You know which senator gets the immigration issue? My senator Coal Joe Manchin. Or as he says "WV needs the immigration - that is where our doctors and specialists come from"
I may not always love him but he crushes that Wins-Above-Replacement like Shohei Ohtani
Notably, this is why the immigration consensus is so sustainable in Canada. White supermajority rural areas* are also conservative in Canada, but the Conservative party is supportive of the current Canadian immigration system (which lets in ~1% of the population every year, compared to ~0.3% of the American population in 2019). In a lot of these small rural towns and villages, just about the only brown people in town are the doctor and the dentist, and it's quite obvious to everyone that the alternative to having a brown doctor & dentist is having to drive 4+ hours to the nearest city.
*I'm specifying white supermajority rural areas instead of saying "rural areas" because Canada has a larger First Nations population % than America, some of that population is in the far far north, and as a result has very large sections of Canada's electoral map are First Nations majority.
Canada is also able to draw from British Commonwealth countries where middle class strivers had access to excellent English language schools. That caliber of immigrant is easy to assimilate
AFAIK there isn't a specific carve-out for British Commonwealth countries in the immigration process, but rather a focus on English fluency regardless of where it came from (points based system with language & job prospects as large components).
There's also a parallel process for selecting French-speaking immigrants for Quebec where (I think?) historically Quebec was allowed to set its desired level of French-speaking immigration, but IDK if that's still true.
Actually Matt, you should get the Slow Boring analytics department and task them to come up with a simple WAR for senators - some napkin stat to generate. The Takes community will be outraged of course
I suspect that a good amount of this is really that Manchin and Capito get along. If it were a second Republican instead of Manchin, then Capito probably wouldn't be in all the bipartisan "gangs" that she's in. So her difference from expectation should probably *also* be accounted to Manchin.
(Of course, I might be completely wrong - this might be me erasing a real moderate woman, along the lines of Murkowski or Collins.)
My recollection is that Capito was about the 30th most moderate House Republican in her caucus before she moved up to the Senate, so I don't think it's only Manchin's influence.
I have a feeling all the talk about America becoming a majority non-white country and that locking in Democratic electoral wins forever really made bipartisan immigration deals impossible.
MAGA doesn't like it, and very few Republican office holder are unafraid of primary challenges. I expect that's a bigger driver of GOP hostility to immigration legislation at this point, especially given the very real signs of increasing Republican viability with Hispanic voters.
Primaries really have made intelligent legislation impossible. It seems to encourage literally the exact mob rule dynamic that the founding fathers tried to protect against when creating our democracy.
It’s not just MAGA. My parents immigrated from Bangladesh to George H.W. Bush’s America. They came here because they wanted to live in that culture. The idea that immigration is going to change that culture is alarming to them too.
The primary thing which differentiates America from Western Europe, to which they didn't emigrate, is our risk-taking attitudes, which have always extended to immigration until very recently.
The demographic majority folks are idiots, but they've succeeded in turning the GOP into a risk-averse clusterfuck on the topics of, you know, losing elections and trusting in America's immense cultural magnetism to assimilate even much-larger-than-current flows of immigrants.
If the US looks like Bulgaria or Hungary, old and rapidly bleeding out, by 2080... we know where to place the blame.
I don't agree. I think our assimilation capacity is less than we assume. Immigration has overwhelmed our assimilation capacity before--the influx of Italians at the turn of the 20th century fundamentally changed the country, and brought more Continental European attitudes. And in getting FDR elected, it dismantled the original Constitutional design and replaced it with something very different. We can argue about whether the new thing is better than the old thing, but if you immigrated here for the old thing, I think it's fair to be concerned what the new thing looks like.
My grandparents are German, Italian and Polish and so are most of my relatives, including their in-laws. And so we're most of my friends growing up (plus a few Irish).
I've long (since childhood) had the personal observation that the Italian-Americans were just a little less assimilated than the others, and also, personally, they seemed to have somewhat worse values and modes of behaviors than especially the German-Americans. For one thing, they are always talking about "i do such-and-such because I'm Italian" which no other White people I know seem to do.
I don't personally know that I believe these observations would extend very far outside of my close circles, and since I haven't convinced myself (nor do I care all that much to) I really am not trying to convince anyone else of them.
But it does leave me personally open to the idea that bigger waves of immigration can impact the local culture, and it's fair to like or dislike aspects of those waves. It doesn't make one a nazi to simply prefer one country's culture over another, and I don't know why the commentators here are acting like it does.
Extra addendum - when I moved to California the local culture was obviously very different, and it seems likely to me that some of those aspects - a sunnier disposition, a flakier sense of time and social commitments, an elevated awareness of social status - are probably in part driven by the immigrant population of that state.
Yea, that's definitely not in line with my experience. The Italian quarter of the family is the richest, and while boisterous, also most invested in their communities, most likely to volunteer, most generous with their time and money, most possessed of civic spirit. My mom's Pennsylvania Dutch side is, yes, more staid... but also more aloof, less well-off, and less willing or able (hard to say which is bigger) to get involved in their community beyond their church. The old British bit of the family is basically gone because no one was rooted enough to settle down and have kids. My grandfather was 1 of 3 and the only descendants are his, who mostly have assimilated into the Italian family he married into.
All this is to say that making policy on the basis of these personal impressions is an exercise in futility.
Stasis is a mirage. It's never existed in all of recorded history, and the only possible way to make it exist is by destroying a great number of other, important things, like any semblance of personal freedom, for one, not to mention economic prosperity, and likely the ties of community in a great many places too.
The goal for those of us who believe in the old conservative vision of "society as an organism" must be to preserve the ties of community and nationhood from the one-worlders, while holding those who would try to cast everything in amber and thus render it all brittle and apt to shatter at bay. Change will happen; we need to ensure that it doesn't leave too many out in the cold when economic, and ensure it happens at a pace that the majority find comfortable, when demographic.
It is not given to us that the world be the same on our deathbed as it was in our childhood.
You do realize that Ben Franklin wrote long screeds about how these loose, lazy Germans were corrupting pure English folk and causing Pennsylvania to be irredeemably corrupted? After all, he was horrified that many of them were Catholic and played cards on Sundays.
And yet, somehow, we became the richest, most powerful country in the world. No one alive immigrated here for the "old thing", and no one immigrating now is entitled to demand the country be frozen in amber for all eternity right after they step on our shores. Frankly, I find it deeply annoying that immigrants think they have the right to bar other immigrants or prevent change.
I don’t think immigrants uniquely feel entitled to block further change. I do think we have much more perspective than native born Americans about how people from different cultures are different, and how that affects society. And many of us immigrated to get away from those other social structures.
Americans are like fish in a bowl. They take for granted that they’re surrounded by the cultural tradition that supports an egalitarian liberal democracy. They aren’t concerned about the risks of immigration because they don’t know their world could be different than it is.
All change is good and every would-be immigrant in the entire world should be admitted? These seem like really extreme counter-argument to me.
In any case, we probably both agree that immigrant citizens should be allowed to vote and voice concerns just like any other citizen.
But in terms of what's personally annoying, coming here and then complaining that everything is unfair and needs changed strikes me as more annoying than coming here and saying a lot of things are good and deserve defending.
"Frankly, I find it deeply annoying that immigrants think they have the right to bar other immigrants or prevent change." - I gather that you believe that immigrants are not entitled to the same range of political views as the next citizen?
Britain, which is the closest to the "old thing" you can get, also experienced a massive expansion in the state around the same period. It wasn't caused by Italians, it was caused by the quadruple-whammy of the expansion of the franchise, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
I think you're being ridiculously unfair and judgemental here. At least have some sympathy for how a human could think that way rather discounting it completely.
Just as one example that pops into my head - do you think the relatively (for rural areas) pro-Democrat rural areas of the upper Midwest and the historically generally socialist leanings of Minnesota have anything to with local Scandinavian-influenced culture there? Or how about this - do people in Philly put lawn chairs in their parking spots after shoveling the snow out of them like they do in Pittsburgh? I've read an analysis that that practice only happens in areas that had significant numbers of Italian Americans.
I'm not actually saying he holds all those views, I'm just saying that it's part and parcel of the same logic.
Neither I nor he (and maybe you, am I misremembering that there's a good dash of Eastern European ancestry in there somewhere?) would be here had people *before* him held these risk-averse, frankly whiny-sounding attitudes.
I'm disinclined to be charitable because I have discussed this with him before, and he just expects the same absolute cultural stasis that is the darling of all nativists and has never, ever existed, probably not since the days when humanity adopted agriculture.
And...what part of his parents thought process is so completely illogical or unreasonable?
They could be wrong or have a lot of the normal in-group human biases. I don't know them, and they probably agree with what you said anyways.
But are you disputing that different levels or types of immigration change the culture in different ways? If Canada removed their points system and replaced it with a refugee system aimed at only 1 or 2 countries, would that possibly change the culture?
It's fairly well-studied and agreed to that smaller waves of immigrants assimilate faster and change their surrounding cultures less. If you go to white areas of the US that still have a preponderance of descendants of one particular immigrant group they'll often talk about how that's where some of their values come from.
2007 in my memory constituted the earliest strong portent of the arrival of MAGA, except before it was MAGA it was called the Tea Party. (It's not perfect overlap; at the time the Tea Party talked a good libertarian game; but my sense is the overlap is now realistically about 85%).
We'll have to agree to disagree on the pedigree of the Tea Party and MAGA. This is from a WaPo article talking about the death of Bush era (2006-07) immigration reform efforts:
>>>>>"We misread" the situation, said Frank Sharry of America's Voice. Advocates thought that with Democrats in control of Congress, Bush would try a moderate approach again and succeed. Instead, "Republicans were beginning what we might call the advent of the tea party -- they started to lurch to the right, they wanted to give Bush a bloody nose, the conservative media mobilized."<<<<<<
Anyway, the article talks about how right wing radio was mobilized to kill the legislation, and there was a general increase in hard-right energy and mobilization. Two short years later, they were rallying against the radical socialist from the South Side with the dodgy passport.
I don't believe the Tea Party was very "libertarian" in the consistent sense of that term (drug legalization, laissez-faire immigration, etc). They were more "low tax conservatives with a healthy dollop of white supremacy." And the direct tie from them to MAGA, of course, was birtherism. As I wrote above, it's not a perfect overlap, but surely the overwhelming majority of people most enthused about taking on the Kenyan in 2009 were enthusiastically supporting his successor in 2016.
Ya, that stupid "structural demographic majority" narrative, as popularly understood, seems to have provoked the GOP into a ton of stupidity, starting with the gerrymandering in 2010, continuing through the rabid anti-immigration crap, culminating in the Stop the Steal nonsense.
The amusing thing is, despite every subsequent development that should prove it untrue, despite its original articulators saying "not what we meant," despite the fracturing of both political coalitions that fed into it... there's this weird manifestation of horseshoe theory whereby both far-left and far-right still believe this is going to happen, the only difference is how they react.
One of the authors of the famous book, Ruy Teixeira, on the "emerging Democratic majority" idea has pretty much abandoned the idea and now works for AEI because he couldn't get a job at a progressive institution due to apostasy.
Reading this substack has convinced me that the more important you think an issue is, the more willing you should be to make compromises and trade-offs in order to make progress on it.
Since I think increasing immigration is a top priority for the country, I'd support a compromise aimed at increasing immigration from select countries and otherwise retaining the legal immigration status quo . . . and let the Republicans pick the countries. Even though I assume they'd pick some kind of fig leaf for "white people who speak English" and that makes me a bit morally queasy. We need the immigrants enough to make that worth it.
Maybe start with something like easy immigration for Canadian and UK citizens?
I think there are legitimate and non-racist reasons to prefer immigrants who speak English.
EDIT: it should be noted that requiring English fluency would mean a ton of immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Nigeria (which are three of the most successful immigrant groups in the entire country, all of which outearn natives on average).
People also constantly forget just how many non-White people are in the major "white" English-speaking countries. Australia, NZ Canada and UK are as a group almost as non-white as we are and trending non-white even faster. The younger people who might legally immigrate from those countries are very likely to be non-white.
I don't mean to direct this at either Allan or Loren personally, especially since we're limited to a reasonable word count here, but it's actually quite annoying to me that people seem to completely ignore the non-white people of those countries.
I suspect that the first-generation adults arriving with English fluency helps them succeed and give an even bigger second-generation boost to their kids. All reasons to support that system as a political compromise.
Did Stephen Miller suggest something like this and Jim Acosta had a fit in the White House press room? Or am i not recalling correctly? I agree with the obsevation that placing a premium on English fluency would by no means result in just white immigrants being allowed, but i don't know if that is something that certain sections of the media-progressive industrial complex understands.
I agree this would be a smart compromise. Nearly all my extended family are big time red-team folks. I don’t think any of them care about skin color - their neighborhoods and friend pools are racially diverse - but I hear a fair amount of grumbling about people not speaking English.
I’ve heard people express a sincere fear that at some point in the future Spanish will be the majority language. I think this fear is unfounded nationally, but in the southern border states there really are a lot of majority Spanish communities and those are growing fast, so, just because it’s not going to be true nation-wide doesn’t mean it’s not a real concern locally.
My sister in law speaks pretty good Italian (her grandparents immigrated). But I've really come across very few Americans in my life who can speak the language of their ancestors if that language wasn't English. Seems super rare, actually.
As probably one of the most anti-immigrant and conservative people here, the mere fact of massive illegal immigration and an unsecured border is the main issue.
I'd be in favor of doubling the legal immigration rate (ideally with a points system implemented at the same time), but reducing each years legal immigration rate by the previous year's illegal + asylum claim estimate.
Or something similar to incentivize Dems to care about, you know, securing the f****ing border.
Every recent republican proposal to increase boarder security also reduces legal immigration... so I have trouble believing legality is the actual issue for most.
The main recent one I'm thinking of is the Cotton/Perdue bill which dramatically reduced green cards among other things. On my phone or I'd grab a link.
Is there a bill being pushed by Republicans in congress that raises the legal numbers? Happy to be proven wrong here.
I don't think Republicans want to solve the issue either though - the wall is a pretty flimsy solution compared to e-Verify (there's a lot of money and talent in smuggling), and it's also the most polarizing solution possible which makes it about as realistic a solution as when Democratic Socialists pretend that we're going to have single payer medicine instead of more realistic healthcare policies. I think both parties prefer to fundraise off the issue instead of solving it, and no party is really any better here.
I'm not sure the business-aligned GOP doesn't want to fix it. I don't think they did 20 years ago, but the situation is different today. I do think it's not a terribly high-salience issue for them, though.
I think the populist base wants to fix it in theory, but in practice all of their preferred "solutions" are unrealistic, cruel, or both. GOP politicians, however, definitely *do not* want to fix it, all of their incentives seem to run towards keeping this as a live issue to hammer the Dems and fire up the base.
The base, perhaps. The faux-populist GOP politicians don't want to fix *any* issue, because they need something to run on while quietly acting like the business-aligned GOP. And that's assuming you can draw a clean line between the two categories.
I don't know what "significantly less illegal immigration and asylum seekers" means. 50%, 75%, what? Also, the number of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers is often driven by events in other countries, which we may not be able to control.
This is not very helpful, and doesn't match statements about "control". "Controlling the border" is a slogan, not a plan. If it's all about your feelings, then I can't help you, particularly if your feelings are influenced by whatever Fox News decides to report on.
What do you mean by "basically work". What is the goal here? Were the immigration flows on 2019 across the border satisfactory? I don't know what "securing the border" means. North Korea and East Germany secured their borders and made it a priority. What precisely does Belisarius want to have happen here?
Wasn't the big news in the runup to the 2018 midterm about some sort of border caravan? Do you just mean that the issue disappeared from the news for a few months, or was there actually some change in 2019?
Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites have very high intermarriage rates. Is Matt apart of the non-white majority? The future of America is white. Instead of people having Irish, German and British ancestry. It’s going to be British, Mexican,German and Irish.
Voters are frustrated migrants are lying about asylum. 80% do not qualify under our loose guidelines. If there’s one thing Americans hate its gaming the system. Migrants pass through multiple countries to get here. Trump got this issue right, make migrants apply for asylum in the first country they step in and remain in Mexico. This issue is the Democrat’s Achilles hill. Just like making 10 year olds carry rape pregnancies to term is for Republicans.
Serious question: Why would a politcal party made up of rich, professional class, secular people want tens of millions of poor, working class Catholics and Evangelicals to join? Even if it does create a permenant Democratic majority (which a mass amnesty won't), the Democratic Party would not be the same. The power the of woke, professional class, progressives who want mass amnesty would be diluted by the newcomers who are a lot more conservative.
I want more immigration for more or less the same reasons Matt has talked about (good for economy, good for US geopolitical heft).
GIve me that increase folded into a points-based system like other rich countries—and so boost our STEM-skills—and we'll have a deal. I'm not wedded to the desirability of taking in poor immigrants. But, if we can't get well-educated folks, I'm happy to see an increase in blue collar immigrants, because I believe such a policy passes cost-benefit analysis (just not by as big a margin as a policy concentrating on the better educated).
"I believe such a policy passes cost-benefit analysis"
While I believe you hold this view in good faith, I must point out that such a view is also easy for you (or I) to hold, because it redounds entirely to our economic benefit. For the working classes, less so. Increased supply of working-class and low-skilled labor with no increased demand from upper-class and professional-class folks must (and did, from 1980-2008) hold down wages in the bottom third of the spectrum.
Yes, ultimately those immigrants' kids usually climb out of that status to compete with you or I, or at least those a rung below us on the economic ladder, and the economy advances for all... but "ultimately" covers a multitude of sins, lol.
But it's hardly unreasonable that many people oppose that sort of immigration make-up.
Unfortunately, many folks also oppose the notion of allowing in experts who will be relatively better off than them, even if it also makes them better off in absolute terms.
That last comment of mine wasn't rendered very clearly. What I meant was: I'd like to see decent sized increase in immigration inflows. My first choice is concentrating on the highly skilled (perhaps a shift toward a Canada-style points system). But if we can't get that I'd be ok with simply increasing quotas/inflows based on the status quo (which emphasizes family reunification and employer sponsorship). My understanding is that the vast majority of working-age immigrants are quite gainfully employed, and their education levels compare favorably with the US general population (and has tended to be on the upswing, ie, we're getting a lot more university-educated immigrants). IOW we'd be fine, and would see a net-benefit in terms of economic vigor and geopolitical competitiveness.
So, no, I'm not specifically seeking to import an additional half million landscapers and roofers each year, which it very much sounded like based on what I wrote. Badly worded—that's on me.
When I've brought that up with my most progressive friends they just get really uncomfortable. I'm not sure if the reality of the idea is too hard to engage with or if their searching for some kind of hidden meaning, like an underlying racism or that I'm making a stealth argument for voting for Trump or something like that.
So I guess I conclude that they're just not really thinking of it.
I don't know if the newcomers would be more or less conservative, probably more on some issues, less on others, but they sure can make a lot more money in the US than back home, which drives much of the immigration. The question: 'why would a political party made of rich, professional class, secular people want tens of millions of poor, working class Catholics and Evangelicals to join?' reminds me of a lunchroom conversation decades ago (at a liberal, or progressive, if you prefer, law firm) when the question came up, and the answer was because they're our doulas, they take care care of kids, they cook our dinners and clean our apartments. We want them because they make life great. Of course, the flip of this was they didn't want them to be able to vote, with actual citizenship; they wanted to be able to employ them legally as a cheap lumpenproletariat making life easy for the bien-pensants making the world a better place.
Most of these people are, on some level, intelligent/cunning enough to know that the 2008-16 paradigm of dirt-cheap working class labor under which they came of age is only going to continue if low-skilled immigration is significantly higher than today, and the best way to do that is a blanket amnesty for past illegal immigration and no real enforcement going forward.
But... most of them are also dumb enough to fail to understand that this isn't some malleable, reliable Democratic voting bloc they're getting. How many people are still shoving their heads up their asses about Hispanic voting trends?
I don't know that there's really an Hispanic voting trend as much as there was one (really bad) election. I would personally predict Hispanics will trend that direction mainly because of my bayesian priors, which are that both assimilation and education sorting will continue. But there's not a trend of voting patterns to support that thesis.
I don't have a source to hand but from memory, in 2012 the Hispanic vote share was 71%, in 2016 it was 69%, in 2018 around 66%, in 2020 61%. Generic ballot average for this coming fall, last I checked, was 58%.
Yea, there's a lot of noise there, but it's been pretty consistently degrading for a decade now.
White progressives assume they can keep control of us the way they have Black people. That’s the whole point of CRT education. You teach kids to be race conscious, but they learn about their conception of their race from a white liberal woman.
This is a fundamental mistake conservatives have about CRT. It’s not an attack on “white people.” It’s a way for white liberals to take up the mantle of “good white people” while attacking conservatives as “bad white people.”
And yet, here we are, having this discussion, with you sharing precisely *none* of those attitudes, with a native-born American who is in every way to your left.
We are not proposing to allow 10 million Bangladeshi immigrants to settle in TX over the next half decade and create an ethnolinguistic crystal that even America’s incredible ability to assimilate and, yes, learn from immigrants can’t dissolve back into the solution which fills your fishbowl.
We’re proposing to continue the policies that have worked for two centuries to ensure the US is a great place to live for hundreds of million and cement our place as the premier power on the globe in the face of Chinese neo-fascism. To draw the best and brightest and most ambitious from everywhere on the globe and stitch them into the fabric of a country where origin doesn’t matter, at a measured pace that allows us the time to do the job right.
Is this without risk? No. That, again, is not given to us in this life.
But the way to bet is that America’s incredible prosperity, opportunities for personal fulfillment, English lingua Franca and accompanying magnetic cultural attraction, still-strong educational institutions, and broad demand that children be brought up as Americans will win over the next generation of immigrants as they did you.
You, in denying the fundamental tenability of that goal, propose instead to risk the complete destruction the future my children and yours alike will live in, out of a profoundly ill-informed misreading of history, in pursuit of an imagined stasis that has not existed since man first figured out how to cast copper!
You’d turn us into fucking Hungary because you lack the faith that we can still be the United States! Why in fuck’s name would anyone simply let this horseshit pass by unmet?
I know I said this wasn’t worth it but goddamn this is easy: which is it?
Are the good, sensible, down-to-earth immigrants going to be our saviors from the homegrown radicals, or are immigrants with latent collectivist tendencies going to Socialize Our Murrica (tm)?
Political alignments are different in other countries. E.g. Islamic socialism is a thing.
The biggest concern to republicans is probably people like my parents. They’ll put aside their conservative social values and vote for white liberals for the socialism. They don’t feel any ownership of the broader culture, and have mechanisms within the ethnic community to police conformity. (My mom was quite clear when I was a kid that just because my white American friends were allowed to do something doesn’t mean I was.)
Sorry go read the other comment that I made in reply to the completely unrelated comment of yours lol.
EDIT now that near computer:
"And yet, here we are, having this discussion, with you sharing precisely *none* of those attitudes, with a native-born American who is in every way to your left.
We are not proposing to allow 10 million Bangladeshi immigrants to settle in TX over the next half decade and create an ethnolinguistic crystal that even America’s incredible ability to assimilate and, yes, learn from immigrants can’t dissolve back into the solution which fills your fishbowl.
We’re proposing to continue the policies that have worked for two centuries to ensure the US is a great place to live for hundreds of million and cement our place as the premier power on the globe in the face of Chinese neo-fascism. To draw the best and brightest and most ambitious from everywhere on the globe and stitch them into the fabric of a country where origin doesn’t matter, at a measured pace that allows us the time to do the job right.
Is this without risk? No. That, again, is not given to us in this life.
But the way to bet is that America’s incredible prosperity, opportunities for personal fulfillment, English lingua Franca and accompanying magnetic cultural attraction, still-strong educational institutions, and broad demand that children be brought up as Americans will win over the next generation of immigrants as they did you.
You, in denying the fundamental tenability of that goal, propose instead to risk the complete destruction the future my children and yours alike will live in, out of a profoundly ill-informed misreading of history, in pursuit of an imagined stasis that has not existed since man first figured out how to cast copper!
You’d turn us into fucking Hungary because you lack the faith that we can still be the United States! Why in fuck’s name would anyone simply let this horseshit pass by unmet?"
But I do share many of those Bangladeshi attitudes. I have none of the frontier attitude that fuels American small government conservatism and libertarianism. I believe in a government big enough to fund a welfare state but also to regulate morality. In my home country getting married and having babies is a moral obligation. Even if I vote Republican it’s a very different kind of republicanism than prevailed before.
And I grew up around white people because south asian immigration was thin and spread out back then. By contrast, my cousins are growing up in heavily Bangladeshi/Muslim neighborhoods.
I am in favor of much more immigration too. I am also not a Democrat or a progressive. The 2013 immigration bill plan for dealing with illegal immigrants already in the country is a really good idea. We should take in a lot more legal immigrants every year and make it easier to apply for visas in the home countries of immigrants, especially in Central and South America, so people don't have to make bad claims of asylum if they want to come to the US.
I'm a pretty firm center-lefty, and while IDGAF about religion one way or another, allowing a bunch of folks who think "public services" includes the most fundamental maintenance of public safety, law, and order... seems fine to me!
Hopefully the evolutionary dead-end that the woke/hipster lefties have wandered down will die out when they're too cosmopolitan, unrooted, and incapable of sacrifice to, ya know, breed.
Not that it should matter anyway, but not only is the apodosis of this statement ("ergo, Democratic majority forever") is now widely recognized as false, we should really note that the protasis , too, is in fact a myth, and there is, to my knowledge, no real reason to assume that America will become "majority non-white" in any meaningful way anytime soon. It's just that the Census is tweaking its racial definition in an absurd manner to artificially produce that result, by using the racist "one drop rule" AND the media exacerbates things by misreporting "white" for the figure of "non-hispanic white" excluding all Hispanic whites from consideration for the purposes if this prognosis (even though they are projected to be a HUGE group!). And even under this very very strained analysis, "whites" remain the solid plurality, far outnumbering any other group. If we do count hispanic whites as white, however, there is a projected white supermajority to the end of all of of the census projections. But that projection seems to be totally inconvenient to politicians on all sides, so no one appears to bother reporting it, even though it appears on literally the same Census reports!
That's certainly a possibility, but it was always a dumb idea and I don't understand why both parties believed in it. I think it has more to do with the rise of radio talk shows and Fox News. GOP elites were interested in bipartisan talks, but they were afraid of their constituents coming after them after listening to Rush Limbaugh. Not really that different than how they are today.
I think it's more about assimilation than colorblindness. Even if they wouldn't articulate it this way, I bet most Republicans don't have an issue with immigration when they associate it with people like Aileen Cannon or Nick Fuentes, rather than the stereotypical "day laborers outside of Home Depot" or a La Raza activist. And for those who say that Hispanics and Asians have it easier because of (generally) lighter skin, I would point to Herman Cain, David Clarke, etc.
Just because the left has an obsession with coding everything as being about whiteness, I don't think there's much in mainstream American culture in 2022 that isn't objectively colorblind (especially if separated from its origins).
Tl;dr since posting on a phone sucks: It's mostly about culture, not race (and JiB makes a good point that as Republicans start to recognize the shifts Trump set into motion with Black and Hispanic voters, especially men, rather than seeing them all as future Squad members, even MAGA will adapt).
I think it's even more simple - just about politics, not even culture really. Miami culture is full of people who speak Spanish and expect you to do the same, which we wouldn't look at as "assimilated" if it was happening in Ohio, and the culture is pretty different than mainstream American culture too. But they're Republican, so conservatives like Miami Cuban-Americans while liberals are always looking at a way to write them out of being a minority.
The fact there have been conservative minorities willing to align with white conservatives against the vast majority of their own ethnic group in a bid for political power for theirselves is nothing new - you can go back to the 1870's and see conservative blacks of the time making the same arguments about lazy, shiftless blacks that a type of anti-woke black conservative has loved to make for literal centuries.
So, no I'm not really surprised white Republican's are OK with minority voices who will agree witht them that racism ended in whatever year we've now decided (I think it's now the 90's that everybody tries to say was so much better), and that current activists have zero actual connection to minority communities at all is funny, when the median black Republican would get savaged if they actually went into an inner city community and tried their typical act.
Believe me,. whatever white people say about black conservatives, black liberals and black socialists are 100x more nasty and happy to say things that would get non-black liberals cancelled.
Accusing conservative minorities of disagreeing with "the vast majority of their own ethnic group in a bid for political power for themselves" is an inaccurate and offensive effort to project Black politics onto other minorities.
The "vast majority" of Hispanics and Asians are not Democrats. The social reinforcement that ties Black people to the Democratic Party is entirely absent among Hispanics and Asians. A plurality of both groups identify as independents. Hispanics went for Biden over Trump roughly 60-40, and Asians 70-30. That's dog people versus cat people, not the "community consensus" versus "self-promoting traitors." The majority of Asians voted Republican as recently as 1996, and a number of Hispanic and Asian communities are still stalwart republicans: Vietnamese, Cubans, etc. Non-college white people are about 60-40 in the other direction, but nobody finds it remarkable that someone might be a white Starbucks barista who voted for Biden.
"when the median black Republican would get savaged if they actually went into an inner city community and tried their typical act"
First, inner city community does not equal "typical Black community" or "speaks authentically for all black voters". You're sounding like Trump.
But anyways, I'm not sure if that's actually true. It would depend on their message, their personal charisma and who they were speaking to. I'm sure Candace Owens might get savaged if she went to a local D meeting and launched into a Fox tirade. But I imagine the median black GOP politician would do just fine talking to regular people on the street if they came from a similar community, if for no other reason than that most non-partisan people are fairly open-minded.
You know which senator gets the immigration issue? My senator Coal Joe Manchin. Or as he says "WV needs the immigration - that is where our doctors and specialists come from"
I may not always love him but he crushes that Wins-Above-Replacement like Shohei Ohtani
Notably, this is why the immigration consensus is so sustainable in Canada. White supermajority rural areas* are also conservative in Canada, but the Conservative party is supportive of the current Canadian immigration system (which lets in ~1% of the population every year, compared to ~0.3% of the American population in 2019). In a lot of these small rural towns and villages, just about the only brown people in town are the doctor and the dentist, and it's quite obvious to everyone that the alternative to having a brown doctor & dentist is having to drive 4+ hours to the nearest city.
*I'm specifying white supermajority rural areas instead of saying "rural areas" because Canada has a larger First Nations population % than America, some of that population is in the far far north, and as a result has very large sections of Canada's electoral map are First Nations majority.
Canada is also able to draw from British Commonwealth countries where middle class strivers had access to excellent English language schools. That caliber of immigrant is easy to assimilate
AFAIK there isn't a specific carve-out for British Commonwealth countries in the immigration process, but rather a focus on English fluency regardless of where it came from (points based system with language & job prospects as large components).
There's also a parallel process for selecting French-speaking immigrants for Quebec where (I think?) historically Quebec was allowed to set its desired level of French-speaking immigration, but IDK if that's still true.
Actually Matt, you should get the Slow Boring analytics department and task them to come up with a simple WAR for senators - some napkin stat to generate. The Takes community will be outraged of course
Already happened in a previous post!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/joe-manchin/comments
FiveThirtyEight is doing this, and as you might imagine, Manchin is leading by a big margin. Scroll down and sort the Senate by the Biden +/- score:
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/biden-congress-votes/votes/
Thanks! and Capito is surprising right there with Joe.
I suspect that a good amount of this is really that Manchin and Capito get along. If it were a second Republican instead of Manchin, then Capito probably wouldn't be in all the bipartisan "gangs" that she's in. So her difference from expectation should probably *also* be accounted to Manchin.
(Of course, I might be completely wrong - this might be me erasing a real moderate woman, along the lines of Murkowski or Collins.)
My recollection is that Capito was about the 30th most moderate House Republican in her caucus before she moved up to the Senate, so I don't think it's only Manchin's influence.
I have a feeling all the talk about America becoming a majority non-white country and that locking in Democratic electoral wins forever really made bipartisan immigration deals impossible.
MAGA doesn't like it, and very few Republican office holder are unafraid of primary challenges. I expect that's a bigger driver of GOP hostility to immigration legislation at this point, especially given the very real signs of increasing Republican viability with Hispanic voters.
Primaries really have made intelligent legislation impossible. It seems to encourage literally the exact mob rule dynamic that the founding fathers tried to protect against when creating our democracy.
It’s not just MAGA. My parents immigrated from Bangladesh to George H.W. Bush’s America. They came here because they wanted to live in that culture. The idea that immigration is going to change that culture is alarming to them too.
The primary thing which differentiates America from Western Europe, to which they didn't emigrate, is our risk-taking attitudes, which have always extended to immigration until very recently.
The demographic majority folks are idiots, but they've succeeded in turning the GOP into a risk-averse clusterfuck on the topics of, you know, losing elections and trusting in America's immense cultural magnetism to assimilate even much-larger-than-current flows of immigrants.
If the US looks like Bulgaria or Hungary, old and rapidly bleeding out, by 2080... we know where to place the blame.
I don't agree. I think our assimilation capacity is less than we assume. Immigration has overwhelmed our assimilation capacity before--the influx of Italians at the turn of the 20th century fundamentally changed the country, and brought more Continental European attitudes. And in getting FDR elected, it dismantled the original Constitutional design and replaced it with something very different. We can argue about whether the new thing is better than the old thing, but if you immigrated here for the old thing, I think it's fair to be concerned what the new thing looks like.
My grandparents are German, Italian and Polish and so are most of my relatives, including their in-laws. And so we're most of my friends growing up (plus a few Irish).
I've long (since childhood) had the personal observation that the Italian-Americans were just a little less assimilated than the others, and also, personally, they seemed to have somewhat worse values and modes of behaviors than especially the German-Americans. For one thing, they are always talking about "i do such-and-such because I'm Italian" which no other White people I know seem to do.
I don't personally know that I believe these observations would extend very far outside of my close circles, and since I haven't convinced myself (nor do I care all that much to) I really am not trying to convince anyone else of them.
But it does leave me personally open to the idea that bigger waves of immigration can impact the local culture, and it's fair to like or dislike aspects of those waves. It doesn't make one a nazi to simply prefer one country's culture over another, and I don't know why the commentators here are acting like it does.
Extra addendum - when I moved to California the local culture was obviously very different, and it seems likely to me that some of those aspects - a sunnier disposition, a flakier sense of time and social commitments, an elevated awareness of social status - are probably in part driven by the immigrant population of that state.
Yea, that's definitely not in line with my experience. The Italian quarter of the family is the richest, and while boisterous, also most invested in their communities, most likely to volunteer, most generous with their time and money, most possessed of civic spirit. My mom's Pennsylvania Dutch side is, yes, more staid... but also more aloof, less well-off, and less willing or able (hard to say which is bigger) to get involved in their community beyond their church. The old British bit of the family is basically gone because no one was rooted enough to settle down and have kids. My grandfather was 1 of 3 and the only descendants are his, who mostly have assimilated into the Italian family he married into.
All this is to say that making policy on the basis of these personal impressions is an exercise in futility.
Stasis is a mirage. It's never existed in all of recorded history, and the only possible way to make it exist is by destroying a great number of other, important things, like any semblance of personal freedom, for one, not to mention economic prosperity, and likely the ties of community in a great many places too.
The goal for those of us who believe in the old conservative vision of "society as an organism" must be to preserve the ties of community and nationhood from the one-worlders, while holding those who would try to cast everything in amber and thus render it all brittle and apt to shatter at bay. Change will happen; we need to ensure that it doesn't leave too many out in the cold when economic, and ensure it happens at a pace that the majority find comfortable, when demographic.
It is not given to us that the world be the same on our deathbed as it was in our childhood.
You do realize that Ben Franklin wrote long screeds about how these loose, lazy Germans were corrupting pure English folk and causing Pennsylvania to be irredeemably corrupted? After all, he was horrified that many of them were Catholic and played cards on Sundays.
And yet, somehow, we became the richest, most powerful country in the world. No one alive immigrated here for the "old thing", and no one immigrating now is entitled to demand the country be frozen in amber for all eternity right after they step on our shores. Frankly, I find it deeply annoying that immigrants think they have the right to bar other immigrants or prevent change.
I don’t think immigrants uniquely feel entitled to block further change. I do think we have much more perspective than native born Americans about how people from different cultures are different, and how that affects society. And many of us immigrated to get away from those other social structures.
Americans are like fish in a bowl. They take for granted that they’re surrounded by the cultural tradition that supports an egalitarian liberal democracy. They aren’t concerned about the risks of immigration because they don’t know their world could be different than it is.
All change is good and every would-be immigrant in the entire world should be admitted? These seem like really extreme counter-argument to me.
In any case, we probably both agree that immigrant citizens should be allowed to vote and voice concerns just like any other citizen.
But in terms of what's personally annoying, coming here and then complaining that everything is unfair and needs changed strikes me as more annoying than coming here and saying a lot of things are good and deserve defending.
"Frankly, I find it deeply annoying that immigrants think they have the right to bar other immigrants or prevent change." - I gather that you believe that immigrants are not entitled to the same range of political views as the next citizen?
Britain, which is the closest to the "old thing" you can get, also experienced a massive expansion in the state around the same period. It wasn't caused by Italians, it was caused by the quadruple-whammy of the expansion of the franchise, World War I, the Great Depression, and World War II.
Ahh, right, I remember you now...
Your family emigrated to that "something very different," I remind you.
And other than that, I'm bowing out, because I have nothing nice to say.
Good day to you.
Immigration has always changed the culture. Your parents are part of that.
"We were the last good immigrants"
"They should have stopped developing after my cul-de-sac"
"School curricula were perfect back in my day"
Ad infinitum.
I think you're being ridiculously unfair and judgemental here. At least have some sympathy for how a human could think that way rather discounting it completely.
Just as one example that pops into my head - do you think the relatively (for rural areas) pro-Democrat rural areas of the upper Midwest and the historically generally socialist leanings of Minnesota have anything to with local Scandinavian-influenced culture there? Or how about this - do people in Philly put lawn chairs in their parking spots after shoveling the snow out of them like they do in Pittsburgh? I've read an analysis that that practice only happens in areas that had significant numbers of Italian Americans.
I'm not actually saying he holds all those views, I'm just saying that it's part and parcel of the same logic.
Neither I nor he (and maybe you, am I misremembering that there's a good dash of Eastern European ancestry in there somewhere?) would be here had people *before* him held these risk-averse, frankly whiny-sounding attitudes.
I'm disinclined to be charitable because I have discussed this with him before, and he just expects the same absolute cultural stasis that is the darling of all nativists and has never, ever existed, probably not since the days when humanity adopted agriculture.
Aiming for it will break *everything else.*
And...what part of his parents thought process is so completely illogical or unreasonable?
They could be wrong or have a lot of the normal in-group human biases. I don't know them, and they probably agree with what you said anyways.
But are you disputing that different levels or types of immigration change the culture in different ways? If Canada removed their points system and replaced it with a refugee system aimed at only 1 or 2 countries, would that possibly change the culture?
It's fairly well-studied and agreed to that smaller waves of immigrants assimilate faster and change their surrounding cultures less. If you go to white areas of the US that still have a preponderance of descendants of one particular immigrant group they'll often talk about how that's where some of their values come from.
2007 in my memory constituted the earliest strong portent of the arrival of MAGA, except before it was MAGA it was called the Tea Party. (It's not perfect overlap; at the time the Tea Party talked a good libertarian game; but my sense is the overlap is now realistically about 85%).
We'll have to agree to disagree on the pedigree of the Tea Party and MAGA. This is from a WaPo article talking about the death of Bush era (2006-07) immigration reform efforts:
>>>>>"We misread" the situation, said Frank Sharry of America's Voice. Advocates thought that with Democrats in control of Congress, Bush would try a moderate approach again and succeed. Instead, "Republicans were beginning what we might call the advent of the tea party -- they started to lurch to the right, they wanted to give Bush a bloody nose, the conservative media mobilized."<<<<<<
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2013/01/30/how-immigration-reform-failed-over-and-over/
Anyway, the article talks about how right wing radio was mobilized to kill the legislation, and there was a general increase in hard-right energy and mobilization. Two short years later, they were rallying against the radical socialist from the South Side with the dodgy passport.
I don't believe the Tea Party was very "libertarian" in the consistent sense of that term (drug legalization, laissez-faire immigration, etc). They were more "low tax conservatives with a healthy dollop of white supremacy." And the direct tie from them to MAGA, of course, was birtherism. As I wrote above, it's not a perfect overlap, but surely the overwhelming majority of people most enthused about taking on the Kenyan in 2009 were enthusiastically supporting his successor in 2016.
Ya, that stupid "structural demographic majority" narrative, as popularly understood, seems to have provoked the GOP into a ton of stupidity, starting with the gerrymandering in 2010, continuing through the rabid anti-immigration crap, culminating in the Stop the Steal nonsense.
The amusing thing is, despite every subsequent development that should prove it untrue, despite its original articulators saying "not what we meant," despite the fracturing of both political coalitions that fed into it... there's this weird manifestation of horseshoe theory whereby both far-left and far-right still believe this is going to happen, the only difference is how they react.
One of the authors of the famous book, Ruy Teixeira, on the "emerging Democratic majority" idea has pretty much abandoned the idea and now works for AEI because he couldn't get a job at a progressive institution due to apostasy.
Reading this substack has convinced me that the more important you think an issue is, the more willing you should be to make compromises and trade-offs in order to make progress on it.
Since I think increasing immigration is a top priority for the country, I'd support a compromise aimed at increasing immigration from select countries and otherwise retaining the legal immigration status quo . . . and let the Republicans pick the countries. Even though I assume they'd pick some kind of fig leaf for "white people who speak English" and that makes me a bit morally queasy. We need the immigrants enough to make that worth it.
Maybe start with something like easy immigration for Canadian and UK citizens?
I think there are legitimate and non-racist reasons to prefer immigrants who speak English.
EDIT: it should be noted that requiring English fluency would mean a ton of immigrants from India, Pakistan, and Nigeria (which are three of the most successful immigrant groups in the entire country, all of which outearn natives on average).
People also constantly forget just how many non-White people are in the major "white" English-speaking countries. Australia, NZ Canada and UK are as a group almost as non-white as we are and trending non-white even faster. The younger people who might legally immigrate from those countries are very likely to be non-white.
I don't mean to direct this at either Allan or Loren personally, especially since we're limited to a reasonable word count here, but it's actually quite annoying to me that people seem to completely ignore the non-white people of those countries.
I suspect that the first-generation adults arriving with English fluency helps them succeed and give an even bigger second-generation boost to their kids. All reasons to support that system as a political compromise.
Did Stephen Miller suggest something like this and Jim Acosta had a fit in the White House press room? Or am i not recalling correctly? I agree with the obsevation that placing a premium on English fluency would by no means result in just white immigrants being allowed, but i don't know if that is something that certain sections of the media-progressive industrial complex understands.
I agree this would be a smart compromise. Nearly all my extended family are big time red-team folks. I don’t think any of them care about skin color - their neighborhoods and friend pools are racially diverse - but I hear a fair amount of grumbling about people not speaking English.
I’ve heard people express a sincere fear that at some point in the future Spanish will be the majority language. I think this fear is unfounded nationally, but in the southern border states there really are a lot of majority Spanish communities and those are growing fast, so, just because it’s not going to be true nation-wide doesn’t mean it’s not a real concern locally.
Preserving the ability of your children and grandchildren to speak the ancestral tongue has historically been an utterly hopeless challenge.
My sister in law speaks pretty good Italian (her grandparents immigrated). But I've really come across very few Americans in my life who can speak the language of their ancestors if that language wasn't English. Seems super rare, actually.
As probably one of the most anti-immigrant and conservative people here, the mere fact of massive illegal immigration and an unsecured border is the main issue.
I'd be in favor of doubling the legal immigration rate (ideally with a points system implemented at the same time), but reducing each years legal immigration rate by the previous year's illegal + asylum claim estimate.
Or something similar to incentivize Dems to care about, you know, securing the f****ing border.
Every recent republican proposal to increase boarder security also reduces legal immigration... so I have trouble believing legality is the actual issue for most.
What proposals have you seen?
The main recent one I'm thinking of is the Cotton/Perdue bill which dramatically reduced green cards among other things. On my phone or I'd grab a link.
Is there a bill being pushed by Republicans in congress that raises the legal numbers? Happy to be proven wrong here.
That bill did not address border security.
It addressed the legal immigration process, and called for drastic reductions. So I infer they prefer drastic reductions.
If you have a different data point please provide.
I don't think Republicans want to solve the issue either though - the wall is a pretty flimsy solution compared to e-Verify (there's a lot of money and talent in smuggling), and it's also the most polarizing solution possible which makes it about as realistic a solution as when Democratic Socialists pretend that we're going to have single payer medicine instead of more realistic healthcare policies. I think both parties prefer to fundraise off the issue instead of solving it, and no party is really any better here.
I think the business-aligned GOP doesn't want to fix it.
I think the populist GOP does, though.
I'm not sure the business-aligned GOP doesn't want to fix it. I don't think they did 20 years ago, but the situation is different today. I do think it's not a terribly high-salience issue for them, though.
I think the populist base wants to fix it in theory, but in practice all of their preferred "solutions" are unrealistic, cruel, or both. GOP politicians, however, definitely *do not* want to fix it, all of their incentives seem to run towards keeping this as a live issue to hammer the Dems and fire up the base.
Cycle of US policy formation, first draft:
Step 1: Democratic Trifecta
Democrats- "No problem."
Republicans- "BIG Problem!"
Step 2: After GOP wins midterms
Democrats- "Still no problem, but throw small bone"
Republicans- "BIG Problem!"
Step 3: After GOP win presidency
Democrats- "Problem, here solution"
Republicans- "BIG Problem!"
Step 4: Democrats win midterms
Democrats- "Problem, here compromise solution?"
Republicans- "BIG Problem!"
Step 5: After Democrats win Presidency
Democrats- "Problem, here own solution, pass via reconciliation."
Republicans- "BIG Problem!
And back to Step 1 until issue fades over a decade thanks to whatever bit of legislation was just passed.
You can also substitute Progressives for Republicans, dynamic and outcomes are mostly the same.
The base, perhaps. The faux-populist GOP politicians don't want to fix *any* issue, because they need something to run on while quietly acting like the business-aligned GOP. And that's assuming you can draw a clean line between the two categories.
What's the metric for securing the border, precisely? How would you know you have succeeded? Tell me what success looks like here.
Significantly less illegal immigration and asylum seekers at the border than we have in the last couple of years.
I don't know what "significantly less illegal immigration and asylum seekers" means. 50%, 75%, what? Also, the number of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers is often driven by events in other countries, which we may not be able to control.
“…the number of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers is often driven by events in other countries, which we may not be able to control”
We can control our borders and our asylum laws.
I'm intentionally not defining it, because it would only be my opinion.
The percentage would be worked out by the political process during any actual compromise.
This is not very helpful, and doesn't match statements about "control". "Controlling the border" is a slogan, not a plan. If it's all about your feelings, then I can't help you, particularly if your feelings are influenced by whatever Fox News decides to report on.
What do you mean by "basically work". What is the goal here? Were the immigration flows on 2019 across the border satisfactory? I don't know what "securing the border" means. North Korea and East Germany secured their borders and made it a priority. What precisely does Belisarius want to have happen here?
Clearly it's a moat filled with Alligators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VAOEInEzpec
Wasn't the big news in the runup to the 2018 midterm about some sort of border caravan? Do you just mean that the issue disappeared from the news for a few months, or was there actually some change in 2019?
I don’t know what you’re worried about: Kamala Harris says the US has a secure border.
Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites have very high intermarriage rates. Is Matt apart of the non-white majority? The future of America is white. Instead of people having Irish, German and British ancestry. It’s going to be British, Mexican,German and Irish.
Voters are frustrated migrants are lying about asylum. 80% do not qualify under our loose guidelines. If there’s one thing Americans hate its gaming the system. Migrants pass through multiple countries to get here. Trump got this issue right, make migrants apply for asylum in the first country they step in and remain in Mexico. This issue is the Democrat’s Achilles hill. Just like making 10 year olds carry rape pregnancies to term is for Republicans.
Serious question: Why would a politcal party made up of rich, professional class, secular people want tens of millions of poor, working class Catholics and Evangelicals to join? Even if it does create a permenant Democratic majority (which a mass amnesty won't), the Democratic Party would not be the same. The power the of woke, professional class, progressives who want mass amnesty would be diluted by the newcomers who are a lot more conservative.
I want more immigration for more or less the same reasons Matt has talked about (good for economy, good for US geopolitical heft).
GIve me that increase folded into a points-based system like other rich countries—and so boost our STEM-skills—and we'll have a deal. I'm not wedded to the desirability of taking in poor immigrants. But, if we can't get well-educated folks, I'm happy to see an increase in blue collar immigrants, because I believe such a policy passes cost-benefit analysis (just not by as big a margin as a policy concentrating on the better educated).
"I believe such a policy passes cost-benefit analysis"
While I believe you hold this view in good faith, I must point out that such a view is also easy for you (or I) to hold, because it redounds entirely to our economic benefit. For the working classes, less so. Increased supply of working-class and low-skilled labor with no increased demand from upper-class and professional-class folks must (and did, from 1980-2008) hold down wages in the bottom third of the spectrum.
Yes, ultimately those immigrants' kids usually climb out of that status to compete with you or I, or at least those a rung below us on the economic ladder, and the economy advances for all... but "ultimately" covers a multitude of sins, lol.
But it's hardly unreasonable that many people oppose that sort of immigration make-up.
Unfortunately, many folks also oppose the notion of allowing in experts who will be relatively better off than them, even if it also makes them better off in absolute terms.
That last comment of mine wasn't rendered very clearly. What I meant was: I'd like to see decent sized increase in immigration inflows. My first choice is concentrating on the highly skilled (perhaps a shift toward a Canada-style points system). But if we can't get that I'd be ok with simply increasing quotas/inflows based on the status quo (which emphasizes family reunification and employer sponsorship). My understanding is that the vast majority of working-age immigrants are quite gainfully employed, and their education levels compare favorably with the US general population (and has tended to be on the upswing, ie, we're getting a lot more university-educated immigrants). IOW we'd be fine, and would see a net-benefit in terms of economic vigor and geopolitical competitiveness.
So, no, I'm not specifically seeking to import an additional half million landscapers and roofers each year, which it very much sounded like based on what I wrote. Badly worded—that's on me.
When I've brought that up with my most progressive friends they just get really uncomfortable. I'm not sure if the reality of the idea is too hard to engage with or if their searching for some kind of hidden meaning, like an underlying racism or that I'm making a stealth argument for voting for Trump or something like that.
So I guess I conclude that they're just not really thinking of it.
I don't know if the newcomers would be more or less conservative, probably more on some issues, less on others, but they sure can make a lot more money in the US than back home, which drives much of the immigration. The question: 'why would a political party made of rich, professional class, secular people want tens of millions of poor, working class Catholics and Evangelicals to join?' reminds me of a lunchroom conversation decades ago (at a liberal, or progressive, if you prefer, law firm) when the question came up, and the answer was because they're our doulas, they take care care of kids, they cook our dinners and clean our apartments. We want them because they make life great. Of course, the flip of this was they didn't want them to be able to vote, with actual citizenship; they wanted to be able to employ them legally as a cheap lumpenproletariat making life easy for the bien-pensants making the world a better place.
Most of these people are, on some level, intelligent/cunning enough to know that the 2008-16 paradigm of dirt-cheap working class labor under which they came of age is only going to continue if low-skilled immigration is significantly higher than today, and the best way to do that is a blanket amnesty for past illegal immigration and no real enforcement going forward.
But... most of them are also dumb enough to fail to understand that this isn't some malleable, reliable Democratic voting bloc they're getting. How many people are still shoving their heads up their asses about Hispanic voting trends?
I don't know that there's really an Hispanic voting trend as much as there was one (really bad) election. I would personally predict Hispanics will trend that direction mainly because of my bayesian priors, which are that both assimilation and education sorting will continue. But there's not a trend of voting patterns to support that thesis.
2020 was really bad for Ds and Hispanics though.
2018 was already bad, concealed by the make-up of the electorate that turned out.
2022's polling says "D's fucked again with Hispanics".
2024's as well.
If I gambled, I'd bet on hitting break-even within this decade.
How was that with 2018? I haven't seen that data and I don't know where to look for it
I don't have a source to hand but from memory, in 2012 the Hispanic vote share was 71%, in 2016 it was 69%, in 2018 around 66%, in 2020 61%. Generic ballot average for this coming fall, last I checked, was 58%.
Yea, there's a lot of noise there, but it's been pretty consistently degrading for a decade now.
White progressives assume they can keep control of us the way they have Black people. That’s the whole point of CRT education. You teach kids to be race conscious, but they learn about their conception of their race from a white liberal woman.
I thought the point of CRT is that the tears of white liberal women are the most delicious things possible.
This is a fundamental mistake conservatives have about CRT. It’s not an attack on “white people.” It’s a way for white liberals to take up the mantle of “good white people” while attacking conservatives as “bad white people.”
And yet, here we are, having this discussion, with you sharing precisely *none* of those attitudes, with a native-born American who is in every way to your left.
We are not proposing to allow 10 million Bangladeshi immigrants to settle in TX over the next half decade and create an ethnolinguistic crystal that even America’s incredible ability to assimilate and, yes, learn from immigrants can’t dissolve back into the solution which fills your fishbowl.
We’re proposing to continue the policies that have worked for two centuries to ensure the US is a great place to live for hundreds of million and cement our place as the premier power on the globe in the face of Chinese neo-fascism. To draw the best and brightest and most ambitious from everywhere on the globe and stitch them into the fabric of a country where origin doesn’t matter, at a measured pace that allows us the time to do the job right.
Is this without risk? No. That, again, is not given to us in this life.
But the way to bet is that America’s incredible prosperity, opportunities for personal fulfillment, English lingua Franca and accompanying magnetic cultural attraction, still-strong educational institutions, and broad demand that children be brought up as Americans will win over the next generation of immigrants as they did you.
You, in denying the fundamental tenability of that goal, propose instead to risk the complete destruction the future my children and yours alike will live in, out of a profoundly ill-informed misreading of history, in pursuit of an imagined stasis that has not existed since man first figured out how to cast copper!
You’d turn us into fucking Hungary because you lack the faith that we can still be the United States! Why in fuck’s name would anyone simply let this horseshit pass by unmet?
I know I said this wasn’t worth it but goddamn this is easy: which is it?
Are the good, sensible, down-to-earth immigrants going to be our saviors from the homegrown radicals, or are immigrants with latent collectivist tendencies going to Socialize Our Murrica (tm)?
Political alignments are different in other countries. E.g. Islamic socialism is a thing.
The biggest concern to republicans is probably people like my parents. They’ll put aside their conservative social values and vote for white liberals for the socialism. They don’t feel any ownership of the broader culture, and have mechanisms within the ethnic community to police conformity. (My mom was quite clear when I was a kid that just because my white American friends were allowed to do something doesn’t mean I was.)
Sorry go read the other comment that I made in reply to the completely unrelated comment of yours lol.
EDIT now that near computer:
"And yet, here we are, having this discussion, with you sharing precisely *none* of those attitudes, with a native-born American who is in every way to your left.
We are not proposing to allow 10 million Bangladeshi immigrants to settle in TX over the next half decade and create an ethnolinguistic crystal that even America’s incredible ability to assimilate and, yes, learn from immigrants can’t dissolve back into the solution which fills your fishbowl.
We’re proposing to continue the policies that have worked for two centuries to ensure the US is a great place to live for hundreds of million and cement our place as the premier power on the globe in the face of Chinese neo-fascism. To draw the best and brightest and most ambitious from everywhere on the globe and stitch them into the fabric of a country where origin doesn’t matter, at a measured pace that allows us the time to do the job right.
Is this without risk? No. That, again, is not given to us in this life.
But the way to bet is that America’s incredible prosperity, opportunities for personal fulfillment, English lingua Franca and accompanying magnetic cultural attraction, still-strong educational institutions, and broad demand that children be brought up as Americans will win over the next generation of immigrants as they did you.
You, in denying the fundamental tenability of that goal, propose instead to risk the complete destruction the future my children and yours alike will live in, out of a profoundly ill-informed misreading of history, in pursuit of an imagined stasis that has not existed since man first figured out how to cast copper!
You’d turn us into fucking Hungary because you lack the faith that we can still be the United States! Why in fuck’s name would anyone simply let this horseshit pass by unmet?"
But I do share many of those Bangladeshi attitudes. I have none of the frontier attitude that fuels American small government conservatism and libertarianism. I believe in a government big enough to fund a welfare state but also to regulate morality. In my home country getting married and having babies is a moral obligation. Even if I vote Republican it’s a very different kind of republicanism than prevailed before.
And I grew up around white people because south asian immigration was thin and spread out back then. By contrast, my cousins are growing up in heavily Bangladeshi/Muslim neighborhoods.
I am in favor of much more immigration too. I am also not a Democrat or a progressive. The 2013 immigration bill plan for dealing with illegal immigrants already in the country is a really good idea. We should take in a lot more legal immigrants every year and make it easier to apply for visas in the home countries of immigrants, especially in Central and South America, so people don't have to make bad claims of asylum if they want to come to the US.
I'm a pretty firm center-lefty, and while IDGAF about religion one way or another, allowing a bunch of folks who think "public services" includes the most fundamental maintenance of public safety, law, and order... seems fine to me!
Hopefully the evolutionary dead-end that the woke/hipster lefties have wandered down will die out when they're too cosmopolitan, unrooted, and incapable of sacrifice to, ya know, breed.
Not that it should matter anyway, but not only is the apodosis of this statement ("ergo, Democratic majority forever") is now widely recognized as false, we should really note that the protasis , too, is in fact a myth, and there is, to my knowledge, no real reason to assume that America will become "majority non-white" in any meaningful way anytime soon. It's just that the Census is tweaking its racial definition in an absurd manner to artificially produce that result, by using the racist "one drop rule" AND the media exacerbates things by misreporting "white" for the figure of "non-hispanic white" excluding all Hispanic whites from consideration for the purposes if this prognosis (even though they are projected to be a HUGE group!). And even under this very very strained analysis, "whites" remain the solid plurality, far outnumbering any other group. If we do count hispanic whites as white, however, there is a projected white supermajority to the end of all of of the census projections. But that projection seems to be totally inconvenient to politicians on all sides, so no one appears to bother reporting it, even though it appears on literally the same Census reports!
That's certainly a possibility, but it was always a dumb idea and I don't understand why both parties believed in it. I think it has more to do with the rise of radio talk shows and Fox News. GOP elites were interested in bipartisan talks, but they were afraid of their constituents coming after them after listening to Rush Limbaugh. Not really that different than how they are today.
I think it's more about assimilation than colorblindness. Even if they wouldn't articulate it this way, I bet most Republicans don't have an issue with immigration when they associate it with people like Aileen Cannon or Nick Fuentes, rather than the stereotypical "day laborers outside of Home Depot" or a La Raza activist. And for those who say that Hispanics and Asians have it easier because of (generally) lighter skin, I would point to Herman Cain, David Clarke, etc.
Just because the left has an obsession with coding everything as being about whiteness, I don't think there's much in mainstream American culture in 2022 that isn't objectively colorblind (especially if separated from its origins).
Tl;dr since posting on a phone sucks: It's mostly about culture, not race (and JiB makes a good point that as Republicans start to recognize the shifts Trump set into motion with Black and Hispanic voters, especially men, rather than seeing them all as future Squad members, even MAGA will adapt).
I think it's even more simple - just about politics, not even culture really. Miami culture is full of people who speak Spanish and expect you to do the same, which we wouldn't look at as "assimilated" if it was happening in Ohio, and the culture is pretty different than mainstream American culture too. But they're Republican, so conservatives like Miami Cuban-Americans while liberals are always looking at a way to write them out of being a minority.
The fact there have been conservative minorities willing to align with white conservatives against the vast majority of their own ethnic group in a bid for political power for theirselves is nothing new - you can go back to the 1870's and see conservative blacks of the time making the same arguments about lazy, shiftless blacks that a type of anti-woke black conservative has loved to make for literal centuries.
So, no I'm not really surprised white Republican's are OK with minority voices who will agree witht them that racism ended in whatever year we've now decided (I think it's now the 90's that everybody tries to say was so much better), and that current activists have zero actual connection to minority communities at all is funny, when the median black Republican would get savaged if they actually went into an inner city community and tried their typical act.
Believe me,. whatever white people say about black conservatives, black liberals and black socialists are 100x more nasty and happy to say things that would get non-black liberals cancelled.
Accusing conservative minorities of disagreeing with "the vast majority of their own ethnic group in a bid for political power for themselves" is an inaccurate and offensive effort to project Black politics onto other minorities.
The "vast majority" of Hispanics and Asians are not Democrats. The social reinforcement that ties Black people to the Democratic Party is entirely absent among Hispanics and Asians. A plurality of both groups identify as independents. Hispanics went for Biden over Trump roughly 60-40, and Asians 70-30. That's dog people versus cat people, not the "community consensus" versus "self-promoting traitors." The majority of Asians voted Republican as recently as 1996, and a number of Hispanic and Asian communities are still stalwart republicans: Vietnamese, Cubans, etc. Non-college white people are about 60-40 in the other direction, but nobody finds it remarkable that someone might be a white Starbucks barista who voted for Biden.
"when the median black Republican would get savaged if they actually went into an inner city community and tried their typical act"
First, inner city community does not equal "typical Black community" or "speaks authentically for all black voters". You're sounding like Trump.
But anyways, I'm not sure if that's actually true. It would depend on their message, their personal charisma and who they were speaking to. I'm sure Candace Owens might get savaged if she went to a local D meeting and launched into a Fox tirade. But I imagine the median black GOP politician would do just fine talking to regular people on the street if they came from a similar community, if for no other reason than that most non-partisan people are fairly open-minded.