I'm overly focused on this aspect, because I covered the 2020 Democratic primary where it mattered, but the senescence of "the groups" during the Lankford/Murphy float was fascinating.
Four years ago, well-funded and well-organized immigrant rights/reform groups were demanding an end to deportations. Movimiento Cosecha, which launched in 2015 (part of a wave of new left organizing built to pressure Obama and Hillary), was showing up at candidate events and demanding an end to deportations. Most famously, one of their activists confronted Biden, asking him to "stop all deportations on day one by executive action." Biden said no, he'd keep deporting violent criminals, then got annoyed and said "you should vote for Trump," which went viral.
What was Movimiento Cosecha doing around the Lankford/Murphy bill? Very little. Like many left-space organizations it's spending a lot of time demanding a Gaza ceasefire. The Groups made a politically untenable demand, then got exhausted and moved on.
At some level I truly don't get why discrimination on skin color or religion is genuinely seen as a moral evil and a totally random and non-predictive fact about someone like where they were born is totally fine to make legally binding status.
Perhaps this is me being deeply autistic but the idea that some people just deserve to be killed by gangs more powerful than the government or to be abused by patriarchal socieities that don't protect minorities seems like a view that's roughly akin to blacks should be protected by no laws.
At some point, I would love to see a balanced analysis of E-verify as part of the solution. This seems like a logical component of any comprehensive legislation to me, but I haven't seen a detailed analysis of the policy and politics of it, which are obviously vast and complex.
I liked this piece, esp. as someone who doesn't know much or have strong feelings on this issue. I'm relatively ignorant and in listening mode. How many other readers, like me, have unsettled, not-strong views about asylum policy and immigration more generally? Who knows.
Growing up, almost everyone I knew had come to this country illegally, or their parents had. Just the way it was. I wonder what they make of all this. Anecdotally, I get the sense that views are all over the place.
Re skilled immigration - anecdotal and, I know, only marginally related.
I work in data. Fifteen years ago, we didn't have many Americans going into the field, and we absolutely needed immigrants, particularly in technical roles. Then "data scientist" became the sexiest job, and people started jumping in along with every college creating programs in the field.
There are now enough Americans to fill the work. Perhaps more importantly, many of the H1Bs we're getting to fill many of the open jobs are not remotely good at them.
Isn't this all based on the assumption that immigration is bad? It strikes me that is a very strange assumption. Immigration moves people from places where they are unproductive to places where they are much more productive. If we think that immigration is positive, and it is mostly xenophobia that makes people adverse to it, isn't the current failure of the system a great thing? Doesn't it mean that many more people are improving their lives - and everyone they trade with lives'? It seems that the collapse of the immigration deal is pretty close to the best of all possible worlds - a really bad law was avoided, and Democrats can credibly blame Republicans for it - indeed Trump took the blame publically.
As with so many things in life, the question is not "is x good or bad?" but rather, "what amount of x is good/at what dose of x do the harms start to outweigh the benefits?"
Immigration is good! Immigration built America! Also, having tens of thousands of desperately poor, frequently low-educated and/or non-English-speaking people suddenly show up in your city wreaks havoc on that city; see comments elsewhere in this thread about the governments of NYC and Chicago and Denver absolutely freaking out about having to house/feed/provide for this many asylum seekers, and 30k is a teeny-tiny drop in the bucket compared with the number of immigrants who would love to come to the US if they could.
This isn't the 1880s anymore and we aren't going to put all these immigrants to work digging canals or building railroads or working in textile mills. This isn't a question of "Americans who are adverse to immigrants are mean old xenophobes," this is "immigration is a really complex issue with a ton of tradeoffs, and right now we aren't near any kind of Pareto optimum."
Thanks for the response, but I don't buy it. Remember that there were always arguments against immigrations, and in hindsight we always see them as spurious. No on today thinks that the "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s had a point; There is no shortage of Jobs available for non-English speaking poor people in the US, and most of these people would be very happy to do them. It is my understanding that while spending lots of money on the immigrants, cities like NYC and Chicago limit their attempts to work. That is self defeating policy. What the immigrants need is benign neglect, not much more.
The world continues to heat up. I hear there is mass starvation in Ethiopia for example. Is coming from a place too hot & dry to grow food a “credible fear”? We support the Immigration compromise and agree we will be very sorry that Trump blocked it. Masses of migrants will continue to come north. Unfortunately the left wing insistence that it had to be addressed only in a comprehensive way allowed Biden to wait too long to get tough.
If Democrats really wanted to have credibility with voters on the immigration issue, they should have brought up the exact same border security bill in 2022, back when Democrats controlled the House, and dared Republicans to filibuster it in the Senate. Whether the bill passes or fails in this counter-factual world, Democrats still gain.
I'm late to the party, but here's my opinion, and I realize it's probably to the right of many commenters here:
I have a visceral dislike of the "pathway to citizenship" for immigrants who first came here illegally. Years ago, my mom longed to leave Poland and immigrate to a more prosperous country. She was fluent in English, so she applied for an immigrant visa to several English-speaking countries. She filled out all the forms and paid all the fees and then waited, and waited, and waited, for years, plural.
Finally, when I was twelve, my parents and I received Landed Immigrant Status from Canada (the equivalent of the US green card). We settled in Canada as legal immigrants! Yay! Eventually we became Canadian citizens. Years later, I moved to the US as a graduate student; then I met my future husband, who sponsored me for a green card. Now I'm a Polish-Canadian-American citizen.
A path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is a slap in the face for people like my mom. It says to them, "You are suckers! Why apply to immigrate legally and wait in line for years? Just sneak across the border or overstay your tourist visa and hope for a pathway to citizenship in the future!" Yes, in retrospect, you could say "But things worked out for your mom, so what's the problem?" But she didn't know that in advance.
To be clear, I don't want to round up and deport illegal immigrants who've been in the country for years, that would be both cruel and terribly disruptive. I would settle for a pathway to legal permanent resident status, not citizenship.
I think what voters mostly want is a path to citizenship for people who came here as kids. Like, if your parent smuggled you in when you were 5 years old, it would be very harsh to deport you, and also harsh to require that you stay under a reduced-status residency with no path to citizenship.
Hi. I like reading your posts. You often ground your comments in personal experience, and I like seeing the connection between life and ways of seeing. My own perspective comes from being a child in a Mexican immigrant family when the Reagan amnesty laws passed. Growing up in an immigrant community, I didn't attach any moral valence to people coming here illegally. Looking around, I could hardly have pointed out to you anyone who wasn't here illegally, except my teachers and those of us kids born here. With very rare exceptions, if anyone else around me didnt come here illegally, wan't a child of those who did, or wasn't a refugee, it would've been news to me. Some pursued citizenship after Reagan's amnesty, some resident alien status. Some were deported. I understand where you're coming from in your comment. And I guess I don't have anything like "an answer" to share. Only that, being born into a community where a bunch of people were extended the opportunity for citizenship (I remember helping my mom study for her test when I was still in elementary school), I didn't come away with the impression that people had done something wrong in coming here, leaving the conditions they had left, and in the context that they arrived. To my eyes as a kid, it made sense to have come and I didn't give it much thought. Certainly it wasn't freighted with a sense of it having had a moral dimension. It was, again, just what had happened. As for citizenship, well, we only saw the upsides of it. The question of what this meant for anyone else didn't really arise. Not when I was nine, at any rate.
Anyhow, this is only to share an impression from my own youth. It certainly isn't meant as any sort of "counterargument" or to be "against" what you shared. I appreciate your sharing how you think about things, and making the connection to the life you've lived. As for how I think about things now, I suppose it's easy or convenient for me to wave my hands and say "it's complex." That said, my own thoughts on the meaning of Mexican migration here (i.e. my own family's) don't resolve into anything more definite. But I appreciate learning from what others have to say about their own experiences. So thank you.
I understand group dynamics that require full-throated legislation to be like a kind of political tick. There’s not much thought put into it, it’s just there like the background of a refrigerator hum. Or just an automated response like an actual tick.
>"That being said, the narrative in right-wing media isn’t that the Biden administration is struggling with an over-capacity asylum system, it’s that they welcome the influx."
It is majority opinion among Republicans that Democrats want open borders and amnesty, because Republicans believe that all Democrats see in immigrants are a pile of votes.
I really think the politics of this would be much more constructive if Republicans appreciated and cared about the fact that a lot of these people would vote Republican (at least if not alienated by the hostility). Middle class Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime are not about to become Bernie enthusiasts.
Local Republican chapters in south Texas and south Florida understand that, which is why they have been electorally successful in those places in recent years. But the national party doesn't understand the dynamics of Hispanic voting at all.
The Emerging Democratic Majority broke both parties' brains, and both parties to some extent believe in "demographics is destiny," which drives national campaign strategies: Democrats take immigrant voters for granted and Republicans try to making voting as difficult as possible.
As a side note, I don't understand why a ton of secular Democrats believe that adding tens of millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their ranks will be beneficial for secular Democrats.
I have no idea who benefits politically on net from the people made citizens by generous asylum and refugee admission policies. It doesn't matter to me at all, at least not in terms of how I think about the policy question.
"I don't understand why a ton of secular Democrats believe that adding tens of millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their ranks will beneficial for secular Democrats."
Surely they think that because, at least for Catholic immigrants, it's been true on net for the past several decades? Other than the special case of Cubans, Catholic Hispanics have consistently voted more Democratic than Republican. Admittedly the skew is not anywhere near as lopsided as with black voters, but if first generation American citizen Hispanic voters reliably go at least 55% for Democrats, then it's a clear winner on net.
True, but that was before white Democrats secularized. Joe Biden is a unicorn among white Democrats. Religious immigrants have different views on social policy and culture than do white progressive Democrats.
"Religious immigrants have different views on social policy and culture than do white progressive Democrats."
Yes, but my point was that we don't have much evidence so far that, after these immigrants either become American citizens or their US-born children get old enough to vote, those views lead them to be *more likely* to vote for Republicans than Democrats. E.g., Republicans have made some gains with Hispanics in recent elections that are probably for religious reasons, but AFAICT in the vast majority of races Democrats are still getting a majority of the Hispanic vote. Until Hispanics trend so far right that Democrats can no longer even win a plurality of the Hispanic vote (and there's no evidence of that), there's no reason for Democrats to *not* think that "adding tens of millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their ranks will be beneficial for secular Democrats."
I'm overly focused on this aspect, because I covered the 2020 Democratic primary where it mattered, but the senescence of "the groups" during the Lankford/Murphy float was fascinating.
Four years ago, well-funded and well-organized immigrant rights/reform groups were demanding an end to deportations. Movimiento Cosecha, which launched in 2015 (part of a wave of new left organizing built to pressure Obama and Hillary), was showing up at candidate events and demanding an end to deportations. Most famously, one of their activists confronted Biden, asking him to "stop all deportations on day one by executive action." Biden said no, he'd keep deporting violent criminals, then got annoyed and said "you should vote for Trump," which went viral.
What was Movimiento Cosecha doing around the Lankford/Murphy bill? Very little. Like many left-space organizations it's spending a lot of time demanding a Gaza ceasefire. The Groups made a politically untenable demand, then got exhausted and moved on.
Very well done. Thanks for your effort here.
lol. You are citing refugee admissions.
At some level I truly don't get why discrimination on skin color or religion is genuinely seen as a moral evil and a totally random and non-predictive fact about someone like where they were born is totally fine to make legally binding status.
Perhaps this is me being deeply autistic but the idea that some people just deserve to be killed by gangs more powerful than the government or to be abused by patriarchal socieities that don't protect minorities seems like a view that's roughly akin to blacks should be protected by no laws.
At some point, I would love to see a balanced analysis of E-verify as part of the solution. This seems like a logical component of any comprehensive legislation to me, but I haven't seen a detailed analysis of the policy and politics of it, which are obviously vast and complex.
I liked this piece, esp. as someone who doesn't know much or have strong feelings on this issue. I'm relatively ignorant and in listening mode. How many other readers, like me, have unsettled, not-strong views about asylum policy and immigration more generally? Who knows.
Growing up, almost everyone I knew had come to this country illegally, or their parents had. Just the way it was. I wonder what they make of all this. Anecdotally, I get the sense that views are all over the place.
Re skilled immigration - anecdotal and, I know, only marginally related.
I work in data. Fifteen years ago, we didn't have many Americans going into the field, and we absolutely needed immigrants, particularly in technical roles. Then "data scientist" became the sexiest job, and people started jumping in along with every college creating programs in the field.
There are now enough Americans to fill the work. Perhaps more importantly, many of the H1Bs we're getting to fill many of the open jobs are not remotely good at them.
Isn't this all based on the assumption that immigration is bad? It strikes me that is a very strange assumption. Immigration moves people from places where they are unproductive to places where they are much more productive. If we think that immigration is positive, and it is mostly xenophobia that makes people adverse to it, isn't the current failure of the system a great thing? Doesn't it mean that many more people are improving their lives - and everyone they trade with lives'? It seems that the collapse of the immigration deal is pretty close to the best of all possible worlds - a really bad law was avoided, and Democrats can credibly blame Republicans for it - indeed Trump took the blame publically.
As with so many things in life, the question is not "is x good or bad?" but rather, "what amount of x is good/at what dose of x do the harms start to outweigh the benefits?"
Immigration is good! Immigration built America! Also, having tens of thousands of desperately poor, frequently low-educated and/or non-English-speaking people suddenly show up in your city wreaks havoc on that city; see comments elsewhere in this thread about the governments of NYC and Chicago and Denver absolutely freaking out about having to house/feed/provide for this many asylum seekers, and 30k is a teeny-tiny drop in the bucket compared with the number of immigrants who would love to come to the US if they could.
This isn't the 1880s anymore and we aren't going to put all these immigrants to work digging canals or building railroads or working in textile mills. This isn't a question of "Americans who are adverse to immigrants are mean old xenophobes," this is "immigration is a really complex issue with a ton of tradeoffs, and right now we aren't near any kind of Pareto optimum."
Thanks for the response, but I don't buy it. Remember that there were always arguments against immigrations, and in hindsight we always see them as spurious. No on today thinks that the "Know-Nothings" of the 1850s had a point; There is no shortage of Jobs available for non-English speaking poor people in the US, and most of these people would be very happy to do them. It is my understanding that while spending lots of money on the immigrants, cities like NYC and Chicago limit their attempts to work. That is self defeating policy. What the immigrants need is benign neglect, not much more.
Overall agreed, but it doesn't solve family catch and release.
Either way Senate Democrats should bring up and try and pass the house passed immigration bill HR2.
Then dare Republicans to block it
The world continues to heat up. I hear there is mass starvation in Ethiopia for example. Is coming from a place too hot & dry to grow food a “credible fear”? We support the Immigration compromise and agree we will be very sorry that Trump blocked it. Masses of migrants will continue to come north. Unfortunately the left wing insistence that it had to be addressed only in a comprehensive way allowed Biden to wait too long to get tough.
A+ piece. I learned a lot from this!
If Democrats really wanted to have credibility with voters on the immigration issue, they should have brought up the exact same border security bill in 2022, back when Democrats controlled the House, and dared Republicans to filibuster it in the Senate. Whether the bill passes or fails in this counter-factual world, Democrats still gain.
Hi everyone,
I'm late to the party, but here's my opinion, and I realize it's probably to the right of many commenters here:
I have a visceral dislike of the "pathway to citizenship" for immigrants who first came here illegally. Years ago, my mom longed to leave Poland and immigrate to a more prosperous country. She was fluent in English, so she applied for an immigrant visa to several English-speaking countries. She filled out all the forms and paid all the fees and then waited, and waited, and waited, for years, plural.
Finally, when I was twelve, my parents and I received Landed Immigrant Status from Canada (the equivalent of the US green card). We settled in Canada as legal immigrants! Yay! Eventually we became Canadian citizens. Years later, I moved to the US as a graduate student; then I met my future husband, who sponsored me for a green card. Now I'm a Polish-Canadian-American citizen.
A path to citizenship for illegal immigrants is a slap in the face for people like my mom. It says to them, "You are suckers! Why apply to immigrate legally and wait in line for years? Just sneak across the border or overstay your tourist visa and hope for a pathway to citizenship in the future!" Yes, in retrospect, you could say "But things worked out for your mom, so what's the problem?" But she didn't know that in advance.
To be clear, I don't want to round up and deport illegal immigrants who've been in the country for years, that would be both cruel and terribly disruptive. I would settle for a pathway to legal permanent resident status, not citizenship.
I think what voters mostly want is a path to citizenship for people who came here as kids. Like, if your parent smuggled you in when you were 5 years old, it would be very harsh to deport you, and also harsh to require that you stay under a reduced-status residency with no path to citizenship.
Hi. I like reading your posts. You often ground your comments in personal experience, and I like seeing the connection between life and ways of seeing. My own perspective comes from being a child in a Mexican immigrant family when the Reagan amnesty laws passed. Growing up in an immigrant community, I didn't attach any moral valence to people coming here illegally. Looking around, I could hardly have pointed out to you anyone who wasn't here illegally, except my teachers and those of us kids born here. With very rare exceptions, if anyone else around me didnt come here illegally, wan't a child of those who did, or wasn't a refugee, it would've been news to me. Some pursued citizenship after Reagan's amnesty, some resident alien status. Some were deported. I understand where you're coming from in your comment. And I guess I don't have anything like "an answer" to share. Only that, being born into a community where a bunch of people were extended the opportunity for citizenship (I remember helping my mom study for her test when I was still in elementary school), I didn't come away with the impression that people had done something wrong in coming here, leaving the conditions they had left, and in the context that they arrived. To my eyes as a kid, it made sense to have come and I didn't give it much thought. Certainly it wasn't freighted with a sense of it having had a moral dimension. It was, again, just what had happened. As for citizenship, well, we only saw the upsides of it. The question of what this meant for anyone else didn't really arise. Not when I was nine, at any rate.
Anyhow, this is only to share an impression from my own youth. It certainly isn't meant as any sort of "counterargument" or to be "against" what you shared. I appreciate your sharing how you think about things, and making the connection to the life you've lived. As for how I think about things now, I suppose it's easy or convenient for me to wave my hands and say "it's complex." That said, my own thoughts on the meaning of Mexican migration here (i.e. my own family's) don't resolve into anything more definite. But I appreciate learning from what others have to say about their own experiences. So thank you.
I understand group dynamics that require full-throated legislation to be like a kind of political tick. There’s not much thought put into it, it’s just there like the background of a refrigerator hum. Or just an automated response like an actual tick.
>"That being said, the narrative in right-wing media isn’t that the Biden administration is struggling with an over-capacity asylum system, it’s that they welcome the influx."
It is majority opinion among Republicans that Democrats want open borders and amnesty, because Republicans believe that all Democrats see in immigrants are a pile of votes.
I really think the politics of this would be much more constructive if Republicans appreciated and cared about the fact that a lot of these people would vote Republican (at least if not alienated by the hostility). Middle class Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime are not about to become Bernie enthusiasts.
Local Republican chapters in south Texas and south Florida understand that, which is why they have been electorally successful in those places in recent years. But the national party doesn't understand the dynamics of Hispanic voting at all.
The Emerging Democratic Majority broke both parties' brains, and both parties to some extent believe in "demographics is destiny," which drives national campaign strategies: Democrats take immigrant voters for granted and Republicans try to making voting as difficult as possible.
As a side note, I don't understand why a ton of secular Democrats believe that adding tens of millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their ranks will be beneficial for secular Democrats.
I have no idea who benefits politically on net from the people made citizens by generous asylum and refugee admission policies. It doesn't matter to me at all, at least not in terms of how I think about the policy question.
"I don't understand why a ton of secular Democrats believe that adding tens of millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their ranks will beneficial for secular Democrats."
Surely they think that because, at least for Catholic immigrants, it's been true on net for the past several decades? Other than the special case of Cubans, Catholic Hispanics have consistently voted more Democratic than Republican. Admittedly the skew is not anywhere near as lopsided as with black voters, but if first generation American citizen Hispanic voters reliably go at least 55% for Democrats, then it's a clear winner on net.
True, but that was before white Democrats secularized. Joe Biden is a unicorn among white Democrats. Religious immigrants have different views on social policy and culture than do white progressive Democrats.
"Religious immigrants have different views on social policy and culture than do white progressive Democrats."
Yes, but my point was that we don't have much evidence so far that, after these immigrants either become American citizens or their US-born children get old enough to vote, those views lead them to be *more likely* to vote for Republicans than Democrats. E.g., Republicans have made some gains with Hispanics in recent elections that are probably for religious reasons, but AFAICT in the vast majority of races Democrats are still getting a majority of the Hispanic vote. Until Hispanics trend so far right that Democrats can no longer even win a plurality of the Hispanic vote (and there's no evidence of that), there's no reason for Democrats to *not* think that "adding tens of millions of Catholics and Evangelicals to their ranks will be beneficial for secular Democrats."
Count me as one Democrat who loathes Trump, does not want open borders, and does not take it for granted that all immigrants would vote for Democrats.
I'm not claiming it is true, but it is what Republicans believe is true.
Fair enough.
"I think we will all live to regret Trump’s wrecking of this one."
Hey, I regret it already.
I will regret it less if the Democrats run on it, which isn't rocket science but would be distasteful to many. Here is the recipe:
Pick out conservative positions, the Dem concessions, one by one. Loudly and proudly say "We want this, Trump killed it".
Repeat about one zillion times.