(1) I think citizens support, and Democrats should market their policies in support of, green cards on pure rights-based grounds. If I fall in love with someone that’s a foreign national, I should have the right as an American citizen to bring them over with work rights. Sure such a policy might and would be gamed at the margin, mail-order brides and all, but taking such a policy away is taking away rights from American citizens. Marketing such a policy on bleeding heart-based grounds is persuasive to some but not to all. And the America First crowd could perhaps be convinced that the right way to put America First is not to take away the rights of US citizens!
(2) I think that there are two (well, three) ideas commonly espoused by the bulk of SB readership that are fundamentally in tension with each other:
- the elite overproduction hypothesis
- the desire for a skills-based immigration regime
- the housing theory of everything
That is, if our colleges are producing too many graduates for high-skilled jobs (we need another H1B software engineer like we need holes in all our heads, IMO, given the tech job market), and we have a shortage of tradespeople to build houses and metro lines and drive buses to the extent that this is expensive (obviously we need regulatory reform too), we should be fighting *against* a skills-based immigration regime and for an immigration regime that would allow us to combat Baumol’s in the construction sector (ideally with lower minimum wages for temp immigrant workers, too, but that’s a harder sell).
That being said, this is also in tension with the national security idea that
- a brain drain from our enemies (well, China mostly) to us is good to the extent that it harms those countries and that they don’t form a 5th column
- we educate a lot of foreigners in our universities and it seems like a waste to export that human capital back
- there is nonzero value in terms of this process in terms of hopefully exporting American values to hostile countries, but it is somewhat zero-sum when those spots at university are taken from an American citizen who can be educated.
I’m not sure how I would tackle this, tbh, though I have some ideas. I would say that a brain drain from allies like India to the US is probably not good - negative sum - whereas from China it’s probably negative sum as well, given a billion people any brain drain to here is a drop in the bucket, and has the risk of them returning to China with the skills they learned here, which is bad.
Mass deportation (if I were Trump) = beef up immigration judges along with changing rules to make asylum rules strict. Move up everyone's asylum case... deport anyone who loses immediately. Deport anyone who fails to show up for court case immediately.
This alone would end up deporting a huge percentage of recent asylum seekers, and since they fairly recent, it wont be that hard to "justify". Its not even changing the rules or anything... since the asylum seekers theoretically knew what the process was. It only targets fairly recent migrants.
This is the obvious ploy since even Democrats will admit asylum system is being gamed and abused.
One policy that I think would be really cool: Giving individual states the right to issue some number of US visas (with the condition that people on these visas remain in the state of issuance). A state could issue visas to highly skilled workers, use visas to attract top international students to State U, sell the visas to raise cash, issue visas on humanitarian grounds, get seasonal agricultural labor, not issue visas, whatever.
I have to admit that this is somewhat inspired by the Abbott busing strategy. I get the idea that many voters are very physically separated from the effects (positive and negative) of immigration. Immigration is basically an emotional omni-issue. Pushing at least some of immigration down to the state level will make it more real to people.
Most of the people who scream in fear about illegal immigrants....don't know any illegal immigrants.
It's just a bogeyman they can easily blame all their problems on without having to personally deal with them in the flesh. A nebulous, powerless group they knowingly can punch down on without it having to affect their lives personally because, again, they don't know any illegal immigrants.
This is what made the Simpsons episode on immigration so good--it made the family see it differently once they discovered Apu overstayed his visa. (Of course, this being Springfield, they still voted to pass the deportation initiative, leading to Homer saying this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdkM_eSYXdw)
I don't know about the screamers, but when large numbers of migrants appear somewhere and seem to be sheltered at tax payer expense there is always a backlash, whether that's at the border or in Chicago or NYC.
A college friend of mine from California who has always been an illegal immigration hawk also comes to mind. His take was basically "all the shitty kids at school who started fights and acted like fools were the kids of illegal immigrants". So that's another way the opinion could be formed.
In NYC I get the sense that no one wants to deport the dishwasher who’s been here illegally for 10+ years. But people seem fed up with the migrant shelters and tax dollars being spent on them.
That seems right for Chicago too. The biggest change is how nearly every intersection has migrant panhandlers on it now. Sadly with infants and toddlers in arms. & there has to be some coordination because they're setting up on corners 10-15 miles away from shelters.
Yeah we see them on the subways selling candy and going down blocks with outdoor dining. Anecdotally it’s working class Hispanics that get the most fired up about them in my experience.
I've always felt that the Ellis Island era of virtually unrestricted immigration was the source of American greatness and it makes me sad that the public at large doesn't agree. I understand the pragmatic calculus - obviously a Trump administration would be worse for immigration than whatever compromise position the Democrats come up with - but boy is it hard when popularism comes for the things you care about.
Explosive population growth, obviously. In my ideal world every city center in the country would be another Manhattan (obviously this is illegal today, but if I'm waving a magic wand that's fixed too). Probably you'd see a lot of ethnic enclaves spring up like happened back then, and over generations they'd assimilate same as they do today.
"the Ellis Island era of virtually unrestricted immigration was the source of American greatness and it makes me sad that the public at large doesn't agree."
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, it seems pretty obvious that "the Ellis Island era of virtually unrestricted immigration" was a major, and probably THE biggest single, contributing factor to the post-WWI immigration restriction movement that lasted for about 40 years.
My view is that immigration is vital to our national strength but we have to take pauses when there are big surges to absorb the new bulge and afterwards we can open the doors much wider again. Big surges will always lead to a backlash. We're probably at the point now where we need to slow down and absorb the newcomers. But not not not expel them. We need them!
Probably so. I think that was un-American then and it's un-American now. I don't like having to compromise with people who don't feel patriotic when they read "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" but that's why I just read about politics instead of running for office.
When people are against immigrants, they are most often against them because they don't believe they are sympathetic strivers, they think they (or a portion of them) are rule-breakers who are taking advantage of the US in various ways.
The polling in today's post shows, in part, that if you describe a potential immigrant in sympathetic terms, you'll tend to get a positive response. It also shows people expect immigrants to follow the rules of immigration. They didn't ask, but if you describe immigrants in unysmpathetic terms (taking advantage of an asylum system, or involved in drug-smuggling, for example), people will respond very negatively.
I think people's responses don't vary a lot on these aspects. The fundamental beliefs are rather similar except for at the fringe of the left and right. What varies more is the types of immigrants they are exposed to in their life and in the media.
I'm not sure that mass deportation would be as unpopular as we'd like to think. Hasn't history shown that a great many people will cheer as their neighbors are rounded up and dragged away? Often times when they're being dragged away to far worse fates than exile to a foreign country.
It seems like the strong public reaction in 2017/18 to drastically less aggressive deportation efforts by Trump is pretty good evidence that there would not be a very positive response to a program that would have to be literally almost two whole orders of magnitude bigger to match Trump's promises.
Agreed to all of this, but I would note that republicans have zero trust with democrats on this issue.
Thus, you will probably need to do enforcement first. Get illegal immigration really, really low, then try and do some type of legalization of the people that are here
Basically, I suggest hiring way more immigration judges, building bigger detention centers and not allowing anybody into the country of any type of asylum claims
Also reform what allows for asylum
And finally, put a provision, you shut down the border, if detention centers are full
Reading this well written and agreeable Yglesias piece, I couldn't help thinking about a conservative relative of mine with whom I've often had mostly productive disagreements about politics. This relative is a fairly decent fellow, and his conservatism is born more from tribal/social/religious reasons than any deep conservative beliefs.
In our conversations he has expressed sympathy for undocumented persons, welfare recipents, and even in the idea of systemic racism, which makes his knee jerk support of Trump (he is an even bigger fan of DeSantis) so puzzling to me. When we talk about issues he is so rational and even tempered, willing to give other humans the benefit of the doubt, and even expand his circle of caring to folks with strange names and faces.
And yet he supports Trump 100%. And it dawned on me, reading your article that he is simply not a rational person when it comes to politics. He is incapable of voting Democratic, no matter how much he might sympathize with liberal ideas, because deep inside of him he identifies with the conservative populism of our shared family history.
And I think this is a lot of what we are dealing with. We need to stop trying to analyze why conservatives are the way they are. It's not a mystery. They simply perceive Trump as their tribal leader and that is it. There is no conversation about the issues that will change their mind. It is pointless.
And this makes me really sick of the NY Times constant "we interviewed 12 Trump voters and here's what they think" articles.
It's good to keep people like him in mind, but he's not the only type of voter. Comparing 2016 and 2020, 14% of voters switched their presidential vote, and a greater number voted in 2020 but not 2016 (turnout).
I'm sure there is a big chunk of immovable tribalists, but at the same time we can't minimize the number of swing voters.
Totally agree, but I suppose I'm reacting to the whole "liberals are big meanies and don't GET conservatives" articles that I see everywhere all the time these days.
Those articles would be much better if they shifted the framing from "don't GET conservatives" to "don't get why people might VOTE conservative"
I feel like I personally know a lot of people who have shifted their votes in the last couple elections, and when they've voted for Trump, it's because some subset of conservative arguments appealed to them. They aren't conservatives, because they like some liberal arguments, too.
The thing is, liberals would normally "GET" the appeal of the liberal arguments, but "NOT GET" why the same person would like the conservative argument.
I guess my point is, the framing is annoying because it makes it seem like liberals should bend over backwards to appease committed partisans. But I really do think there are people out there being persuaded by various issues. And it's useful to understand what's pushing or pulling them to the GOP.
The example of persuadable voters I always think of are a father / son I know who flipped from voting R / D in 2016 to D / R in 2020. I think the retired father was upset about Trump's handling of covid, and thought it showed he was incompetent, while the son was upset about having to pay his workers excessive amounts of sick time any time one of them had a cold or fever, and blamed Dem for that.
How do we deal with anti-assimilation populations such as the Islamists and active “death to America” settler colonialism crowd? They seem ideologically incapable of embracing America, but perhaps this will wain after a couple generations? It seems that the MEMRI stars should be prioritized for deportation, no?
Are there significant Islamist populations that are actively and vocally against assimilation? How many are there and are they mostly 1st or 2nd generation (or native)?
It's an interesting question. Our history shows immigrants usually assimilate quite nicely. But the Amish are a good example of a group that has never assimilated and looks like it might never will. So we can't take assimilation for granted.
The German immigrants who swung hard against FDR in 1944(!) ended up being an obvious benefit to the country even during the actual freaking war. By far the largest dodge of the immigration-bad side is not applying their own reasoning to previous time periods
Also don't confuse loud and large. There are some extremely obnoxious Hamas cheerleaders on college campuses. I suspect many are Americans but it is possible some are here on student visas.
But the numbers are small. Meanwhile the average Muslim immigrant loves America, lives their life, and has nothing to do with any terrorists.
Great article this morning. I particularly appreciate the first section. In my experience, speaking to people who are very concerned about immigration, their concerns don't really make sense and aren't born out by data, but this is a democracy and those people vote, so what can you do? The violent crime rate of legal immigrants is about a third the rate of native-born Americans, and the violent crime rate of illegal immigrants is only slightly higher than for native-born Americans. Other concerns listed are not necessarily untrue, but would be true of American-born citizens as well. "They'll compete for labor." Yeah, so will your kids in 20 years. They'll also increase the labor supply. "They'll compete for housing." Again, so will your kids in 20 years. The arguments I run in to are usually just arguments against having more people. Nothing about said people being immigrants makes the problem worse. But at the end of the day, this is a democracy, so we don't just get to tell wife swathes of voters "sorry, your concerns aren't backed up by data, nothing we can do."
As for the left, one thing I'd like them to stop doing is treating deportation like a crime against humanity. Matt lines out some sympathetic cases for people here illegally to not be deported, and that's fine. But there should be some acknowledgement that we're extending grace. We're fully within our rights to deport people who are here illegally. It kind of reminds me of when somebody gets busted for weed in a red state. "Oh my God, he got arrested for WEED, can you believe it?" Well, yeah I can actually. Weed is illegal there, so...
"Nothing about said people being immigrants makes the problem worse"
True, but options on the table for kids vs immigrants are wildly different. I think I can understand why a person might want kids but not immigrants, although they both would compete for jobs and housing and stuff, and in many ways the kids are actually worse, since they'll drain resources for 20 years.
I wonder if the "more people" arguments are more prominent on the West Coast, where housing is in short supply than they are around where I live.
I'll be more specific. A lot of people will insist they're not opposed to immigration, just illegal immigration. But when pressed as to why, they'll just bring up stuff that would be true of legal immigrants, or just more human beings in an area, whether domestic or alien. There's nothing wrong with holding this position, it's just that the reasons listed usually don't match what they say they're concerned about.
Yes on the West Coast, there is a strain of Malthusianism too where some people will say point blank they want fewer humans.
I think it’s worth acknowledging that illegal immigration to the US is a genuinely hard problem because America has a very long, heavily trafficked border with a country that is much poorer. The American public mostly wants the issue to go away and not deal with any tradeoffs. They’re mad now about the level of illegal immigration, but they were also mad about Trump’s immigration crackdowns.
This is half of why we don't have a Schengen-style Zone with our northern neighbors. The US doesn't want to de-facto be governed by Canadian immigration laws, and the other half is that Canada doesn't want to be de-facto governed by our firearms laws.
I actually worry about this quite a bit. It's going to be very tempting for Canada to take steps to deal with their unpopular immigration situation that result in people trying to cross into the US.
It's not Canadians coming from the northern border, it's asylum seekers or people without work permits who come in from the North because it's far less patrolled.
My general hot take on this is that we should sell green cards for ~$100k a pop, and use the funds for border security+other populist causes (e.g., free college). Coyotes aren't cheap, and if you make that $100k financeable, the labor premium from being in the country legally will be worth it, IMO
That's a great point! Central American migrants are already paying significant funds (5k or 10k, I think?) to smugglers, with great risk to themselves. The trip North is like a hidden humanitarian catastrophe that few people want to talk about.
Anyways, if a person would pay 10k to smugglers for X% chance to get here successfully (including Y% of being kidnapped or raped) that person would certainly pay more to arrive legally.
And maybe prices as low as 15k would be unpalatable to the electorate and unworkable, but it suggests some price-based solutions may be out there.
I predict that Taylor Swift will adopt a Dutch auction system for her concert tickets before the US adopts such a policy -- the left would hate it ("Rich people get to skip to the front of the line!") and the right would hate it ("Evil foreign powers will infiltrate spies en masse and George Soros will pay to import gangs of rapists!").
I'm aware that there are other countries that do it, but I think they very likely had dramatically different immigration paradigms to begin with that made adopting such policies easier.
George Washington?
Some thoughts on this article:
(1) I think citizens support, and Democrats should market their policies in support of, green cards on pure rights-based grounds. If I fall in love with someone that’s a foreign national, I should have the right as an American citizen to bring them over with work rights. Sure such a policy might and would be gamed at the margin, mail-order brides and all, but taking such a policy away is taking away rights from American citizens. Marketing such a policy on bleeding heart-based grounds is persuasive to some but not to all. And the America First crowd could perhaps be convinced that the right way to put America First is not to take away the rights of US citizens!
(2) I think that there are two (well, three) ideas commonly espoused by the bulk of SB readership that are fundamentally in tension with each other:
- the elite overproduction hypothesis
- the desire for a skills-based immigration regime
- the housing theory of everything
That is, if our colleges are producing too many graduates for high-skilled jobs (we need another H1B software engineer like we need holes in all our heads, IMO, given the tech job market), and we have a shortage of tradespeople to build houses and metro lines and drive buses to the extent that this is expensive (obviously we need regulatory reform too), we should be fighting *against* a skills-based immigration regime and for an immigration regime that would allow us to combat Baumol’s in the construction sector (ideally with lower minimum wages for temp immigrant workers, too, but that’s a harder sell).
That being said, this is also in tension with the national security idea that
- a brain drain from our enemies (well, China mostly) to us is good to the extent that it harms those countries and that they don’t form a 5th column
- we educate a lot of foreigners in our universities and it seems like a waste to export that human capital back
- there is nonzero value in terms of this process in terms of hopefully exporting American values to hostile countries, but it is somewhat zero-sum when those spots at university are taken from an American citizen who can be educated.
I’m not sure how I would tackle this, tbh, though I have some ideas. I would say that a brain drain from allies like India to the US is probably not good - negative sum - whereas from China it’s probably negative sum as well, given a billion people any brain drain to here is a drop in the bucket, and has the risk of them returning to China with the skills they learned here, which is bad.
Mass deportation (if I were Trump) = beef up immigration judges along with changing rules to make asylum rules strict. Move up everyone's asylum case... deport anyone who loses immediately. Deport anyone who fails to show up for court case immediately.
This alone would end up deporting a huge percentage of recent asylum seekers, and since they fairly recent, it wont be that hard to "justify". Its not even changing the rules or anything... since the asylum seekers theoretically knew what the process was. It only targets fairly recent migrants.
This is the obvious ploy since even Democrats will admit asylum system is being gamed and abused.
(this is an intellectual exercise)
"Deport anyone who fails to show up for court case immediately."
Not sure if you've fully thought through the implementation challenges here.
Make them wear an ankle monitor until trial.
By deport immediately, I mean if and when contact is made with the person. Maybe make an attempt to go to last recorded address.
I am sure there would be all sorts of exceptions and court rulings etc... but this is the gist of how Trump could appear to be deporting.
One policy that I think would be really cool: Giving individual states the right to issue some number of US visas (with the condition that people on these visas remain in the state of issuance). A state could issue visas to highly skilled workers, use visas to attract top international students to State U, sell the visas to raise cash, issue visas on humanitarian grounds, get seasonal agricultural labor, not issue visas, whatever.
I have to admit that this is somewhat inspired by the Abbott busing strategy. I get the idea that many voters are very physically separated from the effects (positive and negative) of immigration. Immigration is basically an emotional omni-issue. Pushing at least some of immigration down to the state level will make it more real to people.
OH NO I missed the Nate Silver livestream! Will it be available for us to view later?
According to Matt: "It's not ready yet but there will be" https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1846591016276771255
Thanks! I hope it’ll be the full thing rather than just highlights as Silver indicated somewhere (on Twitter?)
Most of the people who scream in fear about illegal immigrants....don't know any illegal immigrants.
It's just a bogeyman they can easily blame all their problems on without having to personally deal with them in the flesh. A nebulous, powerless group they knowingly can punch down on without it having to affect their lives personally because, again, they don't know any illegal immigrants.
It's a coward's position.
This is what made the Simpsons episode on immigration so good--it made the family see it differently once they discovered Apu overstayed his visa. (Of course, this being Springfield, they still voted to pass the deportation initiative, leading to Homer saying this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdkM_eSYXdw)
I don't know about the screamers, but when large numbers of migrants appear somewhere and seem to be sheltered at tax payer expense there is always a backlash, whether that's at the border or in Chicago or NYC.
A college friend of mine from California who has always been an illegal immigration hawk also comes to mind. His take was basically "all the shitty kids at school who started fights and acted like fools were the kids of illegal immigrants". So that's another way the opinion could be formed.
In NYC I get the sense that no one wants to deport the dishwasher who’s been here illegally for 10+ years. But people seem fed up with the migrant shelters and tax dollars being spent on them.
It’s easy to get people out of the shelters if you make it legal for them to work, so that now they can afford rent.
I sort of doubt it. There’s plenty of opportunities for under the table work in NYC.
That seems right for Chicago too. The biggest change is how nearly every intersection has migrant panhandlers on it now. Sadly with infants and toddlers in arms. & there has to be some coordination because they're setting up on corners 10-15 miles away from shelters.
Yeah we see them on the subways selling candy and going down blocks with outdoor dining. Anecdotally it’s working class Hispanics that get the most fired up about them in my experience.
I've always felt that the Ellis Island era of virtually unrestricted immigration was the source of American greatness and it makes me sad that the public at large doesn't agree. I understand the pragmatic calculus - obviously a Trump administration would be worse for immigration than whatever compromise position the Democrats come up with - but boy is it hard when popularism comes for the things you care about.
Genuine question: What do you think would happen if the US went back to a system of virtually unrestricted immigration?
Explosive population growth, obviously. In my ideal world every city center in the country would be another Manhattan (obviously this is illegal today, but if I'm waving a magic wand that's fixed too). Probably you'd see a lot of ethnic enclaves spring up like happened back then, and over generations they'd assimilate same as they do today.
"the Ellis Island era of virtually unrestricted immigration was the source of American greatness and it makes me sad that the public at large doesn't agree."
On the one hand, yes. On the other hand, it seems pretty obvious that "the Ellis Island era of virtually unrestricted immigration" was a major, and probably THE biggest single, contributing factor to the post-WWI immigration restriction movement that lasted for about 40 years.
My view is that immigration is vital to our national strength but we have to take pauses when there are big surges to absorb the new bulge and afterwards we can open the doors much wider again. Big surges will always lead to a backlash. We're probably at the point now where we need to slow down and absorb the newcomers. But not not not expel them. We need them!
Probably so. I think that was un-American then and it's un-American now. I don't like having to compromise with people who don't feel patriotic when they read "give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free" but that's why I just read about politics instead of running for office.
I don't really think how people respond to poetry should make much difference in how I treat their viewpoints.
It's not about the poem, it's about fundamental beliefs on what the United States represents!
When people are against immigrants, they are most often against them because they don't believe they are sympathetic strivers, they think they (or a portion of them) are rule-breakers who are taking advantage of the US in various ways.
The polling in today's post shows, in part, that if you describe a potential immigrant in sympathetic terms, you'll tend to get a positive response. It also shows people expect immigrants to follow the rules of immigration. They didn't ask, but if you describe immigrants in unysmpathetic terms (taking advantage of an asylum system, or involved in drug-smuggling, for example), people will respond very negatively.
I think people's responses don't vary a lot on these aspects. The fundamental beliefs are rather similar except for at the fringe of the left and right. What varies more is the types of immigrants they are exposed to in their life and in the media.
I'm not sure that mass deportation would be as unpopular as we'd like to think. Hasn't history shown that a great many people will cheer as their neighbors are rounded up and dragged away? Often times when they're being dragged away to far worse fates than exile to a foreign country.
It seems like the strong public reaction in 2017/18 to drastically less aggressive deportation efforts by Trump is pretty good evidence that there would not be a very positive response to a program that would have to be literally almost two whole orders of magnitude bigger to match Trump's promises.
Agreed to all of this, but I would note that republicans have zero trust with democrats on this issue.
Thus, you will probably need to do enforcement first. Get illegal immigration really, really low, then try and do some type of legalization of the people that are here
Basically, I suggest hiring way more immigration judges, building bigger detention centers and not allowing anybody into the country of any type of asylum claims
Also reform what allows for asylum
And finally, put a provision, you shut down the border, if detention centers are full
No catch and release
"Get illegal immigration really, really low"
In the meantime a whole slew of industries, from construction to agriculture, are fully gutted and grind to a halt.
1. Cutting off illegal immigration isn't going to grind all those industries to a halt. Though it will make hiring more difficult.
2. Those industries and everyone else are free to push for more legal immigration.
But until you actually cut off that illegal immigration people on the right aren't going to believe you to be serious
Oh and mandate e verify
Reading this well written and agreeable Yglesias piece, I couldn't help thinking about a conservative relative of mine with whom I've often had mostly productive disagreements about politics. This relative is a fairly decent fellow, and his conservatism is born more from tribal/social/religious reasons than any deep conservative beliefs.
In our conversations he has expressed sympathy for undocumented persons, welfare recipents, and even in the idea of systemic racism, which makes his knee jerk support of Trump (he is an even bigger fan of DeSantis) so puzzling to me. When we talk about issues he is so rational and even tempered, willing to give other humans the benefit of the doubt, and even expand his circle of caring to folks with strange names and faces.
And yet he supports Trump 100%. And it dawned on me, reading your article that he is simply not a rational person when it comes to politics. He is incapable of voting Democratic, no matter how much he might sympathize with liberal ideas, because deep inside of him he identifies with the conservative populism of our shared family history.
And I think this is a lot of what we are dealing with. We need to stop trying to analyze why conservatives are the way they are. It's not a mystery. They simply perceive Trump as their tribal leader and that is it. There is no conversation about the issues that will change their mind. It is pointless.
And this makes me really sick of the NY Times constant "we interviewed 12 Trump voters and here's what they think" articles.
It's good to keep people like him in mind, but he's not the only type of voter. Comparing 2016 and 2020, 14% of voters switched their presidential vote, and a greater number voted in 2020 but not 2016 (turnout).
I'm sure there is a big chunk of immovable tribalists, but at the same time we can't minimize the number of swing voters.
Totally agree, but I suppose I'm reacting to the whole "liberals are big meanies and don't GET conservatives" articles that I see everywhere all the time these days.
Those articles would be much better if they shifted the framing from "don't GET conservatives" to "don't get why people might VOTE conservative"
I feel like I personally know a lot of people who have shifted their votes in the last couple elections, and when they've voted for Trump, it's because some subset of conservative arguments appealed to them. They aren't conservatives, because they like some liberal arguments, too.
The thing is, liberals would normally "GET" the appeal of the liberal arguments, but "NOT GET" why the same person would like the conservative argument.
I guess my point is, the framing is annoying because it makes it seem like liberals should bend over backwards to appease committed partisans. But I really do think there are people out there being persuaded by various issues. And it's useful to understand what's pushing or pulling them to the GOP.
The example of persuadable voters I always think of are a father / son I know who flipped from voting R / D in 2016 to D / R in 2020. I think the retired father was upset about Trump's handling of covid, and thought it showed he was incompetent, while the son was upset about having to pay his workers excessive amounts of sick time any time one of them had a cold or fever, and blamed Dem for that.
How do we deal with anti-assimilation populations such as the Islamists and active “death to America” settler colonialism crowd? They seem ideologically incapable of embracing America, but perhaps this will wain after a couple generations? It seems that the MEMRI stars should be prioritized for deportation, no?
I don’t believe there is an Islamist movement to create settler colonial communities in the United States.
Are there significant Islamist populations that are actively and vocally against assimilation? How many are there and are they mostly 1st or 2nd generation (or native)?
It's an interesting question. Our history shows immigrants usually assimilate quite nicely. But the Amish are a good example of a group that has never assimilated and looks like it might never will. So we can't take assimilation for granted.
The German immigrants who swung hard against FDR in 1944(!) ended up being an obvious benefit to the country even during the actual freaking war. By far the largest dodge of the immigration-bad side is not applying their own reasoning to previous time periods
Also don't confuse loud and large. There are some extremely obnoxious Hamas cheerleaders on college campuses. I suspect many are Americans but it is possible some are here on student visas.
But the numbers are small. Meanwhile the average Muslim immigrant loves America, lives their life, and has nothing to do with any terrorists.
Great article this morning. I particularly appreciate the first section. In my experience, speaking to people who are very concerned about immigration, their concerns don't really make sense and aren't born out by data, but this is a democracy and those people vote, so what can you do? The violent crime rate of legal immigrants is about a third the rate of native-born Americans, and the violent crime rate of illegal immigrants is only slightly higher than for native-born Americans. Other concerns listed are not necessarily untrue, but would be true of American-born citizens as well. "They'll compete for labor." Yeah, so will your kids in 20 years. They'll also increase the labor supply. "They'll compete for housing." Again, so will your kids in 20 years. The arguments I run in to are usually just arguments against having more people. Nothing about said people being immigrants makes the problem worse. But at the end of the day, this is a democracy, so we don't just get to tell wife swathes of voters "sorry, your concerns aren't backed up by data, nothing we can do."
As for the left, one thing I'd like them to stop doing is treating deportation like a crime against humanity. Matt lines out some sympathetic cases for people here illegally to not be deported, and that's fine. But there should be some acknowledgement that we're extending grace. We're fully within our rights to deport people who are here illegally. It kind of reminds me of when somebody gets busted for weed in a red state. "Oh my God, he got arrested for WEED, can you believe it?" Well, yeah I can actually. Weed is illegal there, so...
"Nothing about said people being immigrants makes the problem worse"
True, but options on the table for kids vs immigrants are wildly different. I think I can understand why a person might want kids but not immigrants, although they both would compete for jobs and housing and stuff, and in many ways the kids are actually worse, since they'll drain resources for 20 years.
I wonder if the "more people" arguments are more prominent on the West Coast, where housing is in short supply than they are around where I live.
I'll be more specific. A lot of people will insist they're not opposed to immigration, just illegal immigration. But when pressed as to why, they'll just bring up stuff that would be true of legal immigrants, or just more human beings in an area, whether domestic or alien. There's nothing wrong with holding this position, it's just that the reasons listed usually don't match what they say they're concerned about.
Yes on the West Coast, there is a strain of Malthusianism too where some people will say point blank they want fewer humans.
I think it’s worth acknowledging that illegal immigration to the US is a genuinely hard problem because America has a very long, heavily trafficked border with a country that is much poorer. The American public mostly wants the issue to go away and not deal with any tradeoffs. They’re mad now about the level of illegal immigration, but they were also mad about Trump’s immigration crackdowns.
I was surprised at how many come through the Northern border as well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXdu8gkNLTk
This is half of why we don't have a Schengen-style Zone with our northern neighbors. The US doesn't want to de-facto be governed by Canadian immigration laws, and the other half is that Canada doesn't want to be de-facto governed by our firearms laws.
I actually worry about this quite a bit. It's going to be very tempting for Canada to take steps to deal with their unpopular immigration situation that result in people trying to cross into the US.
Canadian immigrants are mostly associated with helping the United States keep the Stanley Cup, so we don’t complain too much.
It's not Canadians coming from the northern border, it's asylum seekers or people without work permits who come in from the North because it's far less patrolled.
Ah. I promise I’ll watch the video after work :).
So they must all move to Florida then.
Quickly: More legal workers working for respectable wages is broadly popular, except for construction firms in Texas (H/T JVL):
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/border-crisis-texas-solutions/
My general hot take on this is that we should sell green cards for ~$100k a pop, and use the funds for border security+other populist causes (e.g., free college). Coyotes aren't cheap, and if you make that $100k financeable, the labor premium from being in the country legally will be worth it, IMO
We currently sell green cards for $1,050,000. Why should we reduce that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
I guess inflation has reduced it, but it hasn't touched the "create 10 jobs" part.
Elasticity of demand. We can make more money with lower prices, because volumes would be higher.
That's a great point! Central American migrants are already paying significant funds (5k or 10k, I think?) to smugglers, with great risk to themselves. The trip North is like a hidden humanitarian catastrophe that few people want to talk about.
Anyways, if a person would pay 10k to smugglers for X% chance to get here successfully (including Y% of being kidnapped or raped) that person would certainly pay more to arrive legally.
And maybe prices as low as 15k would be unpalatable to the electorate and unworkable, but it suggests some price-based solutions may be out there.
I predict that Taylor Swift will adopt a Dutch auction system for her concert tickets before the US adopts such a policy -- the left would hate it ("Rich people get to skip to the front of the line!") and the right would hate it ("Evil foreign powers will infiltrate spies en masse and George Soros will pay to import gangs of rapists!").
The rich already skip to the front of the line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
It could be linked to job skills or other vetting systems.
You might be right, but there are other countries that do it.
I'm aware that there are other countries that do it, but I think they very likely had dramatically different immigration paradigms to begin with that made adopting such policies easier.