Strong agree based on the experience of Australia. Support for migration and asylum here is high, but this depends critically on the perception that the state is in control and that the system is fair. Stopping boat arrivals in international waters was key to this.
Strongly agree with all of this, and as usual, I am led straight back to the question of: why the $&@# does anyone, at all, care about these goddamn “groups”? Just tell them to f off already.
This is why despite having mostly conservative viewpoints, I subscribe to this Substack. I want to see Progressives who aren't histrionic, and he seems to be one of the few that gets any attention. It is good to see his opinions, even when I disagree. Matt mentioned in a previous article that he didn't think he reached any Republicans, but I bet he reaches plenty of normie Republicans. At least I read his stuff, FWIW.
It has been disgusting to me to see that people freak out when Trump talked about building a wall (even a broken clock is right twice a day), but yet Matt is intelligently pointing out that uncontrolled illegal immigration seems to be a big negative for most any thinking human being.
I think it could be summed up that most Americans think that illegal immigration should be harder and legal immigration should be easier. But you have to shut down the illegal pipeline to do that, and Progressives immediately scream racism and the whole conversation goes up in smoke. Therefore we don't really have any sensible immigration policy in the USA.
Good points in this column. Immigration is by far where I agree with Matt the least (I’d like to get national E-Verify going, increase deportation raids significantly, and cut low-skilled immigration…while increasing refugee admissions significantly) but it’s nice to see a column that at least understands some of the issues
By our standards, Guatemala is a lousy place to live. Most Guatemalans can legitimately have a “credible fear” of something bad happening to them - and quality for asylum.
We definitely need to tighten the definition of asylum, and simply make wanting to come here a good enough reason to immigrate legally. If everyone qualifies for asylum, then nobody really does.
For me, "Make it harder for people to make asylum claims" is sufficiently villainous that I would need implausibly strong assurances that it would be worth it.
This does make me think the dirtbag left framing of the professional–managerial class (PMC) is on to something. Some amazing class solidarity between Matt and other university educated professionals that would be among the upper class stratum of their home countries, and very limited sympathy towards people fleeing the abysmal states of south and central America.
Obviously, practically I see the benefits, but a lot of the benefits of migration and asylum are minimised if it becomes a tool of economic development for receiving nations rather than an escape route for the world's wretched poor and huddled masses.
Oh please. Yeah it definitely helps the people fleeing abysmal states in Central America to keep the number of them capped quite low because it feels bad to announce that there’s an actual cap. Grow up.
I guess what I'm really getting at is there's some basic stolen valour in the migration policy world. Often migration is discussed in terms of saving people in awful circumstances, so it gets seen as something noble to support. But actual migration policy is settling into a pattern where we make it very hard to people in need to find help (apart from low 1%ages of those that make it to camps that get resettled), and easy for people at the top of the income scale in poor countries to 10x their income. Hardly meeting the promise of the UN refugee charter.
"Canada is massively underpopulated relative to its vast land area and natural resources"
/facepalm
Matt Y, I love your Substack, but this argument is deeply flawed. It's based on equivocation between a) "Canada" and b) "the parts of Canada where immigrants actually want to settle." Unlike a), b) actually is *massively overpopulated*. Take a look at the skyrocketing housing costs in Greater Vancouver metro area. New immigrants want to live in Vancouver or Toronto, not in Nunavut or Yellowknife. The fact that the population density of the Yukon is 0.5 humans and 2 caribou per square mile is completely irrelevant.
The problem with Toronto and Vancouver isn't that they're running out of land, it's that they've made it basically impossible to build new housing on the land they have.
Seems like you will never be able to seal the border adequately and that there is going to have to be an e-verify and internal enforcement mechanism in the US if you're serious about trying to control immigration. Which will make it hard for illegal aliens when interacting with law enforcement.
Amazing that the mainstream progressive Democrats position now is that the. USA is irredeemably racist, white supremecist oppressive culture yet all these POC from around the world are constantly flooding in here at unmanageable rates. What are the legal/illegal immigration rates for Nigeria? For Panama? Are there a lot of asylum seekers heading to Chad?
1) Who, really, among “mainstream progressive Democrats” is saying this, in 2023?
1b) Who are you including in this group? Do you mean “Democrat” as in elected officials? People on Twitter? Cultural figures nominally associated with the Democrat party? Some guy you know?
1c) What does “mainstream progressive” even mean? Are you using these terms to actually indicate some kind of substantive politics, or as a vague synonym for “you know, *those* people”?
2) Do you really think that migrants are investigating in any depth American history or culture before deciding to make the (often arduous) journey to come here? Even if “mainstream progressive Democrats” were really saying that the US were irredeemably racist, do you seriously think the average migrant is saying to themselves, “gee, [mainstream progressive Democrat] said that the U.S. is irredeemably racist! I’d better forget all my plans to try and make a better life for myself and my family!” Or are they saying to their partner, “hey honey, forget our plans to go to the US to start a new life - I just learned about the history of redlining”? Could it be that the reason that people are coming to the U.S.and not Chad is because there are *economic opportunities* in the U.S. and not Chad?
Not go all "Housing Theory of Everything" but the key to immigration is...housing, and more specifically superstar blue cities' complete abdication on building adequate housing supplies. We've seen the struggle DC and NYC have had housing migrants because there's no housing. We saw it when Afghan and Ukrainian refugees were looking to flee here. We see it in working class black neighborhoods where Latino immigrants and native populations compete for limited stock. If we can't build enough housing, and the native working class feels threatened by immigrants, it'll become a political albatross.
On the flip side, we've seen where immigrants have changed and revitalized otherwise dying cities. The Dominicans have totally re-made Hazleton, PA as an example comes to mind. It's not always easy and hugs and roses when steep demographic changes happen in towns like this, but I think the end result is an undeniable positive.
We should try to target policy to bring immigrants to cities that need an injection of population and people looking to build the American dream. Setting a goal to settle 10,000 migrants fleeing Hong Kong in St Louis, or Ukrainians in Detroit or Rohingya in Youngstown would be a potential economic powerhouse for cities who were made 100+ years ago by similar migration patterns from southern and eastern Europe. Let Jackson, MS become Little Kurdistan, make Peoria Little Caracas. Play to our strengths of assimilation and cultural synthesis and shore up our dying flyover metropolises.
"And while Ron DeSantis’ weird stunt of flying people to Martha’s Vineyard mostly backfired..."
Did it? This stunt completely dominated the media for several days. Plenty of people got huge satisfaction at seeing the absolute pandemonium caused by delivering a mere ~50 asylum seekers to a location associated with wealthy leftists.
I think it backfired because Martha's Vineyard is not a realistic place of settlement. DeSantis is just really awkward and makes his publicity stunts look dopey (or Dopey, given his spat with Disney).
The migrants being moved off MV quickly under massive media coverage was more feature than bug for RDS. Fair or not, the rapid relocation of migrants away from the second homes of wealthy liberals was gleefully seen by a lot of Republican voters as an example of liberal hypocrisy.
It seemed like an excellent application of #4 and #6 from "Rules for Radicals."
Great post, and it highlights my confusion with my fellow liberals: why would you want EVERYTHING to be strongly regulated except immigration? I know people want to feel good about welcoming everybody, but it doesn’t work if there’s a backlash and we elect right-wing populists as many European countries have done.
It does seem as the rules for asylum have shifted from someone deliberately targeted for who they are to anyone who lives among bad crime or a bad economy.
> Great post, and it highlights my confusion with my fellow liberals: why would you want EVERYTHING to be strongly regulated except immigration?
I don't think that this is actually how most liberals (or maybe more accurately, progressives) think. They don't want everything strongly regulated -- drugs and homelessness, for example, are things they aren't screaming for more regulation of. The regulatory instinct is instead mostly applied to businesses.
Something I kind of wonder about is if the US said, screw it, we'll just take in anyone from Central and South America for the next five years who wants to make an asylum claim and we'll accept it and devote the amount of resources we would need to process and temporarily shelter these people, but then after that, super strict asylum rules, how many people would we have to take in? 50 million? Could we do it?
"there’s really no jurisdiction in the United States that’s prepared to cope with large, irregular inflows of people."
OK, not a perfect fit, but ironically, why not send them to Detroit, st Louis, Cleveland... or other shrinking cities with over-sized municipal infrastructures...?
Strong agree based on the experience of Australia. Support for migration and asylum here is high, but this depends critically on the perception that the state is in control and that the system is fair. Stopping boat arrivals in international waters was key to this.
Strongly agree with all of this, and as usual, I am led straight back to the question of: why the $&@# does anyone, at all, care about these goddamn “groups”? Just tell them to f off already.
This is why despite having mostly conservative viewpoints, I subscribe to this Substack. I want to see Progressives who aren't histrionic, and he seems to be one of the few that gets any attention. It is good to see his opinions, even when I disagree. Matt mentioned in a previous article that he didn't think he reached any Republicans, but I bet he reaches plenty of normie Republicans. At least I read his stuff, FWIW.
It has been disgusting to me to see that people freak out when Trump talked about building a wall (even a broken clock is right twice a day), but yet Matt is intelligently pointing out that uncontrolled illegal immigration seems to be a big negative for most any thinking human being.
I think it could be summed up that most Americans think that illegal immigration should be harder and legal immigration should be easier. But you have to shut down the illegal pipeline to do that, and Progressives immediately scream racism and the whole conversation goes up in smoke. Therefore we don't really have any sensible immigration policy in the USA.
Good points in this column. Immigration is by far where I agree with Matt the least (I’d like to get national E-Verify going, increase deportation raids significantly, and cut low-skilled immigration…while increasing refugee admissions significantly) but it’s nice to see a column that at least understands some of the issues
By our standards, Guatemala is a lousy place to live. Most Guatemalans can legitimately have a “credible fear” of something bad happening to them - and quality for asylum.
We definitely need to tighten the definition of asylum, and simply make wanting to come here a good enough reason to immigrate legally. If everyone qualifies for asylum, then nobody really does.
For me, "Make it harder for people to make asylum claims" is sufficiently villainous that I would need implausibly strong assurances that it would be worth it.
This does make me think the dirtbag left framing of the professional–managerial class (PMC) is on to something. Some amazing class solidarity between Matt and other university educated professionals that would be among the upper class stratum of their home countries, and very limited sympathy towards people fleeing the abysmal states of south and central America.
Obviously, practically I see the benefits, but a lot of the benefits of migration and asylum are minimised if it becomes a tool of economic development for receiving nations rather than an escape route for the world's wretched poor and huddled masses.
Oh please. Yeah it definitely helps the people fleeing abysmal states in Central America to keep the number of them capped quite low because it feels bad to announce that there’s an actual cap. Grow up.
Not completely follow you to be honest.
I guess what I'm really getting at is there's some basic stolen valour in the migration policy world. Often migration is discussed in terms of saving people in awful circumstances, so it gets seen as something noble to support. But actual migration policy is settling into a pattern where we make it very hard to people in need to find help (apart from low 1%ages of those that make it to camps that get resettled), and easy for people at the top of the income scale in poor countries to 10x their income. Hardly meeting the promise of the UN refugee charter.
"Canada is massively underpopulated relative to its vast land area and natural resources"
/facepalm
Matt Y, I love your Substack, but this argument is deeply flawed. It's based on equivocation between a) "Canada" and b) "the parts of Canada where immigrants actually want to settle." Unlike a), b) actually is *massively overpopulated*. Take a look at the skyrocketing housing costs in Greater Vancouver metro area. New immigrants want to live in Vancouver or Toronto, not in Nunavut or Yellowknife. The fact that the population density of the Yukon is 0.5 humans and 2 caribou per square mile is completely irrelevant.
The problem with Toronto and Vancouver isn't that they're running out of land, it's that they've made it basically impossible to build new housing on the land they have.
Seems like you will never be able to seal the border adequately and that there is going to have to be an e-verify and internal enforcement mechanism in the US if you're serious about trying to control immigration. Which will make it hard for illegal aliens when interacting with law enforcement.
Amazing that the mainstream progressive Democrats position now is that the. USA is irredeemably racist, white supremecist oppressive culture yet all these POC from around the world are constantly flooding in here at unmanageable rates. What are the legal/illegal immigration rates for Nigeria? For Panama? Are there a lot of asylum seekers heading to Chad?
1) Who, really, among “mainstream progressive Democrats” is saying this, in 2023?
1b) Who are you including in this group? Do you mean “Democrat” as in elected officials? People on Twitter? Cultural figures nominally associated with the Democrat party? Some guy you know?
1c) What does “mainstream progressive” even mean? Are you using these terms to actually indicate some kind of substantive politics, or as a vague synonym for “you know, *those* people”?
2) Do you really think that migrants are investigating in any depth American history or culture before deciding to make the (often arduous) journey to come here? Even if “mainstream progressive Democrats” were really saying that the US were irredeemably racist, do you seriously think the average migrant is saying to themselves, “gee, [mainstream progressive Democrat] said that the U.S. is irredeemably racist! I’d better forget all my plans to try and make a better life for myself and my family!” Or are they saying to their partner, “hey honey, forget our plans to go to the US to start a new life - I just learned about the history of redlining”? Could it be that the reason that people are coming to the U.S.and not Chad is because there are *economic opportunities* in the U.S. and not Chad?
Not go all "Housing Theory of Everything" but the key to immigration is...housing, and more specifically superstar blue cities' complete abdication on building adequate housing supplies. We've seen the struggle DC and NYC have had housing migrants because there's no housing. We saw it when Afghan and Ukrainian refugees were looking to flee here. We see it in working class black neighborhoods where Latino immigrants and native populations compete for limited stock. If we can't build enough housing, and the native working class feels threatened by immigrants, it'll become a political albatross.
On the flip side, we've seen where immigrants have changed and revitalized otherwise dying cities. The Dominicans have totally re-made Hazleton, PA as an example comes to mind. It's not always easy and hugs and roses when steep demographic changes happen in towns like this, but I think the end result is an undeniable positive.
We should try to target policy to bring immigrants to cities that need an injection of population and people looking to build the American dream. Setting a goal to settle 10,000 migrants fleeing Hong Kong in St Louis, or Ukrainians in Detroit or Rohingya in Youngstown would be a potential economic powerhouse for cities who were made 100+ years ago by similar migration patterns from southern and eastern Europe. Let Jackson, MS become Little Kurdistan, make Peoria Little Caracas. Play to our strengths of assimilation and cultural synthesis and shore up our dying flyover metropolises.
"And while Ron DeSantis’ weird stunt of flying people to Martha’s Vineyard mostly backfired..."
Did it? This stunt completely dominated the media for several days. Plenty of people got huge satisfaction at seeing the absolute pandemonium caused by delivering a mere ~50 asylum seekers to a location associated with wealthy leftists.
I think it backfired because Martha's Vineyard is not a realistic place of settlement. DeSantis is just really awkward and makes his publicity stunts look dopey (or Dopey, given his spat with Disney).
The migrants being moved off MV quickly under massive media coverage was more feature than bug for RDS. Fair or not, the rapid relocation of migrants away from the second homes of wealthy liberals was gleefully seen by a lot of Republican voters as an example of liberal hypocrisy.
It seemed like an excellent application of #4 and #6 from "Rules for Radicals."
"Trying to get in on the joke too late" is basically DeSantis in a nutshell, is it not?
Great post, and it highlights my confusion with my fellow liberals: why would you want EVERYTHING to be strongly regulated except immigration? I know people want to feel good about welcoming everybody, but it doesn’t work if there’s a backlash and we elect right-wing populists as many European countries have done.
It does seem as the rules for asylum have shifted from someone deliberately targeted for who they are to anyone who lives among bad crime or a bad economy.
> Great post, and it highlights my confusion with my fellow liberals: why would you want EVERYTHING to be strongly regulated except immigration?
I don't think that this is actually how most liberals (or maybe more accurately, progressives) think. They don't want everything strongly regulated -- drugs and homelessness, for example, are things they aren't screaming for more regulation of. The regulatory instinct is instead mostly applied to businesses.
Something I kind of wonder about is if the US said, screw it, we'll just take in anyone from Central and South America for the next five years who wants to make an asylum claim and we'll accept it and devote the amount of resources we would need to process and temporarily shelter these people, but then after that, super strict asylum rules, how many people would we have to take in? 50 million? Could we do it?
This is just a repeat of what Tom "America's greatest thinker" Friedman wrote in 2006: "I favor a very high fence, with a very big gate."
https://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/05/opinion/high-fence-and-big-gate.html
"there’s really no jurisdiction in the United States that’s prepared to cope with large, irregular inflows of people."
OK, not a perfect fit, but ironically, why not send them to Detroit, st Louis, Cleveland... or other shrinking cities with over-sized municipal infrastructures...?
I believe there are some programs that do that, but they are of limited size. See, e.g., https://www.bridgemi.com/urban-affairs/repopulating-detroit-city-still-welcoming-immigrants-and-refugees
Because immigrants need jobs, and lack of jobs is a big part of why those cities are shrinking.