This piece is completely right on the merits but unfortunately we live in a democracy and voters never seem to prioritize keeping our growth rate greater than our deficit/GDP ratio.
I have no real idea how you do this, but screening for high skilled immigrants *who also really want to be Americans* is really necessary.
If someone is trying to immigrate, that should be evidence enough. Putting people into a system where they are monitored for their thoughts is itself against American values and would in practice lead to a totalitarian system that would turn off even the people you do want like we’re seeing under Trump now.
Not really. If, idk, the Netherlands gave me the chance to 10x my income I’d probably take it, even though I have no desire to be Dutch.
And I don’t think we should monitor thoughts but if part of the screening process was a test that asked things like “who was the first US president” and “who won the college football playoff this year” then you’d be able to get people interested in our culture and not just our job market.
I think a vibes-based immigration system that screens for stuff like "Do you like college football?" is vastly inferior to a system that screens for actually measureable, merit-based factors like education, criminal record and work experience.
If someone is willing to work hard and not break any laws, that should be good enough. And if after a long day of working hard and not breaking any laws, you do come home muttering that you secretly hate this country, who cares. Millions of actual Americans probably do that as well.
My point is that we live in a democracy, and the demos doesn’t like immigration as much as us. That said, people do seem to have warm feelings to those who love and are grateful for America, so screening for that gives us more capacity to bring in more immigrants.
Realistically if someone offers you a 10x to your income you’d probably be pretty loyal to them. There’s even a concept in economics about this, the “efficiency wage.”
We already have a screening test that asks people about the President, and caring about college football seems like kind of a weird way to determine culture. Most Americans don’t care about college football either.
Again with the football thing... it's a popular sport, but it's not reasonable to expect anyone to know that, especially since the collapse of the whole three network system. This is the stuff that gets people talking about goaldowns.
Honestly, the way you do it is by bringing the tradeoff to the table. When have you ever heard the options presented this way by a politician? Even pro-immigrant Democrats are still lying to voters about fixing these problems with “tax the rich and corporations”.
We shoud not overlook te foreign policy advantages of a proper political asylum system. We undermine authoritarian regimes by providing a secure escape hatch for dissidents and by providing an additional incentive for high earning potential immigrants to leave. This is the main way we have weakened Cuba and it probably would have resulted in regime change if the economic blockade did not reduce cultural/economic relations.
This is correct, but I think it's best to see this within the foreign policy sphere specifically, where it's the policy of our government to make decisions here given the past abuse of the asylum system.
What is a 'proper' asylum system? How is it different from an 'improper' asylum system? Substantial numbers of people around the world now have access to flights, and substantial numbers of people can make up tales about how they are persecuted. Will the 'proper' asylum system be able to keep these guys out?
I think the improper version is where we take “my home country has gang violence” as equivalent to “my home country seeks to murder me and everyone of my ethnicity”.
All of this makes sense but the 2026 immigration backlash is focused on Indian immigrants with household incomes of $150k, while the only program that Trump has TACO-ed out of attacking is marriage green cards. So if the goal is to make the system more politically sustainable to capture the benefits…
And this makes absolutely no sense to be. Indian immigrants make a lot of money, pay taxes, don’t commit crimes, and bring delicious food and beautiful women with them. Anti-Indian sentiment is completely idiotic.
It is a sore subject in parts of the tech sector, not totally without reason, but my suspicion is that it's not really part of the larger political backlash. To the extent there's an issue I think it's solved by de-emphasizing family reunification beyond spouse and children and doubling down on skill/merit, which is what should be done anyway.
I kinda wonder how big the actual “problem” is. Like a real estimate on how many firms actually turned their entire stack and contractor network into a set of cousins.
I’ve worked for and with a ton of Indians and while you hear about this stuff it’s literally never happened to me and I’ve never, ever seen it happen.
Well that and center-left people trying to be ruthlessly pragmatic on immigration *should actually do that*. Why no focus on making the consular marriage visa not a years-long delay shitshow?
I once had an Uber driver complain about how long it was taking to get a visa for his (mail-order? Idk) bride. This was in 2021 and he was blaming Biden and the migrants for hogging up all the processing. Factually that was absurd, the problem was caused by Trump’s COVID immigration restrictions. But it did kind of drive home to me the kind of dynamic Democrats are dealing with. The good news is that there’s probably a lot of room to be pro-legal immigration like making marriage processing take a week instead of multiple years and spouses of citizens are something like 30% of new green cards so that’s actually a very big deal, rather than focusing on illegals and the border, so the next Democratic President should do that.
Unequivocally legal and widely-supported immigration (or anything else that touches the immigration system, like "birth abroad" certificates) have gotten incredibly slow and frustrating over the past decade. (I have a US citizen colleague - a white-collar professional - who's been married to someone he met while working abroad for 3 years - they are still trying to get her a US Visa.)
Yes. A friend's daughter is an ophthalmologist living abroad and working as a fitness trainer as they await a visa for her husband. They are in their mid-20s and educated. The husband is a from the UK, so I doubt a terrorist concern, and, obviously, speaks English fluently. I am shocked at how difficult the process has been. Their plight really opened my eyes. I knew the immigration process was a mess, but I didn't realize how much of a mess.
Yeah the dynamic for this issue is Trump made it worse and Biden mostly just entrenched Trump’s status quo, leading to a one-way ratchet to more restrictions. The immigration priority for the next Democratic President should be fixing this.
>Factually that was absurd, the problem was caused by Trump’s COVID immigration restrictions
Not sure that was the problem; the current processing time for an I-130 petition is 51 months. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times. Don't know what it was back then.
Visa availability is a different source of delay, post approval of an I-130.
That was always a positive view for me starting right with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, one of the most adored and better written characters on the show, and the effort to cancel him was a moment where wokeness had gone too far.
The backlash against immigrants of Indian heritage is a thing, but my impression is it’s mostly driven by a rather small, very weird, overly online cohort of illogical (Indians are highly educated and affluent as a group) haters.
How broad is anti-Indian backlash? give heard about it but I’ve never really seen it irl. I suppose some youngsters who just missed the cutoff for med school might have hard feelings, but that’s a small group.
A lot of this ignores the practicality that more selectivity can also hurt the immigrants you want to attract. To take a simple example if you make family reunification harder it becomes much harder to attract people you want where they wouldn’t be able to bring their family over. This isn’t the 1800s where there are lots of people so poor they’re willing to live in workers’ ghettos and never have family. And also people who haven’t dealt with the immigration system often don’t realize this but people can be stuck in the immigration process for years during which they’re essentially living under a totalitarian regime subject to arbitrary rules with no freedom to travel and fear of even speaking in case they get jailed and deported for it. It’s not very attractive, and you see this in how the flow of certain groups you really want like Chinese scientists have gone into reverse and that’s helped China keep up in AI more than anyone expected.
We should make the system easier for everyone to legally immigrate. If the political tradeoff is to be really strict at the border then so be it.
Would selectivity really hurt family unification? Financial and human capital tends to pool in families, people with degrees and money will have siblings with degrees and money
I know some Indian IT specialists working here in Germany, and they really do care a lot about stuff like "Can I bring my wife with me" and "Will my kid be able to get a German passport one day". Which is understandable!
Sure, you could tell them to stop complaining and just visit their pregnant wife in India once a month. But then they'll just move somewhere else where they get treated better. If you want to encourage legal immigration, you need to be serious about it.
The positive fiscal effects of immigration are important and that of course has an effect on reducing the economic drag of the annual deficits, but deficit reduction ought not be the central point of immigration policy nor the most important way of reducing the net deficit of social insurance systems.
Right, immigration is win-win even if the immigrant isn’t a net fiscal contributor to the government as long as the immigrant is producing goods and services in the market that others are buying. Like probably 80-90% of native-born Americans are net drains on the government (most people have to be because the government is in debt and also because income and therefore tax payments are distributed based on a power law), but if you magically got rid of them, obviously that would completely nuke the economy.
Yelling at women to have more babies is more fun than tweaking immigration policy. When that gets old, you can hector men to get married even if their partner is anxious, obese, or depressed. Telling other people to have more unprotected sex is why Substack exists.
And babies are very large net drains on the economy for their first 20-25 years; higher fertility isn’t a solution to the fiscal issue but make it worse in the short run (and then interest rates mean short-run issues compound in the long-run). Countries usually have their fastest period of economic growth when fertility falls rapidly leading to a low dependency ratio; it’s called the “demographic dividend” but can only happen once. Increased fertility would be an anti-dividend just in hopes of getting another dividend in the future when fertility falls again.
Preach it. Well-managed immigration is much better than fertility policy — for one thing, it actually works.
But well-managed immigration means having frank discussions about who can come here, which means admitting American culture exists and being willing to exclude those who will assimilate poorly. If we get this wrong, we recreate the Parisian banlieues in North America. No thank you.
Are there any really groups that really assimilate more poorly than the MAGAs we have currently? Most people who want to immigrate are inherently going to be more cosmopolitan and open-minded than people who stay put. I feel confident that the average would-be immigrant in the world is less likely to vote to restrict my rights than the average Trump supporter. Like even big scary Muslims—there was just a brouhaha about some Muslims being bullied at the Texas Republican Convention (https://x.com/texastribune/status/2066621910620721530)—almost all the Muslims I know are great and though they are criticized for being socially conservative, polls show they are actually more pro-choice and pro-gay marriage than Evangelical Christians.
Also I’ve never been to Paris so don’t know what it’s like in the banlieues but tbh seeing how right-wing people talk about my perfectly safe mostly white-college-educated urban neighborhood with admittedly some homeless around like it’s a crime-ridden hell-hole makes me totally distrust what they’re saying about Europe. It’s possible things are going badly there but I bet it’s exaggerated a lot in the media.
According to the Internet, even foreign tourists who just came here to watch soccer for a couple of weeks have already been assimilated by ranch dressing and Taco Bell.
I think Dutch football supporters would assimilate quite easily. Any nordic person who can hold a job could assimilate, they speak english and have similar values.
Increased fertility is also the only way to stave off population aging and eventual decline on a *global* level -- once other countries fall below replacement fertility, there's no other planet for people to immigrate to Earth from.
World population won’t peak until the 2080s and who knows what’ll happen by then—the way things are going we’ll have robots and AI doing all the work well before then.
I’d be very concerned about having too many people in a world where robots and AI do all the work and the extra people aren’t needed and have no leverage, especially without global UBI (which would mean global government). It would look like the movie Elysium.
Correct. Americans today probably won't see the adverse affects of this in our lifetimes due to how rich and relatively welcoming we are to immigrants, but we might see stress points in other countries without those advantages within our lifetimes.
An honest question because I don't know the answer: how long can increased immigration work as a solution to budget and fertility collapse issues?
Is it like "until 2030"? "Until 2070"? ""Until 2150"?
It doesn't seem likely that "forever" is actually the answer but maybe it is?
If the answer is less than "forever" at what point does "just fix the actual structural issues instead of kicking the can down the road" become the better option?
Forever is not a viable demographic planning horizon. We have a pretty good idea how many babies will be born in ten years because we know how many reproductive aged people will exist and the fertility rate doesn’t change that quickly. However, we have no idea what the fertility rate will be in forty years or how many reproductive age adults will exist then.
If fertility had remained constant for the last 40 years, there would be about 11 billion people, not 8.2 billion.
It could be forever. I don't know whether the calculations include the effect of economic growth, but a $2 trillion annual deficit is trivial if GDP is $100 trillion.
GDP also has to grow, at least in nominal terms, to sustain a deficit indefinitely. The government is allowed to issue more debt than it retires every year, forever, but the outstanding debt still accumulates. If nominal GDP is $100 trillion and stationary, a $2 trillion deficit will accumulate to a debt the size of GDP in 50 years, and a debt twice the size of GDP in 100 years, which becomes a problem.
Of course, we would probably maintain NGDP growth above 2% (e.g. through 2% inflation plus some real growth), which you may have been implicitly assuming. And immigrants almost mechanically add to GDP -- additional people who can participate in that domestic production.
I'd point out that growing forever is impossible on a finite planet, at least if "growing" has any physical correlates (consuming more "stuff" or more energy), but I don't know what the limits are. We're straining the planet now, but it's possible to decouple economic value from things like CO2 emissions or other specific measures of material consumption.
In the long run we’re all dead, or perhaps ascended into being AI.
“Fixing the actual structural issues” means very large tax increases or cuts to spending, which (unless we become pacifists/isolationists and do all the cuts to defense spending) would be significantly more painful to people than more immigration.
Maybe to reframe my question slightly: if we have to eventually have painful changes in (say) 2050 then why bother with expanding immigration now?
Matt always talks about being clear eyed about tradeoffs but I'm very unclear on how long the “immigration arbitrage” can actually play out and whether it is actually worth the effort.
Just to clarify, while I am pro immigration on moral grounds things like the Swiss referendum — where 45% of Swiss are viscerally against skilled German immigrants (how close to Swiss demographics can you get?) — make me wonder at what point to just throw in the towel and give the people what they want because we're going to need to adapt to a world of materially zero immigration anyway in the next 30-70-100 years.
>make me wonder at what point to just throw in the towel and give the people what they want because we're going to need to adapt to a world of materially zero immigration anyway in the next 30-70-100 years
You mention other reasons, like referendums (referenda?) against immigration, but I wanted to push back on "someday the world will run out of immigrants" as an argument against immigration. It's an argument that we can't rely on immigration *forever*, but not that we shouldn't do it now.
I will second "in the long run we're dead" -- at least the people who are alive today to comment here. Eventually we will find it impossible to stay alive, but we still try to make our lives good while they last. In the longer term, human population is expected to decline, perhaps quickly, though it's hard to foresee future demographics, but like being alive, we have a temporary (several decades) situation to contend with now.
If you own a car, it won't last forever, but spare parts can still be useful.
Similarly, our planet is finite and expanding beyond it is very difficult. It will eventually be impossible to increase our material consumption. You can "decouple" GDP growth from material indicators like CO2 emissions, but there's probably some limit (I don't know where) on how far you can de-materialize the economy. And yet that doesn't mean degrowth now, necessarily -- after all, the planet was finite in 1800 too, and they would have been wrong to deliberately impoverish themselves back then. (To be clear, I think the case has changed since 1800, not because the planet was infinite back then, but because humanity's strain on it has visibly increased. My point is that things change, a century is a long time, and we don't usually require a standard of "this can be sustained literally forever" to do something now.)
I think similarly, "we will run out of immigrants in a few generations" is not a reason to avoid taking them now. There may be good reasons -- you mention that a country's citizens may not want immigrants, and the government should respect those wishes. I agree with that part, but it's separate from immigration not being sustainable forever.
The deficit is such a drag on growth that the government of the world's richest country can't even afford to pay real artists for their shitty meme images, they use bad AI ones instead. Sad!
Recently the proposed $100k application fee for H-1Bs got axed by court action, and although it probably wasn't the first best solution - it sure seems like it'd have similarly salutary fiscal benefits as some of these highlighted fees/fines/etc? Not just the direct dollars, but in terms of selection effects, you're not gonna set six figures on fire unless it's really sending their best. Of course, this doesn't address the tension between the humanitarian and fiscal cases for immigration (nor does Matt try to): a large share of people are uncomfortable with such a mercenary approach to what they view as a human-rights-and-freedom issue. Can't say I 100% disagree with them either! At the end of the day, money is just a made-up but very useful social fiction, whereas people are...well...people. There's something a bit grubby about reducing immigration to just dollars and sense, you know?
(...which is the nominal point of systems like asylum, but whoops, we can't be trusted with that particular tool again...)
In practice, I've found that pro-immigration advocates are very unwilling to actually reduce any categories of immigration, or force any material number of people here illegally to leave. Few of them are even willing to admit the way almost every category in our immigration/migration system has become a scam in some way (median or lower talent H-1B's replacing US workers, reportedly Only Fans models getting O-1B visas, "Temporary" Protected Status that lasts forever, bogus asylum claims, EB-5 money going into Hudson Yards, etc.), much less agree to any tangible reform. From his tweets, Yglesias himself seemed unaware until recently that large numbers of Indians are actually here illegally, for example. (Pew says over 700,000, the third highest source and about 14% of the total US Indian population).
When someone argues for why we need more "high-skilled immigration", for example - btw, always vaguely stated and almost never actually defined as to what high-skill actually tangibly means - I always ask whether he's open to reducing low skill immigration to make that happen. Almost no one would agree to that. Their position is since high skill immigration is good for America, or so they claim, they shouldn't have to give up anything to get it.
They all want deals similar to the previous amnesties, in which there's only vague immigration enforcement that never seems to actually materialize, or can be discretionarily removed at will or legally subverted in some way.
I short, I don't believe there's any actual deal to be made in which we actually reduce some categories of immigration in return for increasing others.
But it is true that a very tight labor market benefits low-end workers with better wages and bargaining power with their employeer. So I'm not sure how to design a system that keeps that in mind as well.
Yes, this. As someone said in an earlier discussion "if your choices are a 20-year-old pothead, a 40-year-old who just got out of jail, or the most ambitious guy from some small town in Honduras - you're hiring the guy from Honduras." But from a societal perspective, having jobs for the 40-year-old who just got out of jail is really important.
This hypothetical seems like a dark side of patriotism IMO—it’s basically arguing that a literal criminal (who assuming he committed his crime at peak criminal age around 20 and has a 20-year sentence probably did something very bad) is more deserving than a foreigner who did nothing wrong. I don’t think that’s a good moral position.
Of all the obstacles keeping a 40-year-old ex-con from getting a job, the availability of hardworking immigrants is pretty far down the list, but there should be opportunities for both to find useful employment. I just think the narrative of "this immigrant is taking a job away from an American" only really fits certain sectors, and doesn't even fit them very well. I've never understood why we can't just come up with a good way to recognize reality (we benefit from cheap, seasonal migrant labor in many ways) and design a system that maintains those benefits (like lower prices on produce) while also making the migrants safer and reduces the need for illegal activity by the migrants themselves and the companies employing them.
Well one good thing about Bidenomics was that the economy was so hot there was plenty of wage growth for both low-end workers and immigrants. (yes I know there were a lot of problems as well)
Americans have vastly different moral values and many (most?) believe this is not just a perfectly fine moral position, but it's the position any decent American should hold.
I'm not sure what the percentage is, but I'd guess the vast majority of Americans place the well-being of any random American above well-being of a random foreigner, regardless of either's personal history or deservedness.
A long time ago you were on a podcast with Dara Lind who said policy was a stalking horse for values and it’s so evident how this feels totally removed from why people want different immigration policies. It would be great if the political coalition in the United States were practical about immigration.
But we have one coalition that wants to be inclusive and help foreigners because they feel bad about the conditions of those people and another that has a mix of disdain for disorder, in group loyalty and racism that means what immigration can or should do for America is kind of a back burner issue.
It’s worth thinking about three different kinds of immigration:
a) low skill, “illegal” or legalized like asylum seekers/TPS who contribute to social insurance funding via a wage tax but receive no benefits
b) regular family unification/lottery immigration
c) Selective, Hib vista type programs “entrepreneurs for cash, etc.
My guess is that all are economically beneficial to non-immigrants but with very different fiscal/private costs and benefits. Obviously, each and be tweaked and have marginal costs/benefits that differ according to the stock of each and the rate of flow of each.
It's worth noting that family unification is really split. Family unification for your type c tends to be like more type c, for type a like more type a.
This is right on the merits, but it seems wrong to sell immigration on the basis that it's the solution to an acute, temporary problem. It's like saying we should only invest in health care until heart disease falls below x%.
Perhaps, that's all that's needed to support a modest increase. Maybe if we can just get orderly immigration over the political finish line, it will be so obviously beneficial that Americans will jump on board.
But I'd love to hear an argument that can unlock durable support among the electorate. I don't expect the median American to adopt my cosmopolitan preferences, but I do think they're positively disposed towards economic growth, and there must be a way to convey the benefits of specialization.
And do you expect the deficit to be reduced to manageable levels anytime soon?
At least with respect to Social Security payments, increasing the ratio of workers to retirees seems difficult to accomplish given the failure of pro-natalist policies to increase birth rates.
Let me put it this way: what I think is irrelevant.
We need to sell immigration to people that have no idea how long it will take to reduce the deficit to manageable levels. (Or, for that matter, how serious a problem it could become.)
I don't even think Americans are all that anti-immigrant if you look at polling. The median American makes a large distinction between illegal and legal and believes that the nation has a right to control the border.
There's just a fundamental difference between the vocal anarcho-cosmopolitans on the left and xenophobes on the right. Both may be a plurality in their coalition but not the nation. Honestly, without the filibuster we probably would have had a productive compromise by now.
But the next Democratic administration should make a bipartisan deal a priority and be willing to triangulate their own base.
Sort of love Matt’s chance to try to be “normie swing voter”. Trump’s (or probably more accurately Stephen Miller and JD Vance if recent reporting is to be believed) authoritarian tendencies are souring Americans on tough anti immigration policy? Actually, I like immigration.
I kid. I’m aware that you’ve never been some anti immigration zealot during the Biden years despite what idiots like David Sirota might say.
Anyway, my question is this. How is a Dem candidate going to sell this idea? Because my god to Biden poison the waters on this. But I also think you make a pretty compelling case that increasing immigration is actually kind of necessary if you want to avoid draconian cuts to social security.
So my pitch to Jon Ossoff (I know we’re two years out but he’s definitely impressing me right now). Go hard with calls for border enforcement and closing the asylum loophole. It sucks on the latter because I genuinely think welcoming all sorts of asylum seekers would be a good thing for America both on the fiscal but moral merits. But I’m trying to be realistic about the politics of mass migration not just here but with all peer countries. And then pair with a commitment to significantly expanding the H1-B program.
I think the thing that Dems need to be less afraid of recognizing based on polling who is most anti immigrant full stop and where they are located. And while I know Dems need to make at least slight inroads in areas where anti immigrant feeling is highest, based on what we know about who is most anti immigrant a) these people are probably not gettable swing voters b) the type of immigrants eligible for H1-B visas are going to be a lot less “scary” to people who maybe swung right on immigration circa 2023-2024 but were never on board with whole White Nationalist agenda.
I honestly think you thread the needle on this it can be a winning immigration message for the Dem nominee in 2028*.
* I’m also not delusional about immigration being the ideal ground for a Dem candidate to run. Ideally, the campaign is much more about a) Trump through his ow stupidity making inflation worse not better b) the blatant and Batista levels of corruption and self dealing c) Democratic reforms like expanding the House, curtailing pardon power and other ideas your podcast colleague calls for (think he’s right about this), d) cuts to Medicaid and GOP indicating they’re down to cut social security. But just noting a Dem candidate is going to need to have a “thread the needle” message against the inevitable bad faith attacks from candidate Rubio (who would be more insulated from accusations he’s pushing some white nationalist immigration agenda).
I think a selective immigration policy is a winning tactic, because polls show that most people don’t like the uncontrolled nature of immigration, not immigration itself (except for the hardcore 20% that wouldn’t vote for a Democrat anyway).
"But that’s the way I’d like to see us thinking about immigration. Don’t identify flaws in our visa programs and use those flaws as an argument for cutting them. Identify flaws and fix them! And since you’re making immigration better, why not have more of it?"
Using flaws as an excuse to kill programs across the board has kind of become the Republican go-to strategy for governance - it was the entire point of DOGE. This has been effective because it seems to make it impossible for Democrats to robustly defend just about anything - the flaws become the entire narrative, and nuanced discussion goes right out the window. And very few Republican lawmakers seem interested in actually fixing anything, downstream of Trump having no interest in, or ability to, actually fix anything.
This piece is completely right on the merits but unfortunately we live in a democracy and voters never seem to prioritize keeping our growth rate greater than our deficit/GDP ratio.
I have no real idea how you do this, but screening for high skilled immigrants *who also really want to be Americans* is really necessary.
If someone is trying to immigrate, that should be evidence enough. Putting people into a system where they are monitored for their thoughts is itself against American values and would in practice lead to a totalitarian system that would turn off even the people you do want like we’re seeing under Trump now.
Not really. If, idk, the Netherlands gave me the chance to 10x my income I’d probably take it, even though I have no desire to be Dutch.
And I don’t think we should monitor thoughts but if part of the screening process was a test that asked things like “who was the first US president” and “who won the college football playoff this year” then you’d be able to get people interested in our culture and not just our job market.
I think a vibes-based immigration system that screens for stuff like "Do you like college football?" is vastly inferior to a system that screens for actually measureable, merit-based factors like education, criminal record and work experience.
If someone is willing to work hard and not break any laws, that should be good enough. And if after a long day of working hard and not breaking any laws, you do come home muttering that you secretly hate this country, who cares. Millions of actual Americans probably do that as well.
My point is that we live in a democracy, and the demos doesn’t like immigration as much as us. That said, people do seem to have warm feelings to those who love and are grateful for America, so screening for that gives us more capacity to bring in more immigrants.
Realistically if someone offers you a 10x to your income you’d probably be pretty loyal to them. There’s even a concept in economics about this, the “efficiency wage.”
We already have a screening test that asks people about the President, and caring about college football seems like kind of a weird way to determine culture. Most Americans don’t care about college football either.
Again with the football thing... it's a popular sport, but it's not reasonable to expect anyone to know that, especially since the collapse of the whole three network system. This is the stuff that gets people talking about goaldowns.
Honestly, the way you do it is by bringing the tradeoff to the table. When have you ever heard the options presented this way by a politician? Even pro-immigrant Democrats are still lying to voters about fixing these problems with “tax the rich and corporations”.
We shoud not overlook te foreign policy advantages of a proper political asylum system. We undermine authoritarian regimes by providing a secure escape hatch for dissidents and by providing an additional incentive for high earning potential immigrants to leave. This is the main way we have weakened Cuba and it probably would have resulted in regime change if the economic blockade did not reduce cultural/economic relations.
This is correct, but I think it's best to see this within the foreign policy sphere specifically, where it's the policy of our government to make decisions here given the past abuse of the asylum system.
What is a 'proper' asylum system? How is it different from an 'improper' asylum system? Substantial numbers of people around the world now have access to flights, and substantial numbers of people can make up tales about how they are persecuted. Will the 'proper' asylum system be able to keep these guys out?
I think the improper version is where we take “my home country has gang violence” as equivalent to “my home country seeks to murder me and everyone of my ethnicity”.
Neither of those is grounds for political asulum.
"Proper" among other things measn separating out made up tales from real dissent.
All of this makes sense but the 2026 immigration backlash is focused on Indian immigrants with household incomes of $150k, while the only program that Trump has TACO-ed out of attacking is marriage green cards. So if the goal is to make the system more politically sustainable to capture the benefits…
And this makes absolutely no sense to be. Indian immigrants make a lot of money, pay taxes, don’t commit crimes, and bring delicious food and beautiful women with them. Anti-Indian sentiment is completely idiotic.
It is a sore subject in parts of the tech sector, not totally without reason, but my suspicion is that it's not really part of the larger political backlash. To the extent there's an issue I think it's solved by de-emphasizing family reunification beyond spouse and children and doubling down on skill/merit, which is what should be done anyway.
I kinda wonder how big the actual “problem” is. Like a real estimate on how many firms actually turned their entire stack and contractor network into a set of cousins.
I’ve worked for and with a ton of Indians and while you hear about this stuff it’s literally never happened to me and I’ve never, ever seen it happen.
But I think the fact that it makes no sense is precisely NotCompeting's point, if I understand them correctly.
Well that and center-left people trying to be ruthlessly pragmatic on immigration *should actually do that*. Why no focus on making the consular marriage visa not a years-long delay shitshow?
I once had an Uber driver complain about how long it was taking to get a visa for his (mail-order? Idk) bride. This was in 2021 and he was blaming Biden and the migrants for hogging up all the processing. Factually that was absurd, the problem was caused by Trump’s COVID immigration restrictions. But it did kind of drive home to me the kind of dynamic Democrats are dealing with. The good news is that there’s probably a lot of room to be pro-legal immigration like making marriage processing take a week instead of multiple years and spouses of citizens are something like 30% of new green cards so that’s actually a very big deal, rather than focusing on illegals and the border, so the next Democratic President should do that.
Unequivocally legal and widely-supported immigration (or anything else that touches the immigration system, like "birth abroad" certificates) have gotten incredibly slow and frustrating over the past decade. (I have a US citizen colleague - a white-collar professional - who's been married to someone he met while working abroad for 3 years - they are still trying to get her a US Visa.)
Yes. A friend's daughter is an ophthalmologist living abroad and working as a fitness trainer as they await a visa for her husband. They are in their mid-20s and educated. The husband is a from the UK, so I doubt a terrorist concern, and, obviously, speaks English fluently. I am shocked at how difficult the process has been. Their plight really opened my eyes. I knew the immigration process was a mess, but I didn't realize how much of a mess.
Yeah the dynamic for this issue is Trump made it worse and Biden mostly just entrenched Trump’s status quo, leading to a one-way ratchet to more restrictions. The immigration priority for the next Democratic President should be fixing this.
>Factually that was absurd, the problem was caused by Trump’s COVID immigration restrictions
Not sure that was the problem; the current processing time for an I-130 petition is 51 months. https://egov.uscis.gov/processing-times. Don't know what it was back then.
Visa availability is a different source of delay, post approval of an I-130.
“Dey took r jobz”
That was always a positive view for me starting right with Apu Nahasapeemapetilon, one of the most adored and better written characters on the show, and the effort to cancel him was a moment where wokeness had gone too far.
The backlash against immigrants of Indian heritage is a thing, but my impression is it’s mostly driven by a rather small, very weird, overly online cohort of illogical (Indians are highly educated and affluent as a group) haters.
How broad is anti-Indian backlash? give heard about it but I’ve never really seen it irl. I suppose some youngsters who just missed the cutoff for med school might have hard feelings, but that’s a small group.
Enough that Ohio might get a Democratic governor!
It is mainly online and built up very quickly, so my son's theory is that it started as a planned and targeted campaign by some group or other.
it emerged because the anglosphere now has a shared political discourse thanks to X, the ultimate source was Canada/UK
Also found willing disciples in tech. I don’t think it’s all wumaos but I think it probably got broadcast by them
Is this an IRL thing or just Twitter?
A lot of this ignores the practicality that more selectivity can also hurt the immigrants you want to attract. To take a simple example if you make family reunification harder it becomes much harder to attract people you want where they wouldn’t be able to bring their family over. This isn’t the 1800s where there are lots of people so poor they’re willing to live in workers’ ghettos and never have family. And also people who haven’t dealt with the immigration system often don’t realize this but people can be stuck in the immigration process for years during which they’re essentially living under a totalitarian regime subject to arbitrary rules with no freedom to travel and fear of even speaking in case they get jailed and deported for it. It’s not very attractive, and you see this in how the flow of certain groups you really want like Chinese scientists have gone into reverse and that’s helped China keep up in AI more than anyone expected.
We should make the system easier for everyone to legally immigrate. If the political tradeoff is to be really strict at the border then so be it.
Would selectivity really hurt family unification? Financial and human capital tends to pool in families, people with degrees and money will have siblings with degrees and money
I know some Indian IT specialists working here in Germany, and they really do care a lot about stuff like "Can I bring my wife with me" and "Will my kid be able to get a German passport one day". Which is understandable!
Sure, you could tell them to stop complaining and just visit their pregnant wife in India once a month. But then they'll just move somewhere else where they get treated better. If you want to encourage legal immigration, you need to be serious about it.
Plenty of high gaokao scorers with peasant farmer parents, MI proposing to ban them from seeing their parents in old age seems suboptimal
If they have passports they can visit. Or their high achieving kids can go home to see them.
The positive fiscal effects of immigration are important and that of course has an effect on reducing the economic drag of the annual deficits, but deficit reduction ought not be the central point of immigration policy nor the most important way of reducing the net deficit of social insurance systems.
But it's good to frame immigration in as a benefit to voters rather than the progressive strategy of tearfully self-sacrifice.
Right, immigration is win-win even if the immigrant isn’t a net fiscal contributor to the government as long as the immigrant is producing goods and services in the market that others are buying. Like probably 80-90% of native-born Americans are net drains on the government (most people have to be because the government is in debt and also because income and therefore tax payments are distributed based on a power law), but if you magically got rid of them, obviously that would completely nuke the economy.
Yelling at women to have more babies is more fun than tweaking immigration policy. When that gets old, you can hector men to get married even if their partner is anxious, obese, or depressed. Telling other people to have more unprotected sex is why Substack exists.
And babies are very large net drains on the economy for their first 20-25 years; higher fertility isn’t a solution to the fiscal issue but make it worse in the short run (and then interest rates mean short-run issues compound in the long-run). Countries usually have their fastest period of economic growth when fertility falls rapidly leading to a low dependency ratio; it’s called the “demographic dividend” but can only happen once. Increased fertility would be an anti-dividend just in hopes of getting another dividend in the future when fertility falls again.
Preach it. Well-managed immigration is much better than fertility policy — for one thing, it actually works.
But well-managed immigration means having frank discussions about who can come here, which means admitting American culture exists and being willing to exclude those who will assimilate poorly. If we get this wrong, we recreate the Parisian banlieues in North America. No thank you.
Are there any really groups that really assimilate more poorly than the MAGAs we have currently? Most people who want to immigrate are inherently going to be more cosmopolitan and open-minded than people who stay put. I feel confident that the average would-be immigrant in the world is less likely to vote to restrict my rights than the average Trump supporter. Like even big scary Muslims—there was just a brouhaha about some Muslims being bullied at the Texas Republican Convention (https://x.com/texastribune/status/2066621910620721530)—almost all the Muslims I know are great and though they are criticized for being socially conservative, polls show they are actually more pro-choice and pro-gay marriage than Evangelical Christians.
Also I’ve never been to Paris so don’t know what it’s like in the banlieues but tbh seeing how right-wing people talk about my perfectly safe mostly white-college-educated urban neighborhood with admittedly some homeless around like it’s a crime-ridden hell-hole makes me totally distrust what they’re saying about Europe. It’s possible things are going badly there but I bet it’s exaggerated a lot in the media.
Exactly, who are these groups that assimilate poorly? America's success rate at assimilating various groups seems to be basically 100%.
According to the Internet, even foreign tourists who just came here to watch soccer for a couple of weeks have already been assimilated by ranch dressing and Taco Bell.
I think Dutch football supporters would assimilate quite easily. Any nordic person who can hold a job could assimilate, they speak english and have similar values.
There’s like 5 of them in a country of 400 million but travelers have not assimilated that well.
"Cosmopolitan and open-minded" is the opposite of "assimilated."
I'm not too worried abut PhD jihadists. Musk "assimilated" well, just to the wrong groups.
Increased fertility is also the only way to stave off population aging and eventual decline on a *global* level -- once other countries fall below replacement fertility, there's no other planet for people to immigrate to Earth from.
World population won’t peak until the 2080s and who knows what’ll happen by then—the way things are going we’ll have robots and AI doing all the work well before then.
I’d be very concerned about having too many people in a world where robots and AI do all the work and the extra people aren’t needed and have no leverage, especially without global UBI (which would mean global government). It would look like the movie Elysium.
Correct. Americans today probably won't see the adverse affects of this in our lifetimes due to how rich and relatively welcoming we are to immigrants, but we might see stress points in other countries without those advantages within our lifetimes.
Or hector women marry jeks! :)
An honest question because I don't know the answer: how long can increased immigration work as a solution to budget and fertility collapse issues?
Is it like "until 2030"? "Until 2070"? ""Until 2150"?
It doesn't seem likely that "forever" is actually the answer but maybe it is?
If the answer is less than "forever" at what point does "just fix the actual structural issues instead of kicking the can down the road" become the better option?
Forever is not a viable demographic planning horizon. We have a pretty good idea how many babies will be born in ten years because we know how many reproductive aged people will exist and the fertility rate doesn’t change that quickly. However, we have no idea what the fertility rate will be in forty years or how many reproductive age adults will exist then.
If fertility had remained constant for the last 40 years, there would be about 11 billion people, not 8.2 billion.
It could be forever. I don't know whether the calculations include the effect of economic growth, but a $2 trillion annual deficit is trivial if GDP is $100 trillion.
GDP also has to grow, at least in nominal terms, to sustain a deficit indefinitely. The government is allowed to issue more debt than it retires every year, forever, but the outstanding debt still accumulates. If nominal GDP is $100 trillion and stationary, a $2 trillion deficit will accumulate to a debt the size of GDP in 50 years, and a debt twice the size of GDP in 100 years, which becomes a problem.
Of course, we would probably maintain NGDP growth above 2% (e.g. through 2% inflation plus some real growth), which you may have been implicitly assuming. And immigrants almost mechanically add to GDP -- additional people who can participate in that domestic production.
I'd point out that growing forever is impossible on a finite planet, at least if "growing" has any physical correlates (consuming more "stuff" or more energy), but I don't know what the limits are. We're straining the planet now, but it's possible to decouple economic value from things like CO2 emissions or other specific measures of material consumption.
In the long run we’re all dead, or perhaps ascended into being AI.
“Fixing the actual structural issues” means very large tax increases or cuts to spending, which (unless we become pacifists/isolationists and do all the cuts to defense spending) would be significantly more painful to people than more immigration.
More, becasue immigrationis net positive, but fixing Social insurance with a VAT does not have larger dead weight losses.
Maybe to reframe my question slightly: if we have to eventually have painful changes in (say) 2050 then why bother with expanding immigration now?
Matt always talks about being clear eyed about tradeoffs but I'm very unclear on how long the “immigration arbitrage” can actually play out and whether it is actually worth the effort.
Just to clarify, while I am pro immigration on moral grounds things like the Swiss referendum — where 45% of Swiss are viscerally against skilled German immigrants (how close to Swiss demographics can you get?) — make me wonder at what point to just throw in the towel and give the people what they want because we're going to need to adapt to a world of materially zero immigration anyway in the next 30-70-100 years.
>make me wonder at what point to just throw in the towel and give the people what they want because we're going to need to adapt to a world of materially zero immigration anyway in the next 30-70-100 years
You mention other reasons, like referendums (referenda?) against immigration, but I wanted to push back on "someday the world will run out of immigrants" as an argument against immigration. It's an argument that we can't rely on immigration *forever*, but not that we shouldn't do it now.
I will second "in the long run we're dead" -- at least the people who are alive today to comment here. Eventually we will find it impossible to stay alive, but we still try to make our lives good while they last. In the longer term, human population is expected to decline, perhaps quickly, though it's hard to foresee future demographics, but like being alive, we have a temporary (several decades) situation to contend with now.
If you own a car, it won't last forever, but spare parts can still be useful.
Similarly, our planet is finite and expanding beyond it is very difficult. It will eventually be impossible to increase our material consumption. You can "decouple" GDP growth from material indicators like CO2 emissions, but there's probably some limit (I don't know where) on how far you can de-materialize the economy. And yet that doesn't mean degrowth now, necessarily -- after all, the planet was finite in 1800 too, and they would have been wrong to deliberately impoverish themselves back then. (To be clear, I think the case has changed since 1800, not because the planet was infinite back then, but because humanity's strain on it has visibly increased. My point is that things change, a century is a long time, and we don't usually require a standard of "this can be sustained literally forever" to do something now.)
I think similarly, "we will run out of immigrants in a few generations" is not a reason to avoid taking them now. There may be good reasons -- you mention that a country's citizens may not want immigrants, and the government should respect those wishes. I agree with that part, but it's separate from immigration not being sustainable forever.
The deficit is such a drag on growth that the government of the world's richest country can't even afford to pay real artists for their shitty meme images, they use bad AI ones instead. Sad!
Recently the proposed $100k application fee for H-1Bs got axed by court action, and although it probably wasn't the first best solution - it sure seems like it'd have similarly salutary fiscal benefits as some of these highlighted fees/fines/etc? Not just the direct dollars, but in terms of selection effects, you're not gonna set six figures on fire unless it's really sending their best. Of course, this doesn't address the tension between the humanitarian and fiscal cases for immigration (nor does Matt try to): a large share of people are uncomfortable with such a mercenary approach to what they view as a human-rights-and-freedom issue. Can't say I 100% disagree with them either! At the end of the day, money is just a made-up but very useful social fiction, whereas people are...well...people. There's something a bit grubby about reducing immigration to just dollars and sense, you know?
(...which is the nominal point of systems like asylum, but whoops, we can't be trusted with that particular tool again...)
In practice, I've found that pro-immigration advocates are very unwilling to actually reduce any categories of immigration, or force any material number of people here illegally to leave. Few of them are even willing to admit the way almost every category in our immigration/migration system has become a scam in some way (median or lower talent H-1B's replacing US workers, reportedly Only Fans models getting O-1B visas, "Temporary" Protected Status that lasts forever, bogus asylum claims, EB-5 money going into Hudson Yards, etc.), much less agree to any tangible reform. From his tweets, Yglesias himself seemed unaware until recently that large numbers of Indians are actually here illegally, for example. (Pew says over 700,000, the third highest source and about 14% of the total US Indian population).
When someone argues for why we need more "high-skilled immigration", for example - btw, always vaguely stated and almost never actually defined as to what high-skill actually tangibly means - I always ask whether he's open to reducing low skill immigration to make that happen. Almost no one would agree to that. Their position is since high skill immigration is good for America, or so they claim, they shouldn't have to give up anything to get it.
They all want deals similar to the previous amnesties, in which there's only vague immigration enforcement that never seems to actually materialize, or can be discretionarily removed at will or legally subverted in some way.
I short, I don't believe there's any actual deal to be made in which we actually reduce some categories of immigration in return for increasing others.
This pro-immigrant personis very willing to essentially make illegal immigration/phoney saylum seeking zero.
I like all of the stuff in this article.
But it is true that a very tight labor market benefits low-end workers with better wages and bargaining power with their employeer. So I'm not sure how to design a system that keeps that in mind as well.
Yes, this. As someone said in an earlier discussion "if your choices are a 20-year-old pothead, a 40-year-old who just got out of jail, or the most ambitious guy from some small town in Honduras - you're hiring the guy from Honduras." But from a societal perspective, having jobs for the 40-year-old who just got out of jail is really important.
This hypothetical seems like a dark side of patriotism IMO—it’s basically arguing that a literal criminal (who assuming he committed his crime at peak criminal age around 20 and has a 20-year sentence probably did something very bad) is more deserving than a foreigner who did nothing wrong. I don’t think that’s a good moral position.
Of all the obstacles keeping a 40-year-old ex-con from getting a job, the availability of hardworking immigrants is pretty far down the list, but there should be opportunities for both to find useful employment. I just think the narrative of "this immigrant is taking a job away from an American" only really fits certain sectors, and doesn't even fit them very well. I've never understood why we can't just come up with a good way to recognize reality (we benefit from cheap, seasonal migrant labor in many ways) and design a system that maintains those benefits (like lower prices on produce) while also making the migrants safer and reduces the need for illegal activity by the migrants themselves and the companies employing them.
Well one good thing about Bidenomics was that the economy was so hot there was plenty of wage growth for both low-end workers and immigrants. (yes I know there were a lot of problems as well)
Americans have vastly different moral values and many (most?) believe this is not just a perfectly fine moral position, but it's the position any decent American should hold.
I'm not sure what the percentage is, but I'd guess the vast majority of Americans place the well-being of any random American above well-being of a random foreigner, regardless of either's personal history or deservedness.
A long time ago you were on a podcast with Dara Lind who said policy was a stalking horse for values and it’s so evident how this feels totally removed from why people want different immigration policies. It would be great if the political coalition in the United States were practical about immigration.
But we have one coalition that wants to be inclusive and help foreigners because they feel bad about the conditions of those people and another that has a mix of disdain for disorder, in group loyalty and racism that means what immigration can or should do for America is kind of a back burner issue.
It’s worth thinking about three different kinds of immigration:
a) low skill, “illegal” or legalized like asylum seekers/TPS who contribute to social insurance funding via a wage tax but receive no benefits
b) regular family unification/lottery immigration
c) Selective, Hib vista type programs “entrepreneurs for cash, etc.
My guess is that all are economically beneficial to non-immigrants but with very different fiscal/private costs and benefits. Obviously, each and be tweaked and have marginal costs/benefits that differ according to the stock of each and the rate of flow of each.
It's worth noting that family unification is really split. Family unification for your type c tends to be like more type c, for type a like more type a.
reunification does not apply to a)
This is right on the merits, but it seems wrong to sell immigration on the basis that it's the solution to an acute, temporary problem. It's like saying we should only invest in health care until heart disease falls below x%.
Perhaps, that's all that's needed to support a modest increase. Maybe if we can just get orderly immigration over the political finish line, it will be so obviously beneficial that Americans will jump on board.
But I'd love to hear an argument that can unlock durable support among the electorate. I don't expect the median American to adopt my cosmopolitan preferences, but I do think they're positively disposed towards economic growth, and there must be a way to convey the benefits of specialization.
How temporary is this problem? Do you expect birth rates to increase anytime soon?
No, but isn't this article selling deficit/debt reduction?
And do you expect the deficit to be reduced to manageable levels anytime soon?
At least with respect to Social Security payments, increasing the ratio of workers to retirees seems difficult to accomplish given the failure of pro-natalist policies to increase birth rates.
Let me put it this way: what I think is irrelevant.
We need to sell immigration to people that have no idea how long it will take to reduce the deficit to manageable levels. (Or, for that matter, how serious a problem it could become.)
I don't even think Americans are all that anti-immigrant if you look at polling. The median American makes a large distinction between illegal and legal and believes that the nation has a right to control the border.
There's just a fundamental difference between the vocal anarcho-cosmopolitans on the left and xenophobes on the right. Both may be a plurality in their coalition but not the nation. Honestly, without the filibuster we probably would have had a productive compromise by now.
But the next Democratic administration should make a bipartisan deal a priority and be willing to triangulate their own base.
Took me a while to find it, but here was my hippy dippy, politics free, moar immigrants version I did on the calculator when JSG shared this last week: https://manhattan.institute/article/immigration-calculator?plan=8&metric=debtToGdp&horizon=10ymetric%3DdebtToGdp&horizon=10y&plan=8&daca=10&legalization=14&h1b=32&endGreenCardCaps=38&workAuth=44&diversity=20
Anyone else have results they want to share?
Sort of love Matt’s chance to try to be “normie swing voter”. Trump’s (or probably more accurately Stephen Miller and JD Vance if recent reporting is to be believed) authoritarian tendencies are souring Americans on tough anti immigration policy? Actually, I like immigration.
I kid. I’m aware that you’ve never been some anti immigration zealot during the Biden years despite what idiots like David Sirota might say.
Anyway, my question is this. How is a Dem candidate going to sell this idea? Because my god to Biden poison the waters on this. But I also think you make a pretty compelling case that increasing immigration is actually kind of necessary if you want to avoid draconian cuts to social security.
So my pitch to Jon Ossoff (I know we’re two years out but he’s definitely impressing me right now). Go hard with calls for border enforcement and closing the asylum loophole. It sucks on the latter because I genuinely think welcoming all sorts of asylum seekers would be a good thing for America both on the fiscal but moral merits. But I’m trying to be realistic about the politics of mass migration not just here but with all peer countries. And then pair with a commitment to significantly expanding the H1-B program.
I think the thing that Dems need to be less afraid of recognizing based on polling who is most anti immigrant full stop and where they are located. And while I know Dems need to make at least slight inroads in areas where anti immigrant feeling is highest, based on what we know about who is most anti immigrant a) these people are probably not gettable swing voters b) the type of immigrants eligible for H1-B visas are going to be a lot less “scary” to people who maybe swung right on immigration circa 2023-2024 but were never on board with whole White Nationalist agenda.
I honestly think you thread the needle on this it can be a winning immigration message for the Dem nominee in 2028*.
* I’m also not delusional about immigration being the ideal ground for a Dem candidate to run. Ideally, the campaign is much more about a) Trump through his ow stupidity making inflation worse not better b) the blatant and Batista levels of corruption and self dealing c) Democratic reforms like expanding the House, curtailing pardon power and other ideas your podcast colleague calls for (think he’s right about this), d) cuts to Medicaid and GOP indicating they’re down to cut social security. But just noting a Dem candidate is going to need to have a “thread the needle” message against the inevitable bad faith attacks from candidate Rubio (who would be more insulated from accusations he’s pushing some white nationalist immigration agenda).
I think a selective immigration policy is a winning tactic, because polls show that most people don’t like the uncontrolled nature of immigration, not immigration itself (except for the hardcore 20% that wouldn’t vote for a Democrat anyway).
"But that’s the way I’d like to see us thinking about immigration. Don’t identify flaws in our visa programs and use those flaws as an argument for cutting them. Identify flaws and fix them! And since you’re making immigration better, why not have more of it?"
Using flaws as an excuse to kill programs across the board has kind of become the Republican go-to strategy for governance - it was the entire point of DOGE. This has been effective because it seems to make it impossible for Democrats to robustly defend just about anything - the flaws become the entire narrative, and nuanced discussion goes right out the window. And very few Republican lawmakers seem interested in actually fixing anything, downstream of Trump having no interest in, or ability to, actually fix anything.