For all the "deport them all" people. There is no way to do that. 12 million is too many to catch and deport. Additionally, I'd guess a major part of that 12 million are actually productive. What would happen to the economy if 12 million workers disappeared?
The moderate position is if they've been here long enough (pick a time) and have been working and haven't committed crimes, they pay a (substantial) fine and are on probation for awhile. It solves the "illegal" issue, and also doesn't destabilize the economy.
I feel crazy every time immigration is brought up. Where in the country is immigration an issue? I live in a border state and the only issue I explicitly see is homelessness (fentanyl I guess but that is a symptom and not the cause).
I just feel the people who hate and want to deport immigrants the most are the ones who are the most insulated from the issue.
A most informative look at immigration and voter preference for an old man who has served in the US Navy and lived and worked in foreign countries for nearly 50 years. My ancestors were Irish and German, and I have only a vague idea of what a good and workable immigration policy for the US should be. I did encounter comments in my work overseas. One of those was that only the riffraff emigrated to the US and the best and brightest remained in England. This was from an Englishman who had never lived in another country. There was a spurt of Freudian pleasure asking him to be seated as a descendant of this riffraff would be chairing the technical meeting and we would adhere to the timeline for the many issues to be covered in the meeting.
Matt did a great service for me by including the graphic on importance and trust of issues for Republicans and Democrats. The results of the last presidential election are clear based on this graphic. It is also clear that the campaign run by the Democrats was woefully unaware of the importance and trust to voters on the issues in the campaign. I choose not to accept that some of the leaders of the Democratic party were aware they were beating a dead horse with the issues they chose to emphasize in trying to get the first non-white, female elected to the presidency of the US. Many will think this is far too generous and I will not disagree with them.
A graphic of this sort should have been presented to all voters to help educate them about the issues they should focus on and to keep their comments and message focused on those issues.
From my perspective the Democratic Party has become the Republican Lite Party separated only by their greater empathy for citizens in need and led by too many professional politicians with too little awareness of what is important to voters.
I have a cynical take on how Dems got here: We all know Dems by and large are not shy about attacking progressive economic positions and using dirty tactics to undermine the Sanders left in primary elections. This is partly because they know what is politically unpopular/risky and partly because they depend on the corrupt campaign finance system.
But on the issue of illegal immigration, the same cut-throat Dems are like deer caught in the headlights and can't seem to find their voice to attack the "no human being is ever illegal" types on the left. Being the cynic that I am, I think the reason for this is probably because Dem politicians and their extended families are making money by being involved in immigration non-profits and NGOs that get state and federal funding in various places.
The right likes to invest in a prison/detention-center industrial complex and get federal funding for that. The Dems on the flip side might be similarly involved with immigration/asylum NGOs and nothing can strengthen your core beliefs like having a funding stream attached to holding said beliefs. This is the only rational explanation that is compatible with the suicidal actions of the Biden admin on asylum.
Sorry but I don't think very highly of the actual moral convictions of any Dems.
You may be correct, but my suspicion is that Democrats are also "like deer caught in the headlights" on immigration because pro-immigration groups were very successful in branding all opposition to immigration as a form of racism. (And, to be fair, a large part of the opposition to immigration *IS* motivated by racism!) As I've commented here before, invoking "racism" for the past 40 to 50 years has effectively been a cheat code that bypasses all normal abilities of those on the American left to critique something (whether regarding electoral impacts, cost-benefit, actual effectiveness at resolving a problem, etc.).
On position taking in primary debates, Dems circa 2019 were in a bind as Trump broke our minds with unconstitutional/illegal child separations but Biden in fact ran as a centrist on immigration even after Harris tried to label him a racist over busing.
But on the matter of actually governing the Southern border once in power, no one would have called Biden racist if he had done in 2022 what he eventually did in 2024 in terms of restricting asylum system abuse. Even if some "groups" complained loudly as they did by calling Obama "deporter in-chief" no one would have cared. Obama paid zero price with the Dem base for keeping deportation numbers high. So I can't convince myself that the suicidal actions of the Biden admin on the migrant issue were simply out of fear of being labeled racist.
This discussion seems woefully out of step with the times.
What is the value of crafting an immigration policy, when the legality of anybody's immigration claim is simply determined by the whim of the current secretary of state and his toadies? We cannot trust the administration to follow the plain meaning of the laws. We cannot trust the courts to provide timely judgments as to the meaning of the law, nor remedies in cases of blatant malfeasance by the agents of the government. We cannot even trust Congress to raise questions about this behavior.
Under these circumstances, the laws are what the president says they are, and unless/until that changes, debating what those laws should be seems pretty pointless.
I read this article and scrolled pretty far through the comments, and nowhere does anyone come to grips with the fact that Democrats **tried very hard** to pass bipartisan immigration reform **several times**, and Republicans scuttled their attempts because it is much more helpful to retain immigration as a wedge issue. There is no point in admonishing Democrats to take a more moderate position. Republicans are not interested in fixing this.
Any of the so-called bipartisan immigration reforms suffer from how things happened after the 1986 amnesty first approach. There was amnesty, but no enforcement. As Roger Daltrey said, we don’t get fooled again.
Not to dox myself, but I was born in 1986 and am coming up on 40 years old. Both parties are very different now (to say the least), as is the situation on the ground.
Suppose it's true that bipartisan bills are forever impossible. The Democrats still have a ton of agency. Biden himself became much stricter on immigration in 2023, after two years of Matt Y, right here at SlowBoring, writing that he should close asylum loopholes and get a handle on the issue.
And the Democrats can still message on immigration when they are out of power. At present, they don't seem to have any unified message and are simply reacting. If they are going to talk about immigration while out of power, they ought to do so wisely.
I followed the link to the AP story on tourists being thrown in deterntion. I got chills and a pit in my stomach. There has to more going on. Right? What in the actual F? Someone bring me back down…
Respect for the law is a two way street; the law must be deserving of respect by being reasonable and logical. Our immigration laws are not reasonable and logical. It is not reasonable and logical to get between a willing buyer and a willing seller, a willing employer and a willing worker, a willing landlord and a willing tenant, because the transaction crosses a line in the sand drawn by politicians to divide people and enhance their own power.
It’s hard to go from if you don’t agree with our (Democrats) approach and language and everything we say about immigration then you are a Racist Bigot to I understood your concerns and rest assured I will give them serious consideration and you should vote for me.
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.
Like Matt, I have lots of sympathy for would-be immigrants, and my grandparents also came here around the turn of the last century. And I also don't believe in open immigration. So what I am not seeing is people working on where we would want to be in the future (skipping for the moment the mess we are currently in). How many people can we take every year? How do we decide how to choose those people? Merit (like Canada)? Family ties? Asylum? Should people who live closer to us, as in Mexico and Central America, have more moral status than people who live further away? Does it matter if most of our immigrants come from a few countries, or are we better off taking a wide variety? Do we care if immigrants share "our" values--whatever American values are these days? Where are people talking about this???
"How do we decide how to choose those people? Merit (like Canada)?"
Good news for anti-immigration people: now that the Trump administration completely effed up Canada-US relations, insulting Canada and talking about annexing it/"51st state"/"Governor Trudeau," to the point that nice, polite Canadians are booing The Star-Spangled Banner at hockey games, you'll be lucky to find ANY Canadians who want to come here. Why would they?
That aside, I think your questions are good and we should discuss them. I personally think "wide variety is good" and "we care if they share small-l liberal values (like the value of the individual over the collective)."
Good point and it shows the real lack of leadership on the Dem side right now. I forget if Matt wrote this, or if it was somewhere in the comments, but someone mentioned that the Dems are currently ineffective in part because they have no unified vision of what they are actually "for" on this issue.
Restoring small-d democratic norms is *non-negotiable*. Things like "it's not okay to try to overturn an election" and "it's not okay to use the DOJ as a weapon against your political opponents," etc.
This means *everybody* who is still for small-d democracy and, therefore, against Trump has to unite. Of freaking course these people will disagree on a ton of things in matters of policy, because we're talking a coalition that spans everyone from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to AOC and Bernie Sanders.
In contrast, MAGA is unified, because their message is "Trump our God King who can do no wrong" and uniting around that message is super easy, barely an inconvenience!
That's how you get unified Republicans (= true MAGA believers and those who hate him but are terrified of him and hence STFU; those are the only two kinds of Republicans nowadays, with the occasional exception of Senators Murkowski and Collins) and disorganized Democrats.
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.
It's not exactly related to the point of the post as I can't imagine it'd sway any swing or moderate voter, but lately I've thought a lot about how there was possibly an opportunity here to reframe some of the issues around immigration in a way that could have gotten some of the members of the team to knock off some of their most counterproductive rhetoric.
It is, technically, a really good sign that a lot of people from other countries want to come here. How optimistic of them! Many people of all different kinds, from all over the world, are going to great lengths to come to America. Maybe this isn't such an evil, bad country, the way your anthropology TA (millionaire parents) seems to think it is. Obviously a lot of it is economic, but there aren't a lot of credible ways for us to get in on "patriotism" and this seems like an okay candidate.
"Democrats wouldn’t necessarily need a response beyond throwing Biden under the bus"
I very much enjoyed the piece overall but I would think you, of all people, Matt, would not be on the "throw Biden under the bus" bandwagon. This isn't the first time you've endorsed the strategy, either.
I'm absolutely baffled by how people think "we messed up and nominated a terrible President and then told you he was great for four years" is supposed to be a winning message. How did leaving Carter to the wolves work out for the party?
People are going to notice that things are worse under 47 than 46. Why would we not point that out, and instead continue to tell them they were right to hate the most effective policy President in decades?
I missed the part about what the Donks were going to say about immigration....
For all the "deport them all" people. There is no way to do that. 12 million is too many to catch and deport. Additionally, I'd guess a major part of that 12 million are actually productive. What would happen to the economy if 12 million workers disappeared?
The moderate position is if they've been here long enough (pick a time) and have been working and haven't committed crimes, they pay a (substantial) fine and are on probation for awhile. It solves the "illegal" issue, and also doesn't destabilize the economy.
I feel crazy every time immigration is brought up. Where in the country is immigration an issue? I live in a border state and the only issue I explicitly see is homelessness (fentanyl I guess but that is a symptom and not the cause).
I just feel the people who hate and want to deport immigrants the most are the ones who are the most insulated from the issue.
A most informative look at immigration and voter preference for an old man who has served in the US Navy and lived and worked in foreign countries for nearly 50 years. My ancestors were Irish and German, and I have only a vague idea of what a good and workable immigration policy for the US should be. I did encounter comments in my work overseas. One of those was that only the riffraff emigrated to the US and the best and brightest remained in England. This was from an Englishman who had never lived in another country. There was a spurt of Freudian pleasure asking him to be seated as a descendant of this riffraff would be chairing the technical meeting and we would adhere to the timeline for the many issues to be covered in the meeting.
Matt did a great service for me by including the graphic on importance and trust of issues for Republicans and Democrats. The results of the last presidential election are clear based on this graphic. It is also clear that the campaign run by the Democrats was woefully unaware of the importance and trust to voters on the issues in the campaign. I choose not to accept that some of the leaders of the Democratic party were aware they were beating a dead horse with the issues they chose to emphasize in trying to get the first non-white, female elected to the presidency of the US. Many will think this is far too generous and I will not disagree with them.
A graphic of this sort should have been presented to all voters to help educate them about the issues they should focus on and to keep their comments and message focused on those issues.
From my perspective the Democratic Party has become the Republican Lite Party separated only by their greater empathy for citizens in need and led by too many professional politicians with too little awareness of what is important to voters.
I have a cynical take on how Dems got here: We all know Dems by and large are not shy about attacking progressive economic positions and using dirty tactics to undermine the Sanders left in primary elections. This is partly because they know what is politically unpopular/risky and partly because they depend on the corrupt campaign finance system.
But on the issue of illegal immigration, the same cut-throat Dems are like deer caught in the headlights and can't seem to find their voice to attack the "no human being is ever illegal" types on the left. Being the cynic that I am, I think the reason for this is probably because Dem politicians and their extended families are making money by being involved in immigration non-profits and NGOs that get state and federal funding in various places.
The right likes to invest in a prison/detention-center industrial complex and get federal funding for that. The Dems on the flip side might be similarly involved with immigration/asylum NGOs and nothing can strengthen your core beliefs like having a funding stream attached to holding said beliefs. This is the only rational explanation that is compatible with the suicidal actions of the Biden admin on asylum.
Sorry but I don't think very highly of the actual moral convictions of any Dems.
You may be correct, but my suspicion is that Democrats are also "like deer caught in the headlights" on immigration because pro-immigration groups were very successful in branding all opposition to immigration as a form of racism. (And, to be fair, a large part of the opposition to immigration *IS* motivated by racism!) As I've commented here before, invoking "racism" for the past 40 to 50 years has effectively been a cheat code that bypasses all normal abilities of those on the American left to critique something (whether regarding electoral impacts, cost-benefit, actual effectiveness at resolving a problem, etc.).
On position taking in primary debates, Dems circa 2019 were in a bind as Trump broke our minds with unconstitutional/illegal child separations but Biden in fact ran as a centrist on immigration even after Harris tried to label him a racist over busing.
But on the matter of actually governing the Southern border once in power, no one would have called Biden racist if he had done in 2022 what he eventually did in 2024 in terms of restricting asylum system abuse. Even if some "groups" complained loudly as they did by calling Obama "deporter in-chief" no one would have cared. Obama paid zero price with the Dem base for keeping deportation numbers high. So I can't convince myself that the suicidal actions of the Biden admin on the migrant issue were simply out of fear of being labeled racist.
This discussion seems woefully out of step with the times.
What is the value of crafting an immigration policy, when the legality of anybody's immigration claim is simply determined by the whim of the current secretary of state and his toadies? We cannot trust the administration to follow the plain meaning of the laws. We cannot trust the courts to provide timely judgments as to the meaning of the law, nor remedies in cases of blatant malfeasance by the agents of the government. We cannot even trust Congress to raise questions about this behavior.
Under these circumstances, the laws are what the president says they are, and unless/until that changes, debating what those laws should be seems pretty pointless.
I read this article and scrolled pretty far through the comments, and nowhere does anyone come to grips with the fact that Democrats **tried very hard** to pass bipartisan immigration reform **several times**, and Republicans scuttled their attempts because it is much more helpful to retain immigration as a wedge issue. There is no point in admonishing Democrats to take a more moderate position. Republicans are not interested in fixing this.
Any of the so-called bipartisan immigration reforms suffer from how things happened after the 1986 amnesty first approach. There was amnesty, but no enforcement. As Roger Daltrey said, we don’t get fooled again.
Not to dox myself, but I was born in 1986 and am coming up on 40 years old. Both parties are very different now (to say the least), as is the situation on the ground.
Suppose it's true that bipartisan bills are forever impossible. The Democrats still have a ton of agency. Biden himself became much stricter on immigration in 2023, after two years of Matt Y, right here at SlowBoring, writing that he should close asylum loopholes and get a handle on the issue.
And the Democrats can still message on immigration when they are out of power. At present, they don't seem to have any unified message and are simply reacting. If they are going to talk about immigration while out of power, they ought to do so wisely.
I followed the link to the AP story on tourists being thrown in deterntion. I got chills and a pit in my stomach. There has to more going on. Right? What in the actual F? Someone bring me back down…
Respect for the law is a two way street; the law must be deserving of respect by being reasonable and logical. Our immigration laws are not reasonable and logical. It is not reasonable and logical to get between a willing buyer and a willing seller, a willing employer and a willing worker, a willing landlord and a willing tenant, because the transaction crosses a line in the sand drawn by politicians to divide people and enhance their own power.
It’s hard to go from if you don’t agree with our (Democrats) approach and language and everything we say about immigration then you are a Racist Bigot to I understood your concerns and rest assured I will give them serious consideration and you should vote for me.
"I am someone whose sincerely held convictions on a hot-button policy topic are far out of line with public opinion."
Matt Y : immigration :: drosophilist : climate change
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.
Many of those are no-brainers, but no one wants e-verify.
Like Matt, I have lots of sympathy for would-be immigrants, and my grandparents also came here around the turn of the last century. And I also don't believe in open immigration. So what I am not seeing is people working on where we would want to be in the future (skipping for the moment the mess we are currently in). How many people can we take every year? How do we decide how to choose those people? Merit (like Canada)? Family ties? Asylum? Should people who live closer to us, as in Mexico and Central America, have more moral status than people who live further away? Does it matter if most of our immigrants come from a few countries, or are we better off taking a wide variety? Do we care if immigrants share "our" values--whatever American values are these days? Where are people talking about this???
"How do we decide how to choose those people? Merit (like Canada)?"
Good news for anti-immigration people: now that the Trump administration completely effed up Canada-US relations, insulting Canada and talking about annexing it/"51st state"/"Governor Trudeau," to the point that nice, polite Canadians are booing The Star-Spangled Banner at hockey games, you'll be lucky to find ANY Canadians who want to come here. Why would they?
That aside, I think your questions are good and we should discuss them. I personally think "wide variety is good" and "we care if they share small-l liberal values (like the value of the individual over the collective)."
I was referencing the way Canada takes immigrants, according to a point system.
I want immigrants who believe in separation of church and state!
Sorry, I misunderstood you! I thought you were saying "Canadians have merit and we should try to attract more Canadian immigrants."
100% agreement on church and state, and the 1st Amendment in general.
Good point and it shows the real lack of leadership on the Dem side right now. I forget if Matt wrote this, or if it was somewhere in the comments, but someone mentioned that the Dems are currently ineffective in part because they have no unified vision of what they are actually "for" on this issue.
One more time, for those in the back:
Restoring small-d democratic norms is *non-negotiable*. Things like "it's not okay to try to overturn an election" and "it's not okay to use the DOJ as a weapon against your political opponents," etc.
This means *everybody* who is still for small-d democracy and, therefore, against Trump has to unite. Of freaking course these people will disagree on a ton of things in matters of policy, because we're talking a coalition that spans everyone from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger to AOC and Bernie Sanders.
In contrast, MAGA is unified, because their message is "Trump our God King who can do no wrong" and uniting around that message is super easy, barely an inconvenience!
That's how you get unified Republicans (= true MAGA believers and those who hate him but are terrified of him and hence STFU; those are the only two kinds of Republicans nowadays, with the occasional exception of Senators Murkowski and Collins) and disorganized Democrats.
JVL of The Bulwark had an excellent piece on this yesterday: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/how-to-think-and-act-like-a-dissident-in-trumps-america
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.
It's not exactly related to the point of the post as I can't imagine it'd sway any swing or moderate voter, but lately I've thought a lot about how there was possibly an opportunity here to reframe some of the issues around immigration in a way that could have gotten some of the members of the team to knock off some of their most counterproductive rhetoric.
It is, technically, a really good sign that a lot of people from other countries want to come here. How optimistic of them! Many people of all different kinds, from all over the world, are going to great lengths to come to America. Maybe this isn't such an evil, bad country, the way your anthropology TA (millionaire parents) seems to think it is. Obviously a lot of it is economic, but there aren't a lot of credible ways for us to get in on "patriotism" and this seems like an okay candidate.
"Democrats wouldn’t necessarily need a response beyond throwing Biden under the bus"
I very much enjoyed the piece overall but I would think you, of all people, Matt, would not be on the "throw Biden under the bus" bandwagon. This isn't the first time you've endorsed the strategy, either.
I'm absolutely baffled by how people think "we messed up and nominated a terrible President and then told you he was great for four years" is supposed to be a winning message. How did leaving Carter to the wolves work out for the party?
People are going to notice that things are worse under 47 than 46. Why would we not point that out, and instead continue to tell them they were right to hate the most effective policy President in decades?