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.
Here's a concrete example of this. I attended some historical society event that had invited a Gullah pastor to give a lecture about that community. A third of the 30 minute presentation ended up being about the great "Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court." (To the consternation of the white liberals in the audience who were expecting guilt porn about slavery.)
It's also telling that nobody ever levels that criticism at Black people who have embraced white progressive social views. Clarence Thomas is much more representative of "people who look like him" (southern Black men) than the white-friendly intersectional progressive Black people CNN puts on TV. But of course we don't point that out because it's a wholly political effort.
Yea, I don't think my black middle-class neighbors would have even the slightest concern at Tim Scott turning up to talk with them about policing.
I'm probably the most rabidly pro-law-and-order lefty in this comment section... most of my views are informed by talking with them. They've been here between 2 and 8 times as long as my family and they understand how the city has been grappling with this problem over decades.
I just dash a nice dollop of "hey, I understand how these large technological systems and process automation work, somewhat" atop views that are mostly cribbed from them.
You’re mixing up “color” and “culture.” I don’t think my brown skin makes me any different than my wife’s white skin. But the fact that I come from a third world Muslim country, and she comes from Oregon pioneers, sure as hell makes a difference. Completely different cultural backgrounds, and it manifests in our voting.
If a majority of white people think that they are already being directly disadvantaged (legally and often by the government itself) while they are in the majority...why would they suddenly think that it would get better when they are the minority?
It seems pretty reasonable to assume that it would only get worse when they lose even more political power.
I don't see how you can separate race from partisanship here?
The argument went "we're going to continue welcoming immigrants from non-White countries and they were vote Democrat and lock you guys (the GOP) out of power permanently"
It seems like you could eliminate that little "non-" before White and not really change the meaning of the message by much at all. Do you think Rs would be much less scared by being permanently locked out of power by white voters? Imagine if Ukrainians were resettling here and clearly voting for Ds by 10-1...do you think Rs would be excited about that?
I think it is more directly about who has the political power. People want their concerns foregrounded, their folkways honored, etc. That's the latent fear, they they will be replaced as the dominant cultural group in America.
As a social democrat, I believe in actual colorblindness and meritocracy, not the current version of colorblindness/meritocracy that acts like any kind of crticism where the proof isn't actual slurs being used/cross being burned or only SAT scores allowed is wokeness or forced diversity.
Don't worry, another 2-3 decades of GOP "benign neglect" of rural/majority white areas in the same way that urban/majority-minority areas have been neglected will have them all on the same, color-blind side, united in shared dislike of the suburban-to-urban professional and capital-owning classes.
We'll have fixed all the racial issues... just in time for the revival of class warfare!
Yes, the colorblindness that has blinders to the past, and act like we're all on an equal footing today and everybody who says otherwise is just whining.
It’s worth reflecting on the political realignment that makes the 2007/2013 potential compromises unworkable as frameworks going forward. Immigration used to be a rare topic that was not neatly polarized across parties. Republicans were split between a nativist base and pro-immigration business community, Dems divided between open borders idealists and labor unions protecting their turf. This drove both years of stalemate plus opportunity for bipartisan agreement (as in 1986 and almost in 2007/2013).
Post Trump we have Republicans organized around “immigrants are bad period” while Democrats play footsie with “any immigration restrictions or enforcement are bad period”. Pro-immigration corporate republicans have moved to be anti-Trump Dems, and labor has made peace with immigrants as an important source of new members. It’s hard to imagine any legislative deal being reached without a filibuster proof trifecta of one side or the other in this political configuration.
I think it’s interesting that you included that glib mention of car thefts because I actually think that the impact of intentional non-enforcement of burglaries IS actually a big political issue!
In Philly/SF/other jurisdictions with aggressively progressive prosecutors there is a major debate over whether ‘soft’ sentencing encourages more of these types of crime. I think most people acknowledge that car theft would continue under a stricter regime (and would still be bad) but proponents would argue that increased/harsher enforcement would lead to less commission.
With the usual caveats about how immigration shouldn’t be compared to crime (though you started it) the political situations seem pretty comparable.
The glib mention of car thefts was meant merely as a jab against Governor DeSantis, not as an actual comparison between enforcement policies. Don't take it too seriously.
This has been a big problem in St Pete for quite a while, I think under both Democrats and Republican mayors. It seems to have a lot to do with idiots not locking their vehicles, like they think just because they live in a “nice” neighborhood they can leave their car unlocked and not worry about thieves or kids stealing the car for a joyride (increases in car theft/joyriding seemed to coincide with releases of “Fast and Furious” movies)
I agree people should lock their cars, but I've seen people unironically say that you should leave your car doors unlocked so that thieves can just help themselves to the contents of the car without needing to break a window or jimmy the lock. (A neighbor of mine had a trailer parked in the back alley behind her house for a few months before it got destroyed by a fire apparently started by drug users hanging out in it. When I was speaking with the neighbor about it the next day, she volunteered to me that she always left the trailer unlocked so that people wouldn't break the door open!)
Could you cite to any progressive prosecutors that are calling for non-enforcement of the law against burglaries? I'm from Ohio and here, and I think in most states, burglary is considered a violent crime. I would be very surprised if there are any prosecutors who would announce a policy of non-enforcement.
You seem to be confusing burglaries with robberies. It's absolutely clear that there's de facto zero enforcement of burglary laws in most large US jurisdictions if there are no physical injuries to the residents and the loss in theft and damages is in the low five figures or less. My house was broken into about 10 years ago, but with minimal property stolen, and the police didn't even bother to photograph the scene, let alone dust for fingerprints.
I'm not confusing burglaries and robberies, both are considered violent crimes. Ray in his post alleges "intentional non-enforcement" as a big issue. I would be shocked if any prosecutor anywhere in the United States has announced that their office is no longer prosecuting burglaries. So far no one has commented with an example of one prosecutor that is calling for this, or has called for this in the past.
"I was disappointed a decade ago by the level of police resources used to investigate a burglary at my house" is a very long way from "In Joe Biden's America radical woke prosecutors are de facto legalizing burglary"
In Georgia, burglary is the borderland between a small time felony and a big time felony. Most first time burglary sentences involve a year or more of prison, though sixty days in jail is possible with a sympathetic defendant and good lawyering.
The problem is that there is very little trust that the Democrats would hold up their end of such a bargain. They would get the amnesty right away, but why should anyone believe that they would enforce the new laws, when they have demonstrated no willingness to enforce the ones that are currently on the book?
Pre 2013, the Democrats had at least some credibility on this issue. Obama did step up enforcement and was willing to take some flak from the left for it. And there were prominent voices in the party supporting him. I understand why he pivoted after the second attempt at a compromise bill fell apart, but the fact is that he did pivot, he used executive power to grant amnesty, scaled back internal enforcement, and the party has never looked back.
The idea that Biden would enforce stricter laws and actually deport significant numbers of people who did not fall under the amnesty is ludicrous. He has shown zero appetite for standing up to the progressive left on any issue. And he was the *most* centrist candidate in the 2020 primary.
If Matt is right that there are many Democrats in Congress who are concerned about the way the asylum process works, then why not start with passing a bipartisan bill that fixes that problem? And if E-Verify is included, then that would be even better. As Matt often points out in other contexts, if there is something that should be done that a majority of Congress thinks is good on the merits, then just pass it, without using it as a lever to get the other side to yield on something else.
The nice thing about negotiating on legislation is that you don't have to have trust. Whatever is decided becomes law.
I think Matt is writing this column partly to encourage lawmakers on the Left to start this process. I agree with you that there is not a huge appetite on the Left right now to get this done because they are scared of getting attacked from their progressive wing. But Biden calling for more money for immigration courts IS him standing up to that progressive wing, which has been calling for the abolition of enforcement.
Good article. The phrase that really resonated with me is that asylum seekers have swallowed up the system, and the debate. So true. Modern immigrants seek asylum as their first choice, because word of mouth has taught them it works. A bevy of immigration lawyers pile on to the problem, as they don’t give a hoot about breaking the system, they just care about their clients and helping them use any means available to stay in the US. Can’t blame them, but it has overwhelmed and thus broken the system. The flood of asylum seekers has made it impossible to differentiate true need. Drastic measures will be required to fix this, which will absolutely jeopardize some seekers with true need, but in the long run it will be better for everybody.
They're already allowed to make claims at embassies and consulates, but it may not be realistic for people who are genuinely afraid.
Picture this: Local drug lord demands that you join his gang or else he'll torture and kill you/your wife/your children. If you go to the nearest consulate and ask for asylum in the U.S., he'll find out about it, because he knows everything that goes on in your town. What will he do to you then? Your best bet is to disappear with your family quietly and try to make it across the border.
Why isn't your best bet to go into hiding 100 miles away?
But also, if i do picture that, realistically speaking I'm picturing a situation where I've already probably made some stupid decisions. I may owe a debt to this guy or have a previous history of working with him. I'm actually pretty darn steeped in realistic versions of this story, i was reading one just yesterday, in fact:
What is absurd is that you believe that no random townspeople in countries with 10's of millions of people are being threatened willy-nilly.
In fact, it is pretty much assuredly true that some random people are being willy-nilly threatened. We could have a debate about how significant this number is, except that neither you nor I have any idea about it.....
Did you misread me or something? Did I say not a single person in Central America had ever been randomly threatened? And why "picture this" if it's a 1 in a million thing? He was suggesting it's typical, and it's not.
You don't get conscripted into a drug cartel under threat of your wife and children being tortured or murdered. You may "have" to join the local gang for protection, as sometimes also happens in the US in gang-dominated neighborhoods, but the idea that refusing would lead to your family's torture-murder is completely sensationalist.
I've read enough of these types of accounts, at least dozens if not over a hundred, of how people end up threatened to have as a good an idea of what's realistic as anyone here. So if we debated and came up with guesses I'd likely be the more informed party...
Also, “exile” is doing a lot of work here. Exile is a punishment because it means forced parting from one’s home. Illegal immigrants definitionally cannot be exiled. Rather, they are removed from a place to which they do not belong and which they entered uninvited (or overstayed their welcome). It’s not even a punishment, just basic enforcement of the principle of sovereignty.
"Exile" is an appropriate term for deporting DACA recipients.
Proportionality plays a key role in what punishment is appropriate to whom. Sending a visa overstay back is a proportionate punishment. Sending a young person back to a country they were made to leave when they were a child is not.
Well now you're kind of stretching the meaning of the word punishment quite a bit. Most immigration "crimes" have very light punishments or no punishment at all. An example punishment might be disallowing tourist visas in the future.
But not extending the right to live in a country to which you are not a citizen is not a punishment, anymore than not inviting you to my kids next birthday party is a punishment. I think you're retreating to the argument about DACA's because they are very clearly morally sympathetic, and so like most people I favored an extension of the rights of citizenship to them. But it's not something that is owed to every person who. buys a plane ticket to Mexico and then pays a smuggler to get them across the border.
“Sending a visa overstay back is a proportionate punishment”
No, it’s not a punishment at all. Punishment would be assessing a fine on their way out (whether they are leaving voluntarily or not) and/or banning them from reentering legally in the future.
"Exile is a punishment because it means forced parting from one’s home. Illegal immigrants definitionally cannot be exiled. Rather, they are removed from a place to which they do not belong".
Even accepting the premises that illegal immigration is victimless and that victimless crimes should in general receive fines rather than exile, this still doesn’t make sense. Exile is literally a complete remedy for this particular crime and represents a return to the status quo ante, and thus the natural way to remediate illegal immigration. Conversely, I don’t see how unilaterally giving up the power to remove people for illegal presence wouldn’t also mean that as a corollary we wouldn’t be able to, for example, deport someone for overstaying a tourist visa or otherwise violating visa conditions, assuming that exile is a disallowable remedy for illegal presence.
How do you impose a fee on someone who' used the last of their savings to pay a smuggler to cross the border?
Edit: It's tangential, but the human smugglers who are supported by illegal crossings (I've come across a range of numbers, from $500 to $5,000 per head) absolutely create many victims. The worst of them rob and kidnap and rape and extort their wards, and the best of them fork over a % of their profits as taxes to Drug Cartels ,who do all of those same things and more to their enemies.
The point is that the individual would-be migrants aren't directly harming anyone, but collectively they're funding an entire criminal industry and all the violence that goes along with it.
lol, i'll ignore the silly and incredibly ironic ad hominem and instead ask if you think that someone breaking into your home and not taking anything but rather simply deciding to live there cause its nice is committing a "victimless crime"?
No, it doesn't. No matter how many people vote for it, we can't deny Donald Trump the right to rent the house next to mine. Whereas if we were owners of a cooperatively-owned building in New York, we would have the property right to deny Donald Trump the right to rent in the building or buy a share of the building.
If it was raining outside and someone came into my unlocked house to get out of the rain, yes that’s a victimless crime. Breaking and entering has a victim in most cases because it involves breaking locks, intimidating home owners, intent to steal etc but if someone just wanted to be inside because being outside is bad for some reason, yeah, that sounds victimless.
Have you noticed how you changed the analogy? The correct one is a stranger coming to your home uninvited and deciding to live there without asking your permission. Or alternatively a guest who overstays their welcome - again with the apparent intention of staying permanently (despite the fact that you invited them only as a guest). Are you not within your rights to remove them ? Would that be a “punishment”?
The reason we are inundated with asylum seekers is that several Central American countries are basically failed states, where drug gangs get to murder and extort with impunity (my apologies and meaning no personal insult to anyone from Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras reading these words.) Plus, climate change means terrible droughts and loss of farming. How can we/should we help Central America develop to the point where people *want* to stay there?
We talk about immigration like it's an unalloyed good, but for plenty of people, it's the least bad option - they don't want to leave, but feel forced to do so. Homesickness is a thing; nostalgia is a thing. Many people would be happier if they could stay in a peaceful and prosperous Guatemala rather than abandoning everything they know and moving to a new country where they don't know anyone and may not feel like they fit in.
Is there any realistic way to help Central America without being neo-imperialist or having a bunch of really bad unintended consequences?
This year's surge is largely fueled by Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. People are flying to Mexico and then heading north. And, in the case of Venezuela, they can't be deported.
Fair point, but my question remains. How can/should we help these countries? Especially Haiti, which is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Millions upon millions of foreign aid $$ poured into Haiti don't seem to have helped at all.
The root cause seems to be the legal and political systems being incompetent and corrupt.
Most countries, our own included, can barely figure out how to fix problems like that within themselves. So fixing it somewhere else is a very tall order.
The alternative is we stop "helping" Central America at all. That is, we stop supporting right-wing governments aligned with the US who have a habit of immiserating and killing their own population, causing them to want to flee to the US.
Has this been true since like, the 80s? We've sanctioned the Ortega regime in Nicaragua. Venezuela and Cuba have hard-left regimes that aren't recognized by the US and they're the two main countries driving asylum claims.
Of course! Right-wingers believe in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Left-wingers believe the US government should do more to take care of the less fortunate. We should listen to their wishes!
Our actions in Venezuela and Cuba absolutely drive refugee flows to the US. There are persistent questions about our involvement in the coup in Honduras in 2009. Take a look at the "Aftermath" section of the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Honduran_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
On another point, that map of Venezuelan sanctions is amazing. Basically, North and South America, and the EU/UK, and that's it. Sort of amazing how even Japan and South Korea and Australia haven't gone along with them.
I'm not saying Venezuelan sanctions were the cause of their economic collapse. Misuse of oil funds by a kleptocracy (like in many other oil-based economies) was the cause. My point (supported in the article) is that "the new sanctions could worsen the situation.[5][6] In April 2019, Human Rights Watch and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a joint report noting that most early sanctions did not target the Venezuelan economy in any way,[7] adding that sanctions imposed in 2019 could worsen the situation, but that "the crisis precedes them"."
If you really want to reduce refugee and immigration to the US, one way is to reduce the poverty and desperation of the feeder countries. The US government is not doing that in Venezuela, because other foreign policy goals are considered to more important than reducing Venezuelan immigration to the US. That's my point about "helping" Latin America.
Our sanctions on Venezuela and our wet-foot, dry-foot policy on Cuba absolutely factor into people's considerations on whether to emigrate. Those governments have the primary responsibility, but there are policy changes we could make tomorrow that would reduce the flow of migrants to the US if we wanted to.
The Trump administration seemed to have found a legal or semi-legal method to make all people who file asylum claims to wait in Mexico for those claims to be adjudicated, whereas the Biden administration seems to have returned to the pre-Trump status quo of letting asylum seekers wait for their trial in the US.
If asylum seekers are waiting in Mexico, Mexico has a VERY powerful incentive to play ball with teh US and reduce the total flow of illegal immigrants moving north. If asylum seekers are allowed to pass through Mexico into the US, then Mexico doesn't care as much about how many people are passing through Mexico.
Am I missing something? Why wasn't this in the piece?
As much as I loathe and despise Agent Orange, I actually thought the "remain in Mexico" policy was a good idea at first glance. The reason it became terrible is that the asylum seekers were herded into horrible, squalid camps, instead of being settled in Mexican communities. If the asylum seekers were allowed to settle in regular neighborhoods in, say, Oaxaca (a poor but relatively safe part of Mexico) while waiting for their claim to be adjudicated, this would have been a good solution! They get to live in a country where they can assimilate more easily (no language barrier), the cost of living is much lower than in the U.S., the U.S. government reimburses Mexico for the cost of temporarily housing the migrants, and the U.S. has more control over who comes in. Too bad it didn't work out that way.
If "Remain in Mexico" was a stable US governmental policy that the Mexican government could expect to persist for at least a decade, then you'd expect to see more effort by the Mexican government to produce win-win outcomes for asylum-queue-waiters + Mexican communities, with the process perhaps lubricated by a small amount of American money. However, we only had the policy for ?about a year? pre-COVID, and then it was rapidly unwound post-COVID.
If the precedent is that "Remain in Mexico" will only happen during Republican presidencies and not Democratic presidencies, that substantially weakens the incentive for a Mexican government at any level to devote time to generating wins that evaporate half the time.
Matt does address it in the piece; he also doesn't understand why Remain fell apart. My thinking is that Biden demanded better conditions for people waiting in Mexico than Trump, and the Mexican govt wouldn't meet those demands. Complicating the situation is that Mexico's northern border is largely controlled by the cartels.
No, he doesn't? The word "Remain" does not appear in the piece. Matt says he doesn't know why Mexico is refusing to cut off the flow of people when it was willing to do so under Trump, when one possible explanation for that is that Biden chose to unilaterally dismantle the "Remain In Mexico" policy and therefore put himself in a much worse bargaining position. The omission remains strange.
"Complicating the situation is that Mexico's northern border is largely controlled by the cartels."
This is a possible explanation for why Biden chose to dismantle the "Remain In Mexico" policy, yes.
A question I have is why the visa system in the US, say for people who want student visas, short-term work visas, or even tourist visas, is so screwed up. Like 2+ years to wait just to get an appointment for a short-stay visa, arbitrary denials, that kind of thing.
Seems like this problem could probably be solved by the executive branch without any partisan hacks noticing and turning it into a wedge, but I don't know what the root cause of the problem is. It's very mysterious. Any DC swamp creatures have some insight?
I have no specific insight on this issue but it sounds like it may just be a staffing and resources issue, which in turn may tie the Executive’s hands (barring some initiative to increase rubber-stamping on noncontroversial visas, which might be a good idea!) inasmuch as it’s bound by Congressional appropriations.
Biden seems to be curiously blase about fixing immigration. No special insight here, but my guess (strictly a guess) is that his people are telling him don't make the issue more salient. Same, I think, with some of their seemingly bizarre nonchalance about covid. It's the politics.
I think there needs to be a point made about the failures of the old consensus to be enacting legislatively. In 2007 the GOP was not behind their own President's proposal, while a handful of mostly conservative/populist red-state Democratic Senators weren't on board. But in 2013, the GOP had shifted enough as well as Democratic defections eliminated by it passed the Senate. The only roadblock was Speaker Boehner, who refused to bring it up for a vote because he was afraid of what the Freedom Caucus would do to him.
You look at 2007 and it's hard to say the proposal was only killed by the filibuster, as it didn't look close to being able to get even 50 votes in the Senate. But by 2013 the GOP had temporarily moderated, post-2012 defeat, that there was a strong interest in doing something. Boehner's cowardice still killed it though.
Stephen Miller also played a very big role in generating that pressure on Boehner. He was instrumental in raising the salience of the bill, which otherwise might have stayed low-profile.
The hope that the U.S. can build out semiconductor manufacturing in a regionally “equitable” way seems really really hard to me. But the thing that I think could give it a decent shot to succeed is a heartland visa like system. That would make those regions attractive places to set up shop because they would have unique access to high skilled immigrants and you wouldn’t be relying purely on subsidies.
What about the effect of immigration on culture? As an immigrant myself, I don’t think it’s entirely positive. We bring our different ways of thinking and I don’t think it’s always a good thing. I think Americans seriously underestimate how long that socialization endures. I grew up in the US since age 5, and I’m still quite different in my thinking than other Americans.
Matt mentions historical immigration, but was that positive? I can’t help but notice that e.g. Italian immigration made New York City more like Italy (chaotic and disorganized). Wouldn’t it be better, or at least more orderly, if it was still New Amsterdam and populated by Dutch people?
This comment isn't even wrong. It's an unfalsifiable, ahistorical statement that doesn't even purport to explain how immigration affects local culture and government over long periods.
It all depends on the culture. I don’t think that, for example, Korean immigrants bitterly clinging to their love of education and high social cohesion is making the US worse off.
The Netherlands seems like a great place, but it was still New Yorkers who had to bail their asses out in WW2. I'm sure that our culture has changed significantly over the years as our immigration levels and directions have changed, but that change isn't necessarily bad or good. Italian culture is good at some things and bad at others. There is no one single culture that is the best at everything. And I don't think the dutch culture today is the same as it was in the 1800s, so how much does it really matter anyway? We are one of the strongest, most innovative nations on the planet so how can we now claim that the cultural diversity was a weak point? Is it the culture of England that made us strong? Then why are we now stronger than England? I don't think there is any evidence to say that maintaining one kind of culture leads to better outcomes.
I probably would grit my teeth and support such a compromise but the idea that we are prisoners of the state we are born into and only get to leave with permission even when leaving under literal threat of death seems really deeply fucked.
States really shouldn’t be able to control people in this way without some sort of underlying crime we shouldn’t be imprisoned where we don’t want to be.
We shouldn't have to get cancer either, but sometimes we do. Life's unfair man, gotta deal with it. "I can't leave the country I was born in, boo hoo hoo" is such a 21st century problem. 99% of the people who've ever lived didn't have that option either.
And the central Americans we're talking about here can and do, in fact, leave the place they were born in. Sometimes they move to other cities or regions within their own countries. Sometimes they move to a neighboring country or to Mexico. By world standards they probably have more options than someone from Afghanistan, Iraq or much of Africa. Seeking asylum in the US is the long-shot option, many more go for the safer thing closer to home and you don't hear about them.
Cancer isn't fair, but if Congress could just pass a bill that ended cancer, they should. Similarly, being imprisoned in the country you were born in unless you get permission to leave isn't fair, and if Congress could just pass a bill that ended this, they should.
Just because life isn't fair doesn't mean you should refuse to pass bills that make it more fair. You need to actually argue that it's *better* to have this unfair situation than the situation that would result from the bill.
At best I'm about halfway following your argument here. A couple reasons it's not landing with me:
1) There is no such bill under discussion. Sure, if we can improve things, we should, but well-meaning attempts at improvement often fail and sometimes even cause harm. I think Matt Y has some good ideas, but they're not ideas that will "rescue" every single Central American who lives in a poor or high crime neighborhood, let alone every world citizen in those circumstances. And no one else has those ideas either. By all means, cure cancer if you can. Complaining that congress hasn't solved poverty in C America is something like complaining we haven't cured cancer.
2) Apart from N Korea and maybe Cuba, no countries I know of imprison their citizens within their borders. Central Americans are free to attempt emigration or asylum in dozens of countries, most of them closer, cheaper to reach and also Spanish speaking. Calling it imprisonment is pure hyperbole.
3) It's kind of an aside - but the typical asylum argument is fairly weak for C Americans. Their governments are not torturing or killing large numbers of citizens. The violence they are fleeing is gang violence, comparable in scope to the gang violence that he have **in bad neighborhoods in our own country**. Honduras has a homicide rate equivalent to the worst cities in the USA, at around 60 pre 100k. Guatemala is about half that, equivalent to the city I live in, and El Salvador is about as bad as Compton in the 90s. But those levels of violence aren't even high enough to drive Americans out of those neighborhoods and cities in large numbers.
Pretty sure the poster is talking about various countries in Central America that are quite not great to live in that many people on this comment section think should basically be made impossible to immigrate into the US from.
There's wide ranging support here for making it much more difficult to claim asylum and lots of talk about how US should get out of treaties that make it impossible for the US to dismiss asylym claims as quickly as many people here want too, because they seem to believe asylum should only basically be for people who are direct targets of a government, because they spoke out against it.
"only basically be for people who are direct targets of a government" Is that not the intention of asylum laws and the treaties that created the asylum system? Allowing it to be hijacked for other purposes is likely to put the asylum system at risk of falling apart, internationally, which will endanger asylum seekers who are actually in danger from their government.
People don't want the asylum system shutdown, they want it used as designed. If you want to stealth argue that legal pathways be expanded to allow more central americans, be my guest, but don't try to trick people with a refugee loophole for people who are not refugees.
Or go to Canada or Mexico or Europe and complain to them that they should accept more low-skill immigrants from Central America. None of them are currently willing to do it. We're the only country that currently takes in millions of Central American.
I'm sure I'm a hapless naif on this topic, but is there any reason the US couldn't require asylum seekers from select countries (where the overwhelming majority of such applicants are clearly motivated mainly be economic reasons) to apply at a US embassy or consulate? (In other words no applications at the border?). An international treaty we've signed, perhaps?
Note that it's not a violation of the Protocol to make the applicants stay in Mexico, unless Mexico itself is the country where their rights are endangered. You just can't send them back.
The EU recognized this with the Dublin Regulation, basically their own version of the Remain in Mexico policy. This requires asylum-seekers to file their claims in the first EU member state they enter.
The idea is that if you've fled from (say) Afghanistan to Greece for valid political reasons you should be willing to settle there and not shop around for a higher standard of living in Germany or Sweden , whereas economic migrants might be deterred by the prospect of staying in Greece indefinitely.
It doesn't work very well, mainly because the Greek government has no incentive to cooperate. I have a Pakistani friend who got busted a couple of years ago for jumping the turnstile in the Athens metro; the cops took him down to the station for a few hours and then let him go. But they refused to take his fingerprints or formally arrest him, because the prints would have gone into a pan-EU database that's used to enforce the Dublin Regulation. The Greeks are hoping that he and all the other undocumented people will eventually sneak into Northern Europe. So if they can help it they won't create evidence that he was ever in Greece, because they'd be forced to take him back if he got caught or applied for asylum elsewhere.
How would that work practically? Consulates are not large. They'd need a whole new class of State employees to deal with it directly. Plus, what's the actual process? "I'm seeking asylum because my govt wants to arrest me for trying to unionize my workplace/because my husband is a police officer who beats me mercilessly and I have nowhere to go/because MS-13 put a hit out on my son" "Fill out this form, then go home and wait in danger and you should hear from us in 10-12 weeks."
Sort of reminiscent of how in The Wire, the gangs would keep tabs on who went in and out of Police HQ downtown. If you were seen there, it wouldn't be good for you.
Also, State has difficulty filling consular officer positions right now, because they're relatively low-status in the department and don't have great promotion potential. While everyone at State understands that helping Americans overseas is important for maintaining Congressional support (what's called ACS, or American Citizen Services), processing visas is thankless, neverending, and you always have to worry about being the officer who let in a terrorist, criminal, etc.
The problem is that nearly everyone in certain countries would be eligible. All you have to do is make some unfalsifiable claim like "I want to criticize the government".
The way international asylum law operates in practice is that it uses the willingness to migrate without documents as a filter: proof that you're serious about the danger you face in your home country. That might have worked fairly well in Europe after the end of World War Two but it doesn't work so well in a world linked by cheap international air travel. People are being incentivized to take enormous risks in the hope that they either won't get caught or can find a sympathetic judge if they do.
I've had occasion to become familiar with asylum law due to some pro bono work and your first point touches directly on something I've said, "If I were to become an immigration lawyer, my first piece of advice to any client hoping to claim asylum would be for them to become passionately and loudly interested in the politics of their home country, preferably via a public website, YouTube channel, or other preservable media outlet, and to loudly and specifically denounce the government and various public officials there by name in very harsh terms."
They definitely could, though it would require legislation. If there's any chance of a bipartisan agreement on this, something along those lines would probably need to be in it.
Spot on. But this is going to be a really, really tough row to hoe. At its base, Trump's rise was about immigration and his acolytes have every incentive to shout as loudly about this as possible. It's just so easy for right wingers to point to an example of an immigrant committing a crime to shut down a reasonable debate over this topic, and the business wing of the Republican party (who would benefit enormously from an immigration compromise) has probably decided that it's not worth supporting the fight when they can use immigration as a tool to rile up voters.
This has become 100% about race for a lot of people, and not just on the other side. And the only morally correct answer on race is more and more acceptance.
I think some pieces of each coalition are going to become more willing to compromise, if current voting trends continue.
The US is a very different country than Sweden (ethnically homogenous, parliamentary system) so the framing and outcomes would necessarily be different. But your point is valid... a lot of people just don't like immigrants.
Ehhh... some people have negative feelings in the abstract but I'd be willing to guess we're individually more positive than Swedes are. In Sweden the underclass who are disproportionately criminal and use welfare are more likely to be immigrants, but here it's sometimes the reverse. There are certainly guys locked in their basements 2,000 miles from the border watching Fox News who believe immigrants are criminals but my guess is that's a small and weak portion of the electorate.
What I think more people really don't like is a big mess of illegal immigration, or large numbers of immigrants (perceived to be) pushing up rental prices in already unaffordable metros and things like that. It's the disorder and the sense that we're not in control of our own system or our own borders.
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.
Here's a concrete example of this. I attended some historical society event that had invited a Gullah pastor to give a lecture about that community. A third of the 30 minute presentation ended up being about the great "Clarence Thomas, Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court." (To the consternation of the white liberals in the audience who were expecting guilt porn about slavery.)
It's also telling that nobody ever levels that criticism at Black people who have embraced white progressive social views. Clarence Thomas is much more representative of "people who look like him" (southern Black men) than the white-friendly intersectional progressive Black people CNN puts on TV. But of course we don't point that out because it's a wholly political effort.
Yea, I don't think my black middle-class neighbors would have even the slightest concern at Tim Scott turning up to talk with them about policing.
I'm probably the most rabidly pro-law-and-order lefty in this comment section... most of my views are informed by talking with them. They've been here between 2 and 8 times as long as my family and they understand how the city has been grappling with this problem over decades.
I just dash a nice dollop of "hey, I understand how these large technological systems and process automation work, somewhat" atop views that are mostly cribbed from them.
I think there's a lot of truth to this as well.
You’re mixing up “color” and “culture.” I don’t think my brown skin makes me any different than my wife’s white skin. But the fact that I come from a third world Muslim country, and she comes from Oregon pioneers, sure as hell makes a difference. Completely different cultural backgrounds, and it manifests in our voting.
If a majority of white people think that they are already being directly disadvantaged (legally and often by the government itself) while they are in the majority...why would they suddenly think that it would get better when they are the minority?
It seems pretty reasonable to assume that it would only get worse when they lose even more political power.
Surely reasonable, conditional on the premises, while surely delusional, conditional on reality.
I don't see how you can separate race from partisanship here?
The argument went "we're going to continue welcoming immigrants from non-White countries and they were vote Democrat and lock you guys (the GOP) out of power permanently"
It seems like you could eliminate that little "non-" before White and not really change the meaning of the message by much at all. Do you think Rs would be much less scared by being permanently locked out of power by white voters? Imagine if Ukrainians were resettling here and clearly voting for Ds by 10-1...do you think Rs would be excited about that?
I think it is more directly about who has the political power. People want their concerns foregrounded, their folkways honored, etc. That's the latent fear, they they will be replaced as the dominant cultural group in America.
As a social democrat, I believe in actual colorblindness and meritocracy, not the current version of colorblindness/meritocracy that acts like any kind of crticism where the proof isn't actual slurs being used/cross being burned or only SAT scores allowed is wokeness or forced diversity.
So...that peculiar kind of colorblindness that focuses on....color?
Don't worry, another 2-3 decades of GOP "benign neglect" of rural/majority white areas in the same way that urban/majority-minority areas have been neglected will have them all on the same, color-blind side, united in shared dislike of the suburban-to-urban professional and capital-owning classes.
We'll have fixed all the racial issues... just in time for the revival of class warfare!
:P
Yes, the colorblindness that has blinders to the past, and act like we're all on an equal footing today and everybody who says otherwise is just whining.
Caring about other people’s circumstances and history is just liberalism, it has nothing to do with color.
Racial “resentment” tests that show conservatives lacking sympathy for Black people also show they have identical attitudes toward poor white people: https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/renos/files/carneyenos.pdf
I think there's a lot of truth to that.
It’s worth reflecting on the political realignment that makes the 2007/2013 potential compromises unworkable as frameworks going forward. Immigration used to be a rare topic that was not neatly polarized across parties. Republicans were split between a nativist base and pro-immigration business community, Dems divided between open borders idealists and labor unions protecting their turf. This drove both years of stalemate plus opportunity for bipartisan agreement (as in 1986 and almost in 2007/2013).
Post Trump we have Republicans organized around “immigrants are bad period” while Democrats play footsie with “any immigration restrictions or enforcement are bad period”. Pro-immigration corporate republicans have moved to be anti-Trump Dems, and labor has made peace with immigrants as an important source of new members. It’s hard to imagine any legislative deal being reached without a filibuster proof trifecta of one side or the other in this political configuration.
I think it’s interesting that you included that glib mention of car thefts because I actually think that the impact of intentional non-enforcement of burglaries IS actually a big political issue!
In Philly/SF/other jurisdictions with aggressively progressive prosecutors there is a major debate over whether ‘soft’ sentencing encourages more of these types of crime. I think most people acknowledge that car theft would continue under a stricter regime (and would still be bad) but proponents would argue that increased/harsher enforcement would lead to less commission.
With the usual caveats about how immigration shouldn’t be compared to crime (though you started it) the political situations seem pretty comparable.
The glib mention of car thefts was meant merely as a jab against Governor DeSantis, not as an actual comparison between enforcement policies. Don't take it too seriously.
This has been a big problem in St Pete for quite a while, I think under both Democrats and Republican mayors. It seems to have a lot to do with idiots not locking their vehicles, like they think just because they live in a “nice” neighborhood they can leave their car unlocked and not worry about thieves or kids stealing the car for a joyride (increases in car theft/joyriding seemed to coincide with releases of “Fast and Furious” movies)
I agree people should lock their cars, but I've seen people unironically say that you should leave your car doors unlocked so that thieves can just help themselves to the contents of the car without needing to break a window or jimmy the lock. (A neighbor of mine had a trailer parked in the back alley behind her house for a few months before it got destroyed by a fire apparently started by drug users hanging out in it. When I was speaking with the neighbor about it the next day, she volunteered to me that she always left the trailer unlocked so that people wouldn't break the door open!)
“…they think just because they live in a ‘nice’ neighborhood they can leave their car unlocked and not worry about…”
…someone stealing their unsecured, loaded pistol from the center console.
Could you cite to any progressive prosecutors that are calling for non-enforcement of the law against burglaries? I'm from Ohio and here, and I think in most states, burglary is considered a violent crime. I would be very surprised if there are any prosecutors who would announce a policy of non-enforcement.
You seem to be confusing burglaries with robberies. It's absolutely clear that there's de facto zero enforcement of burglary laws in most large US jurisdictions if there are no physical injuries to the residents and the loss in theft and damages is in the low five figures or less. My house was broken into about 10 years ago, but with minimal property stolen, and the police didn't even bother to photograph the scene, let alone dust for fingerprints.
I'm not confusing burglaries and robberies, both are considered violent crimes. Ray in his post alleges "intentional non-enforcement" as a big issue. I would be shocked if any prosecutor anywhere in the United States has announced that their office is no longer prosecuting burglaries. So far no one has commented with an example of one prosecutor that is calling for this, or has called for this in the past.
"I was disappointed a decade ago by the level of police resources used to investigate a burglary at my house" is a very long way from "In Joe Biden's America radical woke prosecutors are de facto legalizing burglary"
In Georgia, burglary is the borderland between a small time felony and a big time felony. Most first time burglary sentences involve a year or more of prison, though sixty days in jail is possible with a sympathetic defendant and good lawyering.
The problem is that there is very little trust that the Democrats would hold up their end of such a bargain. They would get the amnesty right away, but why should anyone believe that they would enforce the new laws, when they have demonstrated no willingness to enforce the ones that are currently on the book?
Pre 2013, the Democrats had at least some credibility on this issue. Obama did step up enforcement and was willing to take some flak from the left for it. And there were prominent voices in the party supporting him. I understand why he pivoted after the second attempt at a compromise bill fell apart, but the fact is that he did pivot, he used executive power to grant amnesty, scaled back internal enforcement, and the party has never looked back.
The idea that Biden would enforce stricter laws and actually deport significant numbers of people who did not fall under the amnesty is ludicrous. He has shown zero appetite for standing up to the progressive left on any issue. And he was the *most* centrist candidate in the 2020 primary.
If Matt is right that there are many Democrats in Congress who are concerned about the way the asylum process works, then why not start with passing a bipartisan bill that fixes that problem? And if E-Verify is included, then that would be even better. As Matt often points out in other contexts, if there is something that should be done that a majority of Congress thinks is good on the merits, then just pass it, without using it as a lever to get the other side to yield on something else.
The nice thing about negotiating on legislation is that you don't have to have trust. Whatever is decided becomes law.
I think Matt is writing this column partly to encourage lawmakers on the Left to start this process. I agree with you that there is not a huge appetite on the Left right now to get this done because they are scared of getting attacked from their progressive wing. But Biden calling for more money for immigration courts IS him standing up to that progressive wing, which has been calling for the abolition of enforcement.
agreed that we should simply pass legislation that does good things and that everyone agrees on
Good article. The phrase that really resonated with me is that asylum seekers have swallowed up the system, and the debate. So true. Modern immigrants seek asylum as their first choice, because word of mouth has taught them it works. A bevy of immigration lawyers pile on to the problem, as they don’t give a hoot about breaking the system, they just care about their clients and helping them use any means available to stay in the US. Can’t blame them, but it has overwhelmed and thus broken the system. The flood of asylum seekers has made it impossible to differentiate true need. Drastic measures will be required to fix this, which will absolutely jeopardize some seekers with true need, but in the long run it will be better for everybody.
Allowing people to make asylum claims at embassies and consulates would be a good step.
They're already allowed to make claims at embassies and consulates, but it may not be realistic for people who are genuinely afraid.
Picture this: Local drug lord demands that you join his gang or else he'll torture and kill you/your wife/your children. If you go to the nearest consulate and ask for asylum in the U.S., he'll find out about it, because he knows everything that goes on in your town. What will he do to you then? Your best bet is to disappear with your family quietly and try to make it across the border.
Why isn't your best bet to go into hiding 100 miles away?
But also, if i do picture that, realistically speaking I'm picturing a situation where I've already probably made some stupid decisions. I may owe a debt to this guy or have a previous history of working with him. I'm actually pretty darn steeped in realistic versions of this story, i was reading one just yesterday, in fact:
http://www.borderlandbeat.com/2022/09/a-cartel-bodyguard-in-mexicos-hot-land.html
The idea that drug lords are just willy-nilly threatening the families of random townspeople who don't want to work for them is absurd.
What is absurd is that you believe that no random townspeople in countries with 10's of millions of people are being threatened willy-nilly.
In fact, it is pretty much assuredly true that some random people are being willy-nilly threatened. We could have a debate about how significant this number is, except that neither you nor I have any idea about it.....
Did you misread me or something? Did I say not a single person in Central America had ever been randomly threatened? And why "picture this" if it's a 1 in a million thing? He was suggesting it's typical, and it's not.
You don't get conscripted into a drug cartel under threat of your wife and children being tortured or murdered. You may "have" to join the local gang for protection, as sometimes also happens in the US in gang-dominated neighborhoods, but the idea that refusing would lead to your family's torture-murder is completely sensationalist.
I've read enough of these types of accounts, at least dozens if not over a hundred, of how people end up threatened to have as a good an idea of what's realistic as anyone here. So if we debated and came up with guesses I'd likely be the more informed party...
I was objecting to your final sentence which appears to say that "not a single person in Central America has ever been randomly threatened":
"The idea that drug lords are just willy-nilly threatening the families of random townspeople who don't want to work for them is absurd."
A missing common sense point is that illegal immigration is a victimless crime, and victimless crimes should be punished with fees, not exile.
The left no longer considers it a crime, and the right no longer considers it victimless.
Also, “exile” is doing a lot of work here. Exile is a punishment because it means forced parting from one’s home. Illegal immigrants definitionally cannot be exiled. Rather, they are removed from a place to which they do not belong and which they entered uninvited (or overstayed their welcome). It’s not even a punishment, just basic enforcement of the principle of sovereignty.
"Exile" is an appropriate term for deporting DACA recipients.
Proportionality plays a key role in what punishment is appropriate to whom. Sending a visa overstay back is a proportionate punishment. Sending a young person back to a country they were made to leave when they were a child is not.
Well now you're kind of stretching the meaning of the word punishment quite a bit. Most immigration "crimes" have very light punishments or no punishment at all. An example punishment might be disallowing tourist visas in the future.
But not extending the right to live in a country to which you are not a citizen is not a punishment, anymore than not inviting you to my kids next birthday party is a punishment. I think you're retreating to the argument about DACA's because they are very clearly morally sympathetic, and so like most people I favored an extension of the rights of citizenship to them. But it's not something that is owed to every person who. buys a plane ticket to Mexico and then pays a smuggler to get them across the border.
“Sending a visa overstay back is a proportionate punishment”
No, it’s not a punishment at all. Punishment would be assessing a fine on their way out (whether they are leaving voluntarily or not) and/or banning them from reentering legally in the future.
"Exile is a punishment because it means forced parting from one’s home. Illegal immigrants definitionally cannot be exiled. Rather, they are removed from a place to which they do not belong".
Home is where the heart is.
Even accepting the premises that illegal immigration is victimless and that victimless crimes should in general receive fines rather than exile, this still doesn’t make sense. Exile is literally a complete remedy for this particular crime and represents a return to the status quo ante, and thus the natural way to remediate illegal immigration. Conversely, I don’t see how unilaterally giving up the power to remove people for illegal presence wouldn’t also mean that as a corollary we wouldn’t be able to, for example, deport someone for overstaying a tourist visa or otherwise violating visa conditions, assuming that exile is a disallowable remedy for illegal presence.
How do you impose a fee on someone who' used the last of their savings to pay a smuggler to cross the border?
Edit: It's tangential, but the human smugglers who are supported by illegal crossings (I've come across a range of numbers, from $500 to $5,000 per head) absolutely create many victims. The worst of them rob and kidnap and rape and extort their wards, and the best of them fork over a % of their profits as taxes to Drug Cartels ,who do all of those same things and more to their enemies.
The point is that the individual would-be migrants aren't directly harming anyone, but collectively they're funding an entire criminal industry and all the violence that goes along with it.
“…the right no longer considers it victimless”
One wonders why the sanctuary city Chicago took some of the immigrants arriving from Texas and bussed them off to a non-sanctuary city in the suburbs.
Is burglary also victimless ?
Lol. Are the immigrants ganking your stuff?
lol, i'll ignore the silly and incredibly ironic ad hominem and instead ask if you think that someone breaking into your home and not taking anything but rather simply deciding to live there cause its nice is committing a "victimless crime"?
These are not analogous situations. No one, individually nor collectively, 'owns' the USA.
Does a country not belong to its people ?
No, it doesn't. No matter how many people vote for it, we can't deny Donald Trump the right to rent the house next to mine. Whereas if we were owners of a cooperatively-owned building in New York, we would have the property right to deny Donald Trump the right to rent in the building or buy a share of the building.
Not in a property sense - no.
If it was raining outside and someone came into my unlocked house to get out of the rain, yes that’s a victimless crime. Breaking and entering has a victim in most cases because it involves breaking locks, intimidating home owners, intent to steal etc but if someone just wanted to be inside because being outside is bad for some reason, yeah, that sounds victimless.
Have you noticed how you changed the analogy? The correct one is a stranger coming to your home uninvited and deciding to live there without asking your permission. Or alternatively a guest who overstays their welcome - again with the apparent intention of staying permanently (despite the fact that you invited them only as a guest). Are you not within your rights to remove them ? Would that be a “punishment”?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adverse_possession
If someone lived in abandoned house peacefully for many years and you evict them, yes, you’re an asshole even if it’s your legal right.
Elephant in the room time!
The reason we are inundated with asylum seekers is that several Central American countries are basically failed states, where drug gangs get to murder and extort with impunity (my apologies and meaning no personal insult to anyone from Guatemala, El Salvador, or Honduras reading these words.) Plus, climate change means terrible droughts and loss of farming. How can we/should we help Central America develop to the point where people *want* to stay there?
We talk about immigration like it's an unalloyed good, but for plenty of people, it's the least bad option - they don't want to leave, but feel forced to do so. Homesickness is a thing; nostalgia is a thing. Many people would be happier if they could stay in a peaceful and prosperous Guatemala rather than abandoning everything they know and moving to a new country where they don't know anyone and may not feel like they fit in.
Is there any realistic way to help Central America without being neo-imperialist or having a bunch of really bad unintended consequences?
This year's surge is largely fueled by Venezuela, Cuba and Haiti. People are flying to Mexico and then heading north. And, in the case of Venezuela, they can't be deported.
Fair point, but my question remains. How can/should we help these countries? Especially Haiti, which is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Millions upon millions of foreign aid $$ poured into Haiti don't seem to have helped at all.
Find similar stories of countries that have ended in success.
The root cause seems to be the legal and political systems being incompetent and corrupt.
Most countries, our own included, can barely figure out how to fix problems like that within themselves. So fixing it somewhere else is a very tall order.
The alternative is we stop "helping" Central America at all. That is, we stop supporting right-wing governments aligned with the US who have a habit of immiserating and killing their own population, causing them to want to flee to the US.
Has this been true since like, the 80s? We've sanctioned the Ortega regime in Nicaragua. Venezuela and Cuba have hard-left regimes that aren't recognized by the US and they're the two main countries driving asylum claims.
It's only bad to send aid if it's a right-wing dictatorship. If it's a left-wing dictatorship, then the problem is not sending aid.
Of course! Right-wingers believe in pulling themselves up by their bootstraps. Left-wingers believe the US government should do more to take care of the less fortunate. We should listen to their wishes!
Our actions in Venezuela and Cuba absolutely drive refugee flows to the US. There are persistent questions about our involvement in the coup in Honduras in 2009. Take a look at the "Aftermath" section of the wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Honduran_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
Venezuela was very far into literally collapsing years before the US imposed economic sanctions. This is a common far left talking point, but it's just wrong. You can read the actual history of them here! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_sanctions_during_the_Venezuelan_crisis
On another point, that map of Venezuelan sanctions is amazing. Basically, North and South America, and the EU/UK, and that's it. Sort of amazing how even Japan and South Korea and Australia haven't gone along with them.
I'm not saying Venezuelan sanctions were the cause of their economic collapse. Misuse of oil funds by a kleptocracy (like in many other oil-based economies) was the cause. My point (supported in the article) is that "the new sanctions could worsen the situation.[5][6] In April 2019, Human Rights Watch and Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health published a joint report noting that most early sanctions did not target the Venezuelan economy in any way,[7] adding that sanctions imposed in 2019 could worsen the situation, but that "the crisis precedes them"."
If you really want to reduce refugee and immigration to the US, one way is to reduce the poverty and desperation of the feeder countries. The US government is not doing that in Venezuela, because other foreign policy goals are considered to more important than reducing Venezuelan immigration to the US. That's my point about "helping" Latin America.
“Our actions in Venezuela and Cuba absolutely drive refugee flows to the US”
Naw, it’s the actions of the murderous, leftist governments in those countries that people are fleeing.
Our sanctions on Venezuela and our wet-foot, dry-foot policy on Cuba absolutely factor into people's considerations on whether to emigrate. Those governments have the primary responsibility, but there are policy changes we could make tomorrow that would reduce the flow of migrants to the US if we wanted to.
Isn't the key difference between Biden's border policy and Trump's border policy "Remain in Mexico"?
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/biden-administration-ends-trump-era-remain-in-mexico-policy
The Trump administration seemed to have found a legal or semi-legal method to make all people who file asylum claims to wait in Mexico for those claims to be adjudicated, whereas the Biden administration seems to have returned to the pre-Trump status quo of letting asylum seekers wait for their trial in the US.
If asylum seekers are waiting in Mexico, Mexico has a VERY powerful incentive to play ball with teh US and reduce the total flow of illegal immigrants moving north. If asylum seekers are allowed to pass through Mexico into the US, then Mexico doesn't care as much about how many people are passing through Mexico.
Am I missing something? Why wasn't this in the piece?
As much as I loathe and despise Agent Orange, I actually thought the "remain in Mexico" policy was a good idea at first glance. The reason it became terrible is that the asylum seekers were herded into horrible, squalid camps, instead of being settled in Mexican communities. If the asylum seekers were allowed to settle in regular neighborhoods in, say, Oaxaca (a poor but relatively safe part of Mexico) while waiting for their claim to be adjudicated, this would have been a good solution! They get to live in a country where they can assimilate more easily (no language barrier), the cost of living is much lower than in the U.S., the U.S. government reimburses Mexico for the cost of temporarily housing the migrants, and the U.S. has more control over who comes in. Too bad it didn't work out that way.
If "Remain in Mexico" was a stable US governmental policy that the Mexican government could expect to persist for at least a decade, then you'd expect to see more effort by the Mexican government to produce win-win outcomes for asylum-queue-waiters + Mexican communities, with the process perhaps lubricated by a small amount of American money. However, we only had the policy for ?about a year? pre-COVID, and then it was rapidly unwound post-COVID.
If the precedent is that "Remain in Mexico" will only happen during Republican presidencies and not Democratic presidencies, that substantially weakens the incentive for a Mexican government at any level to devote time to generating wins that evaporate half the time.
Matt does address it in the piece; he also doesn't understand why Remain fell apart. My thinking is that Biden demanded better conditions for people waiting in Mexico than Trump, and the Mexican govt wouldn't meet those demands. Complicating the situation is that Mexico's northern border is largely controlled by the cartels.
No, he doesn't? The word "Remain" does not appear in the piece. Matt says he doesn't know why Mexico is refusing to cut off the flow of people when it was willing to do so under Trump, when one possible explanation for that is that Biden chose to unilaterally dismantle the "Remain In Mexico" policy and therefore put himself in a much worse bargaining position. The omission remains strange.
"Complicating the situation is that Mexico's northern border is largely controlled by the cartels."
This is a possible explanation for why Biden chose to dismantle the "Remain In Mexico" policy, yes.
A question I have is why the visa system in the US, say for people who want student visas, short-term work visas, or even tourist visas, is so screwed up. Like 2+ years to wait just to get an appointment for a short-stay visa, arbitrary denials, that kind of thing.
Seems like this problem could probably be solved by the executive branch without any partisan hacks noticing and turning it into a wedge, but I don't know what the root cause of the problem is. It's very mysterious. Any DC swamp creatures have some insight?
I have no specific insight on this issue but it sounds like it may just be a staffing and resources issue, which in turn may tie the Executive’s hands (barring some initiative to increase rubber-stamping on noncontroversial visas, which might be a good idea!) inasmuch as it’s bound by Congressional appropriations.
Biden seems to be curiously blase about fixing immigration. No special insight here, but my guess (strictly a guess) is that his people are telling him don't make the issue more salient. Same, I think, with some of their seemingly bizarre nonchalance about covid. It's the politics.
I think there needs to be a point made about the failures of the old consensus to be enacting legislatively. In 2007 the GOP was not behind their own President's proposal, while a handful of mostly conservative/populist red-state Democratic Senators weren't on board. But in 2013, the GOP had shifted enough as well as Democratic defections eliminated by it passed the Senate. The only roadblock was Speaker Boehner, who refused to bring it up for a vote because he was afraid of what the Freedom Caucus would do to him.
You look at 2007 and it's hard to say the proposal was only killed by the filibuster, as it didn't look close to being able to get even 50 votes in the Senate. But by 2013 the GOP had temporarily moderated, post-2012 defeat, that there was a strong interest in doing something. Boehner's cowardice still killed it though.
Stephen Miller also played a very big role in generating that pressure on Boehner. He was instrumental in raising the salience of the bill, which otherwise might have stayed low-profile.
The hope that the U.S. can build out semiconductor manufacturing in a regionally “equitable” way seems really really hard to me. But the thing that I think could give it a decent shot to succeed is a heartland visa like system. That would make those regions attractive places to set up shop because they would have unique access to high skilled immigrants and you wouldn’t be relying purely on subsidies.
What about the effect of immigration on culture? As an immigrant myself, I don’t think it’s entirely positive. We bring our different ways of thinking and I don’t think it’s always a good thing. I think Americans seriously underestimate how long that socialization endures. I grew up in the US since age 5, and I’m still quite different in my thinking than other Americans.
Matt mentions historical immigration, but was that positive? I can’t help but notice that e.g. Italian immigration made New York City more like Italy (chaotic and disorganized). Wouldn’t it be better, or at least more orderly, if it was still New Amsterdam and populated by Dutch people?
This comment isn't even wrong. It's an unfalsifiable, ahistorical statement that doesn't even purport to explain how immigration affects local culture and government over long periods.
It all depends on the culture. I don’t think that, for example, Korean immigrants bitterly clinging to their love of education and high social cohesion is making the US worse off.
The Netherlands seems like a great place, but it was still New Yorkers who had to bail their asses out in WW2. I'm sure that our culture has changed significantly over the years as our immigration levels and directions have changed, but that change isn't necessarily bad or good. Italian culture is good at some things and bad at others. There is no one single culture that is the best at everything. And I don't think the dutch culture today is the same as it was in the 1800s, so how much does it really matter anyway? We are one of the strongest, most innovative nations on the planet so how can we now claim that the cultural diversity was a weak point? Is it the culture of England that made us strong? Then why are we now stronger than England? I don't think there is any evidence to say that maintaining one kind of culture leads to better outcomes.
I probably would grit my teeth and support such a compromise but the idea that we are prisoners of the state we are born into and only get to leave with permission even when leaving under literal threat of death seems really deeply fucked.
States really shouldn’t be able to control people in this way without some sort of underlying crime we shouldn’t be imprisoned where we don’t want to be.
We shouldn't have to get cancer either, but sometimes we do. Life's unfair man, gotta deal with it. "I can't leave the country I was born in, boo hoo hoo" is such a 21st century problem. 99% of the people who've ever lived didn't have that option either.
And the central Americans we're talking about here can and do, in fact, leave the place they were born in. Sometimes they move to other cities or regions within their own countries. Sometimes they move to a neighboring country or to Mexico. By world standards they probably have more options than someone from Afghanistan, Iraq or much of Africa. Seeking asylum in the US is the long-shot option, many more go for the safer thing closer to home and you don't hear about them.
Cancer isn't fair, but if Congress could just pass a bill that ended cancer, they should. Similarly, being imprisoned in the country you were born in unless you get permission to leave isn't fair, and if Congress could just pass a bill that ended this, they should.
Just because life isn't fair doesn't mean you should refuse to pass bills that make it more fair. You need to actually argue that it's *better* to have this unfair situation than the situation that would result from the bill.
At best I'm about halfway following your argument here. A couple reasons it's not landing with me:
1) There is no such bill under discussion. Sure, if we can improve things, we should, but well-meaning attempts at improvement often fail and sometimes even cause harm. I think Matt Y has some good ideas, but they're not ideas that will "rescue" every single Central American who lives in a poor or high crime neighborhood, let alone every world citizen in those circumstances. And no one else has those ideas either. By all means, cure cancer if you can. Complaining that congress hasn't solved poverty in C America is something like complaining we haven't cured cancer.
2) Apart from N Korea and maybe Cuba, no countries I know of imprison their citizens within their borders. Central Americans are free to attempt emigration or asylum in dozens of countries, most of them closer, cheaper to reach and also Spanish speaking. Calling it imprisonment is pure hyperbole.
3) It's kind of an aside - but the typical asylum argument is fairly weak for C Americans. Their governments are not torturing or killing large numbers of citizens. The violence they are fleeing is gang violence, comparable in scope to the gang violence that he have **in bad neighborhoods in our own country**. Honduras has a homicide rate equivalent to the worst cities in the USA, at around 60 pre 100k. Guatemala is about half that, equivalent to the city I live in, and El Salvador is about as bad as Compton in the 90s. But those levels of violence aren't even high enough to drive Americans out of those neighborhoods and cities in large numbers.
A Venezuelan, for instance, who leaves South America and makes it into Mexico is no longer under threat of death from the Venezuelan government.
Pretty sure the poster is talking about various countries in Central America that are quite not great to live in that many people on this comment section think should basically be made impossible to immigrate into the US from.
Can you find me even one commentator here who's suggesting legal paths of immigration from Central America be shut down?
There's wide ranging support here for making it much more difficult to claim asylum and lots of talk about how US should get out of treaties that make it impossible for the US to dismiss asylym claims as quickly as many people here want too, because they seem to believe asylum should only basically be for people who are direct targets of a government, because they spoke out against it.
"only basically be for people who are direct targets of a government" Is that not the intention of asylum laws and the treaties that created the asylum system? Allowing it to be hijacked for other purposes is likely to put the asylum system at risk of falling apart, internationally, which will endanger asylum seekers who are actually in danger from their government.
People don't want the asylum system shutdown, they want it used as designed. If you want to stealth argue that legal pathways be expanded to allow more central americans, be my guest, but don't try to trick people with a refugee loophole for people who are not refugees.
Or go to Canada or Mexico or Europe and complain to them that they should accept more low-skill immigrants from Central America. None of them are currently willing to do it. We're the only country that currently takes in millions of Central American.
I'm sure I'm a hapless naif on this topic, but is there any reason the US couldn't require asylum seekers from select countries (where the overwhelming majority of such applicants are clearly motivated mainly be economic reasons) to apply at a US embassy or consulate? (In other words no applications at the border?). An international treaty we've signed, perhaps?
I think it's the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-refoulement
Note that it's not a violation of the Protocol to make the applicants stay in Mexico, unless Mexico itself is the country where their rights are endangered. You just can't send them back.
The EU recognized this with the Dublin Regulation, basically their own version of the Remain in Mexico policy. This requires asylum-seekers to file their claims in the first EU member state they enter.
The idea is that if you've fled from (say) Afghanistan to Greece for valid political reasons you should be willing to settle there and not shop around for a higher standard of living in Germany or Sweden , whereas economic migrants might be deterred by the prospect of staying in Greece indefinitely.
It doesn't work very well, mainly because the Greek government has no incentive to cooperate. I have a Pakistani friend who got busted a couple of years ago for jumping the turnstile in the Athens metro; the cops took him down to the station for a few hours and then let him go. But they refused to take his fingerprints or formally arrest him, because the prints would have gone into a pan-EU database that's used to enforce the Dublin Regulation. The Greeks are hoping that he and all the other undocumented people will eventually sneak into Northern Europe. So if they can help it they won't create evidence that he was ever in Greece, because they'd be forced to take him back if he got caught or applied for asylum elsewhere.
This anecdote is fascinating and frustrating, and of course it makes some degree of sense for everyone involved--thank you for sharing.
Thoughtful answer. Thanks.
How would that work practically? Consulates are not large. They'd need a whole new class of State employees to deal with it directly. Plus, what's the actual process? "I'm seeking asylum because my govt wants to arrest me for trying to unionize my workplace/because my husband is a police officer who beats me mercilessly and I have nowhere to go/because MS-13 put a hit out on my son" "Fill out this form, then go home and wait in danger and you should hear from us in 10-12 weeks."
Sort of reminiscent of how in The Wire, the gangs would keep tabs on who went in and out of Police HQ downtown. If you were seen there, it wouldn't be good for you.
>>How would that work practically? Consulates are not large.<<
Oh, we'd definitely need to spend money increasing capacity in this area.
Also, State has difficulty filling consular officer positions right now, because they're relatively low-status in the department and don't have great promotion potential. While everyone at State understands that helping Americans overseas is important for maintaining Congressional support (what's called ACS, or American Citizen Services), processing visas is thankless, neverending, and you always have to worry about being the officer who let in a terrorist, criminal, etc.
In fact, my understanding is that asylum/refugeeship seekers aren't allowed to apply anywhere but the US border
It would be better for everyone involved if applications could be made at embassies and consulates
The problem is that nearly everyone in certain countries would be eligible. All you have to do is make some unfalsifiable claim like "I want to criticize the government".
The way international asylum law operates in practice is that it uses the willingness to migrate without documents as a filter: proof that you're serious about the danger you face in your home country. That might have worked fairly well in Europe after the end of World War Two but it doesn't work so well in a world linked by cheap international air travel. People are being incentivized to take enormous risks in the hope that they either won't get caught or can find a sympathetic judge if they do.
This is all such a mess.
I've had occasion to become familiar with asylum law due to some pro bono work and your first point touches directly on something I've said, "If I were to become an immigration lawyer, my first piece of advice to any client hoping to claim asylum would be for them to become passionately and loudly interested in the politics of their home country, preferably via a public website, YouTube channel, or other preservable media outlet, and to loudly and specifically denounce the government and various public officials there by name in very harsh terms."
They definitely could, though it would require legislation. If there's any chance of a bipartisan agreement on this, something along those lines would probably need to be in it.
Spot on. But this is going to be a really, really tough row to hoe. At its base, Trump's rise was about immigration and his acolytes have every incentive to shout as loudly about this as possible. It's just so easy for right wingers to point to an example of an immigrant committing a crime to shut down a reasonable debate over this topic, and the business wing of the Republican party (who would benefit enormously from an immigration compromise) has probably decided that it's not worth supporting the fight when they can use immigration as a tool to rile up voters.
This has become 100% about race for a lot of people, and not just on the other side. And the only morally correct answer on race is more and more acceptance.
I think some pieces of each coalition are going to become more willing to compromise, if current voting trends continue.
“Row.”
Ahhhh! Thanks... of course it is.
The US is a very different country than Sweden (ethnically homogenous, parliamentary system) so the framing and outcomes would necessarily be different. But your point is valid... a lot of people just don't like immigrants.
Ehhh... some people have negative feelings in the abstract but I'd be willing to guess we're individually more positive than Swedes are. In Sweden the underclass who are disproportionately criminal and use welfare are more likely to be immigrants, but here it's sometimes the reverse. There are certainly guys locked in their basements 2,000 miles from the border watching Fox News who believe immigrants are criminals but my guess is that's a small and weak portion of the electorate.
What I think more people really don't like is a big mess of illegal immigration, or large numbers of immigrants (perceived to be) pushing up rental prices in already unaffordable metros and things like that. It's the disorder and the sense that we're not in control of our own system or our own borders.