If Kamala loses this election, we'll look back at their immigration policy as the major unforced error that sank them.
The important points on immigration:
- The public is 60-70% against Biden/Kamala's (old) position
- Changing your position after 3 1/2 years, just before the election, brings you basically zero creditability
- When Biden/Kamala switched their positions a few months ago, there was barely a squeak from the left. Did they lose any votes over it?
This means Biden was holding a position for 3 1/2 that was generating burning rage across a large slice of the country, mild rage across swing voters, and not really getting anything in return.
Straight up political malpractice.
They were blinded by the desire to do the opposite of what Trump would do and couldn't see how voters really felt.
This could be a separate article. But there is zero percent chance the left wing of the Democratic party leaves this election with the point you made above. Instead they'll talk about how Kamala was too centrist and not economically populist enough.
Why'd Kamala lose? Idk, the top two issues voters were worried about she didn't command majority trust.
If the electorate tries to teach that lesson and the left wing of the Democratic party refuses to learn it, it might reduce that factions’ influence within the party.
That is basically what happened when Republicans won presidential elections from 1980-1992 though. Moderate Democrats became more powerful, but it's a bummer to be a Democrat through those numerous losses.
Violence Against Women Act? Assault Weapons Ban? Welfare Reform? Children's Health Insurance Program? HIPAA? Did I just imagine those things happening?
I don't like him at all as a person and there are many legislations that you can criticize but his presidency was one of the best in terms of the economy and he ended it with a surplus. 2000 was the peak performance for the US federal government. Everything went downhill from there.
To be fair, that is the level of analysis that most people give, even on here. "If everyone just adopted [my position on my top issue] they'd win in a landslide."
>If Kamala loses this election, we'll look back at their immigration policy as the major unforced error that sank them.<
Nah. I hope to God she wins. But if not, the actual unforced error will be choosing her as running mate in 2020 instead of a heartland governor or senator with strong centrist branding. This is a pretty tough political environment for incumbents (worldwide, not just America). But Democrats have been gifted with the mother of all candidate quality problems in the form of Donald J. Trump. Given how close the race appears to be (I could have egg on my face in three weeks' time for writing this, but it seems inconceivable if Trump wins it'll be by a lot; if he prevails it will be a narrow win.), we'll look back and say, she gave it her all, but she just wasn't the optimal candidate.
Her being Biden's VP wouldn't be an unforced error if Biden simply did the right thing and announce he's not running for a 2nd term. Hard to see any mistake being judged as harshly as that one.
Again, Harris may win. I'm hopeful! She's still leading in the polls, and my sense is the "Trump isn't cognitively fit for office" story may beginning to bite a bit...
But if she doesn't prevail, it seems pretty plausible that the innate characteristics of Kamala Harris qua politician (plenty of lefty baggage; image as a San Francisco liberal) will have played a role in that. And in the scenario you describe, it's pretty likely she'd be an even weaker matchup against Trump. That's because—while she'd still be overwhelmingly likely to prevail as the nominee—she'd inevitably have had to say and do things to win the primary that would now be on the record (that is, promises to shore up her left flank).
I don't know why you're so sure she would have prevailed. Her biggest weakness is not her reputation as a lefty but the fact that she's tied to an administration that delivered record inflation and "open borders". A candidate without that baggage would be doing better, even if they had to make some bad partisan arguments as part of the primary process.
No sitting VP since 1952 has failed to secure the nomination if they're entered the primary. In August we got further confirmation of the dominant position a sitting VP is in if the nomination becomes available. Not a single other prominent Democrat even threw their hat in the ring. I wonder why that might be?
Anything's possible—and I'd never put it at 100%—but yeah "overwhelming favorite" sounds about right.
I can't read minds, but I am a hundred percent certain that he would have passed the buck if literally anyone had made a serious run for the buck in the primaries. No one did. Here we are.
The president does not throw the buck in the air while he remains physically capable of holding it. That is the definition of the job. It's called leading.
That would have been a different unforced error, because it would have told Russia a year ago, "no matter what happens, you can ba assured of a President who is less friendly to Ukraine than the current one." I am sure that others here can provide other examples of why proclaiming himself a lame duck would have had negative consequences. As a practical matter, he had no choice but to declare he was running.
There's no reason to believe that Biden would have acted sensibly on immigration if he had chosen someone else. He would still have been unpopular and the Republican nominee would still have the advantage of running against against an unpopular incumbent. The real problem is that Biden ran for re-election and didn't allow a normal primary to occur because of how late he dropped off.
The abnormal nomination process was a feature, not a bug. VP Harris gets the nomination either way, but in a competitive primary she's now got more baggage.
She'd have more, though, if she had to fend off challenges from various competitors for the nomination. Who knows what she'd maybe have to promise if Bernie or Warren ran again.
Not at all guarantee she wins the primary if her 2020 presidential run is any indication and her baggage such as being attached to a very unpopular president.
The assumption that Harris gets the nomination in an open primary makes an ass of you. She would've wilted against real competition, against people that aren't scared to do interviews.
People say this but even if Biden picked someone else, do you think his immigration policy would have changed? No. That mystical other person would still have been saddled with an unpopular immigration record
His immigration policy would not have changed, no. I'm not suggesting there are no challenges for a generic Democratic nominee. Immigration would be one of those challenges, no matter who is the standard-bearer. I'm simply suggesting that, in a close election, the innate attributes of the nominee could prove decisive, and that it's conceivable a different nominee would be a stronger performer this cycle.
"Conceivable" doesn't mean "certain" of course. And the fact is we don't have a parallel universe to test it either way. But in any event TO SECURE that different nominee, I think it approaches 100% necessity for Biden to have chosen a different running mate in 2020, given the overwhelming advantages sitting Vice Presidents enjoy in vying for their party's nomination. We haven't seen a failed nomination effort on the part of a vice president in more than 70 years.
The US center-left needs to learn the lesson that the Scandinavian center-left has learned since 2015 (Denmark was earlier and their center left party changed already 2005 or so): tack right on immigration and crime or lose power permanently.
The Danish Social Democrats are way left on every issue except immigration and crime, the Swedish Social Democrats have completely changed their rhetoric and policies and now compete with the Swedish center right who is the toughest. Same in Norway and Finland. The German Social Democrats are about to get obliterated in the next election because they refuse to learn the lesson from Scandinavia. They will surely also change after losing power, too bad they can’t change already now and will instead risk becoming smaller than an actually fascist party in the upcoming federal German elections.
Matt may be correct that few normie voters think “immigrants are making my labor less precious.”. However, anyone who is interested in policy matters needs to grapple with the fact that 1) the benefits provided by a first world welfare state are lavish by Indian or Nigerian standards and 2) the project of having a first world welfare state will founder if you let too many low wage workers in.
Interestingly, conservative line drawing on immigration might let America come closer to the European welfare state model.
"the project of having a first world welfare state will founder if you let too many low wage workers in."
This is pretty much false. Herein lies the giant myth of "high skilled immigration": they don't actually contribute more to taxes and society than low wage workers. This is because low wage immigrants tend to have children that grow up to earn higher wages, because there is a pretty large selection bias in this population: it is full of people who went to extraordinary lengths to provide a better future for their families, especially their kids. There's also the factor that lots of "low wage" immigrants are actually well-educated, but have no certifications in the US, or the school they went to has zero credibility here, and are simply forced to work jobs like taxi driving or janitorial duties.
By comparison, children of low-wage native born parents do not tend to move up in socio-economic status. And the children of high-skilled immigrants tend to be a) fewer in number and b) less likely to outperform their parents.
I think your definition of "cheap" is very different from what a typical Caste Indian might perceive.
FWIW, I've worked with lots of them so I doubt that my ignorance here is high. And when I speak of "extraordinary lengths to provide a better future for their families", I am not just talking about money. How many Americans refuse to move out of dead-end cities to pursue better jobs? It is no trivial thing to just wake up and decide to leave your entire life behind and move to another country. One who does so usually has a level of intent and purpose that tends to correlate with upward mobility across generations.
Absent legal restrictions, high caste indians would arrange to provide airfare for low caste indians in exchange for something between employment and indentured servitude. high caste indians have lots of money and 5000 years’ experience living off their poorer countrymen
Or maybe they were captive to cosmopolitan liberals who would tell them “no person is illegal” and call them racist if they said people should learn English before coming here.
There are local governments all over America currently spending significant resources on “accessibility” guidelines. The guidelines are in part aimed at disabled individuals but they also promote communication in as many languages as possible. This takes time and money. I don’t hear conversations that it would be a positive for these foreign speakers to learn English. I imagine the immigrants themselves would value that but on the government side it would be seen as bad form to say that was a social good.
Finding quotes of notable politicians would take time but I can affirm it’s in the culture of local governments to not proactively encourage people to learn English. I’m not saying classes are offered, etc. I’m saying if Matt’s sister in law went to her local government they would do everything they could to accommodate her in Vietnamese and would definitely not encourage her to learn English. That’s the government culture.
When I visit non-anglophone countries, I am very appreciative for things being in English. I see no problem with things in America being in other languages.
That makes me sad. I really don't see the problem here-- it's just making the world easier.
The people who feel that way should travel, it would probably give them a different perspective. The first time I travelled outside the US & anglophone Canada was when the military sent me to Japan, and I still remember being shocked and very appreciative that the Japanese had English translations on almost everything.
I know people who work in local government and have participated in the meetings. Twenty people in a conference room for numerous meetings coming up with the guidelines. Entire departments sitting in even larger conference rooms being informed about the new guidelines. Think about how government works.
Do a Google search for government accessibility guidelines. Look through the documents. Think about how much effort you think went into creating it. Now multiply that by 5x and you’ll have a feel for the amount of staff time that went into it.
Many of those staff members are managers or directors and make $130k a year or more. These things are done through committees. Committees are time consuming. No one forms a committee so decisions are made quickly.
Do I have receipts, no. I doubt many governments record their employees time in a way that could be ascertained through even a public records request. If I were a Republican I’d push for citizen audits of the processes that create this policies. Where a citizen auditor goes through the entire process recording the time, process, and discussions and makes it public record. This would be a smarter approach to public policy and politics than dumbass running his mouth about people eating pets.
As far as the language piece goes Google does a good job of translating.
When I use the word significant i think it terms of value. So I think about the cost vs benefits. Of course I have imperfect information so I’m always a little off.
But as an example, if a local government sent a staff member to a flood plain conference as part of professional development and spent $1,000 for the trip I’d think okay. But if they spent $20,000 I’d say that’s a significant amount of money to educate that employee at a 3 day conference.
I think this same way about coming up with accessibility guidelines. I also think the guidelines could be done with less bureaucracy and get a similar result for a lot less costs. Government employees sitting in meetings is not free. This relates to Matt’s piece yesterday. Government would benefit from more libertarian and conservative thinking. It has gone too far to the left. Musk is advancing space exploration and the government is having non productive meetings.
For all the Musk haters, yes he’s an asshole. You’re totally right about that. He also does great things. That matters.
I think this reply kind of went off the rails. Bureaucracy can become quite inefficient - no disagreement there. I'm just not sure translating a few docs is a major part of the problem. But now we're both just operating off intuition.
I would pushback on the unforced error part of this. The surge in illegal immigration has little to do with American policy changes and instead seems to be driven by:
1) Information spread that bogus asylum claims will allow you to reside legally in the US for a while.
2) White hot job market in the US.
3) COVID ending, which had reduced the international flow of people.
4) Increased economic and political issues in Latin America.
5) Increased sophistication by coyotes, which have become more professionalized and are actively advertising for people to come to the US.
That’s a pretty tough set of issues and many have no clear solutions. It’s also not completely crazy that the administration thought that the surge would be more temporary and driven by COVID ending. We know now that didn’t happen with the benefit of hindsight, but I don’t think that was obvious 2 years ago.
Yes, it was obvious to everyone but you and the Biden administration. If an executive order issued a few months from the election can have the desired effect, it's very obvious that this administration dropped the ball. One of his first acts as President was to revoke Trump's executive order which worked very well because the first surge happened under Trump. The Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.
I do think, though, that one subfactor of (1) has been the public messaging from Biden and other Democrats. When Biden was elected he very publicly tried to do a 100 day deportation pause. During the first wave of migrants being bused by Abbot etc many Democrats including the NYC mayor were publicly welcoming migrants to their cities. I feel the overall message being sent was: if you make it across the border you won’t be sent back and in fact a bunch of support will be waiting with you.
Combine this with social media and point number (5), and I think this generates a lot of new border crossings.
The asylum loophole is very old. 60 Minutes did a feature on it in the 1980's. The difference is, that was people showing up at JFK airport with fake passports and saying "political asylum" and getting paroled in. That became harder to do because airlines check and double check documents now.
But the modern asylum crisis is most likely a product of better communication and easier land transportation. It's just much cheaper and easier to get to the physical border now than it used to be and asylum applicants can game the system by overwhelming it.
I think historically asylum adjudication wait times weren’t as long as now, so it wasn’t a great strategy. I briefly Googled but couldn’t find statistics.
The long adjudication times definitely benefit latecomers, after a huge queue has already been established. It's now a very rational strategy to seek asylum even if you're sure your claim will be rejected in seven or so years.
I'm not sure I understand the first mover motivation when queues were much shorter and adjudication was (presumably) done more rapidly. What was in it for them?
You can imagine the initial bump being caused by an unusual surge of people coming from countries in bad enough shape that they think it's worth spending a bit in detention for a shot at actually succeeding in the asylum hearing.
Then the queue gets too long to keep everyone in detention, then word gets out about the loophole on social media, then things snowball.
Interesting question. There are at least two other sources of the backlog: (1) genuine asylum cases and (2) people who are being deported and who claim asylum as part of those proceedings (because why not i guess). I wonder if those two cases are enough to get a backlog going.
Speaking of the Biden/Harris border position over the past 3 years, did anyone else listen to Ezra Klein's interview with Alejandro Mayorkas (Secretary of Homeland Security)?
I found that interview incredibly frustrating because we have all these border problems, and they do seem solvable, but Mayorkas presented them as intractable in a way that made me think either his hands are tied by politics, or he is unwilling to do anything because of underlying pro-illegal immigration sentiment, or plain old incompetence.
Given the existing law and mandated resource allocation which problem seems easily solvable to you? Most of this stuff is pretty intractable because at base we are an attractive country to come to compared to the home countries. Along with tat we are not throwing anywhere near the resources necessary to really fix any single part of it.
Mayorkas, for the first time that I heard a senior official, talked about something which my relative who works in this space has been telling me for a couple years, which is that a lot of the illegal immigration today is being driven by organized smugglers really encouraging people to come now (via the smugglers) in a way that's substantively different then when people better planned their migration and coordinated with family/friends already here. It's part of the reason there are more asylum seekers who have no plan other than show up and hope for the best.
Take for example the judges with tens of thousands of asylum cases. The current asylum laws are currently being abused. Instead of hiring more judges, reject every asylum case (something the Border Act of 2024 would have sort of done when there were a lot of applicants). This is something that the majority of Americans would support, as most Americans oppose illegal immigration.
"Easily" was the wrong adjective. Just "solvable" would have been more accurate.
But you cannot just "reject every asylum case" because that would be illegal, and the border act didn't pass to make it legal.
I mean, every problem is solvable if you imagine the person with the problem just has a bunch of magic powers that they do not have. You are just assuming a can opener.
As I understand it we need (1) reform of the law governing the handling of asylum claims, and (2) the cooperation of Mexican authorities. I think we've been getting more of the latter recently, and IIRC the former would have been part of the bipartisan bill that Trump ordered the GOP to defeat.
It is not. It is the 'hands are tied" thing. He has no budget, and is constrained by a bunch of legal bullshit (which congress tried to alter, until Trump forced Republicans to shelve the bill because it would have been good for America, which would have made it bad for Trump winning an election).
Definitely agree. One of Ezra's worst pods of the year. Nothing more than canned political answers and they weren't even good ones. There's no way Ezra was happy with the outcome of that interview.
I agree with this. Kamala's non-answer to Bill Whitaker's immigration question was her weakest moment. She's had what ... 3 months now to come up with her talking points / positions and she still has nothing to say. It's so frustrating.
It could be that a Democratic loss will be because of immigration. We'll see.
However, I remember way way back to the 2022 midterms when we were going to have a red wave amidst the horror stories of migrant caravans heading toward the border. And since then border crossings have plunged and the Biden-Harris administration has actually done things with an EO and strongly supported a very conservative bill that Trump tanked.
It could be that the electorate will punish them *now* for failings of a couple years ago, but it should make us stop and think a bit about why that same electorate didn't punish them back then when there was more reason to do so.
Or maybe immigration isn't as hot of an issue as the sound and fury suggests?
I'd date the administration's change of position earlier, to the beginning of this year, when they went full on in support of the Lankford bill. Probably they should have issued an EO earlier, but it's still not a last minute change.
I think if the center-left wants to be persuasive on the topic of immigration, they need to do two things.
First, they need to become more comfortable delineating immigrants who on net add to the social safety net vs those who take from it, so the argument is not about helping the outgroup but rather about making America stronger.
Second, assimilation needs to stop being a bad word. Conservatives would largely not have a problem with more brown people coming to this country if they saw that those brown people also ate hot dogs on 4th of July and watched college football in the fall.
When I talk with people (strangers on the train) about immigration and they express anti-immigrant sentiments I usually just respond with "People are people and they want to do right by the people they care about. There are so many cities in this country that are half the size they were 50 years ago. We have a lots of places that can absorb and benefit from more people."
I then follow up with examples of areas of the city that have had Hispanic immigrants and point out all the small businesses. People are clever and if someone is going to uproot their life and travel thousands of miles then maybe they have a bit of American dynamism inside them.
Yeah, I live in a state that could actually really use people, and it seems like an obvious fit, but the existing people would throw a fit over this. Instead, even the most intellectual conservatives(Deneen, for example) seem more interested in some Maoist-type policy of deporting Americans from major metro areas to West Virginia as a way to get population back into the state.
In some ways, I think it's just cope for not seeming as dynamic as their forefathers, and afraid of being shown up by recent immigrants, but in others, i think it's just more standard Know-Nothing suspicion of The Foreigner.
A lot of the most dynamic people leave these areas for opportunities and those who stay are tied down by family (I am from Ohio, this is the pattern.) There is a real human capital drain and labor markets are tapped out. Employers are scraping the bottom the barrel for workers because those who they want to hire all have jobs already.
Some of the people who leave would have stayed if they could have found good jobs. Remote work affects that balance. So does availability of lower cost housing.
You don’t need to “deport people from urban areas” to get them to move to rural areas and smaller cities. You can simply make it possible to work remote, and publicize low cost housing and remote work opportunities. People who like the outdoors will take advantage.
Harpers Ferry is already booming. The New River Valley is breathtakingly beautiful, and is a popular tourist destination.
Not every remote area will pick up population, but a surprising number are starting to. In general, areas within an hour or two of an urban center, areas within an hour of a college or university, areas with outdoor recreational opportunities, and areas of particular beauty are likeliest to attract newcomers.
Which is funny, because I absolutely see my Hispanic neighbors out grilling stuff. I am too polite to find out what, though my chihuahua definitely wants to find out.
However, when what you see on the news is Tren de Aragua being menaces in Colorado, you want deportation. When your neighbors who work hard and whose children were friends with yours in school get on the deport list… that’s when the backlash starts.
(I swear this is the exact mentality of one of my coworkers. Also, the gang members should be deported.)
I feel like it’s very frustrating that there isn’t any sort of humanitarian option available other than let these people come to the United States.
Like I care a lot more about culturally left politics all around the world than anything and I just don’t see much in the way of outreach options so to help with some of these people with tenuous particular social group asylum claims. Like is it really impossible to spend a bit either in serious philanthropy money or foreign policy aid to make sure that outspoken women, queer people and narco gang targets have safe places to go outside of the US?
I think the sentiment here is well intentioned. But obviously it's incredibly hard to spend money to fix the root political and economic problems that push these people out of their home countries. And it's of course worth noting that Biden's right-leaning EO capped asylum claims at 2,500 per day.
> Like is it really impossible to spend a bit either in serious philanthropy money or foreign policy aid to make sure that outspoken women, queer people and narco gang targets have safe places to go outside of the US?
My experience is that no matter how little foreign aid we give, people freak out when they see a $B on the line item, even though it's a tiny fraction of the budget, so there's never any appetite for it.
I think the same people who hate these people going to the US also hate them in general so they're never going to be in support of policies to support them elsewhere, either.
Targets of narco gangs are usually people who were working or deeply involved with narcos in some way. If a narco gang is willing to expend resources to chase you outside of your hometown you probably stole real money from them, betrayed them to their enemies or contributed to killing some of their people.
Sorry but that's not accurate. To the gangs you are a resource to be exploited, either by conscripting your son, abusing your daughter, or extorting your labor through protection rackets. Exiting those situations is perilous, and they take pretty much the same view of it as the old Stasi did of people crossing the Wall. They do in fact track and punish people externally --- pour encourager les autres.
When we say gangs we're talking about a large variety of organizations, most commonly impoverished street gangs that control local barrios, but ranging all the way to transnational, well-funded organizations that spend millions on bribery and intelligence.
So it's legitimate to point out that some fraction may be targeting innocents across borders, as Andrew and yourself imagines, but totally incorrect to say all, or imho most of them are like that.
Fwiw my opinion is largely formed from reading Borderlandbeat.com for almost 20 years now, as well as a big dose of several other blogs and analysis sights like InsightCrime, an obscure crime data blog called "Diego Valle's Blog" etc.. I'm not coming out of this from left field or from reading 1 or 2 things.
My sense is that it's hardest to leave when you are deeply involved, and very few people become deeply involved unwillingly. As far as innocents go, criminals would be happy to torch a business that doesn't pay protection or shoot the owner as an example, but if the guy flees town they have no incentive to chase them as they've already won. They may coerce people into working with them but they rarely conscript them, especially into roles of any importance, because unwilling workers are usually bad workers.
I'm fine with avoiding bleeding heart language, but "recruiting the best and brightest" seems too narrow to me as a subset of people who are hard working and want to do a job, which strikes me as adding to the social safety net.
That's fair. My larger point is that data engineers from India are going to contribute a lot more to our economy than hardworking albeit lower-skilled immigrants (though, personally, I support welcoming both).
Canada is experiencing a gigantic backlash from closely following your idea. The guy who nails shingles to roofs is MUCH more important to defuse immigration backlash than the n+1st software engineer
Right -- which is why we should also screen for *wanting to be American*.
Having a bunch of enclaves of high-skilled immigrants who do not assimilate into the broader culture is going to cause a lot more backlash than if there is a great deal of assimilation.
I thought that backlash had more to do with Indians and cheap colleges exploiting education visas?
In other words, the backlash is directed at people who might at first seem "high skill" because they are in an engineering program, but since it turns out the program is a joke they aren't really high skill
But that's just a wonky way of saying we've gotten a lot older. Aging societies need transfers. Americans are rapidly getting too damned old to work! We're no longer so much better than Italians or Japanese in that regard. So, If you don't want Americans to be increasingly reliant on transfers, you've got to import new, working age Americans. The math is indisputable.
The gist of of my point is this: while it's desirable to attract the most highly educated possible pool of immigrants, the more immediate aim is just to arrest the aging of the population. I think in broad brushstroke terms, immigrants in general are net "adders" to the safety net provided they're young(ish) workers.
I would guess that the NPV of immigrants can be predicted surprisingly well from just age, English proficiency, and education level. I would be really interested in a regression analysis of cumulative FICA payments or something on these independent variables.
First you have to get everyone working legally so that they are definitely paying income taxes. Then the question is: for each worker, how many dependents do they have? Like if we've got one undocumented housekeeper with three kids in local public schools (maybe even requiring ESL support) and on Medicaid, that doesn't make a whole lot of financial sense. The amount she's paying each year in taxes is trivial compared to the cost of educating her kids.
Last paragraph is straight up wrong. South American immigrants--the ones Conservatives have a problem with--assimilate well. I grew up in an 85% Trump part of Texas and every Memorial 4th and Labor Day had tons of Hispanic (or Hispanic/white) families out grilling; Hispanic men watch football, play football, etc.
A lot of these views on immigration are ill-informed and wrong. Now, we should accept that and try to win their votes. But I'm not gonna pretend that the median American has good, well-informed views on immigration
That huge spike pew measure in anti-immigration sentiment is not due to changed feelings about brown people. Far and away the most common complaint is "disorder". Not that there aren't some racists, but eating hot dogs and watching football has, I think, nothing to do with it.
A lot of white people don't eat hot dogs or watch college football. These are dumb stereotypical examples of assimilation. The US will remain a culturally diverse country even if all immigration is stopped.
The poor being equally as deserving as the rich, and white American culture having no moral authority over any other, are kind of the central axioms of the left... I think you are simply wishing for more conservatives.
There won't be a major comprehensive immigration law until The Emerging Democratic Majority book fades from civic memory. That book convinced both parties that "demographics are destiny" but they then ran in opposite directions with the idea. For comprehensive immigration reform to pass, Republicans have to believe it won't ruin them electorally and Democrats have to believe it won't hand them eternal power.
A comprehensive immigration law with a pathway to citizenship is clearly the only policy that works on the merits. I don't think Democrats are supporting it because it will give them eternal power, but I do think Republicans are not supporting it because they're terrified it'll invite a primary challenge.
Democrats vastly underestimate how much of a widespread belief amongst Republicans is that Democrats want "amnesty" because all Democrats see is a giant pile of votes.
Sure, and Rebublicans underestimate how conservative immigrants are on a vast array of social issues, relative to the median voter. They both just need to realize their errors. That's all Ben is saying.
Yep! The GOP position on amnesty is untenable on the merits and once the Hispanics get closer to being a toss-up voter, they'll hopefully back down a bit.
I'd like to think that, but I'm not sure that the number of Hispanics personally connected to an amnesty situation is all that large, particularly among the segments that are moving to the GOP.
Right. All I'm saying is that the GOP has a bad position on undocumented people in this country. The leader of their party has an insane position on undocumented people in this country. The Obama position on it was correct and not rooted in a desire to unlock millions of Democratic votes.
I've found it odd for years that many Democrats believe that adding millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their coalition will be good for *progressive* causes.
I don't see why "path to citizenship" needs to be on the table. I think nearly all stakeholders except left-left people would be OK with permanent residence without citizenship, and that nullifies electoral concerns.
Immigrants who follow the legal pathways should get citizenship. I agree that citizenship (as opposed to just legal status) for illegal immigrants shouldn't be a priority.
I think we should really seriously ask to whose benefit it is to have permanent residence WITHOUT the possibility of citizenship for those who want it. Like, someone who can live here and access every benefit of living here except voting, who wants to take an oath of allegiance to the United States and become a citizen, and we're like, "No, you can't do that"? Who does that serve?
I agree that of course specifically rushing towards making people citizens doesn't make sense.
EDIT: Just to spice up my take a little: Maybe we should say that there is no permanent residence without citizenship. Like, long-term residence? Sure. But put a, I don't know, 15 year timer on it. If you're still here in 15 years, you should either become a citizen or leave (and anyone in those statuses who can do the civics test and take the oath can become a citizen, you aren't like going into a lottery).
It serves to unlock a challenging political situation that gives those people legal status and dramatically improved their life. I agree there's many Rs that are afraid of immigration reform because they fear a wave of blue votes coming from this .
I think there's also a lot of people that think there should be consequences for coming here illegaly (hence why Obama was proposing paying back taxes), and a sensible one could be not being eligible for citizenship.
I think that you can assuage Republican concerns about like stacking the vote if you aren't actually rushing people towards citizenship.
But once you're talking about people who've been here for a long time, who have put down roots in the country, I think you can easily judo it to, "These are people who are choosing to become Americans, who want to become part of the US culture, not people who want to drag the US to their culture." That won't of course convince the people who are hardcore against all immigration, but I don't think they're gettable to begin with.
If I had my way illegal immigrants would be offered a path to citizenship similar to the ones in the 2007 and 2013 bills. But if all that is politically achievable is a trade of no citizenship for no deportation, I'll take it.
Permanent Residence can much more easily be revoked than citizenship, e.g. in the case of serious crimes. That's a pretty big reason people don't want to hand out citizenship too easily. In Australia cancelling a permanent residence visa under Section 501 of the Migration Act (e.g. for being a mass murderer, possessing child pornography, etc) is a relatively straightforward bureaucratic step by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
I know a fair number of people who live in Australia "forever" but only have Permanent Residence and not citizenship because their original home country doesn't allow dual citizenship and they don't want to give up that citizenship. In particular, Austria doesn't allow dual citizenship and they don't want to lose an EU passport to gain an Australian one.
What benefit is gained from denying long-time residents citizenship, especially if they've gone through the IR-1 visa process? What cost is mitigated? Who benefits from kicking someone out of the country after 15 years if they don't want a US passport?
I cannot understand this idea that granting citizenship has some hidden cost to it. We should be proud that so many people want to come here, put down roots and bring their families. It's all upside.* We should make it as easy as possible.
*Note that when you sponsor a visa for a family member you agree to pay the US government back if they ever receive government benefits, e.g., unemployment or Medicaid. Also note that becoming a citizen means agreeing to pay US taxes for the rest of your life, no matter where you live. These are not proposals, they are current law.
A citizenship test is not going to have any effect on how assimilated someone is after 15 years. We just went through the naturalization process and the civics test is just some facts about the country; real assimilation comes from putting your kids in school, going to the grocery store every week, traveling around your adopted home—just day-to-day living.
Speaking from experience, after a few years you pretty much plateau at whatever level of assimilation is commensurate with your personality and circumstances. Also speaking from experience, creating barriers to citizenship (barriers, not conditions) discourages assimilation. It creates the feeling that your presence is tolerated rather than welcomed.
It's interesting to me that you could look at any aspect of immigration law (or proposed laws) and thing the framing is "how will this help the immigrant trying to come to the US."
I went through the IR-1 visa process, dealt with USCIS and had to become familiar with immigration law; it is absolutely conceived of an executed based on "how will this help the USA and our citizens".
Every step of the process is designed to select for hard-working, law-abiding immigrants who will someday make model citizens.
That is what asylum, TPS, visa lotteries, etc. are for. The normal through-the-front-door immigration process is entirely about what is good for the United States of America.
A colleague of mine, with an advanced degree from a US institution and a wife and a new baby here in the United States, is recently taking a non-optional one-year vacation to one of our international offices.
It is the dumbest fucking thing on the planet and it draws no small degree of shame.
Just to give the likely legal context here: the US has a visa category called L-1 for employees who are currently working in a foreign office of a company and are being transferred to a US office. In order to qualify for the L-1 visa, the employee must have been working for at least 1 year in the foreign office.
So, if a US employee has run out of visa options, a common strategy is to move them abroad for 1 year, and then bring them back to the US on L-1.
I did not read the non-optional part while I was waking up and thus had a reading comprehension fail, apologies. And yes, that sucks and it's good that he can be a good sport about it.
Terrible sign for America that everyone seems to agree there is zero shot of fixing the skilled pathway. Should the wait for an Indian born Nvidia engineer to become a citizen be >50 years? That is the status quo!
Unsure if this is true. I recall an earlier post that elaborated on the comprehensive nature of immigration reform, and how progressives are reluctant to allow the easier ones - like simplifying and expanding pathway to citizenship for skilled engineers - unless they get their preferred solutions around illegal immigration. The question is whether Harris will embrace centrism or run another Warren-Sanders admin.
60 votes in the senate to get rid of country caps seems utterly fantastical (we have plenty of people here saying skilled immigrants aren’t integrating enough, I think they’re more liberal the the median Nebraskan) but I hope you’re right
Hum…Matt made a lot of good points about the need to enforce traffic rules, no fake tags, etc. many of these people are lower income and are just trying to get by and avoid costly things like taxes and insurance. Matt’s theory is, “Sure, but we need to enforce the law.”
Then we let people in illegally and they make bank and send, as a group, $100s of billions back home every year. But deciding the party is over and they need to go back home is some huge human rights issue.
It’s like if your friend got divorced and needed a place to stay. He stayed 6 months saved some money, paid off some bills and now it’s time to get his own place. That he got used to living in your spare room for free doesn’t really matter.
This is also my reaction. I'm not so naive as to think there aren't some pretty ugly beliefs and sentiments involved in Trump's rhetoric on immigration and why many are receptive to it. But illegal immigration polls the way it does for the same reason all disorder does. People don't like rule breaking even if they may simultaneously be sympathetic to the plight of certain individuals like those brought here as children. It boggles the mind that we can understand this with jumping a turnstile but not crossing a border without a visa.
I work with a young woman who recently had her truck totaled by an uninsured driver. The truck was fully paid off and she only had liability coverage, a thing that’s fairly common among young working class people who are trying to save money wherever they can. She makes $24-$25/hour, is now staying over at work a few hours every day because she has to wait for her wife to pick her up and because, obviously, she has to put together money to get a new car.
I know 3 people in the last 10 years or so who have had cars wrecked by uninsured drivers who, there’s no nice-enough-for-liberal-circles way to say this, spoke little or no English. The legal, insured driver is on the hook for 100% of the consequences. The police will never find the other driver even if they were looking, which they aren’t, and you wouldn’t get any money to help repair your car even if the cops *did* locate them.
To look at the polling, I am much more pro-immigration than the median American but it also drives me crazy when this stuff is made to be 100% about race. None of the consequences of a massive population influx with minimal documentation are going to be visited upon the people who think it’s 100% about race. People who are made by law to buy car insurance don’t want a bunch of uninsured drivers on the road, for instance. Of course they don’t!
Everyone who cares about such things gets lumped in with people who believe Haitian cat stories, and I’m sure it’s infuriating.
In MA we had a ballot question to "remove proof of citizenship for driver's license applications" to address this specific issue. It passed by only 8 points, which I take to mean that even in very liberal MA people still care about following the rules.
Right, if Matt wants to rent a place in Tulum, Mexico is happy to have him for 180 days and then he has to leave. That he really enjoyed it and made friends and such is great. But making him go back to DC isn’t, to my mind, any worse than making him get car insurance or pay for vehicle registration. It’s how countries work.
Matt renting a place in Tulum would likely be for tourism, which is easier to delineate than someone coming for employment, which could be more indefinite on how long their services are needed.
Tons or business travelers arrive every day from Mexico to work in the US as they represent the Mexican auto parts, beverages, Bimbo bakery, etc. industries and they work for a period of time and per the terms of their visa they head back to their Mexican offices.
Turnstile jumping, which is generally a repeated activity, isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like if you jumped a turnstile once when you were 20 and then didn’t do it again, should you be arrested when you’re 30?
I get that people don’t like rule breaking - but what people really don’t like is *consistent* rule breaking. If an illegal immigrant’s only illegal action was crossing 10 years ago, and they have otherwise been model citizens, I truly think that doesn’t bother most non-nativist people.
No, I don’t think working illegally for 10 years is rule breaking. You broke one rule, once - crossing. After that, assuming you aren’t actually causing public disorder, you’re just trying to live your life like anyone else.
Re insurance and driving, states can (and do) solve this by allowing illegal immigrants to get licenses. I think that is a recognition of my point that we shouldn’t brand people with a scarlet letter for one initial act.
If you want me to admit that it’s rule breaking in a technical sense then sure - but it’s really just a secondary outcome of the initial act. Otherwise an illegal immigrant going to work is no different than you or me going to work.
Where I will agree with Andrew is that while I think the illegality is compounding, in my view the marginal illegality is decreasing.
That is to say, the "accumulated badness" of your first year of off-books work is greater than the additional "accumulated badness" of your twentieth year of off-books work.
To be clear I don’t think people should illegally immigrate. But I can acknowledge that once they’ve done that, it’s not practical or productive to describe their whole life that follows as a series of crimes. It’s not a robbery spree.
To better the analogy further, it's more like if you sneak into some club, spa or amusement park in the morning and spend the whole day there. The action of sneaking in only happened once, but you must carry some guilt or paranoia throughout the day for taking advantage, and you could always leave if you're conscience or fear of getting caught caught up to you.
Except you are still here so you are still breaking the law. So the appropriate analogy is you jumped the turnstile and are still on the train. Should they kick you off the train
I understand not liking rulebreaking, but sometimes the rules need to be changed if enforcement of rules would have adverse consequences or be impractical.
That’s where the fine comes in. At some point Matt refers to it as a fee; I don’t know if that was intentional or a parapraxis but it needs to be substantial enough to be a genuine penalty for law-breaking and not just a formality.
Asking your friend to get his own place rather than living with you rent-free is absolutely not like deporting millions of people, including some who arrived in the US as children through no choice of their own. I'm not saying it invalidates the policy but I think it's important not to elide the humanitarian catastrophe of mass deportation.
I guess I have to admit I just don't feel undocumented migrants are hurting America. I see that it's bad to have an illegal shadow economy. But America has tolerated that illegal shadow economy for decades and I don't want to deport people who made their lives under that system. If there is going to be a change towards a harsher system, I'd prefer to amnesty people already in America, certainly if they've been there for a long time, perhaps with a financial surcharge; and then apply the harsher enforcement to future arrivals.
By contrast uninsured drivers are screwing up the insurance market for everyone else, even if they don't want to be doing that.
Back in the 19th century, poor workers from Europe would come and go here mostly for seasonal work, returning home and then often coming again. That's because the border was porous. Now if you come here "illegally" (i.e., doing the same thing the workers did in the 19th century, and yes yes it's still illegal by current law I get it) they take huge risks if they go back home after working seasonally. So they stay.
The median wage earner in 1880 earned about $450/year and a transatlantic round trip ticket was $80 in third class. I very much doubt “seasonal workers” were a thing.
Probably not in an annual way, but the same person might make several trips in their working life and time them so that they could take the max benefit from seasonal work.
Yeh, that didn’t happen. Looking at google flight a transatlantic round trip today is 0.6% of the median wage. In 1880 it was almost 20%. People came and stayed. In rare instances the came, made some money and returned homes. But there was essentially no “commuting”.
How is it a humanitarian catastrophe any more than status quo?
As it stands right now, getting here is an expensive and dangerous gamble that involves paying criminal human trafficking orgs a huge (for the migrant) fee, hoping that you're not abused or raped by the traffickers or Central Americans governments along the way (they generally treat migrants much worse) and then walking through the desert or in the back of a truck.
There's probably a utilitarian, if somewhat paternalistic, argument that the deterrent effect alone would prevent millions of these awful trips from being made.
That's fair. I just think this is one of those situations where we can't choose an ideal option. Ideally, the immigration system would've worked to begin with, there wouldn't be a large human trafficking problem or millions of people living undocumented. That's not the world we live in so I think a more nuanced solution is necessary, and frankly unavoidable, with some mix of amnesty and deportation depending on individual circumstances.
Someone staying in your place rent free is not a close analogy to someone violating immigration law. The people who are violating immigration law are usually paying rent and have good relations with their landlords. If you want to make an analogy to things that might be familiar in your neighborhood, it’s when the zoning code says that no more than two unrelated people can share a residence, but you know your neighbor is renting out rooms to local students and it really makes you mad so you want to evict them.
Seems to me the economic "costs" of enforcing car license plate laws are, uh...nonexistent? We'd probably *help* the economy by reducing traffic accidents. That's a very different animal from evicting 5 million workers. The latter activity actually will cost us production.
In most places to get a plate you need proof of insurance. In Florida median car insurance costs over $250 a month. If we ruthlessly enforced the law there would be a lot of people who desperately need to drive to work who wouldn’t be able to.
Edit: it looks like in Florida 14% of cars are unregistered/uninsured if you suddenly took 14% of vehicles off the road that would have a major economic impact.
If you can’t afford the cost of legally required minimum liability coverage, you shouldn’t be allowed to drive. (I would note that minimum liability coverage in Florida does not cost $250/month on average.)
The alternative is to say that poor people are allowed to externalize the costs of their driving, in an unpleasantly chaotic form of redistribution which also incurs moral hazard.
I can only see that making sense if there’s a large population of poor people who could profitably work for pay, but only if their driving is slightly subsidized, which doesn’t strike me as very plausible.
1 in 4 cars in New Mexico are unregistered. Would you agree with NM saying it can’t enforce car registration laws because it would be too economically disruptive?
If enforcing car registration meant taking the drivers permanently out of the work force, then yes, that's exactly what I would say. No sane person would want to fire 25% of their state's workers.
What I would want to do is enforce the law in a way that serves the interest of the state and its citizens.
Which is why you'd want to provide a legal pathway for folks whose vehicles were previously uninsured to get right with the law. Maybe pay a fine or something. Of course, folks who aren't able to meet those legal standards no longer get to drive.
I've got to say, I used to 100% agree with Matt on traffic rules, but lately, a neighboring city has put up a shitton of traffic cams, and I have become sympathetic to the opposing side, because said City hasn't changed any fine amounts despite the vast increase in violations being enforced.
So when you get your second $250 ticket in 3 months for going 24 in a 20mph school zone (where no kids were in sight, and the signs are easy to miss), it's not hard to feel like you are just this city's personal piggy bank, and then my political stance quickly reverts to "Nah, fuck you, no traffic cams".
If they made the fee $50, whatever, but the whole thing reeks of greed, not crime prevention.
I think that the discrepancy here is that Matt cares about the consequences of enforcement, not the text of the law per se (and in general, thinks of law as being kind of a Calvinball domain). He generally agrees with the social purpose of vehicle licensing and registration requirements, traffic law enforcement, bans on felon gun ownership, laws against theft, etc, so he thinks that vigorous enforcement of those laws is net good.
On the other hand, his signature policy idea is wanting the US to have a billion people, he thinks that increasing the scale of immigration is important for preserving American national greatness, is acutely sensitive to the size of the labor force as a constraint on US economic production, and believes that the current labor market is probably a bit too tight. So in this case, he sees increased enforcement as a negative.
(FWIW, I think that he’s basically right about this on the merits, but I would advise electoral politicians not to adopt this view as a public position; the median voter is wrong about this but their preferences are pretty clear.)
I think Matt’s posts about how we need to enforce the law are always grounded in the benefits of doing that, like what the harms of fake tags are or how big crimes are often caught in the process of investigating small ones. It’s not just about “the law is the law and you enforce the law.” So one reason for the distinction you identify could be that the benefits of mass deportation are more dubious relative to the costs than the benefits of tag enforcement.
This is where I think we get into pretty dangerous territory though. The only laws with legitimacy are the ones that have been enacted through the constitutionally created process. While we all know there can be some pretty significant variance in how heavily laws are enforced the idea that we're only going to enforce the ones with good outcomes or outcomes we like is pretty Trumpian. I don't think we can claim to be really concerned about the threat Trump poses to democracy while also saying we just aren't going to care about the laws that were enacted through the democratic process.
I don’t know who’s saying we just aren’t going to care about laws. Matt is talking about passing *additional* laws democratically, to make it easier for people to become legal citizens.
Right but, to use my FL example, if the state suddenly started enforcing the law on the 14% of “illegal” cars that would have huge economic impacts. I don’t recall Matt ever discussing it.
In the Florida example, the comparison would be marginally more enforcement, not mass enforcement of all 14% of cars overnight, which would be impossible anyway.
So the question in Florida is whether "getting tougher on enforcement" is worth the cost, in the same way that "is getting tougher on unauthorized immigrants" helpful or not. Despite the name, mass deportation will be very unlikely to really mean deport every single person.
Right, it’s the same in both cases. Currently there is no enforcement of people being here illegally. There is some enforcement around working illegally and if someone here illegally otherwise breaks the law they can end up deported.
What we’re talking about is making an active effort to deport people for being here illegally. Sort of like in FL you can get in trouble for driving without a license or in an unregistered vehicle only if you otherwise break the law - speeding, etc.
Are there good ideas for finding out who’s here illegally other than via their interactions with the legal system (via work or via police encounters when a crime is committed)?
I guess fundamentally, I think someone can become an American without legally being an American. Without having the federal government sign a piece of paper saying "now you're an American". I couldn't tell you when that fuzzy diving line is crossed. It's partially a matter of time, but not purely a matter of time, of culture, of immersion. I dunno. But I do believe it's true you can be an American without being granted legal citizenship.
I think there are circumstances when the line is clear. If your child is born in the US, you’re an American. If you’ve held down a job for a decade, you’re an American. If you belong to and donate to a church that actively supports its broader community, you’re an American. If you love the Never Ending Pasta Bowl at Olive Garden, you’re an American.
Does that make some Americans more American than others? Are there "real" Americans and "fake" Americans who have spent too much time overseas or don't speak English right?
Certainly we would say that someone who is plotting the violent overthrow of our democracy is being “un-American” in a very stark way, even though legally they are American citizens while a DREAMer who does well in school and aspires towards citizenship is not.
I don't actually agree, in part because "American" and "Un-American" only have the most subjective of meanings. If doing well in school is being a "real american" to you, that's fine, but it's as subjective as it gets.
I agree it’s subjective. I think that’s contained in SP’s comment. The spirit of what SP is saying is that we don’t necessarily assess American-ness solely in terms of legal status.
The point of getting married is that it's distinct from not being married, in and of that you assume a specific set of obligations to your spouse and your new household, and society recognizes that.
It's the same with citizenship. The whole point is to make a bright line where we can say, 'actually, because you are a citizen, you have these rights and these responsibilities', and there is no argument about the category. Nobody is asking a legal resident to fight for America. They will not be called on to judge their peers in a court of law. In return, they do not get to vote, and their opinions on our affairs are deprecated. If they want to step up and grab the ring, they have to cross the bright line by stepping out of the fuzziness.
In addition to the moral issues, which, whatever... Mass deportation would cause untold economic harm. In addition to the ridiculous expense of the effort itself, the removal of millions of workers from the economy would be devastating. There's loss of taxes (yes, they pay taxes, even though they are illegal, because income tax isn't the only tax that exists), but also the labor shocks, the demand shocks, etc. Noah Smith has a good writeup on this.
It would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Sometimes you have to search for pragmatic solutions, and not get stressed out about moral hazards. Giving illegal immigrants some kind of way out would lead to better outcomes. You do have to pair it up with much more sensible border enforcement, though.
That's why it won't happen in any sort of way that aims to be truly massive or complete. Instead it will be something incremental, and probably have as much impact in terms of deterrence as in actual deportations. If we just went back to Obama levels of deportation, that's workable and something Trump could claim he did. The harms would be greater if that started tomorrow, because of the current job market, but an incremental increase wouldn't cause an immediate recession.
Good luck convincing the American public of that. As Matt pointed out in the article, as soon as you start deporting people who are undocumented, but have been in the country for a while and otherwise law abiding, there’s going to be a huge backlash. There’s a reason why deportations have overwhelmingly focused on recent arrivals and people breaking the law.
I feel like you keep not responding to people’s points about cost-benefit analysis, backlash, etc. and fall back on the question of legality. Which is fine—you’re taking a deontological approach instead of a utilitarian approach—but then it shouldn’t be surprising to you that you and Matt don’t agree on this.
Fair but to me it sounds like NM saying it can’t possibly enforce vehicle laws because 25% of vehicles are unregistered and enforcing the rules would be too disruptive.
I think that's why he liked the idea of a fine/back taxes etc. There's still a penalty for coming here illegally(the fine), but it's much more practical to enforce.
"almost everyone would hate mass deportation if [Trump] really tried to do it"
Bingo. This is one of those things where I think people who want it to happen don't know what they're talking about and are denying tradeoffs, even if it polls above water. And this is also why I would make a terrible politician.
I agree. But unfortunately I think this is true of almost all policy issues. People want impossible, mutually exclusive, or incoherent things all the time. They don't care that it doesn't make sense.
(As an aside, I love the movie "Bruce Almighty" as a pop culture illustration of our impossible magical thinking and why it just can't be how the world works)
The call for mass deportations is, among other things, a rhetorical escalation which liberals have well earned.
Progressive rhetoric on immigration is sneering and insulting. You get yelled at for saying “illegal immigrant.” You get called a racist for saying you like the country you grew up in and don’t want it to change too quickly. If you work for a big corporation, you have to watch what you say on social media. I was recently removed from a Facebook group *consisting of members of my college debating union* for saying I think Vance understands the problems of the white working class and hope he can channel Trumpism in a positive direction. People don’t like being sneered at and they don’t like being told which words to use.
If I were gay and got bullied for it, I would go to drag shows. When people bully me for liking the country I grew up in and not wanting it to change too quickly, I talk about mass deportations.
No, i think these people just hate foreigners. Many Americans just think that hating on foreigners is the way out of dealing with the problems of internal politics. Anti-immigration people sneer all the time at people who have some semblance of humanity. They love to bully, i don't see why they should complain about being bullied.
Hatred of immigrants is a proud American tradition going back into its founding. It's not that weird.
I don’t hate unskilled pickleball players, but I don’t let them to join my group because I want to preserve the standard of play to which I am accustomed. Why is control over free association seen as hatred?
I'm not sure the USA and a pickleball group are really comparable. I mean, should I be able to veto people from living in my town because they don't fit my standards?
Look, I live in West Virginia- the governors here run on 'border security'. Take it from me- they hate foreigners, especially in the abstract. They wouldn't make up a bunch of stuff about crime if they didn't. It's also why every other issue that involves aiding foreigners of any kind polls pretty badly among them.
It's not quite the same as, say, the town council getting to have every new resident stand in front of them and being able to thumbs up or thumbs down them.
Though it's certainly been used to try to enforce something like this before along racial lines.
That’s a rather deep argument. Maybe too semantic for my taste, but it tastes of truth. However, the right to exclude is at the core of free association.
Trump’s race baiting is awful. The nasty reality is he’s closer to the median white American’ view on most racial matters than is Harris. The antidote to Trumps return to the politics of 1968 is a world where people of all races can speak frankly about having spaces that are not open to all. If people get bullied for wanting to preserve spaces like the ones they grew up in, then they will become less tolerant. The correct move is to allow a vast amount of private ordering while of integrated spaces will exist, including especially schools and most work places. An Italian family is literally racist when they hire Italians to work at a family restaurant and yet there’s nothing hateful or odious going on. Do we really want to mash people together in every sphere or do we insist on a robust, integrated public sphere and let corners of laissez faire exist. Defeat Trump. To keep the coalition broad we need voters with old fashioned beliefs, let them age out in peace.
Whether liberals have “earned” this talk or not seems to be beside the point. This isn’t about liberals. Liberals aren’t the victims here. Going to drag shows is not in any way analogous to threatening to evict someone.
you are being a moralist. i am being human. if you denigrate my status (or that of any other human being whose ego hasn’t been crushed) they will push back. you say climate change is an existential threat. i say seawalls today, seawalls tomorrow, seawalls forever. you say we can’t control our borders? i day mass deportations.
but i’m reasonable and will deport the least sympathetic first and stop before the gdp hit is too big.
And why are YOU the ultimate arbiter of exactly how and how quickly the country changes?
Sorry about your FB group but the country doesn’t deserve to have to live with Trump’s deficits and trade restrictions and immigration restrictions as punishment.
”I think writer types struggle with this because we (usually) really like immigrants’ impact on broader society and culture.”
If you lived in Europe I’m not sure you would think this is true. What do we gain by receiving people who refuse to shake hands with women, physically punishes their daughters for meeting native men, tell pollsters they want to introduce sharia laws in their host country, have more loyalty to their local clan than broader society etc? I’d argue that current immigration incurs a cultural loss and back sliding to values we last saw 100+ years ago in Europe.
I know this is a blog written by Americans but I feel like you often try to ”speak for” the western world more generally. Recent asylum immigration to Europe has been a disaster, for Europe. And trust me, I wish this wasn’t the case. I do believe we have an obligation to help people everywhere, but not through immigration - unless the migrants have broadly liberal democratic values (I’m more than fine with letting liberal Afghans migrate to Europe). We must find ways of helping people where they already are, and to help mitigating and preventing the factors that make people migrate in the first place.
True, but I have seen the observation that the average "MENA" immigrants to the US are disproportionately better educated/higher income to start with than "MENA" immigrants in Europe, and also move to the US largely with the intent of remaining permanently, whereas a much larger percentage of the immigrants to Europe theoretically believe they will return to their home country someday, both being factors that make assimilation in the US more likely even before we talk about birthright citizenship.
I think that this comment is unfair to Matt. Matt is ultimately writing from the US, about the US, to a mostly US audience. Of course his articles on immigration will be based on the specific US immigration context. I don’t see any claim that his ideas in the post apply outside of America.
To be clear, I do agree with you that immigration is different in Europe, and that there are specific problems of long term integration that the US does not have.
I understand that it is annoying to foreigners that US domestic debates can influence domestic debates in other countries where the underlying context is very different.
But I would be surprised if the best way to push back on this turned out to be convincing US speakers to spend more time talking about your local context rather than about the US.
European countries seem very comfortable with regulating US-based tech companies. Couldn’t you try to push your governments to force prioritization of local content for local consumers, or something?
Personally I enjoy writing Matt’s take on US politics and I think his writings are 90% relevant in a European context. Immigration policy, however, is not and I wish he would let the European experience influence his somewhat rosy view on immigration (in particular his constant ignoring of cultural factors and cultural costs). Partly the failure of immigration in Europe is due to European factors but partly it’s due to who comes, i.e. demography.
Matt wrote an article about possible pathways to developing an immigration reform compromise that could potentially get enacted into US law though the US Congress.
The article cited surveys of American public opinion, other articles by American journalists about American public opinion, history of recent platforms, speeches, and political positions of American politicians and the two American political parties, and statistics on US border crossings and deportations.
Given what the article is about, those seem like sensible things for it to be focused on?
I want to push back on family migration. We should let as many workers in as we need and raise skilled immigration to the roof. We should take real asylees. And we should, yes, allow people to stay if they are married to a citizen.
But "family migration" meaning you get to bring a bunch of relatives just because of the accident of who they are related to? That's actually not great. It is highly inegalitarian- why should someone with no special skill get in just because of their bloodlines and the luck of being related to someone already here? And when you do it, it ends up being at the expense of worker immigration, which gives rise to illegal immigration by all the people who don't have the right bloodlines.
So no, family immigration should be very narrow. Let's let in workers and skilled migrants and humanitarian refugees rather than migration by bloodline.
Immigration is about what the nation values, not making individual people happy. And a big thing the nation values is fairness, and preference for those with lucky genes is not fair. It's nepotism.
I don't believe that your premise is correct. In a liberal democracy, the ultimate end of any public policy is the well-being of individuals. It is pretty much the defining feature of liberalism.
In that case, why do we have national security exceptions for immigration? Why do we have 5 year and 10 year bans for people who are caught without papers? And why do we not allow very distant relatives, friends, boyfriends, and girlfriends to come? In each of those situations, there may be people close to the person who would be very happy to be near them. And yet, we recognize that immigration policy is actually not about ensuring anyone who wants someone else to be close by is happy. It's about broader policy goals. Not everyone gets to be happy, and guaranteeing everyone will always be happy and that broader policy goals will never get in the way is a promise no liberal society can actually deliver on.
You are misapprehending my statement. I did not say that individuals' desire for family reunification trumps all other considerations. Rather, I was merely asserting that it has substantial value to individuals, and hence family unification is as legitimate a goal as is increasing the number of high skill workers.
I am not sure that actually works. "It has value to me that the government discriminate against someone else because of genetics". It's like saying it has value to me if my kid gets a legacy preference into Harvard.
This isn't liberalism. It's the opposite of liberalism. Equal treatment is a fundamental tenet of liberalism, and this is saying if you have the right genes you get to come to America and if you don't, the golden door is locked shut.
Is the focus on genetics here just for rhetorical purposes? The family ties recognized by immigration law include those like marriage and adoption that don't involve shared genetics.
You are looking at it from the immigrant's perspective, you could instead look at it from the American's perspective.
If I'm a US citizen, and I love living here and I never want to leave, but also I don't want to permanently separated from my parents/kids/siblings who are not US citizens, why can't I petition to have them come join me? Maybe that's not maximally economically efficient, maybe that's not maximally altruistically efficient, but it strikes me as fundamentally human.
Because immigration policy is concerned with much more important things than how often you get to see your extended family, and a visa is a massive benefit that a lot of people want and will work very hard to get and their interests and the country's outweigh your desire to bring in all your relatives.
Do you generally consider parents and kids extended family? Or are you just talking about siblings?
What are the things that are much more important to you than American citizens being with their family? Are you sure those things trade off against family reunification visas?
Family reunification visas are quite popular. To the extent those visas give Americans positive views of immigration in general, perhaps they help rather than hurt other policies like refugee admission.
1. I think under-18 children are a strong case for family admission. But I see no reason whatsoever that one should get to bring their parents as a matter of course. Why should those parents get a preference over the many workers who add to this economy whose only "shortcoming" is that they don't belong to the same gene pool as someone currently here?
And bear in mind, it ISN'T just even parents and adult children under current law. Much more distant relatives can come in, plus chain migration can multiply the effect. So we are talking about a lot of people who get in while workers who are unlucky enough not to have the right genes get kicked out.
2. It's not the things more important to me. It's the things important to immigration policy. The purpose of immigration policy is not to make you happy. It's not to serve the personal desires of particular people. It's about grand strategies far more important to the nation than that-- things like national security, humanitarian concern, equal treatment and the avoidance of favoritism, fairness towards folks from all parts of the world, and yes, our economic, scientific, and technical needs. That's WHY we have an immigration policy. And these things really are much more important than whether a particular person might have to fly back to see family members.
3. I am not sure they are "quite popular". I think it depends on how you word the polls. And especially when it comes to more distant relatives, rather than things like spousal visas, I bet they actually are not.
You’re missing that family migration often supports economic activity. For example, if couple with kids can bring over their parents, it may enable both of them work instead of just one.
As long as the working age couple can support their parents and ensure they don’t need public assistance, there’s no good reason to oppose it.
Sure, to a degree. But the cost-benefit is certainly much less. In your example the parents of the worker are likely to need old-age healthcare in not so many years. And having 1 or 2 seniors taking care of your children is awesome, but it's a very inefficient way to do childcare when compared to daycare
Like with any other immigration, I would prioritize employment over all else. If relatives can fill some job and there's some practical reason to prioritize them, so be it, even though I don't know what reason that would be, but they first need to fill a job.
Family based immigration is not for some distant relatives like aunts or cousins. It's only close relationships like spouses, parents, children & siblings. Except for spouses of US citizens, all the categories are subject to quotas and multi-year waits. Try banning green cards for spouses of US citizens and then observe how white men vote in the next election cycle.
Why should someone who is working and raising children in the US have to quit their job, dump their kids on the spouse, and move back abroad for several years when their parents get old?
It's possible they shouldn't, though I don't think the case is as open and shut as you are portraying. People have relatives living in other countries all the time; they deal with the situation in various ways, and plenty of relatives aren't admissible to the US even under our family reunification rules.
But the fact that there may be limited situations where letting a family member in makes sense (and which could be handled by a narrower rule) does not justify a rule that ensures a large percentage of our legal immigration pool is determined purely by genetics while others who don't have the fortune to be related to someone here have no chance of legally coming.
I think that's way too nihilistic. Look, it's "unfair" (in some sense) that anyone had to be born in Sudan, but that doesn't make it so that everyone in Sudan should be equally welcome to come to the US, even in a philosophical sense.
Those who accept the idea of national borders (for whatever reason) agree that the US has the right to decide on what criteria we admit immigrants. Some criteria are straightforward and almost universally agreed-upon (we admit people who have been oppressed for their political views or ethnicity). Some criteria are straightforwardly bad (we don't limit immigration to certain racial groups). And obviously some are in-between. Dilan Esper said that it is not consistent with his values (or, by extension, OUR values) to make family membership a criterion for admission. Talking about how we're all born equal doesn't address this point.
The other point would be because it’s democracy. If the immigrants who come here become full citizens, then they should be treated as a constituency in the American electorate and the government should at least take their concerns into consideration. Now, of course sometimes a small group of *Americans* can distort national policy, like I think our policy towards Cuba is bad but it’s influenced by Cuban Americans who want the sanctions. So it’s not that we should never override it but there’s a legitimate Democratic case for chain migration as long as you can consider the naturalized immigrants to be actual American citizens deserving of expressing their policy preferences.
In a looser way this sort of thing has happened a lot, historically. 1st and especially 2nd generations from X country have often tried to make it easier for people of their ancestry to immigrate. That's why the diversity visas started out as a way to increase immigration from the smaller countries of Europe.
Sure, they can express their policy preferences. But the democratic (majoritarian) response will almost certainly be along the lines Dilan Esper expressed - in favor of not having family-based immigration.
Similarly, Dilan was expressing his policy preferences, and he was actually proposing a rationale for them. But rather than saying "My family should be able to come in just because I'm here", he's saying that (if I can put words in his mouth) our government shouldn't be officially endorsing nepotism.
Leaving aside the philosophical dispute, I would note that family reunification actually polls quite well. It gets majority support even from Republicans.
That's interesting. I'd like to see how the question is framed in polls showing support for it. "Family reunification" sounds nice, but there are much less-nice (and perhaps more accurate) ways to frame it.
Yes sure, you can have a preference and there might be a solid case for more merit based migration. I was just objecting to whether it was in some sense philosophically “unfair”, since if you consider naturalized American citizens organizing as an interest group constituency to lobby for their favored policy, I would consider that more akin to AIPAC or Cuban Americans trying to influence our foreign policy, even if I don’t think it’s objectively wise or necessarily represents the majoritarian sentiment. It’s just politics with a small group of Americans with intensely strong feelings for a particular outcome (getting their families here) trying to get their preferred policies implemented.
Think not in terms of cutting the line but instead aristocracy. Why should someone get to come here simply because of who they are related to? It's no more fair than legacy admissions.
US has been around for a while. There have always been cohorts/waves of people coming in from the same country. It’s not rocket science. It may take 1-2 generations for some but ultimately most people assimilate in the US.
They do but that's different from saying such communities make assimilation faster or more likely. We had German speaking ghettos in this country way back when, and there are certainly areas in Los Angeles where you run into people who never learned English. The presence of others you can form an ethnic community with makes that sort of thing possible.
I think that argument leads nowhere. It could justify letting in only whites or only Christians or only married straights. After all it's all luck anyway. Nobody deserves it.
In actuality we need to admit that immigration here is an enormous benefit many people want and the system should actually be fair. And just like "whites only" is unfair giving away most of the slots based on genes is unfair too.
To the extent that "chain migration is ... an expression of interest group democracy", that's an incredibly excellent reason to disallow it. There's a lot of things that the US needs, but interest group democracy is decidedly not one of them.
If Cuban Americans wanted a whites only migration policy or Jewish American refugees wanted discrimination against Muslims should we "give that to them" as a matter of interest group democracy?
Immigration is too important to just be given as a gift to interest groups. It should be fair to people seeking to come in.
I really do think the determining variable on illegal immigrants is whether you consider the act of illegal immigration to be a crime, an administrative offense, or no crime at all. Unsurprisingly the reasonable view seems to be “administrative offense,” since that category is typically applied to offenses that hurt nobody in particular in a measurable manner but would cause a negative effect if totally allowed, such as parking in a rude manner.
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.
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.
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.
Democrats should have been trying to make immigration an economic issue. Attracting/recruiting the world's talent would be a huge win for the economy. True that a full Merit based system would allow lots of low-skilled people too, but that still implies something like Biden's last minute decision to enforce Border controls. It was hugely irresponsible not to have used the Relief bill to staff the border to admit real political asylum seekers and turn way those with invalid claims.
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.
Over many essays, Matt Y has written about the power of contingency to shape events. This makes me wonder if Biden's mental and physical decline during his term had more to do with the surge of migrants than we have been led to believe. Perhaps the un-checked surge of migration was allowed to happen because it's been his staff and advisors who have been in charge rather than the faltering Biden. This is, of course, speculation. We won't fully know what was really going on in the Biden White House for a while.
But I do know that when certain people realized what an electoral liability un-checked migration was for Biden and then Harris, lo and behold the brakes have been applied and the numbers are down. The question is, is it too late?
If Kamala loses this election, we'll look back at their immigration policy as the major unforced error that sank them.
The important points on immigration:
- The public is 60-70% against Biden/Kamala's (old) position
- Changing your position after 3 1/2 years, just before the election, brings you basically zero creditability
- When Biden/Kamala switched their positions a few months ago, there was barely a squeak from the left. Did they lose any votes over it?
This means Biden was holding a position for 3 1/2 that was generating burning rage across a large slice of the country, mild rage across swing voters, and not really getting anything in return.
Straight up political malpractice.
They were blinded by the desire to do the opposite of what Trump would do and couldn't see how voters really felt.
This could be a separate article. But there is zero percent chance the left wing of the Democratic party leaves this election with the point you made above. Instead they'll talk about how Kamala was too centrist and not economically populist enough.
Why'd Kamala lose? Idk, the top two issues voters were worried about she didn't command majority trust.
If the electorate tries to teach that lesson and the left wing of the Democratic party refuses to learn it, it might reduce that factions’ influence within the party.
That sounds like wishcasting.
That is basically what happened when Republicans won presidential elections from 1980-1992 though. Moderate Democrats became more powerful, but it's a bummer to be a Democrat through those numerous losses.
clinton gave us a nice tax bill and absolutely, positively nothing else
Violence Against Women Act? Assault Weapons Ban? Welfare Reform? Children's Health Insurance Program? HIPAA? Did I just imagine those things happening?
I don't like him at all as a person and there are many legislations that you can criticize but his presidency was one of the best in terms of the economy and he ended it with a surplus. 2000 was the peak performance for the US federal government. Everything went downhill from there.
He merely showed ust the best times our lives.
To be fair, that is the level of analysis that most people give, even on here. "If everyone just adopted [my position on my top issue] they'd win in a landslide."
>If Kamala loses this election, we'll look back at their immigration policy as the major unforced error that sank them.<
Nah. I hope to God she wins. But if not, the actual unforced error will be choosing her as running mate in 2020 instead of a heartland governor or senator with strong centrist branding. This is a pretty tough political environment for incumbents (worldwide, not just America). But Democrats have been gifted with the mother of all candidate quality problems in the form of Donald J. Trump. Given how close the race appears to be (I could have egg on my face in three weeks' time for writing this, but it seems inconceivable if Trump wins it'll be by a lot; if he prevails it will be a narrow win.), we'll look back and say, she gave it her all, but she just wasn't the optimal candidate.
Her being Biden's VP wouldn't be an unforced error if Biden simply did the right thing and announce he's not running for a 2nd term. Hard to see any mistake being judged as harshly as that one.
Again, Harris may win. I'm hopeful! She's still leading in the polls, and my sense is the "Trump isn't cognitively fit for office" story may beginning to bite a bit...
But if she doesn't prevail, it seems pretty plausible that the innate characteristics of Kamala Harris qua politician (plenty of lefty baggage; image as a San Francisco liberal) will have played a role in that. And in the scenario you describe, it's pretty likely she'd be an even weaker matchup against Trump. That's because—while she'd still be overwhelmingly likely to prevail as the nominee—she'd inevitably have had to say and do things to win the primary that would now be on the record (that is, promises to shore up her left flank).
I don't know why you're so sure she would have prevailed. Her biggest weakness is not her reputation as a lefty but the fact that she's tied to an administration that delivered record inflation and "open borders". A candidate without that baggage would be doing better, even if they had to make some bad partisan arguments as part of the primary process.
No sitting VP since 1952 has failed to secure the nomination if they're entered the primary. In August we got further confirmation of the dominant position a sitting VP is in if the nomination becomes available. Not a single other prominent Democrat even threw their hat in the ring. I wonder why that might be?
Anything's possible—and I'd never put it at 100%—but yeah "overwhelming favorite" sounds about right.
I can't read minds, but I am a hundred percent certain that he would have passed the buck if literally anyone had made a serious run for the buck in the primaries. No one did. Here we are.
If Biden had been looking to pass the buck to someone, he would have communicated that to them. He wasn't (and isn't) a passive observer.
The president does not throw the buck in the air while he remains physically capable of holding it. That is the definition of the job. It's called leading.
George Washington?
That would have been a different unforced error, because it would have told Russia a year ago, "no matter what happens, you can ba assured of a President who is less friendly to Ukraine than the current one." I am sure that others here can provide other examples of why proclaiming himself a lame duck would have had negative consequences. As a practical matter, he had no choice but to declare he was running.
did harris have to pursue the nomination when biden stepped aside?
Choosing the DEI candidate with a weak electoral history was an unforced error. But she is better than Biden and I doubt anyone could save Tester.
DEI candidate? Really?
Biden’s choice, not mine.
There's no reason to believe that Biden would have acted sensibly on immigration if he had chosen someone else. He would still have been unpopular and the Republican nominee would still have the advantage of running against against an unpopular incumbent. The real problem is that Biden ran for re-election and didn't allow a normal primary to occur because of how late he dropped off.
The abnormal nomination process was a feature, not a bug. VP Harris gets the nomination either way, but in a competitive primary she's now got more baggage.
Her baggage is from all the existing videos and 2019 positions that no one can erase.
She'd have more, though, if she had to fend off challenges from various competitors for the nomination. Who knows what she'd maybe have to promise if Bernie or Warren ran again.
There's no guarantee that she would have gotten the nomination in an open primary. This is purely speculative. She wasn't very popular as VP.
Not at all guarantee she wins the primary if her 2020 presidential run is any indication and her baggage such as being attached to a very unpopular president.
The assumption that Harris gets the nomination in an open primary makes an ass of you. She would've wilted against real competition, against people that aren't scared to do interviews.
My, aren't we salty today!
People say this but even if Biden picked someone else, do you think his immigration policy would have changed? No. That mystical other person would still have been saddled with an unpopular immigration record
His immigration policy would not have changed, no. I'm not suggesting there are no challenges for a generic Democratic nominee. Immigration would be one of those challenges, no matter who is the standard-bearer. I'm simply suggesting that, in a close election, the innate attributes of the nominee could prove decisive, and that it's conceivable a different nominee would be a stronger performer this cycle.
"Conceivable" doesn't mean "certain" of course. And the fact is we don't have a parallel universe to test it either way. But in any event TO SECURE that different nominee, I think it approaches 100% necessity for Biden to have chosen a different running mate in 2020, given the overwhelming advantages sitting Vice Presidents enjoy in vying for their party's nomination. We haven't seen a failed nomination effort on the part of a vice president in more than 70 years.
The US center-left needs to learn the lesson that the Scandinavian center-left has learned since 2015 (Denmark was earlier and their center left party changed already 2005 or so): tack right on immigration and crime or lose power permanently.
The Danish Social Democrats are way left on every issue except immigration and crime, the Swedish Social Democrats have completely changed their rhetoric and policies and now compete with the Swedish center right who is the toughest. Same in Norway and Finland. The German Social Democrats are about to get obliterated in the next election because they refuse to learn the lesson from Scandinavia. They will surely also change after losing power, too bad they can’t change already now and will instead risk becoming smaller than an actually fascist party in the upcoming federal German elections.
Matt may be correct that few normie voters think “immigrants are making my labor less precious.”. However, anyone who is interested in policy matters needs to grapple with the fact that 1) the benefits provided by a first world welfare state are lavish by Indian or Nigerian standards and 2) the project of having a first world welfare state will founder if you let too many low wage workers in.
Interestingly, conservative line drawing on immigration might let America come closer to the European welfare state model.
I think if the US population were 100% white evangelicals the Republicans would still never support anything like a European welfare state model.
but it isn’t and there are an electorally significant number of minorities, not to mention secular whites.
Well sure, but my point was that I can't imagine the Republicans under any imaginable circumstances supporting a European-type welfare state.
Core Republicans, no. Secular, working class whites who Trump flipped and who feel protected from poor foreigners by robust borders, absolutely
"the project of having a first world welfare state will founder if you let too many low wage workers in."
This is pretty much false. Herein lies the giant myth of "high skilled immigration": they don't actually contribute more to taxes and society than low wage workers. This is because low wage immigrants tend to have children that grow up to earn higher wages, because there is a pretty large selection bias in this population: it is full of people who went to extraordinary lengths to provide a better future for their families, especially their kids. There's also the factor that lots of "low wage" immigrants are actually well-educated, but have no certifications in the US, or the school they went to has zero credibility here, and are simply forced to work jobs like taxi driving or janitorial duties.
By comparison, children of low-wage native born parents do not tend to move up in socio-economic status. And the children of high-skilled immigrants tend to be a) fewer in number and b) less likely to outperform their parents.
I think you ignore how many low caste Indians there are and how cheap airfare has become.
I think your definition of "cheap" is very different from what a typical Caste Indian might perceive.
FWIW, I've worked with lots of them so I doubt that my ignorance here is high. And when I speak of "extraordinary lengths to provide a better future for their families", I am not just talking about money. How many Americans refuse to move out of dead-end cities to pursue better jobs? It is no trivial thing to just wake up and decide to leave your entire life behind and move to another country. One who does so usually has a level of intent and purpose that tends to correlate with upward mobility across generations.
Absent legal restrictions, high caste indians would arrange to provide airfare for low caste indians in exchange for something between employment and indentured servitude. high caste indians have lots of money and 5000 years’ experience living off their poorer countrymen
Or maybe they were captive to cosmopolitan liberals who would tell them “no person is illegal” and call them racist if they said people should learn English before coming here.
Can you please cite a notable person who thinks it’s racist to say immigrants should learn English?
There are local governments all over America currently spending significant resources on “accessibility” guidelines. The guidelines are in part aimed at disabled individuals but they also promote communication in as many languages as possible. This takes time and money. I don’t hear conversations that it would be a positive for these foreign speakers to learn English. I imagine the immigrants themselves would value that but on the government side it would be seen as bad form to say that was a social good.
Finding quotes of notable politicians would take time but I can affirm it’s in the culture of local governments to not proactively encourage people to learn English. I’m not saying classes are offered, etc. I’m saying if Matt’s sister in law went to her local government they would do everything they could to accommodate her in Vietnamese and would definitely not encourage her to learn English. That’s the government culture.
When I visit non-anglophone countries, I am very appreciative for things being in English. I see no problem with things in America being in other languages.
It's 100% one of the biggest reasons for the pushback against immigration.
People HATE seeing all the signs in Spanish.
That makes me sad. I really don't see the problem here-- it's just making the world easier.
The people who feel that way should travel, it would probably give them a different perspective. The first time I travelled outside the US & anglophone Canada was when the military sent me to Japan, and I still remember being shocked and very appreciative that the Japanese had English translations on almost everything.
When you move there, they will almost certainly insist that you learn the local language.
Indeed, yet they still have a lot of signs in English.
> currently spending significant resources on “accessibility” guidelines.
Can you provide a source for the claim that this is significant? I'm open to it, but I have my doubts.
I know people who work in local government and have participated in the meetings. Twenty people in a conference room for numerous meetings coming up with the guidelines. Entire departments sitting in even larger conference rooms being informed about the new guidelines. Think about how government works.
Do a Google search for government accessibility guidelines. Look through the documents. Think about how much effort you think went into creating it. Now multiply that by 5x and you’ll have a feel for the amount of staff time that went into it.
Many of those staff members are managers or directors and make $130k a year or more. These things are done through committees. Committees are time consuming. No one forms a committee so decisions are made quickly.
Do I have receipts, no. I doubt many governments record their employees time in a way that could be ascertained through even a public records request. If I were a Republican I’d push for citizen audits of the processes that create this policies. Where a citizen auditor goes through the entire process recording the time, process, and discussions and makes it public record. This would be a smarter approach to public policy and politics than dumbass running his mouth about people eating pets.
As far as the language piece goes Google does a good job of translating.
When I use the word significant i think it terms of value. So I think about the cost vs benefits. Of course I have imperfect information so I’m always a little off.
But as an example, if a local government sent a staff member to a flood plain conference as part of professional development and spent $1,000 for the trip I’d think okay. But if they spent $20,000 I’d say that’s a significant amount of money to educate that employee at a 3 day conference.
I think this same way about coming up with accessibility guidelines. I also think the guidelines could be done with less bureaucracy and get a similar result for a lot less costs. Government employees sitting in meetings is not free. This relates to Matt’s piece yesterday. Government would benefit from more libertarian and conservative thinking. It has gone too far to the left. Musk is advancing space exploration and the government is having non productive meetings.
For all the Musk haters, yes he’s an asshole. You’re totally right about that. He also does great things. That matters.
I think this reply kind of went off the rails. Bureaucracy can become quite inefficient - no disagreement there. I'm just not sure translating a few docs is a major part of the problem. But now we're both just operating off intuition.
Me.
I would pushback on the unforced error part of this. The surge in illegal immigration has little to do with American policy changes and instead seems to be driven by:
1) Information spread that bogus asylum claims will allow you to reside legally in the US for a while.
2) White hot job market in the US.
3) COVID ending, which had reduced the international flow of people.
4) Increased economic and political issues in Latin America.
5) Increased sophistication by coyotes, which have become more professionalized and are actively advertising for people to come to the US.
That’s a pretty tough set of issues and many have no clear solutions. It’s also not completely crazy that the administration thought that the surge would be more temporary and driven by COVID ending. We know now that didn’t happen with the benefit of hindsight, but I don’t think that was obvious 2 years ago.
Yes, it was obvious to everyone but you and the Biden administration. If an executive order issued a few months from the election can have the desired effect, it's very obvious that this administration dropped the ball. One of his first acts as President was to revoke Trump's executive order which worked very well because the first surge happened under Trump. The Trump Derangement Syndrome is real.
This is a great comment, thank you.
I do think, though, that one subfactor of (1) has been the public messaging from Biden and other Democrats. When Biden was elected he very publicly tried to do a 100 day deportation pause. During the first wave of migrants being bused by Abbot etc many Democrats including the NYC mayor were publicly welcoming migrants to their cities. I feel the overall message being sent was: if you make it across the border you won’t be sent back and in fact a bunch of support will be waiting with you.
Combine this with social media and point number (5), and I think this generates a lot of new border crossings.
I would add the role of the Mexican government. When AMLO wants to shut off the flow of migrants to the US border, it gets shut off, and vice versa.
I don't know what deal Biden struck with AMLO recently, but I bet there was something.
I really wonder what made people just realize the asylum loophole now.... maybe at first the wait times weren't that long?
The asylum loophole is very old. 60 Minutes did a feature on it in the 1980's. The difference is, that was people showing up at JFK airport with fake passports and saying "political asylum" and getting paroled in. That became harder to do because airlines check and double check documents now.
But the modern asylum crisis is most likely a product of better communication and easier land transportation. It's just much cheaper and easier to get to the physical border now than it used to be and asylum applicants can game the system by overwhelming it.
I think historically asylum adjudication wait times weren’t as long as now, so it wasn’t a great strategy. I briefly Googled but couldn’t find statistics.
The long adjudication times definitely benefit latecomers, after a huge queue has already been established. It's now a very rational strategy to seek asylum even if you're sure your claim will be rejected in seven or so years.
I'm not sure I understand the first mover motivation when queues were much shorter and adjudication was (presumably) done more rapidly. What was in it for them?
You can imagine the initial bump being caused by an unusual surge of people coming from countries in bad enough shape that they think it's worth spending a bit in detention for a shot at actually succeeding in the asylum hearing.
Then the queue gets too long to keep everyone in detention, then word gets out about the loophole on social media, then things snowball.
Interesting question. There are at least two other sources of the backlog: (1) genuine asylum cases and (2) people who are being deported and who claim asylum as part of those proceedings (because why not i guess). I wonder if those two cases are enough to get a backlog going.
The best source of statistics is TRAC https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/backlog/
Speaking of the Biden/Harris border position over the past 3 years, did anyone else listen to Ezra Klein's interview with Alejandro Mayorkas (Secretary of Homeland Security)?
I found that interview incredibly frustrating because we have all these border problems, and they do seem solvable, but Mayorkas presented them as intractable in a way that made me think either his hands are tied by politics, or he is unwilling to do anything because of underlying pro-illegal immigration sentiment, or plain old incompetence.
Given the existing law and mandated resource allocation which problem seems easily solvable to you? Most of this stuff is pretty intractable because at base we are an attractive country to come to compared to the home countries. Along with tat we are not throwing anywhere near the resources necessary to really fix any single part of it.
Mayorkas, for the first time that I heard a senior official, talked about something which my relative who works in this space has been telling me for a couple years, which is that a lot of the illegal immigration today is being driven by organized smugglers really encouraging people to come now (via the smugglers) in a way that's substantively different then when people better planned their migration and coordinated with family/friends already here. It's part of the reason there are more asylum seekers who have no plan other than show up and hope for the best.
Take for example the judges with tens of thousands of asylum cases. The current asylum laws are currently being abused. Instead of hiring more judges, reject every asylum case (something the Border Act of 2024 would have sort of done when there were a lot of applicants). This is something that the majority of Americans would support, as most Americans oppose illegal immigration.
"Easily" was the wrong adjective. Just "solvable" would have been more accurate.
But you cannot just "reject every asylum case" because that would be illegal, and the border act didn't pass to make it legal.
I mean, every problem is solvable if you imagine the person with the problem just has a bunch of magic powers that they do not have. You are just assuming a can opener.
> But you cannot just "reject every asylum case" because that would be illegal,
I'm really surprised Trump didn't try it anyway. It would have been challenged in the courts, but I think he would have gotten credit for trying.
As I recall, Biden did try some stuff, that was challenged in courts.
I don't really think that Biden should get demerits for actually respecting the courts decision, even if they decision was stupid.
As I understand it we need (1) reform of the law governing the handling of asylum claims, and (2) the cooperation of Mexican authorities. I think we've been getting more of the latter recently, and IIRC the former would have been part of the bipartisan bill that Trump ordered the GOP to defeat.
That interview made me wish I could fire him. It was a full hour of listening to convoluted legalistic head-fakes.
“…because of underlying pro-illegal immigration sentiment”
It’s that. He’s not incompetent.
It is not. It is the 'hands are tied" thing. He has no budget, and is constrained by a bunch of legal bullshit (which congress tried to alter, until Trump forced Republicans to shelve the bill because it would have been good for America, which would have made it bad for Trump winning an election).
“which congress tried to alter”
In other words, which Congress declined to alter.
Definitely agree. One of Ezra's worst pods of the year. Nothing more than canned political answers and they weren't even good ones. There's no way Ezra was happy with the outcome of that interview.
I thought it was a great pod though! I was frustrated with Mayorkas not Ezra.
Ezra's interview style is to let push the interviewee a little bit but ultimately let the listener judge interviewee's answer (or lack thereof).
Mayorka's excuses and lack of answers were very obvious and very damning!
“…there was barely a squeak from the left. Did they lose any votes over it?”
The left knows the Biden Administration doesn’t really mean it. Really, everyone who’s been paying attention knows they don’t really mean it.
I agree with this. Kamala's non-answer to Bill Whitaker's immigration question was her weakest moment. She's had what ... 3 months now to come up with her talking points / positions and she still has nothing to say. It's so frustrating.
Yep if Biden had put forward the immigration bill in 2021 people might have believed him
It could be that a Democratic loss will be because of immigration. We'll see.
However, I remember way way back to the 2022 midterms when we were going to have a red wave amidst the horror stories of migrant caravans heading toward the border. And since then border crossings have plunged and the Biden-Harris administration has actually done things with an EO and strongly supported a very conservative bill that Trump tanked.
It could be that the electorate will punish them *now* for failings of a couple years ago, but it should make us stop and think a bit about why that same electorate didn't punish them back then when there was more reason to do so.
Or maybe immigration isn't as hot of an issue as the sound and fury suggests?
But the immigration flow didn't peak until late 2023. It got much worse after the 2022 election.
Would a cognitively functional Biden have allowed the border situation to get so out of control? I'm guessing no.
I'd date the administration's change of position earlier, to the beginning of this year, when they went full on in support of the Lankford bill. Probably they should have issued an EO earlier, but it's still not a last minute change.
I think if the center-left wants to be persuasive on the topic of immigration, they need to do two things.
First, they need to become more comfortable delineating immigrants who on net add to the social safety net vs those who take from it, so the argument is not about helping the outgroup but rather about making America stronger.
Second, assimilation needs to stop being a bad word. Conservatives would largely not have a problem with more brown people coming to this country if they saw that those brown people also ate hot dogs on 4th of July and watched college football in the fall.
When I talk with people (strangers on the train) about immigration and they express anti-immigrant sentiments I usually just respond with "People are people and they want to do right by the people they care about. There are so many cities in this country that are half the size they were 50 years ago. We have a lots of places that can absorb and benefit from more people."
I then follow up with examples of areas of the city that have had Hispanic immigrants and point out all the small businesses. People are clever and if someone is going to uproot their life and travel thousands of miles then maybe they have a bit of American dynamism inside them.
And we see that sentiment reflected in the opinion polls above.
Yeah, I live in a state that could actually really use people, and it seems like an obvious fit, but the existing people would throw a fit over this. Instead, even the most intellectual conservatives(Deneen, for example) seem more interested in some Maoist-type policy of deporting Americans from major metro areas to West Virginia as a way to get population back into the state.
In some ways, I think it's just cope for not seeming as dynamic as their forefathers, and afraid of being shown up by recent immigrants, but in others, i think it's just more standard Know-Nothing suspicion of The Foreigner.
A lot of the most dynamic people leave these areas for opportunities and those who stay are tied down by family (I am from Ohio, this is the pattern.) There is a real human capital drain and labor markets are tapped out. Employers are scraping the bottom the barrel for workers because those who they want to hire all have jobs already.
Some of the people who leave would have stayed if they could have found good jobs. Remote work affects that balance. So does availability of lower cost housing.
You don’t need to “deport people from urban areas” to get them to move to rural areas and smaller cities. You can simply make it possible to work remote, and publicize low cost housing and remote work opportunities. People who like the outdoors will take advantage.
Harpers Ferry is already booming. The New River Valley is breathtakingly beautiful, and is a popular tourist destination.
Not every remote area will pick up population, but a surprising number are starting to. In general, areas within an hour or two of an urban center, areas within an hour of a college or university, areas with outdoor recreational opportunities, and areas of particular beauty are likeliest to attract newcomers.
It's also okay if some areas depopulate. New towns are established, old towns die, places grow or shrink, it's fine.
It’s not okay if it’s not what the people want. The idea of forced depopulation is not popular.
Which is funny, because I absolutely see my Hispanic neighbors out grilling stuff. I am too polite to find out what, though my chihuahua definitely wants to find out.
However, when what you see on the news is Tren de Aragua being menaces in Colorado, you want deportation. When your neighbors who work hard and whose children were friends with yours in school get on the deport list… that’s when the backlash starts.
(I swear this is the exact mentality of one of my coworkers. Also, the gang members should be deported.)
I feel like it’s very frustrating that there isn’t any sort of humanitarian option available other than let these people come to the United States.
Like I care a lot more about culturally left politics all around the world than anything and I just don’t see much in the way of outreach options so to help with some of these people with tenuous particular social group asylum claims. Like is it really impossible to spend a bit either in serious philanthropy money or foreign policy aid to make sure that outspoken women, queer people and narco gang targets have safe places to go outside of the US?
I think the sentiment here is well intentioned. But obviously it's incredibly hard to spend money to fix the root political and economic problems that push these people out of their home countries. And it's of course worth noting that Biden's right-leaning EO capped asylum claims at 2,500 per day.
> Like is it really impossible to spend a bit either in serious philanthropy money or foreign policy aid to make sure that outspoken women, queer people and narco gang targets have safe places to go outside of the US?
......what???
My experience is that no matter how little foreign aid we give, people freak out when they see a $B on the line item, even though it's a tiny fraction of the budget, so there's never any appetite for it.
I think the same people who hate these people going to the US also hate them in general so they're never going to be in support of policies to support them elsewhere, either.
"narco gang targets"
Targets of narco gangs are usually people who were working or deeply involved with narcos in some way. If a narco gang is willing to expend resources to chase you outside of your hometown you probably stole real money from them, betrayed them to their enemies or contributed to killing some of their people.
Sorry but that's not accurate. To the gangs you are a resource to be exploited, either by conscripting your son, abusing your daughter, or extorting your labor through protection rackets. Exiting those situations is perilous, and they take pretty much the same view of it as the old Stasi did of people crossing the Wall. They do in fact track and punish people externally --- pour encourager les autres.
When we say gangs we're talking about a large variety of organizations, most commonly impoverished street gangs that control local barrios, but ranging all the way to transnational, well-funded organizations that spend millions on bribery and intelligence.
So it's legitimate to point out that some fraction may be targeting innocents across borders, as Andrew and yourself imagines, but totally incorrect to say all, or imho most of them are like that.
Fwiw my opinion is largely formed from reading Borderlandbeat.com for almost 20 years now, as well as a big dose of several other blogs and analysis sights like InsightCrime, an obscure crime data blog called "Diego Valle's Blog" etc.. I'm not coming out of this from left field or from reading 1 or 2 things.
My sense is that it's hardest to leave when you are deeply involved, and very few people become deeply involved unwillingly. As far as innocents go, criminals would be happy to torch a business that doesn't pay protection or shoot the owner as an example, but if the guy flees town they have no incentive to chase them as they've already won. They may coerce people into working with them but they rarely conscript them, especially into roles of any importance, because unwilling workers are usually bad workers.
How would you go about figuring out an effective way to do this?
How would we delineate between those who add to the social safety net vs. those who take from it?
Agreed on your second point, especially the football point, as I enjoy people who enjoy watching football.
By talking about the issue not in terms of helping the disadvantaged but rather in terms of recruiting the best and brightest from around the world.
(But in practical policy terms it would be reforming the asylum process and instituting a merit-based immigration system.)
I'm fine with avoiding bleeding heart language, but "recruiting the best and brightest" seems too narrow to me as a subset of people who are hard working and want to do a job, which strikes me as adding to the social safety net.
That's fair. My larger point is that data engineers from India are going to contribute a lot more to our economy than hardworking albeit lower-skilled immigrants (though, personally, I support welcoming both).
Canada is experiencing a gigantic backlash from closely following your idea. The guy who nails shingles to roofs is MUCH more important to defuse immigration backlash than the n+1st software engineer
Right -- which is why we should also screen for *wanting to be American*.
Having a bunch of enclaves of high-skilled immigrants who do not assimilate into the broader culture is going to cause a lot more backlash than if there is a great deal of assimilation.
I thought that backlash had more to do with Indians and cheap colleges exploiting education visas?
In other words, the backlash is directed at people who might at first seem "high skill" because they are in an engineering program, but since it turns out the program is a joke they aren't really high skill
On a one to one basis, sure, but we probably need many more lower skilled immigrants than higher skilled ones.
>>How would we delineate between those who add to the social safety net vs. Those who take from it?<<
A few weeks ago the Wall Street Journal ran an analysis piece about how the country is "more reliant on government transfers than ever."
https://www.wsj.com/politics/elections/americans-government-aid-social-security-medicare-unemployment-34e92b19
But that's just a wonky way of saying we've gotten a lot older. Aging societies need transfers. Americans are rapidly getting too damned old to work! We're no longer so much better than Italians or Japanese in that regard. So, If you don't want Americans to be increasingly reliant on transfers, you've got to import new, working age Americans. The math is indisputable.
The gist of of my point is this: while it's desirable to attract the most highly educated possible pool of immigrants, the more immediate aim is just to arrest the aging of the population. I think in broad brushstroke terms, immigrants in general are net "adders" to the safety net provided they're young(ish) workers.
I would guess that the NPV of immigrants can be predicted surprisingly well from just age, English proficiency, and education level. I would be really interested in a regression analysis of cumulative FICA payments or something on these independent variables.
You can pay the Vanuatu government $130K to get citizenship. And they have a buy one get one deal for $20K more.
Is there a country you can do this for a reasonable amount of money that won’t be under the sea in 30 years?
First you have to get everyone working legally so that they are definitely paying income taxes. Then the question is: for each worker, how many dependents do they have? Like if we've got one undocumented housekeeper with three kids in local public schools (maybe even requiring ESL support) and on Medicaid, that doesn't make a whole lot of financial sense. The amount she's paying each year in taxes is trivial compared to the cost of educating her kids.
Last paragraph is straight up wrong. South American immigrants--the ones Conservatives have a problem with--assimilate well. I grew up in an 85% Trump part of Texas and every Memorial 4th and Labor Day had tons of Hispanic (or Hispanic/white) families out grilling; Hispanic men watch football, play football, etc.
A lot of these views on immigration are ill-informed and wrong. Now, we should accept that and try to win their votes. But I'm not gonna pretend that the median American has good, well-informed views on immigration
That huge spike pew measure in anti-immigration sentiment is not due to changed feelings about brown people. Far and away the most common complaint is "disorder". Not that there aren't some racists, but eating hot dogs and watching football has, I think, nothing to do with it.
A lot of white people don't eat hot dogs or watch college football. These are dumb stereotypical examples of assimilation. The US will remain a culturally diverse country even if all immigration is stopped.
And spoke English
The poor being equally as deserving as the rich, and white American culture having no moral authority over any other, are kind of the central axioms of the left... I think you are simply wishing for more conservatives.
I'm trying to make arguments that would appeal to conservatives.
There won't be a major comprehensive immigration law until The Emerging Democratic Majority book fades from civic memory. That book convinced both parties that "demographics are destiny" but they then ran in opposite directions with the idea. For comprehensive immigration reform to pass, Republicans have to believe it won't ruin them electorally and Democrats have to believe it won't hand them eternal power.
A comprehensive immigration law with a pathway to citizenship is clearly the only policy that works on the merits. I don't think Democrats are supporting it because it will give them eternal power, but I do think Republicans are not supporting it because they're terrified it'll invite a primary challenge.
Democrats vastly underestimate how much of a widespread belief amongst Republicans is that Democrats want "amnesty" because all Democrats see is a giant pile of votes.
Sure, and Rebublicans underestimate how conservative immigrants are on a vast array of social issues, relative to the median voter. They both just need to realize their errors. That's all Ben is saying.
Yep! The GOP position on amnesty is untenable on the merits and once the Hispanics get closer to being a toss-up voter, they'll hopefully back down a bit.
I'd like to think that, but I'm not sure that the number of Hispanics personally connected to an amnesty situation is all that large, particularly among the segments that are moving to the GOP.
Right. All I'm saying is that the GOP has a bad position on undocumented people in this country. The leader of their party has an insane position on undocumented people in this country. The Obama position on it was correct and not rooted in a desire to unlock millions of Democratic votes.
I've found it odd for years that many Democrats believe that adding millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their coalition will be good for *progressive* causes.
Not to mention Venezuelans and Cubans fleeing socialism.
I don't see why "path to citizenship" needs to be on the table. I think nearly all stakeholders except left-left people would be OK with permanent residence without citizenship, and that nullifies electoral concerns.
Immigrants who follow the legal pathways should get citizenship. I agree that citizenship (as opposed to just legal status) for illegal immigrants shouldn't be a priority.
I think we should really seriously ask to whose benefit it is to have permanent residence WITHOUT the possibility of citizenship for those who want it. Like, someone who can live here and access every benefit of living here except voting, who wants to take an oath of allegiance to the United States and become a citizen, and we're like, "No, you can't do that"? Who does that serve?
I agree that of course specifically rushing towards making people citizens doesn't make sense.
EDIT: Just to spice up my take a little: Maybe we should say that there is no permanent residence without citizenship. Like, long-term residence? Sure. But put a, I don't know, 15 year timer on it. If you're still here in 15 years, you should either become a citizen or leave (and anyone in those statuses who can do the civics test and take the oath can become a citizen, you aren't like going into a lottery).
It serves to unlock a challenging political situation that gives those people legal status and dramatically improved their life. I agree there's many Rs that are afraid of immigration reform because they fear a wave of blue votes coming from this .
I think there's also a lot of people that think there should be consequences for coming here illegaly (hence why Obama was proposing paying back taxes), and a sensible one could be not being eligible for citizenship.
I think that you can assuage Republican concerns about like stacking the vote if you aren't actually rushing people towards citizenship.
But once you're talking about people who've been here for a long time, who have put down roots in the country, I think you can easily judo it to, "These are people who are choosing to become Americans, who want to become part of the US culture, not people who want to drag the US to their culture." That won't of course convince the people who are hardcore against all immigration, but I don't think they're gettable to begin with.
If I had my way illegal immigrants would be offered a path to citizenship similar to the ones in the 2007 and 2013 bills. But if all that is politically achievable is a trade of no citizenship for no deportation, I'll take it.
Permanent Residence can much more easily be revoked than citizenship, e.g. in the case of serious crimes. That's a pretty big reason people don't want to hand out citizenship too easily. In Australia cancelling a permanent residence visa under Section 501 of the Migration Act (e.g. for being a mass murderer, possessing child pornography, etc) is a relatively straightforward bureaucratic step by the Department of Immigration and Border Protection.
I know a fair number of people who live in Australia "forever" but only have Permanent Residence and not citizenship because their original home country doesn't allow dual citizenship and they don't want to give up that citizenship. In particular, Austria doesn't allow dual citizenship and they don't want to lose an EU passport to gain an Australian one.
What benefit is gained from denying long-time residents citizenship, especially if they've gone through the IR-1 visa process? What cost is mitigated? Who benefits from kicking someone out of the country after 15 years if they don't want a US passport?
I cannot understand this idea that granting citizenship has some hidden cost to it. We should be proud that so many people want to come here, put down roots and bring their families. It's all upside.* We should make it as easy as possible.
*Note that when you sponsor a visa for a family member you agree to pay the US government back if they ever receive government benefits, e.g., unemployment or Medicaid. Also note that becoming a citizen means agreeing to pay US taxes for the rest of your life, no matter where you live. These are not proposals, they are current law.
The benefit would be a sort of signal that we expect assimilation.
A citizenship test is not going to have any effect on how assimilated someone is after 15 years. We just went through the naturalization process and the civics test is just some facts about the country; real assimilation comes from putting your kids in school, going to the grocery store every week, traveling around your adopted home—just day-to-day living.
Speaking from experience, after a few years you pretty much plateau at whatever level of assimilation is commensurate with your personality and circumstances. Also speaking from experience, creating barriers to citizenship (barriers, not conditions) discourages assimilation. It creates the feeling that your presence is tolerated rather than welcomed.
But wouldn't telling them they _can't_ be citizens work against assimilation?
I think the right lens through which to evaluate any immigration proposal is "How will this help the USA and our citizens?"
Too often, the lens used is "How will this help the immigrant trying to come to the US". I think this is the wrong lens.
It's interesting to me that you could look at any aspect of immigration law (or proposed laws) and thing the framing is "how will this help the immigrant trying to come to the US."
I went through the IR-1 visa process, dealt with USCIS and had to become familiar with immigration law; it is absolutely conceived of an executed based on "how will this help the USA and our citizens".
Every step of the process is designed to select for hard-working, law-abiding immigrants who will someday make model citizens.
Shouldn't the welfare of the immigrant also be a factor? They are a human being, after all.
That is what asylum, TPS, visa lotteries, etc. are for. The normal through-the-front-door immigration process is entirely about what is good for the United States of America.
Not in deciding whether they get in or not.
A colleague of mine, with an advanced degree from a US institution and a wife and a new baby here in the United States, is recently taking a non-optional one-year vacation to one of our international offices.
It is the dumbest fucking thing on the planet and it draws no small degree of shame.
Just to give the likely legal context here: the US has a visa category called L-1 for employees who are currently working in a foreign office of a company and are being transferred to a US office. In order to qualify for the L-1 visa, the employee must have been working for at least 1 year in the foreign office.
So, if a US employee has run out of visa options, a common strategy is to move them abroad for 1 year, and then bring them back to the US on L-1.
That's descriptive, although I didn't know the nomenclature.
Vacation to...an office?
Working from abroad, and he's being an impossibly good sport about it.
I did not read the non-optional part while I was waking up and thus had a reading comprehension fail, apologies. And yes, that sucks and it's good that he can be a good sport about it.
Presumably visa expired and they have to work from their country of origin while they reapply.
Terrible sign for America that everyone seems to agree there is zero shot of fixing the skilled pathway. Should the wait for an Indian born Nvidia engineer to become a citizen be >50 years? That is the status quo!
I think there's a much bigger chance of a Harris administration boosting skilled immigration, it's the pathway to citizenship that remains very dead.
Unsure if this is true. I recall an earlier post that elaborated on the comprehensive nature of immigration reform, and how progressives are reluctant to allow the easier ones - like simplifying and expanding pathway to citizenship for skilled engineers - unless they get their preferred solutions around illegal immigration. The question is whether Harris will embrace centrism or run another Warren-Sanders admin.
60 votes in the senate to get rid of country caps seems utterly fantastical (we have plenty of people here saying skilled immigrants aren’t integrating enough, I think they’re more liberal the the median Nebraskan) but I hope you’re right
Hum…Matt made a lot of good points about the need to enforce traffic rules, no fake tags, etc. many of these people are lower income and are just trying to get by and avoid costly things like taxes and insurance. Matt’s theory is, “Sure, but we need to enforce the law.”
Then we let people in illegally and they make bank and send, as a group, $100s of billions back home every year. But deciding the party is over and they need to go back home is some huge human rights issue.
It’s like if your friend got divorced and needed a place to stay. He stayed 6 months saved some money, paid off some bills and now it’s time to get his own place. That he got used to living in your spare room for free doesn’t really matter.
This is also my reaction. I'm not so naive as to think there aren't some pretty ugly beliefs and sentiments involved in Trump's rhetoric on immigration and why many are receptive to it. But illegal immigration polls the way it does for the same reason all disorder does. People don't like rule breaking even if they may simultaneously be sympathetic to the plight of certain individuals like those brought here as children. It boggles the mind that we can understand this with jumping a turnstile but not crossing a border without a visa.
I work with a young woman who recently had her truck totaled by an uninsured driver. The truck was fully paid off and she only had liability coverage, a thing that’s fairly common among young working class people who are trying to save money wherever they can. She makes $24-$25/hour, is now staying over at work a few hours every day because she has to wait for her wife to pick her up and because, obviously, she has to put together money to get a new car.
I know 3 people in the last 10 years or so who have had cars wrecked by uninsured drivers who, there’s no nice-enough-for-liberal-circles way to say this, spoke little or no English. The legal, insured driver is on the hook for 100% of the consequences. The police will never find the other driver even if they were looking, which they aren’t, and you wouldn’t get any money to help repair your car even if the cops *did* locate them.
To look at the polling, I am much more pro-immigration than the median American but it also drives me crazy when this stuff is made to be 100% about race. None of the consequences of a massive population influx with minimal documentation are going to be visited upon the people who think it’s 100% about race. People who are made by law to buy car insurance don’t want a bunch of uninsured drivers on the road, for instance. Of course they don’t!
Everyone who cares about such things gets lumped in with people who believe Haitian cat stories, and I’m sure it’s infuriating.
In MA we had a ballot question to "remove proof of citizenship for driver's license applications" to address this specific issue. It passed by only 8 points, which I take to mean that even in very liberal MA people still care about following the rules.
https://ballotpedia.org/Massachusetts_Question_4,_Remove_Proof_of_Citizenship_or_Immigration_Status_for_Driver%27s_License_Applications_Referendum_(2022)
Right, if Matt wants to rent a place in Tulum, Mexico is happy to have him for 180 days and then he has to leave. That he really enjoyed it and made friends and such is great. But making him go back to DC isn’t, to my mind, any worse than making him get car insurance or pay for vehicle registration. It’s how countries work.
Matt renting a place in Tulum would likely be for tourism, which is easier to delineate than someone coming for employment, which could be more indefinite on how long their services are needed.
Tons or business travelers arrive every day from Mexico to work in the US as they represent the Mexican auto parts, beverages, Bimbo bakery, etc. industries and they work for a period of time and per the terms of their visa they head back to their Mexican offices.
Turnstile jumping, which is generally a repeated activity, isn’t the right analogy. It’s more like if you jumped a turnstile once when you were 20 and then didn’t do it again, should you be arrested when you’re 30?
I get that people don’t like rule breaking - but what people really don’t like is *consistent* rule breaking. If an illegal immigrant’s only illegal action was crossing 10 years ago, and they have otherwise been model citizens, I truly think that doesn’t bother most non-nativist people.
Working illegally for 10 years isn't rule breaking? What about taxes? Insurance? Driving?
Remind me never to get stuck behind you on the interstate.
Stupid response is stupid.
No, I don’t think working illegally for 10 years is rule breaking. You broke one rule, once - crossing. After that, assuming you aren’t actually causing public disorder, you’re just trying to live your life like anyone else.
Re insurance and driving, states can (and do) solve this by allowing illegal immigrants to get licenses. I think that is a recognition of my point that we shouldn’t brand people with a scarlet letter for one initial act.
“ No, I don’t think working illegally for 10 years is rule breaking. ”
Illegally isn’t rule breaking? What do you think illegal means? They took the job, gave the employer a fake SSN, a fake ID, etc.
If you want me to admit that it’s rule breaking in a technical sense then sure - but it’s really just a secondary outcome of the initial act. Otherwise an illegal immigrant going to work is no different than you or me going to work.
It is very much against the law. I understand you maybe think it shouldn't be but it is.
Where I will agree with Andrew is that while I think the illegality is compounding, in my view the marginal illegality is decreasing.
That is to say, the "accumulated badness" of your first year of off-books work is greater than the additional "accumulated badness" of your twentieth year of off-books work.
To be clear I don’t think people should illegally immigrate. But I can acknowledge that once they’ve done that, it’s not practical or productive to describe their whole life that follows as a series of crimes. It’s not a robbery spree.
If I trespass on someone else's land I'm trespassing the whole time, not just at the moment I jump the fence.
To better the analogy further, it's more like if you sneak into some club, spa or amusement park in the morning and spend the whole day there. The action of sneaking in only happened once, but you must carry some guilt or paranoia throughout the day for taking advantage, and you could always leave if you're conscience or fear of getting caught caught up to you.
Except you are still here so you are still breaking the law. So the appropriate analogy is you jumped the turnstile and are still on the train. Should they kick you off the train
I understand not liking rulebreaking, but sometimes the rules need to be changed if enforcement of rules would have adverse consequences or be impractical.
My take is that people are also pretty willing to be pragmatic. I don't see any contradictions in the polling discussed in the post.
I agree that there's room for hope in that polling, and that enough can be convinced to change some rules.
That’s where the fine comes in. At some point Matt refers to it as a fee; I don’t know if that was intentional or a parapraxis but it needs to be substantial enough to be a genuine penalty for law-breaking and not just a formality.
Asking your friend to get his own place rather than living with you rent-free is absolutely not like deporting millions of people, including some who arrived in the US as children through no choice of their own. I'm not saying it invalidates the policy but I think it's important not to elide the humanitarian catastrophe of mass deportation.
Making people go home after we’ve allowed they to stay and send home $100 of billions a year isn’t a humanitarian catastrophe.
I don’t see how it’s any different from seizing a car from someone who can’t afford insurance yet desperately needs to get to work.
I guess I have to admit I just don't feel undocumented migrants are hurting America. I see that it's bad to have an illegal shadow economy. But America has tolerated that illegal shadow economy for decades and I don't want to deport people who made their lives under that system. If there is going to be a change towards a harsher system, I'd prefer to amnesty people already in America, certainly if they've been there for a long time, perhaps with a financial surcharge; and then apply the harsher enforcement to future arrivals.
By contrast uninsured drivers are screwing up the insurance market for everyone else, even if they don't want to be doing that.
I'm a conservative that isn't opposed to some type of amnesty (depending on the details)
but ONLY after we fix the illegal immigration problem, fix asylum, stop catch and release, implement e-verify.
then I know that the left is serious and we can talk about amenesty
Vance agrees with this!
But Texas construction firms don’t:
Shoot, I’m not subscribed, but TexasMonthly substack has a great piece called “Why Texas secretly loves illegal immigrants”
Back in the 19th century, poor workers from Europe would come and go here mostly for seasonal work, returning home and then often coming again. That's because the border was porous. Now if you come here "illegally" (i.e., doing the same thing the workers did in the 19th century, and yes yes it's still illegal by current law I get it) they take huge risks if they go back home after working seasonally. So they stay.
The median wage earner in 1880 earned about $450/year and a transatlantic round trip ticket was $80 in third class. I very much doubt “seasonal workers” were a thing.
Probably not in an annual way, but the same person might make several trips in their working life and time them so that they could take the max benefit from seasonal work.
Yeh, that didn’t happen. Looking at google flight a transatlantic round trip today is 0.6% of the median wage. In 1880 it was almost 20%. People came and stayed. In rare instances the came, made some money and returned homes. But there was essentially no “commuting”.
How is it a humanitarian catastrophe any more than status quo?
As it stands right now, getting here is an expensive and dangerous gamble that involves paying criminal human trafficking orgs a huge (for the migrant) fee, hoping that you're not abused or raped by the traffickers or Central Americans governments along the way (they generally treat migrants much worse) and then walking through the desert or in the back of a truck.
There's probably a utilitarian, if somewhat paternalistic, argument that the deterrent effect alone would prevent millions of these awful trips from being made.
That's fair. I just think this is one of those situations where we can't choose an ideal option. Ideally, the immigration system would've worked to begin with, there wouldn't be a large human trafficking problem or millions of people living undocumented. That's not the world we live in so I think a more nuanced solution is necessary, and frankly unavoidable, with some mix of amnesty and deportation depending on individual circumstances.
Someone staying in your place rent free is not a close analogy to someone violating immigration law. The people who are violating immigration law are usually paying rent and have good relations with their landlords. If you want to make an analogy to things that might be familiar in your neighborhood, it’s when the zoning code says that no more than two unrelated people can share a residence, but you know your neighbor is renting out rooms to local students and it really makes you mad so you want to evict them.
Seems to me the economic "costs" of enforcing car license plate laws are, uh...nonexistent? We'd probably *help* the economy by reducing traffic accidents. That's a very different animal from evicting 5 million workers. The latter activity actually will cost us production.
In most places to get a plate you need proof of insurance. In Florida median car insurance costs over $250 a month. If we ruthlessly enforced the law there would be a lot of people who desperately need to drive to work who wouldn’t be able to.
Edit: it looks like in Florida 14% of cars are unregistered/uninsured if you suddenly took 14% of vehicles off the road that would have a major economic impact.
If you can’t afford the cost of legally required minimum liability coverage, you shouldn’t be allowed to drive. (I would note that minimum liability coverage in Florida does not cost $250/month on average.)
The alternative is to say that poor people are allowed to externalize the costs of their driving, in an unpleasantly chaotic form of redistribution which also incurs moral hazard.
I can only see that making sense if there’s a large population of poor people who could profitably work for pay, but only if their driving is slightly subsidized, which doesn’t strike me as very plausible.
I'm confident cracking down on car registration laws won't have anywhere near the economic impact of deporting millions of workers.
1 in 4 cars in New Mexico are unregistered. Would you agree with NM saying it can’t enforce car registration laws because it would be too economically disruptive?
If enforcing car registration meant taking the drivers permanently out of the work force, then yes, that's exactly what I would say. No sane person would want to fire 25% of their state's workers.
What I would want to do is enforce the law in a way that serves the interest of the state and its citizens.
No. Sounds like a lame excuse.
Which is why you'd want to provide a legal pathway for folks whose vehicles were previously uninsured to get right with the law. Maybe pay a fine or something. Of course, folks who aren't able to meet those legal standards no longer get to drive.
Seems crazy enough to work!
“ Of course, folks who aren't able to meet those legal standards no longer get to drive.”
And if that number is 1 million people - what then?
I've got to say, I used to 100% agree with Matt on traffic rules, but lately, a neighboring city has put up a shitton of traffic cams, and I have become sympathetic to the opposing side, because said City hasn't changed any fine amounts despite the vast increase in violations being enforced.
So when you get your second $250 ticket in 3 months for going 24 in a 20mph school zone (where no kids were in sight, and the signs are easy to miss), it's not hard to feel like you are just this city's personal piggy bank, and then my political stance quickly reverts to "Nah, fuck you, no traffic cams".
If they made the fee $50, whatever, but the whole thing reeks of greed, not crime prevention.
I think that the discrepancy here is that Matt cares about the consequences of enforcement, not the text of the law per se (and in general, thinks of law as being kind of a Calvinball domain). He generally agrees with the social purpose of vehicle licensing and registration requirements, traffic law enforcement, bans on felon gun ownership, laws against theft, etc, so he thinks that vigorous enforcement of those laws is net good.
On the other hand, his signature policy idea is wanting the US to have a billion people, he thinks that increasing the scale of immigration is important for preserving American national greatness, is acutely sensitive to the size of the labor force as a constraint on US economic production, and believes that the current labor market is probably a bit too tight. So in this case, he sees increased enforcement as a negative.
(FWIW, I think that he’s basically right about this on the merits, but I would advise electoral politicians not to adopt this view as a public position; the median voter is wrong about this but their preferences are pretty clear.)
I think Matt’s posts about how we need to enforce the law are always grounded in the benefits of doing that, like what the harms of fake tags are or how big crimes are often caught in the process of investigating small ones. It’s not just about “the law is the law and you enforce the law.” So one reason for the distinction you identify could be that the benefits of mass deportation are more dubious relative to the costs than the benefits of tag enforcement.
This is where I think we get into pretty dangerous territory though. The only laws with legitimacy are the ones that have been enacted through the constitutionally created process. While we all know there can be some pretty significant variance in how heavily laws are enforced the idea that we're only going to enforce the ones with good outcomes or outcomes we like is pretty Trumpian. I don't think we can claim to be really concerned about the threat Trump poses to democracy while also saying we just aren't going to care about the laws that were enacted through the democratic process.
I don’t know who’s saying we just aren’t going to care about laws. Matt is talking about passing *additional* laws democratically, to make it easier for people to become legal citizens.
Right but, to use my FL example, if the state suddenly started enforcing the law on the 14% of “illegal” cars that would have huge economic impacts. I don’t recall Matt ever discussing it.
In the Florida example, the comparison would be marginally more enforcement, not mass enforcement of all 14% of cars overnight, which would be impossible anyway.
So the question in Florida is whether "getting tougher on enforcement" is worth the cost, in the same way that "is getting tougher on unauthorized immigrants" helpful or not. Despite the name, mass deportation will be very unlikely to really mean deport every single person.
Right, it’s the same in both cases. Currently there is no enforcement of people being here illegally. There is some enforcement around working illegally and if someone here illegally otherwise breaks the law they can end up deported.
What we’re talking about is making an active effort to deport people for being here illegally. Sort of like in FL you can get in trouble for driving without a license or in an unregistered vehicle only if you otherwise break the law - speeding, etc.
Are there good ideas for finding out who’s here illegally other than via their interactions with the legal system (via work or via police encounters when a crime is committed)?
A National ID card would work.
But my comment was about the benefits of doing so. What are the benefits of cracking down on immigration in a major way?
Maybe you should ask the mayors of the cities overrun with illegals.
How much is New York/Anywhere USA paying to house and feed illegal immigrants right now?
If I'm not mistaken it's asylum seekers, not illegal immigrants, who are being housed and fed at taxpayer expense. But I've been wrong before!
The difference is that some people said ‘I'm scared’ and others didn't.
I guess fundamentally, I think someone can become an American without legally being an American. Without having the federal government sign a piece of paper saying "now you're an American". I couldn't tell you when that fuzzy diving line is crossed. It's partially a matter of time, but not purely a matter of time, of culture, of immersion. I dunno. But I do believe it's true you can be an American without being granted legal citizenship.
Which leaves us with a lot of illegal Americans.
This is incorrect. They are foreign nationals.
“…when that fuzzy diving line is crossed”
I think there are circumstances when the line is clear. If your child is born in the US, you’re an American. If you’ve held down a job for a decade, you’re an American. If you belong to and donate to a church that actively supports its broader community, you’re an American. If you love the Never Ending Pasta Bowl at Olive Garden, you’re an American.
Not legally, but spiritually.
Does that make some Americans more American than others? Are there "real" Americans and "fake" Americans who have spent too much time overseas or don't speak English right?
Certainly we would say that someone who is plotting the violent overthrow of our democracy is being “un-American” in a very stark way, even though legally they are American citizens while a DREAMer who does well in school and aspires towards citizenship is not.
I don't actually agree, in part because "American" and "Un-American" only have the most subjective of meanings. If doing well in school is being a "real american" to you, that's fine, but it's as subjective as it gets.
I agree it’s subjective. I think that’s contained in SP’s comment. The spirit of what SP is saying is that we don’t necessarily assess American-ness solely in terms of legal status.
Yes we do.
The point of getting married is that it's distinct from not being married, in and of that you assume a specific set of obligations to your spouse and your new household, and society recognizes that.
It's the same with citizenship. The whole point is to make a bright line where we can say, 'actually, because you are a citizen, you have these rights and these responsibilities', and there is no argument about the category. Nobody is asking a legal resident to fight for America. They will not be called on to judge their peers in a court of law. In return, they do not get to vote, and their opinions on our affairs are deprecated. If they want to step up and grab the ring, they have to cross the bright line by stepping out of the fuzziness.
Ah, but it's illegal for them to get married so they have to exchange promise rings with America instead.
It's not illegal, it's that America likes to be asked in a certain way, and you have to prove your love.
In addition to the moral issues, which, whatever... Mass deportation would cause untold economic harm. In addition to the ridiculous expense of the effort itself, the removal of millions of workers from the economy would be devastating. There's loss of taxes (yes, they pay taxes, even though they are illegal, because income tax isn't the only tax that exists), but also the labor shocks, the demand shocks, etc. Noah Smith has a good writeup on this.
It would be cutting off your nose to spite your face. Sometimes you have to search for pragmatic solutions, and not get stressed out about moral hazards. Giving illegal immigrants some kind of way out would lead to better outcomes. You do have to pair it up with much more sensible border enforcement, though.
That's why it won't happen in any sort of way that aims to be truly massive or complete. Instead it will be something incremental, and probably have as much impact in terms of deterrence as in actual deportations. If we just went back to Obama levels of deportation, that's workable and something Trump could claim he did. The harms would be greater if that started tomorrow, because of the current job market, but an incremental increase wouldn't cause an immediate recession.
Good luck convincing the American public of that. As Matt pointed out in the article, as soon as you start deporting people who are undocumented, but have been in the country for a while and otherwise law abiding, there’s going to be a huge backlash. There’s a reason why deportations have overwhelmingly focused on recent arrivals and people breaking the law.
They are breaking the law. If I’m in France on a tourist visa and I let day 90 pass without going to the airport to go home I’m breaking the law.
*otherwise* law abiding
I feel like you keep not responding to people’s points about cost-benefit analysis, backlash, etc. and fall back on the question of legality. Which is fine—you’re taking a deontological approach instead of a utilitarian approach—but then it shouldn’t be surprising to you that you and Matt don’t agree on this.
Fair but to me it sounds like NM saying it can’t possibly enforce vehicle laws because 25% of vehicles are unregistered and enforcing the rules would be too disruptive.
What feels like that? Opposition to any and all immigration enforcement? Or opposition to attempting to expeditiously deport all illegal immigrants?
I think that's why he liked the idea of a fine/back taxes etc. There's still a penalty for coming here illegally(the fine), but it's much more practical to enforce.
"almost everyone would hate mass deportation if [Trump] really tried to do it"
Bingo. This is one of those things where I think people who want it to happen don't know what they're talking about and are denying tradeoffs, even if it polls above water. And this is also why I would make a terrible politician.
I agree. But unfortunately I think this is true of almost all policy issues. People want impossible, mutually exclusive, or incoherent things all the time. They don't care that it doesn't make sense.
(As an aside, I love the movie "Bruce Almighty" as a pop culture illustration of our impossible magical thinking and why it just can't be how the world works)
It's all thermostatic. People lean anti-immigrant when there's a Democrat in the White House and the opposite when there's a Republican.
I guess the devil is really in the details, though, right? "trying mass deportation" could mean so many different things.
That's always the inherent flaw with poll questions like this.
The call for mass deportations is, among other things, a rhetorical escalation which liberals have well earned.
Progressive rhetoric on immigration is sneering and insulting. You get yelled at for saying “illegal immigrant.” You get called a racist for saying you like the country you grew up in and don’t want it to change too quickly. If you work for a big corporation, you have to watch what you say on social media. I was recently removed from a Facebook group *consisting of members of my college debating union* for saying I think Vance understands the problems of the white working class and hope he can channel Trumpism in a positive direction. People don’t like being sneered at and they don’t like being told which words to use.
If I were gay and got bullied for it, I would go to drag shows. When people bully me for liking the country I grew up in and not wanting it to change too quickly, I talk about mass deportations.
No, i think these people just hate foreigners. Many Americans just think that hating on foreigners is the way out of dealing with the problems of internal politics. Anti-immigration people sneer all the time at people who have some semblance of humanity. They love to bully, i don't see why they should complain about being bullied.
Hatred of immigrants is a proud American tradition going back into its founding. It's not that weird.
I don’t hate unskilled pickleball players, but I don’t let them to join my group because I want to preserve the standard of play to which I am accustomed. Why is control over free association seen as hatred?
I'm not sure the USA and a pickleball group are really comparable. I mean, should I be able to veto people from living in my town because they don't fit my standards?
Look, I live in West Virginia- the governors here run on 'border security'. Take it from me- they hate foreigners, especially in the abstract. They wouldn't make up a bunch of stuff about crime if they didn't. It's also why every other issue that involves aiding foreigners of any kind polls pretty badly among them.
zoning sort of does that
It's not quite the same as, say, the town council getting to have every new resident stand in front of them and being able to thumbs up or thumbs down them.
Though it's certainly been used to try to enforce something like this before along racial lines.
Isn't that how Sweden works? You can be vetoed from citizenship by a canton.
That’s fine. YOU do not need to hire or play pickleball with undocumented immigrants but “free association” allows others to make different choices.
That’s a rather deep argument. Maybe too semantic for my taste, but it tastes of truth. However, the right to exclude is at the core of free association.
Trump’s race baiting is awful. The nasty reality is he’s closer to the median white American’ view on most racial matters than is Harris. The antidote to Trumps return to the politics of 1968 is a world where people of all races can speak frankly about having spaces that are not open to all. If people get bullied for wanting to preserve spaces like the ones they grew up in, then they will become less tolerant. The correct move is to allow a vast amount of private ordering while of integrated spaces will exist, including especially schools and most work places. An Italian family is literally racist when they hire Italians to work at a family restaurant and yet there’s nothing hateful or odious going on. Do we really want to mash people together in every sphere or do we insist on a robust, integrated public sphere and let corners of laissez faire exist. Defeat Trump. To keep the coalition broad we need voters with old fashioned beliefs, let them age out in peace.
We’ve actually been incredibly pro-immigrant compared to the vast majority of countries.
I hate people from the next state over. Go back Medford, asshole!
Don't California my Texas!
Ugh, these bridge and tunnel people are the worst, amirite?
But nobody sees fit to bully me, nobody calls me names, they nod, and then they complain that racists don't want so many immigrants.
Whether liberals have “earned” this talk or not seems to be beside the point. This isn’t about liberals. Liberals aren’t the victims here. Going to drag shows is not in any way analogous to threatening to evict someone.
you are being a moralist. i am being human. if you denigrate my status (or that of any other human being whose ego hasn’t been crushed) they will push back. you say climate change is an existential threat. i say seawalls today, seawalls tomorrow, seawalls forever. you say we can’t control our borders? i day mass deportations.
but i’m reasonable and will deport the least sympathetic first and stop before the gdp hit is too big.
And why are YOU the ultimate arbiter of exactly how and how quickly the country changes?
Sorry about your FB group but the country doesn’t deserve to have to live with Trump’s deficits and trade restrictions and immigration restrictions as punishment.
”I think writer types struggle with this because we (usually) really like immigrants’ impact on broader society and culture.”
If you lived in Europe I’m not sure you would think this is true. What do we gain by receiving people who refuse to shake hands with women, physically punishes their daughters for meeting native men, tell pollsters they want to introduce sharia laws in their host country, have more loyalty to their local clan than broader society etc? I’d argue that current immigration incurs a cultural loss and back sliding to values we last saw 100+ years ago in Europe.
I know this is a blog written by Americans but I feel like you often try to ”speak for” the western world more generally. Recent asylum immigration to Europe has been a disaster, for Europe. And trust me, I wish this wasn’t the case. I do believe we have an obligation to help people everywhere, but not through immigration - unless the migrants have broadly liberal democratic values (I’m more than fine with letting liberal Afghans migrate to Europe). We must find ways of helping people where they already are, and to help mitigating and preventing the factors that make people migrate in the first place.
As far as I know, we don't have those kinds of non-assimilation problems with immigrant, though. Or at least, they are fairly rare.
True, but I have seen the observation that the average "MENA" immigrants to the US are disproportionately better educated/higher income to start with than "MENA" immigrants in Europe, and also move to the US largely with the intent of remaining permanently, whereas a much larger percentage of the immigrants to Europe theoretically believe they will return to their home country someday, both being factors that make assimilation in the US more likely even before we talk about birthright citizenship.
I think that this comment is unfair to Matt. Matt is ultimately writing from the US, about the US, to a mostly US audience. Of course his articles on immigration will be based on the specific US immigration context. I don’t see any claim that his ideas in the post apply outside of America.
To be clear, I do agree with you that immigration is different in Europe, and that there are specific problems of long term integration that the US does not have.
I understand that it is annoying to foreigners that US domestic debates can influence domestic debates in other countries where the underlying context is very different.
But I would be surprised if the best way to push back on this turned out to be convincing US speakers to spend more time talking about your local context rather than about the US.
European countries seem very comfortable with regulating US-based tech companies. Couldn’t you try to push your governments to force prioritization of local content for local consumers, or something?
Personally I enjoy writing Matt’s take on US politics and I think his writings are 90% relevant in a European context. Immigration policy, however, is not and I wish he would let the European experience influence his somewhat rosy view on immigration (in particular his constant ignoring of cultural factors and cultural costs). Partly the failure of immigration in Europe is due to European factors but partly it’s due to who comes, i.e. demography.
Matt wrote an article about possible pathways to developing an immigration reform compromise that could potentially get enacted into US law though the US Congress.
The article cited surveys of American public opinion, other articles by American journalists about American public opinion, history of recent platforms, speeches, and political positions of American politicians and the two American political parties, and statistics on US border crossings and deportations.
Given what the article is about, those seem like sensible things for it to be focused on?
I want to push back on family migration. We should let as many workers in as we need and raise skilled immigration to the roof. We should take real asylees. And we should, yes, allow people to stay if they are married to a citizen.
But "family migration" meaning you get to bring a bunch of relatives just because of the accident of who they are related to? That's actually not great. It is highly inegalitarian- why should someone with no special skill get in just because of their bloodlines and the luck of being related to someone already here? And when you do it, it ends up being at the expense of worker immigration, which gives rise to illegal immigration by all the people who don't have the right bloodlines.
So no, family immigration should be very narrow. Let's let in workers and skilled migrants and humanitarian refugees rather than migration by bloodline.
Because people value their families, and value being united with them. What is wrong with a govt policy that increases the well-being of US citizens?
Immigration is about what the nation values, not making individual people happy. And a big thing the nation values is fairness, and preference for those with lucky genes is not fair. It's nepotism.
I don't believe that your premise is correct. In a liberal democracy, the ultimate end of any public policy is the well-being of individuals. It is pretty much the defining feature of liberalism.
In that case, why do we have national security exceptions for immigration? Why do we have 5 year and 10 year bans for people who are caught without papers? And why do we not allow very distant relatives, friends, boyfriends, and girlfriends to come? In each of those situations, there may be people close to the person who would be very happy to be near them. And yet, we recognize that immigration policy is actually not about ensuring anyone who wants someone else to be close by is happy. It's about broader policy goals. Not everyone gets to be happy, and guaranteeing everyone will always be happy and that broader policy goals will never get in the way is a promise no liberal society can actually deliver on.
You are misapprehending my statement. I did not say that individuals' desire for family reunification trumps all other considerations. Rather, I was merely asserting that it has substantial value to individuals, and hence family unification is as legitimate a goal as is increasing the number of high skill workers.
I am not sure that actually works. "It has value to me that the government discriminate against someone else because of genetics". It's like saying it has value to me if my kid gets a legacy preference into Harvard.
This isn't liberalism. It's the opposite of liberalism. Equal treatment is a fundamental tenet of liberalism, and this is saying if you have the right genes you get to come to America and if you don't, the golden door is locked shut.
Is the focus on genetics here just for rhetorical purposes? The family ties recognized by immigration law include those like marriage and adoption that don't involve shared genetics.
You are looking at it from the immigrant's perspective, you could instead look at it from the American's perspective.
If I'm a US citizen, and I love living here and I never want to leave, but also I don't want to permanently separated from my parents/kids/siblings who are not US citizens, why can't I petition to have them come join me? Maybe that's not maximally economically efficient, maybe that's not maximally altruistically efficient, but it strikes me as fundamentally human.
Because immigration policy is concerned with much more important things than how often you get to see your extended family, and a visa is a massive benefit that a lot of people want and will work very hard to get and their interests and the country's outweigh your desire to bring in all your relatives.
Do you generally consider parents and kids extended family? Or are you just talking about siblings?
What are the things that are much more important to you than American citizens being with their family? Are you sure those things trade off against family reunification visas?
Family reunification visas are quite popular. To the extent those visas give Americans positive views of immigration in general, perhaps they help rather than hurt other policies like refugee admission.
1. I think under-18 children are a strong case for family admission. But I see no reason whatsoever that one should get to bring their parents as a matter of course. Why should those parents get a preference over the many workers who add to this economy whose only "shortcoming" is that they don't belong to the same gene pool as someone currently here?
And bear in mind, it ISN'T just even parents and adult children under current law. Much more distant relatives can come in, plus chain migration can multiply the effect. So we are talking about a lot of people who get in while workers who are unlucky enough not to have the right genes get kicked out.
2. It's not the things more important to me. It's the things important to immigration policy. The purpose of immigration policy is not to make you happy. It's not to serve the personal desires of particular people. It's about grand strategies far more important to the nation than that-- things like national security, humanitarian concern, equal treatment and the avoidance of favoritism, fairness towards folks from all parts of the world, and yes, our economic, scientific, and technical needs. That's WHY we have an immigration policy. And these things really are much more important than whether a particular person might have to fly back to see family members.
3. I am not sure they are "quite popular". I think it depends on how you word the polls. And especially when it comes to more distant relatives, rather than things like spousal visas, I bet they actually are not.
Which visa category allows you to petition for someone who isn't a spouse, parent, child, or sibling?
You just added siblings. :) There's zero justification for siblings to get a genetic preference. Pure nepotism.
You’re missing that family migration often supports economic activity. For example, if couple with kids can bring over their parents, it may enable both of them work instead of just one.
As long as the working age couple can support their parents and ensure they don’t need public assistance, there’s no good reason to oppose it.
Sure, to a degree. But the cost-benefit is certainly much less. In your example the parents of the worker are likely to need old-age healthcare in not so many years. And having 1 or 2 seniors taking care of your children is awesome, but it's a very inefficient way to do childcare when compared to daycare
Also, that really only applies to a limited number of close family members in certain situations anyway. It doesn't near justify what we actually do.
Like with any other immigration, I would prioritize employment over all else. If relatives can fill some job and there's some practical reason to prioritize them, so be it, even though I don't know what reason that would be, but they first need to fill a job.
Family based immigration is not for some distant relatives like aunts or cousins. It's only close relationships like spouses, parents, children & siblings. Except for spouses of US citizens, all the categories are subject to quotas and multi-year waits. Try banning green cards for spouses of US citizens and then observe how white men vote in the next election cycle.
Why should someone who is working and raising children in the US have to quit their job, dump their kids on the spouse, and move back abroad for several years when their parents get old?
It's possible they shouldn't, though I don't think the case is as open and shut as you are portraying. People have relatives living in other countries all the time; they deal with the situation in various ways, and plenty of relatives aren't admissible to the US even under our family reunification rules.
But the fact that there may be limited situations where letting a family member in makes sense (and which could be handled by a narrower rule) does not justify a rule that ensures a large percentage of our legal immigration pool is determined purely by genetics while others who don't have the fortune to be related to someone here have no chance of legally coming.
I think that's way too nihilistic. Look, it's "unfair" (in some sense) that anyone had to be born in Sudan, but that doesn't make it so that everyone in Sudan should be equally welcome to come to the US, even in a philosophical sense.
Those who accept the idea of national borders (for whatever reason) agree that the US has the right to decide on what criteria we admit immigrants. Some criteria are straightforward and almost universally agreed-upon (we admit people who have been oppressed for their political views or ethnicity). Some criteria are straightforwardly bad (we don't limit immigration to certain racial groups). And obviously some are in-between. Dilan Esper said that it is not consistent with his values (or, by extension, OUR values) to make family membership a criterion for admission. Talking about how we're all born equal doesn't address this point.
The other point would be because it’s democracy. If the immigrants who come here become full citizens, then they should be treated as a constituency in the American electorate and the government should at least take their concerns into consideration. Now, of course sometimes a small group of *Americans* can distort national policy, like I think our policy towards Cuba is bad but it’s influenced by Cuban Americans who want the sanctions. So it’s not that we should never override it but there’s a legitimate Democratic case for chain migration as long as you can consider the naturalized immigrants to be actual American citizens deserving of expressing their policy preferences.
In a looser way this sort of thing has happened a lot, historically. 1st and especially 2nd generations from X country have often tried to make it easier for people of their ancestry to immigrate. That's why the diversity visas started out as a way to increase immigration from the smaller countries of Europe.
Sure, they can express their policy preferences. But the democratic (majoritarian) response will almost certainly be along the lines Dilan Esper expressed - in favor of not having family-based immigration.
Similarly, Dilan was expressing his policy preferences, and he was actually proposing a rationale for them. But rather than saying "My family should be able to come in just because I'm here", he's saying that (if I can put words in his mouth) our government shouldn't be officially endorsing nepotism.
Leaving aside the philosophical dispute, I would note that family reunification actually polls quite well. It gets majority support even from Republicans.
That's interesting. I'd like to see how the question is framed in polls showing support for it. "Family reunification" sounds nice, but there are much less-nice (and perhaps more accurate) ways to frame it.
Yes sure, you can have a preference and there might be a solid case for more merit based migration. I was just objecting to whether it was in some sense philosophically “unfair”, since if you consider naturalized American citizens organizing as an interest group constituency to lobby for their favored policy, I would consider that more akin to AIPAC or Cuban Americans trying to influence our foreign policy, even if I don’t think it’s objectively wise or necessarily represents the majoritarian sentiment. It’s just politics with a small group of Americans with intensely strong feelings for a particular outcome (getting their families here) trying to get their preferred policies implemented.
Think not in terms of cutting the line but instead aristocracy. Why should someone get to come here simply because of who they are related to? It's no more fair than legacy admissions.
The answer is simple. Assimilation is easier if you know people who live here and are willing to support you during the transition.
I am not sure that is proven at all. Indeed I suspect it is the opposite- it is easier not to assimilate under those conditions.
US has been around for a while. There have always been cohorts/waves of people coming in from the same country. It’s not rocket science. It may take 1-2 generations for some but ultimately most people assimilate in the US.
They do but that's different from saying such communities make assimilation faster or more likely. We had German speaking ghettos in this country way back when, and there are certainly areas in Los Angeles where you run into people who never learned English. The presence of others you can form an ethnic community with makes that sort of thing possible.
I think that argument leads nowhere. It could justify letting in only whites or only Christians or only married straights. After all it's all luck anyway. Nobody deserves it.
In actuality we need to admit that immigration here is an enormous benefit many people want and the system should actually be fair. And just like "whites only" is unfair giving away most of the slots based on genes is unfair too.
To the extent that "chain migration is ... an expression of interest group democracy", that's an incredibly excellent reason to disallow it. There's a lot of things that the US needs, but interest group democracy is decidedly not one of them.
If Cuban Americans wanted a whites only migration policy or Jewish American refugees wanted discrimination against Muslims should we "give that to them" as a matter of interest group democracy?
Immigration is too important to just be given as a gift to interest groups. It should be fair to people seeking to come in.
I really do think the determining variable on illegal immigrants is whether you consider the act of illegal immigration to be a crime, an administrative offense, or no crime at all. Unsurprisingly the reasonable view seems to be “administrative offense,” since that category is typically applied to offenses that hurt nobody in particular in a measurable manner but would cause a negative effect if totally allowed, such as parking in a rude manner.
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
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.
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.
Democrats should have been trying to make immigration an economic issue. Attracting/recruiting the world's talent would be a huge win for the economy. True that a full Merit based system would allow lots of low-skilled people too, but that still implies something like Biden's last minute decision to enforce Border controls. It was hugely irresponsible not to have used the Relief bill to staff the border to admit real political asylum seekers and turn way those with invalid claims.
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!").
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.
The rich already skip to the front of the line.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
We currently sell green cards for $1,050,000. Why should we reduce that?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EB-5_visa
Elasticity of demand. We can make more money with lower prices, because volumes would be higher.
I guess inflation has reduced it, but it hasn't touched the "create 10 jobs" part.
Over many essays, Matt Y has written about the power of contingency to shape events. This makes me wonder if Biden's mental and physical decline during his term had more to do with the surge of migrants than we have been led to believe. Perhaps the un-checked surge of migration was allowed to happen because it's been his staff and advisors who have been in charge rather than the faltering Biden. This is, of course, speculation. We won't fully know what was really going on in the Biden White House for a while.
But I do know that when certain people realized what an electoral liability un-checked migration was for Biden and then Harris, lo and behold the brakes have been applied and the numbers are down. The question is, is it too late?