrats would love this, whereas Republicans would hate it. Swing voters might think things are changing a little too fast.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that Democrats need to answer the question “Who are we?” No answer will make everyone happy. But my feeling is that the view held by influential liberals is quite different from that of most voters. We cosmopolitans imagine a world like you see in sci fi movies, where you see people of different colors speaking dozens of languages all around you. We need to recognize that this isn’t a universal preference.
That's true as far as it goes but the critical part of your hypothetical I think is a lot less the cosmopolitan component and a lot more the 'from poor countries' component. If immigration means stapling a green card to the back of 4 year degrees awarded to fluent English speaking immigrants I don't think anyone cares, even when you see them and their descendants out driving around the shopping center parking lot. When immigration means chaos at the border and being called a racist for thinking normal laws should be enforced and/or confronted with visible disorder, particularly by non English speaking people, on your town's main drag a lot of people won't like it.
100 million would be unpopular because it would raise overpopulation concerns.
While cosmopolitanism isn’t universal, it’s still broadly popular. Polls show large majorities think religious and racial diversity is good for America: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-and-views-on-immigration-and-diversity/. It’s also why companies run ads with a multiracial aesthetic, even all the daycare brochures emphasize diversity and multiculturalism.
Appreciating diversity is not equivalent to cosmopolitanism.
I know plenty of hard core rural people who appreciate their buggy driving Mennonite neighbors, love their Spanish speaking vet from the Caribbean, go to Catholic fish fries, regularly eat at the local soul food food truck and the Amish food truck, attend churches ranging from evangelical to mainline to Mormon to Quaker, and are still very much of a specific place and a specific rural culture.
Cosmopolitanism is more, we’re all citizens of the world, kumbaya. Which is not the same thing, and is actually not that popular.
Very much agreed. The amount of immigration and who is immigrating is also important.
We have about 1 million legal immigrants each year by now. I think that number could be slightly higher, maybe 1.2m or 1.5m (tops). But would need to be MUCH lower than the total numbers under the Biden admin (3 or 4 million).
The total immigration level needs to be low enough to allow time for assimilation. And we also need to make sure that the people coming broadly share Western liberal values and are willing to learn English and assimilate.
"The US vets 100 million immigrants from poor countries, removes all of those who would’ve committed crimes, and lets the rest in. Would voters be happy?"
For me depends entirely if they are high intelligence or not. Why emphasize "poor countries"? Why do leftists think that immigration should be a charity tool? I want intelligent immigrants from rich countries.
Matt's argument that "immigration increases crime because people cannot commit a negative amount of crime" is just so dumb. The fact that we need to take voters seriously doesn't mean we need to twist ourselves in knots to avoid the conclusion that voters are simply wrong about lots of stuff.
Seeing as the comments section is going to soon be filled with people saying 'why don't we just use E-Verify nationally' or 'has anyone considered E-Verify' or 'E-Verify, but for every job, why don't we try that'. Just wanted to again remind you that E-Verify doesn't really work and is easily gamed:
“Amy Peck, an immigration lawyer with Jackson Lewis, said the first Trump administration conducted an audit of one of her clients, a meatpacking company. Of roughly 600 employees who had previously been cleared by E-Verify, more than half had submitted documents the audit found to be suspicious….. “This has been an open secret, that E-Verify can be evaded,” Peck said.
In 2022, the Labor Department found that one of the country’s largest food-safety sanitation companies had employed at least 102 children in hazardous occupations at 13 meat-processing plants in eight states. The company, now known as Fortrex, said the children had cleared E-Verify by submitting fake documents showing they were adults…..
In 2010, a USCIS contractor found roughly half of unauthorized workers run through E-Verify [received an inaccurate finding](https://archive.is/o/0RyYf/https://www.e-verify.gov/sites/default/files/everify/data/SumFindingsEVerifyEval2010.pdf) of being legally employable, primarily because of identity fraud….. clearing E-Verify can be as easy as obtaining the name and Social Security number of a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, and printing that information on a fake ID. A U.S. citizen’s name and Social Security number can be purchased for about $1 on the dark web, or as low as 10 cents in bulk, Talcove said.
An Arizona woman is set to be sentenced later this month for charges related to a scheme in which she [helped North Korean IT workers illegally land jobs](https://archive.is/o/0RyYf/https://www.wsj.com/business/north-korea-remote-jobs-e4daa727) at hundreds of U.S. companies. According to court filings, E-Verify was queried more than 100 times, using 68 identities stolen by the scammers. It didn’t detect the fraud.”
Ah, well, best give up. Certainly there's no way improve AND increase the use of eVerify. We definitely didn't just give $150B to DHS to improve enforcement of border and immigration issues.
The point is that at some point you're making a tradeoff between catching illegal workers, and living in a Chinese-style surveillance panopticon state. Could you make E-Verify even tougher? Sure. You could build a federal database of everyone's biometric data including a face photo and fingerprints, and then check that whenever someone switches jobs. Maybe a DNA test too? Why not? For all 200 million American adults? Sure, that definitely sounds reasonable.
It's not that these things are 'impossible', it's that there are tradeoffs and at some point the scale and intensity required are just ridiculous for the sake of...... catching some illegal landscapers and busboys? It's kind of like the War On Drugs- is this really a great use of our societal resources, nabbing every guy with a dimebag?
I think 'some' document verification is fine, but again it's a tradeoff and at some point you have to say 'it's too intrusive, we don't want this level of surveillance, and in exchange we're going to quietly accept that some roofers are illegal or whatever'
Or you know a national ID card with a 2D bar code on the back that pulls up a copy of the card so anyone can confirm it's real. Like tons of other liberal first world democracies do.
Your chinese panopticon statement reveals a deep misunderstand of how the rest of the liberal democracies operate.
But you don't know that the person presenting the real ID, is actually the person on the ID card. I could steal or borrow or buy or secretly borrow and return or loan or coax or whatever someone driver's license and it's a 'real' license- 'anyone can confirm it's real' as you say. That doesn't mean that *I'm the person to whom it was issued*. That's where the biometric data would come in.
So every illegal worker borrows US citizen Uncle Jose's card in the neighborhood for a fee, clears the license scan, and then returns it to him. You borrow your cousin's. Etc. etc.
As far as 'rest of the liberal democracies operate', as I've noted to you before, literally every other rich country uses migrant labor for low-income jobs like construction, meatpacking, agriculture, increasingly manufacturing, etc. The way 'the rest of the liberal democracies operate' is that they use cheap, under the table migrant labor!
"But you don't know that the person presenting the real ID, is actually the person on the ID card. "
You compare the photo to the person standing in front of you in HR. And then you scan the 2D bar code to confirm it matches the card and both the card photo matches the database query photo and those two match the person in front of you.
>You compare the photo to the person standing in front of you in HR
But the employers *want* to hire cheap migrant labor. So the have the out of 'yeah, he looked like so-and-so on the ID to me'. You can't prosecute or fine an employer on the basis of 'he didn't look like his ID photo, which was probably taken 6 years ago'. I mean visualize a hundred migrant day laborers. Do they really look so different from each other that you could pick them out of a lineup? C'mon. There's enough reasonable doubt to drive a truck through there.
And that's not even getting into- how about all of the people who would be denied jobs because they *don't* look like their ID photo? We're a country of 200 million adults, most of whom work. Try to picture all of the stories that would come out every day if you just rely on 'does this person look like their ID photo'. Every week in this country 50 people would be denied a job because they've gained weight since their picture was taken, grown a beard, got glasses, got older, etc. There'd be constant complaints from both workers and employers. 'Michigan mother of 3 denied job because HR says she doesn't look like her ID photo', imagine the headlines. 'Major employers angry as hiring becomes more difficult due to new visual test'. Again, c'mon. Not realistic at scale
Or another approach, possibly complementary, is to set distinct (substantially higher) employer paid SS and Medicare taxes on immigrants. Then you can hold the employer accountable for paying back taxes on their fraud.
This also changes the incentive arguments. Now immigrants are helping to shore up our retirement programs. Now we can talk about (reasonably) increasing rates of immigration!
We could definitely allow more *legal* migrant workers while also creating a national ID that would be useful in many ways, including e-verify. The key being that unlike a SSN being stolen and such, a national ID card would have 1 valid card, so if its stolen people are going to report that and if someone presents a stolen card, then it flags them to be picked up and deported for theft.
This is pretty hyperbolic. Many other advanced democracies have basically effective* versions of e-Verify , and no-one would describe them as "Chinese-style surveillance panopticon states."
*In the sense that much fewer than 1% of all workers are illegal immigrants.
Can you name who these other advanced democracies are, so that I can link info proving that they actually use a massive amount of illegal immigration for low-wage jobs? Literally every rich country uses migrants for agriculture, construction, meatpacking, factory work, etc. etc.
in ireland, even small businesses (restaurants etc) require an i-9 equivalent. i am not sure what the enforcement mechanism is, but non-compliance is essentially unheard of. my impression of employment regulations in other countries (UK, Australia, western Europe), from following of the contours of immigration debates there in the media.
I asked ChatGPT for a general overview of this topic (using as neutral language as I could muster) and it agrees:
I followed up on a few (not all) of the links GPT gave and they seem legit and consistent with the general claim.
Finally, please don't move the goalposts: the question is NOT "do other rich countries use large amounts of (possibly legal) migrant labor for agriculture etc?" the question under discussion is "is the US unusually lax in requiring employers to verify right-to-work status of employees?" and the answer to that seems to be yes.
Wait, YOU wrote "*In the sense that much fewer than 1% of all workers are illegal immigrants". How would it be moving the goalposts to note that this is not true? I mean, you only wrote 3 sentences originally, and that's 1 of the 3. You said these laws are 'basically effective'. But if they have huge amounts of migrant labor- then they're...... not effective?
(I find it somewhat alarming that people are consulting ChatGPT as some kind of expert).
I'm assuming that you threw that caveat in there because you realized how much illegal migrant labor European countries use. For example I found an estimate that 95% of agricultural labor in Germany are migrants, 50-80% of the meatpacking sector is, 67% of construction workers are, etc. It's been a long day and I'd have to be pretty motivated to start quoting & linking all of the texts I found about how *every* rich country uses illegal immigrant labor.
Let's just break this down logically. If other countries have laws about mandatory IDs to work- but they have tons of illegal immigrant labor- doesn't it very logically follow that these laws are not being followed? That they're not effective? Right? Am I missing something here?
If your point is, other rich countries have fake laws that they hypocritically don't follow in practice- sure, I'm totally happy to concede that
The idea that keeping our ID system fragmented across a bunch of poorly run DMVs is called security through obscurity. It was a good strategy for the James Bond era, but it doesn't make sense in the digital era. Now it just means that the state of Alabama has to hire its own cyber security team to keep its DMV records safe, and it will do a bad job of it because they don't have enough resources, and if we repeat that across all 50 states then everyone's records will be less safe from bad actors trying to hack the system. But the federal government still has access to all the same information, so we haven't actually done anything to reduce the threat of the panopticon.
It's sort of how putting a lock on a residential door doesn't really stop someone looking to break in. They can always pry it open with a crowbar or smash a window.
Yet that's not the same thing as saying it doesn't matter. A casual barrier deters casual crime. Having to interact with criminals and buy fake papers just to get a job is another barrier to people wanting to stick around in America illegally.
I always saw E-Verify as taking the decision away from some local employer who has no real ability to peer into the data into a wider view, where the government agency running E-Verify can put together the information that this 85-year-old woman from Idaho is now working a meat-packing plant in South Carolina.
Someone needs to be reviewing that data. Maybe get that UCSIS contractor to do it.
*EDIT* Downthread there's a claim to have
> So every illegal worker borrows US citizen Uncle Jose's card in the neighborhood for a fee
Which is exactly what an E-Verify system can do. "Hey, this identity was used to verify 100 jobs in the past month."
This isn't rocket science. The solution is sitting right there. It takes some deliberate obstinance to not see it.
>Which is exactly what an E-Verify system can do. "Hey, this identity was used to verify 100 jobs in the past month." This isn't rocket science. The solution is sitting right there
The problem is false negatives. You're denying people, probably US citizens, the right to work, feed their kids, and pay for rent- the stakes could not be higher. Imagine the possible errors- the system flags the US citizen temp worker who switches jobs every few days. The system glitches and locks a citizen switching jobs out of their new employment. And so on.
I'm sure it looks easy behind your keyboard. Then you try to enforce a real ID system on 200 million adults in the world's third most populated country, using government computing systems, and see how many edge cases and false negatives pop up. Imagine the headlines- "Michigan mother of 3 can't work because of government IT failures, facing homelessness". You're blocking people from being able to work, feed their kids, pay rent or a mortgage. The stakes are gigantically high. How many false negatives would you have in say a month? 50? 100? More?
I'm sure your IT system will work just as smoothly as the Obamacare signups did. Flawlessly, at the scale of 200 million workers. It always looks easy in theory.....
"Seven years later, those laws appear to have been more political bark than bite. None of the Southern states that extended E-Verify to the private sector have canceled a single business license, and only one, Tennessee, has assessed any fines. Most businesses caught violating the laws have gotten a pass. In Georgia the department charged with auditing compliance with the E-Verify law has never been given money to do so. In Louisiana, where the law against hiring unverified employees can lead to cancellation of public contracts or loss of business licenses, no contract has been canceled, no licenses have been suspended, and the state reports zero “actionable” complaints since the mandate went into effect in 2012. In Mississippi no one seems to know who enforces the E-Verify law. The mandate appears to give that job to its Department of Employment Security, which knows nothing about it and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which says it doesn’t know who’s responsible. The same is true in Alabama......"
Yes and that's not great. But Florida and TN have real bite to their laws.
come on, let's be real here, in blue states, their governments do not want to enforce laws that they deem unfair to illegal immigrants (anything that separates them from other residents/citizens).
The vast majority are not employed. It is very easy to set up an LLC, get an EIN, and work as an independent contractor. When was the last time you checked to see if your cleaning service or your pool guy is here legally? E-verify has a miniscule effect because of that and any expansion would have a miniscule effect.
How many employers aren’t asking for I-9s though? Is this just going to end up going after mom-n-pop restaurants, parents hiring nannies, etc.? If it plays out like that it won’t be popular.
In Austria and Germany, as an example, you are required to present your national ID card and register with the local police station within 3 days of moving to a new residence. Your new neighbors can check to make sure you're registered. If the police notice unregistered people about they will investigate.
For all the histrionics about immigration enforcement in the US the rest of the world is vastly more strict.
In Vietnam you are required to register anyone staying overnight (or longer) with the local police beforehand. In practice, nobody is registering their boyfriend who is staying the night a few times a week. But the local police absolutely notice when someone seems to have moved in to the area and hasn't been registered. A friend of mine from Austria came to visit and stayed with us for two weeks and the area police came knocking to remind us to register him.
100% agreed: some people are just spoiling for a fight, or looking to ride the coattails of someone else's fight.
Having said that, hostility to immigration is a recurrent theme in the US with a long, sordid history. There's clearly a large constituency upset by it, and I think it's worth noting that the biggest immigration advocates generally live in the places least affected by it (including me!). Greg Abbot's busing stunt may have been cynical, but it showed how shocking and disruptive surges can be. Muriel Bowser declared a "public health emergency" and established a new government office to support the arrivals of roughly 8,000 people in Washington DC (population 702k, not considering the metro).
The "Social Media Theory of Everything" has a lot of explanatory power even if it's obviously not the whole story. "Why now?" is probably the question it answers best.
I really wish this series had actually addressed the first principles. It’s hard to know what policy you should craft if you’re not all working towards something.
I think one thing that’s missing is that Democrats need to talk about immigration in terms of benefits to Americans. Too often they talk about the benefits to the immigrants instead. I am not saying this as a “one weird trick” kind of thing but IMO is a necessary condition.
That runs you right into the issue of highly skilled people with capital usually having a more positive economic effect than low skill broke people, and it is not permissible to notice (or talk about) that because most D's are more interested in the latter group than the former. You can't make the case if you care more about the welfare of the immigrant than the American.
As a feature of this approach to immigration, a candidate can also make "tough on crime" a theme around rebuilding tax enforcement at the IRS and seriously addressing wage theft. The overall theme of "we are a country of laws and EVERYONE will follow them" would certainly be a huge relief to me ...
Wage theft and tax evasion are much more distant problems and thus less salient than the CVS closed up, toothpaste is locked up, and there are cars with illegal flappy tags running red lights.
Frequency and proximity to exposure matters. The more layers of distance and abstraction between antisocial action and experienced harm the less salient the messaging.
They are distant in the same way that "chaos at the border is distant". In that case many more people care about it then probably "should" but it bothers them because the idea that chaos and disorder is happening anywhere in the country is vaguely disquieting in a "who knows where it pops up next?" kind of way.
So I'm not sure the distance is that important.
Otoh, tax evasion might be more tricky because it's common enough that a significant share of voters might seem themselves as the target.
Chaos at the border was experienced in Southern states and then externalize to lots of northern cities with the bussing and flights of migrants by Texas and Florida. It led to a rise of homelessness and additional burdens on social services. I witnessed this living in DC when the bussing happened and the rise of Door Dash e-bikes running red lights.
Wage theft is much more of a personal interaction that others rarely observe happening, that is why it happens in many cases. It’s not like employers are running around mugging people of their paychecks. It’s a much less observable crime.
I’m all for swift, certain, and severe punishment of shoplifting, but I don’t really get why people get so upset about high value items being locked in cabinets. It’s not much of an inconvenience and I’d rather wait on a clerk to get my detergent than pay a higher price for it due to theft.
It also seems this phenomenon is as much a result of anti-theft tech becoming cheaper as it was a shoplifting wave. You see these cabinets in rich and poor parts of town alike.
I'm not a crook and I resent being treated like one. I'm not going to ask you to be as bothered by this as I am, but I don't think it's conceptually difficult.
It's a total inconvenience, Helikitty. I waited around for 10 minutes to get some mascara, and two different employees swept by me and said they didn't have the key so they'd send someone. Eventually I got ticked off and bought my other stuff, left, and ordered my Great Lash from Amazon.
It seems to me the under staffing is as much as cause of shoplifting as anything else. I'd argue online retail has a much bigger influence on the problem than Defund the Police did.
There's a Walgreen's by my house - every time I got in there I have to search the store for someone to work the register so I can pay. It's inevitably because there are only 1-2 people working, and they have to spend time stocking shelves when not directly helping a customer.
I'm sure it's also super easy to steal from that store. Because you can go in and walk around without ever seeing, much less interacting with an employee.
It’s a vicious cycle. They’re getting killed by Amazon, so you cut back on staffing, which makes it significantly easier to shoplift (combined with social media making everyone aware of this fact). Lock product up, people go to Amazon, so you cut further …
Maybe. But there’s a real cost to having it in place. You need to pay for extra employees to lock and unlock it. And customers that don’t want to wait might just buy online instead.
Your old Safeway has the non-Tide detergent out on shelves, Tide behind the checkout in the liquor section, and locks only on hard liquor and ice cream.
Just because you assert something does not make it true or salient. Wage theft is something experienced by a person and lacks the same broader antisocial impact of other crimes.
This is a prime example of “I am going to ignore what is written and pretend you made a different claim.”
The observability and effects on third parties matters. Most workers do not experience wage theft while large numbers of consumers experience goods being locked up. Making an “anticrime” message about something less perceivable and more niche is a weak message.
This isn't responsive at all to my point. But I'm going to stop commenting (both on this thread, and in general) because the sub-comments become so non-constructive.
Analytically, I understand the view that not deporting long-term residents without legal status unacceptably undermines deterrence. I think there are grave moral problems with such deportations and I strongly oppose them, but I understand the logic of the position.
I do not understand the logic of (1) it's fine to de-prioritize deportations of non-criminals in a way that means the vast majority of undocumented people are at minimal risk of deportation, (2) it's fine (and in fact good policy) to explicitly grant these people legal status through a Congressional statute enacting comprehensive immigration reform, but also (3) it's not fine to not deport random undocumented people swept up in the course of criminal law enforcement, because that unacceptably undermines deterrence. Why does (3) undermine deterrence too much when (1) and (2) don't?
Just to take recent examples, cannabis decriminalization, online gambling, and shoplifting all demonstrate how even a little uncertainty can have a massive deterrent effect.
There's a large difference between tolerating something at low (but ambiguous) level and formally permitting it.
Great point. In general, I think that rules/laws should be enforced if on the books to maintain the rule of law. But to me, wrt the issues you cite here, the status quo ante was preferable. Are there heuristics for drawing lines in these situations? Is even possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube when formal permission generates an unforeseen level of bad outcomes? I would like to read more on this.
I agree that would be a good argument if it was only (1). But it's also (2)--Matt (like Obama and Biden) does want to formalize it, that's the whole premise of comprehensive immigration reform.
For (2), what are we talking about here? I understand that to be roughly "offer a path to legal status to a large subset of currently undocumented immigrants", similar to the 1986 immigration reform bill. That's very different from formally committing to stop deporting non-offenders in perpetuity
Right. There is a large group of people in the US who would be beneficiaries of standard comprehensive immigration reform proposals, which means basically that (1) they've been here for a while and (2) they haven't committed major crimes. What I'm saying is that it makes no sense to say, on the one hand, that you want to enact a statute to grant legal status to those people, and, on the other hand, that you need to deport those people when they make contact with law enforcement because of the need for deterrence.
It's different if we're talking about deporting people who are not in that category, such as major criminals or recent arrivals. It's totally coherent to say that we want those people to be deportable but also that deporting, say, all the people who lose their asylum claims is a lesser priority relative to violent criminals. But Matt is not distinguishing, and as I read him what he's implicitly criticizing is the Obama Administration approach of formalizing non-deportability for certain categories of undocumented people--and that was explicitly about people who would be covered by comprehensive immigration reform (it was actually even narrower than that).
Ah, ok. I would say that it's a painful concession, but I don't see how it's logically contradictory or incoherent.
Amnesty - even a partial amnesty - would weaken the deterrent effect of ongoing enforcement, but by a much smaller degree than formally committing to stop enforcement.
Is it clearer if I expand the proposition a little? "I want nonviolent immigrants to have a path to legal status, but until we decide the precise details of who and how, it's important to enforce the law as written so that we don't get overwhelmed."
I think you have it backwards. A deferred action policy that says we will not deport certain categories of people, which can be withdrawn at any time, is far less beneficial to those people than formal legal status and a path to citizenship, as in a comprehensive immigration reform bill. It's more consistent with deterrence, not less.
That's not right, Matt's view is that the big problem with lax enforcement is that is leads (in reality not in voter perception) to increase in people trying to come to the US.
Incentives matter. The purpose of the malicious show and social media campaign is to signal how cruel and unwelcoming this country can be.
It’s a terrible strategy because of all the collateral damage. If the Trump admin clamped down on the border, focused on following the law, weren’t openly bombastic about immigration enforcement, and sought to work with local jurisdiction then we would be getting a completely different reaction. A bigger collective “meh” from the public. They are doing the opposite of that.
I'm actually agreeing with you, especially on the efficacy. It's just clear they're not actually in the enforcement business.
Having demonstrated that they're serious they could cheaply be sending nasty letters telling illegals to fuck off then send the goon squad in after the noncompliant, but then you wouldn't get the aggressive shows if force and that's no good.
Yes, the on the ground situation is transmitted through the undocumented community in near-real time. There is a whole industry south of the border to test your enforcement. The supply of people who could travel north gets replenished every year. These people are actors who vote with their bodies every day.
I am doubtful that voters care at this level of granularity but more to the point that's actually not the argument Matt is making in the article, it's explicitly about deterrence.
It's the 'ol beer can in a paper bag situation. If you don't look in the paper bag, you don't have to do anything, but if you do find the beer can in the bag, you have to confiscate it.
That's about plausible deniability though, no? You don't want to admit that you're fine with the beer so you confiscate it when it's too obvious to pretend it isn't there. It's not really about deterrence, except to the extent you're deterring being too brazen
Re: (1) - If you're going to be merciful, it's better to be merciful quietly and unpredictably if you also want to maintain deterrence.
Re: (2) - Statutory comprehensive immigration reform is usually conceived as a combination of a path to citizenship for some long-term illegal immigrants, with stepped up enforcement on new arrivals and more funding for border security, right? That's what makes it comprehensive.
We can all agree that the amnesty portion will hurt deterrence, but the other parts help deterrence, and the whole thing (if properly designed) balances out, and leaves us in a state where deterrence for would-be new arrivals is intact, the border is more secure, and we have humane treatment for a defined population of long-term illegal immigrants.
Re: (3) - If you're going to do any interior enforcement at all, it's hard to justify not deporting the guys who you already have in jail in connection with a crime. This takes less resources than anything else, and if you don't do it, you're running Willie Horton type political risks.
Re (2)--I agree with the logic of this, you can achieve adequate deterrence through border control and deportations of new arrivals. There are a lot of resources to do this already, the Trump Administration is delivering more, much of this article is about how the next Democratic administration should focus resources there. Part of the context for the asylum crisis is that the older approach of just crossing the border unnoticed is far harder than it used to be.
So why (3)? You don't need to do it for deterrence, which is the rationale Matt gives. It still makes sense to do some interior enforcement for public safety and crime prevention reasons and because being credible on public safety and crime prevention is part of the political path toward legitimizing comprehensive reform and expanding legal immigration. But that rationale applies only weakly to people who commit minor crimes (who generally would be covered by amnesty legislation!) and it doesn't apply at all to non-criminals who are found to be undocumented in the course of law enforcement work. It's true that this is less resource-intensive than actively searching for undocumented people but it still takes substantial resources to deport a long-term resident (there's an immigration court process, and detention is expensive if you decide to do that too pending the deportation) and more importantly it is just facially inconsistent with the humane commitment to reform--we've already committed to not thinking these people should be deported.
With the element on crime as it relates to immigration, this piece ignores a lot of the debate around the intersection of those two issues.
A) the data surrounding whether immigrants overall commit more or less crime is very contested over all
B) Even accepting that they commit less crime, this is probably just a function of the fact that immigrant crime is closer to one and done and much crime is committed by repeat offenders (this implies that immigrants may commit even more crime as a proportion of the population coming in but may not contribute to higher rates of crime in the population)
C) it ignores the critical fact that 'immigrants' are not uniform, Japanese immigrants commit much lower crime than the general population for instance whereas other groups have significantly higher rates. Also with this, the economic contribution of immigrants is highly concentrated in immigrants from certain nationalities
D) it ignores that when we compare immigrants to 'the US crime rate', that crime rate includes African Americans, who pull up that rate hugely, but people are voting based on will the rate/threat in their community go up so if maybe the violence of the black community is far from you but the immigrants are close, your local crime rate may be going up even though it's being 'lowered' by diluting the violence among the black population. E) data in the US and Europe shows that immigrant's children tend to converge with native peers in terms of crime rates, something that is currently playing out for instance in Minneapolis where, maybe their parents are less criminal than the US population, but their kids have converged with native African American rates, therefore the rate of juvenile crime is rapidly increasing (overall rates are moving around) but people observe this and it absolutely affects their perception of immigration.
Anyway, long message but I just think this discounts too easily fears that voters have tied to crime and immigration.
This sounds like a great approach. It should also be paired on a tough-on-crime approach within ICE and government agencies—any immigration-related government personnel who violated anyone’s constitutional rights, especially First Amendment rights, needs to be at a minimum fired and permanently barred from government employment and ideally renditioned to CECOT. If we can do that I don’t think anyone will care if Democrats are also aggressive about deporting foreign criminals.
Good point. Any Democratic officeholder who goes after the crimes committed by DHS/ICE will open up lots of room in the coalition for taking more aggressive actions against the worst parts of the illegal immigrant population and the border.
In general I think a lot of liberals are sincerely clueless as to how tough other countries are—yes, including rich democratic ones—when it comes to enforcing immigration laws.
Big thing I’ve learned here in Taiwan. Very hard to get temporary work status, much less citizenship.
And what would happen if you shoplifted, openly littered, got DUI arrests or regularly didn't pay your fare on the metro?
I was also surprised to find out that highly educated people genuinely don't know how few countries have birthplace citizenship.
Almost the entire new world does and it’s explicitly in our Constitution so this isn’t an area where it matters what other countries are doing.
I honestly don't begrudge Eastern Hemisphere countries for not having it, because most of those countries are historically some form of ethnostate (not always one ethnicity - sometimes it's more than one - but an ethnostate all the same). While a lot of them are liberal democracies now by law, you can't really expect them to go whole hog on birthright citizenship. But this is America.
I am going to say lots of people haven’t seen how racist different Asian groups can be towards other Asian groups.
Yeah, I don't begrudge a small country that has never really had a modern massive empire and is relatively homogenous for having strict immigration laws. But trying to graft the experience of a "minnow surrounded by whales" onto the US context would just be a gigantic disruption to how people have actually lived.
That's a pretty strong and narrow-minded claim.
Of course it can matter in a myriad of ways. If we're trying to understand why many peer countries deal with immigration differently it's very useful to take things like this into account.
I still think birthright citizenship is the right framework for the United States. When I look at the issues, say, Germany has had with guest workers and their children and now their children's children all I can think is absolutely nope, we do not want that here.
Our problems while serious aren't nearly as intractable. Most importantly we can still solve them with serious front end enforcement. The last thing we want is a large and growing group of people who aren't Americans but who have no relationship with any country in which they might be able to claim citizenship.
That's fine. I was more reacting to the response to KateLE's initial comment which I think was totally fine and reasonable. People who are talking about our immigration and citizenship relative to the rest of the world should at least be expected to understand what the rest of the world is like.
Otherwise you get people making silly "we should be more like Sweden" statements without realizing what that would actually mean.
Fair enough!
"Germany has had with guest workers and their children and now their children's children all I can think is absolutely nope, we do not want that here."
Asian countries have solved this by kicking out any guest workers that have children.
Maybe some countries can manage that but I don't see it as viable and it may make things worse instead of better. One of the reasons our immigration issues are more manageable is that as long as we can dampen down new illegal arrivals and deter more lawbreaking the people born here and their children will be assimilated into our polity without issue, whatever the status of their parents or grandparents was. Birthright citizenship is an important part of making that work, it only becomes an issue when no one is minding the door.
When I lived abroad, locals were not shy about telling me how terrible it was that I put our kids in a bilingual school. The reason: they assumed birthplace citizenship was a thing in Europe and I could not disabuse them of that notion! My take: if you won't give my kids citizenship why should I raise them in your culture and language? Their take: WTF are you talking about, people get citizenship based on where they are born, everyone knows that!
I'm confused - the locals, in the European country you lived in, didn't understand that birthplace citizenship didn't exist in their own country?
Yes, that's right. They take for granted that they are deriving citizenship from their parents' citizenship and just assume that every country works the way the US does because American birthplace citizenship is so well-known. (There are a lot of "accidental Americans" in Europe.)
Natural citizens are remarkably, but understandably, ignorant of their own laws regarding immigration and citizenship because they never had to deal with them. Ask an American how USCIS works and they'll probably ask you what USCIS is.
To get our kids' citizenship recognized, we had to travel to the consulates with proof that we were, in fact, not just citizens of our respective countries of birth, but that we had lived there long enough to transmit our citizenship legally. That is actually a non-trivial task when you've been abroad for a decade. And we had to repeat it de novo for each kid; no re-use of paperwork.
When we returned from a trip to the US to show of our first-born to the family, border agents asked for a residence permit... for a six-month old. The Man does not mess around with this stuff.
Not only did people not believe me when I told them birthplace citizenship isn't a thing, they were deeply skeptical of the true fact that is true that, in most European countries, you have to renounce your existing citizenship to acquire theirs.
That experience made me even more appreciative of birthplace citizenship and the remarkable ability of the US to assimilate and integrate immigrants. "Your kids should learn English because they are American" makes far more sense than "Your kids should learn our weird language because they were born here but don't have our citizenship and have to renounce their American citizenship if they want to get it which they can only do when they're 14 and in the meantime they'll need to apply for residence permits periodically to live here."
Wow - this is super fascinating and I definitely learned something new. Thanks for explaining!
Now I'm even more curious what country it is, so if you're able to share that I'd be even more appreciative. But no worries if you can't!
That's true, but the core identity of most other countries is different than America. The now-popular Reagan quote goes: "...A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American."
That was in a different era when immigrants were encouraged to assimilate and think of themselves as American. The cultural winds have shifted significantly - especially over the last 15 years or so. Popular culture encourages ethnonarcissism and discourages assimilation.
That is just rhetoric, America is better at assimilation than most other countries (although that could just be selection effects), but there is no fundamental divide between America and non-America there are people who assimilate well in Europe and some degree of ghettoisation in America.
Whenever I read this quote I desperately want to emphasize the pronunciation of that last A in ‘American’
I roll my eyes at my friends casually speculating about where they're going to move to. Yeah, no you're not. New Zealand is beautiful, but you'd better have some skill they really need and be prepared to jump through a zillion hoops. Oh, and don't be sick; if you have multiple sclerosis or something, well, sorry honey. Go back to America.
"I hate those racist Republicans and their anti-immigrant rhetoric. I'm going to move to a country that is more white and has even stricter immigration policies!"
I'm an American who is a resident of NZ, and will soon be a citizen. What you've said is substantially true, but it is also true of the sanctioned pathways to American residency and citizenship. As a positive, in NZ I am able to fully participate in society (sans a passport, which I will get once I become a citizen) once I am a resident. This means voting, buying property, serving on juries, etc.
Immigration is likely the hardest thing that most immigrants will ever do, and we shouldn't forget this.
I wasn't really criticizing NZ for its policies. It was more a comment on the blithe ignorance of many Americans. "Of course this other country would simply love to have us!"
This is why I've been more realistic: who will take us? What skills do we have that are portable? How bad will the decrease in our standard of living be?
Still looking into it, but "Let's just move overseas!" isn't an easy out.
Some of the things I have seen in France (yes, the one in Europe) would probably blow people's minds.
Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain... Time to die.
Stuff like that?
That was in Holland.
It depends on what aspects you’re talking about. The really controversial stuff that Trump is doing like illegally renditioning people to foreign prisons, monitoring visa applicants’ social media, or imprisoning foreigners for speech is not something other rich democratic countries do. Heck communist China doesn’t even do that. US visa processing times and requirements also way exceed all the other countries’ I’ve applied for.
I'm sorry that's just not true.
Australia:
https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/foi/files/2020/fa-200200742-document-released.PDF
Germany:
https://www.statewatch.org/media/4440/wk08343-en24.pdf
Easy slam dunk for Republicans would be to just say "we want to copy the immigration policy of [insert European country that every lib loves]"
Other than - maybe Spain - there is no country with looser immigration policies than the U.S.
That's true, but it's largely downstream of labor law. The US is one of the very few countries where it's feasible to work without an national ID card. (The UK is another.) There's a reason that the issue with irregular immigrants in Germany is not lower wages.
In fairness our geography and types of labor requirements have no convenient parallels. That changes a lot, though I doubt many of the "No one is illegal" types take that into account.
I think Matt is vaguely right about how the Dems need to approach this but he's horribly misguided about how easy it'll be. You absolutely cannot transform Stephen Miller's ICE into a genuine law enforcement agency by putting a few dozen well meaning bureaucrats in charge. The immigration enforcement build out they're doing is an extrajudicial paramilitary group from the very roots that can only rightly be purged by a genuine liberal-democratic leadership. These people they've hired cannot be allowed to retain government powers beyond the Trump administration.
Carrying out the utterly essential turn over of personnel, within the larger context of Matt's strategic redeployment, is going to be a massive logistical and political challenge.
Restoring Obama era ICE leadership seems possible.
My understanding is that a lot of the exrraduciual activity is downstream of the fact that ICE is being deployed into blue cities with the explicit mandate of causing chaos. Change the leadership and the orders, and have more robust oversight of any lawless agents, and it seems like there’s a path to reform.
This agency has been around for 20 or so years, it’s not like Trump just created it overnight.
Leadership is going to be a huge part of this. Having worked as a cop for 15+ years, I can tell you that leadership is one of both the most easily controllable (easy to positively impact) and most important factors in law enforcement performance. Good leadership smooths out the political excesses and negative rhetoric that can cause some of the demoralization that leads to poor performance, and it also has an inordinate impact on addressing poor job performance or, worse, employees who are unsuited for law enforcement.
However, it is an open question whether Democrats will be able to overcome the anti-law enforcement creep that has been created by the "groups" and associated power centers of the democratic party. Tradeoffs, state violence (yes, real violence), and unfortunate outcomes for people who are in all other aspects of their lives good people are things that occur when law enforcement occurs, as Matt alludes to when talking about how even well-targeted enforcement for criminals can sweep up people whose only "crime" is being here illegally. Decrying this to the point of labeling, catastrophizing, and deeming "police" as a common enemy - along the lines of the great untruths seen in "The Coddling of the American Mind" - is something that has given Democratic politicians in too many urban areas too much pause, and impacted their ability to actually be seen as serious towards public safety. This will have to be corrected (maybe the book I'm writing will help with that!)
when your book is finished, please ask Matt if you can preview it in a guest post.
ICE professionalism was an issue even back in the Obama era when they were genuinely concerned with quality hiring standards. Now they're tripling the number of the enforcement agents by hiring groypers and have purged anyone who's insufficiently extremist. Apparently, if recent reporting is true, even Tom Homan is to much of a cuck for this operation.
Institutional culture matters and this one is poisonous way beyond anything even close to reformable.
Perhaps, but what do we do? Not have internal immigration enforcement?
You do like Camden PD did. You fire everyone and make them all reapply under new leadership.
This is ridiculous. The Camden police department has about 600 employees. ICE has over 20,000!!!
You are not going to fire 20 thousand federal agents and make them reapply. If you do, it will cause a massive immigration crisis as traffickers rush to get people across the border while there is no enforcement.
I'm perfectly happy with sticking the military on the border in the mean time. Would be a good look.
While perhaps the solution in an ideal world, this would be fodder for republicans to claim that the Democrats are back to a no-enforcement policy on immigration. These ideas are what has given us Trump 2.0.
Republicans are gonna say that no matter what. The test is gonna be what actions the new admin can proactively show they are taking that seem credible. How they restructure ICE is going to be secondary to whether or not they can be credible in their own right and simply, "Leave the R secret police in place." doesn't do anything to show the public that they have their own ideas about addressing immigration and crime.
Under new leadership that says: "we will not have any internal enforcement"
Excited for GOP 50-year reign.
Decide on the level of internal immigration enforcement you want, and match the numbers to it. If what you want is to find criminals who are illegal immigrants than you don't need the number of agents necessary to carry out wholesale deportations.
If you want greater numbers of federal law enforcement officers than take the funding from ICE, and spend it on new federal agents in other agencies. If, and only if, current ICE agents can qualify under the higher standards of the other agencies, then they can make the transition.
That includes close scrutiny of their actions under today's administration. If they were willing to be overly aggressive in their actions than that is disqualifying. We don't want or need those folks to be able to act under color of law. They won't behave properly under new leadership, and they'll be right there ready and waiting if there's a change back towards something similar to today.
To the best of our ability we need to recognize how badly things can go, and inoculate our institutions against that.
ICE was created in the 21st century, I don't think we had open borders before then
Yeah, but did we shut down the agencies that used to do border enforcement when we created ICE?
(Genuine question; I don't know.)
Use the Coast Guard in the interim for border security?
This seems a little wild eyed to me. Mostly it’s people who want a paycheck. Feels like you can raise standards and fire trouble makers when they, in fact, make trouble.
Making them *useful* given the lax hiring standards so far will be a little challenging but that is a different problem than “it is essential we purge these scary monsters!”
How would human traffickers react to mass firings of Trump era ICE workers?
I suspect many ICE agents just want jobs and would do what their boss tells them to. Close supervision, absolutely, mass firings, no.
That's why it's going to be hard. Credibly embracing border/law enforcement is going to require very ambitious, highly visible action to cover for dismantling the Stasi at the same time. It's a bad situation.
Just send them all out to the Rio Grande to stand there for 8-hour shifts. Maybe some of them can guard the Alaska-Russia border in the same way.
Forget the wall, just put every new ICE hire standing in a line across the the desert... I could get behind this.
Red Rover, Red Rover…
Ok Chief, your position is border wall mile post 418.2 about 100 miles west of El Paso. Need you there every morning at 6:00 AM. Grab a couple bottles of water. Someone will be by around noon with an MRE.
Do you want more Walter Mitties? Because this is how you get more Walter Mitties.
Human traffickers respond to conditions at the border and the immediate treatment of those apprehended there. Word gets back home very quickly if crossings are unsuccessful.
It was primarily the broken asylum system that left the opening for traffickers driving the Biden era surge.
Take some of the ICE money and invest it in more immigration admin law courts so that we don't need to either detain or release people caught, and make the system swift and smooth.
"is an extrajudicial paramilitary group from the very roots"
How did you come about this opinion?
The combination of their hiring standards, advertising, leadership statements, and well documented performance in the field.
That seems like a lot of conjecture.
Advertising is straight out of Helldivers and they've got too many fat asses that can't pass their own fitness standards that aren't particularly high to begin with. Is a high school degree even required?
what do you have against fat people?
We prefer the term "people experiencing fatness".
They require a 4-year degree, actually.
Definitely needs to be a purge... Early steps are to figure out who the fascists purged from ICE, DHS, Border Patrol, particularly if they're Republicans who nonetheless were professionals and said no to doing stuff outside their remit and put them in places of responsibility (alongside Democrat bureaucrats) or guys like Michael Fanone.
Improve fitness standards, educational requirements, lack of criminal records etc to easily justify purging the thugs.
None of it would be magic, just obvious steps to take.
As someone who wants it to happen, how do you distinguish the next President's mass-firing and re-hiring of ICE with the current President's firing of civil servants for wrongthink?
I'm probably broadly less sympathetic to civil service protections than most. "The President can basically fire anyone he wants" is the most compelling part of unitary executive theory stuff to my mind. If Congress wants to shelter things like the Fed and such from presidential dismissal they really have to dot their i's and cross their t's about locating their powers outside the executive branch in a compelling way.
Yeah, it's hard to imagine Greg Bovino faithfully executing the policies of President Pritzker
Sadly, you're probably right.
Why not just fire them all.
"it’s really helpful to have a strong image in the eyes of the public as a politician or a political party that sincerely believes that crime is bad and that criminals should be punished."
The Groups and activists believe that criminals are victims, and that crime is not bad, it is instead justice for the criminals. The leniency and apathy with which some heavily Democratic jurisdictions treat crime and criminals because they are beholden to The Groups are why CVS puts deodorant behind glass, criminals who have been arrested dozens of times are freed without bail, and why public-transit is losing ridership. And this matters outside the cities that are suffering from quality-of-life crimes, because people see videos and photos everything happening and then vote for Republicans. If Democrats don't want to be underwater on crime (and immigration), they need to actually address visible evidence and consequences of crime.
I think this is right. The locked-up drugstore merchandise is something I’ve heard many, many seemingly apolitical people complain about.
Yes, if you wanted to kill every brick and mortar store that wasn't already killed by Amazon, this is the way to do it. I'm not going to stand around begging an employee for a box of Tide. I'll order it from Amazon or Walmart.
I don’t want to have to hit the button and then have an awkward look with the staff member as I get some toothpaste or worse… condoms.
Oh my god, the world is ending, God forbid i have to talk with an employee to get an High value item off of the shelf in a major metro area, How so verry terrible for the country we totally don't have any actual pressing issue we need to face, and should focus on people not liking inconvenience when shopping
Having to press a stupid button for a guy to unlock a glass box so I can get a toothbrush really is terrible and a high stakes issue. I am in a gentrifying neighborhood with a liquor store that doesn't have everything behind bullet proof glass. I *way* prefer going there to the older liquor stores with everything behind the bullet proof glass. It is an immense quality of life concern
I don’t belive you, there this awesome buisness called Amazon that sells literally everything there is almost no reason you need to go to the Packie to get a toothbrush WTF?
"Why do you care about rampant crime? Just never leave your house! Problem solved!"
Except there isn’t rampant crime unless you live in the alternative reality of Fox News you twat.
I love amazon. I also like buying things in person sometimes.
Yes and asking any employee for assistance getting an item is one of the most minor inconveniences imaginable, it’s also not government policy it’s store policy from private buisness
"How so verry terrible for the country we totally don't have any actual pressing issue we need to face, and should focus on people not liking inconvenience when shopping"
Yes this is actually very bad. It is bad that we have people walking around that will openly steal from others. It is bad that everyone else in society has to face a tax (both literal and mental tax) in the form of daily annoyances because we refuse to enforce basic laws around petty crime. It is very, very bad.
There are really no excuses. The bottom 10% in the US has higher disposable income than the bottom 10% in Japan.
No it’s not very bad, these are minor inconveniences experienced by a specific subset of the population living in a few metro areas. Has anybody in power actually said don’t arrest people who steal shit, Or again is this just the vibes we’re getting from so lefties on Twitter? If local politicians are saying that fuckem the dem party should not support them, but like nobody wants people to be openly stealing shit from stores; that is a GOP propaganda narrative we need to stop contributing to.
You’re arguing a strawman. Nobody needs a mayor to literally say “don’t arrest shoplifters” for incentives to flip. When the operational reality is consistent downgrades and slow-or-no follow-through the expected cost of theft = ~zero.
Behavior responds to that, not to press releases or politicians waxing poetic.
“Minor inconvenience in a few metros” also misses the economics. Concentrated externalities still scale: locked shelves, store exits, shorter hours, fewer competitors, higher prices, worse service, etc.. That’s a transfer from rule-abiding customers and workers to a small group of repeat offenders. Call it “vibes” if you want, but retailers don’t spend millions hardening stores (and creating tons of friction) because of Twitter.
One of the biggest findings in criminology is, in deterrence, certainty and speed beat severity. If the system delivers a quick, predictable consequence (fine that actually gets collected, ban, community service that actually happens, escalation for repeaters, etc, etc.), petty theft decreases. Progressives fight against this TOOTH AND NAIL.
Compare littering - NYC to famously socialist Vienna:
NYC moved littering to low-dollar civil tickets under the CJRA, typically $50, plus an option to swap for community service. No criminal record and no jail backstop. EVEN then ~30% don't pay and ignore their ticket and literally nothing happens.
Vienna’s WasteWatcher issues an on-the-spot €50 "organstrafmandat"; if you don’t pay, it automatically escalates into a formal administrative fine with a ceiling of €1,000-€2,000 depending on the conduct, and, most critically, substitute custody up to 4–8 days if the fine isn’t collected. That’s hard enforcement with a jail backstop.
Again, people don't realize how INSANELY soft the American left is on crime. It does not have an international comparison. That's why there is so much open disorder in American cities.
Talks about straw men proceeds to invest arguments I’ve never made nice. Have I ever said don’t enforce crime? No I haven’t I’m saying it’s more of a perceived problem than an actual one, especially with the amount of coverage it gets. Yes it’s very visible to the average person and that is why it gets people animated.
Like I think the automated solution are based, a huge problem is that we have cops tied up on stupid shit like tragic enforcement that could largely be automated or given to a civil law enforcement agency not policy officers we want responding to and trying to prevent actual crimes like. Like we should have camera on every traffic light and hidden speed traps that just auto mail tickets to people, same for other minor infraction so cops can deal with real crimes.
Like I agree with most of what you say, all I’m saying is that in the grand scheme of national politics this isn’t really that big of an issue
These are in fact huge inconveniences to me, and I will vote GOP on the local and state level, until this stops
Nice vote for the sum-human degenerates that’s fantastic for this country why not just do it in the federal level to and stay consistent their chief? Ticket splitting is the dumbest shit, like in what world does it make sense?
Shampoo, soap and razor blades are hardly high value items. People are stealing large amounts of sundries and then reselling them.
In terms of value-per-pound, razor blades are just about the most expensive thing in most grocery stores.
...and now I buy mine on Amazon. I can go without shaving for a day or two while Prime works its underpriced magic.
I don't know many people who buy razor blades by the pound.
Oh no whatever will I do, it’s not like there are grocery stores that also sell toiletries and you know Amazon exists, you can literally have almost any necessity delivered to your home? But you know let’s implement bad policy because people are slightly inconvenienced and we need to humor them a little bit so they don’t make the horrendously moronic choice of putting the GOP in power because the democrats are slightly annoying
1. Calm down. I never said it was the end of the world.
2. The point is that you were completely misunderstanding the issue.
1: I’m an asshole, I talk like a sarcastic prick on occasion, is it the best but at this point I’m done with being nice about politics because the voters have clearly stated they don’t care anymore about character in regards to politics.
2: what is my misunderstanding here?
It illustrates an absolute failure of government. And most of us can remember a time when we didn't need to.
The CVS lockbox experience sucks and makes you feel like you’re being accused of being a criminal and that obviously crime must be rampant why else would they lock up half the store?
It's one of the nicer aspects of a civilized society that you can just take an item off the shelf and go pay for it.
And the vast majority of the time you are able to do this, it’s a problem in specific stores in certain large metro areas where the organized retail theft and locking up items in a problem. Like this is not an issue at all for most people
It wasn't like this just a few years ago.
the CVS lockbox experience. It sucks and makes you feel like you’re being accused of being a criminal.
The lack of shopping baskets is arguably worse.
I blame this on Trump. He normalized selfish amoral behavior and criminality to a whole generation of children. Then with TikTok and generally lax enforcement (because shoplifting was alway low priority), all these teens learned they could steal with impunity because the whole shopping system relied on trust.
MAGA is about destroying social trust.
There were no moves to decriminalize theft under $1,000.00, and anywhere there was such a move, it had no effect on theft.
I hate that too but the locked-up stuff really seems to have struck a nerve.
Where have they removed shopping baskets? Or is it shopping carts?
Basically in most cities shopping baskets are gone from stores. There are carts.
I remember in Tucson they put poles on the carts to prevent people rolling them out the door with cases of beer.
I miss those CVS ladies. So many discounted Arizona Arnold Palmers.
Huh. They aren't gone in Manhattan.
Those shopping cart poles have been around for years, if not decades.
Ain’t got no baskets in DC or Baltimore.
This is my issue. I want to shop with a basket. I just have to use my arms, so I keep dropping stuff.
Republicans are also incredibly lenient on crime by international standards, there seems a general vibe in the Anglosphere that tolerating crime is good and that popular or technocratic policies to lower crime are somehow illegitimate. It is far worse on the far left because they blame impersonal forces for crime.
Famously socialist Vienna issued 10,000 tickets (for a population of 2 million) for littering in 2022. When DeBlasio became mayor of NYC he told the NYPD and DAs to completely stop enforcing and issuing fines for littering other than by businesses (dumping trash). I don't think people realize how extreme and insane American leftists are about excusing petty crime. It's just completely insane relative to international standards.
I think the Anglosphere thinks of everyone else as an NPC and that only they are the main character. How else can you listen to "Bulls on Parade" and think you're standing up to power when you're actually just listening to your iPod in your bedroom. And you quickly wind up with "rules for thee, but not for me."
One alternative is the kind of anarchism in "The Disposessed" where everyone is a main character. People treat their neighbors well because they recognize their fundamental main characterness, and there's no need to enforce the rules because everyone follows them.
The other alternative is that everyone is an NPC. I felt this distinctly traveling to Shanghai, realizing that I was just an insignificant little speck, and so was everyone around me.
I'd prefer the anarcho-utopia if I had my choice, but the American version where everyone thinks they're the center of the universe is insufferable. And it might be at its worst in Silicon Valley, where I've spent my entire career.
Holy Strawman there chief. What elected democrats believe "criminals are victims" and that crime is not bad. Can we stop pretending that 5 follower twitter accounts aren't the democratic party for Christ's sake. If you wanna engage in using the GOP framing opf the issue just go grift a C-PAC you can make bank, Just look at Lindy Li.
"The groups and activists", not "elected democrats".
Even then, I live in a +34 Harris city and have attended city council meetings where discussions of crime have been first dominated and then derailed by discussion of the difficult circumstances the perpetrators face.
There's an attentional tax you must pay to talk about or address many kinds of crime (with a few obvious exceptions), an obligation to spend at least 3x as much time addressing root causes as practical, near-term policy solutions.
And the democratic party is suppose to stop this by.....? I don't care what some voters who show up to your city council think, and neither do the republicans who claim to. Stop contributing to the problem republicans are intentionally causing by conflating Elected democrats and the part broadly with random left wing people.
Democrats are supposed to stop this by... adopting more forceful rhetoric and policy positions that demonstrate to the electorate that they take the threat, and reality, of crime seriously. And, yes, that means being outraged that shoplifting by some small number of criminals is now creating inconveniences for everyone else (i.e., their law-abiding constituents) when buying underwear and deodorant at Target. The "conflation" of elected Democrats with annoying, attention-seeking online lefties is tough, but it is real-- we can't just wish it away.
That being said--murder is way down! Violent crime is way down! The salience of the issue is down, which certainly helps Dems and also makes the task for elected Dems easier--more one of adopting forceful "I'm tough on crime" rhetoric than actually changing any policies in the crime-is-dropping areas, at least for the time being.
I don’t give a fuck about our rhetoric, it pails in comparison to anything the gop messages, voters being too stupid to understand that isn’t the problem of democrats it’s the problem that voters are morons who vote against their own interests on a routine basis and then get mad at the people trying to help for “lecturing them” or being elitist.
And no the conflation isn’t just a tough luck problem it’s literally an existential rial crisis destroying the country. Like there is basically no reason for anyone to vote for the gop outside of being ultra wealthy or for cultural reasons. Like by every metric the country is better when run by democrats but the collective goldfish memory of the country keeps putting the GOP back in power. Anyone on our own side contributing to that conflation are criminally retarded.
As you say be all the metric things are fine, Americans are just too dumb to see it so cut off their nose to spite their face. I want good policy not to be diluted because we had to appease the concerns of people who have no idea what they’re talking about and don’t even know how to achieve their preferred political goals
Voters get to decide what their own interests are, and they want low crime.
If Dems can't provide it, Republicans will be happy to step in.
Pick one.
I should have been clearer: voters were concerned about crime, elected officials were doing the derailing.
But really, the obsessive attempt to focus on elected officials is just a palpable, ridiculous dodge. As I said the other day, when Nick Fuentes, Fred Phelps or random Twitter jackasses scare people away from the Republican party, no one here is protesting. That's because "who supports this politician" is a useful heuristic, even if it's incomplete.
What do we do about it? ESB1980's response is excellent, so maybe start there.
Except Nick Fuentes isn’t scaring anybody away from the Republican Party, what views does he hold that are substantially different than the mainstream GOP right now, besides antisemitism and even that is pretty popular among the right.
And secondly the reason people harp so much on elected officials is because for some strange reason voter judge the democrats by what left’s on titter say and give passes to elected GOP officials because the other side. When actual Republican politicians are degenerate sub-human pieces of garbage, and people complain about what self identified leftists with no power are doing it’s a huge problem.
The Democrats in my city are closing public spaces to the public rather than clear out junkies (who are allowed to continue ruining these spaces with filth and dangerous behavior). All these officials have (D) next to their name.
The President of the United States flew out to go to the bedside of Jacob Blake after he was shot while trying to abduct children.
Yeah the Jacob Blake stuff was cringe, he was not a sympathetic case that should have been supported, don’t know why you bring this up? I have countless more actually substasive things republicans have done and advocated for. Like what is the policy harm of the president showing up when? Also quick question, who was the president of the United States when Jacob Blake was shot in August of 2020? I’m pretty sure it was Donald Trump, so it was bad for democrats that a Republican president flew to stand beside Jacob Blake when he was shot, or do you just screw up the timeline?
I can't even see the goalposts, they're moving so fast.
"What elected democrats believe "criminals are victims"..."
-You
"Joe Biden..."
-Me
This woman is so goddamn annoying that I now realise why people vote Republican after getting annoyed by lefties.
Oh my god you retard Joe Biden was not the president in 2020 either you fucked yo the timeline or you need to be in a padded room
I'm sorry, I do the common thing of referring to a past president as President, because they were the President. It's extremely common, and in this case relevant because he's an elected Democrat.
Well, Defund the Police was supported by some Democratic politicians, like AOC and the Squad. Even Harris supported defund in 2020. And every Dem nominee in 2020 said they would decriminalize border crossing.
It’s often teenagers who raid store shelves. It’s why they got rid of shopping baskets and have those weird sliding things that prevent people from swiping the whole shelf and running out.
Society shouldn't be beholden to dumb teenagers. Deter them.
But what about “harm reduction”…
There have been activists pushing the narrative that holding children in cells,
even temporarily, has broadly negative effects on later outcomes. Of course this is plausibly a selection effect (I do not trust criminal science researchers to address that), but that is the argument towards leniency/impunity.
Then bring back public beatings. Seriously. If we are squeamish about putting people behind bars and they don't have anything valuable that can be fined, beat them with sticks and send them on their way. Letting criminals get away with crime just invites more crime.
Calling for public beatings might be a bit edgelordy but I do think the Eighth Amendment is legitimately part of the problem. One of the reasons we can’t get a handle on the petty crime problem is that our options for what to do with the perps are catch and release, hit them with a fine they won’t pay or community service they won’t show up for, or spend a ton of taxpayer money (usually far more than the value of what they stole/damaged) locking them up for some length of time, during which they will network with other criminals and after which they will be locked out of most gainful employment, none of which are really satisfying solutions. If there were some public humiliation-based punishment we could apply that would be cheap and unpleasant enough that they won’t want to go through it again but won’t massively reduce their chances of reintegrating into society after it’s over I think that would be a much better solution for everyone involved.
Then we have must have a zero tolerance three strikes law. Third strike and its life imprisonment. Doesn't have to be LWOP, but it will be life with parole.
The fact that you don't have an effective punishment for petty crime is a problem, but escalating isn't the solution to that, because disproportionate punishment is always going to generate political pushback (Eighth Amendment or no Eighth Amendment).
You need a punishment that is both a meaningful deterrent and an effective rehabilitation measure. Prisons in other countries achieve that goal (by spending more per-prisoner, they reduce the number of prisoners long-term); so do community punishments with the threat of prison for not turning up.
But if prison is "during which they will network with other criminals and after which they will be locked out of most gainful employment" then my recommendation is that you fix your prison system and also that you make it a lot easier for ex-prisoners to get a job.
I think a lot of America's crime problems are downstream of the fact that America's prison system sucks so badly it makes the UK's look good by comparison.
If your courts had a sentence that represented meaningful deterrence and rehabilitation without completely wrecking the convict's life, then that would make a big difference in terms of the ability to address petty crime.
Corporal punishment
It's funny, this reminded me of back when I used to debate politics on a now long defunct forum associated with the Baltimore Sun. This was during Obama's first term and I remember debating immigration hawks then, in defense of the Obama administration, in essentially the same terms described in this piece. You keep the border secure and you focus on serious crime in the interior. If an illegal alien who hasn't done anything serious gets caught up in that tough, that person gets deported, but you don't prioritize it nor do you engage in big, showy authoritarian stunts.
I agree with MY's broader contours but unfortunately I don't think it will be good enough. Mike Johnston isn't going to convince anyone in an environment where everyone believes that the priority of Democrats is to avoid deporting anyone, ever, unless that person has done something so bad they have no choice (and even then they kinda wish they didn't have to).
This doesn't mean I think some sort of legislative compromise should be abandoned that involves significant amnesty for long settled people. However until that day comes, and in spite of resource reallocation and stopping with the stunts, the message needs to be 'If you get on our radar, and are not here legally you are gone. It doesn't matter how long you've been here. It doesn't matter whether you've paid taxes or haven't committed serious crimes. You will be removed in accordance with the law.'
Only then can the pivot actually happen. The Democrats cannot appear to be squeamish about it either. That way leads us right back to where we are.
Yeah, I think this is probably right. I am slightly more hopeful about the prospects of legal immigration reform and expansion if Dems can team up with business groups. But the terms have to be primarily tailored to US interests and normie sensibilities.
One example could be a expanded student visa program with a direct path to permanent residency, only for colleges with acceptance rates higher than 25%, English proficiency requirement, maybe aspirational civics test and graduation and maybe a GRE score to get permanent residency.
Agree 100% and I think something like that could work without courting the same kind of backlash.
Why would you want this for colleges with greater than 25% acceptance? Surely you want to capture elite foreign students for maximum brain drain.
One there is a true zero sum competition for slots at prestigious schools and it would likely mess with the politics of passing it (also a some schools currently game their stats to look more selective for prestige, so this pushes the other way either expand seats or not game stats). Two currently the demographics are going to be tough for many schools with fewer young people and it's the less selective who will need the extra students.
Also the selective schools are way over indexed in conversations in any case, the entire Ivy League is smaller than Texas A&M, and nothing says those kids can't go on to research at more prestigious places in grad school.
Personally I think we probably need Aggie engineers more than Harvard English majors. I would use the visas for specific skills rather than a broad brush.
Unless I am misinformed, Texas A&M is a pretty decent engineering school.
If we are having an employment slowdown with increasing unemployment, what is the advantage of generally expanded student visa to residency?
Seems better to target to actual shortages, i.e. specific skills like AI, healthcare, engineering, manufacturing, etc.
Current legal immigration has us well above replacement.
Our working age to retiree ratio projections look pretty bad, going from 3.5 workers per retiree down to 2.5. Getting above average educated kids (whose education is going to be paid by their foreign parents) right at the beginning of their working career seems like a clear win.
I am not opposed to H1B type programs, or industry specific programs. But, I don't love the idea of the government picking winners and losers between industries.
Unemployed people aren’t workers and cannot support retirees. I am not suggesting picking by industry - I am saying pick skills that we have a shortage of, across industries, and don’t pick skills where we have an oversupply already. Also, where possible, train our own people first.
We have a shortage of advanced AI people, healthcare people, engineers, manufacturing experts, robotics technicians, etc.
We do not have a shortage of underemployed English majors.
On top of that, we currently have a crop of new graduates struggling to find jobs in a changing job market.
Productivity growth, if it proceeds as projected, is likely to offset a shrinking worker to retiree ratio.
Interesting take on all this at https://cepr.net/publications/productivity-growth-and-the-scary-stories-about-rising-retiree-to-worker-ratios/
We are projected to use a 1/3 to 1/2 of productivity growth just to offset the dependency ratio growth, which would be bad.
Also, it's odd to worry that foreign students are going to major in English. They are much more likely to enter technical fields. And, again, if their family is paying for their education, I would let them decide what they want to study and career to pursue rather than have a government quota do it.
The dependency ratio is currently at 2.7. It’s expected to change 25-33% over the next 25 years. Gradually, not overnight.
It is not expected to use 1/2 to 1/3 of productivity growth to offset the dependency ratio in any projection I have seen that takes current trends in automation in account. Read the article I linked to.
“We have seen very rapid productivity growth over the last year, with an increase of 2.9 percent. It is at least plausible that artificial intelligence and other new technologies could sustain a faster rate of productivity growth going forward.
Suppose that we see the growth rate increase by 0.5 percentage points above the 1.6 percent rate projected by the Trustees to 2.1 percent. This is still well below the rates of close to 3.0 percent that we saw in the post-war boom and the 1995-2005 speed up.
In that case, the average wage will be 72 percent higher in 2050 than it is today. And, if we leave the tax rate at 20 percent, the average retiree will have a benefit that is more than 40 percent higher than retirees get today, even assuming no increase in taxes. Where’s the horror story?”
I am not worrying about foreign students majoring in English. I am pointing out that visas with a path to citizenship should be targeted to who benefits the US. That is a different concern. In fact, most foreign students major in practical things.
But, obviously, if it was necessary politically to tilt the program to certain fields it would be the kind of thing I would compromise on.
Imo a lot of issues the Democratic party has right now happened post 2014 and certainly post 2020 when we started listening to the social progressives about crime and illegal immigration. Body cams on cops and stringent police accountability for violence against suspects? Absolutely. But everything else has done far more reputational and societal harm than good for Democrats.
The big problem with the US immigration system is that you have a large population of relatively well-settled illegal immigrants.
This just doesn't exist elsewhere.
Mass deportation, which is what the law technically requires, would have very substantial, negative, economic impacts. There's a reason that ICE aren't doing raids on farms or meat-packing plants.
I can absolutely understand why a lot of Americans don't want a mass amnesty - they don't trust that there won't be a mass of new illegal immigrants arriving immediately after the amnesty and then they'll have the same problem all over again in a decade or two. That's what happened with the Reagan amnesty, after all.
The battle you have is that if you clamp down in an effective way on the mass of illegal immigrants, you'll have devastating impacts on individuals who are well-established in communities and there will be lots of pushback from their community - but, without those mechanisms, I can't see how you'll ever get popular consent for the amnesty that is the only long-term solution.
But if your clampdown is effective, then future illegal immigrants won't be able to get well-established in the community in the first place, so their deportation won't be as controversial.
Effective clampdown has to mean the federal government issues right-to-work documentation to every citizen and legal non-citizen worker and it's both illegal and impossible to work without it (ie employers get prosecuted for not checking it). It also means separate right-to-study documentation (student visa holders will have RTS but not RTW) and requiring all educational institutions to check that too - and I note that California currently has policies requiring the opposite and enabling illegal immigrants to study, but that's in a context where there are lots of illegal immigrants who would be legal under any sensible immigration regime.
You nailed it
" You keep the border secure and you focus on serious crime in the interior. If an illegal alien who hasn't done anything serious gets caught up in that tough, that person gets deported, but you don't prioritize it nor do you engage in big, showy authoritarian stunts."
My issue with this is that it creates a lot of luck in the system.
Nah fuck that, I want policy that benefits the country not coddles the delusions of the retards I'm ashamed to share the country with.
Magic wand make it so!
Ok cool. 0 low skill immigration and only elite high skill immigration. Guest workers fill low skill role but their children don't get birthright citizenship rights. Guest workers that become pregnant / have their spouses become pregnant are kicked out immediately.
Same, that's why I want to coddle the deluded so that they'll vote for people with saner immigration policies than Trump
This series unfortunately has ended without discussing what I think is one of the central questions: what should the policy be for someone who presents themselves to US border authorities and claims a "well-founded fear of persecution". In the past Matt has suggested that he thinks this should be limited in some way, but actual details seem very important here.
For example, we could have a number of blanket bright line rules for determining asylum status and hold the relevant hearing immediately at the border. Or we could detain everyone who claims asylum in refugee camps. Or we could have a policy like the current one. Or we could abandon asylum altogether. But these are very different.
Do they have a well-founded fear of persecution in Mexico/in Canada/in a country with direct flights to the US that allowed them to board a plane?
Because barring the odd boat refugee or maybe a Russian who swam the Bering Strait, any legitimate asylee needs to demonstrate why the last country they passed through wasn't a safe refuge. That's not an impossible standard; someone flying in from China, several Arab states, or probably a few African ones could meet it. But unless someone crossing the southern border can credibly demonstrate that Claudia Sheinbaum wants them dead, most every claim from a land arrival is prima facie invalid.
1. This is not the asylum standard either in the international treaties or in US law.
2. There's a significant difference between "not going to be persecuted in Mexico" and "have successfully claimed asylum in Mexico".
3. Many people who flee eg government linked gang in Central America are not in fact safe in Mexico.
Okay, I checked and I was wrong about "first safe country" - it's a common standard for countries to adopt and it's compliant with international standards, but it's not current US law.
I do think that at a practical level, the fact that virtually no asylees passing through Mexico even try to get asylum there puts the lie to their persecution narrative. It's a liberal democracy. There are regions with awful gang problems, but that's not true of the whole country. Most would-be-refugees speak the language and have a much closer cultural background than they would in the US. But it also has ~1/5 the GDP per capita of the US. This *strongly* suggests that economic opportunities rather than safety motivates the vast majority of asylum claimants.
I agree that economic issues factor into where people try to seek asylum. But that doesn't mean the people aren't being persecuted, it just means that given that they are fleeing, they want to flee to a richer place. I don't think that's so bad -- it would be much more challenging for Mexico to integrate all those people because of their smaller economy.
Sure, but that doesn't get them refugee status. Refugee status is very limited, and economic pain doesn't count.
My point is that if someone is genuinely fleeing persecution, they might also think the US is a better place to flee to than Mexico for a variety of reasons.
This is a really important point about "first safe country" rules--one of the problems is that it means neighbor countries to countries in crisis get even more overwhelmed (and they still get overwhelmed, there are far more Venezuelan refugees in Colombia than in the US).
This is a fair point and I think an under-discussed dimension of all of this is diplomacy and the stability situation in South and central American. At minimum I'd like to think some kind of constructive arrangement could be reached with Mexico that isn't based on Trump-esque bullying or threats. Having huge numbers of people, and particularly non-Mexican nationals crossing through their territory isn't doing them any favors either.
The Hague Convention says that you have to travel to the country you are seeking asylum in "directly" - but note that was adopted before the mass availability of direct flights and has been repeatedly interpreted by courts in many countries to mean that you can pass through another country as long as you take no action in that country "indicating your intention to stay".
Applying for asylum in Mexico is such an action "indicating intent to stay" which means that your travel to the US was not "direct" and therefore (whether granted or rejected) makes you ineligible for asylum in the US.
This is a really stupid piece of international law, because it makes countries want to play stupid games to get asylum-seekers to pass through their country without applying so they can pass the problem to another country. Mexico deliberately tries to encourage them not to apply and points out that if they do that they make themselves ineligible for US asylum - because the Mexican government doesn't want to have them all living permanently in Mexico.
The front-line countries (like Mexico for Central America or Turkey for Syria and Iraq) will not accept a system where they have to deal long-term with nearly everyone who crosses their border: the sheer numbers will overwhelm their capacity to cope. At one point in the Syrian Civil War, there were approaching ten million Syrians living in Türkiye. Since they obviously couldn't be sent back to Syria at that time, they had to go somewhere. Far better if they could be granted status in Türkiye or Mexico and then dispersed as refugees elsewhere - but the front-line states will only accept that if the dispersal numbers come somewhere close to the numbers coming in.
My inclination is that the country that an individual applied for asylum in should have no impact on where they would end up, and also no impact on whether they are likely to get refugee status granted or not.
To achieve that, you'd need a new treaty that would work something like this: an asylum-seeker applies anywhere for asylum. They are assessed by an international refugee authority (a new agency, nominally under the UN, but where voting rights depend on the number of refugees your country accepted) and that makes a determination of whether they are granted refugee status or not. If not, then they are turned over to local immigration authorities (who can then deport them). If they are granted status, then there's some sort of agreed allocation system where countries agree what percentage of refugees they will each take and then the refugee prioritises where they'd like to end up and where they want to avoid and then the system does its best to allocate people to countries they will be least unhappy (also you'd have to do things like making sure that LGBT+ refugees don't end up in Saudi Arabia, etc)
By allocating votes by the number of refugees a country accepts, you avoid the usual UN problems of one-country-one-vote where a bunch of poorer countries in Africa and Asia seek to use their votes to impose costs on the rich minority of countries - burdens that those countries aren't prepared to take on themselves. If the agency starts granting status too easily, then the US and EU countries will have a sufficient majority to force rules changes or personnel changes to ensure that asylum is only granted to people that really need it.
It really should be US law though. The state department maintains a list of countries US citizens shouldn't visit. why not a list of countries where we believe the government is sufficiently likely to kill their citizens that we will give them a trial to determine if they deserve asylum? If they are not from countries on the list, no judge needed, rule them out without needing a trial.
Surely the other way around? Anyone from the known-dangerous countries gets asylum without need for any further checks. People from the other countries might be in a specific group that is endangered, or the situation there might have changed, or they might be a political dissident - and resolving "might" to yes or no is what trials are for.
If you're a political dissident from China, you probably are entitled to asylum; if you're a random Chinese person, you should go through the normal immigration system.
I think the US Department of State can pre-vet countries that are threatening groups of their citizens. In how many countries around the world are the governments able to credibly threaten the lives of their citizens without the United States being aware this is happening?
I think the idea that a trial with a judge is needed to decide if your home government is planning to kill you is based on the world being much less interconnected than it is now. I will admit there are edge cases, if you are on opposition lawmaker from Mexico (a bordering nation of the United States, meaning the person applying for asylum is not forum-shopping and thus transforming themselves into an economic migrant) and you say you have a thumb drive of Claudia Sheinbaum threatening to have you executed for some reason, you need a full trial with a judge to decide this. But that sounds incredibly unlikely.
If you are some ordinary citizen coming from some country in Central or South America and we know your government isn't sending out death squads (and it's the CIA's job to know this sort of thing) then I don't see why that person can't be told they are ineligible to apply for asylum by whoever is manning the border.
1. I don't care about international law. Amend the Refugee Act to make this the standard and withdraw from the 1967 Protocol.
2. If Mexico is going to deport you, not the problem of the United States.
3. By this logic, Canada should be required to give asylum to Americans because our crime rates are 2-3 times higher.
I feel like Matt has talked about this in depth. There is a fundamental difficulty in that most asylum claims are sympathetic situations but do not truly have a "well founded fear of persecution" unless you draw that line so loosely as to allow almost everyone to have such a fear. But its really hard to turn sympathetic people away, so despite people not having a valid claim there are lots of pro immigration people who want to find a way to let them stay anyway. This is very similar to the way people feel about many criminals - that they are victims that deserve our sympathy.
But you have to draw the line in a sustainable way. If you won't enforce it, then the public will find someone who will. This has been demonstrated across the Western world...
I think Matt has basically said what you said, which is not actually an answer to the hard problems here.
Its not? The answer is that you have to enforce the rule and turn away people who don't meet the criteria. If you do that consistently, then the number of people attempting to claim asylum will fall back to its historic norms of being an overall small number.
What other answer are you looking for here?
To start with, the big problem is that people do not have their case decided immediately. Which means either they go in a camp (has serious problems), or they get released into the US (different problems), or they have to stay in Mexico until their case is decided (this is the remain in Mexico policy which requires agreement from Mexico among other things). Which of these are you suggesting? Which is Matt suggesting? Is the current rate at which people actually get asylum after the process is over appropriate to the goals? Can people work while they are waiting? There are a lot of questions here that make a really big difference.
This is primarily an issue because of the surge. If you brought asylum claims back to normal levels, then you could handle them fairly quickly.
Nor do I see *inherent* problems in housing them in a border camp. The way the Trump is doing it is problematic, because they are trying to be cruel. But people who have traveled to escape persecution are going to be okay sitting in a basic camp for a week/month while a determination is being made. If that's not acceptable to them, they should probably have not come in the first place...
Yes, if the determination was done in a very short amount of time then it would work. Unfortunately that's not the current situation ...
Just because Mexico let them in doesn't mean we have to let them in.
Right but our bilateral relationship with Mexico is important, and also this still hasn't answered the original question about what our policy should be.
During the Biden years, the fundamental problem with asylum claims was that the surge overwhelmed the number of judges we had to adjudicate the claims so people could stay in the country for years before they had to appear before a judge.
My solution is -- bear with me here -- use AI to judge, or at least triage, the claims. Hey, if we're going to (probably soon) use AI to review your scans for cancer and other diseases, why can't it fairly judge asylum cases? At least, use it to identify the most bogus cases immediately and say, sorry, you're out of here. And with access to all asylum case information, I'd argue that such AI judges would do *better* than human ones.
Lastly, because these folks are not American citizens, they do not have the same right to due process including appearing before a human judge.
And lastly, lastly, just using it for triage, and getting rid of the ~50% of the claims that are prima facie totally bogus will take away a lot of the backlog and allow us to process the rest a lot faster.
I'm very doubtful that AI would make anyone happy in this situation. Depending on your opinion, you'll think that the AI rules are too strict or not strict enough. And I think you'll have some groups working out the language need to game the AI such that it requires constant adjusting.
I think AI would be very bad at this, but also would not pass constitutional muster at the supreme court. A better approach would be to have more judges and to have bright line rules about what is acceptable as a cause.
Well, it's true that nowhere in the Constitution does it say that it's okay to replace human judges with AI.
And the Democrats tried to get more judges but we all know who put the kibosh on that.
A big help would be to dramatically raise the number of immigration judges. Biden's immigration bill did that, but the OBBBA did not.
Those people should be held in detention camps. If the camps are full, then they can't come in. There should be ZERO catch and release.
Why not turn away without trial anyone on the southern border trying to claim asylum who can't prove their application for asylum in Mexico has been rejected?
That could be one idea
This would be quite expensive, of course. And worse for the economy.
Leaving people in Mexio doesn't cost us anything.
I’m not sure I buy the idea that the public’s aversion to immigration is all about crime. So even if the Democrats could somehow commit to it, I don’t think pairing (1) harsh measures against criminal illegal immigrants and stricter border control with (2) vastly expanded legal immigration is going to please voters who are unhappy with the current situation.
Consider the following thought experiment. The US vets 100 million immigrants from poor countries, removes all of those who would’ve committed crimes, and lets the rest in. Would voters be happy? I think cosmopolitan Democrats would love this, whereas Republicans would hate it. Swing voters might think things are changing a little too fast.
Ultimately, it comes down to the fact that Democrats need to answer the question “Who are we?” No answer will make everyone happy. But my feeling is that the view held by influential liberals is quite different from that of most voters. We cosmopolitans imagine a world like you see in sci fi movies, where you see people of different colors speaking dozens of languages all around you. We need to recognize that this isn’t a universal preference.
That's true as far as it goes but the critical part of your hypothetical I think is a lot less the cosmopolitan component and a lot more the 'from poor countries' component. If immigration means stapling a green card to the back of 4 year degrees awarded to fluent English speaking immigrants I don't think anyone cares, even when you see them and their descendants out driving around the shopping center parking lot. When immigration means chaos at the border and being called a racist for thinking normal laws should be enforced and/or confronted with visible disorder, particularly by non English speaking people, on your town's main drag a lot of people won't like it.
" If immigration means stapling a green card to the back of 4 year degrees awarded to fluent English speaking immigrants I don't think anyone cares"
I think people care less, and you could certainly have higher levels of those types of immigrants. But the total amount would still matter.
Dems are not going to run on "vastly expanded" legal immigration.
100 million would be unpopular because it would raise overpopulation concerns.
While cosmopolitanism isn’t universal, it’s still broadly popular. Polls show large majorities think religious and racial diversity is good for America: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/religion-and-views-on-immigration-and-diversity/. It’s also why companies run ads with a multiracial aesthetic, even all the daycare brochures emphasize diversity and multiculturalism.
Appreciating diversity is not equivalent to cosmopolitanism.
I know plenty of hard core rural people who appreciate their buggy driving Mennonite neighbors, love their Spanish speaking vet from the Caribbean, go to Catholic fish fries, regularly eat at the local soul food food truck and the Amish food truck, attend churches ranging from evangelical to mainline to Mormon to Quaker, and are still very much of a specific place and a specific rural culture.
Cosmopolitanism is more, we’re all citizens of the world, kumbaya. Which is not the same thing, and is actually not that popular.
Very much agreed. The amount of immigration and who is immigrating is also important.
We have about 1 million legal immigrants each year by now. I think that number could be slightly higher, maybe 1.2m or 1.5m (tops). But would need to be MUCH lower than the total numbers under the Biden admin (3 or 4 million).
The total immigration level needs to be low enough to allow time for assimilation. And we also need to make sure that the people coming broadly share Western liberal values and are willing to learn English and assimilate.
"The US vets 100 million immigrants from poor countries, removes all of those who would’ve committed crimes, and lets the rest in. Would voters be happy?"
For me depends entirely if they are high intelligence or not. Why emphasize "poor countries"? Why do leftists think that immigration should be a charity tool? I want intelligent immigrants from rich countries.
Matt's argument that "immigration increases crime because people cannot commit a negative amount of crime" is just so dumb. The fact that we need to take voters seriously doesn't mean we need to twist ourselves in knots to avoid the conclusion that voters are simply wrong about lots of stuff.
It's not dumb at all. It's an acknowledgement that there are tradeoffs.
Seeing as the comments section is going to soon be filled with people saying 'why don't we just use E-Verify nationally' or 'has anyone considered E-Verify' or 'E-Verify, but for every job, why don't we try that'. Just wanted to again remind you that E-Verify doesn't really work and is easily gamed:
“Amy Peck, an immigration lawyer with Jackson Lewis, said the first Trump administration conducted an audit of one of her clients, a meatpacking company. Of roughly 600 employees who had previously been cleared by E-Verify, more than half had submitted documents the audit found to be suspicious….. “This has been an open secret, that E-Verify can be evaded,” Peck said.
In 2022, the Labor Department found that one of the country’s largest food-safety sanitation companies had employed at least 102 children in hazardous occupations at 13 meat-processing plants in eight states. The company, now known as Fortrex, said the children had cleared E-Verify by submitting fake documents showing they were adults…..
In 2010, a USCIS contractor found roughly half of unauthorized workers run through E-Verify [received an inaccurate finding](https://archive.is/o/0RyYf/https://www.e-verify.gov/sites/default/files/everify/data/SumFindingsEVerifyEval2010.pdf) of being legally employable, primarily because of identity fraud….. clearing E-Verify can be as easy as obtaining the name and Social Security number of a U.S. citizen or permanent resident, and printing that information on a fake ID. A U.S. citizen’s name and Social Security number can be purchased for about $1 on the dark web, or as low as 10 cents in bulk, Talcove said.
An Arizona woman is set to be sentenced later this month for charges related to a scheme in which she [helped North Korean IT workers illegally land jobs](https://archive.is/o/0RyYf/https://www.wsj.com/business/north-korea-remote-jobs-e4daa727) at hundreds of U.S. companies. According to court filings, E-Verify was queried more than 100 times, using 68 identities stolen by the scammers. It didn’t detect the fraud.”
https://archive.is/0RyYf
Ah, well, best give up. Certainly there's no way improve AND increase the use of eVerify. We definitely didn't just give $150B to DHS to improve enforcement of border and immigration issues.
The point is that at some point you're making a tradeoff between catching illegal workers, and living in a Chinese-style surveillance panopticon state. Could you make E-Verify even tougher? Sure. You could build a federal database of everyone's biometric data including a face photo and fingerprints, and then check that whenever someone switches jobs. Maybe a DNA test too? Why not? For all 200 million American adults? Sure, that definitely sounds reasonable.
It's not that these things are 'impossible', it's that there are tradeoffs and at some point the scale and intensity required are just ridiculous for the sake of...... catching some illegal landscapers and busboys? It's kind of like the War On Drugs- is this really a great use of our societal resources, nabbing every guy with a dimebag?
I think 'some' document verification is fine, but again it's a tradeoff and at some point you have to say 'it's too intrusive, we don't want this level of surveillance, and in exchange we're going to quietly accept that some roofers are illegal or whatever'
Or you know a national ID card with a 2D bar code on the back that pulls up a copy of the card so anyone can confirm it's real. Like tons of other liberal first world democracies do.
Your chinese panopticon statement reveals a deep misunderstand of how the rest of the liberal democracies operate.
But you don't know that the person presenting the real ID, is actually the person on the ID card. I could steal or borrow or buy or secretly borrow and return or loan or coax or whatever someone driver's license and it's a 'real' license- 'anyone can confirm it's real' as you say. That doesn't mean that *I'm the person to whom it was issued*. That's where the biometric data would come in.
So every illegal worker borrows US citizen Uncle Jose's card in the neighborhood for a fee, clears the license scan, and then returns it to him. You borrow your cousin's. Etc. etc.
As far as 'rest of the liberal democracies operate', as I've noted to you before, literally every other rich country uses migrant labor for low-income jobs like construction, meatpacking, agriculture, increasingly manufacturing, etc. The way 'the rest of the liberal democracies operate' is that they use cheap, under the table migrant labor!
"But you don't know that the person presenting the real ID, is actually the person on the ID card. "
You compare the photo to the person standing in front of you in HR. And then you scan the 2D bar code to confirm it matches the card and both the card photo matches the database query photo and those two match the person in front of you.
>You compare the photo to the person standing in front of you in HR
But the employers *want* to hire cheap migrant labor. So the have the out of 'yeah, he looked like so-and-so on the ID to me'. You can't prosecute or fine an employer on the basis of 'he didn't look like his ID photo, which was probably taken 6 years ago'. I mean visualize a hundred migrant day laborers. Do they really look so different from each other that you could pick them out of a lineup? C'mon. There's enough reasonable doubt to drive a truck through there.
And that's not even getting into- how about all of the people who would be denied jobs because they *don't* look like their ID photo? We're a country of 200 million adults, most of whom work. Try to picture all of the stories that would come out every day if you just rely on 'does this person look like their ID photo'. Every week in this country 50 people would be denied a job because they've gained weight since their picture was taken, grown a beard, got glasses, got older, etc. There'd be constant complaints from both workers and employers. 'Michigan mother of 3 denied job because HR says she doesn't look like her ID photo', imagine the headlines. 'Major employers angry as hiring becomes more difficult due to new visual test'. Again, c'mon. Not realistic at scale
Or another approach, possibly complementary, is to set distinct (substantially higher) employer paid SS and Medicare taxes on immigrants. Then you can hold the employer accountable for paying back taxes on their fraud.
This also changes the incentive arguments. Now immigrants are helping to shore up our retirement programs. Now we can talk about (reasonably) increasing rates of immigration!
Biometric verification is much better than it used to be, too.
Isn't this conflating two different things?
We could definitely allow more *legal* migrant workers while also creating a national ID that would be useful in many ways, including e-verify. The key being that unlike a SSN being stolen and such, a national ID card would have 1 valid card, so if its stolen people are going to report that and if someone presents a stolen card, then it flags them to be picked up and deported for theft.
This is pretty hyperbolic. Many other advanced democracies have basically effective* versions of e-Verify , and no-one would describe them as "Chinese-style surveillance panopticon states."
*In the sense that much fewer than 1% of all workers are illegal immigrants.
Can you name who these other advanced democracies are, so that I can link info proving that they actually use a massive amount of illegal immigration for low-wage jobs? Literally every rich country uses migrants for agriculture, construction, meatpacking, factory work, etc. etc.
in ireland, even small businesses (restaurants etc) require an i-9 equivalent. i am not sure what the enforcement mechanism is, but non-compliance is essentially unheard of. my impression of employment regulations in other countries (UK, Australia, western Europe), from following of the contours of immigration debates there in the media.
I asked ChatGPT for a general overview of this topic (using as neutral language as I could muster) and it agrees:
https://chatgpt.com/share/690d06ff-79bc-8010-a4ab-fa5a2bd6e920
I followed up on a few (not all) of the links GPT gave and they seem legit and consistent with the general claim.
Finally, please don't move the goalposts: the question is NOT "do other rich countries use large amounts of (possibly legal) migrant labor for agriculture etc?" the question under discussion is "is the US unusually lax in requiring employers to verify right-to-work status of employees?" and the answer to that seems to be yes.
Wait, YOU wrote "*In the sense that much fewer than 1% of all workers are illegal immigrants". How would it be moving the goalposts to note that this is not true? I mean, you only wrote 3 sentences originally, and that's 1 of the 3. You said these laws are 'basically effective'. But if they have huge amounts of migrant labor- then they're...... not effective?
(I find it somewhat alarming that people are consulting ChatGPT as some kind of expert).
I'm assuming that you threw that caveat in there because you realized how much illegal migrant labor European countries use. For example I found an estimate that 95% of agricultural labor in Germany are migrants, 50-80% of the meatpacking sector is, 67% of construction workers are, etc. It's been a long day and I'd have to be pretty motivated to start quoting & linking all of the texts I found about how *every* rich country uses illegal immigrant labor.
Let's just break this down logically. If other countries have laws about mandatory IDs to work- but they have tons of illegal immigrant labor- doesn't it very logically follow that these laws are not being followed? That they're not effective? Right? Am I missing something here?
If your point is, other rich countries have fake laws that they hypocritically don't follow in practice- sure, I'm totally happy to concede that
The idea that keeping our ID system fragmented across a bunch of poorly run DMVs is called security through obscurity. It was a good strategy for the James Bond era, but it doesn't make sense in the digital era. Now it just means that the state of Alabama has to hire its own cyber security team to keep its DMV records safe, and it will do a bad job of it because they don't have enough resources, and if we repeat that across all 50 states then everyone's records will be less safe from bad actors trying to hack the system. But the federal government still has access to all the same information, so we haven't actually done anything to reduce the threat of the panopticon.
It's sort of how putting a lock on a residential door doesn't really stop someone looking to break in. They can always pry it open with a crowbar or smash a window.
Yet that's not the same thing as saying it doesn't matter. A casual barrier deters casual crime. Having to interact with criminals and buy fake papers just to get a job is another barrier to people wanting to stick around in America illegally.
I always saw E-Verify as taking the decision away from some local employer who has no real ability to peer into the data into a wider view, where the government agency running E-Verify can put together the information that this 85-year-old woman from Idaho is now working a meat-packing plant in South Carolina.
Someone needs to be reviewing that data. Maybe get that UCSIS contractor to do it.
*EDIT* Downthread there's a claim to have
> So every illegal worker borrows US citizen Uncle Jose's card in the neighborhood for a fee
Which is exactly what an E-Verify system can do. "Hey, this identity was used to verify 100 jobs in the past month."
This isn't rocket science. The solution is sitting right there. It takes some deliberate obstinance to not see it.
>Which is exactly what an E-Verify system can do. "Hey, this identity was used to verify 100 jobs in the past month." This isn't rocket science. The solution is sitting right there
The problem is false negatives. You're denying people, probably US citizens, the right to work, feed their kids, and pay for rent- the stakes could not be higher. Imagine the possible errors- the system flags the US citizen temp worker who switches jobs every few days. The system glitches and locks a citizen switching jobs out of their new employment. And so on.
I'm sure it looks easy behind your keyboard. Then you try to enforce a real ID system on 200 million adults in the world's third most populated country, using government computing systems, and see how many edge cases and false negatives pop up. Imagine the headlines- "Michigan mother of 3 can't work because of government IT failures, facing homelessness". You're blocking people from being able to work, feed their kids, pay rent or a mortgage. The stakes are gigantically high. How many false negatives would you have in say a month? 50? 100? More?
I'm sure your IT system will work just as smoothly as the Obamacare signups did. Flawlessly, at the scale of 200 million workers. It always looks easy in theory.....
> I'm sure it looks easy behind your keyboard
If you're going to be an arrogant ass, you should get the difference between false positive and false negative right.
If you're determined to fail, you will succeed at that.
Who cares? Isn't "force employers to use e-verify" and "prosecute employers for hiring illegals" a popular position for Dems to take?
Is it? Democrats have lots of employers as voters too.
Almost all of the E-verify states are red states.
Uh huh
"Seven years later, those laws appear to have been more political bark than bite. None of the Southern states that extended E-Verify to the private sector have canceled a single business license, and only one, Tennessee, has assessed any fines. Most businesses caught violating the laws have gotten a pass. In Georgia the department charged with auditing compliance with the E-Verify law has never been given money to do so. In Louisiana, where the law against hiring unverified employees can lead to cancellation of public contracts or loss of business licenses, no contract has been canceled, no licenses have been suspended, and the state reports zero “actionable” complaints since the mandate went into effect in 2012. In Mississippi no one seems to know who enforces the E-Verify law. The mandate appears to give that job to its Department of Employment Security, which knows nothing about it and referred questions to the attorney general’s office, which says it doesn’t know who’s responsible. The same is true in Alabama......"
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-08-23/e-verify-laws-across-southern-red-states-are-barely-enforced
https://archive.is/dz3AH#selection-2375.0-2375.305
Yes and that's not great. But Florida and TN have real bite to their laws.
come on, let's be real here, in blue states, their governments do not want to enforce laws that they deem unfair to illegal immigrants (anything that separates them from other residents/citizens).
Is e verify a partial reason welfare state receives money from non legal residents?
Very surprised to see nothing in here about employer-side enforcement.
Yeah somehow that hasn’t come up in any of these articles. Expandeing e-Verify seems like an obvious lever to pull
The vast majority are not employed. It is very easy to set up an LLC, get an EIN, and work as an independent contractor. When was the last time you checked to see if your cleaning service or your pool guy is here legally? E-verify has a miniscule effect because of that and any expansion would have a miniscule effect.
Then put checks on the EIN process, right?
I would be all for it, but I think you would see fierce resistance to that as there would be no unsympathetic employer to divert enforcement onto.
How many employers aren’t asking for I-9s though? Is this just going to end up going after mom-n-pop restaurants, parents hiring nannies, etc.? If it plays out like that it won’t be popular.
The restaurant should be asking for the I9 right now.
In Austria and Germany, as an example, you are required to present your national ID card and register with the local police station within 3 days of moving to a new residence. Your new neighbors can check to make sure you're registered. If the police notice unregistered people about they will investigate.
For all the histrionics about immigration enforcement in the US the rest of the world is vastly more strict.
https://www.oesterreich.gv.at/en/themen/persoenliche_dokumente_und_bestaetigungen/an__abmeldung_des_wohnsitzes/Seite.1180200
In Vietnam you are required to register anyone staying overnight (or longer) with the local police beforehand. In practice, nobody is registering their boyfriend who is staying the night a few times a week. But the local police absolutely notice when someone seems to have moved in to the area and hasn't been registered. A friend of mine from Austria came to visit and stayed with us for two weeks and the area police came knocking to remind us to register him.
When I came to the US on an F-1 (student) visa, I was required to notify USCIS of any change of address within 10 days.
We know enough to keep an eye on those shifty polacks.
I kinda wonder how much this stuff matters when you can just feed pogrom inducing AI slop to Libs of TikTok and create an immigration problem.
My current working hypothesis to explain basically all of politics these days is that people just generally want to be mad about stuff.
100% agreed: some people are just spoiling for a fight, or looking to ride the coattails of someone else's fight.
Having said that, hostility to immigration is a recurrent theme in the US with a long, sordid history. There's clearly a large constituency upset by it, and I think it's worth noting that the biggest immigration advocates generally live in the places least affected by it (including me!). Greg Abbot's busing stunt may have been cynical, but it showed how shocking and disruptive surges can be. Muriel Bowser declared a "public health emergency" and established a new government office to support the arrivals of roughly 8,000 people in Washington DC (population 702k, not considering the metro).
The "Social Media Theory of Everything" has a lot of explanatory power even if it's obviously not the whole story. "Why now?" is probably the question it answers best.
I really wish this series had actually addressed the first principles. It’s hard to know what policy you should craft if you’re not all working towards something.
I think one thing that’s missing is that Democrats need to talk about immigration in terms of benefits to Americans. Too often they talk about the benefits to the immigrants instead. I am not saying this as a “one weird trick” kind of thing but IMO is a necessary condition.
That runs you right into the issue of highly skilled people with capital usually having a more positive economic effect than low skill broke people, and it is not permissible to notice (or talk about) that because most D's are more interested in the latter group than the former. You can't make the case if you care more about the welfare of the immigrant than the American.
As a feature of this approach to immigration, a candidate can also make "tough on crime" a theme around rebuilding tax enforcement at the IRS and seriously addressing wage theft. The overall theme of "we are a country of laws and EVERYONE will follow them" would certainly be a huge relief to me ...
Wage theft and tax evasion are much more distant problems and thus less salient than the CVS closed up, toothpaste is locked up, and there are cars with illegal flappy tags running red lights.
Frequency and proximity to exposure matters. The more layers of distance and abstraction between antisocial action and experienced harm the less salient the messaging.
They are distant in the same way that "chaos at the border is distant". In that case many more people care about it then probably "should" but it bothers them because the idea that chaos and disorder is happening anywhere in the country is vaguely disquieting in a "who knows where it pops up next?" kind of way.
So I'm not sure the distance is that important.
Otoh, tax evasion might be more tricky because it's common enough that a significant share of voters might seem themselves as the target.
Chaos at the border was experienced in Southern states and then externalize to lots of northern cities with the bussing and flights of migrants by Texas and Florida. It led to a rise of homelessness and additional burdens on social services. I witnessed this living in DC when the bussing happened and the rise of Door Dash e-bikes running red lights.
Wage theft is much more of a personal interaction that others rarely observe happening, that is why it happens in many cases. It’s not like employers are running around mugging people of their paychecks. It’s a much less observable crime.
I’m all for swift, certain, and severe punishment of shoplifting, but I don’t really get why people get so upset about high value items being locked in cabinets. It’s not much of an inconvenience and I’d rather wait on a clerk to get my detergent than pay a higher price for it due to theft.
It also seems this phenomenon is as much a result of anti-theft tech becoming cheaper as it was a shoplifting wave. You see these cabinets in rich and poor parts of town alike.
I'm not a crook and I resent being treated like one. I'm not going to ask you to be as bothered by this as I am, but I don't think it's conceptually difficult.
It’s not our fault you vaguely resemble Richard Nixon.
It's a total inconvenience, Helikitty. I waited around for 10 minutes to get some mascara, and two different employees swept by me and said they didn't have the key so they'd send someone. Eventually I got ticked off and bought my other stuff, left, and ordered my Great Lash from Amazon.
It seems to me the under staffing is as much as cause of shoplifting as anything else. I'd argue online retail has a much bigger influence on the problem than Defund the Police did.
There's a Walgreen's by my house - every time I got in there I have to search the store for someone to work the register so I can pay. It's inevitably because there are only 1-2 people working, and they have to spend time stocking shelves when not directly helping a customer.
I'm sure it's also super easy to steal from that store. Because you can go in and walk around without ever seeing, much less interacting with an employee.
It’s a vicious cycle. They’re getting killed by Amazon, so you cut back on staffing, which makes it significantly easier to shoplift (combined with social media making everyone aware of this fact). Lock product up, people go to Amazon, so you cut further …
Yeah, the stores are all understaffed where I am
I think people just want to go back to the higher trust equilibrium of 2010.
Because most of us remember a period of time not that long ago when you didn't have to.
We want to go back to that time.
Sure. But even if we drastically reduced shoplifting I don’t think the cabinets would go away. The technology is too cheap, and already in place.
Maybe. But there’s a real cost to having it in place. You need to pay for extra employees to lock and unlock it. And customers that don’t want to wait might just buy online instead.
I don’t doubt it. They should make all the employees have the keys to the cabinets so it’s less of an issue
Your old Safeway has the non-Tide detergent out on shelves, Tide behind the checkout in the liquor section, and locks only on hard liquor and ice cream.
Clearly zoomers are drinking Tide.
Toothpaste is high value?
That's what I have to wait the longest on for someone to come open the cabinet for me.
Easy to grab, easy to fence
I think wage theft is pretty frequent and proximal once folks realize it's happening to them.
Just because you assert something does not make it true or salient. Wage theft is something experienced by a person and lacks the same broader antisocial impact of other crimes.
Just minimum wage violations: 17% of minimum wage workers. "Pretty frequent" (especially as compared to other forms of crime) is fair. https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-from-workers-paychecks-each-year/
Ah, yes, because once they find they can get away with it a wage thief will only strike once.
This is a prime example of “I am going to ignore what is written and pretend you made a different claim.”
The observability and effects on third parties matters. Most workers do not experience wage theft while large numbers of consumers experience goods being locked up. Making an “anticrime” message about something less perceivable and more niche is a weak message.
This isn't responsive at all to my point. But I'm going to stop commenting (both on this thread, and in general) because the sub-comments become so non-constructive.
Analytically, I understand the view that not deporting long-term residents without legal status unacceptably undermines deterrence. I think there are grave moral problems with such deportations and I strongly oppose them, but I understand the logic of the position.
I do not understand the logic of (1) it's fine to de-prioritize deportations of non-criminals in a way that means the vast majority of undocumented people are at minimal risk of deportation, (2) it's fine (and in fact good policy) to explicitly grant these people legal status through a Congressional statute enacting comprehensive immigration reform, but also (3) it's not fine to not deport random undocumented people swept up in the course of criminal law enforcement, because that unacceptably undermines deterrence. Why does (3) undermine deterrence too much when (1) and (2) don't?
Just to take recent examples, cannabis decriminalization, online gambling, and shoplifting all demonstrate how even a little uncertainty can have a massive deterrent effect.
There's a large difference between tolerating something at low (but ambiguous) level and formally permitting it.
Great point. In general, I think that rules/laws should be enforced if on the books to maintain the rule of law. But to me, wrt the issues you cite here, the status quo ante was preferable. Are there heuristics for drawing lines in these situations? Is even possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube when formal permission generates an unforeseen level of bad outcomes? I would like to read more on this.
I agree that would be a good argument if it was only (1). But it's also (2)--Matt (like Obama and Biden) does want to formalize it, that's the whole premise of comprehensive immigration reform.
For (2), what are we talking about here? I understand that to be roughly "offer a path to legal status to a large subset of currently undocumented immigrants", similar to the 1986 immigration reform bill. That's very different from formally committing to stop deporting non-offenders in perpetuity
Right. There is a large group of people in the US who would be beneficiaries of standard comprehensive immigration reform proposals, which means basically that (1) they've been here for a while and (2) they haven't committed major crimes. What I'm saying is that it makes no sense to say, on the one hand, that you want to enact a statute to grant legal status to those people, and, on the other hand, that you need to deport those people when they make contact with law enforcement because of the need for deterrence.
It's different if we're talking about deporting people who are not in that category, such as major criminals or recent arrivals. It's totally coherent to say that we want those people to be deportable but also that deporting, say, all the people who lose their asylum claims is a lesser priority relative to violent criminals. But Matt is not distinguishing, and as I read him what he's implicitly criticizing is the Obama Administration approach of formalizing non-deportability for certain categories of undocumented people--and that was explicitly about people who would be covered by comprehensive immigration reform (it was actually even narrower than that).
Ah, ok. I would say that it's a painful concession, but I don't see how it's logically contradictory or incoherent.
Amnesty - even a partial amnesty - would weaken the deterrent effect of ongoing enforcement, but by a much smaller degree than formally committing to stop enforcement.
Is it clearer if I expand the proposition a little? "I want nonviolent immigrants to have a path to legal status, but until we decide the precise details of who and how, it's important to enforce the law as written so that we don't get overwhelmed."
I think you have it backwards. A deferred action policy that says we will not deport certain categories of people, which can be withdrawn at any time, is far less beneficial to those people than formal legal status and a path to citizenship, as in a comprehensive immigration reform bill. It's more consistent with deterrence, not less.
Matt is trying to navigate public opinion, not symbolic logic.
That's not right, Matt's view is that the big problem with lax enforcement is that is leads (in reality not in voter perception) to increase in people trying to come to the US.
Incentives matter. The purpose of the malicious show and social media campaign is to signal how cruel and unwelcoming this country can be.
It’s a terrible strategy because of all the collateral damage. If the Trump admin clamped down on the border, focused on following the law, weren’t openly bombastic about immigration enforcement, and sought to work with local jurisdiction then we would be getting a completely different reaction. A bigger collective “meh” from the public. They are doing the opposite of that.
Dems need to be serious about immigration because the NatCons are serious about ethnic cleansing...
I'm actually agreeing with you, especially on the efficacy. It's just clear they're not actually in the enforcement business.
Having demonstrated that they're serious they could cheaply be sending nasty letters telling illegals to fuck off then send the goon squad in after the noncompliant, but then you wouldn't get the aggressive shows if force and that's no good.
But presumably if you want “One Billion Americans” then the problem is not people coming per se but the impact it has on voter perceptions.
Yes, the on the ground situation is transmitted through the undocumented community in near-real time. There is a whole industry south of the border to test your enforcement. The supply of people who could travel north gets replenished every year. These people are actors who vote with their bodies every day.
I am doubtful that voters care at this level of granularity but more to the point that's actually not the argument Matt is making in the article, it's explicitly about deterrence.
you are being pedantic. matt likes immigration. he is only interested in deterring illegal immigrants because he wants dems to win elections.
I think you meant to say retard-whispering
It's the 'ol beer can in a paper bag situation. If you don't look in the paper bag, you don't have to do anything, but if you do find the beer can in the bag, you have to confiscate it.
That's about plausible deniability though, no? You don't want to admit that you're fine with the beer so you confiscate it when it's too obvious to pretend it isn't there. It's not really about deterrence, except to the extent you're deterring being too brazen
Re: (1) - If you're going to be merciful, it's better to be merciful quietly and unpredictably if you also want to maintain deterrence.
Re: (2) - Statutory comprehensive immigration reform is usually conceived as a combination of a path to citizenship for some long-term illegal immigrants, with stepped up enforcement on new arrivals and more funding for border security, right? That's what makes it comprehensive.
We can all agree that the amnesty portion will hurt deterrence, but the other parts help deterrence, and the whole thing (if properly designed) balances out, and leaves us in a state where deterrence for would-be new arrivals is intact, the border is more secure, and we have humane treatment for a defined population of long-term illegal immigrants.
Re: (3) - If you're going to do any interior enforcement at all, it's hard to justify not deporting the guys who you already have in jail in connection with a crime. This takes less resources than anything else, and if you don't do it, you're running Willie Horton type political risks.
The logic fits together for me.
Re (2)--I agree with the logic of this, you can achieve adequate deterrence through border control and deportations of new arrivals. There are a lot of resources to do this already, the Trump Administration is delivering more, much of this article is about how the next Democratic administration should focus resources there. Part of the context for the asylum crisis is that the older approach of just crossing the border unnoticed is far harder than it used to be.
So why (3)? You don't need to do it for deterrence, which is the rationale Matt gives. It still makes sense to do some interior enforcement for public safety and crime prevention reasons and because being credible on public safety and crime prevention is part of the political path toward legitimizing comprehensive reform and expanding legal immigration. But that rationale applies only weakly to people who commit minor crimes (who generally would be covered by amnesty legislation!) and it doesn't apply at all to non-criminals who are found to be undocumented in the course of law enforcement work. It's true that this is less resource-intensive than actively searching for undocumented people but it still takes substantial resources to deport a long-term resident (there's an immigration court process, and detention is expensive if you decide to do that too pending the deportation) and more importantly it is just facially inconsistent with the humane commitment to reform--we've already committed to not thinking these people should be deported.
With the element on crime as it relates to immigration, this piece ignores a lot of the debate around the intersection of those two issues.
A) the data surrounding whether immigrants overall commit more or less crime is very contested over all
B) Even accepting that they commit less crime, this is probably just a function of the fact that immigrant crime is closer to one and done and much crime is committed by repeat offenders (this implies that immigrants may commit even more crime as a proportion of the population coming in but may not contribute to higher rates of crime in the population)
C) it ignores the critical fact that 'immigrants' are not uniform, Japanese immigrants commit much lower crime than the general population for instance whereas other groups have significantly higher rates. Also with this, the economic contribution of immigrants is highly concentrated in immigrants from certain nationalities
D) it ignores that when we compare immigrants to 'the US crime rate', that crime rate includes African Americans, who pull up that rate hugely, but people are voting based on will the rate/threat in their community go up so if maybe the violence of the black community is far from you but the immigrants are close, your local crime rate may be going up even though it's being 'lowered' by diluting the violence among the black population. E) data in the US and Europe shows that immigrant's children tend to converge with native peers in terms of crime rates, something that is currently playing out for instance in Minneapolis where, maybe their parents are less criminal than the US population, but their kids have converged with native African American rates, therefore the rate of juvenile crime is rapidly increasing (overall rates are moving around) but people observe this and it absolutely affects their perception of immigration.
Anyway, long message but I just think this discounts too easily fears that voters have tied to crime and immigration.
This sounds like a great approach. It should also be paired on a tough-on-crime approach within ICE and government agencies—any immigration-related government personnel who violated anyone’s constitutional rights, especially First Amendment rights, needs to be at a minimum fired and permanently barred from government employment and ideally renditioned to CECOT. If we can do that I don’t think anyone will care if Democrats are also aggressive about deporting foreign criminals.
Good point. Any Democratic officeholder who goes after the crimes committed by DHS/ICE will open up lots of room in the coalition for taking more aggressive actions against the worst parts of the illegal immigrant population and the border.