The European elections show how to beat the populist right - neutralize the immigration issue. No other compromise is necessary. With immigration off the table the far right cannot exceed 20% of the votes.
Scandinavia bucked the EU trend as left wing and centrist parties did much better here than in the rest of Europe, while the far right did much worse. The reason is that our center-right and center-left parties shifted their stances on immigration towards a much stricter policy with only a small, controlled number of asylum migrants allowed yearly (to make succesful integration possible). Denmark was first, Finland and Norway followed and since 2015 Sweden finally turned as well (after having scolded the Danes for being racists for years, now Swedish politicians are talking about Denmark as a model to copy, even the center-left Social Democrats have sent its people there to learn about Danish reforms when it comes to demolishing houses and restructuring segregated neighbourhoods).
Centrist parties in Germany, France, Spain and Italy should learn from the Nordic example and take a hard line on asylum immigration. There is zero popular legitimacy for ”open borders”/uncontrolled immigration and it will only lead to a growing far right that threatens liberal democracy.
The US should learn as well. In particular, US progressives who love to idealize Scandinavia should take a closer look at the current immigration policies of Scandinavian countries. They are closer to the Republican party than to those of the Democratic party.
As David Frum has said : "If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do."
My concern is that this option was available to President Biden for 3.5 years and yet only chose to do this 6 months prior to the election. So although I applaud the move, I don't think the Administration's commitment to reducing fake asylum claims is genuine.
Big agree on this. Imagine if Biden pushed for a legislative fix earlier in his presidency, back when Trump had less political clout. If he took the mantle of responsible immigration policy and put the GOP on the defensive. Would his favorables look at least a little bit better?
To some extent, it's not just Biden. The Democratic party has still not come to terms with Trump's win in 2016. That's why instead of moderating on issues like immigration, they've doubled down on open borders. With Trump, Democrats have always focussed on his personal negatives instead of neutralizing him on policy issues (especially, the popular ones). That works when his opponent is popular, not when he/she is also unpopular.
I agree with most of this but I actually don’t think it’s true they focus on his personal negatives rather than his unpopular policies. As Matt said, they haven’t make much out of his conviction, and Matt has repeatedly tried to emphasize Trump’s con man past that Democrats (he thinks) haven’t spent much time on. I think what Democrats have focused on is how non-woke his policies and views and statements are; in other words, they attack him politically but from a left-wing lens, which blunts the attacks’ impact among people who don’t share the left-wing frame.
Not interested in arguing with hyper partisan people or in providing proof for why Biden's approval rating is in the toilet on the issue of immigration.
More than a little, I think. It's one of his biggest negative issues. In many cities you can actually see large numbers of asylum seekers camping out at police stations. No fox news required.
In my little city, the newspaper has been running stories about how hard it is for recent immigrants to find housing, and the comments are full of people pointing out that existing citizens also can't find housing in the first place, and that it's been a problem for a few years now, so maybe....
I think this article demonstrates why he didn't do this earlier. There's a good argument that even pro-illegal-immigration Progressives should back off criticism of Biden for this EO since the election is 5 months away, since Trump would be a lot worse on the issue.
If there was no upcoming election, there wouldn't be as good an argument for Progressives to fight Biden much harder on it.
I think ultimately, he made the wrong call on the politics and the merits, but he saved himself a lot of progressive knifing by waiting until it was clearly an political decision.
To be blunt one of the defining features of the Biden administration is how terrified his administration is of the fringe left. (Israel is a notable exception to this, but even there he's shifted.)
It's hard to parse how much of this is a reasonable (but wrong imo) analysis that losing progressive support will sabotage his re-election versus Biden running the party like a Senator who is always focused on keeping a broad set of constituencies happy.
A centrist in congress will find it easier to shore up support at the extreme of her or his party than to convince the opposition to cross over. And going to the other side can damage standing in a politician's own party.
Unfortunately, the impact to the electorate is the opposite: voters reward politicians who defy their party and work with the other side in selected areas.
A exception? What world are you living in? He has been pushed around by progressives like a leaf in the wind on the Gaza War, starting from a day or two after October 7. First there are red lines, then there's "ironclad support", then we're back to red lines again.
Biden is terrified of organized groups. This explains his actions on Israel. The pro-Israel lobby is professional and organized. The students camping out are basically having a high minded circle jerk.
better to be knifed in the back by progressives who will end up voting for Biden anyway than to be knifed in the front by center-right voters who bring Trump back to the white house
As I understood it, he has been trying to get something done for years, but all his staff have screwed him on this, starting with Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. Having some control is popular in the country, but unpopular among the party factions, and that's where their loyalty lies.
True, but voters know that Trump stands for less immigration and more border enforcement. They aren't confused about that. So if that is an important issue for voters, they will choose Trump.
I still wonder to what extent those concerns are what are shifting marginal voters' candidate choices vs voters' stating a preference post candidate choices.
Sigh. I just want reforms to the legal immigration system and to close the asylum loopholes.
Remain in Mexico was a Trump idea that Democrats considered inhumane, but are now adopting.
I strongly prefer the comprehensive immigration reform agenda of Democrats to the Republican policy of "just shut it down," but it's clear that the right is more committed and capable of creating effective immigration policy.
From a 2020 Times article about a house committee investing made in Mexico:
The “Remain in Mexico” initiative, committee Democrats said, “is a dangerously flawed policy that threatens the health and safety of legitimate asylum seekers” and warrants “a comprehensive review of the policy, its implementation and its impact on vulnerable populations.”
The right time to pass CIR was under Bush or Obama. There's no way it's going to pass with another 10-12 million added in the last 3+ years on top of the 10-12 million at that time. It's either going to be mass deportation or tough interior enforcement on work permits, forcing them to self deport.
Neither will probably happen. Americans say they like mass deportation , but I don’t think they have the stomach to actually see it happen. And businesses will scream at the idea of having work permits enforced, which would put pressure both on the business, friendly Republicans and Dems.
What will probably happen is that we will continue to muddle on, until Congress passes some sort of asylum change. The people that are already in the United States will probably just remain.
I wouldn't count on what has happened in the past to be the guide for predicting the future. Public opinion on illegal immigration has changed over time and it's not just a fringe group that's angry over this. There are already systems like E-Verify that employers have to use. It may take a long time to clear out the backlog of asylum seekers but I have no doubt that the vast majority of those who came in the last 3 years will be deported.
Come on. They scuttled the deal because it's an election year, and why give help to your opponent by compromising, when you have a good chance of getting everything you want in a few months. It was entirely predictable, and for Biden to be in this position is pure political malpractice.
No, it's absolutely not predictable. Republicans wanted to make the deal, and only scuttled it after Trump personally and vehemently came out against it. I agree that a wiser course of action could have prevented this outcome, but it's only predictable if you acknowledge that Trump will harm the country for his political benefit, and the rest of the GOP will happily go along with that, even if it "hurts" them in the eyes of moderate voters. Now, you and I might be cynical enough to predict that at this point, but I do think it's a pretty massive change in what counted as "smart politics" even as recently as 2022 where being seen as too Trumpy cost Republican candidates a bunch of winnable races.
I can only view this as parroting a party line. As I see it, it is the Democratic gaslighting experts trying to make the pathetic best of the ton-of-bricks reckoning that their party is getting for their years of inaction on this issue, which has indeed harmed the country. "Blame Trump" is always a winner with their most loyal and partisan supporters, but by the polls, this is just pushing on a string. The great majority of Americans aren't buying it.
Yeah, this is really what I want to see addressed. If you believe in this policy on the merits, do it at the beginning of your presidency and spend the time to make this argument. I'm not sure how this sways a single voter who cares deeply about immigration (because let's face it, they're voting for Trump anyway) and pisses off progressives who don't like Biden anyway.
"because let's face it, they're voting for Trump anyway". Or staying home. There are so many people with unique combinations of electoral concerns, ie hate Biden b/c of immigration, hate Trump b/c he said "grab her by the p*##$" or abortion or whatever else. People like that often stay home or vote for a 3rd party or emotionally decide to vote R or D in the final weeks.
There really are a tremendous amount of swing voters, not to mention 1st-time voters whose views are still being molded. When I've listened to people's "political origin story" it's often some random thing they saw that turned them to one party or the other. I don't know if this change creates Biden voters but it might prevent a few Trump one.
I fall into that category, and for me, it's not about immigration per se, but about the principle and also about the competence. There are a lot of Democrats who are not loyal to the President and who don't want to obey the immigration laws. Moreover, they are quite open about how they want to legalize all these people and get their votes so they can marginalize the deplorables. It is toxic for Biden, but he is too old and weak to manage these people (if they can even be managed). INo matter who is President, a Democratic administration will be largely run by such people, because they are the people who present themselves to staff the jobs in a Democratic administration.
What was the timeline of border issues? My recollection is that during the pandemic there wasn’t much of an issue, so it took a year or more into Biden’s term for it to become obvious that asylum was the big loophole people were exploiting. But perhaps it was clear earlier to people who were paying closer attention what the problem was going to become?
This is the part I feel is missing from this discussion. The beginning of Biden's presidency was deiminated by everything COVID. It would have been astonishingly weird for Biden to focus on the border when vaccine rollout was still at its early stages. And given border crossings were quite low in the beginning of his term, it just would have made no sense. If you want to say he was a bit slow in 2022 then maybe.
Honestly, one thing that's really clear to me in retrospect is I think we all underestimated how quickly Americans pivoted to being "back to normal". Which also likely partially explains inflation as Americans turned back to pre-covid spending habits and activity way faster than anyone anticipated. I half joked back in 2022 that Vladimir Putin ended the COVID pandemic; his invasion meant that for the first time in 2 years, the front pages were not dominated by COVID stories (or have at least one COVID story as one of its lead stories). Think we're sort of memory holing how much COVID was still in the front of people's minds in 2021 (A big part of the VA governor's race was controversies over schools still having strict COVID policies and likely helps explain Youngkin's victory).
Point about all this is all this loose talk about how Biden should have pivoted to attacking immigration earlier while probably correct is rewriting history a bit.
Biden *did* pay attention to the border right away in his presidency. Within the first two weeks in 2021, he took a number of actions to undo Trump administration efforts to control the border (to be clear I agree with some of them, but it belies the idea that they just weren't paying attention):
I can tell you that it's been about 18 months since Denver suddenly found itself coping with an immense number of Veneuelan migrants. And it did seem extremely sudden.
First he tried legislation and then he delayed to make the Mexican government happier by pushing to after their election. Obviously this wasn’t Biden’d day one priority but he has been working the issue for a while now.
Yes, and worth noting that it should not have been a day 1 priority, since we were still in the middle of Covid and the resulting economic recovery. Arguably they could've or should've prioritized sooner (maybe in 2022 instead of 2023)
This worries me too. I mean, better to do the right thing now than never, but after years of one side saying "close the border" and the administration saying "oh sorry we can't", it's a tricky thing to now say "ah-ha we CAN!"
Is it possible this won't hold up in court, so it's a timing game to do this now & it won't get overturned until after the election?
I really hate the phrase “close the border”, which is how the press has been describing this policy. It was only Matt’s article that finally told me what the policy actually was.
Obviously the border is not closed now - you can go to Tijuana for the weekend if you like. And the border wasn’t open before - people would ask you for your documentation at any border crossing. What has changed is that asylum claims are now only processed at the border, not if you are illegally in the country already.
He needed to have a potent policy response and a potent symbolic response. Even if the intent of this action is to have it prosecuted, it's too late to have much symbolic impact.
“…only chose to do this 6 months prior to the election”
There were other strategies available for the 3.5 years: Trump was going to get trounced in the primaries, lawfare, the pliant media, etc. Now that those have fallen by the wayside it’s time for desperate measures.
Does anyone remember the early Democratic debates in the last election? Democrats were one upping each other on their openness to illegal immigration and how we should support the immigrants with healthcare and education. They did pull back some as the primary rolled on but that instinct is still there.
I remember, oh so well, how Julian Castro presented his vision of inviting large numbers of Mexicans to settle in their own separate communities in Texas, where they could keep their culture safe from . . Texans.
This, to me, is really the only important point. Whatever we might say about the prudence and balance of Biden's (currently proposed) plan, it is far, far too late. At this point, massive damage has been done, and there is no more trust. And the toxic factionalism in the party that thwarted Biden and allowed an unpopular and irresponsible minority to drive the bus for the last three years, is still there, and is still a problem.
If you build a an economically just and awesome democracy, people will want to come. But, when the average African earns 10% as much as the average European. you can’t let them all in without bankrupting your utopia and poisoning it’s politics with premodern values.
Harshly formulated but essentially correct. Sometimes it’s not so much about values as people having 6 years of bad schooling, not being able to read and write, which makes it almost impossible to earn a decent wage in a high wage, welfare state. And with a lack of housing you will end up in depressing suburbs full of council estates which the native population have abandoned. Perfect conditions for radicalization, crime gangs, clan rule, violence and alienation… which in turn fuels a popular reaction with success for far right movements. This describes my Sweden during the last 20 years, from complete left wing dominance to a party of ex-Nazis becoming the second largest party and part of the government… That would never have happened without the left losing its mind on immigration policy since the 90s.
The Nordic left seems not to have run off the rails nearly as much as the American left, Greta Thunberg notwithstanding. Why is this? I suspect it’s so hard to actually implement progressive economic ideas here that we are left haggling over cultural symbolism, and that hardly encourages adult conversation, much less pragmatism
"you can’t let them all in without bankrupting your utopia"
The US isn't rich because we have a lot of gold or oil. The US is rich because we have a lot of people, which enables deep labor markets and specialization. Adding more people makes our utopia richer, not poorer.
People are people. If you want to grow the population by immigration, there are limits to how fast you can do it without the whole system breaking down in ethnic conflict. The United States has more capacity than many other countries, but the capacity is not infinite, especially when stupid stuff like encouraging illegal immigration and castigating the native population as "racist." The polls say clearly that most Americans (varying widely in political opinions) agree that they want an end to this mess.
What's your point? You can dream up all the utopias you want, but if you have no way of passing along the road it would take to get there, it would seem rather pointless, no?
1. David Abbott originally claimed that mass immigration posed a threat to any "economically just and awesome democracy" because immigration harms a high-performant economies ("bankrupting one's utopia") and generates reverse assimilation ("poisoning its politics with premodern values").
2. His latter claim ("poisoning…values") is hard to argue about, because it relies on all sorts of personal judgements about how fast assimilation must be to be fast enough, so I'm setting it aside in this discussion.
3. His first claim ("bankrupting…utopia") is empirically false; immigration tends to improve high-performant economies.
There are a lot of caveats to this. It depends on the speed of which people come to the country, the availability of jobs, and the skills which the immigrants bring. You absolutely can have too many immigrants come in a particular timeframe to the point that it not only strains a countries resources, but generates a political backlash. If you want an example of this, you can just look to Canada, which has had a significant drop in GDP per capita, a huge rise in negative sentiment against immigration and spiking unemployment.
Fair: "generates a political backlash" leapt out at me and I skimmed the rest. I disagree with your overall claim, though.
To the extent that you refer to "it not only strains a countries resources", then I say again: the US is not rich because of its resources. Moreover: we do say certain municipalities (e.g. NYC) strain to house recent immigrants because their zoning rules have made their housing stock inelastic. But that's already a problem, because it prevent people from moving to NYC when they want to, or NYC adapting if the native-born birth rate were to suddenly rise. Immigration is merely *exposing* or highlighting the problem.
To the extent that your refer to "Canada, which has had a significant drop in GDP per capita", then your timing is off. Canada has had relatively constant proportional immigration (about 0.75% current population) between 1989 and 2017, increasing to about 1% thereafter. The absolute number of immigrants began increasing (from about 250k people) in 2014.
Now, Canadian GDP per capita did experience a large drop in 2014. That cannot be caused the proportional increase post-2017. In principle, it could be cause by the absolute increase at that time, but (1) it is implausible that absolute numbers matter here. If Canada had 1000x it's current population, it would surely be able to assimilate at least twice as many people. (2) It doesn't explain why Canadian GDP per capita then *stagnates*, instead of continuing to drop as immigration accelerates. (3) If you plot Canadian GDP per capita on a longer scale (e.g. 1990-present), it is clear that the drop is not actually a drop: Canadian GDP per capita increases by a factor of about 3 until 2008 (I wonder what happened then?), and has hovered around the same quantity since then. 2014 just happens to be a random downwards oscillation, comparable in size to the 2008-2010 dip, and so we shouldn't read too much into the two data points of 2014 and 2015.
The rate limiter is the ability of the populace to accept social change, not financial impact. Yes, truly open borders would bankrupt the country, but we will never approach the point where immigration impairs the US economic because voters will elect anti-immigration republicans first.
Strict immigration policies (which btw doesn’t mean zero asylum immigration but a sustainable level over time that allows for successful integration and cohesion) should be coupled with increased aid to help people where they are, and to high quality temporary refugee camps run by the UN and financed by the rich world. Noone should be left without support but immigration is not always the answer.
Non-asylum immigration is another matter. Here there is much higher chances of attracting/screening people who can be expected to learn the local language, find a job, support themselves, adapt to the local cultural values and norms etc.
I've seen various explanations for the differences, but the thing the US is good at, in fact exceptional at, is integrating new immigrants into the society. By every measure, without doing any prescreening, immigrants to this country learn English, find jobs (to our pride or shame, if you're not willing to work in this country you will go hungry), adapt to the local norms, and their kids or at minimum grandkids are indistinguishable from their peers in social mores.
It’s true, the US is better at integrating newcomers for economic and cultural reasons. I wonder, however, what would happen if you accepted 4 million poorly educated people - 75% men - from the Middle East in one single year as Sweden did in 2015 (proportional to total population). Their integration would likely have been more successful but not without problems.
But it's also true that even amid increasing variety, US migrant crossings still come disproportionately from Latin America, which just has much, much less cultural difference from the US than the Middle East does from Sweden.
There are many commonalities between the two situations, but they aren't the same.
No, no — Sweden's actual immigration figure in 2015 was about 163k, or between 1% and 2% of the population. Joachim's "4 million" figure is what you get when you scale that up to the US's much larger population, to make it a fair hypothetical.
I enjoy comparative politics as much as the next guy, but I always feel like something gets lost when we equate the US and Europe on migration issues.
Not to forgive right wing xenophobia in European politics, but openness toward migration from the South seem to offer both greater positives and fewer negatives to the US across a variety of domains versus the situation in Europe.
I think this analysis is correct. But I think so much of the opposition to immigration stems from feeling that they're taking up resources that would've gone to citizens. If we made our welfare state harder to access, then we'd inherently select for ambitious and hard working immigrants and immigration would add to our fiscal capacity, not detract from it.
I think there is a lot to this, but also people feel alienated if their culture is changing too much and too quickly. Especially if the culture of the newcomers seem to hark back to the Middle Ages when it comes to sexual values, views of women, religious beliefs etc.
I would argue that most of the people who "feel alienated" by rapid cultural change due to immigration, are (almost) entirely different people than those concerned by immigrants bringing antiquated social values.
It’s a paradox, but in Sweden the people who support our far right wing party (the Sweden Democrats) are constantly talking about burkas, honor killings and threats to hbtq people from islam, while also being anti-trans and anti-feminists… while the left silences people who criticize honour culture (beatings, killings, oppression of young women) and homophobia in immigrant communities.
White supremacists are anti-Semitic. Most of them seem to live in the woods in Idaho or in their mothers' basements. The "US right" is not white supremacist, unless you're an addled liberal who imagines that Christians and all the other people you dislike fall into that category.
Perhaps cosmopolitans the world over are natural allies, but traditionalists are very much not - the whole thing is believing very strongly in your tradition’s superiority to the others! Plenty of history is war between civilizations that would both read as trad and right-wing today.
"Especially if the culture of the newcomers seem to hark back to the Middle Ages when it comes to sexual values, views of women, religious beliefs etc."
The last thing our welfare system needs to be is “harder to access.” It’s already a redundant bureaucratic nightmare that dumps shameful amounts of resources into sniffing out infrequent fraud schemes.
You're correct that opposition to immigration comes from perceptions of fairness, but I don't believe that the specifics of how resources are shared would have any impact on anti-immigration views.
I strongly recommend the book Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. It's a sociological study of right-wing anger in the Mississippi Delta that shows convincingly how this is a visceral issue, not a rational one. Heather McGhee's book The Sum of Us covers how many communities closed public pools rather than integrate them -- people diminished their own quality of life in order to deny it to others (I haven't read it, but did hear an interview with her about it).
Mostly critical articles from a left wing perspective it seems... Google "danish social democrats ghetto demolish". The reforms have largely worked, are popular among Danish people (including many immigrants) and increasingly emulated by Swedish politicians, even on the center-left.
We need more judges and we need them now. This need is especially acute in the immigration system but extends to our entire legal system.
Attorneys would be vastly more productive if we had more judges. I spend many of my working hours waiting for judges to listen to me. It’s quite normal for 50 to 150 cases to be on a single court calendar and for me to spend a two to three hours waiting in court to make a simple announcement and speak for 60 seconds. I price this time in to the fees I charge. It’s why, even when a case is so simple I can think through it in a few minutes, my fee will be thousands of dollars. It would be much, much cheaper to hire an extra judge than to have two dozen lawyers queening in court to make announcements. The problem is judicial salaries are a transparent public expense and attorney wait time is an opaque private expense.
Waiting in court is only the tip of the inefficiency iceberg. Many of my interactions with clients are dominated by the fact that we will have to wait months for a hearing. I spend quite a bit of time telling divorce clients that I can’t really influence their spouse’s behavior any time soon because I can’t get a court date. In criminal cases, plea negotiations have as much to do with court scheduling as culpability and deterrence. You can get good outcomes in mid grade criminal cases by getting a bond and keeping your client out of trouble long enough to show his crime was a “one time” mistake.
Nothing would do more for the rule of law than hiring a ton of judges.
I'd have to think budget for compensation would really be the single biggest factor -- the base salary without local COL adjustment appears to be less than $130K a year (and, unlike a federal district court judge, there's not lifetime job security), so bumping it up by $50K to $75K would probably let you staff out the bench to an almost arbitrary degree.
There are no judicial vacancies at the current salaries. Maybe if we increased their numbers by a third you maybe would see it, but I doubt it.
Being a judge is about as good a gig, quality of life wise, as you can get. You don't have to hustle for clients, you don't have to do much scut work, much of the frustrations about inefficiency are removed from you. You essentially think good legal thoughts and make good legal decisions over and over again as the cases come past you.
Being a state level judge has its warts. You are up on the bench, the center of attention, for hours at a time. While lawyers blog on Slow Boring and wait to be called, you are ploughing through case after case. People lie to you all the time. You have to have good manners or else people will hate you. A middling lawyer makes more per hour than you do, but your pension is first rate.
Yes, but the discussion here was about hiring *more* judges and in sufficient quantities to clear a literally several years' backlog of cases and keep providing relatively prompt service for all new applicants; not just filling the existing slots. And yes, being a judge is a good gig (I would love to be a judge!), but you want experienced people for the position and, except for people whose kids are already done with college and either don't have a lot of other expenses or have a spouse with a good paying job, taking a 50% pay cut hurts even if it means you are freed from business development, tracking billable hours, etc.
There are times when I think about about returning to my beloved West "By G-d" Virginia and running for magistrate (because magistrates are not required to be admitted to the practice of law), although I wish we still used "justice of the peace." I would even supply my own gavel, to sweeten the deal for voters.
The structural reasons basically come down to lack of available space for courtrooms, court staff, etc. Judges themselves tend to be among the most highly-paid public employees in their jurisdiction (basically, if you want a judge who's not an idiot, then you're going to have to pay well because any judge who wouldn't be an idiot can make a lot of money in private law practice.)
In a lot of the places where the need for more judges is most acute, the courthouse was built 100 years ago for a county that was a tenth the size it is now.
Trials are problematic to hold over Zoom for a lot of reasons (although this depends on what kind of "trials" you're talking about; I'm assuming jury trials here.) Certain hearings less so, but in a lot of contexts jury trials are necessary grease to make the system function.
In fact part of what creates the backlog is a lack of capacity for jury trials but that's something that requires a lot of physical courtroom space. (Backlogs exist in a lot of places right now because courts couldn't hold jury trials for a while during COVID, with longer backlogs in the states that held on to COVID restrictions for longer.)
Doesn't it just come down to the amount of money congress allows for asylum courts? That's part of what the border deal would have done, give more money to hire judges and such.
I have to assume that a large part of this phenomenon is Baumol's cost disease. What incentives, if any, do judges have to improve productivity through adoption of new technology?
Well, I've shared with you before that they *have* been hiring and the number of judges increases every year, but it's never going to be enough to keep up with the backlog under the current review process.
There's something about the anglophone world where people just accept waiting in lines without questioning it. Every time people have to wait in line is a market failure!
The judges still have to see the same number of cases whether they see them now or in six months. So presumably the gains are huge, and with like 10% more capacity they could cut wait times by 50%. Same with visits to the DMV - it's not like people can just skip getting a drivers license. The volume is pretty much constant, and the work still gets done, so why can't we get rid of the line!
I can't agree with this enough. We need to hire enough judges, to get processing time down to a couple of weeks at most. And build enough holding facilities to manage the number of people.
ZERO people should be released into the United States without an approved asylum application. That includes families with children.
If that change requires a constitutional amendment then one should be pushed through
As I point out elsewhere, we do keep hiring judges and the backlog keeps reaching record numbers. To reach your goal, we probably need thousands more judges (we have ~700 now, I believe), an impossibility even if federal hiring weren't sclerotic. The much simpler way (to my mind anyway) is to just change the criteria so that determinations don't require judges and can be made much more easily.
Would you implement any reforms to reduce caseloads or streamline them, especially on the civil side?
I've always felt like there are three great structural inhibitors to bad behavior in our society: 1) laws and regulations, 2) the legal system, and 3) insurance (although insurance largely derives from 1 and 2). I have no patience for conservatives who want to limit all three -- that's just crony capitalism in action. But I've really wondered when enforcement through the executive branch versus the legislative branch is more efficient and effective. The downside of the executive branch is that bureaucrats often have weird incentives that don't align with the public good, but can act relatively quickly. The downside of the legal branch is what you mention, but it better resembles a marketplace where optimal solutions will be found.
Shouting "it's the law" as if that magics away policy problems that polls find widespread concern about is a sign of epistemic closure, and that's just as true if you're a Liz Warren voter as a Trump voter. Especially when the law was written in 1951 (as the Geneva convention was)!
The far left only started to love the law after it realized that its own political agenda (on immigration and cultural issues) had little public support. They have lost faith in the people and the people have lost faith in them and their unwillingness to accept trade offs and tough realistic decisions on crime, immigration etc.
It’s depressing how democracy is abandoned as soon as the people don’t support your ideals. It goes for the far right as well btw.
I think this is like a mental habit of a previous world where Republicans would insist they were for legal immigration, which asylum seeking absolutely is.
It used to be the case if you said someone was against immigration xenophobes would jump all over you to say it was merely the legal status they were upset with.
Maybe, but I think it's more that there's a condition that could be described as "International Law Brain," in which the sufferer believes that international law is a real thing of great moral weight. I say this because, "Muh international law!" is something that gets trotted out in a lot of foreign affairs contexts where it's clearly not just being deployed to try to appeal to Republicans.
That also seems real. I think in general a small number of cosmopolitan people like me are trying for some argument that will let people get around indifference to foreigners.
But is there anyone who is indifferent to foreigners yet who finds appeals to "international law" (or even specific appeals to treaties that contain no enforcement mechanism and impose no requirement that enabling legislation be enacted) persuasive?
I don’t think it’s that weird that people think this way? The idea of a rules-based international order is literally centuries old, it has a ton of appeal to people who want alternatives to zero-sum great power competition or a global human rights/antipoverty regime, and it’s been part of the official governing ideology of the US and most European countries since the end of the Second World War (although obviously an imperfectly honored one in practice.)
We need to come up with a different name for it besides law. People conflate domestic law with enforcement by the government with international law which is adhered to mostly voluntarily by sovereigns.
This, a thousand times this. Whatever we mean by International Law, it has no analogy to what we mean when we talk about the law in every other context.
It has a very important analogy - it is a series of rules for governing interpersonal activities that was agreed to be democratically elected authorities in democratic countries and the autocrats in autocratic ones. Now it’s *enforced* vastly differently (if at all), but the same is true when you compare family law, tax law, drug law, etc.
The abstract concept of international law is not weird, nor is *desiring* such an international legal system. What's weird is people who very sincerely act like declaring, "International law requires/forbids . . ." is actually a meaningful argument *in and of itself* rather than, at most, a philosophical starting point for an argument.
To put it another way, saying "International law requires/forbids [X]" by itself is meaningless since in most contexts no governing body with any power is going to actually enforce the supposed "international law" in the first place, and especially not enforce it against the U.S. or other great power states. But I have IRL had discussions with people (having worked on my law school's international law journal) who literally can be trembling with emotion when they say, "U.S. policy [X] must stop because it is in violation of international law," and believe that's a self-contained winning position.
You should ask them if the US is required to immediately outlaw marijuana possession and close all of the retail stores in the states. After all, we did sign a 1961 treaty mandating that, so technically we're violating 'international law' by legalizing pot lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs
"But I have IRL had discussions with people (having worked on my law school's international law journal) who literally can be trembling with emotion when they say, 'U.S. policy [X] must stop because it is in violation of international law,' and believe that's a self-contained winning position."
If you're already a law-abiding person, the existence of an enforcement mechanism is never relevant to how the law modifies your behavior. You have to have criminal tendencies to notice that the enforcement mechanism is missing for international law.
In the bitter end, international law is based on fear - fear of what the hegemon can and will do. The Roman Peace (a rules-based international order) was effective so long as the legions could (and did) massacre anybody who disturbed that peace. In the best times, they didn't have to. Today's rules-based order is breaking down because the power of the United States, that guaranteed that order, is also breaking down.
I believe we are perfectly capable of allowing our system of justice to work in a timely fashion.
I also believe if it were really as big of a deal as some of these hawks believe they’d be willing to offer much more substantive conceessions to other areas the way Conservatives did when they believed Soviet military force was a threat. But there was nothing like Reagan wanting to expand the defense department and Tip O’Neal wanting to expand spending type of deals offered because the optics are better than solving the problem.
Since you chose not to answer my question: I think there is a good deal of evidence that migrants are being coached on what to say and how to answer questions in a way that forces the hand of immigration officials to declare the standard has been met to merit a hearing before a judge. Since the system is overwhelmed and no hearings are available for many months, the migrant is released on their own recognizance by promising to show up for an appointment those many months in the future. And, having been released into the US, migrants disappear and have no intention to attend a their hearings.
I mean like suppose that’s true why isn’t the answer to just staff up the article 1 courts handling this so that there isn’t a years long backlog?
Like people have been calling this a crisis for 10 years and they’ve just dithered. One would hope if we were really being invaded we wouldn’t be prioritizing everything but what would solve it.
And often when you scratch deeper just a little bit, you find that it's not even the law, or at best is just one contested argument for how the law should be interpreted, that's being inaccurately presented as settled law by journalists who don't know any better.
For example, it's hard to tell from the article, but it appears this Biden move, as the Trump policy before it, is based on the Surgeon General's authority under section 265 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code to prevent the entry to the United States of would-be immigrants who pose a risk of spreading communicable disease.
Has the Surgeon General Murthy made a medical valid, evidence-based determination that the entire class of asylum seekers coming from Mexico and subject to this policy are disease carriers? Has there been some other rational evidence-based efforts to determine that the people being excluded are likely to spread contagious diseases in the United States?
From Wikipedia:
§265. "Suspension of entries and imports from designated places to prevent spread of communicable diseases
Whenever the Surgeon General determines that by reason of the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States, and that this danger is so increased by the introduction of persons or property from such country that a suspension of the right to introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of the public health, the Surgeon General, in accordance with regulations approved by the President, shall have the power to prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate in order to avert such danger, and for such period of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose." (July 1, 1944, ch. 373, title III, §362, 58 Stat. 704.)
While I'd agree that those on the far-left on immigration are probably not shouting that in good faith, the actual law does matter. It sucks that Trump torpedoed immigration reform, but that doesn't change the fact that the executive branch is not supposed to make law. If the courts strike down the executive action (like they did during the Trump admin), then we're back to square one.
Half of our problems as a nation come from using (unelected, irresponsible) judges to decide every damn thing. The legislative process should be the end of the matter in almost all cases. At this point, I'm longing for someone, somewhere, to channel Andy Jackson on something ("Mr Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it").
I’ve always found the “it’s the law trope”in persuasive. Many laws are stupid or easily gamed and almost everyone breaks the las sometimes. Who hasn’t sped or drank beer before they were 21.
Now we are finding out that voters apply this trope rather selectively. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies and his polling average dropped by about 1%, the change was subtle enough it could be pure noise. Of course it wasn’t completely clear that falsifying business records was a felony under New York law until the DA decided to nail Trump with a novel legal theory.
It would be cool to have a clear, non-evasive answer from a defender of our current (i.e., before President Biden's most-recent restrictions) asylum policy about why, given the way the world is now, we should permit people to claim asylum at other than legal points of entry. (Saying "that's what the law is" or "our system is overburdened, so the only way in is between points of entry" are not interesting answers, in my opinion.)
Defenders of the system give vague responses about Europe in World War II and other points in space-time where war zones and totalitarian countries make it impossible for asylum-seekers to seek asylum at pre-defined locations. But there is nothing about Mexico in 2024 (that I'm aware of) that prevents one from seeking asylum in an orderly way.
I did a massive research paper in college on immigration from the northern triangle (back when that was the major source of immigration at the southern border.) And the journey is truly hellish. Many of the people fleeing the countries truly did not have a home to go back to, and the smuggling coyotes and cartels in Mexico made the area around the border very unsafe.
So those are really the points people defending lawless immigration are making. The migrants fleeing are doing so for good reasons and it's not safe for them to remain in Mexico or go back to their country. Of course, those people don't have a good answer for the migrant driven problems in border towns and now in major cities. So they're left with arguing about abstract American ideals, while the rest of the country completely sours on immigration. The answer, of course, has always been a compromise that looks something like the gang of 8 bill bill back in 2013. But that's not happening anytime soon, so we're left with this perfectly sensible executive order.
People fundamentally don't care about the process very much. They either want immigration to go up or down. Progressives rightly point out that the distinctions made by asylum law of credible fear from government and from nonstate actors or poverty is often arbitrary. They see the issues of processing this many people as the rightwing crying wolf, which frankly, it has been for many years. Immigration has been a driver of growth, and as Matt has pointed out multiple times, probably slightly help with inflation. It's by executive fiat, but the left, along with much of America, doesn't understand or care, as long as their shortterm policy preferences are satisfied.
Now as a One Billion American fans, I sympathize. I see immigration as pretty darn good, even if it involves some middling through. The 1965 Immigration Act also has a lot of unintended consequences, and that's looked back at fondly by many. However, I don't think this process is politically sustainable, which is why I don't object too strenuously to it. In the long run, we need a more politically sustainable system, but that requires a faith in the political process, that's in very short supply everywhere, including on the left.
It is the duty of the United States to operate a system such that every person who presents themself at a legal point of entry would be speedily processed.
The US has been abusing the system at legal points of entry by not enabling everyone who seeks to enter at one to be fairly and properly processed, and, by physically limiting the numbers that can cross the border, it has been able to prevent people from applying for asylum at all. People can have wait time measured in years. Morally, people should be able to make an application within hours of reaching the US, and the final decision should be a matter of weeks at most. They shouldn't be physically forced to stay in Mexico.
One of the big problems here is that, because the default status of anyone is that they can't enter the United States, a lack of asylum officers results in people not getting in. This creates the perverse incentive to underfund the office that determines whether someone can get in or not because you can limit the numbers of asylum entrants by limiting the number of asylum case officers (and immigration judges, etc).
I'm tempted to propose that the solution to this is to say that if the case can't be processed in a reasonable timeframe (ie set some formal deadlines), then the applicant automatically receives a grant of the status they applied for. That creates an incentive among those wishing to limit immigration to spend more money on case officers in order to be able to reject more applications. The reverse incentive is less dangerous - the left might seek to cut the budget on some "defund the police" style basis, but in general large number of unionised public sector jobs are not things that much of the left is inclined to cut, and there'll be plenty of resistance from inside the Democratic coalition to that.
I find Ilya Somin's argument that the Chinese Exclusion Cases were wrongly decided, and the federal government has no inherent power over immigration (https://reason.com/volokh/2021/09/17/terrible-supreme-court-decisions-that-should-be-added-to-the-anticanon-of-constitutional-law-part-i/) quite persuasive. At minimum, I would think that the right to immigrate cannot be withdrawn absent due process of law, so that people have the right to immigrate by default; only deportation and whatever border controls are necessary to permanently exclude the deported are legal.
Of course, almost no other Americans agree with this view, and zany legal theories do not excuse lawbreaking.
I can't see how this could possibly be based in fact. Immigration has been regulated in this country since 1790. There was never a time in our history when "people have the right to immigrate by default."
"Immigration has been regulated in this country since 1790. There was never a time in our history when 'people have the right to immigrate by default.'"
No. *Naturalization* has been regulated since 1790, but immigration was entirely unregulated until CA attempted to pass the Anti-Coolie Act in 1862.
"Entirely" is a bit much. America in the past was different than it is today. Americans had many ways through their states and localities to ban, discourage, or move along people that they didn't like. There was also a tremendous amount of mob violence against immigrants, naturalized and not. The "default" scenario was always: find a job you can live on, in a place where the locals would accept you, or else go back where you came from (or starve). This was far more effective enforcement than any immigration law.
There's a fairly easy moral defense: Progressives are cosmopolitan - they don't think an American's interests are more valuable than a non-American. From a progressive, utilitarian standpoint, letting poor foreigners into the country is a clear good, so a loophole that allows that is good (especially so if closing that loophole will inevitably prevent some actually-deserving asylum seekers.)
It's actually harder to make a anti-open-borders claim without relying on "because it's the law."
(FWIW, I believe illegal and loophole-driven immigration should be cracked down on, but it's a slightly uncomfortable belief for me since it relies on second-order effects and selfishness.)
"It's actually harder to make a anti-open-borders claim without relying on "because it's the law.""
I don't think it's hard at all. The whole concept of a nation revolves around the ability of the people within its borders to decide on their own rules. One of those rules involves who can enter the nation and who can't. It's hard to imagine any sane person arguing that any organization (a condo association, a club, a business, a nation) can't restrict access to its resources or space.
I agree, but "not enforcing border rules will weaken the concept of nation states which will, over time, result in net negative utility despite the immediate, massive benefits to the immigrants themselves" is a harder argument to make than "it's good to let poor people improve their lives."
How about "people, being people, the society will collapse into ethnic conflict if we handle this poorly, so maybe we have other things to think about than whether it's good to let poor foreigners improve their lives"
Weakening nation states isn’t the argument. The argument is whether or not an immigration policy is better for the people already citizens. Politicians are voted in to represent current citizens. If they don’t feel their interests are represented, they will vote for someone else.
You can make the same argument that governments have the right to ban gay sex or that governments have the right to ban religions. Why is it that “who can enter the nation and who can’t” is part of what rules nations can have while “who can have sex and who can’t” or “what religions you can practice” isn’t?
“Who can have sex and who can’t” or “what religions you can practice” is clearly something nations can rule on because many of them do and on some level we do now.
I thought this was a thread about *moral* defenses of government regulation. I thought NYZack was saying that every group has a *moral right* to control who enters the territory they govern, not just the *practical ability* to do so.
Most of us don't think that governments have the moral right to restrict religious or sexual practices (at least, among actively willing participants).
The US governments control who and what you have sexual practices with all the time, you just **agree** with those restrictions so don't find them objectionable. You not only don't find them objectionable, but would find it objectionable and immoral if they weren't restricted. The same applies to plenty of religious practices.
This really isn’t about government or morality. It’s about politics and representative government. Citizens vote. Non-citizens do not. If those voters do not believe immigration policy is in THEIR best interest, they will vote for someone else and change it.
But, ""it's the law is always part of any answer. Why can't we just surveil everybody's electronic communications all the time so that we can find criminals also involves "because it's the law" as part of the explanation. We make laws that bind our own behavior, and importantly bind our own government's behavior.
And it's important to remember that the law we're talking about here isn't "International Law", it's actually US law. Whatever the UN, or whoever, may say, we have decided, thorough Congress, to permit people who have a credible threat of persecution to seek asylum in the US. We could democratically decide to rescind that, and there's nothing anyone outside the US could do.
What we haven't done is add in a caveat that we'll only grant asylum if you show up at a port of entry. Maybe we should do that, but until we do we have bound ourselves, as we do all the time, to follow the laws we've decided upon.
One of the reasons we don't require port of entry status is because some people who are credibly threatened by foreign regimes cannot safely present themselves at a port --- because if you're fleeing from say the CCP, or Putin, or a cartel, that's where they're going to be looking for you, and sneaking in is the only safe option. It's also possible that someone is already here when they find out that going back home is deadly, in which case leaving the country in order to return would be silly.
"One of those rules involves who can enter the nation and who can't. It's hard to imagine any sane person arguing that any organization (a condo association, a club, a business, a nation) can't restrict access to its resources or space."
In fact, many businesses are subject to "public accommodations" law, which requires them to treat with all comers. More to the point, whether *any* nation can restrict immigration is irrelevant; the question is whether it is compatible with *the US's* status as a free nation governed by our constitution for the federal government to set such a rule. I, personally, believe in the off-the-wall theory that such rules are unconstitutional; many "open borders" people think such rules are incompatible with the US being a free nation. YMMV, but I don't think that those are arguments no "sane person" would make.
(To be clear, given that nobody agrees with me about constitutionality, I think the laws on the books should be followed and enforced.)
Any time I bring this up to anyone defending it, it comes down to some real bullshit belief about how people have a "right to migration" or it's just nonsense about push factors. It's pretty clear that people defending the current asylum policy actually just don't believe that the United States has a right to decide who can and cannot enter the country.
In general, it is not possible present yourself at legal ports is entry for an asylum claim. Basically, they won't let very many people do it per day, and if you are not physically in the US then saying that you have an asylum claim won't get you across the border.
It seems to me that your answer is along the lines of "our system is overburdened, so the only way in is between points of entry." That seems to me to be a bad basis for public policy (and not a very productive hill to die on).
I agree that a system where everyone who has an asylum claim can present themselves at a legal port of entry would be better but it fundamentally wouldn't change anything about the current challenges the system faces.
I really disagree with that. Not having people and families crossing the Rio Grande and/or dangerous desert would be a huge improvement. Having a systematic way to catalogue all of the people entering the country would be a huge improvement. Discouraging people from crossing by telling them they have a zero chance of entry if they're caught would be a huge improvement.
If they could enter through a port of entry with a non-zero chance of entry (and by no means are all of these asylum claims bogus) then don't you think they'd do that instead?
I do think this is a major hypothetical: you're asking to envision a functional asylum-processing system, which would be very unlike our current system. If migrants could look forward to being processed speedily at a port of entry, most would probably not make the journey at all, since most asylum claims would rapidly be judged as bogus. But most legitimate political refugees would prefer this option. (I'm not taking a moral stand against economic migrants, but honestly most migrants are economic.)
So it seems like the detailed answer you gave to my original question really is "our system is overburdened, so the only way in is between points of entry." You agree, then, that, if our immigration system were adequately staffed and funded, you'd have no problem with banning all entry at the southern border, except at points of entry?
Just to be clear here, the 'loophole' is that people who do not genuinely believe they may have a legitimate claim to asylum are asking for asylum anyway in order to avoid being deported.
People who do genuinely believe they may have a legitimate claim aren't exploiting a loophole in the law, they're using the law working as intended.
I don't think loophole is really the right word. The more accurate term is gaming the system. The former implies some kind of exception or drafting issue that failed to adequately anticipate current conditions. What's actually happening is people acting based on the knowledge that the system is overwhelmed and therefore chances of ever actually being deported are low. Especially if you're smart enough to keep your head down.
Agreed. Gaming the timing, maybe? Or using the asylum system to do an end-run around the normal immigration process? But note that this applies only to people who think their asylum claims aren't valid. If you think you have a valid claim, you're just... using, even struggling with, an overwhelmed system.
But that describes very few of the people applying for asylum.
I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what "asylum" actually means, and many people conflate it with "refugees" which are an entirely different matter. (Somebody fleeing persecution by the government is seeking asylum; somebody fleeing a natural disaster, a war, or a generalized fear of crime is a refugee.)
The criteria appears to be broader. Across several different websites: 'returning to his or her country would lead to persecution on account of race, religion, nationality or political beliefs.'
This is from 'habitatforhumanity', but the same key phrase can be found in the public-facing information of other reputable organisations.
Particularly, the persecution doesn't have to be by the government, it is sufficient that the government choose or be unable to protect the person from it. Presumably gangs and cartels kill people who have law-and-order political beliefs, so, they would be covered. It's a little glib, but accepting war as an extension of politics by other means implies its exercised against those with particular political beliefs, so it's covered. A natural disaster per-se isn't covered, but if the local government's relief efforts are biased by race, religion, nationality or political belief then that is a form of persecution and so covered. I agree though that in the case where a natural-disaster local-government is supplying aid in an evenhanded way this convention wouldn't apply.
I agree with Matt in that I believe in rules, and in rules being enforced - including on countries and their asylum systems. If the US wants to change it's asylum laws, it needs to look into withdrawing formally from the relevant treaties.
The thing is they have to be targeting you because of some protected category, and that's where many gang claims fail.
If you are fleeing because your life is in danger because of the high crime rate, you aren't an asylee (even though I'd argue your case is very sympathetic). You or your group has to be targeted.
I think the idea that the persecution does not have to be from the government is something that was invented later, and is not part of the International Treaties the US signed. That's part of how this loophole got so big in the first place, there are very few people being credibly threatened with violence by their own government in the western hemisphere, but many, many more threatened by violence by a gang. I think their was a concerted effort by immigration attorneys to stretch this definition over the years wider and wider.
I mean, that text could say 'government persecution' and it doesn't. I think the reason for that is that this international law was drafted as part of the post-second-world-war settlement, so they were looking back at the rise of Hilter and the Nazis to inform in part what they wanted to be covered or not.
In particular, they were looking at the 'sturmabteilung' or 'storm troopers' or 'brownshirts' who were the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party mainly in the 1920s-1930s, but specifically weren't associated with the German government at that time. For various reasons, the formal government either wasn't able or willing to protect people against the brownshirts.
Beyond that... it's the normal business of government and the courts for people to present their view as to how the law should be applied. Of course it's the normal business of immigration attorneys to represent their clients vigorously, and of course it's normal for anyone to want their rights interpreted in the most favourable light to them.
The most legitimate complaint might lie in the area of 'an immigration friendly government didn't vigorously defend such cases', for which I'm not without sympathy. But there's also always a remedy in terms of changing the law and/or pulling out of the relevant treaties.
That kind of depends on what they believe is a legitimate asylum claim. IMO asylum was created to help people fleeing from political or religious persecution. Most of the claims now are because gangs are threatening people. If that's true then go to the police. If the police don't help them reform them. I don't think having an incompetent government is grounds for asylum.
We probably agree it's for the system to judge the legitimacy of claims.
But the applicant is only exploiting a loophole or gaming the system if they don't believe they have a legitimate claim. It doesn't really matter whether or not the claim is actually legitimate. The legitimacy of their use of the system is only dependent on their belief. Otherwise its a genuine error on their part.
In a ridiculous example, let's say I'm allergic to oranges, and there are oranges and orange products everywhere in my country. And somehow I have the - genuinely held - belief that the US will offer me asylum for this. So I turn up and claim asylum. I'm not using a loophole or gaming the system. I'm just... horribly confused. And my claim should be processed and rejected. But it would be wrong to turn me away without properly processing my claim.
"Most of the claims now are because gangs are threatening people"
I find it truly hard to believe that's the case. Is that the stated reason for the majority of claims? If it is it's very likely bullshit. If you live in the worst neighborhood of Chicago or LA gangs likely "threaten you" to some extent, but very very people are actually direct targets of extortion or violence. It's the same in Mexico, El Salvador, etc. As far as I can tell, homicide rates in these countries are anti-correlated with asylum seekers.
Both widespread extortion (every business owner in this neighborhood has to pay a certain gang) and gang-enforced rules on where civilians can go exist on a significant scale in Central America in a way they don’t anywhere in the US.
Sure widespread extortion exists in much of central America. If you ran the numbers on people being extorted and matched them with asylum seekers, I doubt the two would match up in a reasonable way. But I don't agree these things are threats on the level of "X gang wants to kill me, though," let alone a threat that would fall into the narrower definition of persecution of asylum claims.
This is more like taxes. If you don't pay government taxes you'll eventually be physically hauled off to jail, but I don't consider the IRS to be threatening me. The small businesses paying extortion taxes are being forced to follow rules by a subset of their neighbors (often just by random semi-anonymous criminals and not always by organized gangs). These are only threats in the same way any governing body "threatens" it's citizens by enforcing rules and taxes. But living under a shitty government is not a basis for asylum or even really to describe yourself as threatened.
If you had waited a couple days to post this I could’ve sent you some polling we just did that backs up your argument. Not only is Biden correct on the merits, he’s spot on on the politics of the issue—particularly with Latino voters.
The bipartisan electoral consensus of circa-2012 that every Hispanic voter in the US was a single-issue immigration dove was so profoundly incorrect and such a bizarre assumption the moment you thought about it at all.
Kind of the canary in the coal mine of "the groups" not reflecting the actual views of the demographics they purported to represent.
At least in Denver, there has been considerable tension between the recent Venezuelan migrants and the resident Mexican and Mexican-American folks. As the Venezuelan migrants get housecleaning, landscaping, construction work, etc., they really are taking jobs away from some Mexican and Salvadoran residents. (I'm trying really hard to use the right language here, so don't yell at me if I'm phrasing things wrong). Also, there is some resentment that the city and the earnest white ladies (note: I am an earnest white lady) bent over backward trying to keep the Venezuelan migrants housed and fed, when no one did that for earlier groups of migrants.
(And some resident Mexican-American Denverites also tried to help the Venezuelans, life is complicated, people are different, I'm trying not to make huge false generalizations while nevertheless conveying truthful information.)
As someone who is married to one of the "earnest white ladies" involved, I feel like this criticism rings hollow because the biggest defining characteristic of the Venezuelans' arrival was surely that there were literally hundreds of people (many of them families with small children -- which is how my wife was involved through our kids' school) being dumped daily in concentrated doses and with no further plan about where they would go/what they would do. AFAIA, Mexican and Central American immigrants to the Denver area historically: (a) arrived more in a continuous trickle, (b) typically came here with a plan about seeking work and/or connecting with friends or relatives already in the area, and (c) were typically adults without children accompanying them.
TL;DR: Venezuelans arrived overwhelmingly as refugees, vs. Mexicans and Central Americans who arrived primarily, if not overwhelmingly, as migrant workers.
Thanks for sharing that perspective. Always nice to have a bit of qualitative data to go with the quantitative. As the journalist that gave the keynote at YDN banquet said, it helps to "make the big small and the small big."
I'd be interested to know if you have any polling that breaks this down by red/blue/purple areas. I'm wondering if the progressive politicians who are biting back at Biden are in safe zones where the polling looks different. Is Warren representing Massachusetts voters when she pushes back, or is she just representing Massachusetts twitter?
The political conditions of Haiti and Venezuela (at least) mean that the entire populations of those countries have a plausible claim to asylum.
The whole asylum system is designed for individual dissidents, not for mass oppressed populations. We - the West as a whole, not just the US - were very fortunate that the Warsaw Pact deliberately chose to try to keep its oppressed populations inside their countries during the Cold War. If they'd just left the borders open, then a Western Europe of about nine countries would have been left to try to absorb millions of immigrants. We might have managed to do this, especially if the East Bloc had had a rule to not let people back in.
But we're now facing that situation: there are massive oppressed populations and their governments are entirely content for them all to leave. Millions of Syrians have left, and Assad doesn't want them back. Maduro isn't even trying to stop Venezuelans from leaving, and there's no way that the US can send them back to Venezuela (the US doesn't even try: it sends them back to Mexico, where they entered from). The Taliban is entirely content to drive people out; it doesn't need them to stay and be oppressed, if anyone slightly liberal-minded just leaves Afghanistan, then they'll be fine with that.
Of course, these are economic crises too, but that doesn't make them not political crises. The "solution" that most have come up with is to stop them at the border and make them the problem of the countries that neighbour the one with the crisis. So there are huge camps full of Syrians in Turkey. Turkey has no intention of assimilating them, it expects someone to take them off their hands eventually, but it's OK with being paid by European countries to keep the annual numbers down - maybe at some point they can go back to Syria, if not, there's a steady trickle into Europe, which is mostly enough to keep people relatively content and hopeful, rather than riotous.
I don't have an answer: there are more people legitimately fleeing things than the West can reasonably absorb. Imagine if China let the Uyghurs and the Tibetans and any other minority that wants out to just go instead of Sinicizing them all: There'd be a few tens of millions of people turning up in Uzbekistan and Nepal and no country is going voluntarily take a "fair share" that would be measured in the millions.
But we do need an answer, because at some point there's going to be a Ganges Delta flood, and someone's going to have to house a hundred million Bangladeshis.
"no country is going voluntarily take a 'fair share' that would be measured in the millions."
To get the USA to 1 bln Americans by 2100 requires adding 8.8 mln people on average each year, and with our birth rate those would all be immigrants. Assuming an exponential growth instead, immigration to the US would need to be 1.5% of the current population each year, or about 4.8 mln this year.
(Of course, 1 bln Americans is only consensus on this here blog.)
Add Cuba to the "doesn't care if they leave list." It's an interesting that these authoritarian regimes generally don't care if people flee, since it'll eventually lead to the demise of these countries solely due to demographics.
One major problem in the contemporary left is a lack of seriousness or ignorance about history and the world. When every conflict is “genocide” and every person wishing to improve their lot by immigration becomes “asylum seeker” or “refugee”, when international law created in the aftermath of the Holocaust is trivialized to supposedly address every human hardship of any level and kind — at that point we are actually doing a terrible wrong to the extremely unfortunate people whom these laws were actually meant to protect.
Because there *are* today people whose life is in real, literal, danger and who *should* receive asylum. Biden’s decision is terrible for them and should infuriate all of us, but our fury should not be directed at Biden. It should be directed at the entire cynical political establishment which allows the conflation of real asylum seekers and regular migrants. The left is very much part of this awful dynamic and adds insult to injury by trivializing and flattening history and thereby rendering toothless the laws and principles it purports to defend.
The question "why are there more asylum claims in 2024 than in 1984?" seems to me to be part of a broader question. Relative to what differentials in living standards would seem to imply, why was there so little international migration in the past?
The British Empire had open internal borders. People living in what's now India, Nigeria, Kenya... were British citizens and legally entitled to move to London. But they mostly didn't.
Obviously Parliament would have changed the rules if people actually had started migrating in enormous numbers. But why did that never happen in the first place? Was it only transportation costs, or something else?
Transportation and communication. Different members of my family have moved country many times, and when we moved in the 1990s it was almost like we were moving to another planet, whereas now communication with someone in a different country is not all that different to someone living one neighbourhood over.
Hell, when my family moved to the other side of the country in 1989 we suddenly had much less contact with other family members because of the cost of long-distance phone calls.
There are a lot of network effects in migration. People are more likely to consider migrating if somebody else that they know did it, and often rely on people who migrated a bit earlier than them for help finding work and settling in to a new country. If you look at say, migration patterns in late 19th century Lebanon or Sicily or Guandong, it’s clear that having a recent emigrant made the people in a given village more likely to emigrate.
In recent years, a few trends have accelerated network-building. Urbanization in poor countries, a huge worldwide increase in literacy, and the rapid spread of the internet have made the sort of social networks that facilitate migration in poorer countries much larger. (And there’s also more of a critical mass of other migrants in host countries.)
Yes. Additionally, all of these have allowed the creation of black-market businesses that can guide migrants north. They're likely much more efficient and effective than the ad hoc "mom and pop" guides that must have existed 40 years ago.
Svalbard was open to all refugees in WW2 and in every conflict since 1926 but no one goes there. It is not a loophole anyone has spotted. There seems to be an activation energy barrier where no one uses a loophole that exists until people know about it.
Svalbard is open to everyone but you’ve still got to be able to get there (which is almost entirely only via the Schengen zone) and find work of some kind when you do — Norwegian welfare is only available to citizens and those working for Norwegian companies. Most people, let alone refugees, aren’t both independently wealthy enough to move there and still desperate enough to actually do it.
It is impractical, but a flight from Istanbul to Oslo and then Svalbard costs £423 ($539) much less than refugees regularly pay to a people trafficker or a regular flight to Mexico.
The Turks have no problem with fairly draconian measures to enforce migration through and into Turkey. When I was there it was very common for buses to be stopped so everyone's papers could be examined and people were often pulled off and detained for questioning. I think it would be very hard to get onto a plane at Ataturk without a proper entry visa into Turkey in the first place.
My experience predates that deal by several years. They didn't need any encouragement to have a very strict security state, between PKK attacks and historically high amounts of illicit travel/smuggling because of geography. Istanbul is the bellybutton of the world, after all.
1) Transportation costs, which are partially about network effects and "the business of migration". You could probably hire someone to guide you from El Salvador through Mexico on the top of trains 40 years ago, but those ad hoc guides are nowhere as efficient as the cartel-funded coyote businesses that operate today.
2) Communication and exposure feels like a plausible theory. 40 years ago you might never see your parents again. Today you can call or zoon them.
People don't like outsiders and if you moved to where you were an outsider you would likely be treated poorly. This usually only made sense if conditions in you home got absolutely terrible.
Take a look at England’s current 2024 Euro squad and you”ll see the “mostly they didn’t” is not actually true. In fact in recent times, in an irony of ironies, immigration from the Caribbean, India and Africa increased as a result of Brexit.
The fact that Brexit happened at all is an argument to lefties that you can’t just ignore immigration restrictionists. It’s a close cousin of Frum’s aphorism that people will turn to fascism to control the borders if you as a liberal (classical or lefty) don’t. In the UK case, the population is quite willing to commit economic sabotage if you don’t get immigration under control.
I bring up the Euro 2024 England squad to also point out a vivid example of why finding a controlled way to welcome immigrants is very very good thing. England is a co-favorite to win the tourney and there is no way they are co-favorites without players who are children or grand children of said migrants*
*South London is now rivaling parts of Paris and Sao Paulo as one of the best sources of soccer talent on the planet. Beyond played playing for England there are others who actually pledged their allegiance to other countries (as a recent in the news example; see Ademala Lookman). Now go see how diverse this area is and it’s striking how much immigration to England has led to an explosion in talent.
Yes but my question was: why is there lots of immigration now, when it's legally restricted, but hardly any in the past when it wasn't?
I'm thinking the reason might be that poor people needed some kind of organized transportation scheme to migrate before modern communications made them more knowledgeable about the rest of the world.
Indians did move in large numbers to Trinidad and Malaya to do agricultural work, but I think those were programs arranged by the British government to settle what were then underpopulated regions. And the first big wave of Caribbean immigration to Britain itself was the Windrush program in the late 1940s, which was also state-sponsored.
There's a quote from George Bernard Shaw that I can't seem to find: I think probably from one of the long-winded prefaces to his plays. He was mocking free-market economists who argued for mass Chinese immigration to South Africa on the grounds of comparative advantage, and pointed out that by that logic there should be mass Chinese immigration to downtown London.
There was mass immigration to the UK from India and Pakistan and the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s which led to restrictions, starting with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962.
Now, if you want to ask why there wasn't much immigration before Windrush in 1948, I'd point you at the Second World War, and before that at the Great Depression - and remind you that mass immigration to the United States was absolutely permitted from many places until 1924 - and that far more immigrants went to the US than to anywhere in Europe for as long as they were permitted to do so.
True, but the US didn't permit immigration from Asia or Africa. The UK theoretically did permit it from their colonies in those continents.
I get that most of the explanation is transport costs+credit constraints+lack of information, but it still seems as if people might have started moving on a large scale in Victorian or Edwardian times.
Totally unrelatedly: I also wonder why nobody in Britain smoked weed in those eras, even though it was totally legal and grew all over India. Maybe the general level of social conformism in the past was just higher than we can easily think ourselves into.
"Maybe the general level of social conformism in the past was just higher than we can easily think ourselves into."
Yes, that is a huge thing that people today really have a hard time grasping when talking about history, along with the closely related concepts of the vast majority of historical populations having sincere religious beliefs and also not believing that "change" (or change within their lifetimes) was possible.
The US absolutely did permit immigration from Asia and Africa until the 1880s, and it's only China that was really restricted until WWI. There's a reason that there was a Chinese Exclusion Act, because it was allowed and there were lots of Chinese immigrants before that. There was a lot of Japanese immigration until the 1924 exclusion act.
Europeans, of course, did do mass immigration in the Victorian era. But it's worth noting how marginal this was on a cost basis. Steerage accomodation on a liner across the Atlantic was something that families would save up for over several years. I suspect that most of Africa was too poor (or, at least, too cash-poor) to afford that in mass numbers. Of course, there was a lot of immigration from China to Europe, if not quite "mass" immigration; there's a reason that most "Chinatowns" date from this era.
Cannabis was mostly used in Britain in the Victorian era for hemp rope (cannabis grown outdoors in the UK has very little THC), so cannabis to be smoked had to be imported from hotter climes, which would make it costly, especially as it had to be converted to resin before being loaded on a boat in India (and the traditional Indian process for making charas, ie hashish, is both slow and manpower-intensive). It was used for its pain-killing properties (most famously by Queen Victoria for menstrual cramps). Leaf and flower cannabis wasn't an option in Britain apart from some very small-scale imports from Morocco - it doesn't preserve well on the months-long voyage from India to Britain.
As an aside, the only way to smoke resin is to mix it with tobacco - the resin alone doesn't burn very well - and it will clog a tobacco pipe (pipes were the predominant way to smoke until mass manufacture of cigarettes in the 1880s), so other means of consumption (usually a tincture, ie dissolved in alcohol) were more usual in Victorian times.
Victorians were not shy about taking other drugs, though - Sherlock Holmes is a cocaine addict, and that wasn't thought particularly unusual or untowards in the story. Plenty of people took cocaine or laudanum (an opiate) for pleasure.
(ChatGPT tells me this is in the preface to "Captain Brassbound's Conversion", one of his "Three Plays for Puritans". If anyone has it on Kindle, the full quote should be there)
That's possible. (I couldn't find the reference in Project Gutenberg's edition of "Three Plays For Puritans" either.) But I don't think •I'm• hallucinating... it was definitely in one of the prefaces, which I read back in high school
" and there is no way they are co-favorites without players who are children or grand children of said migrants"
Just as far as sports go, I think this sort of thing is taken too much for granted. A lot of top star development is about investment and training. Remove one current star and his replacement in an alternate universe might not be the much worse, if at all. It's like the Malcolm Gladwell Hockey birthday-thing. The kids with the winter birthdays aren't all the most naturally gifted, to a large degree they were just developed more.
The political problem is that Biden specifically and Democrats generally ignored or downplayed this loophole problem for the last couple of years despite the clear evidence most Americans thought it was a major issue. The bipartisan bill that Trump had the GoP kill was not because Democrats had a big desire to deal with this problem, but because it was the price Congressional Republicans in the Senate demanded to vote for Ukraine funding.
Now this EO comes just a few months before the election and it looks to many people like a political strategy to defuse an issue that is hurting Biden politically. I fear it is too little too late and that Biden won’t get much benefit from it, especially since it’s likely going to get tied up in the courts and not actually going to go into effect before the election.
This is so much of my frustration with Biden. Trying to stay in the middle of the Democratic party, too often splitting the baby and satisfying no one (like with Israel/Hamas) and finally taking a stand after a ton of water has already gone under the bridge. He should have done this long before now, or done something to at least give the appearance of taking the loophole issue more seriously.
The other thing to remember about international law is it requires only one thing- that we not send back a legitimate asylee to face persecution. International law says nothing about detention or burden of proof or work permits or parole or any other aspect of procedure.
Nor does international law say that you have the right to file a PHONY asylum application. That's like saying the right of access to the courts grants you the right to file a frivolous lawsuit, or that you have the right to apply for social security benefits if you don't qualify for them and hope they make a mistake and give them to you.
Asylum is truly important. But for asylum to work it can't be overwhelmed with phony claims. And if phony claimants can't apply their rights aren't being violated. We want them to stop applying so asylum is available for legitimate asylees.
Right, but the problem now is that there are so many cases that the backlog is up to something like four years. We absolutely do throw out phony asylum cases, but they are coming in faster than we can figure out which ones are phony.
We throw them out, but there's a couple of things about that:
1. When we throw one out after years, does the person actually get deported? My impression is some do but that others do not, and obviously the notion that this will get the migrant across the border where they can at least work in the underground economy indefinitely even if the asylum claim fails is part of the incentive.
2. Even if someone will leave once the asylum claim is thrown out, the incentive to come here, get a work permit, and work for American wages for years while the case is pending is itself a massive immigration benefit. It's basically jumping in front of everyone who is applying for temporary work visas.
So that's why unless you add enormously to the amount of immigration judges and detention facilities, you basically have to do something like what Biden did. Because the process itself is what creates the incentive to come and file a phony application.
So that we can have 500+ million poor people, some of them radical Islamists, living in camps/tents amongst us? That is what an open borders + no welfare leads to. A Mad Max society where crime and violence would reach levels previously unheard of… and possibly a violent overthrow of our entire political regime.
I think that Alan could, quite reasonably, riposte that if you restrict welfare benefits, the only economic incentive for migration will be labor income, so a: fewer people will be interested in making the trip in the first place and b: the people who do make the journey and then stick around will be doing so because they’re gainfully employed (which also tends to help people integrate into their host society).
I think that there are some drawbacks to that scenario (labor markets getting tougher/more competitive for low human capital local workers; “gold rush” type situations where a localized economic boom causes migration to outstrip a society’s physical capacity to build housing and infrastructure), but I don’t think the scenario that you’re positing here actually makes all that much sense (and reflects a generally irrational paranoia about immigration which is disappointingly common among Europeans.)
I think you drastically overestimate how many immigrants expect to get any kind of public assistance. This would do absolutely nothing to prevent illegal immigration. They are willing to come here and work for peanuts because that is better than they had in their home country. They don't come here because they heard they can live off welfare.
My preferred outcome is that basically anyone who believes in western liberal values and wants to learn english and become a hardworking American can basically come here. So that rules out those who want to live off the dole as well as ruling out radical islamists.
This depends a lot on both the legal status that migrants are seeking and the range of destination countries that they’re considering.
When I was doing research in Beirut, I ran into a fair number of people who had fled from Syria because of the civil war there. A lot of them were actively seeking to get officially resettled in countries with more capacity to absorb refugees long-term than Lebanon did. The guys who I talked to were generally pretty hardworking or entrepreneurial, and would definitely like to work in whatever country they moved to, but they expressed a pretty strong preference for going to Canada or Germany over the US because those countries had stronger safety nets that were more open to refugees.
I don’t think that more than a small fraction of international migrants are wannabe spongers (most people like that don’t have the initiative to do something like moving to a different country), but welfare availability does factor into their decisions.
One of Trump's actions that I agree with was limiting welfare-state benefits to citizens. I'm not even sure why legal non-citizen residents (green-card holders) should have access to the full range of welfare-state benefits.
We place no limitation on who in our community can benefit from government programs. You don't have to have "paid in" or be a good person or not be lazy. But you do have to be a full member of our community, and that means to me you need to have been born a citizen or jump through the hoops (and waited long enough) to become one. (DREAMers are the only exception that seems reasonable to me.)
Jumping through the Green Card hoops and also waiting 5-10 years is how Green Card holders get access to things like Medicare, Medicaid, and SSI benefits.
If you think they should be restricted further then that's a conversation that could/should be had, but I wanted to make sure you knew that there were in fact time-based restrictions on eligibility for some of this stuff. Seems to me like they get some rights and some responsibilities.
No, I know that getting a green card isn't easy or quick, and maybe (though I don't have an opinion on this) it should be easier or quicker.
But I do think that we have a name for full community membership, and that is "citizenship." When you become a citizen, you've thrown your lot in with the rest of the citizens in the US, and you become fully entitled to everything the US has to offer. To be naturalized as a citizen, you may have to demonstrate some English language proficiency, some knowledge of US history and civic institutions: you have to demonstrate some ability and willingness to join and participate in the community, and that is a good thing. I don't think you have to do those things to get a green card.
What about public schools? What about drivers licenses? What about unemployment insurance? These things seem to me like ones that should have broader criteria than citizenship. I think that schooling and drivers licenses make sense to have available for anyone of the right age regardless of other status (even illegal immigrants) precisely because the point is to keep kids off the streets and ensure that people operating motor vehicles have the right skills. Unemployment insurance seems like something that anyone with a job that pays payroll taxes should have access to.
Probably other aspects of the welfare state naturally have other restrictions. But it’s not clear that *citizenship* per se should be the test for *all* of them.
"I'm not even sure why legal non-citizen residents (green-card holders) should have access to the full range of welfare-state benefits."
Many of these don't exist solely out of compassion for the recipients; they also remove negative externalities from public spaces. It's better for (say) a non-citizen resident to live in public housing without disturbing their citizen neighbors than for them to sleep on park benches, and ruin the park for citizens.
We already have a very strong wall around our welfare state when it comes to people who immigrated illegally.
From the National Immigration Law Center: "the law prohibits not-qualified immigrants from enrolling in most “federal public benefit programs.” Federal public benefits include ... HHS programs includ(ing) Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), TANF, Foster Care, Adoption Assistance, the Child Care and Development Fund, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Allan didn't particularly mention illegal immigrants.
Moreover, even with regard to illegal immigrants, it really depends on where they live. In NYC, they're guaranteed a (not very nice) place to live, for instance. This is unsustainable.
If people want to come here and learn English and work hard and watch football, that sounds pretty American to me. And I'd say those who do this have more of that American spirit than those who are lucky enough to be born here but still blame their lot on others.
Again it's about immigration levels. There's a big difference between letting in 1 million people, 10 million people, or 100 million people.
Assimilation takes time. Immigration levels that are too high creates lots of disruption. Moreover, as we've clearly seen you are going to get huge pushback and then probably end up with immigration just cut off (see past US immigration policy swings)
Many second-generation immigrants assimilate, through intermarriage if nothing else. Almost all third-generation immigrants do. We are very far from assimilatory limits; American culture is (luckily for us!) something of a universal solvent.
It's a problem, politically, but something that I do think the pro-immigration left needs to have an honest conversation about is whether they actually want immigration policy to be "whoever shows up at the southern border gets admitted permanently into the country" or if they want immigration policy that will meet the needs of the country.
A fundamental tactical error that I feel like the left has made is to start treating immigration as a humanitarian issue. It's pretty obvious that a lot of the left does like the idea of mass immigration (and I'm not saying I disagree with it as a concept) and it's mostly about figuring out how to sell it to voters, but this is about the worst possible way to go about it.
(The only worse way would be to spend more time going on about "climate refugees," which is beginning to feel like a way to shoehorn mass immigration into the Omnicause.)
Any time a Democrat generating media of any kind (interview, statement) that has to mention Trump should always say "Convicted felon and (rapist/racist) Donald Trump" as the preamble. Over and over. Set the tone.
If Trump wasn’t the alternative, Biden wouldn’t deserve to be re-elected based on the issue of immigration alone. Sitting by and allowing this problem to build up for 3 years before taking it seriously is one of the worst policy failures in the last 24 years.
I'm, let's say... deeply suspicious that Biden does not in fact have the legal authority to do this. These sorts of executive orders are generally illegitimate and it's my understanding that Biden himself has repeatedly disavowed the power to do precisely this. Frankly, that shit is impeachable, Biden, like Obama and GWB before him, should be removed for exercising powers in violation of his own stated understanding of his oath under the Constitution. More importantly this is the sort of thing that gets locked up in the courts for years and does vast harm to our institutions.
Then there's the politics, where Biden has lost on this just catastrophically. If he is willing to do this now it's incredibly discrediting that he didn't do it years ago. He's not gonna convince anyone that he is serious about the issue at this point. Just such a clusterfuck. So much straight up gaslighting on the issue, followed by this rabbit pull isn't helping him with anyone at all.
I don't think it's wrong to pass something to find out if it's legal. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will decide if the order holds up, so what's wrong with Biden just giving it the ol college try?
I agree with your sentiment but if it were that easy to tell we wouldn't need the Supreme Court - and sometimes they don't even agree. If you and the WH lawyers think that it has reasonable arguments for constitutionality, pass it and see what the court says.
I agree, although unfortunately I suspect SCOTUS would strike down legislation authorizing that as unconstitutional (since the "case or controversy" requirement is a constitutional requirement) in a cynical effort to limit their workload.
Biden tried hard to get legislation passed. The republicans killed it. It is not nefarious to say well, we couldn't get everything we wanted, let's see what limited things we can do within our own branch's powers. The Executive has lots of powers it doesn't exercise, and virtually everyone agrees that full legislation is the best form of governing, but that doesn't make less than ideal methods like EXEC orders de facto illegitimate.
The European elections show how to beat the populist right - neutralize the immigration issue. No other compromise is necessary. With immigration off the table the far right cannot exceed 20% of the votes.
Scandinavia bucked the EU trend as left wing and centrist parties did much better here than in the rest of Europe, while the far right did much worse. The reason is that our center-right and center-left parties shifted their stances on immigration towards a much stricter policy with only a small, controlled number of asylum migrants allowed yearly (to make succesful integration possible). Denmark was first, Finland and Norway followed and since 2015 Sweden finally turned as well (after having scolded the Danes for being racists for years, now Swedish politicians are talking about Denmark as a model to copy, even the center-left Social Democrats have sent its people there to learn about Danish reforms when it comes to demolishing houses and restructuring segregated neighbourhoods).
Centrist parties in Germany, France, Spain and Italy should learn from the Nordic example and take a hard line on asylum immigration. There is zero popular legitimacy for ”open borders”/uncontrolled immigration and it will only lead to a growing far right that threatens liberal democracy.
The US should learn as well. In particular, US progressives who love to idealize Scandinavia should take a closer look at the current immigration policies of Scandinavian countries. They are closer to the Republican party than to those of the Democratic party.
As David Frum has said : "If liberals insist that only fascists will defend borders, then voters will hire fascists to do the job liberals will not do."
My concern is that this option was available to President Biden for 3.5 years and yet only chose to do this 6 months prior to the election. So although I applaud the move, I don't think the Administration's commitment to reducing fake asylum claims is genuine.
Big agree on this. Imagine if Biden pushed for a legislative fix earlier in his presidency, back when Trump had less political clout. If he took the mantle of responsible immigration policy and put the GOP on the defensive. Would his favorables look at least a little bit better?
To some extent, it's not just Biden. The Democratic party has still not come to terms with Trump's win in 2016. That's why instead of moderating on issues like immigration, they've doubled down on open borders. With Trump, Democrats have always focussed on his personal negatives instead of neutralizing him on policy issues (especially, the popular ones). That works when his opponent is popular, not when he/she is also unpopular.
I agree with most of this but I actually don’t think it’s true they focus on his personal negatives rather than his unpopular policies. As Matt said, they haven’t make much out of his conviction, and Matt has repeatedly tried to emphasize Trump’s con man past that Democrats (he thinks) haven’t spent much time on. I think what Democrats have focused on is how non-woke his policies and views and statements are; in other words, they attack him politically but from a left-wing lens, which blunts the attacks’ impact among people who don’t share the left-wing frame.
"doubled down on open borders"... they have? Please elaborate as I wasn't aware they weren't proposing open borders at all, let alone doubling down.
Not interested in arguing with hyper partisan people or in providing proof for why Biden's approval rating is in the toilet on the issue of immigration.
The only people I've seen describing the desired policy of Biden or the party's policy preference as "open borders" are hyper partisan people.
Not asking for either of those things. Just, what does "open borders" mean to you?
More than a little, I think. It's one of his biggest negative issues. In many cities you can actually see large numbers of asylum seekers camping out at police stations. No fox news required.
In my little city, the newspaper has been running stories about how hard it is for recent immigrants to find housing, and the comments are full of people pointing out that existing citizens also can't find housing in the first place, and that it's been a problem for a few years now, so maybe....
I think this article demonstrates why he didn't do this earlier. There's a good argument that even pro-illegal-immigration Progressives should back off criticism of Biden for this EO since the election is 5 months away, since Trump would be a lot worse on the issue.
If there was no upcoming election, there wouldn't be as good an argument for Progressives to fight Biden much harder on it.
I think ultimately, he made the wrong call on the politics and the merits, but he saved himself a lot of progressive knifing by waiting until it was clearly an political decision.
To be blunt one of the defining features of the Biden administration is how terrified his administration is of the fringe left. (Israel is a notable exception to this, but even there he's shifted.)
It's hard to parse how much of this is a reasonable (but wrong imo) analysis that losing progressive support will sabotage his re-election versus Biden running the party like a Senator who is always focused on keeping a broad set of constituencies happy.
A centrist in congress will find it easier to shore up support at the extreme of her or his party than to convince the opposition to cross over. And going to the other side can damage standing in a politician's own party.
Unfortunately, the impact to the electorate is the opposite: voters reward politicians who defy their party and work with the other side in selected areas.
A exception? What world are you living in? He has been pushed around by progressives like a leaf in the wind on the Gaza War, starting from a day or two after October 7. First there are red lines, then there's "ironclad support", then we're back to red lines again.
Biden is terrified of organized groups. This explains his actions on Israel. The pro-Israel lobby is professional and organized. The students camping out are basically having a high minded circle jerk.
I am interested in why you think that circle jerk is "high minded."
better to be knifed in the back by progressives who will end up voting for Biden anyway than to be knifed in the front by center-right voters who bring Trump back to the white house
Absolutely, not only would it be popular and correct on the merits, it would also make it clear that he doesn’t take orders from the far left.
As I understood it, he has been trying to get something done for years, but all his staff have screwed him on this, starting with Kamala Harris and Susan Rice. Having some control is popular in the country, but unpopular among the party factions, and that's where their loyalty lies.
After the GOP scuttled the immigration deal, I also doubt Republican's commitment to resolving the asylum problem.
True, but voters know that Trump stands for less immigration and more border enforcement. They aren't confused about that. So if that is an important issue for voters, they will choose Trump.
Disappointingly, the issue is an important one for voters. See this, from Data for Progress: https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2024/3/6/inflation-and-the-economy-consistently-rank-as-top-issues-among-likely-voters-and-heres-our-new-way-to-ask-issue-importance
I still wonder to what extent those concerns are what are shifting marginal voters' candidate choices vs voters' stating a preference post candidate choices.
Sigh. I just want reforms to the legal immigration system and to close the asylum loopholes.
Remain in Mexico was a Trump idea that Democrats considered inhumane, but are now adopting.
I strongly prefer the comprehensive immigration reform agenda of Democrats to the Republican policy of "just shut it down," but it's clear that the right is more committed and capable of creating effective immigration policy.
From a 2020 Times article about a house committee investing made in Mexico:
The “Remain in Mexico” initiative, committee Democrats said, “is a dangerously flawed policy that threatens the health and safety of legitimate asylum seekers” and warrants “a comprehensive review of the policy, its implementation and its impact on vulnerable populations.”
The right time to pass CIR was under Bush or Obama. There's no way it's going to pass with another 10-12 million added in the last 3+ years on top of the 10-12 million at that time. It's either going to be mass deportation or tough interior enforcement on work permits, forcing them to self deport.
Neither will probably happen. Americans say they like mass deportation , but I don’t think they have the stomach to actually see it happen. And businesses will scream at the idea of having work permits enforced, which would put pressure both on the business, friendly Republicans and Dems.
What will probably happen is that we will continue to muddle on, until Congress passes some sort of asylum change. The people that are already in the United States will probably just remain.
I wouldn't count on what has happened in the past to be the guide for predicting the future. Public opinion on illegal immigration has changed over time and it's not just a fringe group that's angry over this. There are already systems like E-Verify that employers have to use. It may take a long time to clear out the backlog of asylum seekers but I have no doubt that the vast majority of those who came in the last 3 years will be deported.
Come on. They scuttled the deal because it's an election year, and why give help to your opponent by compromising, when you have a good chance of getting everything you want in a few months. It was entirely predictable, and for Biden to be in this position is pure political malpractice.
No, it's absolutely not predictable. Republicans wanted to make the deal, and only scuttled it after Trump personally and vehemently came out against it. I agree that a wiser course of action could have prevented this outcome, but it's only predictable if you acknowledge that Trump will harm the country for his political benefit, and the rest of the GOP will happily go along with that, even if it "hurts" them in the eyes of moderate voters. Now, you and I might be cynical enough to predict that at this point, but I do think it's a pretty massive change in what counted as "smart politics" even as recently as 2022 where being seen as too Trumpy cost Republican candidates a bunch of winnable races.
I can only view this as parroting a party line. As I see it, it is the Democratic gaslighting experts trying to make the pathetic best of the ton-of-bricks reckoning that their party is getting for their years of inaction on this issue, which has indeed harmed the country. "Blame Trump" is always a winner with their most loyal and partisan supporters, but by the polls, this is just pushing on a string. The great majority of Americans aren't buying it.
Democrats could always pass HR2
Yeah, this is really what I want to see addressed. If you believe in this policy on the merits, do it at the beginning of your presidency and spend the time to make this argument. I'm not sure how this sways a single voter who cares deeply about immigration (because let's face it, they're voting for Trump anyway) and pisses off progressives who don't like Biden anyway.
"because let's face it, they're voting for Trump anyway". Or staying home. There are so many people with unique combinations of electoral concerns, ie hate Biden b/c of immigration, hate Trump b/c he said "grab her by the p*##$" or abortion or whatever else. People like that often stay home or vote for a 3rd party or emotionally decide to vote R or D in the final weeks.
There really are a tremendous amount of swing voters, not to mention 1st-time voters whose views are still being molded. When I've listened to people's "political origin story" it's often some random thing they saw that turned them to one party or the other. I don't know if this change creates Biden voters but it might prevent a few Trump one.
I fall into that category, and for me, it's not about immigration per se, but about the principle and also about the competence. There are a lot of Democrats who are not loyal to the President and who don't want to obey the immigration laws. Moreover, they are quite open about how they want to legalize all these people and get their votes so they can marginalize the deplorables. It is toxic for Biden, but he is too old and weak to manage these people (if they can even be managed). INo matter who is President, a Democratic administration will be largely run by such people, because they are the people who present themselves to staff the jobs in a Democratic administration.
Still better late than never. I think this move may reassure some voters who despise Trump but also fear open borders and chaos.
What was the timeline of border issues? My recollection is that during the pandemic there wasn’t much of an issue, so it took a year or more into Biden’s term for it to become obvious that asylum was the big loophole people were exploiting. But perhaps it was clear earlier to people who were paying closer attention what the problem was going to become?
This is the part I feel is missing from this discussion. The beginning of Biden's presidency was deiminated by everything COVID. It would have been astonishingly weird for Biden to focus on the border when vaccine rollout was still at its early stages. And given border crossings were quite low in the beginning of his term, it just would have made no sense. If you want to say he was a bit slow in 2022 then maybe.
Honestly, one thing that's really clear to me in retrospect is I think we all underestimated how quickly Americans pivoted to being "back to normal". Which also likely partially explains inflation as Americans turned back to pre-covid spending habits and activity way faster than anyone anticipated. I half joked back in 2022 that Vladimir Putin ended the COVID pandemic; his invasion meant that for the first time in 2 years, the front pages were not dominated by COVID stories (or have at least one COVID story as one of its lead stories). Think we're sort of memory holing how much COVID was still in the front of people's minds in 2021 (A big part of the VA governor's race was controversies over schools still having strict COVID policies and likely helps explain Youngkin's victory).
Point about all this is all this loose talk about how Biden should have pivoted to attacking immigration earlier while probably correct is rewriting history a bit.
Biden *did* pay attention to the border right away in his presidency. Within the first two weeks in 2021, he took a number of actions to undo Trump administration efforts to control the border (to be clear I agree with some of them, but it belies the idea that they just weren't paying attention):
https://nypost.com/2024/03/03/us-news/joe-biden-knowingly-and-purposely-blew-up-the-border-in-2021-dont-believe-his-blame-game-now/
On his first day in office, he signed 4 Executive Orders loosening immigration. The first day.
Nope. It was a problem from early 2021 itself, ever since Biden rolled back Trump's policy on keeping asylum seekers in Mexico (Title 42).
https://images.app.goo.gl/xdXWX2wUYvB6W4k88
I can tell you that it's been about 18 months since Denver suddenly found itself coping with an immense number of Veneuelan migrants. And it did seem extremely sudden.
First he tried legislation and then he delayed to make the Mexican government happier by pushing to after their election. Obviously this wasn’t Biden’d day one priority but he has been working the issue for a while now.
Yes, and worth noting that it should not have been a day 1 priority, since we were still in the middle of Covid and the resulting economic recovery. Arguably they could've or should've prioritized sooner (maybe in 2022 instead of 2023)
Rethorically he could have adressed it more strongly and earlier.
Matt Yglesias from 2008 called, he wants his typos back.
This worries me too. I mean, better to do the right thing now than never, but after years of one side saying "close the border" and the administration saying "oh sorry we can't", it's a tricky thing to now say "ah-ha we CAN!"
Is it possible this won't hold up in court, so it's a timing game to do this now & it won't get overturned until after the election?
I really hate the phrase “close the border”, which is how the press has been describing this policy. It was only Matt’s article that finally told me what the policy actually was.
Obviously the border is not closed now - you can go to Tijuana for the weekend if you like. And the border wasn’t open before - people would ask you for your documentation at any border crossing. What has changed is that asylum claims are now only processed at the border, not if you are illegally in the country already.
yeah it's totally a nonsense slogan, I agree. Don't f* up my avocado imports, people.
But I do think this is what they meant by the slogan?
I have no idea what anyone ever meant by it. I think it’s an importantly vague phrase that suggests ideas people like but has no concrete meaning.
Well, I don't think this not holding up in court would be a loss for the Biden administration considering who exactly "the court" is right now.
He needed to have a potent policy response and a potent symbolic response. Even if the intent of this action is to have it prosecuted, it's too late to have much symbolic impact.
Yeah, Democrats seem like they've spent most of the Trump era trying to figure out a sales pitch rather than shifting to where voters are.
“…only chose to do this 6 months prior to the election”
There were other strategies available for the 3.5 years: Trump was going to get trounced in the primaries, lawfare, the pliant media, etc. Now that those have fallen by the wayside it’s time for desperate measures.
Does anyone remember the early Democratic debates in the last election? Democrats were one upping each other on their openness to illegal immigration and how we should support the immigrants with healthcare and education. They did pull back some as the primary rolled on but that instinct is still there.
I remember, oh so well, how Julian Castro presented his vision of inviting large numbers of Mexicans to settle in their own separate communities in Texas, where they could keep their culture safe from . . Texans.
This, to me, is really the only important point. Whatever we might say about the prudence and balance of Biden's (currently proposed) plan, it is far, far too late. At this point, massive damage has been done, and there is no more trust. And the toxic factionalism in the party that thwarted Biden and allowed an unpopular and irresponsible minority to drive the bus for the last three years, is still there, and is still a problem.
If you build a an economically just and awesome democracy, people will want to come. But, when the average African earns 10% as much as the average European. you can’t let them all in without bankrupting your utopia and poisoning it’s politics with premodern values.
Harshly formulated but essentially correct. Sometimes it’s not so much about values as people having 6 years of bad schooling, not being able to read and write, which makes it almost impossible to earn a decent wage in a high wage, welfare state. And with a lack of housing you will end up in depressing suburbs full of council estates which the native population have abandoned. Perfect conditions for radicalization, crime gangs, clan rule, violence and alienation… which in turn fuels a popular reaction with success for far right movements. This describes my Sweden during the last 20 years, from complete left wing dominance to a party of ex-Nazis becoming the second largest party and part of the government… That would never have happened without the left losing its mind on immigration policy since the 90s.
The Nordic left seems not to have run off the rails nearly as much as the American left, Greta Thunberg notwithstanding. Why is this? I suspect it’s so hard to actually implement progressive economic ideas here that we are left haggling over cultural symbolism, and that hardly encourages adult conversation, much less pragmatism
How incredibly convenient that is for upper-middle class professionals who claim to be progressive and love focusing on cultural symbolism!
That’s part of it, but there are few enough UMC professionals that there’s clearly more going on
"you can’t let them all in without bankrupting your utopia"
The US isn't rich because we have a lot of gold or oil. The US is rich because we have a lot of people, which enables deep labor markets and specialization. Adding more people makes our utopia richer, not poorer.
People are people. If you want to grow the population by immigration, there are limits to how fast you can do it without the whole system breaking down in ethnic conflict. The United States has more capacity than many other countries, but the capacity is not infinite, especially when stupid stuff like encouraging illegal immigration and castigating the native population as "racist." The polls say clearly that most Americans (varying widely in political opinions) agree that they want an end to this mess.
None of those problems are about *bankrupting* one's utopia.
What's your point? You can dream up all the utopias you want, but if you have no way of passing along the road it would take to get there, it would seem rather pointless, no?
My point is the following:
1. David Abbott originally claimed that mass immigration posed a threat to any "economically just and awesome democracy" because immigration harms a high-performant economies ("bankrupting one's utopia") and generates reverse assimilation ("poisoning its politics with premodern values").
2. His latter claim ("poisoning…values") is hard to argue about, because it relies on all sorts of personal judgements about how fast assimilation must be to be fast enough, so I'm setting it aside in this discussion.
3. His first claim ("bankrupting…utopia") is empirically false; immigration tends to improve high-performant economies.
There are a lot of caveats to this. It depends on the speed of which people come to the country, the availability of jobs, and the skills which the immigrants bring. You absolutely can have too many immigrants come in a particular timeframe to the point that it not only strains a countries resources, but generates a political backlash. If you want an example of this, you can just look to Canada, which has had a significant drop in GDP per capita, a huge rise in negative sentiment against immigration and spiking unemployment.
See my response to Rock_M.
It absolutely is about bankrupting ones utopia lol
Fair: "generates a political backlash" leapt out at me and I skimmed the rest. I disagree with your overall claim, though.
To the extent that you refer to "it not only strains a countries resources", then I say again: the US is not rich because of its resources. Moreover: we do say certain municipalities (e.g. NYC) strain to house recent immigrants because their zoning rules have made their housing stock inelastic. But that's already a problem, because it prevent people from moving to NYC when they want to, or NYC adapting if the native-born birth rate were to suddenly rise. Immigration is merely *exposing* or highlighting the problem.
To the extent that your refer to "Canada, which has had a significant drop in GDP per capita", then your timing is off. Canada has had relatively constant proportional immigration (about 0.75% current population) between 1989 and 2017, increasing to about 1% thereafter. The absolute number of immigrants began increasing (from about 250k people) in 2014.
Now, Canadian GDP per capita did experience a large drop in 2014. That cannot be caused the proportional increase post-2017. In principle, it could be cause by the absolute increase at that time, but (1) it is implausible that absolute numbers matter here. If Canada had 1000x it's current population, it would surely be able to assimilate at least twice as many people. (2) It doesn't explain why Canadian GDP per capita then *stagnates*, instead of continuing to drop as immigration accelerates. (3) If you plot Canadian GDP per capita on a longer scale (e.g. 1990-present), it is clear that the drop is not actually a drop: Canadian GDP per capita increases by a factor of about 3 until 2008 (I wonder what happened then?), and has hovered around the same quantity since then. 2014 just happens to be a random downwards oscillation, comparable in size to the 2008-2010 dip, and so we shouldn't read too much into the two data points of 2014 and 2015.
The rate limiter is the ability of the populace to accept social change, not financial impact. Yes, truly open borders would bankrupt the country, but we will never approach the point where immigration impairs the US economic because voters will elect anti-immigration republicans first.
Strict immigration policies (which btw doesn’t mean zero asylum immigration but a sustainable level over time that allows for successful integration and cohesion) should be coupled with increased aid to help people where they are, and to high quality temporary refugee camps run by the UN and financed by the rich world. Noone should be left without support but immigration is not always the answer.
Non-asylum immigration is another matter. Here there is much higher chances of attracting/screening people who can be expected to learn the local language, find a job, support themselves, adapt to the local cultural values and norms etc.
I've seen various explanations for the differences, but the thing the US is good at, in fact exceptional at, is integrating new immigrants into the society. By every measure, without doing any prescreening, immigrants to this country learn English, find jobs (to our pride or shame, if you're not willing to work in this country you will go hungry), adapt to the local norms, and their kids or at minimum grandkids are indistinguishable from their peers in social mores.
It’s true, the US is better at integrating newcomers for economic and cultural reasons. I wonder, however, what would happen if you accepted 4 million poorly educated people - 75% men - from the Middle East in one single year as Sweden did in 2015 (proportional to total population). Their integration would likely have been more successful but not without problems.
It's a fair question.
But it's also true that even amid increasing variety, US migrant crossings still come disproportionately from Latin America, which just has much, much less cultural difference from the US than the Middle East does from Sweden.
There are many commonalities between the two situations, but they aren't the same.
(FWIW, Sweden had a population of 9.7 million at the time, so that those 4 million people constituted an additional 41% of the population.)
No, no — Sweden's actual immigration figure in 2015 was about 163k, or between 1% and 2% of the population. Joachim's "4 million" figure is what you get when you scale that up to the US's much larger population, to make it a fair hypothetical.
I enjoy comparative politics as much as the next guy, but I always feel like something gets lost when we equate the US and Europe on migration issues.
Not to forgive right wing xenophobia in European politics, but openness toward migration from the South seem to offer both greater positives and fewer negatives to the US across a variety of domains versus the situation in Europe.
I think this analysis is correct. But I think so much of the opposition to immigration stems from feeling that they're taking up resources that would've gone to citizens. If we made our welfare state harder to access, then we'd inherently select for ambitious and hard working immigrants and immigration would add to our fiscal capacity, not detract from it.
I think there is a lot to this, but also people feel alienated if their culture is changing too much and too quickly. Especially if the culture of the newcomers seem to hark back to the Middle Ages when it comes to sexual values, views of women, religious beliefs etc.
I would argue that most of the people who "feel alienated" by rapid cultural change due to immigration, are (almost) entirely different people than those concerned by immigrants bringing antiquated social values.
It’s a paradox, but in Sweden the people who support our far right wing party (the Sweden Democrats) are constantly talking about burkas, honor killings and threats to hbtq people from islam, while also being anti-trans and anti-feminists… while the left silences people who criticize honour culture (beatings, killings, oppression of young women) and homophobia in immigrant communities.
That reads more or less the same as the US.
Another version is the US right who is antisemitic but pro Israel.
The US Left is antisemitic and anti-Israel.
White supremacists are anti-Semitic. Most of them seem to live in the woods in Idaho or in their mothers' basements. The "US right" is not white supremacist, unless you're an addled liberal who imagines that Christians and all the other people you dislike fall into that category.
Perhaps cosmopolitans the world over are natural allies, but traditionalists are very much not - the whole thing is believing very strongly in your tradition’s superiority to the others! Plenty of history is war between civilizations that would both read as trad and right-wing today.
"Especially if the culture of the newcomers seem to hark back to the Middle Ages when it comes to sexual values, views of women, religious beliefs etc."
So, when do we start deporting Southern Baptists?
Can't resist the temptation to trash Southerners?
Southern Baptists shouldn't do things like supporting banning iVF they don't want to be compared to knuckle dragging reactionaries.
I'm sure you could find someone in this country to say worse things about you. Kind of a silly game.
Southern Baptists are liberals by ME standards...
Middle East
The last thing our welfare system needs to be is “harder to access.” It’s already a redundant bureaucratic nightmare that dumps shameful amounts of resources into sniffing out infrequent fraud schemes.
You're correct that opposition to immigration comes from perceptions of fairness, but I don't believe that the specifics of how resources are shared would have any impact on anti-immigration views.
I strongly recommend the book Strangers in Their Own Land by Arlie Russell Hochschild. It's a sociological study of right-wing anger in the Mississippi Delta that shows convincingly how this is a visceral issue, not a rational one. Heather McGhee's book The Sum of Us covers how many communities closed public pools rather than integrate them -- people diminished their own quality of life in order to deny it to others (I haven't read it, but did hear an interview with her about it).
Is there a good article in English that explains the "Danish reforms when it comes to demolishing houses and restructuring segregated neighbourhoods"?
Mostly critical articles from a left wing perspective it seems... Google "danish social democrats ghetto demolish". The reforms have largely worked, are popular among Danish people (including many immigrants) and increasingly emulated by Swedish politicians, even on the center-left.
Thanks
We need more judges and we need them now. This need is especially acute in the immigration system but extends to our entire legal system.
Attorneys would be vastly more productive if we had more judges. I spend many of my working hours waiting for judges to listen to me. It’s quite normal for 50 to 150 cases to be on a single court calendar and for me to spend a two to three hours waiting in court to make a simple announcement and speak for 60 seconds. I price this time in to the fees I charge. It’s why, even when a case is so simple I can think through it in a few minutes, my fee will be thousands of dollars. It would be much, much cheaper to hire an extra judge than to have two dozen lawyers queening in court to make announcements. The problem is judicial salaries are a transparent public expense and attorney wait time is an opaque private expense.
Waiting in court is only the tip of the inefficiency iceberg. Many of my interactions with clients are dominated by the fact that we will have to wait months for a hearing. I spend quite a bit of time telling divorce clients that I can’t really influence their spouse’s behavior any time soon because I can’t get a court date. In criminal cases, plea negotiations have as much to do with court scheduling as culpability and deterrence. You can get good outcomes in mid grade criminal cases by getting a bond and keeping your client out of trouble long enough to show his crime was a “one time” mistake.
Nothing would do more for the rule of law than hiring a ton of judges.
Is there a single supply side reform that is preventing us from hiring more judges? Is it simply a matter of will?
I'd have to think budget for compensation would really be the single biggest factor -- the base salary without local COL adjustment appears to be less than $130K a year (and, unlike a federal district court judge, there's not lifetime job security), so bumping it up by $50K to $75K would probably let you staff out the bench to an almost arbitrary degree.
There are no judicial vacancies at the current salaries. Maybe if we increased their numbers by a third you maybe would see it, but I doubt it.
Being a judge is about as good a gig, quality of life wise, as you can get. You don't have to hustle for clients, you don't have to do much scut work, much of the frustrations about inefficiency are removed from you. You essentially think good legal thoughts and make good legal decisions over and over again as the cases come past you.
Being a state level judge has its warts. You are up on the bench, the center of attention, for hours at a time. While lawyers blog on Slow Boring and wait to be called, you are ploughing through case after case. People lie to you all the time. You have to have good manners or else people will hate you. A middling lawyer makes more per hour than you do, but your pension is first rate.
Yes, but the discussion here was about hiring *more* judges and in sufficient quantities to clear a literally several years' backlog of cases and keep providing relatively prompt service for all new applicants; not just filling the existing slots. And yes, being a judge is a good gig (I would love to be a judge!), but you want experienced people for the position and, except for people whose kids are already done with college and either don't have a lot of other expenses or have a spouse with a good paying job, taking a 50% pay cut hurts even if it means you are freed from business development, tracking billable hours, etc.
Being a judge is a good gig, but a lot of people who'd make the best judges would be taking a pay cut to do the job.
Yes, that's what my whole second sentence was about?
There are times when I think about about returning to my beloved West "By G-d" Virginia and running for magistrate (because magistrates are not required to be admitted to the practice of law), although I wish we still used "justice of the peace." I would even supply my own gavel, to sweeten the deal for voters.
The structural reasons basically come down to lack of available space for courtrooms, court staff, etc. Judges themselves tend to be among the most highly-paid public employees in their jurisdiction (basically, if you want a judge who's not an idiot, then you're going to have to pay well because any judge who wouldn't be an idiot can make a lot of money in private law practice.)
In a lot of the places where the need for more judges is most acute, the courthouse was built 100 years ago for a county that was a tenth the size it is now.
Interesting. Should there be more remote trials then? Seems like a good use of zoom, and not something that necessarily needs to be done in person.
Trials are problematic to hold over Zoom for a lot of reasons (although this depends on what kind of "trials" you're talking about; I'm assuming jury trials here.) Certain hearings less so, but in a lot of contexts jury trials are necessary grease to make the system function.
In fact part of what creates the backlog is a lack of capacity for jury trials but that's something that requires a lot of physical courtroom space. (Backlogs exist in a lot of places right now because courts couldn't hold jury trials for a while during COVID, with longer backlogs in the states that held on to COVID restrictions for longer.)
Doesn't it just come down to the amount of money congress allows for asylum courts? That's part of what the border deal would have done, give more money to hire judges and such.
And on issues that this substack focuses on this is also true, the pain of a NEPA/ESA case goes way down if it's done in three months not three years.
A thousand times this.
I have to assume that a large part of this phenomenon is Baumol's cost disease. What incentives, if any, do judges have to improve productivity through adoption of new technology?
They are trying to hire more, fwiw:
https://www.justice.gov/eoir/Adjudicators
https://www.usajobs.gov/job/792679400
That announcement is for one job.
Well, I've shared with you before that they *have* been hiring and the number of judges increases every year, but it's never going to be enough to keep up with the backlog under the current review process.
There's something about the anglophone world where people just accept waiting in lines without questioning it. Every time people have to wait in line is a market failure!
The judges still have to see the same number of cases whether they see them now or in six months. So presumably the gains are huge, and with like 10% more capacity they could cut wait times by 50%. Same with visits to the DMV - it's not like people can just skip getting a drivers license. The volume is pretty much constant, and the work still gets done, so why can't we get rid of the line!
I can't agree with this enough. We need to hire enough judges, to get processing time down to a couple of weeks at most. And build enough holding facilities to manage the number of people.
ZERO people should be released into the United States without an approved asylum application. That includes families with children.
If that change requires a constitutional amendment then one should be pushed through
As I point out elsewhere, we do keep hiring judges and the backlog keeps reaching record numbers. To reach your goal, we probably need thousands more judges (we have ~700 now, I believe), an impossibility even if federal hiring weren't sclerotic. The much simpler way (to my mind anyway) is to just change the criteria so that determinations don't require judges and can be made much more easily.
Biden is a dog person while Trump famously doesn't like them. So you are clearly a fascist. 🤣
“Detention” can be a super 8 motel with TVs and a few guards. It doesn’t have to be Alcatraz.
Would you implement any reforms to reduce caseloads or streamline them, especially on the civil side?
I've always felt like there are three great structural inhibitors to bad behavior in our society: 1) laws and regulations, 2) the legal system, and 3) insurance (although insurance largely derives from 1 and 2). I have no patience for conservatives who want to limit all three -- that's just crony capitalism in action. But I've really wondered when enforcement through the executive branch versus the legislative branch is more efficient and effective. The downside of the executive branch is that bureaucrats often have weird incentives that don't align with the public good, but can act relatively quickly. The downside of the legal branch is what you mention, but it better resembles a marketplace where optimal solutions will be found.
And technology. Get that app to work and expand on it. I bet AI could help process the masses of claims.
Shouting "it's the law" as if that magics away policy problems that polls find widespread concern about is a sign of epistemic closure, and that's just as true if you're a Liz Warren voter as a Trump voter. Especially when the law was written in 1951 (as the Geneva convention was)!
The far left only started to love the law after it realized that its own political agenda (on immigration and cultural issues) had little public support. They have lost faith in the people and the people have lost faith in them and their unwillingness to accept trade offs and tough realistic decisions on crime, immigration etc.
It’s depressing how democracy is abandoned as soon as the people don’t support your ideals. It goes for the far right as well btw.
I think this is like a mental habit of a previous world where Republicans would insist they were for legal immigration, which asylum seeking absolutely is.
It used to be the case if you said someone was against immigration xenophobes would jump all over you to say it was merely the legal status they were upset with.
Maybe, but I think it's more that there's a condition that could be described as "International Law Brain," in which the sufferer believes that international law is a real thing of great moral weight. I say this because, "Muh international law!" is something that gets trotted out in a lot of foreign affairs contexts where it's clearly not just being deployed to try to appeal to Republicans.
That also seems real. I think in general a small number of cosmopolitan people like me are trying for some argument that will let people get around indifference to foreigners.
But is there anyone who is indifferent to foreigners yet who finds appeals to "international law" (or even specific appeals to treaties that contain no enforcement mechanism and impose no requirement that enabling legislation be enacted) persuasive?
I don’t think it’s that weird that people think this way? The idea of a rules-based international order is literally centuries old, it has a ton of appeal to people who want alternatives to zero-sum great power competition or a global human rights/antipoverty regime, and it’s been part of the official governing ideology of the US and most European countries since the end of the Second World War (although obviously an imperfectly honored one in practice.)
We need to come up with a different name for it besides law. People conflate domestic law with enforcement by the government with international law which is adhered to mostly voluntarily by sovereigns.
This, a thousand times this. Whatever we mean by International Law, it has no analogy to what we mean when we talk about the law in every other context.
It has a very important analogy - it is a series of rules for governing interpersonal activities that was agreed to be democratically elected authorities in democratic countries and the autocrats in autocratic ones. Now it’s *enforced* vastly differently (if at all), but the same is true when you compare family law, tax law, drug law, etc.
The abstract concept of international law is not weird, nor is *desiring* such an international legal system. What's weird is people who very sincerely act like declaring, "International law requires/forbids . . ." is actually a meaningful argument *in and of itself* rather than, at most, a philosophical starting point for an argument.
To put it another way, saying "International law requires/forbids [X]" by itself is meaningless since in most contexts no governing body with any power is going to actually enforce the supposed "international law" in the first place, and especially not enforce it against the U.S. or other great power states. But I have IRL had discussions with people (having worked on my law school's international law journal) who literally can be trembling with emotion when they say, "U.S. policy [X] must stop because it is in violation of international law," and believe that's a self-contained winning position.
You should ask them if the US is required to immediately outlaw marijuana possession and close all of the retail stores in the states. After all, we did sign a 1961 treaty mandating that, so technically we're violating 'international law' by legalizing pot lol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_Convention_on_Narcotic_Drugs
"But I have IRL had discussions with people (having worked on my law school's international law journal) who literally can be trembling with emotion when they say, 'U.S. policy [X] must stop because it is in violation of international law,' and believe that's a self-contained winning position."
If you're already a law-abiding person, the existence of an enforcement mechanism is never relevant to how the law modifies your behavior. You have to have criminal tendencies to notice that the enforcement mechanism is missing for international law.
In the bitter end, international law is based on fear - fear of what the hegemon can and will do. The Roman Peace (a rules-based international order) was effective so long as the legions could (and did) massacre anybody who disturbed that peace. In the best times, they didn't have to. Today's rules-based order is breaking down because the power of the United States, that guaranteed that order, is also breaking down.
Republicans despise the very concept of international law. They'd abolish the Peace of Westphalia, if they could.
Actual asylum is clearly legal immigration; filing a bullshit asylum claim so that you can circumvent immigration law for a few years is not.
“…legal immigration, which asylum seeking absolutely is”
You believe most of those filing asylum claims over the past few years legitimately meet the legal criteria?
I believe we are perfectly capable of allowing our system of justice to work in a timely fashion.
I also believe if it were really as big of a deal as some of these hawks believe they’d be willing to offer much more substantive conceessions to other areas the way Conservatives did when they believed Soviet military force was a threat. But there was nothing like Reagan wanting to expand the defense department and Tip O’Neal wanting to expand spending type of deals offered because the optics are better than solving the problem.
Since you chose not to answer my question: I think there is a good deal of evidence that migrants are being coached on what to say and how to answer questions in a way that forces the hand of immigration officials to declare the standard has been met to merit a hearing before a judge. Since the system is overwhelmed and no hearings are available for many months, the migrant is released on their own recognizance by promising to show up for an appointment those many months in the future. And, having been released into the US, migrants disappear and have no intention to attend a their hearings.
That is not legal immigration.
I mean like suppose that’s true why isn’t the answer to just staff up the article 1 courts handling this so that there isn’t a years long backlog?
Like people have been calling this a crisis for 10 years and they’ve just dithered. One would hope if we were really being invaded we wouldn’t be prioritizing everything but what would solve it.
The number of judges has more than doubled while the backlog has increased 3-4x. It's not as simple as everyone keeps claiming!
"...just staff up the article 1 courts handling this so that there isn’t a years long backlog?"
Good idea. So what?
Being coached by *whom*, Ken?
Smugglers and lawyers. E.g.,
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/border-asylum-claims/
https://thediplomat.com/2023/06/brooklyn-lawyers-abuse-asylum-system-in-advising-clients-to-fraudulently-claim-lgbtq-persecution/
It's also a sign of moral decay because it shows how lazy the speaker is.
And often when you scratch deeper just a little bit, you find that it's not even the law, or at best is just one contested argument for how the law should be interpreted, that's being inaccurately presented as settled law by journalists who don't know any better.
For example, it's hard to tell from the article, but it appears this Biden move, as the Trump policy before it, is based on the Surgeon General's authority under section 265 of Title 42 of the U.S. Code to prevent the entry to the United States of would-be immigrants who pose a risk of spreading communicable disease.
Has the Surgeon General Murthy made a medical valid, evidence-based determination that the entire class of asylum seekers coming from Mexico and subject to this policy are disease carriers? Has there been some other rational evidence-based efforts to determine that the people being excluded are likely to spread contagious diseases in the United States?
From Wikipedia:
§265. "Suspension of entries and imports from designated places to prevent spread of communicable diseases
Whenever the Surgeon General determines that by reason of the existence of any communicable disease in a foreign country there is serious danger of the introduction of such disease into the United States, and that this danger is so increased by the introduction of persons or property from such country that a suspension of the right to introduce such persons and property is required in the interest of the public health, the Surgeon General, in accordance with regulations approved by the President, shall have the power to prohibit, in whole or in part, the introduction of persons and property from such countries or places as he shall designate in order to avert such danger, and for such period of time as he may deem necessary for such purpose." (July 1, 1944, ch. 373, title III, §362, 58 Stat. 704.)
While I'd agree that those on the far-left on immigration are probably not shouting that in good faith, the actual law does matter. It sucks that Trump torpedoed immigration reform, but that doesn't change the fact that the executive branch is not supposed to make law. If the courts strike down the executive action (like they did during the Trump admin), then we're back to square one.
Half of our problems as a nation come from using (unelected, irresponsible) judges to decide every damn thing. The legislative process should be the end of the matter in almost all cases. At this point, I'm longing for someone, somewhere, to channel Andy Jackson on something ("Mr Marshall has made his ruling, now let him enforce it").
I’ve always found the “it’s the law trope”in persuasive. Many laws are stupid or easily gamed and almost everyone breaks the las sometimes. Who hasn’t sped or drank beer before they were 21.
Now we are finding out that voters apply this trope rather selectively. Trump was convicted of 34 felonies and his polling average dropped by about 1%, the change was subtle enough it could be pure noise. Of course it wasn’t completely clear that falsifying business records was a felony under New York law until the DA decided to nail Trump with a novel legal theory.
What is your sense of whether it will stand?
It would be cool to have a clear, non-evasive answer from a defender of our current (i.e., before President Biden's most-recent restrictions) asylum policy about why, given the way the world is now, we should permit people to claim asylum at other than legal points of entry. (Saying "that's what the law is" or "our system is overburdened, so the only way in is between points of entry" are not interesting answers, in my opinion.)
Defenders of the system give vague responses about Europe in World War II and other points in space-time where war zones and totalitarian countries make it impossible for asylum-seekers to seek asylum at pre-defined locations. But there is nothing about Mexico in 2024 (that I'm aware of) that prevents one from seeking asylum in an orderly way.
I did a massive research paper in college on immigration from the northern triangle (back when that was the major source of immigration at the southern border.) And the journey is truly hellish. Many of the people fleeing the countries truly did not have a home to go back to, and the smuggling coyotes and cartels in Mexico made the area around the border very unsafe.
So those are really the points people defending lawless immigration are making. The migrants fleeing are doing so for good reasons and it's not safe for them to remain in Mexico or go back to their country. Of course, those people don't have a good answer for the migrant driven problems in border towns and now in major cities. So they're left with arguing about abstract American ideals, while the rest of the country completely sours on immigration. The answer, of course, has always been a compromise that looks something like the gang of 8 bill bill back in 2013. But that's not happening anytime soon, so we're left with this perfectly sensible executive order.
People fundamentally don't care about the process very much. They either want immigration to go up or down. Progressives rightly point out that the distinctions made by asylum law of credible fear from government and from nonstate actors or poverty is often arbitrary. They see the issues of processing this many people as the rightwing crying wolf, which frankly, it has been for many years. Immigration has been a driver of growth, and as Matt has pointed out multiple times, probably slightly help with inflation. It's by executive fiat, but the left, along with much of America, doesn't understand or care, as long as their shortterm policy preferences are satisfied.
Now as a One Billion American fans, I sympathize. I see immigration as pretty darn good, even if it involves some middling through. The 1965 Immigration Act also has a lot of unintended consequences, and that's looked back at fondly by many. However, I don't think this process is politically sustainable, which is why I don't object too strenuously to it. In the long run, we need a more politically sustainable system, but that requires a faith in the political process, that's in very short supply everywhere, including on the left.
Immigration levels need to be low enough to allow time for assimilation and prevent swift cultural changes.
That number is probably a bit above current legal immigration levels but WAY WAY below current legal + illegal levels
There's no evidence of a lack of assimilation by all the usual markers.
Those markers being?
Just comes down to if you think it’s worth the risk.
It is the duty of the United States to operate a system such that every person who presents themself at a legal point of entry would be speedily processed.
The US has been abusing the system at legal points of entry by not enabling everyone who seeks to enter at one to be fairly and properly processed, and, by physically limiting the numbers that can cross the border, it has been able to prevent people from applying for asylum at all. People can have wait time measured in years. Morally, people should be able to make an application within hours of reaching the US, and the final decision should be a matter of weeks at most. They shouldn't be physically forced to stay in Mexico.
One of the big problems here is that, because the default status of anyone is that they can't enter the United States, a lack of asylum officers results in people not getting in. This creates the perverse incentive to underfund the office that determines whether someone can get in or not because you can limit the numbers of asylum entrants by limiting the number of asylum case officers (and immigration judges, etc).
I'm tempted to propose that the solution to this is to say that if the case can't be processed in a reasonable timeframe (ie set some formal deadlines), then the applicant automatically receives a grant of the status they applied for. That creates an incentive among those wishing to limit immigration to spend more money on case officers in order to be able to reject more applications. The reverse incentive is less dangerous - the left might seek to cut the budget on some "defund the police" style basis, but in general large number of unionised public sector jobs are not things that much of the left is inclined to cut, and there'll be plenty of resistance from inside the Democratic coalition to that.
I find Ilya Somin's argument that the Chinese Exclusion Cases were wrongly decided, and the federal government has no inherent power over immigration (https://reason.com/volokh/2021/09/17/terrible-supreme-court-decisions-that-should-be-added-to-the-anticanon-of-constitutional-law-part-i/) quite persuasive. At minimum, I would think that the right to immigrate cannot be withdrawn absent due process of law, so that people have the right to immigrate by default; only deportation and whatever border controls are necessary to permanently exclude the deported are legal.
Of course, almost no other Americans agree with this view, and zany legal theories do not excuse lawbreaking.
I can't see how this could possibly be based in fact. Immigration has been regulated in this country since 1790. There was never a time in our history when "people have the right to immigrate by default."
"Immigration has been regulated in this country since 1790. There was never a time in our history when 'people have the right to immigrate by default.'"
No. *Naturalization* has been regulated since 1790, but immigration was entirely unregulated until CA attempted to pass the Anti-Coolie Act in 1862.
"Entirely" is a bit much. America in the past was different than it is today. Americans had many ways through their states and localities to ban, discourage, or move along people that they didn't like. There was also a tremendous amount of mob violence against immigrants, naturalized and not. The "default" scenario was always: find a job you can live on, in a place where the locals would accept you, or else go back where you came from (or starve). This was far more effective enforcement than any immigration law.
I don't think mob violence really tells us much about how the constitution should be interpreted.
There's a fairly easy moral defense: Progressives are cosmopolitan - they don't think an American's interests are more valuable than a non-American. From a progressive, utilitarian standpoint, letting poor foreigners into the country is a clear good, so a loophole that allows that is good (especially so if closing that loophole will inevitably prevent some actually-deserving asylum seekers.)
It's actually harder to make a anti-open-borders claim without relying on "because it's the law."
(FWIW, I believe illegal and loophole-driven immigration should be cracked down on, but it's a slightly uncomfortable belief for me since it relies on second-order effects and selfishness.)
"It's actually harder to make a anti-open-borders claim without relying on "because it's the law.""
I don't think it's hard at all. The whole concept of a nation revolves around the ability of the people within its borders to decide on their own rules. One of those rules involves who can enter the nation and who can't. It's hard to imagine any sane person arguing that any organization (a condo association, a club, a business, a nation) can't restrict access to its resources or space.
I agree, but "not enforcing border rules will weaken the concept of nation states which will, over time, result in net negative utility despite the immediate, massive benefits to the immigrants themselves" is a harder argument to make than "it's good to let poor people improve their lives."
How about "people, being people, the society will collapse into ethnic conflict if we handle this poorly, so maybe we have other things to think about than whether it's good to let poor foreigners improve their lives"
Weakening nation states isn’t the argument. The argument is whether or not an immigration policy is better for the people already citizens. Politicians are voted in to represent current citizens. If they don’t feel their interests are represented, they will vote for someone else.
You can make the same argument that governments have the right to ban gay sex or that governments have the right to ban religions. Why is it that “who can enter the nation and who can’t” is part of what rules nations can have while “who can have sex and who can’t” or “what religions you can practice” isn’t?
“Who can have sex and who can’t” or “what religions you can practice” is clearly something nations can rule on because many of them do and on some level we do now.
I thought this was a thread about *moral* defenses of government regulation. I thought NYZack was saying that every group has a *moral right* to control who enters the territory they govern, not just the *practical ability* to do so.
Most of us don't think that governments have the moral right to restrict religious or sexual practices (at least, among actively willing participants).
The US governments control who and what you have sexual practices with all the time, you just **agree** with those restrictions so don't find them objectionable. You not only don't find them objectionable, but would find it objectionable and immoral if they weren't restricted. The same applies to plenty of religious practices.
This really isn’t about government or morality. It’s about politics and representative government. Citizens vote. Non-citizens do not. If those voters do not believe immigration policy is in THEIR best interest, they will vote for someone else and change it.
But, ""it's the law is always part of any answer. Why can't we just surveil everybody's electronic communications all the time so that we can find criminals also involves "because it's the law" as part of the explanation. We make laws that bind our own behavior, and importantly bind our own government's behavior.
And it's important to remember that the law we're talking about here isn't "International Law", it's actually US law. Whatever the UN, or whoever, may say, we have decided, thorough Congress, to permit people who have a credible threat of persecution to seek asylum in the US. We could democratically decide to rescind that, and there's nothing anyone outside the US could do.
What we haven't done is add in a caveat that we'll only grant asylum if you show up at a port of entry. Maybe we should do that, but until we do we have bound ourselves, as we do all the time, to follow the laws we've decided upon.
One of the reasons we don't require port of entry status is because some people who are credibly threatened by foreign regimes cannot safely present themselves at a port --- because if you're fleeing from say the CCP, or Putin, or a cartel, that's where they're going to be looking for you, and sneaking in is the only safe option. It's also possible that someone is already here when they find out that going back home is deadly, in which case leaving the country in order to return would be silly.
"One of those rules involves who can enter the nation and who can't. It's hard to imagine any sane person arguing that any organization (a condo association, a club, a business, a nation) can't restrict access to its resources or space."
In fact, many businesses are subject to "public accommodations" law, which requires them to treat with all comers. More to the point, whether *any* nation can restrict immigration is irrelevant; the question is whether it is compatible with *the US's* status as a free nation governed by our constitution for the federal government to set such a rule. I, personally, believe in the off-the-wall theory that such rules are unconstitutional; many "open borders" people think such rules are incompatible with the US being a free nation. YMMV, but I don't think that those are arguments no "sane person" would make.
(To be clear, given that nobody agrees with me about constitutionality, I think the laws on the books should be followed and enforced.)
Any time I bring this up to anyone defending it, it comes down to some real bullshit belief about how people have a "right to migration" or it's just nonsense about push factors. It's pretty clear that people defending the current asylum policy actually just don't believe that the United States has a right to decide who can and cannot enter the country.
In general, it is not possible present yourself at legal ports is entry for an asylum claim. Basically, they won't let very many people do it per day, and if you are not physically in the US then saying that you have an asylum claim won't get you across the border.
It seems to me that your answer is along the lines of "our system is overburdened, so the only way in is between points of entry." That seems to me to be a bad basis for public policy (and not a very productive hill to die on).
I agree that a system where everyone who has an asylum claim can present themselves at a legal port of entry would be better but it fundamentally wouldn't change anything about the current challenges the system faces.
I really disagree with that. Not having people and families crossing the Rio Grande and/or dangerous desert would be a huge improvement. Having a systematic way to catalogue all of the people entering the country would be a huge improvement. Discouraging people from crossing by telling them they have a zero chance of entry if they're caught would be a huge improvement.
If they could enter through a port of entry with a non-zero chance of entry (and by no means are all of these asylum claims bogus) then don't you think they'd do that instead?
I do think this is a major hypothetical: you're asking to envision a functional asylum-processing system, which would be very unlike our current system. If migrants could look forward to being processed speedily at a port of entry, most would probably not make the journey at all, since most asylum claims would rapidly be judged as bogus. But most legitimate political refugees would prefer this option. (I'm not taking a moral stand against economic migrants, but honestly most migrants are economic.)
So it seems like the detailed answer you gave to my original question really is "our system is overburdened, so the only way in is between points of entry." You agree, then, that, if our immigration system were adequately staffed and funded, you'd have no problem with banning all entry at the southern border, except at points of entry?
My understanding was that Biden has released an app allowing people to request an asylum hearing and that they can use that app from anywhere..?
I think you might be talking about CBP One.
Just to be clear here, the 'loophole' is that people who do not genuinely believe they may have a legitimate claim to asylum are asking for asylum anyway in order to avoid being deported.
People who do genuinely believe they may have a legitimate claim aren't exploiting a loophole in the law, they're using the law working as intended.
I don't think loophole is really the right word. The more accurate term is gaming the system. The former implies some kind of exception or drafting issue that failed to adequately anticipate current conditions. What's actually happening is people acting based on the knowledge that the system is overwhelmed and therefore chances of ever actually being deported are low. Especially if you're smart enough to keep your head down.
Agreed. Gaming the timing, maybe? Or using the asylum system to do an end-run around the normal immigration process? But note that this applies only to people who think their asylum claims aren't valid. If you think you have a valid claim, you're just... using, even struggling with, an overwhelmed system.
Excellent way of putting it.
But that describes very few of the people applying for asylum.
I think there is a lot of misunderstanding of what "asylum" actually means, and many people conflate it with "refugees" which are an entirely different matter. (Somebody fleeing persecution by the government is seeking asylum; somebody fleeing a natural disaster, a war, or a generalized fear of crime is a refugee.)
The criteria appears to be broader. Across several different websites: 'returning to his or her country would lead to persecution on account of race, religion, nationality or political beliefs.'
This is from 'habitatforhumanity', but the same key phrase can be found in the public-facing information of other reputable organisations.
Particularly, the persecution doesn't have to be by the government, it is sufficient that the government choose or be unable to protect the person from it. Presumably gangs and cartels kill people who have law-and-order political beliefs, so, they would be covered. It's a little glib, but accepting war as an extension of politics by other means implies its exercised against those with particular political beliefs, so it's covered. A natural disaster per-se isn't covered, but if the local government's relief efforts are biased by race, religion, nationality or political belief then that is a form of persecution and so covered. I agree though that in the case where a natural-disaster local-government is supplying aid in an evenhanded way this convention wouldn't apply.
I agree with Matt in that I believe in rules, and in rules being enforced - including on countries and their asylum systems. If the US wants to change it's asylum laws, it needs to look into withdrawing formally from the relevant treaties.
The thing is they have to be targeting you because of some protected category, and that's where many gang claims fail.
If you are fleeing because your life is in danger because of the high crime rate, you aren't an asylee (even though I'd argue your case is very sympathetic). You or your group has to be targeted.
I think the idea that the persecution does not have to be from the government is something that was invented later, and is not part of the International Treaties the US signed. That's part of how this loophole got so big in the first place, there are very few people being credibly threatened with violence by their own government in the western hemisphere, but many, many more threatened by violence by a gang. I think their was a concerted effort by immigration attorneys to stretch this definition over the years wider and wider.
I mean, that text could say 'government persecution' and it doesn't. I think the reason for that is that this international law was drafted as part of the post-second-world-war settlement, so they were looking back at the rise of Hilter and the Nazis to inform in part what they wanted to be covered or not.
In particular, they were looking at the 'sturmabteilung' or 'storm troopers' or 'brownshirts' who were the paramilitary wing of the Nazi party mainly in the 1920s-1930s, but specifically weren't associated with the German government at that time. For various reasons, the formal government either wasn't able or willing to protect people against the brownshirts.
Beyond that... it's the normal business of government and the courts for people to present their view as to how the law should be applied. Of course it's the normal business of immigration attorneys to represent their clients vigorously, and of course it's normal for anyone to want their rights interpreted in the most favourable light to them.
The most legitimate complaint might lie in the area of 'an immigration friendly government didn't vigorously defend such cases', for which I'm not without sympathy. But there's also always a remedy in terms of changing the law and/or pulling out of the relevant treaties.
That kind of depends on what they believe is a legitimate asylum claim. IMO asylum was created to help people fleeing from political or religious persecution. Most of the claims now are because gangs are threatening people. If that's true then go to the police. If the police don't help them reform them. I don't think having an incompetent government is grounds for asylum.
We probably agree it's for the system to judge the legitimacy of claims.
But the applicant is only exploiting a loophole or gaming the system if they don't believe they have a legitimate claim. It doesn't really matter whether or not the claim is actually legitimate. The legitimacy of their use of the system is only dependent on their belief. Otherwise its a genuine error on their part.
In a ridiculous example, let's say I'm allergic to oranges, and there are oranges and orange products everywhere in my country. And somehow I have the - genuinely held - belief that the US will offer me asylum for this. So I turn up and claim asylum. I'm not using a loophole or gaming the system. I'm just... horribly confused. And my claim should be processed and rejected. But it would be wrong to turn me away without properly processing my claim.
"Most of the claims now are because gangs are threatening people"
I find it truly hard to believe that's the case. Is that the stated reason for the majority of claims? If it is it's very likely bullshit. If you live in the worst neighborhood of Chicago or LA gangs likely "threaten you" to some extent, but very very people are actually direct targets of extortion or violence. It's the same in Mexico, El Salvador, etc. As far as I can tell, homicide rates in these countries are anti-correlated with asylum seekers.
Both widespread extortion (every business owner in this neighborhood has to pay a certain gang) and gang-enforced rules on where civilians can go exist on a significant scale in Central America in a way they don’t anywhere in the US.
Sure widespread extortion exists in much of central America. If you ran the numbers on people being extorted and matched them with asylum seekers, I doubt the two would match up in a reasonable way. But I don't agree these things are threats on the level of "X gang wants to kill me, though," let alone a threat that would fall into the narrower definition of persecution of asylum claims.
This is more like taxes. If you don't pay government taxes you'll eventually be physically hauled off to jail, but I don't consider the IRS to be threatening me. The small businesses paying extortion taxes are being forced to follow rules by a subset of their neighbors (often just by random semi-anonymous criminals and not always by organized gangs). These are only threats in the same way any governing body "threatens" it's citizens by enforcing rules and taxes. But living under a shitty government is not a basis for asylum or even really to describe yourself as threatened.
Also, forcefully conscripting 12 year olds into the gangs.
If you had waited a couple days to post this I could’ve sent you some polling we just did that backs up your argument. Not only is Biden correct on the merits, he’s spot on on the politics of the issue—particularly with Latino voters.
If you post this publicly, link it in a daily thread here.
The bipartisan electoral consensus of circa-2012 that every Hispanic voter in the US was a single-issue immigration dove was so profoundly incorrect and such a bizarre assumption the moment you thought about it at all.
Kind of the canary in the coal mine of "the groups" not reflecting the actual views of the demographics they purported to represent.
At least in Denver, there has been considerable tension between the recent Venezuelan migrants and the resident Mexican and Mexican-American folks. As the Venezuelan migrants get housecleaning, landscaping, construction work, etc., they really are taking jobs away from some Mexican and Salvadoran residents. (I'm trying really hard to use the right language here, so don't yell at me if I'm phrasing things wrong). Also, there is some resentment that the city and the earnest white ladies (note: I am an earnest white lady) bent over backward trying to keep the Venezuelan migrants housed and fed, when no one did that for earlier groups of migrants.
(And some resident Mexican-American Denverites also tried to help the Venezuelans, life is complicated, people are different, I'm trying not to make huge false generalizations while nevertheless conveying truthful information.)
As someone who is married to one of the "earnest white ladies" involved, I feel like this criticism rings hollow because the biggest defining characteristic of the Venezuelans' arrival was surely that there were literally hundreds of people (many of them families with small children -- which is how my wife was involved through our kids' school) being dumped daily in concentrated doses and with no further plan about where they would go/what they would do. AFAIA, Mexican and Central American immigrants to the Denver area historically: (a) arrived more in a continuous trickle, (b) typically came here with a plan about seeking work and/or connecting with friends or relatives already in the area, and (c) were typically adults without children accompanying them.
TL;DR: Venezuelans arrived overwhelmingly as refugees, vs. Mexicans and Central Americans who arrived primarily, if not overwhelmingly, as migrant workers.
Thanks for sharing that perspective. Always nice to have a bit of qualitative data to go with the quantitative. As the journalist that gave the keynote at YDN banquet said, it helps to "make the big small and the small big."
I'd be interested to know if you have any polling that breaks this down by red/blue/purple areas. I'm wondering if the progressive politicians who are biting back at Biden are in safe zones where the polling looks different. Is Warren representing Massachusetts voters when she pushes back, or is she just representing Massachusetts twitter?
We don't (because the sample size is ~1,000 people nationally) but we do have breakouts by party ID
What does that look like?
You'll have to wait and see!
I am not surprised.
The political conditions of Haiti and Venezuela (at least) mean that the entire populations of those countries have a plausible claim to asylum.
The whole asylum system is designed for individual dissidents, not for mass oppressed populations. We - the West as a whole, not just the US - were very fortunate that the Warsaw Pact deliberately chose to try to keep its oppressed populations inside their countries during the Cold War. If they'd just left the borders open, then a Western Europe of about nine countries would have been left to try to absorb millions of immigrants. We might have managed to do this, especially if the East Bloc had had a rule to not let people back in.
But we're now facing that situation: there are massive oppressed populations and their governments are entirely content for them all to leave. Millions of Syrians have left, and Assad doesn't want them back. Maduro isn't even trying to stop Venezuelans from leaving, and there's no way that the US can send them back to Venezuela (the US doesn't even try: it sends them back to Mexico, where they entered from). The Taliban is entirely content to drive people out; it doesn't need them to stay and be oppressed, if anyone slightly liberal-minded just leaves Afghanistan, then they'll be fine with that.
Of course, these are economic crises too, but that doesn't make them not political crises. The "solution" that most have come up with is to stop them at the border and make them the problem of the countries that neighbour the one with the crisis. So there are huge camps full of Syrians in Turkey. Turkey has no intention of assimilating them, it expects someone to take them off their hands eventually, but it's OK with being paid by European countries to keep the annual numbers down - maybe at some point they can go back to Syria, if not, there's a steady trickle into Europe, which is mostly enough to keep people relatively content and hopeful, rather than riotous.
I don't have an answer: there are more people legitimately fleeing things than the West can reasonably absorb. Imagine if China let the Uyghurs and the Tibetans and any other minority that wants out to just go instead of Sinicizing them all: There'd be a few tens of millions of people turning up in Uzbekistan and Nepal and no country is going voluntarily take a "fair share" that would be measured in the millions.
But we do need an answer, because at some point there's going to be a Ganges Delta flood, and someone's going to have to house a hundred million Bangladeshis.
Interesting parallels with the situation in Gaza/egypt.
"no country is going voluntarily take a 'fair share' that would be measured in the millions."
To get the USA to 1 bln Americans by 2100 requires adding 8.8 mln people on average each year, and with our birth rate those would all be immigrants. Assuming an exponential growth instead, immigration to the US would need to be 1.5% of the current population each year, or about 4.8 mln this year.
(Of course, 1 bln Americans is only consensus on this here blog.)
Add Cuba to the "doesn't care if they leave list." It's an interesting that these authoritarian regimes generally don't care if people flee, since it'll eventually lead to the demise of these countries solely due to demographics.
Hell, Cuba used to intentionally ship their most problematic citizens to Miami.
An excellent and under appreciated point!
One major problem in the contemporary left is a lack of seriousness or ignorance about history and the world. When every conflict is “genocide” and every person wishing to improve their lot by immigration becomes “asylum seeker” or “refugee”, when international law created in the aftermath of the Holocaust is trivialized to supposedly address every human hardship of any level and kind — at that point we are actually doing a terrible wrong to the extremely unfortunate people whom these laws were actually meant to protect.
Because there *are* today people whose life is in real, literal, danger and who *should* receive asylum. Biden’s decision is terrible for them and should infuriate all of us, but our fury should not be directed at Biden. It should be directed at the entire cynical political establishment which allows the conflation of real asylum seekers and regular migrants. The left is very much part of this awful dynamic and adds insult to injury by trivializing and flattening history and thereby rendering toothless the laws and principles it purports to defend.
The question "why are there more asylum claims in 2024 than in 1984?" seems to me to be part of a broader question. Relative to what differentials in living standards would seem to imply, why was there so little international migration in the past?
The British Empire had open internal borders. People living in what's now India, Nigeria, Kenya... were British citizens and legally entitled to move to London. But they mostly didn't.
Obviously Parliament would have changed the rules if people actually had started migrating in enormous numbers. But why did that never happen in the first place? Was it only transportation costs, or something else?
Transportation and communication. Different members of my family have moved country many times, and when we moved in the 1990s it was almost like we were moving to another planet, whereas now communication with someone in a different country is not all that different to someone living one neighbourhood over.
Hell, when my family moved to the other side of the country in 1989 we suddenly had much less contact with other family members because of the cost of long-distance phone calls.
There are a lot of network effects in migration. People are more likely to consider migrating if somebody else that they know did it, and often rely on people who migrated a bit earlier than them for help finding work and settling in to a new country. If you look at say, migration patterns in late 19th century Lebanon or Sicily or Guandong, it’s clear that having a recent emigrant made the people in a given village more likely to emigrate.
In recent years, a few trends have accelerated network-building. Urbanization in poor countries, a huge worldwide increase in literacy, and the rapid spread of the internet have made the sort of social networks that facilitate migration in poorer countries much larger. (And there’s also more of a critical mass of other migrants in host countries.)
Yes. Additionally, all of these have allowed the creation of black-market businesses that can guide migrants north. They're likely much more efficient and effective than the ad hoc "mom and pop" guides that must have existed 40 years ago.
I think people just didn't think about it.
Svalbard was open to all refugees in WW2 and in every conflict since 1926 but no one goes there. It is not a loophole anyone has spotted. There seems to be an activation energy barrier where no one uses a loophole that exists until people know about it.
Why is Svalbard specifically open to refugees?
The Svalbard Treaty of 1920 that came into force in 1925.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svalbard_Treaty
https://en.m.wikisource.org/wiki/Spitsbergen_Treaty
Thanks!
Svalbard is open to everyone but you’ve still got to be able to get there (which is almost entirely only via the Schengen zone) and find work of some kind when you do — Norwegian welfare is only available to citizens and those working for Norwegian companies. Most people, let alone refugees, aren’t both independently wealthy enough to move there and still desperate enough to actually do it.
It is impractical, but a flight from Istanbul to Oslo and then Svalbard costs £423 ($539) much less than refugees regularly pay to a people trafficker or a regular flight to Mexico.
The Turks have no problem with fairly draconian measures to enforce migration through and into Turkey. When I was there it was very common for buses to be stopped so everyone's papers could be examined and people were often pulled off and detained for questioning. I think it would be very hard to get onto a plane at Ataturk without a proper entry visa into Turkey in the first place.
Well, yeah, because the EU literally pays Turkey to do that (among other things).
https://apnews.com/article/eu-turkey-migrants-deal-education-auditors-69a817f320ec2181d5429dc05c8f2df6
My experience predates that deal by several years. They didn't need any encouragement to have a very strict security state, between PKK attacks and historically high amounts of illicit travel/smuggling because of geography. Istanbul is the bellybutton of the world, after all.
1) Transportation costs, which are partially about network effects and "the business of migration". You could probably hire someone to guide you from El Salvador through Mexico on the top of trains 40 years ago, but those ad hoc guides are nowhere as efficient as the cartel-funded coyote businesses that operate today.
2) Communication and exposure feels like a plausible theory. 40 years ago you might never see your parents again. Today you can call or zoon them.
People don't like outsiders and if you moved to where you were an outsider you would likely be treated poorly. This usually only made sense if conditions in you home got absolutely terrible.
Or if you could mitigate it by moving to an ethnic enclave in your new country. There's a reason why so many cities have a Chinatown.
Very true. Enclaves both provided protection against limited attacks, but also created potential ghettos which could lead to pogroms and such.
Take a look at England’s current 2024 Euro squad and you”ll see the “mostly they didn’t” is not actually true. In fact in recent times, in an irony of ironies, immigration from the Caribbean, India and Africa increased as a result of Brexit.
The fact that Brexit happened at all is an argument to lefties that you can’t just ignore immigration restrictionists. It’s a close cousin of Frum’s aphorism that people will turn to fascism to control the borders if you as a liberal (classical or lefty) don’t. In the UK case, the population is quite willing to commit economic sabotage if you don’t get immigration under control.
I bring up the Euro 2024 England squad to also point out a vivid example of why finding a controlled way to welcome immigrants is very very good thing. England is a co-favorite to win the tourney and there is no way they are co-favorites without players who are children or grand children of said migrants*
*South London is now rivaling parts of Paris and Sao Paulo as one of the best sources of soccer talent on the planet. Beyond played playing for England there are others who actually pledged their allegiance to other countries (as a recent in the news example; see Ademala Lookman). Now go see how diverse this area is and it’s striking how much immigration to England has led to an explosion in talent.
Yes but my question was: why is there lots of immigration now, when it's legally restricted, but hardly any in the past when it wasn't?
I'm thinking the reason might be that poor people needed some kind of organized transportation scheme to migrate before modern communications made them more knowledgeable about the rest of the world.
Indians did move in large numbers to Trinidad and Malaya to do agricultural work, but I think those were programs arranged by the British government to settle what were then underpopulated regions. And the first big wave of Caribbean immigration to Britain itself was the Windrush program in the late 1940s, which was also state-sponsored.
There's a quote from George Bernard Shaw that I can't seem to find: I think probably from one of the long-winded prefaces to his plays. He was mocking free-market economists who argued for mass Chinese immigration to South Africa on the grounds of comparative advantage, and pointed out that by that logic there should be mass Chinese immigration to downtown London.
There was mass immigration to the UK from India and Pakistan and the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s which led to restrictions, starting with the Commonwealth Immigrants Act in 1962.
Now, if you want to ask why there wasn't much immigration before Windrush in 1948, I'd point you at the Second World War, and before that at the Great Depression - and remind you that mass immigration to the United States was absolutely permitted from many places until 1924 - and that far more immigrants went to the US than to anywhere in Europe for as long as they were permitted to do so.
True, but the US didn't permit immigration from Asia or Africa. The UK theoretically did permit it from their colonies in those continents.
I get that most of the explanation is transport costs+credit constraints+lack of information, but it still seems as if people might have started moving on a large scale in Victorian or Edwardian times.
Totally unrelatedly: I also wonder why nobody in Britain smoked weed in those eras, even though it was totally legal and grew all over India. Maybe the general level of social conformism in the past was just higher than we can easily think ourselves into.
"Maybe the general level of social conformism in the past was just higher than we can easily think ourselves into."
Yes, that is a huge thing that people today really have a hard time grasping when talking about history, along with the closely related concepts of the vast majority of historical populations having sincere religious beliefs and also not believing that "change" (or change within their lifetimes) was possible.
The US absolutely did permit immigration from Asia and Africa until the 1880s, and it's only China that was really restricted until WWI. There's a reason that there was a Chinese Exclusion Act, because it was allowed and there were lots of Chinese immigrants before that. There was a lot of Japanese immigration until the 1924 exclusion act.
Europeans, of course, did do mass immigration in the Victorian era. But it's worth noting how marginal this was on a cost basis. Steerage accomodation on a liner across the Atlantic was something that families would save up for over several years. I suspect that most of Africa was too poor (or, at least, too cash-poor) to afford that in mass numbers. Of course, there was a lot of immigration from China to Europe, if not quite "mass" immigration; there's a reason that most "Chinatowns" date from this era.
Cannabis was mostly used in Britain in the Victorian era for hemp rope (cannabis grown outdoors in the UK has very little THC), so cannabis to be smoked had to be imported from hotter climes, which would make it costly, especially as it had to be converted to resin before being loaded on a boat in India (and the traditional Indian process for making charas, ie hashish, is both slow and manpower-intensive). It was used for its pain-killing properties (most famously by Queen Victoria for menstrual cramps). Leaf and flower cannabis wasn't an option in Britain apart from some very small-scale imports from Morocco - it doesn't preserve well on the months-long voyage from India to Britain.
As an aside, the only way to smoke resin is to mix it with tobacco - the resin alone doesn't burn very well - and it will clog a tobacco pipe (pipes were the predominant way to smoke until mass manufacture of cigarettes in the 1880s), so other means of consumption (usually a tincture, ie dissolved in alcohol) were more usual in Victorian times.
Victorians were not shy about taking other drugs, though - Sherlock Holmes is a cocaine addict, and that wasn't thought particularly unusual or untowards in the story. Plenty of people took cocaine or laudanum (an opiate) for pleasure.
You are correct! I was thinking the national quotas came in with Asian exclusion, but they were part of the 1924 Act.
(ChatGPT tells me this is in the preface to "Captain Brassbound's Conversion", one of his "Three Plays for Puritans". If anyone has it on Kindle, the full quote should be there)
The play is freely available on WikiSource (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Captain_Brassbound%27s_Conversion/), and does not appear to have a preface. The play does bear an introductory note, but nothing about China or Chinese immigration.
In general, I wouldn't use ChatGPT for these sorts of "locate a particular source" type of questions; it's too likely to hallucinate.
That's possible. (I couldn't find the reference in Project Gutenberg's edition of "Three Plays For Puritans" either.) But I don't think •I'm• hallucinating... it was definitely in one of the prefaces, which I read back in high school
Found it. It's the preface to _John Bull's Other Island_ (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/John_Bull%27s_Other_Island/Preface_to_Home_Rule_Editions_of_1912).
" and there is no way they are co-favorites without players who are children or grand children of said migrants"
Just as far as sports go, I think this sort of thing is taken too much for granted. A lot of top star development is about investment and training. Remove one current star and his replacement in an alternate universe might not be the much worse, if at all. It's like the Malcolm Gladwell Hockey birthday-thing. The kids with the winter birthdays aren't all the most naturally gifted, to a large degree they were just developed more.
The political problem is that Biden specifically and Democrats generally ignored or downplayed this loophole problem for the last couple of years despite the clear evidence most Americans thought it was a major issue. The bipartisan bill that Trump had the GoP kill was not because Democrats had a big desire to deal with this problem, but because it was the price Congressional Republicans in the Senate demanded to vote for Ukraine funding.
Now this EO comes just a few months before the election and it looks to many people like a political strategy to defuse an issue that is hurting Biden politically. I fear it is too little too late and that Biden won’t get much benefit from it, especially since it’s likely going to get tied up in the courts and not actually going to go into effect before the election.
This is so much of my frustration with Biden. Trying to stay in the middle of the Democratic party, too often splitting the baby and satisfying no one (like with Israel/Hamas) and finally taking a stand after a ton of water has already gone under the bridge. He should have done this long before now, or done something to at least give the appearance of taking the loophole issue more seriously.
The other thing to remember about international law is it requires only one thing- that we not send back a legitimate asylee to face persecution. International law says nothing about detention or burden of proof or work permits or parole or any other aspect of procedure.
Nor does international law say that you have the right to file a PHONY asylum application. That's like saying the right of access to the courts grants you the right to file a frivolous lawsuit, or that you have the right to apply for social security benefits if you don't qualify for them and hope they make a mistake and give them to you.
Asylum is truly important. But for asylum to work it can't be overwhelmed with phony claims. And if phony claimants can't apply their rights aren't being violated. We want them to stop applying so asylum is available for legitimate asylees.
Right, but the problem now is that there are so many cases that the backlog is up to something like four years. We absolutely do throw out phony asylum cases, but they are coming in faster than we can figure out which ones are phony.
We throw them out, but there's a couple of things about that:
1. When we throw one out after years, does the person actually get deported? My impression is some do but that others do not, and obviously the notion that this will get the migrant across the border where they can at least work in the underground economy indefinitely even if the asylum claim fails is part of the incentive.
2. Even if someone will leave once the asylum claim is thrown out, the incentive to come here, get a work permit, and work for American wages for years while the case is pending is itself a massive immigration benefit. It's basically jumping in front of everyone who is applying for temporary work visas.
So that's why unless you add enormously to the amount of immigration judges and detention facilities, you basically have to do something like what Biden did. Because the process itself is what creates the incentive to come and file a phony application.
I know this is not popular but the correct position is to build a wall around our welfare state, not around our country.
So that we can have 500+ million poor people, some of them radical Islamists, living in camps/tents amongst us? That is what an open borders + no welfare leads to. A Mad Max society where crime and violence would reach levels previously unheard of… and possibly a violent overthrow of our entire political regime.
The movie Elysium was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.
That movie was supposed to be a lot of things. All it actually was was terrible.
I thought it was a warning that before you make a movie you should test your screenwriters for a high school understanding of economics first.
I think that Alan could, quite reasonably, riposte that if you restrict welfare benefits, the only economic incentive for migration will be labor income, so a: fewer people will be interested in making the trip in the first place and b: the people who do make the journey and then stick around will be doing so because they’re gainfully employed (which also tends to help people integrate into their host society).
I think that there are some drawbacks to that scenario (labor markets getting tougher/more competitive for low human capital local workers; “gold rush” type situations where a localized economic boom causes migration to outstrip a society’s physical capacity to build housing and infrastructure), but I don’t think the scenario that you’re positing here actually makes all that much sense (and reflects a generally irrational paranoia about immigration which is disappointingly common among Europeans.)
I think you drastically overestimate how many immigrants expect to get any kind of public assistance. This would do absolutely nothing to prevent illegal immigration. They are willing to come here and work for peanuts because that is better than they had in their home country. They don't come here because they heard they can live off welfare.
My preferred outcome is that basically anyone who believes in western liberal values and wants to learn english and become a hardworking American can basically come here. So that rules out those who want to live off the dole as well as ruling out radical islamists.
This depends a lot on both the legal status that migrants are seeking and the range of destination countries that they’re considering.
When I was doing research in Beirut, I ran into a fair number of people who had fled from Syria because of the civil war there. A lot of them were actively seeking to get officially resettled in countries with more capacity to absorb refugees long-term than Lebanon did. The guys who I talked to were generally pretty hardworking or entrepreneurial, and would definitely like to work in whatever country they moved to, but they expressed a pretty strong preference for going to Canada or Germany over the US because those countries had stronger safety nets that were more open to refugees.
I don’t think that more than a small fraction of international migrants are wannabe spongers (most people like that don’t have the initiative to do something like moving to a different country), but welfare availability does factor into their decisions.
One of Trump's actions that I agree with was limiting welfare-state benefits to citizens. I'm not even sure why legal non-citizen residents (green-card holders) should have access to the full range of welfare-state benefits.
We place no limitation on who in our community can benefit from government programs. You don't have to have "paid in" or be a good person or not be lazy. But you do have to be a full member of our community, and that means to me you need to have been born a citizen or jump through the hoops (and waited long enough) to become one. (DREAMers are the only exception that seems reasonable to me.)
Jumping through the Green Card hoops and also waiting 5-10 years is how Green Card holders get access to things like Medicare, Medicaid, and SSI benefits.
If you think they should be restricted further then that's a conversation that could/should be had, but I wanted to make sure you knew that there were in fact time-based restrictions on eligibility for some of this stuff. Seems to me like they get some rights and some responsibilities.
No, I know that getting a green card isn't easy or quick, and maybe (though I don't have an opinion on this) it should be easier or quicker.
But I do think that we have a name for full community membership, and that is "citizenship." When you become a citizen, you've thrown your lot in with the rest of the citizens in the US, and you become fully entitled to everything the US has to offer. To be naturalized as a citizen, you may have to demonstrate some English language proficiency, some knowledge of US history and civic institutions: you have to demonstrate some ability and willingness to join and participate in the community, and that is a good thing. I don't think you have to do those things to get a green card.
Creating groups of people living in the country who don't feel a part of the country is how Europeis having it's current issues with assimilation.
What about public schools? What about drivers licenses? What about unemployment insurance? These things seem to me like ones that should have broader criteria than citizenship. I think that schooling and drivers licenses make sense to have available for anyone of the right age regardless of other status (even illegal immigrants) precisely because the point is to keep kids off the streets and ensure that people operating motor vehicles have the right skills. Unemployment insurance seems like something that anyone with a job that pays payroll taxes should have access to.
Probably other aspects of the welfare state naturally have other restrictions. But it’s not clear that *citizenship* per se should be the test for *all* of them.
"I'm not even sure why legal non-citizen residents (green-card holders) should have access to the full range of welfare-state benefits."
Many of these don't exist solely out of compassion for the recipients; they also remove negative externalities from public spaces. It's better for (say) a non-citizen resident to live in public housing without disturbing their citizen neighbors than for them to sleep on park benches, and ruin the park for citizens.
We already have a very strong wall around our welfare state when it comes to people who immigrated illegally.
From the National Immigration Law Center: "the law prohibits not-qualified immigrants from enrolling in most “federal public benefit programs.” Federal public benefits include ... HHS programs includ(ing) Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), TANF, Foster Care, Adoption Assistance, the Child Care and Development Fund, and the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program.
Nobody is coming here for the free lunch.
Allan didn't particularly mention illegal immigrants.
Moreover, even with regard to illegal immigrants, it really depends on where they live. In NYC, they're guaranteed a (not very nice) place to live, for instance. This is unsustainable.
"In NYC, they're guaranteed a (not very nice) place to live, for instance. This is unsustainable."
Legalize SROs!
Nope. It's not just about the money. It's about the culture and assimilation. Immigration levels need to be low enough to allow time for assimilation.
If people want to come here and learn English and work hard and watch football, that sounds pretty American to me. And I'd say those who do this have more of that American spirit than those who are lucky enough to be born here but still blame their lot on others.
Again it's about immigration levels. There's a big difference between letting in 1 million people, 10 million people, or 100 million people.
Assimilation takes time. Immigration levels that are too high creates lots of disruption. Moreover, as we've clearly seen you are going to get huge pushback and then probably end up with immigration just cut off (see past US immigration policy swings)
Many second-generation immigrants assimilate, through intermarriage if nothing else. Almost all third-generation immigrants do. We are very far from assimilatory limits; American culture is (luckily for us!) something of a universal solvent.
See https://scholars-stage.org/how-many-generations-until-immigrants-think-like-the-rest-of-us/, https://scholars-stage.org/against-patrick-deneen-ii/, and (to a lesser extent) https://scholars-stage.org/america-makes-you-violent/.
It's a problem, politically, but something that I do think the pro-immigration left needs to have an honest conversation about is whether they actually want immigration policy to be "whoever shows up at the southern border gets admitted permanently into the country" or if they want immigration policy that will meet the needs of the country.
A fundamental tactical error that I feel like the left has made is to start treating immigration as a humanitarian issue. It's pretty obvious that a lot of the left does like the idea of mass immigration (and I'm not saying I disagree with it as a concept) and it's mostly about figuring out how to sell it to voters, but this is about the worst possible way to go about it.
(The only worse way would be to spend more time going on about "climate refugees," which is beginning to feel like a way to shoehorn mass immigration into the Omnicause.)
Any time a Democrat generating media of any kind (interview, statement) that has to mention Trump should always say "Convicted felon and (rapist/racist) Donald Trump" as the preamble. Over and over. Set the tone.
Personally, I think ever since January 6th he should have been referred to as “the Traitor Donald Trump”.
Another online community that I moderate has started to use and self enforce among themselves the acronym CFDT.
He'll get more votes off the fence that way.
If Trump wasn’t the alternative, Biden wouldn’t deserve to be re-elected based on the issue of immigration alone. Sitting by and allowing this problem to build up for 3 years before taking it seriously is one of the worst policy failures in the last 24 years.
Totally. But Trump is the alternative.
I'm, let's say... deeply suspicious that Biden does not in fact have the legal authority to do this. These sorts of executive orders are generally illegitimate and it's my understanding that Biden himself has repeatedly disavowed the power to do precisely this. Frankly, that shit is impeachable, Biden, like Obama and GWB before him, should be removed for exercising powers in violation of his own stated understanding of his oath under the Constitution. More importantly this is the sort of thing that gets locked up in the courts for years and does vast harm to our institutions.
Then there's the politics, where Biden has lost on this just catastrophically. If he is willing to do this now it's incredibly discrediting that he didn't do it years ago. He's not gonna convince anyone that he is serious about the issue at this point. Just such a clusterfuck. So much straight up gaslighting on the issue, followed by this rabbit pull isn't helping him with anyone at all.
I don't think it's wrong to pass something to find out if it's legal. Ultimately, the Supreme Court will decide if the order holds up, so what's wrong with Biden just giving it the ol college try?
IMHO it's a violation of your oath of office to do something you think is illegal/unconstitutional.
He swore an oath to defend the constitution, not see what he can try and get away with
I agree with your sentiment but if it were that easy to tell we wouldn't need the Supreme Court - and sometimes they don't even agree. If you and the WH lawyers think that it has reasonable arguments for constitutionality, pass it and see what the court says.
If you personally feel something is unconstitutional then pushing it is a violation of your oath of office
I agree, but that's not what I interpreted feels lNels as suggesting.
We should allow advisory opinions
I agree, although unfortunately I suspect SCOTUS would strike down legislation authorizing that as unconstitutional (since the "case or controversy" requirement is a constitutional requirement) in a cynical effort to limit their workload.
Elected officials have an individual duty to the constitution. They don't merely swear to abide by the SCOTUS.
Biden tried hard to get legislation passed. The republicans killed it. It is not nefarious to say well, we couldn't get everything we wanted, let's see what limited things we can do within our own branch's powers. The Executive has lots of powers it doesn't exercise, and virtually everyone agrees that full legislation is the best form of governing, but that doesn't make less than ideal methods like EXEC orders de facto illegitimate.
No he didn't. Trying hard would have been three years ago.
Moreover, Republicans did pass an immigration bill from the house HR2. The senate could take that up and pass it at any time, and Biden could sign it.