Matt writes: "That means strong borders, it means deporting people who actually do commit crimes..."
My one (and relatively small) point of disagreement with Matt on this topic -- he is broadly right in his advocacy for increased immigration -- is this: If one wants "strong borders", presumably that is to keep out people who are attempting to enter illegally. So, why limit deportation to those who "actually do commit crimes"?
This rhetorically sounds to me like illegal immigration isn't a crime and isn't subjected to deportation. It is fuel for the view that we want open borders.
I agree. Obama made a very specific argument that he was PRIORITIZING criminal deportation in his first term to look strong on immigration and enforcement to the right while mollifying elements in the left all by making a resource constraint argument.
There was an article the other day about ICE agents detaining Jeanette Vizguerra, who has spent over two decades in the US flagrantly undocumented and has done things in the past like seeking refuge in a church to avoid detention (sanctuary!! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/jeanette-vizguerra-ice-colorado)
This is where the pain is going to have to happen. She's non-violent, arguably sympathetic, but while many Democrats see her as someone who should stay, the median voter (and me, honestly!) does not appreciate the pretty shameless flouting of our immigration law. She should be deported and Democrats are harmed politically by defending her and cases similar to hers. But that is absolutely going to cause rifts in the coalition. The sooner we rip the bandaid off the better on that one.
There are things like easements and adverse possession in the law where repeated and continued usage of a thing that you originally wouldn't have a lawful right to use can ultimately result in lawful access/ownership (including title to the property that prevents the original title holder from repossessing their property). So there are plenty of precedents where repeated and willful violations can be deemed sufficient to establish lawful ownership access.
I think the situation at issue here is far more analogous to those circumstances than it is to criminal tax fraud.
Note that you can’t adversely possess land as against the government precisely because it imposes an unreasonable obligation of the government to zealously police its title rights all the time against everyone.
For sure. It's more analogous than tax fraud, but it's not perfectly analogous. The point is that it's not unheard of for offenses that don't actively cause harm and can be argued to be pro social to be viewed as potentially going on for long enough to warrant abandoning the original claim against the offender.
True in current law. But there have been many eras and places where “usefully occupy public land for enough time and it’s yours, maybe conditional on paying a token amount” has been the rule. Most famously with homesteading in this country, but the various Acemogulu-coded attempts in developing countries to give formal recognition of peasant land rights also count.
So are you proposing the government should have more enforcement vigilance then? I don’t think it’s very hard to create a financial surveillance panopticon machine to flag likely illegals if you wanted to, even without increasing enforcement vigilance against employers.
I was merely pointing out that tax fraud is a poor analogy and that other legal actions seem far more similar. I haven't spent considerable time trying to work out a way to apply those legal theories to illegal immigration, but I imagine that if I did it would require significant modification to the ways in which they operate. For one, AP is designed to reward productive uses of property and punish those who allow their properties to go unmanaged and underutilized for significant periods of time- it incentivizes better use of real property. Applying it to illegal immigration would imply incentivizing illegal immigrants to come here and then seek to evade capture for the prescribed time period, which doesn't seem great to me.
So I don't think it necessarily resolves the issue, but I think it's more helpful to engage with metaphors that more closely approximate the thing you're comparing them to if we want to have productive discussions is all. Hysterical claims that simply existing in the USA (and likely paying into the social safety net and producing more for the USA than you're taking) is similar to multi-decade tax fraud or other criminal activities isn't a useful mechanism for moving the conversation forwards.
I think people commonly kind of misunderstand adverse possession. It's not really a law that's about bowing to criminal behavior, it's sort of a "paperwork / real world normalization process."
The idea is that sometimes your paperwork gets out of sync with the real world. And you can't just let your paperwork be permanently out of sync, and at some point it's too costly to go back and try to undo what's happened in the real world and get back into sync with your paperwork that way -- so you just declare a mulligan, change your paperwork to be conformant to the real world, and go on.
And this was of course much more common and necessary in an era in which paperwork was ACTUALLY ON PAPER, and geographically spread out over who knows how much area, and prone to things like "oh, well we had water damage and all this paper has been destroyed" and so on. Where you might've transferred ownership between Joe and Bob in a handshake deal, and then 20 years later Bob dies and Bob's heirs are like, "Wait, I found a deed to that land in my dad's file cabinet." Like, that's the intended use case for adverse possession. The case where Joe sneaks onto Bob's land and builds a house there isn't.
It's been a long time since I took property, but that's not the recollection I have of adverse possession. It's not a correction for clerical errors or a "paperwork/real world normalization process". As I said elsewhere, adverse possession can be justified on public policy grounds that it allows for useful applications of real property and avoiding squalor. The public policy justifications are well founded and go back quite a ways. It absolutely can apply to situations where Joe occupies property on Bob's land, but because Bob isn't actively using his property Joe can acquire title through constructive and open use over a defined period of time.
One of the elements of adverse possession is "non-permissive" use, meaning that the possessor must not have a right to live there. Your paperwork examples fails this fundamental element. The person in that situation actually is the legal title holder but has lost the paperwork. For the inheritance example, if the title between Joe and Bob was lawfully transferred 20 years ago via a handshake deal then Bob is the lawful owner and can claim to own the property. The heirs can't claim to have an ejectment action against him because they never owned the property- their claim was defeated once the property was transferred, so their expectation of ownership upon their father's death isn't legally valid.
This is all dependent on jurisdictional issues as well given that different places will have legal regimes that differ, so it's a fact-intensive inquiry.
ETA: A quick search demonstrates that the good faith requirement for adverse possession claims is a small minority of jurisdictions. So the claim that this is something that only applies where someone actually thinks that they're the legitimate owner and it's just a technical reason why they can't prove real title is simply not the case in an AP case. Even in those instances where a good faith defense is required, it doesn't require the person to have been correct in their assessment (such as would be the case where the records are only missing because a flood destroyed the paperwork or something like that)- rather, they had to believe they had the right to the property.
As stated above, an element of adverse possession is non-permissive use. Permissive use never initiates the clock for adverse possession purposes. So if Joe permissively occupied Bob's property for 20 years and then Bob dies then his heirs WOULD be able to evict Joe IF he had never lawfully obtained the property. Sure, he would have been living there for 20 years, but it would have been a permissive situation where he was allowed to live there- it's not "adverse" to the actual owners interests. As I said above, it's incredibly likely in this situation that Joe would have simply lawfully owned the property, so the dispute would be resolved via contract law. But if he was just living there with Bob's acquiescence then it's not an adverse possession case.
Can you explain why it's a bad idea? I'm left assuming the reason is that it makes enforcement look reasonable. But that's downstream of whether the analogy is sound in the first place.
Distinction without a difference. Both will end up punished when caught - she gets deported and the tax cheat pays up and maybe goes to jail. Essentially put in the position they've been trying to avoid for all those years. The type of proceeding is irrelevant to the outcome.
All you just communicated is that you think the soundness of reasoning and argumentation does not matter.
All in response to a comment opining about how messed up legal immigration process is. Jumping to the lazy “this person is bad, they deserve to be punished” and ignoring the actual substance of my comment. Congratulations, you just virtue signaled.
In the tax analogy, if you were committing tax fraud every year, some of your older frauds would fall outside the statute of limitations, but your most recent ones wouldn't.
So in this analogy, you'd be deported because you're here now. But you wouldn't be punished in some way because you first crossed 20 years ago.
Sure, but that's because we've decided it's a continuing offense, which makes it more like the encroachment/trespass example above. Now, adverse possession doesn't run against the federal government, so re.oval can still be required, but courts really don't live 'get the corner of your 40 year old house off federal property' even if it's legally correct.
The very ambivalent attitude that even conservatives have about doing enforcement at employment sites is the culprit here. There's been a tacit legalization for decades, especially of working illegally.
Pew estimates that almost 5% of the current workforce is undocumented immigrants. Realistically the economic toll of suddenly deporting them would be dramatic and negative with a huge supply shock to certain industries and a negative demand in the wider economy.
All of which is why a comprehensive immigration bill would seem to make policy sense. But, the Democrats have zero credibility on the issue as we see. In the parlance of our times, they have no cards, so realistically they have to drop it.
Politically Trump is probably the only one who could do a comprehensive immigration bill at this point, but I would not bet on it.
"The very ambivalent attitude that even conservatives have about doing enforcement at employment sites is the culprit here."
I think that one of the things that Trump has highlighted is that elites of both parties have been ambivalent, but I think a sizeable majority of the country would be strongly supportive of such enforcement.
I mean I'm sure they would be, but that's because a sizable majority of the country has no capacity to think through the possible ways that immediately deporting 5% of the workforce may negatively impact their own well-being.
Sure. Lots of people believe untrue things in politics, because politicians lie to them all the time. We can balance the budget by only taxing billionaires. Tariffs can replace income taxes. Companies are raising prices now because they are greedy. This next generation will be the ones to throw off the shackles of capitalism and embrace a environmental socialist utopia where we all survive on pixie dust and rainbows.
If you give that person an easy pathway then it's pretty borked for the people who only wanted to immigrate legally, but decided not to risk it. It might also feel pretty unfair to the person who was deported after 5 or 10 years.
This is the main issue I see with the idea that being in the US illegally for a long period of time should confer some legal status. It selects against skilled immigrants.
It's also backwards from the normal logic of "the more of the rule you broke, the better your outcome". Normally, we forgive old transgressions through statutes of limitations. But we don't give additional credit for older ones.
The counterpoint on this (as I noted to Monkey) is "City air makes you free," which some part of the American electorate genuinely seems to subscribe to in the context of immigration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtluft_macht_frei
I agree and I get that point as a lawyer. However, I've seen it noted in the past that a non-trivial percentage of Americans genuinely seem to believe that avoiding being deported for some extended length of time should confer (or even actually *does* confer!) protection against removal, if not actual citizenship. (While I'm sure not a single person who believes that would articulate it this way, it seems like some sort of folk manifestation of the medieval concept of "City air makes you free": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtluft_macht_frei )
I can’t help but wonder whether it would be easier to get the immigration debate unstuck if the ask from our side wasn’t a path to citizenship but a path to lawful permanent residency with a bar on naturalization. Someone who’s been here for 10-15 years without causing trouble should be able to stay, with maybe a fine and paying back taxes, but only people who immigrate legally should be eligible for citizenship.
I don't like the idea that we end up with an institutional two-tiered system of class, with 'true citizens' and a nonvoting underclass divided along largely racial lines
It feels like the kind of idea that would extrapolates out to some pretty ugly stuff
The fact that this is, in fact, our de facto system right now is one of the major problems with it. We should not try to enshrine that problem into law.
Keep the focus one immigrants we want to attract and say nothing specific about how to do border secutity except due process for detainees, which is part of attracting "good" immigrants.
Undocumented migrants who aren't committing (additional) crimes contribute to the US economy. They're also the parents of a lot of children who are US citizens who would suffer gravely were their parents to be deported.
Democrats would ideally make and win that argument. But it requires voters to trust Democrats to take future enforcement very seriously.
In reality, Matt's chart shows the voters' trust in Democrats on border security is the lowest of any issue for either party.
So Democrats are kinda stuck. IDK what they can do other than perhaps some giant Sister Soulja moment against their fringe.
Agreed. For me, it is a moral redline to deport someone who came here illegally a decade or so ago and has started a life. It doesn’t make sense resource wise to focus on deporting that person, and in my mind that person has a right to be in this country.
But Dems need to gain confidence with border security and then hope they can get some compromise on immigration with the post trump gop.
For some people, the moral redline is prioritizing that person's goals over a would-be immigrant's, when the latter chose to use legal pathways over illegal ones.
No doubt, legal immigrants have much more moderate takes because they went through the system and paid their dues. Doesn't make it good policy to deport someone who would otherwise have been eligible for DAPA.
One issue here is that native-born citizens wildly overestimate the breadth of the path for legal immigration, and even most legal immigrants substantially overstate how many people it's available to.
The median American thinks we legally admit 3-4X as many people as we actually do each year, if I recall the survey data correctly...
Perhaps legal immigrants would also like a system where brown-skinned people, no matter their status, won't be picked up and put on a plane to El Salvador.
That is, a solution that defuses the issue and reduces its valence to the American public would be good for those legal immigrants even if it includes amnesty for those who didn't jump through hoops like they had to.
In terms of the relevance of this discussion, if Ben, for example, wants to help aim for a workable solution, he has to realize that some people are going to view the morality of how to treat a long-term illegal resident very differently from the way he views it.
But you're right that if law-abiding brown-skinned people are being shipped to El Salvador then most immigrants I know will be angry. Whether many are angry right now, while it's limited to campus Palestinian protestors and gang members, is harder to judge.
I'm referring to the legal pathways that a legal resident took, as well as the pathways a *would-be* immigrant attempted or considered attempting.
The person who wanted to immigrate, and either didn't, or did after significant effort, is likely to strongly resent people who simply "cut in line" and then got a better outcome.
I know many immigrants to the US too, and I wouldn't describe "I've got my [green card], Jack" as a *moral* red line. But I take your point that it is a widely held sentiment. Though I wonder if a single one would trade in their security for the existential nightmare that it is to be a DREAMer today.
"For me, it is a moral redline to deport someone who came here illegally a decade or so ago and has started a life."
Why?
I'm extremely pro immigration and would be almost open borders personally, but this idea that a person who does something illegally for a long time is now sympathetic because they have built their life around it doesn't make sense to me.
If anything, I'm much more sympathetic to the person fleeing Venezuela last year than someone who crossed the border from Mexico illegally in 2005 and now would have to go back to Mexico.
I have a similar view. They got to live in the US for 20 years.
If the US started offering nonrenewable 20-years visas, a lot of people would use these visas. Should we feel bad at the end of the twenty years that they have to leave?
What’s more important: winning the battle or the war? In the liberal discourse about how to react to Trump, somebody always says, “but [insert victim] is going to be hurt, so we have to do everything possible to stop it.” The result is an unwillingness to make hard choices to earn long term gains.
The left’s goal in immigration should solely be to establish public credibility so that it can eventually enact policies that are both moral and good policy. To do that there will be victims. As an immigration maximalist, this sucks. But the alternative is to continue ceding ground to the right and enabling their morally repugnant policies.
No, that person does not have a right to be in the country.
The US can make a decision to keep said person in the country (and in many situation this is probably the right course of action). I as an American want the US to be humane and make humane decisions when it can and not waste resources.
But that person does not have a *right* to be here.
Plus, we have considerable evidence that the Obama-era GOP, like its Biden-era incarnation, sunk comprehensive immigration reform because they were (correctly) aware that the perpetual dumpster fire translates into votes for their brand (and perhaps the strongest, most emotive marker of GOP identity). Cue "brokenism": heads you lose, tails the GOP wins. Again and again.
I disagree that this is hard political calculus for Dems. The primary challenge, IMO, is that the political solution requires staking out a position that's right-of-center and involves advocating for a lot of harm for a lot of pretty vulnerable folks.
If you came here illegally, then subsequent moral living doesn't wash away that "original sin". You must still perform restitution in a way that doesn't retroactively penalize folks who complied with our laws from the get-go.
This is the crux of the 2012 Dem platform passage MY quoted above. To Binya's point, voters don't trust Dems to design a process that's sufficiently punitive, and Republicans have no interest or motivation in cooperating on designing ANY passage. The path for Dems is to outline a very harsh process. Some ideas include going case-by-case identifying back taxes that weren't paid and making folks pay them; adding a surcharge on top of that (maybe through garnishing wages); misdemeanors get you an extra probationary period on your timeline (felons need not even apply); and sending folks availing themselves of this process to the "back of the line" in cases where actual queues exist.
I'd also recommend requiring some sort of English training or testing as part of this process. I think it's both good politics, and I think many folks in this position would jump at an opportunity to improve their English!)
IDK if even that is sufficiently over-the-top to impress the median voter, but I think it's a starting point.
A "punitive amnesty" like you lay out here sounds pretty good. It limits disruption to communities and the wrecking of lives people have built here but has clear elements of punishment that the people would (and probably should) demand.
"but it requires voters to trust Democrats to take future enforcement very seriously."
THIS. And to build that trust Democrats should do the following
Democrats should sponsor a VERY strong border bill. That bill should do the following
Hire a LOT more immigration judges
build a LOT more detention centers
Stop all catch and release and make clear that if the detention centers are full then the border closes until there is room.
build the wall
reform asylum laws to stop abuses of them
mandate e-verify
then AFTER this is all done, and illegal immigration becomes not a problem, and the Democrats build back some credibility, we can look at increase legal immigration for high skilled people, and doing something for the Dreamers.
But the order is important. First secure the border.
I mean they wrote a strong border bill back in like 2023 that looked like it was going to pass until Trump said he didn’t like and a bunch of people just started lying about what was in it.
> Undocumented migrants who aren't committing (additional) crimes contribute to the US economy
"But I contribute to the economy" isn't, and shouldn't be, much more than a trivially small data point.
I used to live in Vietnam and there were TONS of foreigners who were not only in the country illegally (abusing tourist visas by renewing them every 3 months for years, or decades on end or getting business visa from fake companies) but also working illegally (no work permit, so not legally allowed to work) AND not paying any income taxes -- and without fail every single one of them would talk about how they "contribute to the economy" by renting apartments and eating in restaurants.
I am sceptical that low skilled immigration contributes, the national academy of sciences report suggested immigrants without high school are net fiscal costs.
The Danes have also done a pretty serious accounting of immigrants by national background (which correlates strongly to skill-levels) and found a lot of variation, with many of their lower-skilled nationalities coming up as net drains.
Of course that's a different country, so it may not apply here. But, also, it might!
The Danes and also the Dutch finance ministries did a deep look into the costs of immigration and found it to be massively costly to the dismay of lots of economists. But because of the design of the welfare system and different sources of immigrants I am not sure it says much about the American situation.
Though with the important caveat that you should massively reduce confidence in any economists who thought low skilled immigrants living on welfare in Europe would be an economic boost.
I think The Economist had an article on this recently and if you look directly at the individual, low skill legal immigrants are a net drain(once you factor in that eventually they'll be old too and need SS etc).
But...
If you start factoring in side effects like the extra productivity they add by adding people to the workforce then even low skill immigrants start turning positive. This is admittedly harder to measure accurately.
Problem with increasing immigration right now is, we are seeing increased productivity in white collar jobs, probably driven by LLM adoption, which translates into a slower pace of hiring. I do not expect AGI or The Singularity any time soon, and I don’t expect massive layoffs, but I do expect hiring of entry level white collar employees to decline significantly and I do expect scattered layoffs.
We’re already seeing slow hiring of new grads and an increase in the white collar unemployment rate. See NYT today.
If you’re in the beginning of a labor market readjustment, you really don’t want or need to greatly increase the number of people you have to support going through that shift.
New grads and unemployed white collar are never gonna compete with construction or agricultural workers. They could probably do some hospitality jobs, I guess.
They will because most people are not fully and permanently in one category or the other.
It's a little like the argument on housing or used cars, where people claim building luxury units has no effect on down-market prices, but it does because impacts ripple up-and-down the price chain.
People absolutely do switch between white and blue collar occupations. No one single person is likely to switch from say, lawyer to agricultural worker. But maybe they shift from lawyer to teacher, a teacher shifts to construction worker, a construction worker shifts to farm worker, etc.
Anecdata, but I know several retired successful white collar workers who are now hobby farmers selling at farmers markets. As in, know personally and am familiar with their farms.
During COVID I had a PoliSci professor and a newly graduated teachers aide on my crew for a season before schools opened again. One was better than the other on the job, but they both lasted a season without being fired or quitting. An anecdote fwiw.
New grads are very likely to compete for manufacturing and blue collar jobs if we see a reduction in white collar knowledge work. Being an electrician is a skilled job. One of my CTO friends does carpentry as a hobby and volunteers for Habitat because he likes to do it. Etc. Modern manufacturing includes a lot of skilled jobs and could absorb available workers.
Agriculture is already pretty automated for grain crops, many aspects of dairy, and root crops. There are ways to automate more - for example, if you grow veggies and strawberries in greenhouses, there are robot pickers.
You might see more farmers-market- scale food, and historically about a third of farm labor was done by farm owners and their family, but I do not expect a huge surge in ag jobs because, if labor costs go up, the market responds. I would guess automation, greenhouses, and to some degree an increase in local farming.
It’s based on what I have personally observed at work, and what close friends and I have personally discussed about their observations at their work. Essentially, LLMs are useful and effective productivity tools that have to be checked, and are not replacements for workers, but can result in getting significantly more work done per person.
Which thus means less entry level hiring. Which BTW was the topic of a New York Times article yesterday, discussing it as a trend nationwide. “Has the Decline of Knowledge Work Begun?”
I'm not sure where you work, but color me skeptical. Broad productivity trends like this usually occur because there are fewer workers being forced to do the same work. Maybe they're using LLMs to do it, but I don't think the overwhelming majority of office workers are necessarily getting loads more done.
Broad productivity trends tend to occur with any useful new technology. Adoption can increase with worker shortage, but greater efficiency is a business incentive in the absence of worker shortages.
Relevant quote from the NYT article I cited, “Still, at least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see A.I. as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an A.I. assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2022 to 2024, to 4.4 percent from 2.9 percent.”
The flaw with this logic is that decreasing immigration can accelerate not decelerate white collar job loss in the local areas, agglomeration effects are real.
Agglomeration is greatly oversold when a significant percentage of workers have jobs that are essentially location-independent and are frequently performed in different states and countries from their co workers. People in many jobs collaborate online more than in person.
If you have rapidly increasing productivity and resultant job loss, you want to decrease overall immigration levels, while still admitting people with specific skills. When you are trying to find jobs for your own displaced people, bringing in more is not helpful.
Yeah I'm about as wild eyed libertarian as you can get on immigration, but whenever liberal freak out about deportation it reminds me of when people freak out about arrests for weed in states where weed isn't legal.
Yeah, that person did something they knew was illegal and they got busted. Maybe I don't think what they did should be illegal, but it is. So...
Also on the weed side, people seem widely unaware it is still illegal in all the states. The state law didn’t preempt the federal law. So, tomorrow trump could order the DEA to raid every “legal” dispensary in the country, seize their assets, and arrest every grandmother there for medical reasons. The fact that states enable it doesn’t actually make it legal. In general I think it should though. We need more federalism, and state-level state-capacity.
I think people are downplaying the importance of even Trump not doing full-on workplace enforcement, including holding farm and construction company owners criminally accountable for repeatedly hiring illegal immigrants. That would probably generate more Dem support for a crackdown since it’d mean some big GOP-friendly groups pay the price for their complicity.
I'm sorry but that whole article screams "I'm white & from a rich European country, you can't do this to me!"
"he suspected the border patrol officer assumed he was living unlawfully in the US, trying to skirt the 90-day regulation by taking the short trip out of the country."
That's exactly how US immigration authorities have treated everyone from a third world country for decades. I used to walk past the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City every morning. They process about 1,000 visa applications a day. All visas, even a tourist one, require an in-person interview. If you live hundreds of kilometers away, you need to travel to HCMC for the interview. Everyone waits outside (no air condition; the building for US citizen services is air conditioned). It generally takes all day. 80-90% of them are rejected. No reason is ever given. No appeal is possible. You lose your application fee -- which is about 1 month's income for the average Vietnamese -- and told to apply again later. It is entirely up to the interviewer's discretion. My wife went for an interview there once and saw a dozen people in queue in front of her all rejected by a single agent who was possibly just having a bad day.
Is that the compromise that you want Democrats to offer? Broad support and funding to deport those here illegally if Republicans will criminalize business owners who hire illegal labor.
Because I think that you are correct that historically Republican elites have not wanted that, but then again they also wanted the immigration compromise in 2008. Its the base of the Republican party that didn't want that, and I'm pretty sure they would be happy to take the deal offered above.
There are too many illegal aliens to deport them all without massive economic disruption and humanitarian hardship. However, just deporting aliens who commit non-immigration crimes is too weak. It means you can ignore immigration law as long as you don’t drive drunk or beat your girlfriend.
Democrats should also prioritize deportation of non English speakers. The most cuckish thing about the Democratic party is it’s refusal to defend American culture and reluctance to admit American culture exists. Not speaking English separates an immigrant from mainstream American culture. It makes immigrants other and harder to assimilate. It makes immigration more threatening for natives who don’t want to suffer an economic penalty for being monoglots.
It's also a mark of disrespect for the culture when an immigrant doesn't bother learning the culture's language. This applies everywhere, whether we're talking about immigrants here who don't learn English or rich Americans who move to France and never bother to learn more than how to order dinner in a restaurant.
I simply cannot understand why a rich person would move to a country and not learn the language. Why would you want to be alienated from the culture of the place where toy live?
You're underestimating the difficulty of learning a foreign language as an adult, particularly for those who were monolingual as a child. Don't say, "But X did it." Some people are good at learning languages and some, despite their best efforts, are bad. Look at Miguel Bloombito.
The thing is, it's very common for immigrants not only to not put forth their best effort, but to not even spend 15 minutes a day on a YouTube instructional channel learning about their adopted nation's language.
Actually, Im not. I view the difficulty in learning a foreign language as a decisive reason not to emigrate to a non-English speaking country. I love Norway. But I will never speak Norwegian fluently, so I can only enjoy Norway as a tourist.
Of course you wouldn't, but you have opportunities here. We should look instead at people who are coming here for opportunities because they have none in their home country. Should we be barring people who are willing to work hard and raise English-speaking children, just because they are unable to learn English well as adults? [There can be many other reasons for barring people. I'm talking now only about barring them only because although they made a good effort, they couldn't learn English.]
I used to have a guy working for me, born in Mexico, came here (I don't know under what circumstances) as an adult, worked in kitchens in San Francisco, eventually became a naturalized citizen, tried his best to learn English and even (tragically) forbade his children from speaking Spanish, but forty years on still could barely communicate in English. What's the problem?
The only effective means of domestic enforcement is employer-based, and doing that would cause a *massive* backlash to the disruption it would cause to citizens and LPRs.
Since you’re not advocating for it, you just want to place the hypocrisy at a slightly different location, it seems?
I am a big fan of workplace enforcement and E-verify and that should be where the Administration focuses its efforts. Apologies for not including this specific enforcement tactic in my list.
It seemed as if you were implying that the effectiveness of enforcement in-country would be limited across the couple comments above, sorry.
That said, to be clear, I am completely in favor of rank hypocrisy on this issue; we should *not* want to own the intense disruption to several sectors of the economy, inflation, crime rates, and other key indicators that would come from finally taking employer enforcement seriously. Let the GOP eventually catch that car and we can pick up the pieces.
Secure the border, deport criminals, talk a big game about deporting benefits and tax cheats, etc...
My preferred option would be to introduce two separate bills, one which sets up employer-based enforcement, and the other which creates a pathway to legal status conditional on having been employed for X years illegally or on snitching on your employer.
If the Republicans vote through the enforcement but not the pathway to legal status, then you can repeatedly say whose fault it is when the problems arise.
I think it’s fair to hold the Administration and its goals to account. Of course it would be disruptive. And politically inconvenient for Republicans. But at least it’d be serious instead of the current approach.
What especially galling is that they accuse various NGOs like Lutheran Family Services of enticing and harboring illegal immigrants but then ignore the main economic source of their presence here- employers, many of whom play dumb about the status of their workers.
Democrats can propose the bill and make the Republicans vote it down.
Would be especially fun if you get an all-Democratic Congress and a Republican President (last happened in 2006-08) as the Democrats would then control the agenda and the Republicans can't dodge the votes.
Very few people immigrated during the Biden administration in a way that is actually "illegal." It is not illegal to seek asylum, even if you have a really terrible case. Yes, enforcement arguably ran roughshod over the spirit of the law, but things were done to the letter pretty well.
It is if the applicant claims, but does not actually have, a bona fide and well grounded fear of persecution due to “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” in their home country.
But you’d have to prove they were willingly deceitful, claiming ignorance/misinterpretation would probably be a very robust defense.
Also standards are sufficiently subjective, and any evidence sufficiently distant, that it would be very hard to say someone was DEFINITIVELY wrong about their status rather than not meeting the standards as implemented.
But even if it’s not enforceable it’s still illegal, so thank you for the correction.
I'm not sure if this is Matt's reasoning or not, but I believe what some pro-immigration centrist Democrats are doing when they specify deporting "criminals" is tacitly acknowledging, that, while it's desirable to have more effective enforcement, the 12 million or so illegal immigrants *who are already here* aren't going to be deported (at least not the vast majority). Trump won't tell you that. I just did.
Then we should say: "We want to deport all illegal immigrants but, with limited resources and the millions of people here illegally, we are starting with those who have committed other crimes while in the country."
Not really. He didn't say the first part. Only the second. And Obama wasn't seen as being tough on the border by anyone other than the immigration lawyers and activist groups.
Perceived toughness is driven by voters' understanding of what the politician wants, not by what they do. This is why it's so hard to scare people about Trump on abortion. Because voters (rightly) intuit that he doesn't care and so assume he won't do much about it.
While going through 12 million deportations is not doable, if illegal aliens determine that the risk of being caught isn't worth the risk, they'll leave, and new ones will not want to show up.
It's pretty clear that Trump is trying to create this kind of fear with his less-than-hinged policies targeting people here legally.
As Matt pointed out, he hasn't done any workplace raids yet, or tried to charge employers for failing to verify documentation. That would really move the needle but Trump has decline to do this completely mundane form of border enforcement and instead done bizarre and likely illegal things.
Except how can you raise the risk of being caught without actually catching them? That is why deporting 12 million is not possible. The resources required to catch 12 million is way beyond what ICE has or even local police departments.
That'd be great. Police departments can focus on illegals but let all the other criminals go unpunished.
I might be talking to a brick wall here, but the point is that you don't need to catch 12 million. You make a big splashy show of how bad it'll be if you do get caught, and then catch a number several orders of magnitude less than 12 million.
They already know what’s going to happen if they get caught. Although people keep trying to make it a “thing”, self-deportation is never going to make a dent in that 12 million.
I don’t think that’s a small point of disagreement. There’s over 10 million illegal immigrants in the US. Deporting them all would have immense economic and humanitarian impacts. Polling suggests that a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants has majority support, so I’m not sure that trying to deport all illegal immigrants would be popular.
But how far back do you go? And how much enforcement effort should go into deporting the guy who entered illegally 10 years ago and has an American wife and children? That's the kind of immigrant that is a plus for the economy even if he's not as valuable as Elon Musk. Value does not depend on how the person entered.
People were upset about people that entered with bogus asylum claims being allowed to stay. What DeSantis and Abbot did was cruel and immoral (I wonder what they say in Confession) but it just highlighted Biden's mistaken approach.
People are NOT clamoring for fewer H1B visas or rounding up settled immigrants who entered illegally n years ago. They are not opposed to immigration as an economic plus.
I don't believe there is a statute of limitations on being in the country illegally. It is a violation every day.
I am sympathetic to those who have listened as administration after administration has tacitly endorsed the idea that being in the country illegally (absent other criminal behavior) won't lead to deportation. I feel bad for them.
It can't be emphasized enough that the all of the equivocation on this point has not done anyone any favors. It's actually been a bit of a bait and switch that's made things worse by inviting more and more people to take their chances.
I also don't think Americans' hearts will bleed for the plight of long time resident deportees the way a lot of SB commenters assume, even if our wallets might. A while back someone shared a Tony Blair interview where he talked about how misleading polling can be, and the differences between 3 second, 30 second, and 3 minute conversations. I think it's applicable to this situation, maybe more than any other big issue in US politics.
I’m not arguing that legally they are not deportable, but that it woud be economically stupid to spend reauorces to reduce the labor force. And even politically I don’t think wanting to see long-established immigrants deported is a burning issue for many people. Nor is it necessary to deter new border crossing.
I recently found out that they changed the hours of a local park. It used to be open until 2, but now its only open until midnight. I discovered this by being there at 12:30. (Got home, took the dog for a late night walk cause she was energetic).
I was informed by the police explaining that the park closed at midnight and them telling me to leave. I did so, and they were fine with it. But had I tried to stay, they would have "removed" me from the park because I was breaking the rules. I couldn't just stay because I was already there. Nor could I stay because I had gone to that park late in the past when it was legal. If I had stayed, I would have been committing a crime of being there illegally, similar to an immigrant coming to the US illegally and staying.
I asked what crime is being in the country illegally, not entering the country illegally. John from FL said he didn't think there was a statute of limitations on being in the country illegally, and I want to know what the crime of being in the country illegally actually is.
Just say you want open borders and make the case for it instead of this eye rolling charade of legalistic nit-picking.
Are you trying to argue that a person who sneaks across the border, or overstays a visa, cannot be returned to their home country by the federal government for those reasons alone? Because that's obviously not true, no matter how it's framed. If you enter illegally, you can be deported.
The talk above about a statute of limitations is a red herring. There is no extant time limit beyond which the federal government cannot deport someone who does not have legal, current immigration status inside the United States of America.
"I don't believe there is a statute of limitations on being in the country illegally. It is a violation every day."
This should be changed - people who have been resident for long enough should be automatically able to come out of the cold. 20 years (or 20 years since adulthood) seems reasonable.
Voters won't agree to that unless you can convince them you're serious about controlling the border. Otherwise it just becomes a, very bad, pathway to citizenship.
Given that you can't expel the several million-strong underclass of illegal immigrants (because there are too many of them), the alternatives are to make them legal at some point or to keep them illegal until they die. The present policy of all parties appears to be the latter because there's a political faction prepared to lie that they can expel them.
If you want to stop new illegal immigrants coming, you have to work out why they come and change the situations that they come into. That probably means preventing them from working. Using social security data for immigration enforcement would be a good idea, as would criminalising employing an illegal immigrant.
In order to deport just 25% of the illegal immigrants in this country you'd need actual camps and men with guns knocking down doors on a scale even the Trump administration doesn't have the stomach for. This is a fantasy. So it's just a question of whether we should lie about it. I don't think more politicians lying about the immigration enforcement they're going to do is really a helpful answer to anything.
The big impacts can or could come from deterrence, international agreements and economic conditions. I don't have a prediction on any of those, but I just mean to say that there are ways to get a large decrease in immigrants without necessarily having to do millions of deportations
I think those things can deter more illegal immigration. I don't see how you get the millions of people out of the country that have built lives here without dragging them.
I've heard this sentiment before and I don't buy the argument that if a law is unable to be enforced absolutely, then any increase in enforcement is pointless. If a leader wanted to get serious about enforcing the speed limit, we wouldn't say that it's a fantasy to stop speeding since we don't have the stomach to blanket every inch of roadway with speed cameras and traffic cops.
Bad example since we could easily eliminate the majority of speeding with a small increase in enforcement. If the goal is to throw 10 million people out of the country, it's not clear to me that throwing 1% out would really impact the other 99% that much, you need to actually go throw out the 10 million people.
There are two separate issues.
- Should we / could we do that on any meaningful number? I don't think it's feasible. I mean if going from .5% to 2% matters a great deal to you then sure, but this just doesn't seem to matter very much in the grand scheme. But yeah your point is taken.
- Assuming even republicans, let alone dems, aren't going to try to hit a meaningful percentage, what should politicians say about it? That's what I was getting at. I don't think making promises about deportations you know you aren't going to keep is great politics.
Maybe I'm sane-washing the Republican position, but when you're setting priorities it can be helpful to agree on your ideal end state as an animating principle (zero undocumented immigrants in the country, zero traffic deaths annually, no child left behind uneducated). Then you can take incremental actions with an eye on whether they support that principle.
For example, if your city has signed up for Vision Zero (0 traffic deaths on city streets) you could say that it's an impossible goal, accidents are always going to happen, there's no way to guarantee that an accident will never happen. But having the goal is good because you can look at individual steps like road diets, higher curbs, better signage, helmet campaigns etc and see if they contribute to progress.
Tying back to the article what drove me crazy about Biden's policies was until 2023 and the proposed immigration bill there was no real goal on immigration, just reflexive contrarianism that because the Republicans hated immigration, more of it must be good. Over the course of his term we ended up with what, +4M immigrants on specious asylum claims? It seems like the Democrats believe that people are sympathetic to long-term immigrants here illegally, so is the plan to kick the can down the road until they qualify for some future amnesty program? That's a non-starter so I guess I agree with you, there's nothing really that politicians can say about it unless you're willing to sign up for team mass deportations.
"on a scale even the Trump administration doesn't have the stomach for." I used to think this, but his approach to tariffs has suggested his stomach is in worse shape than I thought.
I think it if started to become well known that if Trump catches you here illegally, he is going to ship you off to an El Salvador prison, many people will "self deport."
I think that would be *very* bad on a many fronts, but seems more the angle they are going for.
I think advocating for mass deportations of peaceful contributing members of society is not a "small disagreement". I am politically a moderate, but I would personally never vote for any candidate who advocated that. Why not vote for Republicans if this is your viewpoint?
Because I'm not a single-issue voter, and I agree with Democrats more than the Trump-led Republicans.
Take another look at the graph of "who do you trust" from Matt's column. Border security is the issue where Democrats are trusted the least of any issue. And it is above 50% on the importance scale. So I think the party needs to address its weakness and leaning into a stance that people here illegally should be deported (while also advocating for much more legal immigration) could flip some moderate voters.
I don't think "do mass deportations, but also expand immigration" is a sizeable voting bloc. If people voted rationally perhaps that would be a winning position (being just one iota to the left of the Republican position), but they don't, it they vote expressively. I know "turnout" is overblown argument on the left, but Dems embracing mass deportations would absolutely affect turnout in a big way.
Because that would functionally lead to an elimination of our border. If entering the country illegally merely results in a fine, probation and the ability to stay, then our immigration stance is "pay a fine, don't commit additional crimes, and you can stay".
If you read what I said, you'd see that I didn't say even functionally no border. There is a border and border patrol. Someone entering illegally but unable to prove they have a job for some long period of time would be deported.
What I am against is an absolutist approach that would cause too much disruption for the US economy, and for which US voters don't even want to pay.
Update: Sorry I thought you were replying to another comment of mine where I did mention the conditions I thought should be applied. Yes, caught crossing the border or within 100 miles of the border, deportation. However, there should be a path to legalization for people that are without criminal records and have been living and working for at least 10 years, or have children who are U.S. citizens. And although saying the path is leaving and applying for legal entry is a path, it is not very practical.
Immigration is one of those Slow Boring hot-button issues, and at a certain level I think it's one of those ultimately irreconcilable topics because of psychological and emotional preferences.
I'm always cautious with work in political psychology, because doing good surveys is hard, but it does seem to be the case that people are roughly broken down between between a preference for sameness and a preference for difference. I'm not saying one is better - I know which one I prefer, but that is me and my preference doesn't really matter.
Being a political geographer, though, I would argue that if we're being honest with ourselves, technocratic details about immigration don't matter at a certain point. I agree that nailing the politics of immigration preferences - the topic of this essay - is essential for Democrats in the short term, but taking a step back, the notion of bounded political community that confers privileges on insiders and restrictions on outsiders relies on boundaries that are ultimately arbitrary. Deciding where those boundaries lie is inherently political - there is nothing natural or eternal or transcendent about them (on this point I disagree with e.g. Damon Linker, who wants to argue based on e.g. Isaiah Berlin that national communities have moral ontological status).
As is often the case, I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say other than that it strikes me that a lot of the debates that play out here over immigration seem to be more resistant to data-driven explanation and rely on prior beliefs and preferences more than is the case for other topics (big exception: trans issues, which is the ultimate "yell at each other" topic), and I think that's inherent to the topic itself.
In the spirit of the foregoing comment, insightful in my view, I have an honest question for the commentariat: what is it that has excited so much opposition, in the United States and in these pages, to immigration as a general proposition? As a matter of state capacity, I get it - but once there is state capacity to determine to a level of reasonable probability who's a felon and who's not, what are the fundamental sources of opposition to broad and permissive legal entry? The (apparently sincere) intuitive belief, amongst MAGAs and otherwise, that the magic solution to underemployment, deindustrialization and strains on federal, state and local services and resources is to stop immigration, both illegal and legal, would seem not to be empirically correct based on what most recognized economists think (so far as I am aware the only respectable academic economist who believes anything that looks like this is George Borjas at Harvard). In a credal nation, why don't more people look at someone who'd walk 2500 miles from Chiapas to Iowa to work in a meat-packing plant and see someone they want playing for Team America? This is sincerely not meant to be a snotty question - I am really very curious why this issue arouses more passion than, say, Medicare-for-all or zeroing out the long-term capital gains tax, or some such.
I think you’ll find a lot of different reasons, but big ones are mostly cultural. People really don’t like having their cities change due to an influx of people with different ways of living.
I think "scarcity mindsets", which are magnified by housing shortages and inflation, play a big role. There's also fear of difference and fear of change.
And then there are the "lived experiences". people have. It's easy enough to have a negative interaction, or to perceive negative competition (job, housing, school, etc.) with a few people of category "xzy", whatever xyz may be, and decide you don't like them. If a person has a recent negative experience of some kind that might push them in one direction. If they have a positive experience it might push them the other way.
Historically, big surges in immigrants have led to a backlash in the resident population. 14% of the population is foreign born now, close to the historical high of 15% in 1890.
We get big pulses in immigration, which sparks a backlash, pause and absorb them, and move on to the next wave.
My intuition though is that people feel more negatively about (at least illegal) immigrants who are somewhere else vs. those in their own communities. I wonder if there's survey data on this?
"what is it that has excited so much opposition, in the United States and in these pages, to immigration as a general proposition?"
Here is what I suspect drives anti-immigration sentiment in the US, roughly from most to least significant:
-Resource scarcity. For example, high housing costs.
-Dislike of cultural change or being made to feel like an outsider, language particularly.
-Concerns about crime.
-Suspicion that immigrants are economic net negatives (especially WRT schools).
-Concerns about loyalty to the US versus home nation.
-Racism.
-Competition for jobs.
You asked specifically about the US, but I think that citizens of many countries would have similar lists about immigration. Note that these are not my views, they're what I suspect drives anti-immigration sentiment for other people.
As a parent, I have the most sympathy for the argument that a rapid influx of non-English speakers will overwhelm public schools and require disproportionate resources be devoted to ESL students. And the downside will be disproportionately felt by working class families reliant on their neighborhood school.
I think, if I were to try to steelman it, it would go like this:
We lack the state capacity you say we have and we lack the broad legal authority for entry that you want. Once you have the first, we can discuss the second, but so long as we lack the first, I believe you are denying the resources and support needed to get it, because your actual goal is stolen base politics for de facto open borders, because despite big talk about rule of law, you're just as willing to sabotage enforcement of the law as Trump, you just don't admit that's what you're doing.
I think the idea of increasing entry bandwidth being some big holdup when the problem of "how to have somebody live here 60 years" has already been solved is pretty silly. But they've made worse arguments.
Steelman is not my formulation, can't claim credit.
But, just to push back, I think this thread makes it clear that 'how should we handle someone who entered illegally, but lived in the US all their life is not a solved problem as people genuinely disagree, but more broadly, the response I've heard is amnesty without true enforcement is simply de facto open borders, just done after the fact in repeated anesthesia and 'we do not trust you on enforcement, give us true enforcement and control and maybe we can talk about quotas or paths to citizenship.'
Do I trust that? Not really, but this is where government by lawsuit/executive action really fails and you need hard statutes that aren't open to nonconstitutional challenges.
"why don't more people look at someone who'd walk 2500 miles from Chiapas to Iowa to work in a meat-packing plant and see someone they want playing for Team America?"
Does that person want to Be An American, or do they just want a good job?
"I will not 'take as American' someone who doesn't give a fuck about America"
I also wish we could deport Trump, his entire cabinet, and all Republican members of Congress to Russia/a remote island in the Pacific/a colony on Mars, but sadly, that is not achievable.
One response to this is that it isn't up to you to decide who we "take as American". If they are born in the country or naturalize as citizens, they are American, full stop. I also think it is very hard to tell what people's interior motivations are.
This discussion isn't about people who go through the path of naturalization or are born here. The example given was a guy who walks here from Chiapas to get a job.
If I could offer the outside view, as a non-American: the two goals are wedded and fused in the minds of many. We know it as the American Dream, and the people who I've personally met who pursue it do so with an assiduousness, determination, and (often) optimism I've rarely seen elsewhere. My subjective two cents: your mileage may vary.
Fair point. In my experience, the only people I know willing to pay $9/lb for ground beef are the kinds of liberals who defend illegal immigrants, FWIW.
The apples and potatoes that are grown and picked here in Maine are done so almost entirely through American citizen and legal Caribbean temporary visa labor, and nobody is complaining about high apple and potato prices. I think the "bazillion dollar lettuce" argument is not rooted in reality.
I think Matt's invocation of hard-coded "Malthusian intution" is pretty right on the money, and acknowledges that the objections to immigration are ultimately irrational in a way that doesn't accuse people of bigotry.
Riffing on a classic xkcd comic, "politics" is only legible as a topic if you specify the scale at which sovereign governance is exercised - so all politics is just applied geography.
I think you are mischaracterizing the current belief on immigration. While I'm sure some MAGA people truly do want zero immigration theactual argument is for there to be less than there is now and for it to be more controlled. I also wonder what exactly you mean by "broad and permissive."
Take this thought experiment. Let's imagine we create an Imigration AI that can determine if someone has ever committed a crime we care about in the past and can predict with perfect accuracy if they ever will in the future if allowed into the US. This AI also has effectively infinite capacity to review visa requests. Assuming we deny 100% of applicants with past or future crimes and that the majority of the world population aren't criminals, how many immigrants should we allow in every year? Even with the capacity to review visas do you believe society could handle a million, 10 million, 100 million per year? If there is a cap how do we decide what it is?
A lot of people (including many immigrants) just get angry about people “not doing it the right way”. But yeah, I agree with your overall point. Most people who complain about illegal immigrants have next to no appreciation for how difficult it is to run and staff a business where revenue comes exclusively from manual labor. They know the lack of Americans willing to do manual labor is a problem, but they don’t care enough to offer any solutions to the larger problem.
Don't even joke. The circumcision discourse Balrog can come for any comment section at any time, laying waste with its knotted scourge of flames from wars modern and antique, back unto the dawn of the message board.
But one of the advantages of talking about immigration as a positive value is to de-emphasize the "difference." Fleeing tyranny and wanting to work in a high paying field very "just like us" characteristics. That's why we want more of them!
I think the recent pain in Britain is a counterpoint. Brexit won because there were basically a huge number of people voting to express their dislike of foreigners.
But in the follow ups, as it became clear what the economic fallout was, there seemed to be a lot of people who regretted that decision. You mention being honest with ourselves, and I would be curious if people ever are, but not like you meant. I mean as in, questions like "Do you dislike foreigners more than you like low prices?"
Because I think a lot of people do not understand the connection, at all.
And worse: many voted for Trump because of the price of eggs! Immigration is a topic that is best shoved under the rug in a democracy. Unfortunately, it is always a hot button used by desperate politicians to leverage their way into power.
That's an interesting perspective. I personally think that because immigration is an emotional topic, it's impossible to discuss in non-technical terms. Even the most ardent immigration opponents are ok with some exceptions and that's where you can start to find common ground; like if a rich person wants to immigrate to build a factory and create jobs, if an American meets their wife in a foreign country, if a good foreign doctor is willing to move to their town to provide care, if temporary workers are willing to pick vegetables so they're cheap for Americans, etc etc.
When you get away from discussing the details of immigration, who can become an American, and move to platitudes, that's where it's difficult to find agreement. Platitudes can come from the anti-immigration camp, like "anyone that immigrates here isn't American, therefore immigration makes the country less American" (true but absurd if you follow that to it's conclusion, unless you're a Native American). Platitudes can also come from the pro-immigration camp, like "the average immigrant to date is a net benefit to the economy, therefore increasing immigration by reducing immigration requirements will be an even bigger gain" (possibly true but the conclusion does not necessarily follow).
Yes, establishing the boundary for who is an American is political, but so is literally every decision that the government makes. That's no reason to avoid talking about it and making your pitch for your preferred boundary.
Agreed - I don't think anyone should avoid talking about it and making their pitch. Quite the opposite! But I think it's always good to acknowledge that there are pre-political preferences that underlie political debates.
Recently Massachusetts ran out of shelter beds and had to start turning away undocumented immigrants from homeless shelters. I told some of my California friends and they were shocked and said that sounded awful, while completely ignoring the fact that California turns ~everyone away from shelter beds.
These are tough times and I feel for people struggling, but if you try to help everybody all the time, you can't actually help anybody.
that's not entirely true. it's more that the state stopped paying for the overflow space we were using last year. in that sense, yes, we "ran out", but it's because they shut down a bunch of temporary shelters.
It's really only tangential to immigration but, "The Federal government has started snatching people off the streets and disappearing them into a prison in El Salvador" is actual, genuine, take up arms against the government level tyranny. It's by far the scariest thing Trump has done domestically and I really really hope the judiciary still has the power to impose some process here before the only correct recourse becomes to start shooting ICE agents.
That one is really, really bad. But I think the assault on law firms -- Perkins Coie, Paul, Weiss and others -- is a little worse. It undermines the rule of law to target lawyers who represent clients who wish to challenge illegal, or potentially illegal, executive actions.
I agree the law firm EOs are more broadly threatening to the rule of law, but I guess I think there's just more recourse there. Perkins Coie is absolutely gonna win in court. It's gonna take time and fighting those is gonna be costly for sure, but it's not really the same as, "Do I let this dude detain me or do I fight for my life because I'm gonna be disappeared?"
I think anybody who used a brief period of power to persecute the most powerful lawyers in America is going to spend the rest of their lives in courtrooms being driven into abject poverty. It will be a lot of fun.
Trump operatives: You have power because you won a stupid election, that probably wasn't even fair, by a sliver. They have power because they are the best at what they do, and do it on behalf of people just as rich as you.
"You don’t have to agree with me but don’t play fuckin dumb. You know what election I’m talking about."
I honestly didn't. You are the first person I've seen talk about the 2024 election that way.
As for campaign spending, Harris had 1.15 billion dollars for her campaign and 840 million in outside spending money to reach just under 2 billion. Trump had 463 million in campaign money and 988 million in outside spending money for 1.4 billion dollars. If Harris couldn't win with a 500+ million dollar advantage in campaign money, I don't think whether Elon was pissing on campaign finance laws or not made much difference.
One of the things I've respected recently about Democrats is that they accept the election results even when having lost. Republicans have been the ones crying foul anytime they lose and making stuff up. Be like Harris not Trump.
Please don't be like the 2020 election truthers and hop around and never say anything falsifiable.
State a claim and be prepared to defend it. If your defense of that claim will ever be "well okay *that* claim didn't make sense but I have a lot of others" then pick one of those others instead.
The targeting of law firms for political purposes has been under-covered in my bubble. I'd be interested to read intelligent opinions about what the downstream effects are.
It looks like PW was able to negotiate an easy agreement without much more than a kowtow, but that's the kind of thing that looks like precedent-setting, starting a process where each subsequent agreement will require more subservience than the last. Seems bad!
Priorities matter, especially when the circumstances are dire. For me, rule of law goes first, even above functioning democracy. Democracy without rule of law is a farce.
Yeah, this shock and awe stuff is really tough to deal with when the government is wrong/lying. I want undocumented gang members deported without a full criminal conviction, so they picked a good excuse. But I also want the government to
- not deport legal temporary residents
- respect habeas corpus
- have at least probable cause before performing a deportation
Is that too much to ask? I thought these people were trained, professional law enforcement. Has ICE just been secretly foaming at the mouth for four years waiting to disrespect the constitution and now they finally have a chance?
>Has ICE just been secretly foaming at the mouth for four years waiting to disrespect the constitution and now they finally have a chance?
I mean this with full sincerity and not an ounce of snark: yes. People who have been exposed to ICE and its agents in the past believe this not because fear has suspended their rationality, as I think many people here might have believed, but because it is literally true that the agency attracts people with authoritarian impulses who do not care about faithfully executing the law. The idea that the law is just a shield that helps Other People to come here and take advantage of our country, and it should not restrain immigration enforcement, is real and is genuinely believed by most people who willingly choose to become ICE agents.
I am skeptical of anyone who claims this about most any other law enforcement organization, but in the case specifically of CBP... I (white, male, unthreatening stature, conservative-to-normie appearance standards) have had a number of unpleasant, politically/racially-tinged, interactions with them even when entering through major urban airports returning from China and Europe. I can think of at least four in 20-odd border entries.
To say nothing of the fact that they just steal shit out of luggage absolutely at random and with no regard for value.
I can only imagine what the agents staffing a random land border crossing into Mexico act like, if this is what we get from New Yorkers and Angelinos.
Yeah, now that you mention it, my uncle started as a chill surfer dude, then joined CBP in San Diego and slowly turned into a gun-toting Mexican-hating nut.
"I can only imagine what the agents staffing a random land border crossing into Mexico act like, if this is what we get from New Yorkers and Angelinos"
If the comparison point is New Yorkers and Angelinos I would imagine they'd act much better?
ICE has always been thuggish, and CBP is even worse. Back in law school, I studied a case of a cognitively disabled US citizen who was deported to Mexico. He couldn’t even communicate - it took his family months to find him. That was during the GWB administration. So some of this egregiously unconstitutional behavior has been happening for a long time, it’s just getting coverage now.
If you want to radicalize people against the Democrats then by all means start shooting ICE agents. You and a few illegal immigrant gang members are going to be heavily outgunned.
Which is why we have judicial review, so we're not stuck with the whole "blood of patriots and tyrants" thing all the time. Hopefully enough of us agree that should keep functioning.
A German-American friend's grandfather saw a neighbor get black-bagged in East Germany in the 1950s and got his family the fuck out of there as fast as he could. Where do we run to, I wonder, and how?
I guess we could wait another few decades for major political reform, that worked for East Germans. (Granted they still unquestionably have the "shitty half" of the country.)
AIUI, the East Germans are also the side of the country that votes disproportionately for AfD. So I'm not sure it's correct to say that political reform has "worked", past tense. Though certainly things are currently much more free than in the Cold War Era.
The average person is probably unaware of how much the undocumented immigration challenge has been growing and changing in recent years. The number of new arrivals has increased, the sending countries have diversified quite a bit, families have been replacing single men, and arrivals through airports (visa overstays) and the northern border have increased drastically. Most of this is in the link below:
Another thing I think we miss is how much the above is driven by economics...of the sending counties. Places like El Salvador, Mexico and India might be poor by US standards, but are much wealthier than a generation ago. And at the same time, smuggling networks have grown more efficient alongside the demand. So now, many more people can afford to take the expensive journey than ever before.
I say all this because longer term solutions will have to take this changing environment into account.
The main challenge is that enforcement has become much more difficult, and the pool of would-be migrants has greatly expanded. It's hard to "notice" that as a regular person, but it means the types of effective solutions that your government can offer are probably more extreme than they used to be. Democrat staffers, in particular, were caught off guard by this earlier in the Biden administration, when the tried to revert to ~2015 era policies and were met with a flood.
But if you took the meaning of "undocumented immigration challenge" to be the numbers of new migrants, this was actually noticed by many, perhaps most, people.
Tangentially - IS enforcement more difficult? I am pretty sure that with modern networking technology and cheap drones it is incredibly easy. I mean, what we saw last term was an unprecedented number of border ENCOUNTERS - that is to say, nobody was sneaking past CBP. They were just walking up to them and claiming asylum. I would guess it's pretty frigging hard to get past them these days. (And if it's not, they could easily implement reforms that made that the case.) The issue is just that we can't quickly deport someone with a bogus asylum claim because of administrative bottlenecks. (Although maybe this is another semantic issue and the administrivia is what you mean by "enforcement.")
For three years Biden "erred" on the side of permissiveness. And I don't think he even really had a problem with the amount of immigration, because the changes to procedure that were implemented via EO in 2024 could have been done at any point. I support high immigration as a policy but when it's being done in such an obviously haphazard way it's not surprising that people get so bent out of shape. It's not how ANYONE would choose to run things.
Yes, it's a huge political error. But I think people also forget that the main issue in the election all through 2022 and 2023 was sure to be "the economy," to an extent that blotted out all other issues, and Biden thought the high immigration would help on that measure in a way that outweighed the downsides. It wasn't until inflation got near 3% and the economy started to really gain steam that suddenly immigration was the biggest problem in the world.
e: oops! You made a response just as I was editing to add those last two paragraphs. Feel free to respond to them!
But I would guess that on balance, it's easier, because #1 far more migrants arrive via Visa overstays or through the Northern Border and #2 Human Traffickers are always upping their game and constantly refining their routes and methods. Let's say it's $5,000 a person x 2,000,000 a year = 10 Billion in revenue, which is enough to fund sophisticated operations including bribery and technology.
Ah yes, so the "supply side" of border security is stronger than ever, but so is the "demand side." It is hard to imagine how that balances out without some detailed information, you're right.
One way to combat this is a punitive excise tax on overseas remittances. Every convenience store I stop in along the Santa Fe Trail to the Opera has a Western Union.
Depends how you structure it, if the verifier gets a giant fine if they get it wrong (and no, "I was fooled by a fake document" is not a defence; "I was fooled by a real document that was obtained fraudulently" would be a defence, of course) then the incentives run the other way.
Sure, but the more giant the fine the more expensive the larger the harm to legal hiring (because employers will want to err on the side of no mistakes) and the larger the collateral damage to people who "seem like they might be illegal".
Ditto if you go after money wiring services, except the collateral damage might be smaller.
Many of those immigrants (legal and illegal) have very poor relatives back in the old country who rely on those remittances for survival.
Cut off or penalize the remittances, and more people in poor countries may think, screw this, I can't survive here, might as well try immigrating illegally to a rich country! Unintended consequences!
A huge excise tax on Canadians, British, and French who try sending money to their banks back home, where they eventually plan on returning to and retiring, seems extraordinarily dumb.
The whole idea is wrapped in an unspoken "but rich white privilege means this law doesn't apply to you, it's only for poor brown people".
Plus, how would you even distinguish a "remittance" from a "wire transfer"? All the Vietnamese I know in America who send remittances use dodgy looking Vietnamese businesses that deal in cash and definitely aren't Western Union or Remitly.com.
"One way to combat this is a punitive excise tax on overseas remittances"
Canadians, British, Australians, and French all send money overseas. Every expatriate does it while working abroad. Lots of them come work in America for a few years but plan to return to their home country when they have children or when they retire. They don't leave their money in America.
OP made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants when talking about a punitive tax for sending money overseas. They almost certainly don't mean to massively penalize all the hard working Europeans in America. So how does enforcement actually work?
"OP made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants when talking about a punitive tax for sending money overseas"
OP probably didn't think about it, so there's not too much to read into it, but if you assume he meant it for everyone, then that's targeting poor brown people even less.
"They almost certainly don't mean to massively penalize all the hard working Europeans in America"
If they're here illegally, he probably did mean to.
Liked for your second clause, but Jimbo in OPKS explicitly mentioned the "punitive excise tax" as being a means to deter illegal immigration for economic purposes, which I'm willing to accept as being racially coded.
It's really going to suck once large portions of equatorial and near near equiotorial regions become uninhabitable due to climate change induced rising temperatures
Given the fact that the Trump basically pulled dead even with the Latino vote (due in large part to cultural conservatism yes, but also around enforcement!) I don't think there would be much political downside to Democrats squaring up to the position articulated here. The left might kick and scream but the most anti-enforcement parts of the coalition have beclowned themselves, so if anything making them visibly mad might help the democratic center by giving them a punching bag.
Agreed on no mono causal explanations, but *Trump voice* many people are saying that working class Latinos want tougher border enforcement. Ruben Gallego wasn't talking tough on the border just for the benefit of Arizona whites, and the towns along the Rio Grande that are heavily Hispanic and swing towards Trump did so in no small part due to the asylum surge.
If it was just inflation then you're not going to see much difference between a border town and suburban Chicago, but if immigration plays a part then the border towns shifts will be different, which is what I believe was the case (but I might be misremembering). My recollection is that border towns swung more towards Trump than other parts of the country, indicating that they really did support his tougher-on-immigration stances.
Hispanics live in very many places, but there is a strong correlation between % Hispanic and % recent immigrant, including undocumenteds, for obvious reasons.
And from what I remember, most of those immigrant-heavy districts and neighborhoods shifted towards Trump in 2020 and 2024.
In other words, you can draw from a much wider data pool than low population border towns to support your conclusion.
The fact that this shift started in a VERY pronounced way in 2020, when immigration was not a major issue, also means that there are factors driving those border towns to the right that are not necessarily related to high immigration. (Although I'm sure immigration is playing a factor.)
What’s the basis for claiming that immigration wasn’t an issue in 2020? It seems to me that immigration has been a major political issue since Trump first descended his golden escalator.
The alternative proposed above (inflation) clearly wasn’t an issue in 2020, so what do you think accounts for the shift?
We are the party that aims to safeguard democracy, yes? We are outraged when government does not follow the rule of law, yes?
So how was it ever okay to gum up the enforcement of immigration law, to support sanctuaries from duly enacted laws (which, by the way, have rather broad support)?
We did it because we knew that we are right.
Now we are surprised that the middle of the country is not blown away by the obvious threats of MAGA to democracy and the rule of law.
In my opinion, Trump and his inner circle are a crass, dangerous group out to do things for reasons of their own. And certainly some of their supporters are simply ugly human beings who appreciate ugliness in a leader.
However, the vast middle of the country sees two sides, two sets of voices that are both threats to democracy, to majority rule, to the rule of law. Both sides come across as willing to set aside law and majority views if they are sure they are right.
As long as so much of blue America expresses such disdain for majority views, such support for getting around majority views, It's going to be an uphill fight to gain any lasting victory against the far Right.
It seems previous pro-immigration administrations played a very oversophisticated (read fucking dumb) game. They spent the money Congress allocated on law enforcement, but also heavily prioritized "just let the people go" as opposed to the detention-happy administrations.
Both are mostly legal. Why? How? WTF? Yes, because there's a huge fucking funding issue close to the heart of this. And this makes the various administrative courts extremely backlogged, to the point that federal courts just order ICE to either let people go or send them somewhere.
Of course the problem with this is this really led to a lot of people residing in the US with extremely weak legality. And then when Congress changed this or that these easily turned into illegality.
Is that better than keeping them indefinitely? Well, yes, yes. Is this a long-term solution? No.
The democratic positioning on immigration has always struck me as the worst of both worlds. They do not want to be explicitly in favor of open borders because that would be unpopular. At the same time they don't really view illegal immigration as a crime unto itself. For most voters that's a distinction without a difference. If anything it's actually worse than that because you basically end up advocating for the existence of an illegal underclass.
Also, because of the immigration lawyers lobby and skepticism of law enforcement points Matt makes, Democrats are forever tempted to just not enforce immigration laws and find excuses like TPS and paroling phony asylum applicants rather than enforcing immigration law while calling for statutory reforms.
I don't agree often with Freddie deBoer but he has a good argument against the progressive immigration stance from the far-left, "workers of the world unite" perspective.
"
Then there’s abandoning core progressive virtues out of a short-term desire to justify undocumented immigration, which happens all the time... Here’s a funny thing about me, as a leftist: I believe in the minimum wage! In think the minimum wage is good! I know ours is far too low, and that many generations of left-leaning people fought like hell just to have one! But now I’m supposed to celebrate the fact that there’s a slice of our population that illegally accepts less than the minimum wage and who work without all manner of protections and privileges the left has been trying to protect for decades? The fact that we have created a system in which undocumented people work as racially-and-linguistically marginalized Morlocks for the good of the American rich is ugly and awful and not something any progressive person should be defending.
And, yes, it makes me angry that so many undocumented immigrants work for less than the minimum wage; it’s a terrible failure of solidarity. That’s why Bernie Sanders used to be a pretty passionate immigration restrictionist, because of the way that undocumented labor undermines the fight for better labor conditions... Again, my preference would be to let immigrants in legally and then insist that they obey our minimum wage laws and other labor regulations, like everyone else. But I hear this claim from supposedly-progressive people, the idea that undocumented immigrants are good because our employers can exploit them, and it drives me insane. Lefty people support labor protections and don’t celebrate when people break them.
Matt -- there is a factual error in the piece. You claim the alleged members of Tren de Aragua are being deported. This is not true. They have not been returned to Venezuela. They are being imprisoned in a third country's torture camp. This is not deportation, the technical term for this is 'extraordinary rendition'.
Bukele is an adored figure for people across Latin America, unbelievably popular at home and seen as a model by leaders in Latin America across the political spectrum.
I struggle to imagine a Democratic party that appeals to Latinos while saying the political figure admired in their homeland is evil and terrible.
Not a fan of polls myself, but the general consensus seems to be that Bukele is pretty popular. I know people from El Salvador. They love him. Gang activity previously stifled Salvadoran society. People can finally go outside, to the market, engage in small business endeavors without fear.
I’m not arguing that he isn’t popular in El Salvador. I think he is very popular in El Salvador. I am saying that he is probably unknown to most Americans.
In a literal sense, sure that's more true than false, but it's not exactly rare to see Latinos flying a Mexican or Colombian or some other LatAm flag. At minimum, people of that description are going to be ok with Olivar's description.
Milan, I understand the point you are trying to make (as a Jewish American without Israeli ancestry, it's annoying to me when people call Israel *my* homeland which it most certainly is not, and I'm sure you've experienced similar things as an Indian American).
But diasporas do pay quite a bit of attention to internal politics in their home country/region and I'm sure many Hispanic Americans have opinions of Bukele and know more about him than German or Irish Americans do.
Narrowly, my point is that some people still consider their country of birth to be a homeland in some sense.
More broadly, that some meaningful section of the Latino electorate has enough connection-to, and positive interest-in Bukele and his brand of politics, and so Olivar's original comment was useful even if worded clumsily.
Was that really so unclear? And is it hard to understand why less Irish / Italian Flag people would consider the country of their great-grandparents to be a "homeland" than would Hispanics who are mostly 1st or 2nd generation?
Right and my point is that most Latino Americans are not Salvadoran and so I’m willing to bet most Latinos (and indeed most Americans) have never heard of Bukele and don’t have an opinion on him.
Serious question - what would you recommend be done with them, given Venezuela refuses to take them back? I understand there are probably better options then "torture camp" but what do we do with them?
I am not actually strictly opposed to the 'imprison them in a third country' solution if they are actually given a fair hearing that establishes, with evidence, that they are violent gangsters. This should of course be a prison that meets basic humanitarian standards, which Bukele's torture camps do not -- this latter point makes it especially galling that there is pretty convincing evidence they have misidentified at least one, and probably more, innocent individuals as being members of this gang. However, honestly they would ideally just be convicted of a crime in the U.S. court system at which point they can constitutionally be held in an American prison with no issues, like anyone else.
Now, my personal preference is that if a person is *not* a violent gangster, like the gay hairdresser who is very obviously not in the gang, they simply remain in the country on TPS or some other form of parole, as Venezuela is a hostile autocratic regime, the same way our country has approached Cubans in the past. But I understand the administration wants to minimize the number of non-citizens in the country very desperately (charitably, this is due to economic illiteracy -- more realistically, it is due to racial animus on the part of its voter base), and so I think the best solution in that case is to establish an agreement with a third country to accept these people under some sort of TPS-like arrangement, with no imprisonment.
As an absolute principle, I am extremely opposed to indefinite imprisonment of people who have only committed immigration offenses (or worse, in the case of at least one alleged member, no proven offenses whatsoever -- he was in the country legally).
I hear you on trying for basic humanitarian standards, but I'm still not sure where we could send them. With these El Trenes (or whatever they are called) - I understand there are false positives included in who is a gang member, but many or most probably are. And so basically nowhere wants them and no other country will take them. But if they haven't been convicted of a crime, you can't really put them in a US jail, either. So what can we do?
"more realistically, it is due to racial animus on the part of its voter base"
It's hard to decode opposition to immigration as "racial" given that all races have similar views, and even oppose / welcome immigrants from various countries at relatively the same levels:
To begin from a first point: when you are sending people to a foreign torture camp, the acceptable rate of type 1 errors is ~0%. So at base, there must be some sort of administrative hearing where the state has a burden to prove that the individual in question is a member of the gang, even if we say the state has no burden to prove there has been an actual crime. Currently, this is not happening, and so regardless of wherever the state is sending these people it is unacceptable.
Secondly, I am not sure there's any reason to believe that Bukele's El Salvador is literally the only the country in the world willing to imprison these people in exchange for financial compensation. I am pretty confident this is in fact not true, and the reason El Salvador was chosen specifically because Bukele's policy of doing sadism theater is popular among the American right. The state has the option to hold these people for, I believe, up to 6 months without convicting them of a crime purely for an immigration offense. They could have rounded them up, used that time to find an acceptable prison, and then rendered them to that country.
Last, if part 2 was implemented and you still wanted to get rid of all the other Venezuelans, you would have a much easier time of convincing another country to accept them under a TPS-like arrangement if you had already sent the gang members to a prison. Again, it might require compensation, but the government doesn't get to waive basic human rights for minor fiscal inconveniences.
As for your point about immigration breakdown by race, my suspicion is that the situation would look much different if instead of deportation and welcoming/unwelcoming you specifically asked questions about whether immigrants, legal or illegal, should be held in foreign prison camps on suspicion that they could be gang members, even if a few false positives happen. I think you would see a lot of Trump's base of uneducated, lower-income whites would be perfectly fine with that but his more marginally attached Hispanic supporters most likely would not. The latter group is more motivated by economic illiteracy than race, but the former group is motivated by both and race takes precedence. I could be wrong, though. If the current policies continue we can get some idea by observing the reaction among Cuban and Venezuelan citizen communities.
If you phrase the question as you did: "immigrants, legal or illegal, should be held in foreign prison camps on suspicion..." then, yes, Hispanics would be less for it, but that's simply because they are more likely to be immigrants or mistaken for immigrants. Not because of some racial or pan-ethnic solidarity. If the question was modified to "only Venezuelans" you're not going to get a big change in the percent of Mexican-Americans who care.
But if you write "Venezuelans or people who are mistaken for Venezuelans by ICE agents", then I think a lot of Mexicans would be concerned about that.
And that's not out of solidarity, but out of an understanding that ICE agents may mistake them for Venezuelans.
Of course, that's how a race (or at least a "minoritized" race) is formed - people who face the same discrimination tend to band together to some degree.
If you can't convict them of a crime, or present enough of a reasonable cause to jail them, then you just have to suck it the fuck up. I can't believe people are even acting like this is negotiable.
It's not even like these are fucking Al Qaeda terrorists, they're petty criminals who mostly victimize other Venezuelan immigrants.
In your view, by virtue of being "mostly petty criminals" they become un-deportable? Probably no other country in our hemisphere would take that viewpoint, fwiw. Maybe Canada?
No. That isn't what I said at all. My point is that if you are going to make an argument that there is a critical threat that should supersede established legal processes, that argument makes a lot more sense with a purported terrorist than it does with a purported gang thug.
How do we justify sending anyone in the United States to a prison without a conviction? We can legally detain them here, but they are in the United States and they have rights. How do we justify sentencing them to prison without a trial?
Because Trump is playing politics here. The legalities are an afterthought, if even that. He figures that most people won't care about due process in dealing with illegal foreign gang members, so he'll deport them, take the political W and move on. Even better if the courts rule against him, because then he can attack them for being soft on crime or whatever other bullshit he wants to throw at them.
My position on optimal immigration levels has always been "the maximum level the public will tolerate." I'm so thoroughly convinced of the economic benefits of immigration, and the ability of America to assimilate migrants, that I personally consider the gains to outweigh the costs in almost every case. But I'm not the average voter. For that reason, whichever compromise those of us with pro-immigration views have to make with the public is worth it. So sometimes that may mean the public is in a restrictionist mood and that should be accommodated. I'm not even necessarily opposed to an immigration pause for a few years if the public demands it. That might lead to sluggish economic growth, which would cause other problems.
The one place where the GOP may push too far is if they go all in on these weird White Nationalist adjacent talking points about ruining the lifeblood of America or something like that. The average voter is skeptical of immigration because they have a (mostly wrong) lump of labor of economics, and overestimate how much crime immigrants commit, both legal and illegal. They're not full blown White Nationalists. Even then, I don't know if they'd face backlash for talking this way as much as be committing the political sin of "rambling about shit nobody cares about."
I am with you, but pro-growth immigration policy is a hard thing to punt on, because that's an actual opportunity cost to people in the United States, who will be poorer because of overly restrictive policy.
You can and should and must acknowledge public opinion, but when the public opinion is harmful to the country, the economy or national security, we should put as much effort, or more, into changing it as pandering to it.
(One thing I am extremely sure is not effective for changing broader attitudes about immigrants is blockbuster Broadway musicals extolling their virtues. I do very much enjoy that show on its own merits, though.)
The argument that Biden's immigration policy was a gigantic economic win is incredibly straightforward and well-supported but even people like Matt are barely willing to make it. It was a horrible political failure, and it was stupid policy, relative to what could be done with an actual legislature. But letting the people in was almost definitely a good thing, as far as the rest of our wallets are concerned.
Paul Krugman has written many columns on the subject. I know other people have written about it, but I’m having a hard time getting to them on Google because Paul Krugman wrote so many damn columns about it. I linked to one of them.
You don’t have to agree with Krugman but it is, at best, an oversimplification to say it “just isn’t true” when one of the most decorated economists of the last 30 years thinks it is.
Meh. Even if you want to deny that the economy was good in 2024, which, fine, whatever, there’s no arguing that it was better than 2022 and 2023 and people were no less agitated. If what you said was true then there would have been a lightening of the mood. But numbers towards even legal immigration fell instead. (And of course the Springfield OH story shows many Americans don’t care if you have legal status if you aren’t up to their personal snuff.)
What I saw was that anti-immigration sentiment was most strongly correlated with how much right wing media talked about immigration, and not much else.
Granted - how much right wing media talked about immigration was correlated with the level of immigration. But it was more strongly correlated with inflation falling - the more the economy improved the more they pivoted to “migrant crime.”
The economy was really good in 2024. To extent people were mad about the economy, I think there was a delayed reaction to 2022.
The reaction to immigration had to do with migrants flooding cities, thanks in part to Greg Abbott shipping them there. That wasn't imagined, it actually happened.
I mostly agree with you about the economics of immigration. That's why I want politicians who share my view to prioritize minimizing chaos, and making sure there isn't slack in the labor market, otherwise immigrants will get blamed.
Is it possible to tie immigration to the strong issues of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Due to our aging workforce, these popular programs will go broke unless we get some young, hard working immigrants into the country
Every politician from both parties lies about the fiscal state of SS and Medicare. Tying them to immigration would require politicians to speak truthfully about SS ans Medicare, and I don't see that happening.
Immigrants use almost no social services because they are young and healthy and insanely hard-working. So their fiscal demand impact is minor. They pay payroll taxes for people who are currently retired, which is crucial because we are currently at a peak ratio of elderly-to-prime age population. (This ratio will start falling soon so we don't need to be concerned about a future full of elderly immigrants. Also, immigrants have more kids, so there will be more people to pay for their Social Security and Medicare.)
And if you do not have a legal right to work, you are paying payroll taxes under a fake Social Security number (probably that of a dead person), which means you will never get the benefits. So the payroll taxes of an unauthorized worker are just pure "profit" for Social Security.
Does anyone here actually believe that the Democratic Party would sincerely advocate for the creation of a large class of people who will be permanently ineligible for Social Security? I certainly don't. The moral hazard problem is huge! Once that class exists there will be enormous pressure to grant them Social Security.
That isn't age adjustment, the question is how they compare to non-immigrants of the same age, I wasn't speculating about long term impact on pensions which is hard to know.
I don't know. One could infer from the physical exertion that is typically involved in a migration from Venezuela or Central America that your average migrant is in better health than an American of the same age, but obviously that is just kind of an inference and not data.
Of course, we have had many waves of immigration, and it would probably be illuminating to see how immigrants fared in those generations.
Two years ago, a GOP senator (I think it was Marshall) told me an amnesty made sense in exchange for 20 some odd billion dollars for a border wall. I reported what he said. He got dragged. His team got dragged. Everyone got dragged online except me, since all I did was ask the simple question: "Would you do an amnesty for a border wall?"
To some, mine was a ridiculous question to go round asking dozens of Senators, but my editor and I actually learned a lot about how 'amnesty' makes Democrats nervous, preferring 'pathway to citizenship' or 'pathway to earned status' and so on. Border wall, too, was a non-starter for Senate Dems.
Republicans pivot to border security when they don't want to make a deal on relief because 'a secure border' is a bullshit moving goalpost that allows them to make a shopping list of items that, in aggregate, will never create 'a secure border'—not between the U.S. and Mexico, let alone around the whole ass country.
Within a week, Marshall (I think) had reversed his position: No Amnesty or relief of any kind ... until "the border is secure" which is never gonna happen via any of the proposals that the GOP has ginned up in the three Congresses that I've been on the Hill.
Now they're putting together another grocery list, this time for a big ass "border" spend, perhaps through reconciliation, by which they actually mean mass deportations nationwide, not just on the border.
But it's disingenuous too say Dems have given up. There are relief proposals that get introduced pretty much every week that could be attached to an enforcement bill to make it bipartisan. There's just no consensus on what to fight for.
I think "the lack of consensus on what to fight for" is core to this piece. When doing researching for this, I was pretty surprised how little Democrats have spoken publicly about immigration policy over the past few months. And I think a big part of that is that the party is pretty lost on what an affirmative vision for that looks like. They know what Trump is doing is deeply inumane, but they have no credibility to argue that when they're in office, they'll do the job better.
A big part of the challenge is the pool of would-be immigrants has vastly expanded. Average incomes and transport infrastructure have improved in most sending countries. Technology makes staying in touch with loved-ones and financial transfers much easier. And human-smuggling networks have become more efficient, while information on how to do it is exchanged faster than ever online.
So Obama-era enforcement will result in far higher than Obama-era immigration. I don't know where the balance is, but Trump's lurch right is less of an excess than it probably appears to many Democrats, assuming you want to have a good chance at winning elections.
"America should encourage the immigration of people who can prove they are high skilled and can assimilate conditional on them not committing a crime" would that statement be Dem coded or GOP coded?
It is like "enforce gun laws in violent inner cities" in that the moderate pragmatic option is anathema to most partisans.
I think that is a bit of a strawman, but there are lots of people who are keen on gun laws but very resistant to the idea of supporting police actually enforcing gun laws.
While I am on board with the OBA take on immigration, we should learn from Canada’s recent about-face on its immigration policy.
They tried a mini version of OBA (“one hundred million Canadians”?), but they did it without zoning reform / housing liberalization. Now the perception is that immigration is fueling their housing crisis, and were it not for the Trump trade war the Liberal Party was about to get trounced by the Conservatives.
Thing is, Democrats don't get credit when cracking down on immigration because, as usual, it's the vibes and branding. You're not going to seem as serious as the other guys at this point unless you're yelling about "shithole" countries, regardless of policy.
I don't know if an overall party policy shift will help as opposed to having a loud but small hawkish Dem faction. The latter seems more credible to me because they are going against party. But I dunno, my ideological views on immigration are almost libertarian so I have no idea what activates people who are wired to be fearful of it.
Someone upthread mentioned a woman in Colorado who has been an open activist for 20 years who never got deported despite final orders of deportation (which is supposed to be the end of the road). She is being defended by all the Democratic politicians because she is an activist and our politicians love anyone connected with The Groups.
I would argue this isn't just vibes. "She's an open activist who has been ordered by courts to leave the country after full due process and despite having lots of lawyers. Democrats want to keep her in the country even though she's a literal scofflaw, because she has political and activist connections" is something the voters see. And we need to knock stuff like that off. She should have been deported years ago and should be now.
If there was some magical deal available in which Democrats win every federal election for the next decade but racial, ethnic, and sexual slurs were legally, socially, and professionally unsanctionable, would Democrats take the deal?
I would hope not. The upside is only upside for the 20% of the population that are committed partisans. Meanwhile 99% of everyone else would hate that.
I feel like that's not quite right. Some of the words we now consider slurs, or least impolite, were the plain, non-insulting words, and only took on a negative connotation over time due to their association with old-timey thinking. I'm thinking of words like "retard" or "oriental" or maybe "negro" or "chinaman". People could have said those words without any demeaning or insulting intent back then, because no such intent was yet imbued in the words.
And there's never been a time when insulting speech had zero social or professional consequences. What might have been different was who you were allowed to insult or dismiss, but that wasn't about a particular word choice, that was about the actual rules of society.
"An idea I keep floating is a small bump in employer-side payroll taxes for foreign-born workers to help keep Social Security solvent."
This actually sounds pretty Trumpy and should definitely be pitched to him as a superior alternative to tariffs. Fulfills his fetishes of sticking it to foreigners and making them pay for stuff. He already mused about selling American citizenships for $$$. If making foreign residents pay higher taxes is all that's needed to make him open to immigration, it sounds like a win win win for American citizens, foreigners hoping to immigrate here, and Trump.
Matt writes: "That means strong borders, it means deporting people who actually do commit crimes..."
My one (and relatively small) point of disagreement with Matt on this topic -- he is broadly right in his advocacy for increased immigration -- is this: If one wants "strong borders", presumably that is to keep out people who are attempting to enter illegally. So, why limit deportation to those who "actually do commit crimes"?
This rhetorically sounds to me like illegal immigration isn't a crime and isn't subjected to deportation. It is fuel for the view that we want open borders.
Our stance should be: Strong Borders, Deport Illegal Immigrants, Increase Legal Immigration Pathways.
I agree. Obama made a very specific argument that he was PRIORITIZING criminal deportation in his first term to look strong on immigration and enforcement to the right while mollifying elements in the left all by making a resource constraint argument.
There was an article the other day about ICE agents detaining Jeanette Vizguerra, who has spent over two decades in the US flagrantly undocumented and has done things in the past like seeking refuge in a church to avoid detention (sanctuary!! https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/19/jeanette-vizguerra-ice-colorado)
This is where the pain is going to have to happen. She's non-violent, arguably sympathetic, but while many Democrats see her as someone who should stay, the median voter (and me, honestly!) does not appreciate the pretty shameless flouting of our immigration law. She should be deported and Democrats are harmed politically by defending her and cases similar to hers. But that is absolutely going to cause rifts in the coalition. The sooner we rip the bandaid off the better on that one.
It’s still kind of borked that a person can spend two decades her without authorization and not have an easy pathway to getting authorization to stay.
If I successfully commit tax fraud for 20 years, should I be allowed to keep the money?
There are things like easements and adverse possession in the law where repeated and continued usage of a thing that you originally wouldn't have a lawful right to use can ultimately result in lawful access/ownership (including title to the property that prevents the original title holder from repossessing their property). So there are plenty of precedents where repeated and willful violations can be deemed sufficient to establish lawful ownership access.
I think the situation at issue here is far more analogous to those circumstances than it is to criminal tax fraud.
Note that you can’t adversely possess land as against the government precisely because it imposes an unreasonable obligation of the government to zealously police its title rights all the time against everyone.
For sure. It's more analogous than tax fraud, but it's not perfectly analogous. The point is that it's not unheard of for offenses that don't actively cause harm and can be argued to be pro social to be viewed as potentially going on for long enough to warrant abandoning the original claim against the offender.
True in current law. But there have been many eras and places where “usefully occupy public land for enough time and it’s yours, maybe conditional on paying a token amount” has been the rule. Most famously with homesteading in this country, but the various Acemogulu-coded attempts in developing countries to give formal recognition of peasant land rights also count.
So are you proposing the government should have more enforcement vigilance then? I don’t think it’s very hard to create a financial surveillance panopticon machine to flag likely illegals if you wanted to, even without increasing enforcement vigilance against employers.
I was merely pointing out that tax fraud is a poor analogy and that other legal actions seem far more similar. I haven't spent considerable time trying to work out a way to apply those legal theories to illegal immigration, but I imagine that if I did it would require significant modification to the ways in which they operate. For one, AP is designed to reward productive uses of property and punish those who allow their properties to go unmanaged and underutilized for significant periods of time- it incentivizes better use of real property. Applying it to illegal immigration would imply incentivizing illegal immigrants to come here and then seek to evade capture for the prescribed time period, which doesn't seem great to me.
So I don't think it necessarily resolves the issue, but I think it's more helpful to engage with metaphors that more closely approximate the thing you're comparing them to if we want to have productive discussions is all. Hysterical claims that simply existing in the USA (and likely paying into the social safety net and producing more for the USA than you're taking) is similar to multi-decade tax fraud or other criminal activities isn't a useful mechanism for moving the conversation forwards.
I think people commonly kind of misunderstand adverse possession. It's not really a law that's about bowing to criminal behavior, it's sort of a "paperwork / real world normalization process."
The idea is that sometimes your paperwork gets out of sync with the real world. And you can't just let your paperwork be permanently out of sync, and at some point it's too costly to go back and try to undo what's happened in the real world and get back into sync with your paperwork that way -- so you just declare a mulligan, change your paperwork to be conformant to the real world, and go on.
And this was of course much more common and necessary in an era in which paperwork was ACTUALLY ON PAPER, and geographically spread out over who knows how much area, and prone to things like "oh, well we had water damage and all this paper has been destroyed" and so on. Where you might've transferred ownership between Joe and Bob in a handshake deal, and then 20 years later Bob dies and Bob's heirs are like, "Wait, I found a deed to that land in my dad's file cabinet." Like, that's the intended use case for adverse possession. The case where Joe sneaks onto Bob's land and builds a house there isn't.
It's been a long time since I took property, but that's not the recollection I have of adverse possession. It's not a correction for clerical errors or a "paperwork/real world normalization process". As I said elsewhere, adverse possession can be justified on public policy grounds that it allows for useful applications of real property and avoiding squalor. The public policy justifications are well founded and go back quite a ways. It absolutely can apply to situations where Joe occupies property on Bob's land, but because Bob isn't actively using his property Joe can acquire title through constructive and open use over a defined period of time.
One of the elements of adverse possession is "non-permissive" use, meaning that the possessor must not have a right to live there. Your paperwork examples fails this fundamental element. The person in that situation actually is the legal title holder but has lost the paperwork. For the inheritance example, if the title between Joe and Bob was lawfully transferred 20 years ago via a handshake deal then Bob is the lawful owner and can claim to own the property. The heirs can't claim to have an ejectment action against him because they never owned the property- their claim was defeated once the property was transferred, so their expectation of ownership upon their father's death isn't legally valid.
This is all dependent on jurisdictional issues as well given that different places will have legal regimes that differ, so it's a fact-intensive inquiry.
ETA: A quick search demonstrates that the good faith requirement for adverse possession claims is a small minority of jurisdictions. So the claim that this is something that only applies where someone actually thinks that they're the legitimate owner and it's just a technical reason why they can't prove real title is simply not the case in an AP case. Even in those instances where a good faith defense is required, it doesn't require the person to have been correct in their assessment (such as would be the case where the records are only missing because a flood destroyed the paperwork or something like that)- rather, they had to believe they had the right to the property.
As stated above, an element of adverse possession is non-permissive use. Permissive use never initiates the clock for adverse possession purposes. So if Joe permissively occupied Bob's property for 20 years and then Bob dies then his heirs WOULD be able to evict Joe IF he had never lawfully obtained the property. Sure, he would have been living there for 20 years, but it would have been a permissive situation where he was allowed to live there- it's not "adverse" to the actual owners interests. As I said above, it's incredibly likely in this situation that Joe would have simply lawfully owned the property, so the dispute would be resolved via contract law. But if he was just living there with Bob's acquiescence then it's not an adverse possession case.
I think drawing analogies between immigration and trespass is a very bad idea and something restrictionists ofteb do.
Can you explain why it's a bad idea? I'm left assuming the reason is that it makes enforcement look reasonable. But that's downstream of whether the analogy is sound in the first place.
Good to know!
That isn’t the same act. Civil violation vs criminal violation. Try to argue based on substance and rather than poorly contorted analogies.
Distinction without a difference. Both will end up punished when caught - she gets deported and the tax cheat pays up and maybe goes to jail. Essentially put in the position they've been trying to avoid for all those years. The type of proceeding is irrelevant to the outcome.
All you just communicated is that you think the soundness of reasoning and argumentation does not matter.
All in response to a comment opining about how messed up legal immigration process is. Jumping to the lazy “this person is bad, they deserve to be punished” and ignoring the actual substance of my comment. Congratulations, you just virtue signaled.
Well you’ll get to keep 14 years worth - the IRS usually can only look back 6 years.
I mean, most crimes have a statute of limitations.
In the tax analogy, if you were committing tax fraud every year, some of your older frauds would fall outside the statute of limitations, but your most recent ones wouldn't.
So in this analogy, you'd be deported because you're here now. But you wouldn't be punished in some way because you first crossed 20 years ago.
Sure, but that's because we've decided it's a continuing offense, which makes it more like the encroachment/trespass example above. Now, adverse possession doesn't run against the federal government, so re.oval can still be required, but courts really don't live 'get the corner of your 40 year old house off federal property' even if it's legally correct.
Keep the money? Hell, we'll make you the President! At a minimum, we'll put you in charge of the IRS
Trump did.
*Yugi reveals Exodia to Kaiba*
I think Trump should have been prosecuted and probably imprisoned decades ago
The very ambivalent attitude that even conservatives have about doing enforcement at employment sites is the culprit here. There's been a tacit legalization for decades, especially of working illegally.
Pew estimates that almost 5% of the current workforce is undocumented immigrants. Realistically the economic toll of suddenly deporting them would be dramatic and negative with a huge supply shock to certain industries and a negative demand in the wider economy.
All of which is why a comprehensive immigration bill would seem to make policy sense. But, the Democrats have zero credibility on the issue as we see. In the parlance of our times, they have no cards, so realistically they have to drop it.
Politically Trump is probably the only one who could do a comprehensive immigration bill at this point, but I would not bet on it.
"The very ambivalent attitude that even conservatives have about doing enforcement at employment sites is the culprit here."
I think that one of the things that Trump has highlighted is that elites of both parties have been ambivalent, but I think a sizeable majority of the country would be strongly supportive of such enforcement.
I mean I'm sure they would be, but that's because a sizable majority of the country has no capacity to think through the possible ways that immediately deporting 5% of the workforce may negatively impact their own well-being.
Sure. Lots of people believe untrue things in politics, because politicians lie to them all the time. We can balance the budget by only taxing billionaires. Tariffs can replace income taxes. Companies are raising prices now because they are greedy. This next generation will be the ones to throw off the shackles of capitalism and embrace a environmental socialist utopia where we all survive on pixie dust and rainbows.
Do you understand how the current situation negatively impacts people who might want a remedy?
If you give that person an easy pathway then it's pretty borked for the people who only wanted to immigrate legally, but decided not to risk it. It might also feel pretty unfair to the person who was deported after 5 or 10 years.
This is the main issue I see with the idea that being in the US illegally for a long period of time should confer some legal status. It selects against skilled immigrants.
It's also backwards from the normal logic of "the more of the rule you broke, the better your outcome". Normally, we forgive old transgressions through statutes of limitations. But we don't give additional credit for older ones.
The counterpoint on this (as I noted to Monkey) is "City air makes you free," which some part of the American electorate genuinely seems to subscribe to in the context of immigration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtluft_macht_frei
I agree and I get that point as a lawyer. However, I've seen it noted in the past that a non-trivial percentage of Americans genuinely seem to believe that avoiding being deported for some extended length of time should confer (or even actually *does* confer!) protection against removal, if not actual citizenship. (While I'm sure not a single person who believes that would articulate it this way, it seems like some sort of folk manifestation of the medieval concept of "City air makes you free": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stadtluft_macht_frei )
One solution is to open up the process for legal immigration give residents amnesty but put them further back in line.
I can’t help but wonder whether it would be easier to get the immigration debate unstuck if the ask from our side wasn’t a path to citizenship but a path to lawful permanent residency with a bar on naturalization. Someone who’s been here for 10-15 years without causing trouble should be able to stay, with maybe a fine and paying back taxes, but only people who immigrate legally should be eligible for citizenship.
I don't like the idea that we end up with an institutional two-tiered system of class, with 'true citizens' and a nonvoting underclass divided along largely racial lines
It feels like the kind of idea that would extrapolates out to some pretty ugly stuff
The fact that this is, in fact, our de facto system right now is one of the major problems with it. We should not try to enshrine that problem into law.
Would the Republicans want to give up such a juicy issue? Is there any evidence that they want a legislative solution to this problem?
Or one decade. Pretty sure that's what my Irish ancestors got through the rolling registry back then.
Keep the focus one immigrants we want to attract and say nothing specific about how to do border secutity except due process for detainees, which is part of attracting "good" immigrants.
Undocumented migrants who aren't committing (additional) crimes contribute to the US economy. They're also the parents of a lot of children who are US citizens who would suffer gravely were their parents to be deported.
Democrats would ideally make and win that argument. But it requires voters to trust Democrats to take future enforcement very seriously.
In reality, Matt's chart shows the voters' trust in Democrats on border security is the lowest of any issue for either party.
So Democrats are kinda stuck. IDK what they can do other than perhaps some giant Sister Soulja moment against their fringe.
Agreed. For me, it is a moral redline to deport someone who came here illegally a decade or so ago and has started a life. It doesn’t make sense resource wise to focus on deporting that person, and in my mind that person has a right to be in this country.
But Dems need to gain confidence with border security and then hope they can get some compromise on immigration with the post trump gop.
For some people, the moral redline is prioritizing that person's goals over a would-be immigrant's, when the latter chose to use legal pathways over illegal ones.
I agree with the Obama-era position. What you’re saying sounds a lot like the GOP attack of the gang of 8 bill.
I'm primarily drawing from conversations with the very many legal immigrants I know.
No doubt, legal immigrants have much more moderate takes because they went through the system and paid their dues. Doesn't make it good policy to deport someone who would otherwise have been eligible for DAPA.
One issue here is that native-born citizens wildly overestimate the breadth of the path for legal immigration, and even most legal immigrants substantially overstate how many people it's available to.
The median American thinks we legally admit 3-4X as many people as we actually do each year, if I recall the survey data correctly...
Perhaps legal immigrants would also like a system where brown-skinned people, no matter their status, won't be picked up and put on a plane to El Salvador.
That is, a solution that defuses the issue and reduces its valence to the American public would be good for those legal immigrants even if it includes amnesty for those who didn't jump through hoops like they had to.
Sure - but that's also a separate topic.
In terms of the relevance of this discussion, if Ben, for example, wants to help aim for a workable solution, he has to realize that some people are going to view the morality of how to treat a long-term illegal resident very differently from the way he views it.
But you're right that if law-abiding brown-skinned people are being shipped to El Salvador then most immigrants I know will be angry. Whether many are angry right now, while it's limited to campus Palestinian protestors and gang members, is harder to judge.
What legal pathways? There aren't legal pathways for most people who are here illegally.
I'm referring to the legal pathways that a legal resident took, as well as the pathways a *would-be* immigrant attempted or considered attempting.
The person who wanted to immigrate, and either didn't, or did after significant effort, is likely to strongly resent people who simply "cut in line" and then got a better outcome.
I know many immigrants to the US too, and I wouldn't describe "I've got my [green card], Jack" as a *moral* red line. But I take your point that it is a widely held sentiment. Though I wonder if a single one would trade in their security for the existential nightmare that it is to be a DREAMer today.
"For me, it is a moral redline to deport someone who came here illegally a decade or so ago and has started a life."
Why?
I'm extremely pro immigration and would be almost open borders personally, but this idea that a person who does something illegally for a long time is now sympathetic because they have built their life around it doesn't make sense to me.
If anything, I'm much more sympathetic to the person fleeing Venezuela last year than someone who crossed the border from Mexico illegally in 2005 and now would have to go back to Mexico.
I have a similar view. They got to live in the US for 20 years.
If the US started offering nonrenewable 20-years visas, a lot of people would use these visas. Should we feel bad at the end of the twenty years that they have to leave?
This is the problem with all the refugees with temporary protected status. Apparently it was assumed by everyone that it was de facto permanent?
Agreed, though slight difference there is about expectations. But that's not enough to substantively change how I would approach these.
Only citizenship confers a right to remain in the country.
It's a privilege for everyone else.
That's the point of citizenship.
What’s more important: winning the battle or the war? In the liberal discourse about how to react to Trump, somebody always says, “but [insert victim] is going to be hurt, so we have to do everything possible to stop it.” The result is an unwillingness to make hard choices to earn long term gains.
The left’s goal in immigration should solely be to establish public credibility so that it can eventually enact policies that are both moral and good policy. To do that there will be victims. As an immigration maximalist, this sucks. But the alternative is to continue ceding ground to the right and enabling their morally repugnant policies.
No, that person does not have a right to be in the country.
The US can make a decision to keep said person in the country (and in many situation this is probably the right course of action). I as an American want the US to be humane and make humane decisions when it can and not waste resources.
But that person does not have a *right* to be here.
Plus, we have considerable evidence that the Obama-era GOP, like its Biden-era incarnation, sunk comprehensive immigration reform because they were (correctly) aware that the perpetual dumpster fire translates into votes for their brand (and perhaps the strongest, most emotive marker of GOP identity). Cue "brokenism": heads you lose, tails the GOP wins. Again and again.
I disagree that this is hard political calculus for Dems. The primary challenge, IMO, is that the political solution requires staking out a position that's right-of-center and involves advocating for a lot of harm for a lot of pretty vulnerable folks.
If you came here illegally, then subsequent moral living doesn't wash away that "original sin". You must still perform restitution in a way that doesn't retroactively penalize folks who complied with our laws from the get-go.
This is the crux of the 2012 Dem platform passage MY quoted above. To Binya's point, voters don't trust Dems to design a process that's sufficiently punitive, and Republicans have no interest or motivation in cooperating on designing ANY passage. The path for Dems is to outline a very harsh process. Some ideas include going case-by-case identifying back taxes that weren't paid and making folks pay them; adding a surcharge on top of that (maybe through garnishing wages); misdemeanors get you an extra probationary period on your timeline (felons need not even apply); and sending folks availing themselves of this process to the "back of the line" in cases where actual queues exist.
I'd also recommend requiring some sort of English training or testing as part of this process. I think it's both good politics, and I think many folks in this position would jump at an opportunity to improve their English!)
IDK if even that is sufficiently over-the-top to impress the median voter, but I think it's a starting point.
A "punitive amnesty" like you lay out here sounds pretty good. It limits disruption to communities and the wrecking of lives people have built here but has clear elements of punishment that the people would (and probably should) demand.
"but it requires voters to trust Democrats to take future enforcement very seriously."
THIS. And to build that trust Democrats should do the following
Democrats should sponsor a VERY strong border bill. That bill should do the following
Hire a LOT more immigration judges
build a LOT more detention centers
Stop all catch and release and make clear that if the detention centers are full then the border closes until there is room.
build the wall
reform asylum laws to stop abuses of them
mandate e-verify
then AFTER this is all done, and illegal immigration becomes not a problem, and the Democrats build back some credibility, we can look at increase legal immigration for high skilled people, and doing something for the Dreamers.
But the order is important. First secure the border.
I mean they wrote a strong border bill back in like 2023 that looked like it was going to pass until Trump said he didn’t like and a bunch of people just started lying about what was in it.
No they wrote a bill that was better than the status quo. It was never a strong border bill. It didn’t stop catch and release.
> Undocumented migrants who aren't committing (additional) crimes contribute to the US economy
"But I contribute to the economy" isn't, and shouldn't be, much more than a trivially small data point.
I used to live in Vietnam and there were TONS of foreigners who were not only in the country illegally (abusing tourist visas by renewing them every 3 months for years, or decades on end or getting business visa from fake companies) but also working illegally (no work permit, so not legally allowed to work) AND not paying any income taxes -- and without fail every single one of them would talk about how they "contribute to the economy" by renting apartments and eating in restaurants.
They aren't wrong, exactly, but so what?
Whether they contribute is an open question.
It's not.
I am sceptical that low skilled immigration contributes, the national academy of sciences report suggested immigrants without high school are net fiscal costs.
The Danes have also done a pretty serious accounting of immigrants by national background (which correlates strongly to skill-levels) and found a lot of variation, with many of their lower-skilled nationalities coming up as net drains.
Of course that's a different country, so it may not apply here. But, also, it might!
The Danes and also the Dutch finance ministries did a deep look into the costs of immigration and found it to be massively costly to the dismay of lots of economists. But because of the design of the welfare system and different sources of immigrants I am not sure it says much about the American situation.
Though with the important caveat that you should massively reduce confidence in any economists who thought low skilled immigrants living on welfare in Europe would be an economic boost.
I think The Economist had an article on this recently and if you look directly at the individual, low skill legal immigrants are a net drain(once you factor in that eventually they'll be old too and need SS etc).
But...
If you start factoring in side effects like the extra productivity they add by adding people to the workforce then even low skill immigrants start turning positive. This is admittedly harder to measure accurately.
I am very sceptical that the net effect is positive, it sounds like something economists propose when their initial theory falls apart.
Problem with increasing immigration right now is, we are seeing increased productivity in white collar jobs, probably driven by LLM adoption, which translates into a slower pace of hiring. I do not expect AGI or The Singularity any time soon, and I don’t expect massive layoffs, but I do expect hiring of entry level white collar employees to decline significantly and I do expect scattered layoffs.
We’re already seeing slow hiring of new grads and an increase in the white collar unemployment rate. See NYT today.
If you’re in the beginning of a labor market readjustment, you really don’t want or need to greatly increase the number of people you have to support going through that shift.
New grads and unemployed white collar are never gonna compete with construction or agricultural workers. They could probably do some hospitality jobs, I guess.
They will because most people are not fully and permanently in one category or the other.
It's a little like the argument on housing or used cars, where people claim building luxury units has no effect on down-market prices, but it does because impacts ripple up-and-down the price chain.
People absolutely do switch between white and blue collar occupations. No one single person is likely to switch from say, lawyer to agricultural worker. But maybe they shift from lawyer to teacher, a teacher shifts to construction worker, a construction worker shifts to farm worker, etc.
Anecdata, but I know several retired successful white collar workers who are now hobby farmers selling at farmers markets. As in, know personally and am familiar with their farms.
During COVID I had a PoliSci professor and a newly graduated teachers aide on my crew for a season before schools opened again. One was better than the other on the job, but they both lasted a season without being fired or quitting. An anecdote fwiw.
New grads are very likely to compete for manufacturing and blue collar jobs if we see a reduction in white collar knowledge work. Being an electrician is a skilled job. One of my CTO friends does carpentry as a hobby and volunteers for Habitat because he likes to do it. Etc. Modern manufacturing includes a lot of skilled jobs and could absorb available workers.
Agriculture is already pretty automated for grain crops, many aspects of dairy, and root crops. There are ways to automate more - for example, if you grow veggies and strawberries in greenhouses, there are robot pickers.
You might see more farmers-market- scale food, and historically about a third of farm labor was done by farm owners and their family, but I do not expect a huge surge in ag jobs because, if labor costs go up, the market responds. I would guess automation, greenhouses, and to some degree an increase in local farming.
"Probably driven by LLM adoption"? This strikes me as a huge stretch. In fact I think it's inverting cause and effect, then adding a dash of hype.
It’s based on what I have personally observed at work, and what close friends and I have personally discussed about their observations at their work. Essentially, LLMs are useful and effective productivity tools that have to be checked, and are not replacements for workers, but can result in getting significantly more work done per person.
Which thus means less entry level hiring. Which BTW was the topic of a New York Times article yesterday, discussing it as a trend nationwide. “Has the Decline of Knowledge Work Begun?”
I'm not sure where you work, but color me skeptical. Broad productivity trends like this usually occur because there are fewer workers being forced to do the same work. Maybe they're using LLMs to do it, but I don't think the overwhelming majority of office workers are necessarily getting loads more done.
Broad productivity trends tend to occur with any useful new technology. Adoption can increase with worker shortage, but greater efficiency is a business incentive in the absence of worker shortages.
Relevant quote from the NYT article I cited, “Still, at least in the near term, many tech executives and their investors appear to see A.I. as a way to trim their staffing. A software engineer at a large tech company who declined to be named for fear of harming his job prospects said that his team was about half the size it was last year and that he and his co-workers were expected to do roughly the same amount of work by relying on an A.I. assistant. Overall, the unemployment rate in tech and related industries jumped by more than half from 2022 to 2024, to 4.4 percent from 2.9 percent.”
I work in tech.
The flaw with this logic is that decreasing immigration can accelerate not decelerate white collar job loss in the local areas, agglomeration effects are real.
Agglomeration is greatly oversold when a significant percentage of workers have jobs that are essentially location-independent and are frequently performed in different states and countries from their co workers. People in many jobs collaborate online more than in person.
If you have rapidly increasing productivity and resultant job loss, you want to decrease overall immigration levels, while still admitting people with specific skills. When you are trying to find jobs for your own displaced people, bringing in more is not helpful.
Yeah I'm about as wild eyed libertarian as you can get on immigration, but whenever liberal freak out about deportation it reminds me of when people freak out about arrests for weed in states where weed isn't legal.
Yeah, that person did something they knew was illegal and they got busted. Maybe I don't think what they did should be illegal, but it is. So...
Also on the weed side, people seem widely unaware it is still illegal in all the states. The state law didn’t preempt the federal law. So, tomorrow trump could order the DEA to raid every “legal” dispensary in the country, seize their assets, and arrest every grandmother there for medical reasons. The fact that states enable it doesn’t actually make it legal. In general I think it should though. We need more federalism, and state-level state-capacity.
I think people are downplaying the importance of even Trump not doing full-on workplace enforcement, including holding farm and construction company owners criminally accountable for repeatedly hiring illegal immigrants. That would probably generate more Dem support for a crackdown since it’d mean some big GOP-friendly groups pay the price for their complicity.
Also gives away the game. Think Matt is underplaying these arrests of European tourists. https://apnews.com/article/border-tourists-german-canadian-detention-immigration-408cd27338e8065268fabc835f8b0c34
Whatever the merits of taking legal action, the "crimes" in question are incredibly small bore. There is a true "cruelty is the point" aspect.
And yet employers who much more flagrantly violate immigration law? Nada.
Extraordinarily telling as far as I'm concerned.
I'm sorry but that whole article screams "I'm white & from a rich European country, you can't do this to me!"
"he suspected the border patrol officer assumed he was living unlawfully in the US, trying to skirt the 90-day regulation by taking the short trip out of the country."
That's exactly how US immigration authorities have treated everyone from a third world country for decades. I used to walk past the US consulate in Ho Chi Minh City every morning. They process about 1,000 visa applications a day. All visas, even a tourist one, require an in-person interview. If you live hundreds of kilometers away, you need to travel to HCMC for the interview. Everyone waits outside (no air condition; the building for US citizen services is air conditioned). It generally takes all day. 80-90% of them are rejected. No reason is ever given. No appeal is possible. You lose your application fee -- which is about 1 month's income for the average Vietnamese -- and told to apply again later. It is entirely up to the interviewer's discretion. My wife went for an interview there once and saw a dozen people in queue in front of her all rejected by a single agent who was possibly just having a bad day.
Yeah, we’ve historically had fairly generous border policies with Europe; we enjoy the same privileges when traveling there.
Is that the compromise that you want Democrats to offer? Broad support and funding to deport those here illegally if Republicans will criminalize business owners who hire illegal labor.
Because I think that you are correct that historically Republican elites have not wanted that, but then again they also wanted the immigration compromise in 2008. Its the base of the Republican party that didn't want that, and I'm pretty sure they would be happy to take the deal offered above.
There are too many illegal aliens to deport them all without massive economic disruption and humanitarian hardship. However, just deporting aliens who commit non-immigration crimes is too weak. It means you can ignore immigration law as long as you don’t drive drunk or beat your girlfriend.
Democrats should also prioritize deportation of non English speakers. The most cuckish thing about the Democratic party is it’s refusal to defend American culture and reluctance to admit American culture exists. Not speaking English separates an immigrant from mainstream American culture. It makes immigrants other and harder to assimilate. It makes immigration more threatening for natives who don’t want to suffer an economic penalty for being monoglots.
It's also a mark of disrespect for the culture when an immigrant doesn't bother learning the culture's language. This applies everywhere, whether we're talking about immigrants here who don't learn English or rich Americans who move to France and never bother to learn more than how to order dinner in a restaurant.
I simply cannot understand why a rich person would move to a country and not learn the language. Why would you want to be alienated from the culture of the place where toy live?
You're underestimating the difficulty of learning a foreign language as an adult, particularly for those who were monolingual as a child. Don't say, "But X did it." Some people are good at learning languages and some, despite their best efforts, are bad. Look at Miguel Bloombito.
I'm one of those people who are bad at it. In fact I still speak with a lisp in English.
But that means I would never move to a non English country.
The thing is, it's very common for immigrants not only to not put forth their best effort, but to not even spend 15 minutes a day on a YouTube instructional channel learning about their adopted nation's language.
data?
Actually, Im not. I view the difficulty in learning a foreign language as a decisive reason not to emigrate to a non-English speaking country. I love Norway. But I will never speak Norwegian fluently, so I can only enjoy Norway as a tourist.
Of course you wouldn't, but you have opportunities here. We should look instead at people who are coming here for opportunities because they have none in their home country. Should we be barring people who are willing to work hard and raise English-speaking children, just because they are unable to learn English well as adults? [There can be many other reasons for barring people. I'm talking now only about barring them only because although they made a good effort, they couldn't learn English.]
I used to have a guy working for me, born in Mexico, came here (I don't know under what circumstances) as an adult, worked in kitchens in San Francisco, eventually became a naturalized citizen, tried his best to learn English and even (tragically) forbade his children from speaking Spanish, but forty years on still could barely communicate in English. What's the problem?
The only effective means of domestic enforcement is employer-based, and doing that would cause a *massive* backlash to the disruption it would cause to citizens and LPRs.
Since you’re not advocating for it, you just want to place the hypocrisy at a slightly different location, it seems?
I am a big fan of workplace enforcement and E-verify and that should be where the Administration focuses its efforts. Apologies for not including this specific enforcement tactic in my list.
It seemed as if you were implying that the effectiveness of enforcement in-country would be limited across the couple comments above, sorry.
That said, to be clear, I am completely in favor of rank hypocrisy on this issue; we should *not* want to own the intense disruption to several sectors of the economy, inflation, crime rates, and other key indicators that would come from finally taking employer enforcement seriously. Let the GOP eventually catch that car and we can pick up the pieces.
Secure the border, deport criminals, talk a big game about deporting benefits and tax cheats, etc...
My preferred option would be to introduce two separate bills, one which sets up employer-based enforcement, and the other which creates a pathway to legal status conditional on having been employed for X years illegally or on snitching on your employer.
If the Republicans vote through the enforcement but not the pathway to legal status, then you can repeatedly say whose fault it is when the problems arise.
I think it’s fair to hold the Administration and its goals to account. Of course it would be disruptive. And politically inconvenient for Republicans. But at least it’d be serious instead of the current approach.
Oh, I'd be overjoyed if the Republicans actually did it, it'd rapidly force a long-term settlement of the issue.
But even they aren't that stupid, though they might have had to tie Stephen Miller up in a chair somewhere.
What especially galling is that they accuse various NGOs like Lutheran Family Services of enticing and harboring illegal immigrants but then ignore the main economic source of their presence here- employers, many of whom play dumb about the status of their workers.
Democrats can propose the bill and make the Republicans vote it down.
Would be especially fun if you get an all-Democratic Congress and a Republican President (last happened in 2006-08) as the Democrats would then control the agenda and the Republicans can't dodge the votes.
Also would Trump veto?
Very few people immigrated during the Biden administration in a way that is actually "illegal." It is not illegal to seek asylum, even if you have a really terrible case. Yes, enforcement arguably ran roughshod over the spirit of the law, but things were done to the letter pretty well.
“It is not illegal to seek asylum…”
It is if the applicant claims, but does not actually have, a bona fide and well grounded fear of persecution due to “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion” in their home country.
Fair enough.
But you’d have to prove they were willingly deceitful, claiming ignorance/misinterpretation would probably be a very robust defense.
Also standards are sufficiently subjective, and any evidence sufficiently distant, that it would be very hard to say someone was DEFINITIVELY wrong about their status rather than not meeting the standards as implemented.
But even if it’s not enforceable it’s still illegal, so thank you for the correction.
I'm not sure if this is Matt's reasoning or not, but I believe what some pro-immigration centrist Democrats are doing when they specify deporting "criminals" is tacitly acknowledging, that, while it's desirable to have more effective enforcement, the 12 million or so illegal immigrants *who are already here* aren't going to be deported (at least not the vast majority). Trump won't tell you that. I just did.
Then we should say: "We want to deport all illegal immigrants but, with limited resources and the millions of people here illegally, we are starting with those who have committed other crimes while in the country."
aka literally Obama in 2009
Not really. He didn't say the first part. Only the second. And Obama wasn't seen as being tough on the border by anyone other than the immigration lawyers and activist groups.
Perceived toughness is driven by voters' understanding of what the politician wants, not by what they do. This is why it's so hard to scare people about Trump on abortion. Because voters (rightly) intuit that he doesn't care and so assume he won't do much about it.
I remember the Deporter in Chief Screeds. Remember how lefties would become drone strikes under Obama?
Now silence.
We're allowed to say "self-deportation," right?
While going through 12 million deportations is not doable, if illegal aliens determine that the risk of being caught isn't worth the risk, they'll leave, and new ones will not want to show up.
It's pretty clear that Trump is trying to create this kind of fear with his less-than-hinged policies targeting people here legally.
As Matt pointed out, he hasn't done any workplace raids yet, or tried to charge employers for failing to verify documentation. That would really move the needle but Trump has decline to do this completely mundane form of border enforcement and instead done bizarre and likely illegal things.
Except how can you raise the risk of being caught without actually catching them? That is why deporting 12 million is not possible. The resources required to catch 12 million is way beyond what ICE has or even local police departments.
That'd be great. Police departments can focus on illegals but let all the other criminals go unpunished.
> The resources required to catch 12 million
I might be talking to a brick wall here, but the point is that you don't need to catch 12 million. You make a big splashy show of how bad it'll be if you do get caught, and then catch a number several orders of magnitude less than 12 million.
They already know what’s going to happen if they get caught. Although people keep trying to make it a “thing”, self-deportation is never going to make a dent in that 12 million.
Mondale - stale unforced candor? Any more of a winner politically in 2025 than in 1984?
Good catch. And not a winner, no. FDR himself couldn't have beaten the Gipper that cycle. Also, I'm not running for office!
I don’t think that’s a small point of disagreement. There’s over 10 million illegal immigrants in the US. Deporting them all would have immense economic and humanitarian impacts. Polling suggests that a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants has majority support, so I’m not sure that trying to deport all illegal immigrants would be popular.
But how far back do you go? And how much enforcement effort should go into deporting the guy who entered illegally 10 years ago and has an American wife and children? That's the kind of immigrant that is a plus for the economy even if he's not as valuable as Elon Musk. Value does not depend on how the person entered.
People were upset about people that entered with bogus asylum claims being allowed to stay. What DeSantis and Abbot did was cruel and immoral (I wonder what they say in Confession) but it just highlighted Biden's mistaken approach.
People are NOT clamoring for fewer H1B visas or rounding up settled immigrants who entered illegally n years ago. They are not opposed to immigration as an economic plus.
I don't believe there is a statute of limitations on being in the country illegally. It is a violation every day.
I am sympathetic to those who have listened as administration after administration has tacitly endorsed the idea that being in the country illegally (absent other criminal behavior) won't lead to deportation. I feel bad for them.
It can't be emphasized enough that the all of the equivocation on this point has not done anyone any favors. It's actually been a bit of a bait and switch that's made things worse by inviting more and more people to take their chances.
I also don't think Americans' hearts will bleed for the plight of long time resident deportees the way a lot of SB commenters assume, even if our wallets might. A while back someone shared a Tony Blair interview where he talked about how misleading polling can be, and the differences between 3 second, 30 second, and 3 minute conversations. I think it's applicable to this situation, maybe more than any other big issue in US politics.
I’m not arguing that legally they are not deportable, but that it woud be economically stupid to spend reauorces to reduce the labor force. And even politically I don’t think wanting to see long-established immigrants deported is a burning issue for many people. Nor is it necessary to deter new border crossing.
What specific crime is "being in the country illegally"?
I recently found out that they changed the hours of a local park. It used to be open until 2, but now its only open until midnight. I discovered this by being there at 12:30. (Got home, took the dog for a late night walk cause she was energetic).
I was informed by the police explaining that the park closed at midnight and them telling me to leave. I did so, and they were fine with it. But had I tried to stay, they would have "removed" me from the park because I was breaking the rules. I couldn't just stay because I was already there. Nor could I stay because I had gone to that park late in the past when it was legal. If I had stayed, I would have been committing a crime of being there illegally, similar to an immigrant coming to the US illegally and staying.
Does that answer your question?
Anne wasn't looking for an answer, she was merely trying to score some vague debating point.
It’s a crime to enter the country illegally: 8 U.S. Code § 1325 and 8 U.S. Code § 1326.
I asked what crime is being in the country illegally, not entering the country illegally. John from FL said he didn't think there was a statute of limitations on being in the country illegally, and I want to know what the crime of being in the country illegally actually is.
Just say you want open borders and make the case for it instead of this eye rolling charade of legalistic nit-picking.
Are you trying to argue that a person who sneaks across the border, or overstays a visa, cannot be returned to their home country by the federal government for those reasons alone? Because that's obviously not true, no matter how it's framed. If you enter illegally, you can be deported.
The talk above about a statute of limitations is a red herring. There is no extant time limit beyond which the federal government cannot deport someone who does not have legal, current immigration status inside the United States of America.
"I don't believe there is a statute of limitations on being in the country illegally. It is a violation every day."
This should be changed - people who have been resident for long enough should be automatically able to come out of the cold. 20 years (or 20 years since adulthood) seems reasonable.
Voters won't agree to that unless you can convince them you're serious about controlling the border. Otherwise it just becomes a, very bad, pathway to citizenship.
Isn't this a recipe for a continued permanent underclass of temporary migrants?
Like the US currently has?
Given that you can't expel the several million-strong underclass of illegal immigrants (because there are too many of them), the alternatives are to make them legal at some point or to keep them illegal until they die. The present policy of all parties appears to be the latter because there's a political faction prepared to lie that they can expel them.
If you want to stop new illegal immigrants coming, you have to work out why they come and change the situations that they come into. That probably means preventing them from working. Using social security data for immigration enforcement would be a good idea, as would criminalising employing an illegal immigrant.
You're right it's just about changing the size and situation of the already-existing underclass.
Is that a bad thing? Seems desirable to me. I had to pay $600 for a plumber recently. Should be $25
In order to deport just 25% of the illegal immigrants in this country you'd need actual camps and men with guns knocking down doors on a scale even the Trump administration doesn't have the stomach for. This is a fantasy. So it's just a question of whether we should lie about it. I don't think more politicians lying about the immigration enforcement they're going to do is really a helpful answer to anything.
The big impacts can or could come from deterrence, international agreements and economic conditions. I don't have a prediction on any of those, but I just mean to say that there are ways to get a large decrease in immigrants without necessarily having to do millions of deportations
I think those things can deter more illegal immigration. I don't see how you get the millions of people out of the country that have built lives here without dragging them.
I've heard this sentiment before and I don't buy the argument that if a law is unable to be enforced absolutely, then any increase in enforcement is pointless. If a leader wanted to get serious about enforcing the speed limit, we wouldn't say that it's a fantasy to stop speeding since we don't have the stomach to blanket every inch of roadway with speed cameras and traffic cops.
Bad example since we could easily eliminate the majority of speeding with a small increase in enforcement. If the goal is to throw 10 million people out of the country, it's not clear to me that throwing 1% out would really impact the other 99% that much, you need to actually go throw out the 10 million people.
There are two separate issues.
- Should we / could we do that on any meaningful number? I don't think it's feasible. I mean if going from .5% to 2% matters a great deal to you then sure, but this just doesn't seem to matter very much in the grand scheme. But yeah your point is taken.
- Assuming even republicans, let alone dems, aren't going to try to hit a meaningful percentage, what should politicians say about it? That's what I was getting at. I don't think making promises about deportations you know you aren't going to keep is great politics.
Maybe I'm sane-washing the Republican position, but when you're setting priorities it can be helpful to agree on your ideal end state as an animating principle (zero undocumented immigrants in the country, zero traffic deaths annually, no child left behind uneducated). Then you can take incremental actions with an eye on whether they support that principle.
For example, if your city has signed up for Vision Zero (0 traffic deaths on city streets) you could say that it's an impossible goal, accidents are always going to happen, there's no way to guarantee that an accident will never happen. But having the goal is good because you can look at individual steps like road diets, higher curbs, better signage, helmet campaigns etc and see if they contribute to progress.
Tying back to the article what drove me crazy about Biden's policies was until 2023 and the proposed immigration bill there was no real goal on immigration, just reflexive contrarianism that because the Republicans hated immigration, more of it must be good. Over the course of his term we ended up with what, +4M immigrants on specious asylum claims? It seems like the Democrats believe that people are sympathetic to long-term immigrants here illegally, so is the plan to kick the can down the road until they qualify for some future amnesty program? That's a non-starter so I guess I agree with you, there's nothing really that politicians can say about it unless you're willing to sign up for team mass deportations.
"on a scale even the Trump administration doesn't have the stomach for." I used to think this, but his approach to tariffs has suggested his stomach is in worse shape than I thought.
Stomach maybe, logistical capability, doubtful.
I think it if started to become well known that if Trump catches you here illegally, he is going to ship you off to an El Salvador prison, many people will "self deport."
I think that would be *very* bad on a many fronts, but seems more the angle they are going for.
definitely bad all around :/
I think advocating for mass deportations of peaceful contributing members of society is not a "small disagreement". I am politically a moderate, but I would personally never vote for any candidate who advocated that. Why not vote for Republicans if this is your viewpoint?
Because I'm not a single-issue voter, and I agree with Democrats more than the Trump-led Republicans.
Take another look at the graph of "who do you trust" from Matt's column. Border security is the issue where Democrats are trusted the least of any issue. And it is above 50% on the importance scale. So I think the party needs to address its weakness and leaning into a stance that people here illegally should be deported (while also advocating for much more legal immigration) could flip some moderate voters.
I don't think "do mass deportations, but also expand immigration" is a sizeable voting bloc. If people voted rationally perhaps that would be a winning position (being just one iota to the left of the Republican position), but they don't, it they vote expressively. I know "turnout" is overblown argument on the left, but Dems embracing mass deportations would absolutely affect turnout in a big way.
So crossing the border w/o authorization is a crime equivalent to robbery?
This is the problem I have with anyone who says "deport".
No, it is a crime equivalent to entering the country illegally. Who said anything about robbery?
So why not just fine them and place them on probation?
Because that would functionally lead to an elimination of our border. If entering the country illegally merely results in a fine, probation and the ability to stay, then our immigration stance is "pay a fine, don't commit additional crimes, and you can stay".
If you read what I said, you'd see that I didn't say even functionally no border. There is a border and border patrol. Someone entering illegally but unable to prove they have a job for some long period of time would be deported.
What I am against is an absolutist approach that would cause too much disruption for the US economy, and for which US voters don't even want to pay.
Update: Sorry I thought you were replying to another comment of mine where I did mention the conditions I thought should be applied. Yes, caught crossing the border or within 100 miles of the border, deportation. However, there should be a path to legalization for people that are without criminal records and have been living and working for at least 10 years, or have children who are U.S. citizens. And although saying the path is leaving and applying for legal entry is a path, it is not very practical.
Immigration is one of those Slow Boring hot-button issues, and at a certain level I think it's one of those ultimately irreconcilable topics because of psychological and emotional preferences.
I'm always cautious with work in political psychology, because doing good surveys is hard, but it does seem to be the case that people are roughly broken down between between a preference for sameness and a preference for difference. I'm not saying one is better - I know which one I prefer, but that is me and my preference doesn't really matter.
Being a political geographer, though, I would argue that if we're being honest with ourselves, technocratic details about immigration don't matter at a certain point. I agree that nailing the politics of immigration preferences - the topic of this essay - is essential for Democrats in the short term, but taking a step back, the notion of bounded political community that confers privileges on insiders and restrictions on outsiders relies on boundaries that are ultimately arbitrary. Deciding where those boundaries lie is inherently political - there is nothing natural or eternal or transcendent about them (on this point I disagree with e.g. Damon Linker, who wants to argue based on e.g. Isaiah Berlin that national communities have moral ontological status).
As is often the case, I'm not really sure what I'm trying to say other than that it strikes me that a lot of the debates that play out here over immigration seem to be more resistant to data-driven explanation and rely on prior beliefs and preferences more than is the case for other topics (big exception: trans issues, which is the ultimate "yell at each other" topic), and I think that's inherent to the topic itself.
In the spirit of the foregoing comment, insightful in my view, I have an honest question for the commentariat: what is it that has excited so much opposition, in the United States and in these pages, to immigration as a general proposition? As a matter of state capacity, I get it - but once there is state capacity to determine to a level of reasonable probability who's a felon and who's not, what are the fundamental sources of opposition to broad and permissive legal entry? The (apparently sincere) intuitive belief, amongst MAGAs and otherwise, that the magic solution to underemployment, deindustrialization and strains on federal, state and local services and resources is to stop immigration, both illegal and legal, would seem not to be empirically correct based on what most recognized economists think (so far as I am aware the only respectable academic economist who believes anything that looks like this is George Borjas at Harvard). In a credal nation, why don't more people look at someone who'd walk 2500 miles from Chiapas to Iowa to work in a meat-packing plant and see someone they want playing for Team America? This is sincerely not meant to be a snotty question - I am really very curious why this issue arouses more passion than, say, Medicare-for-all or zeroing out the long-term capital gains tax, or some such.
I think you’ll find a lot of different reasons, but big ones are mostly cultural. People really don’t like having their cities change due to an influx of people with different ways of living.
I think "scarcity mindsets", which are magnified by housing shortages and inflation, play a big role. There's also fear of difference and fear of change.
And then there are the "lived experiences". people have. It's easy enough to have a negative interaction, or to perceive negative competition (job, housing, school, etc.) with a few people of category "xzy", whatever xyz may be, and decide you don't like them. If a person has a recent negative experience of some kind that might push them in one direction. If they have a positive experience it might push them the other way.
Historically, big surges in immigrants have led to a backlash in the resident population. 14% of the population is foreign born now, close to the historical high of 15% in 1890.
We get big pulses in immigration, which sparks a backlash, pause and absorb them, and move on to the next wave.
My intuition though is that people feel more negatively about (at least illegal) immigrants who are somewhere else vs. those in their own communities. I wonder if there's survey data on this?
"what is it that has excited so much opposition, in the United States and in these pages, to immigration as a general proposition?"
Here is what I suspect drives anti-immigration sentiment in the US, roughly from most to least significant:
-Resource scarcity. For example, high housing costs.
-Dislike of cultural change or being made to feel like an outsider, language particularly.
-Concerns about crime.
-Suspicion that immigrants are economic net negatives (especially WRT schools).
-Concerns about loyalty to the US versus home nation.
-Racism.
-Competition for jobs.
You asked specifically about the US, but I think that citizens of many countries would have similar lists about immigration. Note that these are not my views, they're what I suspect drives anti-immigration sentiment for other people.
As a parent, I have the most sympathy for the argument that a rapid influx of non-English speakers will overwhelm public schools and require disproportionate resources be devoted to ESL students. And the downside will be disproportionately felt by working class families reliant on their neighborhood school.
I think, if I were to try to steelman it, it would go like this:
We lack the state capacity you say we have and we lack the broad legal authority for entry that you want. Once you have the first, we can discuss the second, but so long as we lack the first, I believe you are denying the resources and support needed to get it, because your actual goal is stolen base politics for de facto open borders, because despite big talk about rule of law, you're just as willing to sabotage enforcement of the law as Trump, you just don't admit that's what you're doing.
I think the idea of increasing entry bandwidth being some big holdup when the problem of "how to have somebody live here 60 years" has already been solved is pretty silly. But they've made worse arguments.
(Never seen "steelman" before, pretty clever.)
Steelman is not my formulation, can't claim credit.
But, just to push back, I think this thread makes it clear that 'how should we handle someone who entered illegally, but lived in the US all their life is not a solved problem as people genuinely disagree, but more broadly, the response I've heard is amnesty without true enforcement is simply de facto open borders, just done after the fact in repeated anesthesia and 'we do not trust you on enforcement, give us true enforcement and control and maybe we can talk about quotas or paths to citizenship.'
Do I trust that? Not really, but this is where government by lawsuit/executive action really fails and you need hard statutes that aren't open to nonconstitutional challenges.
"why don't more people look at someone who'd walk 2500 miles from Chiapas to Iowa to work in a meat-packing plant and see someone they want playing for Team America?"
Does that person want to Be An American, or do they just want a good job?
That's the difference.
I'll take them as an American over 90% of the members of the Trump Cabinet. At least they contribute positively to the country and break fewer laws.
The question is what *they* want, not what you want.
I will not 'take as American' someone who doesn't give a fuck about America, Trump or no.
"I will not 'take as American' someone who doesn't give a fuck about America"
I also wish we could deport Trump, his entire cabinet, and all Republican members of Congress to Russia/a remote island in the Pacific/a colony on Mars, but sadly, that is not achievable.
It's really tiresome to have several people unable to stop talking about trump in completely unrelated topics.
"It's raining today."
"I hope lightning strikes Trump!"
🙄
One response to this is that it isn't up to you to decide who we "take as American". If they are born in the country or naturalize as citizens, they are American, full stop. I also think it is very hard to tell what people's interior motivations are.
This discussion isn't about people who go through the path of naturalization or are born here. The example given was a guy who walks here from Chiapas to get a job.
If I could offer the outside view, as a non-American: the two goals are wedded and fused in the minds of many. We know it as the American Dream, and the people who I've personally met who pursue it do so with an assiduousness, determination, and (often) optimism I've rarely seen elsewhere. My subjective two cents: your mileage may vary.
If it was a good job, wouldn’t Iowans do it?
They might if they weren't being underbid by people who aren't worried about complying with wage and safety regulations.
Fair point. In my experience, the only people I know willing to pay $9/lb for ground beef are the kinds of liberals who defend illegal immigrants, FWIW.
The apples and potatoes that are grown and picked here in Maine are done so almost entirely through American citizen and legal Caribbean temporary visa labor, and nobody is complaining about high apple and potato prices. I think the "bazillion dollar lettuce" argument is not rooted in reality.
I think Matt's invocation of hard-coded "Malthusian intution" is pretty right on the money, and acknowledges that the objections to immigration are ultimately irrational in a way that doesn't accuse people of bigotry.
Surely the answer “majoritarian homophily” is suggested by the OP, no?
Riffing on a classic xkcd comic, "politics" is only legible as a topic if you specify the scale at which sovereign governance is exercised - so all politics is just applied geography.
I think you are mischaracterizing the current belief on immigration. While I'm sure some MAGA people truly do want zero immigration theactual argument is for there to be less than there is now and for it to be more controlled. I also wonder what exactly you mean by "broad and permissive."
Take this thought experiment. Let's imagine we create an Imigration AI that can determine if someone has ever committed a crime we care about in the past and can predict with perfect accuracy if they ever will in the future if allowed into the US. This AI also has effectively infinite capacity to review visa requests. Assuming we deny 100% of applicants with past or future crimes and that the majority of the world population aren't criminals, how many immigrants should we allow in every year? Even with the capacity to review visas do you believe society could handle a million, 10 million, 100 million per year? If there is a cap how do we decide what it is?
A lot of people (including many immigrants) just get angry about people “not doing it the right way”. But yeah, I agree with your overall point. Most people who complain about illegal immigrants have next to no appreciation for how difficult it is to run and staff a business where revenue comes exclusively from manual labor. They know the lack of Americans willing to do manual labor is a problem, but they don’t care enough to offer any solutions to the larger problem.
"other topics (big exception: trans issues, which is the ultimate "yell at each other" topic)"
God help us if circumcision ever becomes a political issue.
Don't even joke. The circumcision discourse Balrog can come for any comment section at any time, laying waste with its knotted scourge of flames from wars modern and antique, back unto the dawn of the message board.
But one of the advantages of talking about immigration as a positive value is to de-emphasize the "difference." Fleeing tyranny and wanting to work in a high paying field very "just like us" characteristics. That's why we want more of them!
I think the recent pain in Britain is a counterpoint. Brexit won because there were basically a huge number of people voting to express their dislike of foreigners.
But in the follow ups, as it became clear what the economic fallout was, there seemed to be a lot of people who regretted that decision. You mention being honest with ourselves, and I would be curious if people ever are, but not like you meant. I mean as in, questions like "Do you dislike foreigners more than you like low prices?"
Because I think a lot of people do not understand the connection, at all.
And worse: many voted for Trump because of the price of eggs! Immigration is a topic that is best shoved under the rug in a democracy. Unfortunately, it is always a hot button used by desperate politicians to leverage their way into power.
That's an interesting perspective. I personally think that because immigration is an emotional topic, it's impossible to discuss in non-technical terms. Even the most ardent immigration opponents are ok with some exceptions and that's where you can start to find common ground; like if a rich person wants to immigrate to build a factory and create jobs, if an American meets their wife in a foreign country, if a good foreign doctor is willing to move to their town to provide care, if temporary workers are willing to pick vegetables so they're cheap for Americans, etc etc.
When you get away from discussing the details of immigration, who can become an American, and move to platitudes, that's where it's difficult to find agreement. Platitudes can come from the anti-immigration camp, like "anyone that immigrates here isn't American, therefore immigration makes the country less American" (true but absurd if you follow that to it's conclusion, unless you're a Native American). Platitudes can also come from the pro-immigration camp, like "the average immigrant to date is a net benefit to the economy, therefore increasing immigration by reducing immigration requirements will be an even bigger gain" (possibly true but the conclusion does not necessarily follow).
Yes, establishing the boundary for who is an American is political, but so is literally every decision that the government makes. That's no reason to avoid talking about it and making your pitch for your preferred boundary.
Agreed - I don't think anyone should avoid talking about it and making their pitch. Quite the opposite! But I think it's always good to acknowledge that there are pre-political preferences that underlie political debates.
Recently Massachusetts ran out of shelter beds and had to start turning away undocumented immigrants from homeless shelters. I told some of my California friends and they were shocked and said that sounded awful, while completely ignoring the fact that California turns ~everyone away from shelter beds.
These are tough times and I feel for people struggling, but if you try to help everybody all the time, you can't actually help anybody.
Granted if you don't really try and then say "I tried" then you DEFINITELY can't help anybody.
that's not entirely true. it's more that the state stopped paying for the overflow space we were using last year. in that sense, yes, we "ran out", but it's because they shut down a bunch of temporary shelters.
It's really only tangential to immigration but, "The Federal government has started snatching people off the streets and disappearing them into a prison in El Salvador" is actual, genuine, take up arms against the government level tyranny. It's by far the scariest thing Trump has done domestically and I really really hope the judiciary still has the power to impose some process here before the only correct recourse becomes to start shooting ICE agents.
That one is really, really bad. But I think the assault on law firms -- Perkins Coie, Paul, Weiss and others -- is a little worse. It undermines the rule of law to target lawyers who represent clients who wish to challenge illegal, or potentially illegal, executive actions.
I'm gonna just call it a tie and say they're both really really bad!
I agree the law firm EOs are more broadly threatening to the rule of law, but I guess I think there's just more recourse there. Perkins Coie is absolutely gonna win in court. It's gonna take time and fighting those is gonna be costly for sure, but it's not really the same as, "Do I let this dude detain me or do I fight for my life because I'm gonna be disappeared?"
I think anybody who used a brief period of power to persecute the most powerful lawyers in America is going to spend the rest of their lives in courtrooms being driven into abject poverty. It will be a lot of fun.
Trump operatives: You have power because you won a stupid election, that probably wasn't even fair, by a sliver. They have power because they are the best at what they do, and do it on behalf of people just as rich as you.
"You have power because you won a stupid election, that probably wasn't even fair, by a sliver."
Which election wasn't fair?
You don’t have to agree with me but don’t play fuckin dumb. You know what election I’m talking about.
At the VERY least we know Elon took a giant piss on campaign finance laws.
"You don’t have to agree with me but don’t play fuckin dumb. You know what election I’m talking about."
I honestly didn't. You are the first person I've seen talk about the 2024 election that way.
As for campaign spending, Harris had 1.15 billion dollars for her campaign and 840 million in outside spending money to reach just under 2 billion. Trump had 463 million in campaign money and 988 million in outside spending money for 1.4 billion dollars. If Harris couldn't win with a 500+ million dollar advantage in campaign money, I don't think whether Elon was pissing on campaign finance laws or not made much difference.
One of the things I've respected recently about Democrats is that they accept the election results even when having lost. Republicans have been the ones crying foul anytime they lose and making stuff up. Be like Harris not Trump.
Please don't be like the 2020 election truthers and hop around and never say anything falsifiable.
State a claim and be prepared to defend it. If your defense of that claim will ever be "well okay *that* claim didn't make sense but I have a lot of others" then pick one of those others instead.
Blech. They won. We lost.
Move on.
The targeting of law firms for political purposes has been under-covered in my bubble. I'd be interested to read intelligent opinions about what the downstream effects are.
It looks like PW was able to negotiate an easy agreement without much more than a kowtow, but that's the kind of thing that looks like precedent-setting, starting a process where each subsequent agreement will require more subservience than the last. Seems bad!
David Lat at the Original Jurisdiction substack has been putting out thoughtful analysis and content related to the issue. Check it out!
Priorities matter, especially when the circumstances are dire. For me, rule of law goes first, even above functioning democracy. Democracy without rule of law is a farce.
Such an embarras de richesses, this Trump administration.
Yeah, this shock and awe stuff is really tough to deal with when the government is wrong/lying. I want undocumented gang members deported without a full criminal conviction, so they picked a good excuse. But I also want the government to
- not deport legal temporary residents
- respect habeas corpus
- have at least probable cause before performing a deportation
Is that too much to ask? I thought these people were trained, professional law enforcement. Has ICE just been secretly foaming at the mouth for four years waiting to disrespect the constitution and now they finally have a chance?
>Has ICE just been secretly foaming at the mouth for four years waiting to disrespect the constitution and now they finally have a chance?
I mean this with full sincerity and not an ounce of snark: yes. People who have been exposed to ICE and its agents in the past believe this not because fear has suspended their rationality, as I think many people here might have believed, but because it is literally true that the agency attracts people with authoritarian impulses who do not care about faithfully executing the law. The idea that the law is just a shield that helps Other People to come here and take advantage of our country, and it should not restrain immigration enforcement, is real and is genuinely believed by most people who willingly choose to become ICE agents.
I am skeptical of anyone who claims this about most any other law enforcement organization, but in the case specifically of CBP... I (white, male, unthreatening stature, conservative-to-normie appearance standards) have had a number of unpleasant, politically/racially-tinged, interactions with them even when entering through major urban airports returning from China and Europe. I can think of at least four in 20-odd border entries.
To say nothing of the fact that they just steal shit out of luggage absolutely at random and with no regard for value.
I can only imagine what the agents staffing a random land border crossing into Mexico act like, if this is what we get from New Yorkers and Angelinos.
Yeah, now that you mention it, my uncle started as a chill surfer dude, then joined CBP in San Diego and slowly turned into a gun-toting Mexican-hating nut.
"I can only imagine what the agents staffing a random land border crossing into Mexico act like, if this is what we get from New Yorkers and Angelinos"
If the comparison point is New Yorkers and Angelinos I would imagine they'd act much better?
ICE has always been thuggish, and CBP is even worse. Back in law school, I studied a case of a cognitively disabled US citizen who was deported to Mexico. He couldn’t even communicate - it took his family months to find him. That was during the GWB administration. So some of this egregiously unconstitutional behavior has been happening for a long time, it’s just getting coverage now.
for anyone wondering
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyttle_v._United_States
https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/us-citizen-wrongfully-deported-mexico-settles-his-case-against-federal-government
If you want to radicalize people against the Democrats then by all means start shooting ICE agents. You and a few illegal immigrant gang members are going to be heavily outgunned.
Which is why we have judicial review, so we're not stuck with the whole "blood of patriots and tyrants" thing all the time. Hopefully enough of us agree that should keep functioning.
A German-American friend's grandfather saw a neighbor get black-bagged in East Germany in the 1950s and got his family the fuck out of there as fast as he could. Where do we run to, I wonder, and how?
I guess we could wait another few decades for major political reform, that worked for East Germans. (Granted they still unquestionably have the "shitty half" of the country.)
AIUI, the East Germans are also the side of the country that votes disproportionately for AfD. So I'm not sure it's correct to say that political reform has "worked", past tense. Though certainly things are currently much more free than in the Cold War Era.
The average person is probably unaware of how much the undocumented immigration challenge has been growing and changing in recent years. The number of new arrivals has increased, the sending countries have diversified quite a bit, families have been replacing single men, and arrivals through airports (visa overstays) and the northern border have increased drastically. Most of this is in the link below:
https://www.migrationpolicy.org/news/unauthorized-immigrant-population-mid-2023
Another thing I think we miss is how much the above is driven by economics...of the sending counties. Places like El Salvador, Mexico and India might be poor by US standards, but are much wealthier than a generation ago. And at the same time, smuggling networks have grown more efficient alongside the demand. So now, many more people can afford to take the expensive journey than ever before.
I say all this because longer term solutions will have to take this changing environment into account.
This. These same factors are behind the rise of fake asylum applications too.
"The average person is probably unaware of how much the undocumented immigration challenge has been growing and changing in recent years."
If an issue is a challenge and nobody notices, was it really a challenge?
Yes, obviously? Why would it not be?
The main challenge is that enforcement has become much more difficult, and the pool of would-be migrants has greatly expanded. It's hard to "notice" that as a regular person, but it means the types of effective solutions that your government can offer are probably more extreme than they used to be. Democrat staffers, in particular, were caught off guard by this earlier in the Biden administration, when the tried to revert to ~2015 era policies and were met with a flood.
But if you took the meaning of "undocumented immigration challenge" to be the numbers of new migrants, this was actually noticed by many, perhaps most, people.
OK, yeah, that's fair.
Tangentially - IS enforcement more difficult? I am pretty sure that with modern networking technology and cheap drones it is incredibly easy. I mean, what we saw last term was an unprecedented number of border ENCOUNTERS - that is to say, nobody was sneaking past CBP. They were just walking up to them and claiming asylum. I would guess it's pretty frigging hard to get past them these days. (And if it's not, they could easily implement reforms that made that the case.) The issue is just that we can't quickly deport someone with a bogus asylum claim because of administrative bottlenecks. (Although maybe this is another semantic issue and the administrivia is what you mean by "enforcement.")
For three years Biden "erred" on the side of permissiveness. And I don't think he even really had a problem with the amount of immigration, because the changes to procedure that were implemented via EO in 2024 could have been done at any point. I support high immigration as a policy but when it's being done in such an obviously haphazard way it's not surprising that people get so bent out of shape. It's not how ANYONE would choose to run things.
Yes, it's a huge political error. But I think people also forget that the main issue in the election all through 2022 and 2023 was sure to be "the economy," to an extent that blotted out all other issues, and Biden thought the high immigration would help on that measure in a way that outweighed the downsides. It wasn't until inflation got near 3% and the economy started to really gain steam that suddenly immigration was the biggest problem in the world.
e: oops! You made a response just as I was editing to add those last two paragraphs. Feel free to respond to them!
I don't fully know, that's a good question.
But I would guess that on balance, it's easier, because #1 far more migrants arrive via Visa overstays or through the Northern Border and #2 Human Traffickers are always upping their game and constantly refining their routes and methods. Let's say it's $5,000 a person x 2,000,000 a year = 10 Billion in revenue, which is enough to fund sophisticated operations including bribery and technology.
Ah yes, so the "supply side" of border security is stronger than ever, but so is the "demand side." It is hard to imagine how that balances out without some detailed information, you're right.
One way to combat this is a punitive excise tax on overseas remittances. Every convenience store I stop in along the Santa Fe Trail to the Opera has a Western Union.
If you're prepared to punish the businesses, why not just require them to verify the legal right to be in the US before passing on the payment?
That's actually a very good idea and I'm surprised I haven't heard it before.
It's pretty easy to get around those verifications, especially if the verifier has an incentive for you to pass.
Depends how you structure it, if the verifier gets a giant fine if they get it wrong (and no, "I was fooled by a fake document" is not a defence; "I was fooled by a real document that was obtained fraudulently" would be a defence, of course) then the incentives run the other way.
Sure, but the more giant the fine the more expensive the larger the harm to legal hiring (because employers will want to err on the side of no mistakes) and the larger the collateral damage to people who "seem like they might be illegal".
Ditto if you go after money wiring services, except the collateral damage might be smaller.
Many of those immigrants (legal and illegal) have very poor relatives back in the old country who rely on those remittances for survival.
Cut off or penalize the remittances, and more people in poor countries may think, screw this, I can't survive here, might as well try immigrating illegally to a rich country! Unintended consequences!
Now I had not thought of that. Thanks. However, we could use remittance places to locate undocumented and arrest and deport them.
Except that many legal immigrants remit money to relatives in their home countries too.
A huge excise tax on Canadians, British, and French who try sending money to their banks back home, where they eventually plan on returning to and retiring, seems extraordinarily dumb.
The whole idea is wrapped in an unspoken "but rich white privilege means this law doesn't apply to you, it's only for poor brown people".
Plus, how would you even distinguish a "remittance" from a "wire transfer"? All the Vietnamese I know in America who send remittances use dodgy looking Vietnamese businesses that deal in cash and definitely aren't Western Union or Remitly.com.
Where are you getting the idea that this idea is targeting poor brown people? or Canadians, British and French?
"One way to combat this is a punitive excise tax on overseas remittances"
Canadians, British, Australians, and French all send money overseas. Every expatriate does it while working abroad. Lots of them come work in America for a few years but plan to return to their home country when they have children or when they retire. They don't leave their money in America.
OP made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants when talking about a punitive tax for sending money overseas. They almost certainly don't mean to massively penalize all the hard working Europeans in America. So how does enforcement actually work?
"OP made no distinction between legal and illegal immigrants when talking about a punitive tax for sending money overseas"
OP probably didn't think about it, so there's not too much to read into it, but if you assume he meant it for everyone, then that's targeting poor brown people even less.
"They almost certainly don't mean to massively penalize all the hard working Europeans in America"
If they're here illegally, he probably did mean to.
Liked for your second clause, but Jimbo in OPKS explicitly mentioned the "punitive excise tax" as being a means to deter illegal immigration for economic purposes, which I'm willing to accept as being racially coded.
I'm generally curious how you read a racial coding from that?
So when Pepsi CEO Ramon Laguarta remits money to Spain to pay property taxes and utilities on his home there he has to pay a punitive excise tax?
Not if he is working here legally. “Legally” the password is Legally- Alan Ludden
It's really going to suck once large portions of equatorial and near near equiotorial regions become uninhabitable due to climate change induced rising temperatures
Given the fact that the Trump basically pulled dead even with the Latino vote (due in large part to cultural conservatism yes, but also around enforcement!) I don't think there would be much political downside to Democrats squaring up to the position articulated here. The left might kick and scream but the most anti-enforcement parts of the coalition have beclowned themselves, so if anything making them visibly mad might help the democratic center by giving them a punching bag.
>due in large part to cultural conservatism yes, but also around enforcement!<
I don't buy that. I think the Latino vote was swayed *in large part* by inflation.
Nothing's ever 100% one thing or the other, of course, but....
Agreed on no mono causal explanations, but *Trump voice* many people are saying that working class Latinos want tougher border enforcement. Ruben Gallego wasn't talking tough on the border just for the benefit of Arizona whites, and the towns along the Rio Grande that are heavily Hispanic and swing towards Trump did so in no small part due to the asylum surge.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna155496
If it was just inflation then you're not going to see much difference between a border town and suburban Chicago, but if immigration plays a part then the border towns shifts will be different, which is what I believe was the case (but I might be misremembering). My recollection is that border towns swung more towards Trump than other parts of the country, indicating that they really did support his tougher-on-immigration stances.
Hispanics live in very many places, but there is a strong correlation between % Hispanic and % recent immigrant, including undocumenteds, for obvious reasons.
And from what I remember, most of those immigrant-heavy districts and neighborhoods shifted towards Trump in 2020 and 2024.
In other words, you can draw from a much wider data pool than low population border towns to support your conclusion.
The fact that this shift started in a VERY pronounced way in 2020, when immigration was not a major issue, also means that there are factors driving those border towns to the right that are not necessarily related to high immigration. (Although I'm sure immigration is playing a factor.)
What’s the basis for claiming that immigration wasn’t an issue in 2020? It seems to me that immigration has been a major political issue since Trump first descended his golden escalator.
The alternative proposed above (inflation) clearly wasn’t an issue in 2020, so what do you think accounts for the shift?
Here's the elephant in the room:
We are the party that aims to safeguard democracy, yes? We are outraged when government does not follow the rule of law, yes?
So how was it ever okay to gum up the enforcement of immigration law, to support sanctuaries from duly enacted laws (which, by the way, have rather broad support)?
We did it because we knew that we are right.
Now we are surprised that the middle of the country is not blown away by the obvious threats of MAGA to democracy and the rule of law.
In my opinion, Trump and his inner circle are a crass, dangerous group out to do things for reasons of their own. And certainly some of their supporters are simply ugly human beings who appreciate ugliness in a leader.
However, the vast middle of the country sees two sides, two sets of voices that are both threats to democracy, to majority rule, to the rule of law. Both sides come across as willing to set aside law and majority views if they are sure they are right.
As long as so much of blue America expresses such disdain for majority views, such support for getting around majority views, It's going to be an uphill fight to gain any lasting victory against the far Right.
It seems previous pro-immigration administrations played a very oversophisticated (read fucking dumb) game. They spent the money Congress allocated on law enforcement, but also heavily prioritized "just let the people go" as opposed to the detention-happy administrations.
Both are mostly legal. Why? How? WTF? Yes, because there's a huge fucking funding issue close to the heart of this. And this makes the various administrative courts extremely backlogged, to the point that federal courts just order ICE to either let people go or send them somewhere.
Of course the problem with this is this really led to a lot of people residing in the US with extremely weak legality. And then when Congress changed this or that these easily turned into illegality.
Is that better than keeping them indefinitely? Well, yes, yes. Is this a long-term solution? No.
The democratic positioning on immigration has always struck me as the worst of both worlds. They do not want to be explicitly in favor of open borders because that would be unpopular. At the same time they don't really view illegal immigration as a crime unto itself. For most voters that's a distinction without a difference. If anything it's actually worse than that because you basically end up advocating for the existence of an illegal underclass.
Also, because of the immigration lawyers lobby and skepticism of law enforcement points Matt makes, Democrats are forever tempted to just not enforce immigration laws and find excuses like TPS and paroling phony asylum applicants rather than enforcing immigration law while calling for statutory reforms.
I don't agree often with Freddie deBoer but he has a good argument against the progressive immigration stance from the far-left, "workers of the world unite" perspective.
"
Then there’s abandoning core progressive virtues out of a short-term desire to justify undocumented immigration, which happens all the time... Here’s a funny thing about me, as a leftist: I believe in the minimum wage! In think the minimum wage is good! I know ours is far too low, and that many generations of left-leaning people fought like hell just to have one! But now I’m supposed to celebrate the fact that there’s a slice of our population that illegally accepts less than the minimum wage and who work without all manner of protections and privileges the left has been trying to protect for decades? The fact that we have created a system in which undocumented people work as racially-and-linguistically marginalized Morlocks for the good of the American rich is ugly and awful and not something any progressive person should be defending.
And, yes, it makes me angry that so many undocumented immigrants work for less than the minimum wage; it’s a terrible failure of solidarity. That’s why Bernie Sanders used to be a pretty passionate immigration restrictionist, because of the way that undocumented labor undermines the fight for better labor conditions... Again, my preference would be to let immigrants in legally and then insist that they obey our minimum wage laws and other labor regulations, like everyone else. But I hear this claim from supposedly-progressive people, the idea that undocumented immigrants are good because our employers can exploit them, and it drives me insane. Lefty people support labor protections and don’t celebrate when people break them.
"
From https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/we-have-to-take-some-kind-of-an-l
Matt -- there is a factual error in the piece. You claim the alleged members of Tren de Aragua are being deported. This is not true. They have not been returned to Venezuela. They are being imprisoned in a third country's torture camp. This is not deportation, the technical term for this is 'extraordinary rendition'.
Bukele is an adored figure for people across Latin America, unbelievably popular at home and seen as a model by leaders in Latin America across the political spectrum.
I struggle to imagine a Democratic party that appeals to Latinos while saying the political figure admired in their homeland is evil and terrible.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1264586/approval-salvadoran-president-bukele/
Not a fan of polls myself, but the general consensus seems to be that Bukele is pretty popular. I know people from El Salvador. They love him. Gang activity previously stifled Salvadoran society. People can finally go outside, to the market, engage in small business endeavors without fear.
I’m not arguing that he isn’t popular in El Salvador. I think he is very popular in El Salvador. I am saying that he is probably unknown to most Americans.
Perhaps. But if you are Latino or Spanish speaking , you know about him.
The homeland of Latino Americans is America…
In a literal sense, sure that's more true than false, but it's not exactly rare to see Latinos flying a Mexican or Colombian or some other LatAm flag. At minimum, people of that description are going to be ok with Olivar's description.
Sure and I see plenty of Italian flags when I go to Wooster Square and plenty of Irish flags when I go to bars. Your point?
Milan, I understand the point you are trying to make (as a Jewish American without Israeli ancestry, it's annoying to me when people call Israel *my* homeland which it most certainly is not, and I'm sure you've experienced similar things as an Indian American).
But diasporas do pay quite a bit of attention to internal politics in their home country/region and I'm sure many Hispanic Americans have opinions of Bukele and know more about him than German or Irish Americans do.
Narrowly, my point is that some people still consider their country of birth to be a homeland in some sense.
More broadly, that some meaningful section of the Latino electorate has enough connection-to, and positive interest-in Bukele and his brand of politics, and so Olivar's original comment was useful even if worded clumsily.
Was that really so unclear? And is it hard to understand why less Irish / Italian Flag people would consider the country of their great-grandparents to be a "homeland" than would Hispanics who are mostly 1st or 2nd generation?
Right and my point is that most Latino Americans are not Salvadoran and so I’m willing to bet most Latinos (and indeed most Americans) have never heard of Bukele and don’t have an opinion on him.
Is Bukele really so popular amongst Mexican Americans and Puerto Ricans which together make up 70% of latino Americans? Salvadorean is ~4%.
Yes.
I am trying to find a relevant poll.
Please do because I am somewhat incredulous. Prepared to be proven wrong, however.
Here is a poll (in Spanish) of Bukele's approval among Ecuadoreans. It's in Spanish which I can't read but I got the gist.
https://www.lahora.com.ec/pais/nayib-bukele-valorado-ecuador-politicos-nacionales-encuesta/
This is not among Ecuadorean Americans, but:
1. Many immigrants are closely tied into their home country's politics due to having close family in that country
2. Ecuador is further from El Salvador than Mexico is so I would expect even more Mexicans to have opinions of him.
Serious question - what would you recommend be done with them, given Venezuela refuses to take them back? I understand there are probably better options then "torture camp" but what do we do with them?
I am not actually strictly opposed to the 'imprison them in a third country' solution if they are actually given a fair hearing that establishes, with evidence, that they are violent gangsters. This should of course be a prison that meets basic humanitarian standards, which Bukele's torture camps do not -- this latter point makes it especially galling that there is pretty convincing evidence they have misidentified at least one, and probably more, innocent individuals as being members of this gang. However, honestly they would ideally just be convicted of a crime in the U.S. court system at which point they can constitutionally be held in an American prison with no issues, like anyone else.
Now, my personal preference is that if a person is *not* a violent gangster, like the gay hairdresser who is very obviously not in the gang, they simply remain in the country on TPS or some other form of parole, as Venezuela is a hostile autocratic regime, the same way our country has approached Cubans in the past. But I understand the administration wants to minimize the number of non-citizens in the country very desperately (charitably, this is due to economic illiteracy -- more realistically, it is due to racial animus on the part of its voter base), and so I think the best solution in that case is to establish an agreement with a third country to accept these people under some sort of TPS-like arrangement, with no imprisonment.
As an absolute principle, I am extremely opposed to indefinite imprisonment of people who have only committed immigration offenses (or worse, in the case of at least one alleged member, no proven offenses whatsoever -- he was in the country legally).
I hear you on trying for basic humanitarian standards, but I'm still not sure where we could send them. With these El Trenes (or whatever they are called) - I understand there are false positives included in who is a gang member, but many or most probably are. And so basically nowhere wants them and no other country will take them. But if they haven't been convicted of a crime, you can't really put them in a US jail, either. So what can we do?
"more realistically, it is due to racial animus on the part of its voter base"
It's hard to decode opposition to immigration as "racial" given that all races have similar views, and even oppose / welcome immigrants from various countries at relatively the same levels:
https://globalaffairs.org/commentary-and-analysis/blogs/demographic-divides-immigration-and-diversity
To begin from a first point: when you are sending people to a foreign torture camp, the acceptable rate of type 1 errors is ~0%. So at base, there must be some sort of administrative hearing where the state has a burden to prove that the individual in question is a member of the gang, even if we say the state has no burden to prove there has been an actual crime. Currently, this is not happening, and so regardless of wherever the state is sending these people it is unacceptable.
Secondly, I am not sure there's any reason to believe that Bukele's El Salvador is literally the only the country in the world willing to imprison these people in exchange for financial compensation. I am pretty confident this is in fact not true, and the reason El Salvador was chosen specifically because Bukele's policy of doing sadism theater is popular among the American right. The state has the option to hold these people for, I believe, up to 6 months without convicting them of a crime purely for an immigration offense. They could have rounded them up, used that time to find an acceptable prison, and then rendered them to that country.
Last, if part 2 was implemented and you still wanted to get rid of all the other Venezuelans, you would have a much easier time of convincing another country to accept them under a TPS-like arrangement if you had already sent the gang members to a prison. Again, it might require compensation, but the government doesn't get to waive basic human rights for minor fiscal inconveniences.
As for your point about immigration breakdown by race, my suspicion is that the situation would look much different if instead of deportation and welcoming/unwelcoming you specifically asked questions about whether immigrants, legal or illegal, should be held in foreign prison camps on suspicion that they could be gang members, even if a few false positives happen. I think you would see a lot of Trump's base of uneducated, lower-income whites would be perfectly fine with that but his more marginally attached Hispanic supporters most likely would not. The latter group is more motivated by economic illiteracy than race, but the former group is motivated by both and race takes precedence. I could be wrong, though. If the current policies continue we can get some idea by observing the reaction among Cuban and Venezuelan citizen communities.
Good answers on where to send them.
If you phrase the question as you did: "immigrants, legal or illegal, should be held in foreign prison camps on suspicion..." then, yes, Hispanics would be less for it, but that's simply because they are more likely to be immigrants or mistaken for immigrants. Not because of some racial or pan-ethnic solidarity. If the question was modified to "only Venezuelans" you're not going to get a big change in the percent of Mexican-Americans who care.
But if you write "Venezuelans or people who are mistaken for Venezuelans by ICE agents", then I think a lot of Mexicans would be concerned about that.
And that's not out of solidarity, but out of an understanding that ICE agents may mistake them for Venezuelans.
Of course, that's how a race (or at least a "minoritized" race) is formed - people who face the same discrimination tend to band together to some degree.
If you can't convict them of a crime, or present enough of a reasonable cause to jail them, then you just have to suck it the fuck up. I can't believe people are even acting like this is negotiable.
It's not even like these are fucking Al Qaeda terrorists, they're petty criminals who mostly victimize other Venezuelan immigrants.
In your view, by virtue of being "mostly petty criminals" they become un-deportable? Probably no other country in our hemisphere would take that viewpoint, fwiw. Maybe Canada?
No. That isn't what I said at all. My point is that if you are going to make an argument that there is a critical threat that should supersede established legal processes, that argument makes a lot more sense with a purported terrorist than it does with a purported gang thug.
How do we justify sending anyone in the United States to a prison without a conviction? We can legally detain them here, but they are in the United States and they have rights. How do we justify sentencing them to prison without a trial?
Because Trump is playing politics here. The legalities are an afterthought, if even that. He figures that most people won't care about due process in dealing with illegal foreign gang members, so he'll deport them, take the political W and move on. Even better if the courts rule against him, because then he can attack them for being soft on crime or whatever other bullshit he wants to throw at them.
I meant "legally justify." I understand Trump doesn't care about what is legal, but I do.
The US hold and/or supervises 2-5 million people. At a yearly cost of more than 182 billion.
Perhaps it can bear the additional burden of keeping 250 more alleged violent individuals.
My position on optimal immigration levels has always been "the maximum level the public will tolerate." I'm so thoroughly convinced of the economic benefits of immigration, and the ability of America to assimilate migrants, that I personally consider the gains to outweigh the costs in almost every case. But I'm not the average voter. For that reason, whichever compromise those of us with pro-immigration views have to make with the public is worth it. So sometimes that may mean the public is in a restrictionist mood and that should be accommodated. I'm not even necessarily opposed to an immigration pause for a few years if the public demands it. That might lead to sluggish economic growth, which would cause other problems.
The one place where the GOP may push too far is if they go all in on these weird White Nationalist adjacent talking points about ruining the lifeblood of America or something like that. The average voter is skeptical of immigration because they have a (mostly wrong) lump of labor of economics, and overestimate how much crime immigrants commit, both legal and illegal. They're not full blown White Nationalists. Even then, I don't know if they'd face backlash for talking this way as much as be committing the political sin of "rambling about shit nobody cares about."
I am with you, but pro-growth immigration policy is a hard thing to punt on, because that's an actual opportunity cost to people in the United States, who will be poorer because of overly restrictive policy.
You can and should and must acknowledge public opinion, but when the public opinion is harmful to the country, the economy or national security, we should put as much effort, or more, into changing it as pandering to it.
(One thing I am extremely sure is not effective for changing broader attitudes about immigrants is blockbuster Broadway musicals extolling their virtues. I do very much enjoy that show on its own merits, though.)
The argument that Biden's immigration policy was a gigantic economic win is incredibly straightforward and well-supported but even people like Matt are barely willing to make it. It was a horrible political failure, and it was stupid policy, relative to what could be done with an actual legislature. But letting the people in was almost definitely a good thing, as far as the rest of our wallets are concerned.
"The argument that Biden's immigration policy was a gigantic economic win"
Sorry while I'm broadly in favor of immigration, that just isn't true.
Paul Krugman has written many columns on the subject. I know other people have written about it, but I’m having a hard time getting to them on Google because Paul Krugman wrote so many damn columns about it. I linked to one of them.
You don’t have to agree with Krugman but it is, at best, an oversimplification to say it “just isn’t true” when one of the most decorated economists of the last 30 years thinks it is.
Krugman did some good economic work, then flushed most of his credibility down the drain for partisan politics
in other words "nuh uh!"
compelling
I don't think Americans mind legal immigration as long as the economy is good. So I think it can be done, but politicians have to be careful.
Meh. Even if you want to deny that the economy was good in 2024, which, fine, whatever, there’s no arguing that it was better than 2022 and 2023 and people were no less agitated. If what you said was true then there would have been a lightening of the mood. But numbers towards even legal immigration fell instead. (And of course the Springfield OH story shows many Americans don’t care if you have legal status if you aren’t up to their personal snuff.)
What I saw was that anti-immigration sentiment was most strongly correlated with how much right wing media talked about immigration, and not much else.
Granted - how much right wing media talked about immigration was correlated with the level of immigration. But it was more strongly correlated with inflation falling - the more the economy improved the more they pivoted to “migrant crime.”
Few things:
The economy was really good in 2024. To extent people were mad about the economy, I think there was a delayed reaction to 2022.
The reaction to immigration had to do with migrants flooding cities, thanks in part to Greg Abbott shipping them there. That wasn't imagined, it actually happened.
I mostly agree with you about the economics of immigration. That's why I want politicians who share my view to prioritize minimizing chaos, and making sure there isn't slack in the labor market, otherwise immigrants will get blamed.
Is it possible to tie immigration to the strong issues of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid? Due to our aging workforce, these popular programs will go broke unless we get some young, hard working immigrants into the country
Every politician from both parties lies about the fiscal state of SS and Medicare. Tying them to immigration would require politicians to speak truthfully about SS ans Medicare, and I don't see that happening.
I think you can do that AFTER you secure the border.
But Democrats need to build there credibility first
That is just way too complicated for voters to understand, sadly.
Does the maths add up?
Yes.
Immigrants use almost no social services because they are young and healthy and insanely hard-working. So their fiscal demand impact is minor. They pay payroll taxes for people who are currently retired, which is crucial because we are currently at a peak ratio of elderly-to-prime age population. (This ratio will start falling soon so we don't need to be concerned about a future full of elderly immigrants. Also, immigrants have more kids, so there will be more people to pay for their Social Security and Medicare.)
And if you do not have a legal right to work, you are paying payroll taxes under a fake Social Security number (probably that of a dead person), which means you will never get the benefits. So the payroll taxes of an unauthorized worker are just pure "profit" for Social Security.
Does anyone here actually believe that the Democratic Party would sincerely advocate for the creation of a large class of people who will be permanently ineligible for Social Security? I certainly don't. The moral hazard problem is huge! Once that class exists there will be enormous pressure to grant them Social Security.
Someone elderly having no pension at all sounds like a big social problem.
You think the Democrats should argue for maintaining an abject class of servants with no political rights to fund the retirement of citizens?
Super cool.
Is this response a joke?
Please observe the context in which I made my post and then respond to my words, rather than whatever is going on in your own head.
The context is you making a long comment about how illegal immigrants work really hard, consume free services, and don't get to collect SS benefits.
I'm asking if you think this is a policy that should be formally enacted.
You can say yes or no, it's pretty simple.
But they get old, an analysis that doesn't adjust for age is useless.
I feel like this was addressed multiple times in my comment. Maybe give it another skim?
But at some fundamental level it is deceptive.
Why are these people more productive? Because we are comparing them with children and pensioners.
You have no fucking idea what's even going on in this conversation Oliver, tap out.
That isn't age adjustment, the question is how they compare to non-immigrants of the same age, I wasn't speculating about long term impact on pensions which is hard to know.
I don't know. One could infer from the physical exertion that is typically involved in a migration from Venezuela or Central America that your average migrant is in better health than an American of the same age, but obviously that is just kind of an inference and not data.
Of course, we have had many waves of immigration, and it would probably be illuminating to see how immigrants fared in those generations.
Two years ago, a GOP senator (I think it was Marshall) told me an amnesty made sense in exchange for 20 some odd billion dollars for a border wall. I reported what he said. He got dragged. His team got dragged. Everyone got dragged online except me, since all I did was ask the simple question: "Would you do an amnesty for a border wall?"
To some, mine was a ridiculous question to go round asking dozens of Senators, but my editor and I actually learned a lot about how 'amnesty' makes Democrats nervous, preferring 'pathway to citizenship' or 'pathway to earned status' and so on. Border wall, too, was a non-starter for Senate Dems.
Republicans pivot to border security when they don't want to make a deal on relief because 'a secure border' is a bullshit moving goalpost that allows them to make a shopping list of items that, in aggregate, will never create 'a secure border'—not between the U.S. and Mexico, let alone around the whole ass country.
Within a week, Marshall (I think) had reversed his position: No Amnesty or relief of any kind ... until "the border is secure" which is never gonna happen via any of the proposals that the GOP has ginned up in the three Congresses that I've been on the Hill.
Now they're putting together another grocery list, this time for a big ass "border" spend, perhaps through reconciliation, by which they actually mean mass deportations nationwide, not just on the border.
But it's disingenuous too say Dems have given up. There are relief proposals that get introduced pretty much every week that could be attached to an enforcement bill to make it bipartisan. There's just no consensus on what to fight for.
I think "the lack of consensus on what to fight for" is core to this piece. When doing researching for this, I was pretty surprised how little Democrats have spoken publicly about immigration policy over the past few months. And I think a big part of that is that the party is pretty lost on what an affirmative vision for that looks like. They know what Trump is doing is deeply inumane, but they have no credibility to argue that when they're in office, they'll do the job better.
A big part of the challenge is the pool of would-be immigrants has vastly expanded. Average incomes and transport infrastructure have improved in most sending countries. Technology makes staying in touch with loved-ones and financial transfers much easier. And human-smuggling networks have become more efficient, while information on how to do it is exchanged faster than ever online.
So Obama-era enforcement will result in far higher than Obama-era immigration. I don't know where the balance is, but Trump's lurch right is less of an excess than it probably appears to many Democrats, assuming you want to have a good chance at winning elections.
I'm still waiting for the day when "big ass amnesty" as a starting point to a robust immigration bill. That's a story I'd cover.
"America should encourage the immigration of people who can prove they are high skilled and can assimilate conditional on them not committing a crime" would that statement be Dem coded or GOP coded?
It is like "enforce gun laws in violent inner cities" in that the moderate pragmatic option is anathema to most partisans.
Enforcing gun laws in violent inner cities is racist. Or so I’ve been told.
I think that is a bit of a strawman, but there are lots of people who are keen on gun laws but very resistant to the idea of supporting police actually enforcing gun laws.
I’ll give you “a bit,” but much of the rhetoric I heard following the George Floyd riots used similar wording.
While I am on board with the OBA take on immigration, we should learn from Canada’s recent about-face on its immigration policy.
They tried a mini version of OBA (“one hundred million Canadians”?), but they did it without zoning reform / housing liberalization. Now the perception is that immigration is fueling their housing crisis, and were it not for the Trump trade war the Liberal Party was about to get trounced by the Conservatives.
Thing is, Democrats don't get credit when cracking down on immigration because, as usual, it's the vibes and branding. You're not going to seem as serious as the other guys at this point unless you're yelling about "shithole" countries, regardless of policy.
I don't know if an overall party policy shift will help as opposed to having a loud but small hawkish Dem faction. The latter seems more credible to me because they are going against party. But I dunno, my ideological views on immigration are almost libertarian so I have no idea what activates people who are wired to be fearful of it.
Someone upthread mentioned a woman in Colorado who has been an open activist for 20 years who never got deported despite final orders of deportation (which is supposed to be the end of the road). She is being defended by all the Democratic politicians because she is an activist and our politicians love anyone connected with The Groups.
I would argue this isn't just vibes. "She's an open activist who has been ordered by courts to leave the country after full due process and despite having lots of lawyers. Democrats want to keep her in the country even though she's a literal scofflaw, because she has political and activist connections" is something the voters see. And we need to knock stuff like that off. She should have been deported years ago and should be now.
We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!
If there was some magical deal available in which Democrats win every federal election for the next decade but racial, ethnic, and sexual slurs were legally, socially, and professionally unsanctionable, would Democrats take the deal?
I would hope not. The upside is only upside for the 20% of the population that are committed partisans. Meanwhile 99% of everyone else would hate that.
That was essentially the state of things in the 1930s and 1940s.
There are also a lot more people who want to freely use slurs than you or I would prefer.
I feel like that's not quite right. Some of the words we now consider slurs, or least impolite, were the plain, non-insulting words, and only took on a negative connotation over time due to their association with old-timey thinking. I'm thinking of words like "retard" or "oriental" or maybe "negro" or "chinaman". People could have said those words without any demeaning or insulting intent back then, because no such intent was yet imbued in the words.
And there's never been a time when insulting speech had zero social or professional consequences. What might have been different was who you were allowed to insult or dismiss, but that wasn't about a particular word choice, that was about the actual rules of society.
"An idea I keep floating is a small bump in employer-side payroll taxes for foreign-born workers to help keep Social Security solvent."
This actually sounds pretty Trumpy and should definitely be pitched to him as a superior alternative to tariffs. Fulfills his fetishes of sticking it to foreigners and making them pay for stuff. He already mused about selling American citizenships for $$$. If making foreign residents pay higher taxes is all that's needed to make him open to immigration, it sounds like a win win win for American citizens, foreigners hoping to immigrate here, and Trump.