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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.

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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.

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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.

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That sounds like wishcasting.

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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.

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clinton gave us a nice tax bill and absolutely, positively nothing else

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Violence Against Women Act? Assault Weapons Ban? Welfare Reform? Children's Health Insurance Program? HIPAA? Did I just imagine those things happening?

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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.

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He merely showed ust the best times our lives.

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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."

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>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.

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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.

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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).

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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George Washington?

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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.

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did harris have to pursue the nomination when biden stepped aside?

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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.

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DEI candidate? Really?

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Biden’s choice, not mine.

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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.

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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.

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Her baggage is from all the existing videos and 2019 positions that no one can erase.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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My, aren't we salty today!

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I think if the US population were 100% white evangelicals the Republicans would still never support anything like a European welfare state model.

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but it isn’t and there are an electorally significant number of minorities, not to mention secular whites.

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Well sure, but my point was that I can't imagine the Republicans under any imaginable circumstances supporting a European-type welfare state.

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Core Republicans, no. Secular, working class whites who Trump flipped and who feel protected from poor foreigners by robust borders, absolutely

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"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.

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I think you ignore how many low caste Indians there are and how cheap airfare has become.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Can you please cite a notable person who thinks it’s racist to say immigrants should learn English?

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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.

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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.

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It's 100% one of the biggest reasons for the pushback against immigration.

People HATE seeing all the signs in Spanish.

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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.

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When you move there, they will almost certainly insist that you learn the local language.

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Indeed, yet they still have a lot of signs in English.

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> 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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I really wonder what made people just realize the asylum loophole now.... maybe at first the wait times weren't that long?

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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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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The best source of statistics is TRAC https://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/backlog/

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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> 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.

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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.

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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.

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That interview made me wish I could fire him. It was a full hour of listening to convoluted legalistic head-fakes.

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“…because of underlying pro-illegal immigration sentiment”

It’s that. He’s not incompetent.

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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).

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“which congress tried to alter”

In other words, which Congress declined to alter.

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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.

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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!

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“…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.

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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.

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Yep if Biden had put forward the immigration bill in 2021 people might have believed him

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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?

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But the immigration flow didn't peak until late 2023. It got much worse after the 2022 election.

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Would a cognitively functional Biden have allowed the border situation to get so out of control? I'm guessing no.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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And we see that sentiment reflected in the opinion polls above.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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It's also okay if some areas depopulate. New towns are established, old towns die, places grow or shrink, it's fine.

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