We need immigration, but not too much. We need some people more, others less. Can we create a Reserve Bank of Labor that reviews labor supply and demand every quarter and sets quotas that reflect what we need?
In the past, the point was made that International Law provides a right to claim asylum in the first country of arrival. I’ve read nothing that said it was changed. Mexico is the first country. Doesn’t this preclude a claim that International Law covers anyone other than Mexicans claiming asylum at our southern border? After all, that’s what Canada does respecting claimants passing through the US.
It is rich to disparage Trump for having a political agenda respecting the failed immigration compromise. Biden and company have reveled in shouts of “racist” Republicans, as done in this essay. I suggest that the mechanism that led to the failed bill had less to do with any principle other than the formerly intransigent Democrats finding that the immigration stick long used to beat on Trump was now hitting them.
I thought the history of asylum was based on offering refuge for political dissidents. I remember a big push in the past by advocacy groups to push the government to grant asylum to former supporters of Allende in Chile who opposed the dictator Pinochet. The laws governing asylum had little to do with immigration. They are really two separate issues.
Never ask a man his salary a woman her age or an asylum claimant why he is returning on vacation to the country he supposedly had to flee.
Liberals have a knack for taking sensible humanitarian policies like asylum and allowing them to be stretched to crazy extremes. And sorry, the exploitation of the asylum "loophole" has been going on for years.
Only slightly related - I too support more immigration, both skilled and unskilled. But, based on my hiring interviews from the past few years in data science/analytics, we're starting to get the Indian and Korean equivalents of the kids who had 2.9 GPAs in general business at Penn State. These kids are definitely competing with medicore-+ American kids for jobs and dragging down salaries in tech.
I’m not convinced that using incarceration rates as a proxy for crime is accurate. Illegal immigrants have significantly more to lose by succumbing to arrest and being at the mercy of the legal system. Therefore they may put much more effort into not being arrested and incarcerated.
I have heard this talking point a lot. I would love for someone to do a piece that deep dives into the data.
What I find maddening about the Progressive stance on this issue is what I find to maddening about Progressives...period. That is that they swamp the rest of their country with their "good and righteous" ideas, producing a backlash that helps Trump win. They would rather be "right" than win.
So, they are going to be losing. And people are backtracking from Progressive ideas all over the country. But that doesn't deter them.
Immigration is an example of this. Advocating more immigrants doesn't hurt Progressives one bit. Only hurts people who work with their backs. But Progressives continue with their holier-than-thou attitudes.
So, what to do about Immigration? My answer: There is no answer. We can't have open borders...while at the same time I would hope that if it was my family living in, say, Cuba, that I would have the guts to try to come here.
Matthew states: "People come here not because they are bad people or criminals, but for the same reason people have always come here — economic opportunity." That's certainly what people need, but the primary motivation comes from looking their kids in their faces.
(I know this will get nowhere, but I wish our leaders would all sit down and read the words of Jesus before they started in with their shouting matches. If we want to be a Christian nation, then read the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' parables, etc.
Asking a question in good faith here so please don't pile on:
My assumption is that a lot of what is driving the frustration with the southern border is the perception of chaos, and furthermore the extension of that chaos to communities away from the border where asylum claimants are sleeping in police stations, hotel rooms, etc. I agree with Matt's contention that allowing these asylum claimants to work legally would likely result in a surge of people to the border. That being said, how much would allowing them to work legally alleviate the chaos? Would it alleviate it at all or would the situation go FUBAR? Curious on the perceived short-term and long-term impacts.
Further context around the question: I agree with Matt's take here on the merits but I am curious what people think the result would be of an actual open border? I think the short-term politics would be suicidal but I'm curious what the actual impact on the "chaos metrics" would be. Thanks!
At that point it just becomes a temporary work visa. I imagine there'd be a pretty big surge if you took away the uncertainty of finding a job, at least as long as the job market remains good.
This post leaves me a bit confused by which version of "the right thing" Matt thinks Joe Biden is doing:
(1) The optimal policy that dictator-for-life Matt would choose
(2) The best policy that can be achieved by the legal powers Joe Biden possesses
(3) The best policy that can be achieved given political constraints and the need to appease the median voter
(4) Coalition partners' bashing this is bad
Seems like a mix of 2, 3, & 4 for Matt.
This kind of post would go down easier if went more like, "Between friends here, we know that the median voter is an idiot shithead who doesn't care about the well-being of people born on the other side of a line on the map, but we have to win elections in order to not get something worse, so this is the best we can do. Meanwhile, read One Billion Americans for what I think we should really do."
I think that's an extremely uncharitable view of a voter who might want less of some forms of immigration. There's a lot of things that I wish would happen for less fortunate people. You and probably both wish everyone in America was housed for example, but you're unlikely to be housing a homeless person in your spare room, walk-in closet or garage, for example.
And I wouldn't vote for a policy that forced people to take in homeless people, in part because there's only so much we can do to solve homelessness and in part because there are better policies, like abundant housing.
Likewise, I'd like El Salvadorian migrants to do well. But the US can't fix the problems of every impoverished would-be migrant worldwide, and there are much better ways to do so than a chaotic asylum system. The median voter probably agrees and is not a shithead for thinking so, especially when many median voters are having trouble finding housing themselves.
This is all fine, but I would have liked to see some acknowledgement that most of the asylum-seekers exploiting this loophole don't actually qualify for asylum as originally intended. The number of places in the world where you are likely to be subject to political repression or violence is pretty small and well known (the State Department makes list of these things), and most asylum-seekers aren't from one of those. They know it, and their lawyers certainly know it. It feels like some sort of expedited process should be possible for asylum-seekers which we know aren't valid on the face. I'm all on board with "One Billion Americans". I'm not so thrilled about being lied to and expected to believe it.
"Real world" acknowledgements can be philosophically useful here. If we manage expectations based on What Always Happens Anyway, we can dispense with being shocked, shocked all the time.
1. People will always find loopholes. If the government is giving away "free" money, then people will always find creatively fraudulent ways to get it. The same holds true of your borders if you live in the very most attractive country in the world. We built it, and here they come. As far as I'm concerned, outrage over people coming in illegally (or ghost riding on bus accidents, or whatever) only indicates a woeful lack of appreciation and thankfulness for what most of us enjoy through the sheer luck of our birth.
2. We can never admit everyone who needs or deserves to make a life here (in other words, we can't save the world.) Everyone who ends up with a green card is, in a way, the winner in the lottery of life. All we can do is try to make the lottery a bit more fair. Giving priority to asylees whose lives are genuinely at risk is one way to do this, but it's not our responsibility or within our capacity to Save Them All. In fact, as Matt and others point out, the attempt to do so has negative consequences that affect or even negate "the greater good for the greater number."
Not sure why this is so hard on both the right and the left. For some reason our culture maintains deep habits of denial when it comes to simply acknowledging basic human nature and moving on from there. Maybe we're afraid of being cold-hearted bureaucrats by trying to balance compassion with expediency. Or maybe we haven't come to terms with the fact that life is nasty, brutish and short for many. There will always be heartbreaking stories. The stories are great motivation for taking action, but they shouldn't get in the way of making whatever we do as effective as possible.
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.)
I've never understood the nature of the immigration debate in this country. You would expect there to be disagreement between pro-immigration and restrictionist sides like there is in every country but it's only really in America that there's a controversy over whether or not the government should enforce existing immigration laws.
I think we should make it easier to apply to live and work here for people who want to because the country benefits economically and culturally from immigration. Trump thinks there are too many foreign born people here and we should restrict the number of legal immigrants. That should be the ground that the debate takes place on. Democrats could win that argument! But believing that we should just ignore existing immigration rules and let people enter the country without authorization and live and work here forever because 'no human is illegal' is a crazy and deeply unpopular position.
We need immigration, but not too much. We need some people more, others less. Can we create a Reserve Bank of Labor that reviews labor supply and demand every quarter and sets quotas that reflect what we need?
Rightists way overestimate when Rump is lying to them, vs lying to everyone else on their behalf. Winning!
In the past, the point was made that International Law provides a right to claim asylum in the first country of arrival. I’ve read nothing that said it was changed. Mexico is the first country. Doesn’t this preclude a claim that International Law covers anyone other than Mexicans claiming asylum at our southern border? After all, that’s what Canada does respecting claimants passing through the US.
It is rich to disparage Trump for having a political agenda respecting the failed immigration compromise. Biden and company have reveled in shouts of “racist” Republicans, as done in this essay. I suggest that the mechanism that led to the failed bill had less to do with any principle other than the formerly intransigent Democrats finding that the immigration stick long used to beat on Trump was now hitting them.
I thought the history of asylum was based on offering refuge for political dissidents. I remember a big push in the past by advocacy groups to push the government to grant asylum to former supporters of Allende in Chile who opposed the dictator Pinochet. The laws governing asylum had little to do with immigration. They are really two separate issues.
Never ask a man his salary a woman her age or an asylum claimant why he is returning on vacation to the country he supposedly had to flee.
Liberals have a knack for taking sensible humanitarian policies like asylum and allowing them to be stretched to crazy extremes. And sorry, the exploitation of the asylum "loophole" has been going on for years.
Only slightly related - I too support more immigration, both skilled and unskilled. But, based on my hiring interviews from the past few years in data science/analytics, we're starting to get the Indian and Korean equivalents of the kids who had 2.9 GPAs in general business at Penn State. These kids are definitely competing with medicore-+ American kids for jobs and dragging down salaries in tech.
Tech is an industry that can handle some salary competition, though.
“ the kids who had 2.9 GPAs in general business at Penn State”
Hey hey hey I resemble that remark! We can keep the personal attacks to a minimum.
I’m not convinced that using incarceration rates as a proxy for crime is accurate. Illegal immigrants have significantly more to lose by succumbing to arrest and being at the mercy of the legal system. Therefore they may put much more effort into not being arrested and incarcerated.
I have heard this talking point a lot. I would love for someone to do a piece that deep dives into the data.
Ditto for victims and witnesses being unwilling to talk to police. Lack of convictions is not an indicator of lack of crime.
What I find maddening about the Progressive stance on this issue is what I find to maddening about Progressives...period. That is that they swamp the rest of their country with their "good and righteous" ideas, producing a backlash that helps Trump win. They would rather be "right" than win.
So, they are going to be losing. And people are backtracking from Progressive ideas all over the country. But that doesn't deter them.
Immigration is an example of this. Advocating more immigrants doesn't hurt Progressives one bit. Only hurts people who work with their backs. But Progressives continue with their holier-than-thou attitudes.
So, what to do about Immigration? My answer: There is no answer. We can't have open borders...while at the same time I would hope that if it was my family living in, say, Cuba, that I would have the guts to try to come here.
Matthew states: "People come here not because they are bad people or criminals, but for the same reason people have always come here — economic opportunity." That's certainly what people need, but the primary motivation comes from looking their kids in their faces.
(I know this will get nowhere, but I wish our leaders would all sit down and read the words of Jesus before they started in with their shouting matches. If we want to be a Christian nation, then read the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus' parables, etc.
Asking a question in good faith here so please don't pile on:
My assumption is that a lot of what is driving the frustration with the southern border is the perception of chaos, and furthermore the extension of that chaos to communities away from the border where asylum claimants are sleeping in police stations, hotel rooms, etc. I agree with Matt's contention that allowing these asylum claimants to work legally would likely result in a surge of people to the border. That being said, how much would allowing them to work legally alleviate the chaos? Would it alleviate it at all or would the situation go FUBAR? Curious on the perceived short-term and long-term impacts.
Further context around the question: I agree with Matt's take here on the merits but I am curious what people think the result would be of an actual open border? I think the short-term politics would be suicidal but I'm curious what the actual impact on the "chaos metrics" would be. Thanks!
At that point it just becomes a temporary work visa. I imagine there'd be a pretty big surge if you took away the uncertainty of finding a job, at least as long as the job market remains good.
This post leaves me a bit confused by which version of "the right thing" Matt thinks Joe Biden is doing:
(1) The optimal policy that dictator-for-life Matt would choose
(2) The best policy that can be achieved by the legal powers Joe Biden possesses
(3) The best policy that can be achieved given political constraints and the need to appease the median voter
(4) Coalition partners' bashing this is bad
Seems like a mix of 2, 3, & 4 for Matt.
This kind of post would go down easier if went more like, "Between friends here, we know that the median voter is an idiot shithead who doesn't care about the well-being of people born on the other side of a line on the map, but we have to win elections in order to not get something worse, so this is the best we can do. Meanwhile, read One Billion Americans for what I think we should really do."
I think that's an extremely uncharitable view of a voter who might want less of some forms of immigration. There's a lot of things that I wish would happen for less fortunate people. You and probably both wish everyone in America was housed for example, but you're unlikely to be housing a homeless person in your spare room, walk-in closet or garage, for example.
And I wouldn't vote for a policy that forced people to take in homeless people, in part because there's only so much we can do to solve homelessness and in part because there are better policies, like abundant housing.
Likewise, I'd like El Salvadorian migrants to do well. But the US can't fix the problems of every impoverished would-be migrant worldwide, and there are much better ways to do so than a chaotic asylum system. The median voter probably agrees and is not a shithead for thinking so, especially when many median voters are having trouble finding housing themselves.
This is all fine, but I would have liked to see some acknowledgement that most of the asylum-seekers exploiting this loophole don't actually qualify for asylum as originally intended. The number of places in the world where you are likely to be subject to political repression or violence is pretty small and well known (the State Department makes list of these things), and most asylum-seekers aren't from one of those. They know it, and their lawyers certainly know it. It feels like some sort of expedited process should be possible for asylum-seekers which we know aren't valid on the face. I'm all on board with "One Billion Americans". I'm not so thrilled about being lied to and expected to believe it.
Here’s a puzzle. How can it be the case that:
1. Consigning people to remain under other-than-Western governance violates their human rights
2. Expanding the scope of Western governance to more people and territory is also one of the most morally abhorrent things we’ve ever done
2 didn't really happen, it was just a cover for exploitation which make 1 true.
That's what I think the response would be
"Real world" acknowledgements can be philosophically useful here. If we manage expectations based on What Always Happens Anyway, we can dispense with being shocked, shocked all the time.
1. People will always find loopholes. If the government is giving away "free" money, then people will always find creatively fraudulent ways to get it. The same holds true of your borders if you live in the very most attractive country in the world. We built it, and here they come. As far as I'm concerned, outrage over people coming in illegally (or ghost riding on bus accidents, or whatever) only indicates a woeful lack of appreciation and thankfulness for what most of us enjoy through the sheer luck of our birth.
2. We can never admit everyone who needs or deserves to make a life here (in other words, we can't save the world.) Everyone who ends up with a green card is, in a way, the winner in the lottery of life. All we can do is try to make the lottery a bit more fair. Giving priority to asylees whose lives are genuinely at risk is one way to do this, but it's not our responsibility or within our capacity to Save Them All. In fact, as Matt and others point out, the attempt to do so has negative consequences that affect or even negate "the greater good for the greater number."
Not sure why this is so hard on both the right and the left. For some reason our culture maintains deep habits of denial when it comes to simply acknowledging basic human nature and moving on from there. Maybe we're afraid of being cold-hearted bureaucrats by trying to balance compassion with expediency. Or maybe we haven't come to terms with the fact that life is nasty, brutish and short for many. There will always be heartbreaking stories. The stories are great motivation for taking action, but they shouldn't get in the way of making whatever we do as effective as possible.
Republicans in the house already passed an immigration bill HR 2 that democrats in the senate could take up and pass at any time.
They refuse to do so.
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.)
I've never understood the nature of the immigration debate in this country. You would expect there to be disagreement between pro-immigration and restrictionist sides like there is in every country but it's only really in America that there's a controversy over whether or not the government should enforce existing immigration laws.
I think we should make it easier to apply to live and work here for people who want to because the country benefits economically and culturally from immigration. Trump thinks there are too many foreign born people here and we should restrict the number of legal immigrants. That should be the ground that the debate takes place on. Democrats could win that argument! But believing that we should just ignore existing immigration rules and let people enter the country without authorization and live and work here forever because 'no human is illegal' is a crazy and deeply unpopular position.