This makes some good points, but several comments, from an active volunteer lawyer in immigration law, who has done hundreds of interviews and worked on dozens of cases in asylum, and many more green cards, work permits, citizenship, etc:
1. Asylum cases are far from binary into the good and bad, and like everything legal, you do better with representation than without. I have seen slam dunk cases and outright bad cases, but many are in a gray zone. We know this also because the grant rates vary tremendously from one asylum office to another, and from court to another. Some is due to where the people are coming from, but many cases are just ones where people seeing things differently -- is a 1% chance that the person will be persecuted if returned to their home country enough? or 5%? or 0.1%. And sometimes the ability to get expert advocacy, and expert testimony, or having the resources to dig for info can make a difference.
2. This is why the lower credible fear interview threshold makes sense, and is not atypical in the legal world. The threshold for searching a person, making an arrest, charging a crime, pursuing a prosecution, and convicting of a crime are all different. We do not say that every failure to convict represents a failed arrest or a failure of policing. As part of my volunteer work, I see criminal reports and sometimes serious allegations get downgraded or not prosecuted, and often with good reason -- and it's not just shoplifting. Sometimes the evidence or ability to convict for whatever reason is bad.
3. It's true that the asylum/refugee system was set up in the wake of WW2 and persecution based on religion, race, ethnicity, etc. And political asylum is obvious. The law has a more vague "membership in a particular social group" that is fuzzier. It fits like a glove in LGBT cases -- you can get years in prison in Nigeria or Uganda, for example. But what about failed states? or countries overrun with gangs? or are women a particular social group in the domestic violence context? Lawyers do what they do, which is serve s advocates, and where there are fuzzier areas, they push the bounds as contours are determined.
Maybe I’m getting heartless in my old age, but to me the asylum system is a classic instance of a hard case (WWII) making a bad law. How does it make any kind of sense to expend judicial resources to adjudicate whether Guatemala does a good enough job protecting domestic violence victims?
If there’s another Shoah, let the State Dept make a declaration that people fleeing that will be granted asylum. If we decide Guatemalan domestic violence victims should come to the U.S., let’s pass a law and create a visa category for them. Either there will be political and public support for taking those people or there won’t. Pre-committing to taking people under vague criteria that require detailed individual fact patterns, to be discovered and adjudicated once they arrive, is insane.
It’s not even clear to me that it successfully binds our own hands. If a hundred thousand Sudanese or Uyghur people showed up on our shores tomorrow it’s not obvious to me that we’d go “welp, we gotta take em.” Australia is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention also, but it didn’t prevent them from setting up offshore detention camps for the Rohingya. We abandoned interpreters working for the military in Afghanistan, for God’s sake.
Asylum law doesn’t make any goddamn sense. In a functional political system we’d ask what we’re trying to achieve and pass some laws that actually address the world as it is in 2024.
While I think ”we” (Sweden in my case) should welcome a number of asylum migrants that we can succesfully integrate into society and that is supported by the native population, it’s worth noting that helping people closer to where they are also constitutes help and might even be more cost effective and hence helping more people (also it’s more likely to help elderly, women and children rather than phsyically strong and brave young men who can undertake long journeys).
Yes, exactly. Ameliorating problems in foreign countries makes sense. Deciding in advance to take in some refugees and selecting the ones who are most likely to be successful could be one way to do that. Just declaring, “Hey, spend your life savings to make a dangerous journey halfway around the world and then we’ll figure it out once you get here” is madness.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but “ameliorating problems in foreign countries “ doesn’t work so great (see: Iraq, Afghanistan). How would you ameliorate Venezuela so that fewer want to leave?
Well we invaded Afghanistan because of the Bin Laden connection and then Iraq because of W’s daddy issues. I don’t think caring about fixing their problems was anywhere near to even on our priority list. If we want people to stop fleeing Venezuela we should start by ceasing our sanctions on their government.
You really thought there was something else going on?
It was worse a year ago. I don’t know if you have read my other posts, I think Sweden has had too liberal asylum immigration policies and has now course corrected which was necessary.
As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I think this is mostly right, but it should also be easy to tweak the law so that we’re not talking about domestic violence victims. This is more a story of the legal profession finding a loophole in the vague provisions of the law and then ramming a mountain through it.
Short answer: probably not. I mean there just has to be other ways to help them - what does citizenship have to do with it?
Long answer: if we do, then that’s a discussion to be had. What’s clear is that that’s not what the law was written to achieve, and that that’s not something a majority of Americans would support now (or realistically any time in the past either).
Personally I’m ambivalent about it, because being able to achieve citizenship - which is highly sought after - just by claiming a threat of domestic violence sounds ripe for exploitation. Even if we have a robust verification regime (which I doubt). Moreover there have to be ways to help domestic violence victims in other countries that don’t entail citizenship - these things should have nothing to do with each other.
At the same time I am personally on team 1 Billion Americans so I am biased to view any new member of Team America as a net positive.
If we give an automatic yes to that, we’re basically saying that anyone who comes from a country with fewer legal protections than ours can claim asylum. That’s created the problem in the first place.
It's not just about there being fewer legal protections - it's about there being fewer legal protections, and you being a victim of violence that would be stopped by such legal protections. That's not going to be everyone, except in a few truly extreme cases like perhaps North Korea.
Why is citizenship the answer? Why can’t we tell this person “ok you can stay for a few years but you can’t vote, you’re not entitled to welfare, and you have to pay taxes”? This would solve this person’s flight from her domestic abuser without the extremely perverse incentives that come into play with this being a path to citizenship.
The argument against this "let the state department decide" approach is that was the approach in the run up and during WWII and we decided for political expediency in the face of widespread anti-semitism to reject most claims of Jews fleeing Europe and condemned them to death. In the aftermath we realized that our actions had amounted to aiding and abetting one of the world's worst crimes against humanity. The refugee treaty was our pledge not to repeat this. We have made similar promises in the torture convention not to return people to places they will be tortured by the government.
The arguments for women fleeing DV in Guatemala is that this isn't just DV perpetrated by partners but allowed by the government who chooses not prosecute such cases or protect women because the see DV as a right men have and a way to keep women in a submissive place. It can seem like a stretch of the purpose but discrimination against women often manifests differently than other forms of persecution because it happens within ethnic groups and not between them.
It might be cleaner to just ignore those cases but there are people and courts that think women are as entitled to flee places where they fact physical danger because of their discriminated against status as much as anyone else. As a practical issue, it is harder to manage not because it lacks merit or doesn't fit the law or doesn't involve the same kind of vicarious shame for sending people back to where we know they are unsafe as any other kind of claim. People find the idea of not sending women back to where they will face female genital mutilation or women facing forced abortions in China in the 1980s more classic but it is largely the same thing. What makes it hard is because gender based violence is so widespread, including in the US, that we would literally be setting up a situation where a very large percentage of the world's population would have a claim. In the old days, that was perhaps easier to ignore because they weren't going to end up on doorstep. That is getting to be less true.
We definitely need more infrastructure to process claims and that would help but it is complex.
“It is largely the same thing” - it is simply not. The solution to the state persecuting you is citizenship in another state. The solution to a specific domestic abuser persecuting you, and the state being indifferent to that person needs to entail citizenship in a new country? Come on - there’s quite a wide range of options besides citizenship to help such a person. Moreover by the standard of “the government being indifferent to domestic violence it is persecuting women the same way Nazi Germany persecuted Jews”, we’re persecuting women too by sometimes failing to protect women from repeat abuse. The idea that a state that lacks perfect capacity to protect women is ipso facto persecuting them is absurd.
“There are people and courts” - yes those courts took a law that was all but explicitly about one thing, found a loophole to make it about another thing, and drove an aircraft carrier through it. I would like to see polling but I’d be quite shocked if more than a single digit share of Americans agree with the train of thought “domestic violence is misogynistic persecution => being domestically abused should entitle you to US citizenship”.
I am on Team 1 Billion Americans. We need and should welcome more people onto Team America - even if they’re from Guatemala or anywhere else. But this tendentious sophistry trying to make domestic violence fit into the category of the Holocaust is a sham excuse to facilitate immigration from undeveloped countries that most Americans do not want - you know it, I know it, and everyone involved knows it.
Which of course is why “the groups” are holding the entire immigration system hostage to maintain this status quo.
The basic problem is once large numbers of people are making meritless applications (which was happening) you have to do something to deter that or it becomes a vicious cycle that encourages more and more phony applications as the system is overwhelmed. And then you end up shutting down the system entirely or electing Donald Trump, and deserving applicants don't get asylum.
If you want asylum to work for its purpose (which fulfills an important international law obligation), economic migrants need to not only not get asylum but also get quickly rejected and deported so they have no incentive to try for it.
I get it. The border is overwhelmed. But also, there can be a broad range of merit, depending on the eye of the beholder. And I have seen people focus on one thing, but under questioning, more and better facts come out.
A common difference between left and right is that the left tends to be more willing to have a policy that allows more "unworthy" people to get a benefit, if it allows more "worthy" people to get that benefit, whereas conservatives tend to err on the side of denying the unworthy at the expense of some of the worthy, even if it means more administrative cost; they also like to focus on bad look cases, like the person buying lobster with food stamps. You see this in debates over programs like food stamps, or frivolous lawsuits.
In the asylum context, the consequence is potentially life and death.
The thing is none of that matters if there's a ton of cheating. Both for political reasons (cheating leads to backlash) and for fairness reasons (you end up rewarding cheaters while the original intended recipients of the program don't get the benefits).
On the latter point, one of the things Matt is saying is that when asylum works right it is awarded relatively quickly. Sure the lawyer needs some time to compile the case but it doesn't take years. The asylee quickly gets documented.
Under the current system, flooded with meritless asylum applications, what they get is a court date years from now. In the meantime they are in limbo, facing potential deportation and unable to work for 6 months.
That result is extremely good for the cheater, who can use it to try and illegally migrate into the country. But it's bad for the legitimate asylum applicant, who is getting a much worse deal than they would get if the meritless applications weren't happening.
Yes, I get the whole "liberals don't worry about cheaters" mindset. But that gets us into trouble. Cheating on welfare got us the draconian welfare reform bill, which is why Matt has to write anguished pieces calling for child tax credits. Cheating on emotional support animals on planes forced a crackdown that makes it harder for disabled people to take their service animals with them. Fare jumping on the subway leads to more police abuse and the installation of gates that make life difficult for the disabled.
The public does not agree with liberals that you should do nothing about people who game the system. Which means if you want a generous liberal state the cheaters have to be deterred.
You're a lawyer, right? This thread seems weirdly dismissive of the idea that there might be a very wide spectrum of colorable arguments for merit under a somewhat ambiguous legal standard. Despite the fact that happens all the time in every area of law, and that a practitioner from this area is telling you it's happening here.
Instead you're convinced the system is flooded with clearly meritless applications, and that the people whose job is to screen them are letting them through anyway. Why? Is there some very strong evidence you have seen, which overcomes the straightforward "merit is hard to judge" explanation?
Yes, I know there's a such a thing as a colorable argument that ultimately has no merit and that a litigant can win or lose on.
But that's not what's happening here. Why do we know this? First, simply because of the numbers. There's X number of people who suffer persecution based on membership of one of the protected groups each year. And yet suddenly we have these gigantic surges of people we didn't have before. That can't be because X went up. X didn't go up. What did happen is that (1) travel got cheaper, (2) the internet made information about claiming asylum more widely available, and (3) some specific countries like Venezuela went into economic tailspins.
And by the way, we also know that this isn't an increase of X because it's concentrated in just a few countries. Maduro's Venezuela is bad (I visited Caracas when it was still Chavez's Venezuela, and it was bad then; it's worse now), but it's not as though all the persecution based on group membership is happening in Venezuela and three other countries that happen to be impoverished. What's happening is middle class people from those four countries are paying smugglers to deliver them to the US border where they can cross, present themselves and claim asylum, and stay in the country.
Further, and this is where I think I really disagree with the immigration lawyers' lobby, you don't actually have the right to apply for things you don't qualify for. Yes, for instance, there's an application process for Social Security disability, but if you aren't disabled you don't have the right to apply for it. Applications for important government benefits aren't some lottery ticket where maybe your application will get through the cracks. Applicants have a moral obligation not to apply at all if they do not qualify. And plenty of asylum applicants are applying despite not qualifying. How do we know this? Well look at the acceptance rates. 30% of applicants can't even convince an asylum officer they have a credible fear. So that right there is an indicator that there are some BS applications being made. And then only 40% of applicants are actually granted asylum. Are you going to tell me that those other 60% are all close cases with colorable arguments for merit?
If, say, 30% of applicants for Social Security disability couldn't even meet an initial screening that they might be disabled, and only 40% of applicants actually proved their eligibility, and that because Social Security was overwhelmed with all these meritless applications, delivering benefits to actually disabled people took years, you'd hear some serious calls to reform the application process for disability benefits. This is just political reality, but I also think the critics have a point.
The reality is that if you want a system where (1) people entitled to get asylum get asylum quickly and efficiently, and (2) people with colorable arguments get them fairly heard on full evidentiary records and with full due process, you need all the people making fraudulent arguments to be kept out of the system. And even if you don't agree with that, that's what the public's going to think, especially on an issue like immigration where there's a not entirely unfounded suspicion that some folks like the idea of asylum being a proxy for lifting restrictions on legal immigration that they do not approve of in the first place.
I agree with this analysis. But my assumption is that only a very small portion of X actually makes it to the US border. Most stay put and endure the persecution. Some move internally and a few move to a neighboring country. So I suspect the factors you cite are increasing the proportion of X that shows up in the US. In which case a large increase in applications is not evidence of an increase in the proportion of fraudulent applications.
Also, the first sources on Google give a 30-50% approval rate for SSDI. So that's not a great counterexample - I would tend to think both systems could use more resources, but that rejected applications are probably an inevitable part of administering these programs. There are varying degrees of merit, the standards are very subjective, and obviously the amount of real no-merit fraud is greater than zero.
This was an extremely long-winded way of saying “lawyers and judges are so disconnected from material reality that we just don’t need to think about what’s feasible or the consequences of an infeasible legal regime”.
In real life, if the consequence of running a classifier with a 99% true positive rate (in your words “a 1% chance that the person will be prosecuted”) is millions of extremely expensive false positives, that’s a bad classifier. But for lawyers, that’s just someone else’s problem.
"This is why the lower credible fear interview threshold makes sense, and is not atypical in the legal world."
I agree that the threshold should be lower than the regular one. If 100% of people passing credible fear got asylum I'd expect that we were absolutely leaving people out.
Conversely, if 1% of people passing credible fear got asylum, that would clearly be too low a standard.
20% to me seems to be too low _given that we're overwhelmed_. (If we were not overwhelmed, and 20% was working, I'd leave it alone).
I also do pro bono immigration cases, and I concur for the most part. There are many people with not-unreasonable fear of discrimination or violence for a lot of reasons (domestic violence victims and LGBT being the most common examples). Does that rise to the level of persecution, or is it just a crappy lot in life?
I would like decisions on social group persecution to have some precedental value so the same arguments don’t need to be adjudicated over and over again. It eats up a ton of resources.
This is one of the things I’ve found extremely confusing - clearly these cases should all be boilerplate by now. How many different flavors of “I’m running away from Venezuela” can there possibly be? How is it that every one of these people needs an actual trial with an actual judge - and that the judge can’t just plow through the cases like they do for other boilerplate issues?
Given your experience/expertise, what reforms would you propose to address the situation? Do you think the number of border crossings and/or individuals flowing into the country needs to be reduced, or is it more about humanely processing the people who do come no matter the number?
I struggle with this. We consider ourselves a decent country and the law allows people to seek asylum. And being a desirable destination for people seeking asylum because we have a great and prosperous country is a good thing and certainly better than being a country where a person would think "what hope would I have there?".
A few thoughts:
Some long term things we can do are to really press countries on human rights, like LGBT rights, and also dropping sanctions on places like Venezuela where we are *trying* to break their economy. Obama had reduced the flow significantly up to 2016 and this was part of it. The flow increased substantially under Trump pre-COVID.
Shorter term, resources are obviously needed to process cases faster, and that is happening slowly. In my area, a new immigration court is opening in Lowell MA, and asylum officers have been added to Boston, and there are signs of processing moving faster. I agree with one of the main points, which is that delays hurt the legally best cases, and benefit the legally worst. And a long-delay system creates different incentives.
I would expand legal pathways and numbers, and maybe change the visa mix, e.g., to phase out siblings as a category for family petitioning -- it takes 15+ years anyway now.
I would also allow a form of asylum application from abroad (technically, it's only called asylum if you are here, and refugee if you are not here).
Maybe expand a kind of diversity visa for the most needy places to encourage more people to apply from home and wait.
Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough response. I largely agree with the sentiment and proposals you're putting forth, but I think you and I represent a vision of immigration that is largely divorced from the average voter's views on the issue, so our vision is not politically tenable unfortunately. I think common sense compromises that try and maintain as much human dignity and expanded opportunity while simultaneously taking into account most people's apprehension surrounding widespread immigration are the best that can be hoped for.
Our policy toward Venezuela has failed but how do we press countries without sanctions though? And I think Venezuela is so f'd that economically, socially, and politically that I'm not even sure lifting sanctions would stop the outflow of migrants.
So thinking of Cuba - where our sanctions (or blockade, depends on who ask!) has famously failed for decades - one thing we could do is instead try to bolster our credibility in the region.
We obtained Guantanamo in pretty unsavory way - we swooped in at the end of a 30-year fight for independence ending in 1898, we vetoed their drafts constitution, and pressed to get an indefinite possession of this military base - and we have used it in ways not exactly applauded by human rights groups.
It's politically infeasible to hand back that land (as America did in the 1970s with the Panama Canal) to an undemocratic regime - but I like the idea of transforming Guantanamo Bay into a world-class tropical disease research that brings top scientists from all over the Western hemisphere to try to produce breakthrough research on tropical diseases that afflict countries in the hemisphere. It would transform a place known for American human rights abuses into a symbol of American-led regional collaboration.
Asylum applications dropped pretty fast under Trump. That is so well documented, it is practically common knowledge. They understood the political environment and quit coming. Please show some data for stating that it increased under Trump.
Sometimes it is hard to know what to believe. Is there a difference between the number of apprehensions that aren't let in vs. the number of actual arrivals? Can anyone explain? The pew research paper is talking about whole families vs. individuals for the most part, but point to a total increase as well, I don't know how to reconcile these 2 points of data.
Matt writes: "So I want to conclude by arguing that conservatives should see that Democrats have made real concessions here..."
As long as the Democratic Party sees improving the asylum system and reducing illegal immigration as a **concession**, this issue will continue to be a huge benefit to Republicans, regardless of their cynical and short-sighted actions.
Biden should go ahead and take the Section 212(f) action that Trump took and see if the courts decide it is illegal. Same as he did with student loan forgiveness. Show that this is a crisis and the Administration is on the side of securing the border by any legal means.
You protest too much - everyone was hunky dory with this bill, Senator Lankford (hardly an immigration dove) was clearly satisfied with the concessions Murphy made, but Orange Man reminded them of the political calculus and they We Have Always Been At War With Eurasia-d the bill.
I guarantee if Biden even tried to take 212f action not only would he of course catch flak from his own party for doing something he very obviously said previously was illegal, the GOP would scramble to reframe it as negatively as possible.
So long as the GOP is willing to leverage immigration as cynically as possible it's going to be very hard. They've done a great job making immigration a heads I win tails you lose situation. Border chaos when a Dem is in charge means we need to be tougher so vote Republican, border chaos when a Republican is in charge means we need to be even tougher so vote Republican. They would hate for this issue to go away.
I agree that taking this issue back from a cynical Trump-led GOP will be difficult. And it won’t work for lots of people. Hence, my suggestion that Biden should act without waiting for the House GOP conference. Drop the opposition to Texas putting up barriers. Take the 212(f) action. Call a press conference and send a full-throated message against spurious asylum claims.
In this comments section over the past few years, many have wanted a Sista Soulja moment from the President. This is the perfect timing (9 months from the election) and the perfect issue to do that.
No, no, no. This is not a messaging problem. I am tired of hearing this idea that Biden needs to change messaging. And I'm tired of hearing about Trump.
Biden didn't invite the leader of the House to a private meeting to discuss red lines and concessions like he did with the debt ceiling. That's the story here. Speaker Johnson said several times during December that he needed to be more involved, and dropped blatant hints to the press that he was considering inviting himself over to the White House (WHICH IS A SIGN YOU SHOULD BRING HIM OVER).
Biden didn't do this. We can speculate as to why, but as a simple factual matter, this bill was dead in December without actual discretion between the guy needed to introduce it and the Democratic-led Senate and Presidency.
No, they invited him later in mid-January after the Senate details were already pretty much done to basically just sit there and reiterate why the bill was likely dead. This was before Trump weighed in. Speaker Johnson had been saying all of December that the White House was ignoring him and any Senate bill was currently dead in the water. He never revised his assessment later on from this.
Now maybe it would've failed if the White House had taken him in for talks in December with Schumer! Maybe Republicans are simply too far apart from Democrats to get this kind of bill to happen. I'm not saying it would've succeeded. I'm simply saying Johnson was repeatedly telling them he was not getting any buy-in the month before January and before Trump did his usual Trump show.
I think that's just giving Mike Johnson way too much credit as a good-faith negotiator, rather than a partisan hack. And again, I'm assuming the White House would love to get this bill passed and if meeting with Mike Johnson right now would get it across the finish line in something resembling it's current form, I'm sure they would.
I'm sorry this reads as some "Meet The Press" what happened good ole days when Tip O'Neil and Ronald Reagan could pass bipartisan bills over a glass of scotch.
There are good faith negotiators on the GOP side in the senate and House. But Mike Johnson has very clearly demonstrated he's not one of them and not really interested in being one. There's a reason that a number of House GOP politicians are looking for a discharge petition to try to get Ukraine/Israel funding passed. They clearly themselves don't see Johnson as a good faith House Leader/negotiator but almost certainly don't want another protracted fight for House speaker again, especially since it could end up with someone worse like Jim Jordan.
I think you misunderstand what John wants from Biden - not ”messaging” but leadership. Go it alone and fix the border chaos. Dems need to change tack on immigration policy - not to win, not to ”neutralize the issue”, not to pander - but because it’s the correct thing to do. And also popular.
A leader doesn’t let the border chaos continue, he doesn’t grudgingly accept compromises with Republicans but comes out with plans of his own. Real, tough, workable plans that do not cater to pie-in-the-sky progressives
This comes awfully close to the Green Lantern fantasy. The idea that Biden by himself can "fix the border crisis," I dunno man. By invoking 212(f)? And it will immediately be blocked by the courts, just like happened with Trump.
I agree there are immediate acts Biden could take and Johnson obviously outlined them in a letter to Biden during the December Senate negotiating. But I think Biden didn't fail to get Johnson's buy-in because of a lack of X, Y, then tough-nosed press conference.
Biden failed to get Speaker Johnson's buy-in on the details a la debt ceiling because he literally didn't try to.
I agree with the narrow point about inviting Johnson over. But Republicans' lied their tail off about what this bill did and took the position that the only acceptable route would be to pass their MESSAGING bill (HR2), a bill that was never even intended to become law. So I don't think not meeting with Johnson was the hold up here.
Well Biden desperately needed a border deal to salvage his re-election campaign he is currently losing so maybe this was not the right attitude?
What Matt also didn’t mention is that the border stuff was supposed to be the price of Ukraine aid. So the MAGA crowd in the House were already supposed to swallow a bunch of money for Ukraine as well as the compromise border bill - it was never going to work.
Mike Johnson was never going to go against the Trump dictum. It wasn't because he wasn't invited to the White House. In any case, "Mike Johnson" doesn't exist; he's an avatar for rotating small factions of the House Republican caucus who wish to block things they hate.
I keep hearing this position that the House literally has no head, but if that's true, it must follow there was no way Trump could've killed this deal.
Because that would mean there's no party in the House to introduce it. That doesn't sound right to me! Let's take a look at what Johnson was saying across all of December before Trump let out a peep:
This doesn't make any sense. Indeed they have a symbolic head one that parrots the consensus in the caucus, or at least the views of the deciding voting bloc in that caucus. That's all Johnson was doing. The dude obviously is no Nancy Pelosi -- or even a Newt Gingrich. He's a sock puppet.
I’ve seen others ask you for support of your claim that this was the problem; I imagine you’re still working on that, so I’ll ask something different. If what you’re saying is true, how is it an indictment of Biden, rather than Johnson? Once the bill goes to the House, the House can pass their own version and then they’re in the negotiation. Why is “kill the whole thing, we’re not addressing this issue this year” an acceptable response?
I have avoided opining too hard on Biden because I'm aware he's a political leader with a coalition, and I trust Matt is telling me the truth when he says breaking from the comprehensive 2013-style vision is a real lift that upsets some Democrats. My main objection is the idea this bill's time of death was when Trump weighed in on his 2024 election. The evidence is not there, because it was dead for a while. That said, I cannot prove for certain there was a path to get this bill to happen. I am trying to honestly argue that any serious path would've had to deeply involve Johnson's policy asks from the get-go, and that clearly didn't happen.
The thrust of my argument rests on the evidence that Johnson was saying any talks were dead in the water across all of December. He was repeatedly complaining the White House wasn't taking him seriously, and he didn't get a meeting until mid-January where it looks like he was just allowed to explain why the current details he has heard is likely dead in the water. You don't have to be a Republican to see the Sunday evening right-wing hatefest of the bill was a long time coming with no plan from Johnson to refute it or have major shareholders in the House GOP push back. I thank you for your patience and charity, and direct you to my play by play of Johnson's statements here, starting on December 5th:
Johnson made clear the White House had to own the process. He not only sent them a letter on any possible executive steps to show credibility, but had it passed to the press that he was considering asking for an invite to the White House, which is a pretty strong hint what had to happen.
However, another thing that is true, and the White House is aware of, is that the Senate GOP has members desperate for a Ukraine aid deal. Republicans cannot pretend they were all on the same page as a party about this; Johnson and McConnell obviously disagree on how "default/bipartisan" the Ukraine aid is vs a "partisan" ask to be balanced by some items in HR 2. That is part of how the Senate process was bipartisan in the first place. And how Biden wisely seized the messaging game on this while the Speaker remained cold even as passed some details by Senate GOP.
He didn’t bring up border reform because he can’t pass it on the floor with a majority of republican voting for it because they don’t want border reform because of trump. This is the weakest speaker in 5 decades at least. He has had 6 rule votes go down in his short tenure. He has only passed bills on suspenion essentially only.
This is all wishcasting here. Johnson will not pass border reform because he fears losing his speakership, not because Joe Biden didn’t invite him over for coffee. You can ask members of congress and they will tell you that the death of this package is due to speaker Johnson’s fragility, not some weird face saving letter Johnson sent to Joe Biden.
This is absolutely incorrect. Biden should ask for an evening to address the nation. He should lay out the facts, as Matt has here, and make it clear that Republicans have decided to embrace chaos rather that taking yes for an answer. Show the nation that one side has decided to hand the nation over to Trump for his political interests while the other is trying, willing to be reasonable, and willing to work with people on the other side.
The crazies won’t believe him. We simply have to write them off-there is no saving them from their lunacy. But the middle still has the opportunity to deny the crazies power, and can be persuaded.
No, those Oval Office addresses don't work, as other commenters show.
He *should* make this a big point in the March 7 SOTU where he points to the stonefaced Republicans sitting on their hands, saying "*Those* are the people who *want* chaos on the border while I was standing by with my pen to sign into law the steps we need to solve this problem!" and the Democrats (well, most of them) leap to their feet and cheer wildly.
Perhaps not, but obviously their choice not to cover it would be simply because they don’t like his administration rather than not wanting to “favor a particular political viewpoint.” They chose to air politicians, especially speeches by the president, all the time. They all aired Trump’s boarder security speech on January 8, 2019, for example.
I'm stating what was widely reported as the networks' justification for refusing to carry Obama's speech:
“There was agreement among the broadcast networks that this was overtly political,” a network insider told Politico Playbook at the time. “The White House has tried to make a comparison to a time that all the networks carried President Bush in prime time, also related to immigration [2006]. But that was a bipartisan announcement, and this is an overtly political move by the White House.”
You can disbelieve what was said, but my statement was that those were the "grounds" the networks would refuse it on, not that it was the true ulterior motive for them to refuse to carry such an address.
Disagree. It’s effectively a very old Joe Biden whining about how he can’t fix the problem because of mean Republicans.
The border is in crisis, at least in part because of actions by the Biden administration. If Biden is to have any chance of re-election, he needs to actually fix the problem. Either executive action, or a border bill so juicy the Republican house can’t pass it up.
1) He literally can’t fix it by executive action. Trump couldn’t fix it by executive action. The steps Republicans demand are unfunded-funding they blocked. How have people made it through high school without a basic understanding of our federal government?
2) Republicans got almost everything they have asked for, but killed it anyhow. Republicans plainly want the issue more than they want a solution.
It's absolutely about politics. But Biden has been studiously ignoring the border for three years. Why should Republicans bail him out in an election year, just so he can go back to ignoring the border in 2025? If this were 2021, then I'd be on board with Republicans accepting a compromise like this.
The bill makes reforms that don’t end Election Day. You may not like Joe Biden. But if you don’t want to legislate controversial issues because there is an election, then you don’t want to legislate controversial issues.
It’s only a controversial issue in the minds of far left Democrats. Don’t listen to them. The overwhelming majority of Americans want an end to the chaos and controlled immigration.
The bill contains provisions that require action even if the President in 2025 wants to "ignore" the issue.
I also love the cynicism of your point that Republicans, who have been screaming about the border as an absolute catastrophe for at least 8 years, shouldn't do something to improve the situation simply because it would be perceived as "bailing out" Joe Biden. You'd think if they actually believed it was the nightmare they've been claiming it was then this could easily be framed as "we skillfully forced Biden to do something he didn't want to do in order to address this very serious issue."
Stuff like this makes me think that in March, 2020, if Hilary Clinton was President and GOP controlled the House and/or Senate (very likely scenario for a variety of reasons), there's a pretty decent chance at least in the first attempt a stimulus bill wouldn't pass. I think eventually one would pass* once enough GOP politicians saw what was happening with the stock market (and their stock portfolios), but I'm guessing it would be much more akin to 2009; much smaller than the $2 trillion needed, tilted towards tax cuts for white collar professionals and upper class and probably very little enhanced unemployment.
*this is my fig leaf of hope as to why we won't breach the debt ceiling (I'm definitely in the camp of getting rid of the whole thing btw). That enough GOP donors still have the ear of enough GOP politicians to tell them that breaching the debt ceiling would be disaster for their stock portfolios.
If Republicans think they'll do a better job of solving the issue if they hold a (narrow) trifecta next year, well, they're wrong. This was a Republican bill. Sometimes you just have to take the win.
Unless they *want* border chaos under any and all circumstances. Maybe they do but at some point that may blow up in their faces.
They bailed him out in an election year by shooting the deal down. The Democrats won the political debate over the bill once they agreed to make concessions. At that point, regardless of what the Republicans decided to do on the bill, it became a win-win for the Dems.
This is something Mitch McConnell (or someone close to Mitch) discovered back in 2009; Bipartisanship almost always benefits the President over anyone in the opposition party and failure to pass bipartisan bills almost always results in more blame being apportioned to the President (doesn't help that Biden and especially Obama both ran explicitly as uniters who can get stuff done with the opposition party. Though in Biden's case kind of true).
It's a huge problem politically because it creates the very political incentives we just witnessed. Even when one side explicitly says they are tanking a bill for insanely cynical reasons, majorities of the public invariably blame the President (would probably the same if a non crazy GOP President was in power) over anyone else.
I think that article misses my point. Yes, the public is going to blame the Democrats more than the Republicans for the bill's failure - that's been a well-known and widely-covered phenomenon for 15 years. But the public would have blamed the Democrats even more if they had not made concessions and had not maneuvered the Republicans into sabotaging the bill. Therefore, the concessions made to bring the bill into existence were a net positive for Democrats compared to the status quo ante.
Also, while the article doesn't really go to this at all, I think a lot of people are overestimating how much it would have benefited Democrats if they successfully passed the bill. They'd benefit some, but it's not as if the Republicans would have stopped attacking them, nor is it the case that the border would have been totally "fixed" between now and Election Day. The amount the Democrats would have benefited would have been pretty comparable to the amount they are benefiting now *relative to status quo ante* by getting a deal on the bill that the Republicans then shot down.
I disagree. I think the border being a disaster will (correctly) be laid at Biden's feet between now and November. Trump will be able to point to the simple fact that the border was relatively fine when he was president, and it is a disaster under Biden, without any legislative change. Biden's argument that he needs a new law will be trumped by Trump pointing out that he didn't need a new law.
But the Republicans also would have done that even if the border bill had passed. Either way, their attacks are blunted *relative to the status quo ante of when the Democrats weren't making concessions.* Now that the concessions are a matter of public record, the issue is still negative for Democrats, but less negative than it was pre-concessions, and equally less negative regardless of whether the Republicans agree to the bill or not.
OK, I agree that the *bill* is a net political positive for democrats, but the bill is minor compared to the overall *issue* of immigration. And I don't think the bill moved the needle much on the overall perception of the issue.
No, this was an own goal by the Republicans. The Democrats don't need to own this issue; they just need to cut down the Republicans' advantage on this. Up to now, it was a slam dunk for the Republicans that the Democrats had no answer to. Now, due to (the usual) Republican stupidity, every time they bring up the border the Democrats have at least enough of an answer to win over some voters on the issue.
Do you have a link to that? The bill was still being negotiated in December, nobody knew what was in it, and the only articles I can see from December are Johnson calling on the President to take Executive Action. The letter he sent to Biden on December 21st only mentions that bipartisan negotiations are ongoing, but says nothing negative about them. So what's the basis of your claim that Johnson spent months telling Biden that he wasn't okay with the bill prior to a) the bill's details actually being negotiated and settled upon; b) disclosed to Johnson (or anyone else) such that he could opine on them; and c) Trump coming out and saying (without knowing or caring what was in the bill) that it should be dead on arrival in the House for purely political reasons?
Johnson's letter is a pretty obvious outline of his caucuses grievances; the White House is the executor of anything that will be passed and they don't think it's serious about executing current laws to deter spurious asylum claims coming into the US. This means, if there is a bill to happen, the White House has to get serious. Johnson was never going to say no to the bill before it was announced. But he was signaling in January prior to the bill's announcement, similar to his letter, that the White House had to take up the lead rather than punting to the Senate's Ukraine concerns if they wanted House GOP to vote on it.
Trump came out and said the bill was dead with Republicans. He was correct, but we had already arrived at that situation prior to his announcement. In part, because the Senate GOP and House GOP do not agree on the political nature of Ukraine Aid.
"While a bipartisan group of Senators has begun extensive negotiations over the past few weeks to try to find a compromise, they have not yet been able to finalize an agreement. Statutory reforms designed to restore operational control at our southern border must be enacted, but the crisis at our southern border has deteriorated to such an extent that significant action can wait no longer. It must start now, and it must start with you."
That's all he said about the negotiations in the bill. He literally says there are bipartisan negotiations happening and that legislation must be enacted. He also accuses the Biden administration of needing to do more on its own, sure, but you claimed that he made these grand statements denouncing the bill as far back as December. Now you say it's January. Do you have a link to those statements? Again, I'm looking for any support for your claim that this had to do with some sort of negotiating faux pas on the Biden admin's part that excluded Johnson. What's the basis of the claim that "we had already arrived at that situation prior to his announcement"? McConnell was leaked to have said to his caucus that the bill was basically a good bill that would have passed until the politics changed after Trump came out against it- was McConnell wrong/lying?
This response of yours seems all over the place relative to what you said previously. First he was saying back in December, now it's January. Before, he was saying that he was not hunky dory with the bill back in December. Now he was never going to be against it until the terms had been released. Do you have a clear timeline of what happened and what people were saying as this process played out?
Sure. Here's where I'm reading into Johnson in December as signaling a negotiation between Ukraine aid and immigration is not at all hunky dory.
December 5th: Speaker Johnson's letter clarifies that HR 2 items must be considered in talks alongside any serious Ukraine funds, which he also believes must have various caveats attached on details and objectives.
The Hill[1] reports this is too far apart right now. "Yet even the potential concessions that angered the CHC fell well short of Johnson’s vision. ... Democrats see many of the provisions in H.R. 2 as non-starters, and it was passed with no Democratic votes."
So *Trump has not made a noise about Ukraine-Border talks* to the press, and The Hill is making clear to readers this is unlikely to go forward in December. This is great reporting because it drives home that the parties really do disagree on what successful immigration policy will even look like, because Republicans want less movement into the country while Democrats stress the disorder of the current process. It's a solid read.
The same reporting[1]: "By sticking to the House GOP’s right flank on border demands, Johnson is sending a message to the Senate that a supplemental resembling the administration’s first proposal is dead in the water in the House."
Dead in the water. One might hope Johnson will start sending a very clear different message later when we get to the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy negotiation. But this is the default we are starting with, straight from the guy in charge of the House of Reps.
December 12th: Politico reports [2] that Ukraine's leader Zelenskyy is meeting with Johnson and Jeffries in the House. It notes Johnson is refusing to extend the House legislative session despite asks from the Senate. Then we get this quote:
'“Here we are on the eve, virtually, of Christmas and the end of the year, and the White House, as we talk this morning, has not moved in our direction on that issue,” Johnson said. “And I’ve told them very clearly where we stand.”'
So a week has passed and in Johnson's view, the White House is making no moves to him despite his statement about the Senate process so far. He makes clear he views the Senate and White House as co-equal participants in any success: "The House members will work. We’ve shown that over and over and over, but we’re not getting any cooperation from the White House and the Senate Democrats at all." [2] Sounds like this compromise is not happening in the House so far. Dead in the water still.
A fun precursor of the current White House PR on immigration is also in the Politico Playbook PM story, but about Biden impeachment inquiry. Relaying NBC News reporting, Politico says that the White House has 'blistering new memo, accusing Johnson of “taking marching orders” from Trump by pursuing the vote.' This is obviously how they're going to handle immigration not going their way too.
December 21st: NBC News reports that "With Congress gone for the year with no border deal, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Thursday sent a scathing letter to President Joe Biden, blaming him for the border crisis and urging him to take a number of executive actions." Clear executive actions are outlined over what it would mean for the White House to take the House seriously. Not releasing migrants with court dates. Restricting parole use by the president. Resuming border wall construction. And here's the killer line "It must start now, and it must start with you."
This isn't some weirdo in the House GOP caucus on a power trip. It's the leader of the House saying what has to happen for him to even consider revising his previous statements saying that this Senate process is dead in the water. The NBC story makes clear that the White House is choosing to ignore this letter and praise the Senate process at the end of the story. As you note, the letter acknowledges the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy process, but it does not meaningfully show any optimism in this talk. Given Johnson's previous explicit statements on the Senate process, it's fair to say we're still at "dead in the water" status.
January 10th: NBC News reports [4] Biden has now spoken with Johnson on the phone. We also learn there's no in-person meeting happening. "A senior Biden administration official said the White House has not closed the door to an in-person meeting between Biden and Johnson, but no such meeting has been scheduled." This is after Johnson went to the border in the prior week demanding Biden take executive actions to show any willingness to see legislation happen, as he laid out in his Dec. 21st letter. There's basically no update in this story of any actual legislative process happening between Johnson and the White House. It's a phone call.
January 17th: Johnson is finally given a meeting at the White House to reiterate the HR 2 elements. It does not sound like there's much of any breakthrough or joined discussion with the Senate. CNN reports [5] 'Despite the White House and Democrats rejecting H2, Johnson insisted Wednesday night that it be the basis of any immigration deal. “I think we had productive discussion today at the White House because I told them, it doesn’t matter to me what you label it, I don’t care what you call it, HR 2, but those elements are really important,” he said.' Then we get the kill-shot once again as we heard in December.
"If the bill looks like some of the things that have been rumored, of course it’s dead in the House, because it wouldn’t solve the problem."
I'm going to leave the story here. I think this is a detailed and thorough explanation of what is going on. The CNN story concludes with the Speaker discussing how he will avoid a government shutdown (this is a new and frankly, welcome trend for House Republicans with a Democratic president in my opinion.)
But before we even get to Johnsons's House GOP letter and other moves to say this bill is dead, I'm going to reiterate, Johnson explicitly said he was not getting taken seriously in the legislative process and that anything the Senate was going to do was dead in the water. This has been going on since early December, and nothing Johnson has said indicates a change from that default position. Trump, as usual, showed up at the end and took credit with Democrats shaking their heads and saying "oh there he goes again, ending a good deal for politics."
But we can look at what the Speaker of the House actually said two months ago and see for ourselves if this is true, and Trump seized control of a caucus from a Speaker excited and optimistic about the Senate's attempt to bridge the partisan divide on the immigration and Ukraine aid issues. The opposite was always the case, and it has been the entire time. Even if you think Speaker Johnson is the worst person ever or the House Republicans are traitors, it doesn't change the facts. He told you all along, well before January.
Democrats thought McCarthy was a tool! This didn't stop Biden from inviting McCarthy to talk debt ceiling in the White House, despite Biden's statements to his party that only a clean bill would happen.
At any rate, there is no "ignore the House Speaker if you don't like him" clause in Article I.
Small groups of Senators or House members very frequently negotiate initial packages that then get a hearing on the floor of Congress and don't involve senior leadership at the initial drafting phase. McConnell nor Schumer were directly involved. The objection that the closed door negotiations didn't involve Johnson seems bizarre to me given the 200 year history of legislation being negotiated in precisely the way this legislation was negotiated without anyone freaking out about how it violated Article I or something.
I didn't say it violated Article I, just that you need the House vote on the bill, and the debt ceiling is the vision of that actually coming true between the House GOP and Biden making promises to their respective voters.
No, it was pretty clear before Trump weighed in that Johnson would have been unable to keep his caucus together and jam the bill. It would have passed the house over his objections.
It's true the Biden White House could say, "we were unaware the House GOP Speaker will not allow bills without the buy-in of enough people in his caucus."
But they wisely haven't said that. Because nobody following Congress would be able to stop laughing.
Lankford is a cheap labor shill as are most Republicans in Congress...who would happily sluice more people into the country faster if they could vote off the record.
This is the basic problem. "reform" for liberals and the cheap labor lobby means much higher legal limits. Since they have tried and failed repeatedly to achieve that (most voters want the same or lower limits) "reform" looks like speeding up the asylum process which means accelerating the number of claims we admit or don't admit but don't deport.
The funny thing is that social democratic parties in Scandinavia - who US progressives often praise and seem to want to emulate - have all taken a sharp turn to the right on immigration policy since 2015 (the social democrats in Denmark did so already ten years before that). I never hear about this in the US debate, which can be a bit myopic at times and helped by us Europeans participating in the comment section :)
The party leader of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden - the most electorally succesful left wing party in the Western world post-ww2 - nowadays regularly lambasts the centre-right government for having had a liberal migration policy in the past and try to rewrite history and position her own party as being for a ”responsible”, i.e. strict, migration policy. The Social Democratic Party in Denmark goes further and talks about having net zero immigration the coming decade. I think the latter party goes way too far but this is just to show that there is a space for left wing politics that is restrictive on immigration policy. It took a crisis for them to wake up (particularly in Sweden) but now they see it as a cornerstone of Nordic social democracy. It’s not just tactical, they see that immigration must be controlled and limited so that we can properly take care of those who arrive (housing, jobs, citizenship, language etc).
Please tell your ”open borders”-progressive friends that they should take a closer look at Scandinavian center left politics on this issue.
I tell people all the time that the European experience is instructive on how this plays out politically. The US has a much greater capacity to absorb immigrants but not an unlimited one. At a certain point the same dynamics will kick in for any democratic system of government. Citizenship has to mean something, even in the most liberal societies.
No, this thinking is childish. If the natural result of an approach to a particular policy is cascading political crisis and ultimately an even more difficult to resolve crisis of faith in the liberal order then it is not workable. Blowing up a system that allows for positive reform is not something any liberal or progressive minded person should be interested in.
It’s easy to be morally pure and principled when one refuses to deal with the actual reality. In actual reality there is almost always such a thing as capacity, and only by acknowledging this can one help people in a sustainable way that works.
Why? Surely both options should be on the table. The capacity may not be technocratic, it may be cultural (how good society is at assimilation, for example)
Open borders is a policy that some progressives like, but it's at least as closely associated with libertarians as progressives. I sympathize with it, but am worried about the political fallout. I do think that libertarians are more likely to stick on it as a matter of central principle than most progressives.
Who are the progressives who are for open borders? I mean, I know some who are Jill Stein voters. But which Democrats in some position of power think that we should let in anyone who wants to come in?
While I agree that too many Democrats don't see illegal immigration as a problem that needs to be solved, saying that Biden should do something that is clearly illegal makes no sense.
While the student loan forgiveness issue seems comparable superficially, I don't think it actually is. There was a plausible (though I didn't agree it) argument for the student loan forgiveness, whereas I just don't see how one could plausibly argue that 212f is legal.
Additionally, the argument that the Biden admin has put forward is that the issue needs to be solved legislatively. Executive action undermines that correct argument.
Exactly. I have trouble taking any analysis seriously that doesn't acknowledge that Biden could be doing a lot more now to stem illegal immigration. He's only looking for a fig leaf now that his very blind eye to illegal immigration is a problem even in blue cities.
>Here is the reality: Republicans have something Biden wants — aid for Ukraine. To get it, he needs to give them something they want (and need) — major concessions on border security. Even the many House Republicans who want to help Ukraine need those concessions to do so, so that the anti-Ukraine right cannot accuse them of caring more about Ukraine’s borders than our own.
>The reason the Senate border deal is going nowhere was that it was an immigration reform compromise, not a border concession. Republicans were being asked to approve a border-security package they found woefully insufficient — and then approve the aid to Ukraine that Biden wants. That was never going to fly. In fact, it backfired — losing the votes of pro-Ukraine Republicans in the Senate. Passing Ukraine aid is the Republicans’ concession. The Democrats’ concession has to be securing the border.
He's arguing that (as totally f-ed as this is), giving aid to Ukraine is a huge concession from the GOP, while the Democrats aren't actually making any concessions at all by supporting legislation that would completely shut down the asylum system when the number of border crossings exceeds some threshold number.
I don't see the problem here as Democrats viewing "improving the asylum system and reducing illegal immigration" as concessions—the problem here is that the Republicans view any form of compromise as concessions.
Thiessen goes on to move the goal posts again by arguing that the real objection is the humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but the point is crystal clear: "Compromise" means Republicans getting everything they want even when they can't even articulate what they actually want; and nothing the Democrats offer is truly a concession on their part because it might benefit them politically.
It's mind boggling, especially when you consider that Senate republicans want Ukraine aid too! So for some reason the republicans in the House, with the slimmest possible majority, are the ones that get to control every single facet of the American political process simply because they're so disorganized and petty that they can't be relied upon to behave like real legislators? It's ludicrous to watch this debate play out.
I actually think that Republicans are acting perfectly rational by responding to incentives. The problem is that the overriding incentive is to be re-elected, which necessarily means they cannot get crosswise with MAGA. Trump wields absolute power over elected Republicans because he effectively created a personality cult within the GOP that will believe and do whatever he says. And that cult clearly has no interest in policy; they view everything as cynical political maneuvering to get Trump back into the White House.
What the rest of us see as moving goal posts, the inability to articulate policy goals, bad-faith negotiations and voting on unconstitutional culture-war legislation is viewed inside the cult as "fighting" and is it is the point. Voters now place equal blame on Democrats and Republicans and more blame on Biden than Trump for the failure to pass the border-Ukraine deal, which accomplishes the actual goal. They do not actually care about immigration, the sovereignty of Ukraine or anything else; they care about re-electing Trump, full stop.
I don't know why House Democrats (and some Republicans) haven't already started the discharge petition process for the aid bill yet. Why delay even a second?
Difficult people always get more power over accommodating people because they know they can get their way with intransigence but it usually blows up in the long run.
The fact that Marc Thiesen (in theory) styles himself as a neoconservative Republican makes this all the more galling. In theory, the people in this country who should be most in favor of aid to Ukraine full stop with no strings attached are people like Thiessen.
I don't think he is a hack. I feel for sorry for conservative intellectuals who are watching everyone around them turn into cultists.
I also find it interesting to watch people like him try to synthesize some kind of coherent framework or ideology from the pure chaos that is the modern Republican party. They really cannot see that it is a personality cult run by an amoral narcissist because that would mean accepting that the erstwhile Republican president truly does not care about anything or anyone but himself and will never, ever put party or country or principles over his own interests.
The thing that really just happened is that Trump killed legislation that was good for everyone but him because it hindered his own short-term goal of winning the next election, which itself is only in service of his goals of escaping accountability and making himself richer and also maybe revenge and the sadistic pleasure of breaking people's spirits. So the Thiessens of the world have to synthesize some non-crazy explanation that involves Republicans adhering to some kind of principle. He ends the column by saying that Europe will pay for humanitarian aid, so all you have to do to get Johnson to bring a bill to the floor is to strip out everything but straight military aid for Ukraine. You see, because Conservatives wouldn't just let an autocrat annex a country, they're still hawks—and really it's the bleeding heart liberals who are at fault.
They just impeached the DHS secretary over their gripes over "The Border" and even then couldn't articulate exactly what they want or think should have been done differently.
Yes. this is like the "concessions" in the budget negotiations. When lightning strikes and Republicans actually want something sensible, let yourself be STRUCK!
There’s a very basic disagreement between people who want more immigration to this country and people who want less. That encourages people to think of any change to the status quo as either a win or a loss that requires offsets. The asylum status quo is that we have a defacto immigration path for, e.g. teenagers fleeing gang violence in Central America, even though pro-immigration groups could never pass a law creating a visa category with the same effect. It’s a dysfunctional way to think about and run a country, but welcome to America.
Rebs will keep moving the goal posts no matter what Dems do, as we have seen.
The concession is spending money on punitive police state programs that make people's lives worse, rather than improve the system in ways that give people the opportunity to make their life better.
It's almost like you wanted to make this point, and worked yourself back to doing it using his words.
As a purely political point I am not sure that's better than attacking the Republicans for cynically killing the bipartisan bill.
I would want turn up the salience on that aspect and then announce some sort of executive actions in a televised address, with a safe third country angle and whatever resource shifting to case adjudication you can get away with.
As a legal immigrant, I’m never going to be ok with the Democratic Party’s casual indifference towards illegal immigration. The problem with this attitude is something that Matt has warned about - anti-any-immigration politicians will use this opportunity to gain power and shut down or reduce legal immigration along with illegal immigration. Reducing legal immigration would be a terrible idea.
At this point, continued legal immigration could happen, but with serious internal deportation enforcement. The latter has been diminishing since Obama's first term. There are simply too many people here illegally with American spouses and children who have lived here near a decade or more. So each president since then has reduced enforcement, culminating in Biden's total pause of deportation in his first 100 days (which sent a clear message to asylum seekers.)
And that means legal immigration cannot get buy-in from hawks, who cannot be promised there will be serious enforcement. This is why immigration has soured; if you can't get insurance on your new car, you can't drive it. The inability to drive it does not make a new car unhelpful, useless, "poison", etc as an inherent quality. But you're stuck at that point. I suspect JD Vance's visa bond idea might help address this. But I can see why Democrats and Republicans increasingly refer to illegal and legal immigration in the same breath. The line between the two has steadily blurred due to a lack of willing enforcement, and now millions of (legal) asylum claimants in the country.
Yes, we need a skills approach. I refer you to the man who unites the Ukraine hawks in the Senate GOP desperate for a deal and the border hawks in the House GOP who hate Biden's management of the asylum and parole process. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) produced a RAISE Act outlining such an approach during the Trump years. I suspect we'll see him involved in any successful big immigration changes in the future, if not voting himself on the final deal.
Man, this isn't going to be a popular opinion around here, but it seems to me that the groups are right on the merits. It sure seems to me that working under the table is a much better lot in life than what a lot of asylum claimants are escaping, regardless of whether they officially meet the bar to qualify. And it seems to me that this is an issue of more humanitarian importance than most things that the U.S. does things about. And concerns about the actual consequences of "border insecurity" seem fairly overblown. Most of the arguments for why we need to let fewer people in just seem really flimsy and not grounded in the actual welfare of actual human beings.
Of course, the median voter doesn't agree with me about any of this, which is why the issue is an electoral liability for Biden, so the consequentialistically right thing to do is throw these people under the bus for the sake of not handing the country to Donald Trump. And it's good that Democrats are trying to do this. But man, it sure is a ruthless trolley-problem calculus, and I think it's probably good for our souls to remember the kinds of tradeoffs we're making when we endorse things like this.
I'm not really sure why I'm making this post about What's Morally Right in the Ruthlessly Pragmatic Politics Forum; it's not like saying any of this out loud is helpful from a short-term political perspective. But I don't know where else people both care about the moral consequences of public policy, and also understand that successfully implementing good public policy in a democracy requires message discipline and compromise and whatnot. And in the long run, I think it's better if people who care about making things better bear both of those things in mind at the same time.
It's "morally better" that a nation's collective decision about whom it wants to let in is just disregarded? Do you then just think that national borders are immoral? You're right that that is not a popular opinion.
I find it odd that the "collective decision" framing is only used for immigration and not for other public policy issues. Like, Matt has written here before about how the Jones Act is bad, and most commenters agree, but it's also a "collective decision" in the sense that it was a democratically passed law and any attempt to fix it would be unpopular at least at first. Yet no one seems to view this as a point in its favor.
I'd like to better understand whether the difference is that the status quo is an unintended consequence of the laws on the books (but is that not also true of the Jones Act?), or whether anti-immigration sentiment is more universal and deeper-rooted than economic protectionism for shipbuilders (probably true in some sense but I suspect more of a difference in degree than in kind), or something else.
The collective decision framing was used because you explicitly argued that it’s good for asylum seekers to be allowed in to the country despite not meeting the legal bar for entry.
More generally, the “collective decision” framing gets brought up more in discussions of immigration because immigration is an area where leftists frequently advocate for outright ignoring the laws on the books. (Although with progressive prosecutors increasingly choosing not to prosecute people for clear violations of the law, I suspect the “collective decision” framing will increasingly be used in discussions of crime as well.)
Also, I do in fact think that, on the merits, ignoring political feasibility, the U.S. in particular ought to permit most people in the world (with some exclusion criteria like criminal records) to show up at a point of entry, come in, and start working, as was the case during the pre-1924 period when America grew up into what it is today. This doesn't mean abolishing national borders, we could still have other kinds of border controls. I'm agnostic about whether other rich countries should do this; the U.S. is a nation of immigrants in a way that the rich countries of Europe are not, and seems to be better at assimilation.
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."
I disagree with Reagan on a ton of things, but those are beautiful, inspirational words. I really *want* us to be able to take in anyone who wants to come and who shares our values! Just, that's not going to work on a practical level. Witness the clusterfudge in NYC in Chicago after just a handful of immigrant buses arrived.
As an aside, how did we, as a country, go from Ronal Reagan to Agent Orange?
"Just, that's not going to work on a practical level. Witness the clusterfudge in NYC in Chicago after just a handful of immigrant buses arrived."
If only we had a book on how to improve our regulatory structures so that we can accommodate a gigantic growth in our population. It could even be titled after what our population be if we did allow in anyone who wanted: "One Billion Americans".
There are many ways in which 2024 America is fundamentally different from 1924 America. For example, it is much easier to travel long distances now than it was in 1924, so basically the world is on the US border today. Moreover, there was no governmental social safety net to speak of in 1924. I don't know whether, on balance, unrestricted migration is an economic good, but we can surely make migration economically better (for us) by picking and choosing whom we admit.
With regard to the Jones Act (which you mention in another comment), I don't think that collective decision-making is as applicable. A tiny minority of Americans know what that Act is, and an even smaller minority understand its economic consequences. On the other hand, a large number of Americans have opinions about immigration, and their concerns come from much more than economics. (And, as long as the Jones Act is on the books, I guess it should be enforced, painful as it is to say.)
I’d agree with this, considering the economic and cultural dynamism of the U.S. I think it could afford to be more open to immigrants, especially hispanics who have a similar religion and whose culture and language is already well representer in the country. But it needs to be controlled, as you also point out.
I'll absolutely embrace the unpopular opinion here. It's illegitimate for any State to exclude people from entry. The role of the state is to defend the rights of the people within it's borders, as long as the people entering are respecting those rights then the state has no claim against them. I don't care how strong the popular democratic demand for economic protectionist border policy is, it's not just. Liberalism > democracy.
So according to your view the island of Malta should be willing to accept 10 million refugees from a culturally, religiously and linguistically distant country? Sorry but I think your highly theoretical and idealistic ”liberalism” breaks down when it comes into contact with reality (granted the Malta example is also hypothetical but not impossible if they declared tomorrow that the borders were fully open in accordance with your political philosophy)
That just seems like a classic example of libertarian idealism meeting reality. If 10 million refugees just showed up in a country of 500 thousand people, there would be a massive housing crisis, people homeless everywhere. It'd be bad for the residents and bad for the refugees. People retreating into their property wouldn't solve for that.
The United States on the other hand, has much more of a capacity to welcome refugees, it just takes better policymaking to ensure that it doesn't end up like the crisis we have now.
Sure, whatever exogenous circumstance suddenly dumped 10 million refugees into Malta is surely some kind of dramatic catastrophe. There's no good outcome to that. That's fundamentally different from immigration mediated by the draw of expected economic opportunity.
How does a country restricting who can live in it differ conceptually from a gated community or co-op with exclusive ownership over a given land parcel and a majoritarian incumbent equity holder capable of binding all members including as to restraints on ingress and alienation as far as the legitimacy of the exercise of such rights?
Roughly... people have private property rights. State-ish entities don't("Public property" of sovereign entities being a distinct and complicated concept I'm ignoring here). You can certainly drive down to levels of abstraction where that gets really muddy. If the co-op owns the land in a corporate style arrangement then I suppose they can be as exclusionary as they want, but I've also said before around here that a lot of the powers claimed by HOAs are horseshit because you can't actually contract your property rights away while retaining ownership.
I guess I don't see why one needs to get hung up on the notion of ownership or not -- the recognition of estates less than freehold are about as far from atypical as you can get.
While I appreciate your response what I'm getting at here is that there doesn't seem to be any natural boundary to the expansion of a privately-owned, territorially-delimited majoritarianly-administered system of administration for the common good of equityholders. But it seems weird that as long as we call, e.g., Singapore, a "state" this suddenly places implicit bounds on the legitimacy of entry and exit rights, but not if we call it a "corporation." Cruise ships seem to be state-like entities in many respects but we don't say that they have to let everyone in.
The answer is that if you governed a whole big community (somewhere people couldn't easily leave) by this kind of private property rights, it would be illegitimate. There's no reason this kind of private association needs to be democratic, or to respect personal freedom. In fact old arguments for monarchy often relied on this kind of argument (and some libertarians still make it). But small-r republicanism says that a political community should not be run as anyone's private possession.
"the Nodrumia Corporation, which owns all the property in the area. The corporation distributes usage rights via a legal instrument that looks suspiciously like private property: people who own usage rights keep them forever, can do whatever they want with the land, and can freely transfer and sell them to others."
I fundamentally don't think you can do that. Property rights are more like natural rights that proceed from ownership, not something that is contractually severable. Just like you can't rightly contract yourself into slavery.
The fundamental distinctions between the State and the State Like Corporate Entity are substantial. The SLCE is beholden to the shareholders, and also bound by whatever the state is that it exists within. If the SLCE doesn't exist within a state, then it's just a state with the same obligations of legitimacy. I guess I can imagine some hypothetical self-sustaining corporate arrangement in which all the shareholders reside on the property of the SLCE where you could, I guess, contractually force a shareholder to sell their stake based on their conduct and then expel them, but again you would need a state to expel them into that case. Like, a cruise ship can kick you off the boat, but because they're not a state they can't just throw you in the brig and let you rot.
You can't get out of the obligations of statehood by calling yourself a corporation and you can't be a corporation without a state to recognize, constrain, and legitimate you.
There are so many reasons for objecting to unrestricted migration, and only some of them relate to economic protectionism. I also disagree that open borders have anything to do with liberalism (perhaps libertarianism, but, even then, only very extreme libertarians support open borders).
On a practical level, consider the reasonable connection that has been drawn between out-of-control borders and the rise of populist authoritarianism.
Freedom of movement is absolutely a core liberal right.
This is obviously all wildly unpopular, people are dangerously tribal/populist about this stuff in particular and I'm not actually convinced our constitutional order is sufficiently robust to suppress the tyranny of the majority here, so Matt's right that this is a good bill and the asylum system is broken. We should fix the asylum system because it strengthens the constitutional order. Then we should let as many people in as we can get away with.
Freedom of movement is a right to leave, not a right to come. Much like if I don't let you leave my house, that's kidnapping, but if I don't invite you to my house that's not a crime.
I feel like you're conflating private property rights, which the state doesn't really have, and some version of "right to exit"/the 4th Amendment, with freedom of movement, which is a thoroughly distinct thing.
Bleh, I'm very pro immigration, but also recognize there is a substantive difference between goods/services and people. If a good shows up, we don't recognize a governmental obligation to care for it the way we do for a person.
Are you a “liberal” (i.e., progressive or center-left) or a libertarian? If a libertarian, okay, your position is at least internally coherent even if I disagree with it.
But if you’re a liberal then your position has serious problems. Liberals accept the legitimacy of the State’s restricting people’s personal freedoms in service of certain higher goods. See, eg, progressive taxation to fund the welfare state, regulation of private enterprise to serve workers’ and environmental interests, or restrictions on freedom of association to prevent racial discrimination. I don’t think you can argue with the claim (whether or not you think it is a bad thing) that high levels of immigration can radically alter the culture of a society. I see wanting to preserve the culture of one’s society as a perfectly legitimate desire, on par with the other desires the liberal state routinely curtails personal freedoms to serve. Because that desire is legitimate, even assuming people possess this alleged right to total freedom of movement, the liberal state can infringe on that right in order to protect the society and culture of the community already existing within its borders.
There's no definition of "liberal" that includes using the state to "preserve the culture of one’s society". The absolute core tenet of liberalism is pluralism. Cultural preferences are all equal before the law in a liberal system. The "state can infringe on that right in order to protect the society and culture of the community already existing" is like, borderline blood and soil stuff.
You're simply wrong--liberal countries use the power of the state to preserve their culture all the time. Some cultures believe in female genital mutilation--may we preserve a culture that rejects such practices by criminalizing them? Obviously. Or go back to my previous examples. Some cultures think racism is acceptable. Nonetheless, a liberal state may violate the freedom of association to outlaw racist employment practices--that is, it may use the power of the state to try and protect and encourage a culture that does not engage in racism. Even your very preference for a liberal social order is itself a cultural preference which the state protects (by enforcing freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, etc.).
You can't handwave away the entirely legitimate desire to protect one's culture by scaremongering about "blood and soil." If so many Westerners immigrated to Japan such that Japan became 50% Western and non-Japanese speaking, would Japanese people who complained about the massive change in their culture be bad racists engaging in problematic "blood and soil" politics? I think most people can see when presented with this hypothetical that such grievances would at the very least be legitimate and understandable, even if they nonetheless thought the Westerners should be allowed to immigrate.
The reason for the state to criminalize genital mutilation is not because there's some superior "liberal" culture to be preserved. It's because because in a liberal society the state exists to suborn cultural preferences to the rights of the individual being mutilated.
This is why I *explicitly stated* in my original comment that he should throw the migrants under the bus in order to win the election. If we can't keep straight in our own heads the difference between good politics and good policy, we won't be able to rightly choose which tradeoffs to support going forward.
The problem is this argument, if accepted, proves way too much.
> It's "morally better" that a nation's collective decision about ________
You can fill in the blank here with anything. Some things we think it's morally ok to fill in ("the capital gains tax rate"), some things we don't ("whether women are allowed to vote").
You need a better moral basis than a nation's collective decision here.
These are not Syrian villagers whose homes are being bombed. Most of the "asylum seekers" just want a better life but the system we have makes finding those who ARE being persecuted difficult.
I agree with you, but why aren’t they entitled to try and create a better life? If the pathways to legal immigration weren’t so restrictionist and broken, presumably they’d go about it that way. But that’s not an option.
Of course they are entitled to try. Our system should take advantage of this to let in the people most likely to make American lives better. And this includes SOME admitted on humanitarian grounds and asylum grounds w/o regard to their making an economic contribution.
But until we HAVE that kind of system, let's enforce our bad laws with as much humanity and cost effectiveness as we can because that is the best/only way to ever changing the system.
Actually, if we were NOT in a geopolitical rivalry with China, I would not be AS focused on getting to merit based immigration. But that adds spice to all my fast inclusive growth urges.
No one would think I was trolling if I said rich Americans don’t want to give up their inheritance to the IRS, they would think me lame for stating the obvious.
Yet when I point out that poor Americans-- who inherited mainly the right to work in a prosperous economy-- don’t want to give up their rents, I am suspected of trolling.
You phrased your comment as a combative rhetorical question, so I wasn't sure if you are trolling either. Had you bluntly said "unskilled Americans don't want to give up the rents they lucked into" then we would agree. You are correct; that is indeed the reason why we have borders.
Of course it's better, that's why people exert effort and risk their lives for a chance to do it. The question is whether it's politically sustainable. I think it is not. Support for border control is extremely widespread and support for rule of law especially by immigrants is also strong. So if you swim against that tide, your coalition will lose out.
The problem here is that the case for immigration, which is good, isn't actually a case for the asylum system, which is bad, and conflating them taints both.
When I read this I get a sense of a highly intelligent and empathetic person who lives in a world of abstract principles. I agree with you, in that world, sitting in my armchair at night. In the actual world we actually inhabit people have ties to their land, religion, culture, language etc and any political/legal philosophy that ignores this is a mere thought experiment.
As I wrote in response to someone else, Malta with 500k inhabitants could welcome 10 million immigrants from a vastly different culture tomorrow and it would mean that the island was completely overpopulated and Maltese culture would more or less disappear. The economy would probably crash in the short term (maybe gain long term but probably not), lawlessness and mistrust between citizens would skyrocket, there would possibly be a civil war breaking out when unhappy Maltese try to ”take their country back”, the welfare state would be overburdened, housing crisis would be acute and people would live in tents everywhere, garbage collection would break down etc etc. Yes this is also a thought experiment but the only reason it hasn’t become reality is because no actual country has implemented the immigration policy that follows from your abstract principles. If they would it would.
I would also encourage you to ponder the possibility of helping people close to where they are rather than moving them across the globe. A restrictive immigration policy can be combined with highly generous aid and support abroad.
I noted elsewhere that I'm not uncomplicatedly in favor of European countries doing this. But I'm not worried about America being swamped by immigrants who replace American culture with something else, because American culture *already is* made of immigrant cultures, and meanwhile has a good track record of assimilating individual immigrants, including during the pre-1924 era of mass immigration. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where taco trucks on every corner *is* the culture. As for total population numbers, well, we're already 650 times bigger than Malta, and our host wrote a book about how it would be good if instead we were more like 2000 times bigger, so those concerns seem lesser than in Malta's case.
I'm also in favor of more generous foreign aid, but I'm actually not sure that the case for that is stronger than for less restrictive immigration policy. Helping people by giving them stuff can be hard to do effectively, while allowing them to better their lot by using their existing productive capacity in a place that can better harness it is more robust, in the sense that it relies on fewer assumptions about what works.
I read your argument as more abstract and principled in defense of open borders, which I disagree with. I agree, however, with your assessment of the capacity of the U.S. to welcome more asylum migrants (in a controlled fashion) than they currently do.
"As I wrote in response to someone else, Malta with 500k inhabitants could welcome 10 million immigrants from a vastly different culture tomorrow"
This conflates a *sudden sharp* rise in immigration with a *large long-term secular increase* in immigration. It is true that Malta probably could not house 10500k people next year. It is probably true that Malta could house 750k people next year, either because 250k people immigrated, or because the 500k people all paired up and made a baby. Repeat either course of action over a decade, and Malta now has 2M people. *Immigration* here is irrelevant: either you have the capacity to absorb a sudden increase in the number of people or you don't, and a small island country like Malta doesn't.
But the US isn't a small island country. If all 330M Americans paired up and had four kids over the next decade, we'd be at 1G Americans, independent of immigration. Now, Americans aren't going to do that: we're not all Amish or Orthodox Jews, and our TFR is in fact below-replacement-level. But we have enough land to support that many people and we should have the infrastructure and regulatory system to accommodate if people suddenly changed their behavior that way.
Of course, an open-borders system would lead to much larger swings in immigration flows,* with some years everyone deciding to immigrate to Australia and other years everyone immigrating to the US. But 1G Americans is ⅛ the world population. I'd say more than 7 in every 8 people (*in the world*) has enough local ties that they don't want to emigrate, or is too poor to pay for a plane ticket to the US.
* I'm assuming here that social media means immigrant decisions about selecting their destination will be highly correlated. If not, then the reverse is actually true: a larger median immigration flow will be a relatively steadier one.
It isn't actually humanitarian to say that anyone who gets here and knows the right words to say to game an asylum officer gets in. What this means in practice is that middle class people who can pay smugglers get in. It's something similar to how well off college applicants can game college admissions essays.
The difference, I think, is that college is inherently positional; if a lot more people were let in, it would be less valuable. Immigration isn't like that.
Of course, I'd also like to do what I can to help the less-savvy people, but if there's an opportunity to help some but not all of the people who need helping, I think we should generally err on the side of taking it.
That's wrong. Since the justification for this is fairness, fairness in the process does matter.
Letting in the entire Venezuelan middle class because they know how to manipulate the system isn't some great humanitarian act- it's confirming that connections and money matters more than need.
Plus, if it results in a shutdown of or backlash against asylum, the victims will be the people actually fleeing persecution whom we agreed to take in under international treaties.
Even among refugees from actual wars, the people who are able to successfully make it out and make an asylum claim in a Western country thousands of miles away are more likely to be tied to losing military/government side than powerless victims.
I used to think more like you do, but the stories of public services being overwhelmed by a huge and sudden influx in many towns have made me think that in fact the state does have some responsibility to moderate how and where people immigrate.
One big issue rarely discussed is that we have a presumption that if we let someone in they can just go anywhere. But it doesn't have to be that way. I'm not sure people on visas have the same right to travel that citizens do, and it's possible that we could condition visas on people having to live in a particular area for a particular length of time or as the condition of renewing the visa.
One thing Greg Abbott is actually right about is it isn't fair that Texas specifically has to absorb all the migrants. It really can overwhelm their social services. People we let into the country, including asylum applicants, are a shared responsibility. And we should think about a system where they are diffused more throughout the country or placed in areas where more labor is needed rather than just everyone crosses and crowds the Texas border towns.
Yeah, that dynamic is real and isn't great. I see it as a consequence of the U.S.'s Matryoshka government; if each municipality in the broad geographical area were handling a share of migrants in proportion to its population, then things would be fine, but there's no one with the authority to make that happen.
Undemocratic liberalism is an oxymoron. Yes, there is a need to balance democracy and liberalism, including anti-majoritarian institutions like SCOTUS to mediate against sudden swings in popular mood. But ultimately democracy has to prevail. Non-democratic states are inherently unstable; in the end the people will have their way.
No you're absolutely right -- but democracy isn't ipso facto always good for the reason you mentioned. SCOTUS decisions that we like -- Roe, Obergefell, Bostok, etc. -- were undemocratic but ultimately led us to having a more free and liberal society.
The problem with this is as always it's in the eye of the beholder. Which is why at some level the court decisions will only stand if they gain democratic support. Otherwise they end up being reversed like the death penalty was banned and then allowed again.
Yeah that's totally fair -- and there are some issues where the general public has a better/more liberal view than politicians (weed and sports betting, for example).
Laws work better when they have democratic legitimacy, but that doesn't change the fact that the median American would probably like to see fewer immigrants, even if we're talking about engineers from India who pay a lot in taxes and never commit crimes.
Sure, the median American would like to have more government services and pay fewer taxes. Its up to elites generally and politicians specifically to formulate a realistic governing policy.
Its just really important that the public be willing to accept that governing policy, and with immigration its clear that the existing status quo is not acceptable to the median American. Between the competing visions proposed by the parties, the public seems more inclined to accept the Republican approach on the issue.
The INA only passed by lying to the voters. I still think raising the quota on immigration from Asia from 100 per year was a good idea. Huge amount of cope here where people somehow believe that prior American immigration policy enjoyed broad support
The country quotas were so absurdly low that they would often go unfilled, because no one wanted to waste their time applying for 1 of 200 slots. Abolishing them was pushed as a symbolic gesture to show commitment to civil rights - IIRC RFK reassured a hearing that Asian inflows would stabilize at under 5k/year. The heavy focus on family reunification was pitched as a way to bring southern- and eastern-europeans over. 35 years later, a grand total of 6% of Americans wanted immigration levels increased:
(edit: in reference to your edit about how my beliefs are secretly distasteful, I'm more than happy to explain any policy preferences I have. I just happen to be to the left of most of the country on the topic of immigration)
If I had my druthers, I'd let them in, absolutely - all other things being equal. But doing so is causing a huge backlash and imperiling a bunch of _other_ things I like as well, and potentially imperiling the immigration system over all.
When Trump was trying to kick people out, immigration got more popular - now that the border feels overwhelmed, it is less popular.
Get it under control and it will probably be more popular again.
Amen. Considering Matt is the person who wrote "One Billion Americans", I suspect Matt also agrees with a lot of what you said. I think he's being realistic (as you are) about the politics.
I will say that something Matt sort of notes, your vision (which I support) is a lot more sustainable if we actually had more funding for courts to adjudicate these cases. That's the thing, even if you are a supporter of increased immigration and allowing more asylum seekers in you'd still want more funding for these cases to be adjudicated in a timely manner as those asylum seekers sit in this legal limbo for years which means they are ripe for exploitation by various industries. And let's be real here; that is clearly one of the reasons why despite rhetoric GOP has not done more to fully reform the border. Yes there are the basic political incentives (chaotic border is better for GOP even if their president is in charge), but also there's a lot of GOP donors who are perfectly happy with the status quo as it means cheap exploitable labor.
This (either the article or the bill) doesn't seem to talk about the actual problem here, which is the mismatch between the conditions people are fleeing (violence, discrimination, and poverty, but driven by low state capacity, organized crime, and broad societal attitudes towards eg women or LGBT people) and the circumstances that asylum law was written for (the Holocaust).
Violence and discrimination driven by broad societal attitudes basically describes the Holocaust. I realize there are no state-run death camps in Central America but that seems like an exceedingly high bar.
Asylum wasn't envisioned as a general solution to help people escape awful situations, but was instead created to avoid the specific horrors of high-state-capacity governments employing industrial methods towards systematic persecution and extermination of targeted minorities.
And yet industrial scale violence tends to create large numbers of refugees. The U.S. would never take in all the Uighurs. Indeed, we refused to take in more than a token number of Jews in 1945. If all the displaced Jews in Europe had come to the US in 1945, it would have caused a “migrant crisis” that neither party would have tolerated. In fact, Israel exists in its present form largely because the US/Canada/Argentina/Australia were unwilling to take in large numbers of displaced Jews in 1945.
Asylum law is more a balm for liberal scruples about not averting the holocaust (and a salve eastern block intellectuals) than a practical solution to mass dislocations caused by ethnic cleansing.
It's close to it. Asylum is about being TARGETED for persecution, not living in a generally crappy place. Targeting CAN happen in places with low state capacity but most migrants from poor countries are not targeted.
But surely it has been widened? Also it was the original context.
Above all it was clear the idea was to let people escape terror to safe countries nearby, not to move across the world in sea in search of a better life. The latter should be handled by regular immigration policy.
Right, but discrimination against LGBT people by their neighbors and violence aimed at forcing boys to join gangs fit awkwardly in the statutory language.
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.
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 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.
One other partly semantic point: is the border really not secure? Or just overwhelmed? My suspicion is that the ratio of people who get to the interior without any CBP encounter is as low as ever.
I see photos of people lined up to get in, and many people I have talked to, even when they cross between checkpoint, they just wait to get picked up, or actively seek out a CBP officer to turn themselves over.
The border was legit not secure in 1980 when people crossed back and forth all the time. They were mostly Mexican, and when caught, were just released back -- this is the real origin of the term "catch and release" vis a vis immigration, but that term keeps getting altered. The research seems solid that the border strengthening measures of the late 1980s made the cost of crossing higher, and discouraged people from returning after they made some money here.
Yeah, one irony of the mostly successful effort to secure the border is that it enlarged the undocumented population because people who previously were migrant workers became (de facto) permanent residents.
Yes this. Bad-faith commenters use the number of *encounters* as a proxy for illegal immigration, but that makes no sense. We could pull all CBP officers from the border tomorrow and encounters would go to zero, but that obviously wouldn't solve any actual problem.
I think that there is a solid majority in America for a “high fences and large gates” immigration policy. High fences means enforcing rules and protecting borders, which protects the native population but also rule-following potential immigrants and legitimate asylum seekers. Large gates means permitting legal immigrants to meet our moral, economic and social needs. That can mean special programs for Afghan translators, graduate electrical engineering students, nurses or simply some level of family reunification entries, provided it is thoughtful as to the societal benefits. It seems that a lot of politicians on the left could make this case and many on the right would agree, though there may be pushback as to how large the “gates” should be.
For me the "high fences" is mainly a way to "wider gates." I want us to reframe immigrating as mainly a growth-promoting policy (good for us) with as much much humanitarian/asylum (good for the immigrants) as is politically feasible.
I think that is a legitimate sell. It also probably means de-emphasizing family reunification as a factor. That has political implications, and is much more likely to annoy the left than the right.
Yeah, family immigration is the real hidden landmine in immigration policy. Because immigrant groups love it but it is really in many ways the worst way to do immigration-- it lets in people who are often relatively privileged, because of an accident of birth, who neither have skills, fill particular employment needs, or are fleeing persecution. If we restricted it we could reallocate those slots for much more compelling cases, but it would be an enormous fight to do it.
I sometimes listen to Pod Save America when I'm in the mood for the frothiest Progressive hyperbole. Their interview Senator Murphy was really interesting. I was expecting more pushback from them but they were generally supportive. Their post interview discussion ~ acknowledged how effective (brilliant maybe, there's not a transcript) the sanctuary city busing has been at changing the immigration politics and how comprehensive immigration reform is just off the table until the boarder crossing volume returns to Obama levels. In Chicago, I've seen it first hand really change the salience of the issue. Interesting they're picking it up national / blue state level.
Yes, Abbott sounds like a d-bag from what I know of him, but this move of his was a masterstroke.
He didn't get into a shouting match with the mayors of progressive cities/governors of blue states over immigration. He took them at their word, literally. "Oh, so immigrants/asylum seekers are the best thing about America and anyone who says otherwise is a racist? Fine, here you go, I'll send you a bunch of busloads of immigrants fresh from the Mexican border, YOU have fun housing and feeding and otherwise caring for them!" Later, when NYC mayor and others protested, "What's the problem? I thought you loved immigrants? What are you, some kind of *xenophobic racist*?!?!"
It's genuinely shocking to me how effective this has been and, in particular, that Abbott has kept it up in such a sustained fashion. I'm curious as to how much it's costing Texas to buy this volume of bus tickets and, given the sheer number of migrants that have reportedly arrived from Texas in various other cities, I kind of want to know what percentage of Texas' population pre-2023 was composed of fresh immigrants! (A news story in a local Denver outlet earlier this week said that Denver has received over 38,000 Venezuelan migrants in the last year.)
Yes, but how much sheltering and feeding of immigrants was Texas doing? I had always figured that once someone was released from ICE, they were on their own for figuring out any sort of housing, etc.
In all fairness, I don't know the answer to your question, but even if you're a callous d-bag like Abbott, your state will incur *some* costs from having a bunch of desperately poor immigrants suddenly appear. If nothing else, sick people will show up in your local ER, and by law, they can't be denied emergency life-saving care.
Chicago has received 30k from Texas arriving on buses. More coming through O'Hare. Currently all 27 shelters are full and the police stations are providing overflow. They're now converting shuttered CVS and Walgreen's locations to shelter beds. IL as a state has now spent over $500m on just migrant care.
NYT article showing the strain on Denver - city starting to cut park services due to cost of support for incoming migrants, with impacts on hospitals and education system as well. It's not just refusal to build housing, none of our service systems are built to scale up this quickly. This is not sustainable, and the drift on this topic by the Biden admin is baffling. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/denver-colorado-migrants.html
Our rec centers are closing one day a week. Heaven help the government who takes away Zumba classes from the upper middle class. The situation is going to go really sour very soon.
Abbott’s approach, though, is truly amoral and unAmerican. You don’t fob off your problems on another state so that they can share the pain. If that were the case, California, Oregon and Washington should send their homeless to Texas and Florida while Kentucky and West Virginia should send their opiate addicts to Connecticut and Wisconsin. Using those who are in greatest need as political cannon fodder is just sick.
I think Abbott's strategy is probably purely political and I'm more familiar with Chicago so I don't know what Texas was and is currently doing to support the migrants that are in Texas ... BUT ... Just 30k migrants have constrained every resource in Chicago. There's 40k in Denver and probably 60k in NYC. Maybe more elsewhere. It's probably the *more* compassionate outcome that we're spreading the burden out across these major cities. Said differently -- how the heck could Texas have absorbed these 130k if 30k is crippling Chicago? Isn't this the best solution?
Even if it is purely political, this is literally what the sanctuary cities / states signed up for. No one made them pass the bills at gunpoint. Regardless of Abbott as a person it takes serious chutzpah to fault him for calling out a voluntarily-made bluff.
Look, I don't like Abbott, but can you see that you're inadvertently making his case for him? You just implicitly compared immigrants to homeless people and opiate addicts. That is the diametrical opposite of the standard progressive line about "Immigrants make America stronger and better! Bring on lots of immigrants!" Abbott simply said to the people of NYC and Chicago, "Here they are, you've got what you said you wanted."
Also more succinctly, the sanctuary cities / states basically volunteered for this. You don't get to affirmatively pass legislation in support of accommodating illegal immigrants and then complain when you're asked to accommodate illegal immigrants.
Also, there really is a disproportion issue here. Border states- and much more specifically, border towns- have to absorb the flows. Some of the crossings occur onto private ranches and such. And the numbers overwhelm local social services.
I disagree with Abbott on almost everything but he's right this is a shared responsibility. It's not just something where you can fob it all off on Texas border towns and say "here, you deal with this".
Said the same at ~ the same time. I just think this busing is probably the outcome *given* the current volume. The migrants are getting access to much better conditions.
I did not realize that migrants were sleeping in shelters funded by state/local governments or on the streets until Abbott started busing migrants to other cities. I guess I assumed that the federal government was somehow providing funds for food and shelter.
But doesn’t the asylum rights regime say that asylum claimants should apply in the first safe country. That is Mexico, not the US. So why does the US accept asylum applicants from people passing through Mexico? I realize that Mexico can’t handle all asylum immigrants themselves and I do think that the US and Canada should take a share of them but it should be strictly controlled and with quotas in accordance with the political willingness of the native population. Anything else is undemocratic, will lead to failed integration and is likely to lead to a right wing backlash anyway.
This is incidently how Sweden drastically cut immigration from outside of Europe since 2018. They refused to process claims from people travelling up through Europe. Now all serious political parties want a EU wide solution with strong border control and asylum centres at the border or outside of Europe. US liberals/progressives need to cop on and create a similar framework unless they welcome the far right into power, who will abolish asylum rights in total.
The Biden Administration already imposed a bar to asylum eligibility for people who traversed a third country (with some relatively narrow exceptions for danger) and who crossed the border without authorization. It didn't change the picture fundamentally because you still can't remove people if they pass a reasonable fear screening; even asylum-ineligible people can't be removed into danger. And these days because of overwhelmed capacity most migrants don't go through asylum screenings at all. It's a resources problem, it's not about eligibility on the back end.
I lean rightward and have disagreements over what is optimal or not about the bill, but I think there's an outright factual error going on here, which is the claim Trump killed the bill.
Obviously it is beneficial to Trump and to Democrats to believe Trump killed the bill. But in December, Speaker Johnson made clear that just as McCarthy was brought to the White House to lay out the debt ceiling bill (having gotten his caucus to vote on an alternative bill), Johnson should be brought to White House talks to merge some of their objectives in House Resolution 2 with the Senate and White House objectives on Ukraine funding.
This didn't happen. Johnson was given various updates (which he did not speak approvingly of) from GOP Senate negotiators, but it was clear early on this was not going as planned. Johnson repeatedly warned the Senate bill would not go forward in the House before making such a declaration when the bill went public that Sunday evening in January. All but the last step took place without a public word from Trump, complicating the theory that Trump was the driving force in the House GOP and not their leader (who repeatedly cited HR 2 as the reason to take him seriously a la debt ceiling talks.)
I could speculate why Biden did not emulate the debt ceiling approach, but I won't. I could suggest the GOP Senate had older members desperate for a Ukraine deal, but that's besides the point. It's entirely reasonable for Democrats to want to flip the script on an issue they're bleeding on in an election year. But it simply isn't accurate that this bill reflected engagement with the House majority (which killed not only the 2013 but 2005 reform proposals.) It was clear this bill was dead in December to most serious observers of Congress before Trump got publicly involved.
I'm not going to sit here and cry to Biden that he's being a political leader and working the media process to help his re-eleection odds. He's the president, they all do that! I'm going to stick by what I said, which is Johnson repeatedly made clear in December that he was getting no buy-in for the House to ever seriously consider bringing this bill to a vote. There is no point in pretending Trump is the reason this bill died when we have an entire month prior to visit public statements of the guy running the House of Representatives.
If you want to argue the House GOP and Senate GOP have an awkward disconnect on how partisan Ukraine aid is or isn't, that's fine too. I have no quarrel with that complaint.
My complaint is just with the House GOP leadership. Johnson could have brought it to a vote to see if even a few Republicans would put country above party. If his decision was not influenced by Trump, then ALL the blame falls on him.
I think more of the electorate is for ZERO new entries, legal or illegal, than is generally acknowledged. And not just far right voters. I disagree with the position but any policymaking needs to begin with a grasp of the number of those voters that exist.
On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today? Around 25% say it bad on the whole. Also it show about 25% want LEGAL immigration decreased
That is among the polls i was using. What is interesting that i wouldn't have guessed is that it appears we are generally back to traditional levels of negativity on immigrants. The Trump era pushed Democrats to the left on this for 6-8 years.
What exactly is the Democratic hang up with enforcing immigration vigorously? Do they actually think their Hispanic voters love people flooding across the southern border and therefore are going to vote Democrat? What about their Black voters, they’re not going to be so thrilled with unfettered illegal immigration. Do they actually think these illegals are going to be naturalized and become Democratic voters? What is their theory of the case of why they’re so traditionally loathe to work on immigration enforcement?
I don't think this is actually correct. Every comprehensive immigration reform proposal boosted enforcement. Obama aggressively pursued border enforcement. Biden has been trying various approaches to resolve the border crisis without gutting asylum since he came into office.
It's true that there are left-wing people who are poorly disposed to immigration enforcement though. It's a matter of principle, not political gain: some people think freedom of movement is a basic human right, or that immigration restrictions unfairly discriminate based on place of birth, or that deporting long term residents because they don't have papers violates equality principles. I'm pretty sympathetic to the last argument and I know others who are sympathetic to all of them. But it's not a view that has been embraced by mainstream Democrats.
The remain in Mexico policy was the only way to prevent the asylum process from being (ab)used by every Tom, Dick and Harry capable of physically making it to the border. Once that got branded as "kids in cages" it was all over.
Many of these people believe in the goodness and justness of America, and many are religious Christians or at least have a strong cultural Christianity -- they believe the US will do right by them, and many also believe that God/Jesus will protect them. They sometimes say things like "America is a good place, they will understand" or "I just put my trust in God to help me." Unfortunately for them, they may actually be putting their trust in people like Trump, S Miller, and G Abbott.*
Also underrated and underreported is how many people would much rather go home and really view this as a desperate measure. Home is home, even if it's a poor country. And life in the US, for poorer people in particular, can be difficult. I have encountered a bunch of Haitians over the years where they say a family member returned voluntarily to Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, because that's where home is.
*As a person who lost his Christian faith ages ago, in part because of the conflict between the professed faith and the actions of so many who professed it, this belief versus the true reality of people who publicly proclaim their Christianity makes me sad and a little angry.
The U.S. could do so much more to lift Latin American countries out of semi-poverty. It would also benefit the U.S. itself in a myriad ways. Let China oursource their production to Vietnam, focus on your own backyard (”nearshoring”). Bonus point is you don’t have to deal with violent extremists attacking boats.
This is definitely one of those days where getting sleep means no hope of keeping up with the thread. I'll just have some scattered upvotes and then see everyone in the afternoon.
This makes some good points, but several comments, from an active volunteer lawyer in immigration law, who has done hundreds of interviews and worked on dozens of cases in asylum, and many more green cards, work permits, citizenship, etc:
1. Asylum cases are far from binary into the good and bad, and like everything legal, you do better with representation than without. I have seen slam dunk cases and outright bad cases, but many are in a gray zone. We know this also because the grant rates vary tremendously from one asylum office to another, and from court to another. Some is due to where the people are coming from, but many cases are just ones where people seeing things differently -- is a 1% chance that the person will be persecuted if returned to their home country enough? or 5%? or 0.1%. And sometimes the ability to get expert advocacy, and expert testimony, or having the resources to dig for info can make a difference.
2. This is why the lower credible fear interview threshold makes sense, and is not atypical in the legal world. The threshold for searching a person, making an arrest, charging a crime, pursuing a prosecution, and convicting of a crime are all different. We do not say that every failure to convict represents a failed arrest or a failure of policing. As part of my volunteer work, I see criminal reports and sometimes serious allegations get downgraded or not prosecuted, and often with good reason -- and it's not just shoplifting. Sometimes the evidence or ability to convict for whatever reason is bad.
3. It's true that the asylum/refugee system was set up in the wake of WW2 and persecution based on religion, race, ethnicity, etc. And political asylum is obvious. The law has a more vague "membership in a particular social group" that is fuzzier. It fits like a glove in LGBT cases -- you can get years in prison in Nigeria or Uganda, for example. But what about failed states? or countries overrun with gangs? or are women a particular social group in the domestic violence context? Lawyers do what they do, which is serve s advocates, and where there are fuzzier areas, they push the bounds as contours are determined.
Maybe I’m getting heartless in my old age, but to me the asylum system is a classic instance of a hard case (WWII) making a bad law. How does it make any kind of sense to expend judicial resources to adjudicate whether Guatemala does a good enough job protecting domestic violence victims?
If there’s another Shoah, let the State Dept make a declaration that people fleeing that will be granted asylum. If we decide Guatemalan domestic violence victims should come to the U.S., let’s pass a law and create a visa category for them. Either there will be political and public support for taking those people or there won’t. Pre-committing to taking people under vague criteria that require detailed individual fact patterns, to be discovered and adjudicated once they arrive, is insane.
It’s not even clear to me that it successfully binds our own hands. If a hundred thousand Sudanese or Uyghur people showed up on our shores tomorrow it’s not obvious to me that we’d go “welp, we gotta take em.” Australia is a signatory to the UN Refugee Convention also, but it didn’t prevent them from setting up offshore detention camps for the Rohingya. We abandoned interpreters working for the military in Afghanistan, for God’s sake.
Asylum law doesn’t make any goddamn sense. In a functional political system we’d ask what we’re trying to achieve and pass some laws that actually address the world as it is in 2024.
While I think ”we” (Sweden in my case) should welcome a number of asylum migrants that we can succesfully integrate into society and that is supported by the native population, it’s worth noting that helping people closer to where they are also constitutes help and might even be more cost effective and hence helping more people (also it’s more likely to help elderly, women and children rather than phsyically strong and brave young men who can undertake long journeys).
Yes, exactly. Ameliorating problems in foreign countries makes sense. Deciding in advance to take in some refugees and selecting the ones who are most likely to be successful could be one way to do that. Just declaring, “Hey, spend your life savings to make a dangerous journey halfway around the world and then we’ll figure it out once you get here” is madness.
I agree with a lot of what you say, but “ameliorating problems in foreign countries “ doesn’t work so great (see: Iraq, Afghanistan). How would you ameliorate Venezuela so that fewer want to leave?
Well we invaded Afghanistan because of the Bin Laden connection and then Iraq because of W’s daddy issues. I don’t think caring about fixing their problems was anywhere near to even on our priority list. If we want people to stop fleeing Venezuela we should start by ceasing our sanctions on their government.
You really thought there was something else going on?
Doesn’t Sweden have a bombing problem at the moment?
Yay, onwards and upwards to 1,000,000,000 Swedes!
It was worse a year ago. I don’t know if you have read my other posts, I think Sweden has had too liberal asylum immigration policies and has now course corrected which was necessary.
I don't think Americans know how many foreign-born Swedes there are, particularly in a place like Malmö.
As a grandchild of Holocaust survivors, I think this is mostly right, but it should also be easy to tweak the law so that we’re not talking about domestic violence victims. This is more a story of the legal profession finding a loophole in the vague provisions of the law and then ramming a mountain through it.
Do we not want to give domestic violence victims asylum, if their home country refuses to protect people from domestic violence?
Short answer: probably not. I mean there just has to be other ways to help them - what does citizenship have to do with it?
Long answer: if we do, then that’s a discussion to be had. What’s clear is that that’s not what the law was written to achieve, and that that’s not something a majority of Americans would support now (or realistically any time in the past either).
Personally I’m ambivalent about it, because being able to achieve citizenship - which is highly sought after - just by claiming a threat of domestic violence sounds ripe for exploitation. Even if we have a robust verification regime (which I doubt). Moreover there have to be ways to help domestic violence victims in other countries that don’t entail citizenship - these things should have nothing to do with each other.
At the same time I am personally on team 1 Billion Americans so I am biased to view any new member of Team America as a net positive.
If we give an automatic yes to that, we’re basically saying that anyone who comes from a country with fewer legal protections than ours can claim asylum. That’s created the problem in the first place.
Feature, not a bug.
It's not just about there being fewer legal protections - it's about there being fewer legal protections, and you being a victim of violence that would be stopped by such legal protections. That's not going to be everyone, except in a few truly extreme cases like perhaps North Korea.
Why is citizenship the answer? Why can’t we tell this person “ok you can stay for a few years but you can’t vote, you’re not entitled to welfare, and you have to pay taxes”? This would solve this person’s flight from her domestic abuser without the extremely perverse incentives that come into play with this being a path to citizenship.
No, that's a pretty textbook case of "not our problem."
I mean, so are most crimes that occur outside my house.
The argument against this "let the state department decide" approach is that was the approach in the run up and during WWII and we decided for political expediency in the face of widespread anti-semitism to reject most claims of Jews fleeing Europe and condemned them to death. In the aftermath we realized that our actions had amounted to aiding and abetting one of the world's worst crimes against humanity. The refugee treaty was our pledge not to repeat this. We have made similar promises in the torture convention not to return people to places they will be tortured by the government.
The arguments for women fleeing DV in Guatemala is that this isn't just DV perpetrated by partners but allowed by the government who chooses not prosecute such cases or protect women because the see DV as a right men have and a way to keep women in a submissive place. It can seem like a stretch of the purpose but discrimination against women often manifests differently than other forms of persecution because it happens within ethnic groups and not between them.
It might be cleaner to just ignore those cases but there are people and courts that think women are as entitled to flee places where they fact physical danger because of their discriminated against status as much as anyone else. As a practical issue, it is harder to manage not because it lacks merit or doesn't fit the law or doesn't involve the same kind of vicarious shame for sending people back to where we know they are unsafe as any other kind of claim. People find the idea of not sending women back to where they will face female genital mutilation or women facing forced abortions in China in the 1980s more classic but it is largely the same thing. What makes it hard is because gender based violence is so widespread, including in the US, that we would literally be setting up a situation where a very large percentage of the world's population would have a claim. In the old days, that was perhaps easier to ignore because they weren't going to end up on doorstep. That is getting to be less true.
We definitely need more infrastructure to process claims and that would help but it is complex.
“It is largely the same thing” - it is simply not. The solution to the state persecuting you is citizenship in another state. The solution to a specific domestic abuser persecuting you, and the state being indifferent to that person needs to entail citizenship in a new country? Come on - there’s quite a wide range of options besides citizenship to help such a person. Moreover by the standard of “the government being indifferent to domestic violence it is persecuting women the same way Nazi Germany persecuted Jews”, we’re persecuting women too by sometimes failing to protect women from repeat abuse. The idea that a state that lacks perfect capacity to protect women is ipso facto persecuting them is absurd.
“There are people and courts” - yes those courts took a law that was all but explicitly about one thing, found a loophole to make it about another thing, and drove an aircraft carrier through it. I would like to see polling but I’d be quite shocked if more than a single digit share of Americans agree with the train of thought “domestic violence is misogynistic persecution => being domestically abused should entitle you to US citizenship”.
I am on Team 1 Billion Americans. We need and should welcome more people onto Team America - even if they’re from Guatemala or anywhere else. But this tendentious sophistry trying to make domestic violence fit into the category of the Holocaust is a sham excuse to facilitate immigration from undeveloped countries that most Americans do not want - you know it, I know it, and everyone involved knows it.
Which of course is why “the groups” are holding the entire immigration system hostage to maintain this status quo.
The basic problem is once large numbers of people are making meritless applications (which was happening) you have to do something to deter that or it becomes a vicious cycle that encourages more and more phony applications as the system is overwhelmed. And then you end up shutting down the system entirely or electing Donald Trump, and deserving applicants don't get asylum.
If you want asylum to work for its purpose (which fulfills an important international law obligation), economic migrants need to not only not get asylum but also get quickly rejected and deported so they have no incentive to try for it.
I get it. The border is overwhelmed. But also, there can be a broad range of merit, depending on the eye of the beholder. And I have seen people focus on one thing, but under questioning, more and better facts come out.
A common difference between left and right is that the left tends to be more willing to have a policy that allows more "unworthy" people to get a benefit, if it allows more "worthy" people to get that benefit, whereas conservatives tend to err on the side of denying the unworthy at the expense of some of the worthy, even if it means more administrative cost; they also like to focus on bad look cases, like the person buying lobster with food stamps. You see this in debates over programs like food stamps, or frivolous lawsuits.
In the asylum context, the consequence is potentially life and death.
The thing is none of that matters if there's a ton of cheating. Both for political reasons (cheating leads to backlash) and for fairness reasons (you end up rewarding cheaters while the original intended recipients of the program don't get the benefits).
On the latter point, one of the things Matt is saying is that when asylum works right it is awarded relatively quickly. Sure the lawyer needs some time to compile the case but it doesn't take years. The asylee quickly gets documented.
Under the current system, flooded with meritless asylum applications, what they get is a court date years from now. In the meantime they are in limbo, facing potential deportation and unable to work for 6 months.
That result is extremely good for the cheater, who can use it to try and illegally migrate into the country. But it's bad for the legitimate asylum applicant, who is getting a much worse deal than they would get if the meritless applications weren't happening.
Yes, I get the whole "liberals don't worry about cheaters" mindset. But that gets us into trouble. Cheating on welfare got us the draconian welfare reform bill, which is why Matt has to write anguished pieces calling for child tax credits. Cheating on emotional support animals on planes forced a crackdown that makes it harder for disabled people to take their service animals with them. Fare jumping on the subway leads to more police abuse and the installation of gates that make life difficult for the disabled.
The public does not agree with liberals that you should do nothing about people who game the system. Which means if you want a generous liberal state the cheaters have to be deterred.
This reminds me of the economist “assume a can opener” joke. In this case it’s liberals saying “assume infinite state capacity”
You're a lawyer, right? This thread seems weirdly dismissive of the idea that there might be a very wide spectrum of colorable arguments for merit under a somewhat ambiguous legal standard. Despite the fact that happens all the time in every area of law, and that a practitioner from this area is telling you it's happening here.
Instead you're convinced the system is flooded with clearly meritless applications, and that the people whose job is to screen them are letting them through anyway. Why? Is there some very strong evidence you have seen, which overcomes the straightforward "merit is hard to judge" explanation?
Here's the thing.
Yes, I know there's a such a thing as a colorable argument that ultimately has no merit and that a litigant can win or lose on.
But that's not what's happening here. Why do we know this? First, simply because of the numbers. There's X number of people who suffer persecution based on membership of one of the protected groups each year. And yet suddenly we have these gigantic surges of people we didn't have before. That can't be because X went up. X didn't go up. What did happen is that (1) travel got cheaper, (2) the internet made information about claiming asylum more widely available, and (3) some specific countries like Venezuela went into economic tailspins.
And by the way, we also know that this isn't an increase of X because it's concentrated in just a few countries. Maduro's Venezuela is bad (I visited Caracas when it was still Chavez's Venezuela, and it was bad then; it's worse now), but it's not as though all the persecution based on group membership is happening in Venezuela and three other countries that happen to be impoverished. What's happening is middle class people from those four countries are paying smugglers to deliver them to the US border where they can cross, present themselves and claim asylum, and stay in the country.
Further, and this is where I think I really disagree with the immigration lawyers' lobby, you don't actually have the right to apply for things you don't qualify for. Yes, for instance, there's an application process for Social Security disability, but if you aren't disabled you don't have the right to apply for it. Applications for important government benefits aren't some lottery ticket where maybe your application will get through the cracks. Applicants have a moral obligation not to apply at all if they do not qualify. And plenty of asylum applicants are applying despite not qualifying. How do we know this? Well look at the acceptance rates. 30% of applicants can't even convince an asylum officer they have a credible fear. So that right there is an indicator that there are some BS applications being made. And then only 40% of applicants are actually granted asylum. Are you going to tell me that those other 60% are all close cases with colorable arguments for merit?
If, say, 30% of applicants for Social Security disability couldn't even meet an initial screening that they might be disabled, and only 40% of applicants actually proved their eligibility, and that because Social Security was overwhelmed with all these meritless applications, delivering benefits to actually disabled people took years, you'd hear some serious calls to reform the application process for disability benefits. This is just political reality, but I also think the critics have a point.
The reality is that if you want a system where (1) people entitled to get asylum get asylum quickly and efficiently, and (2) people with colorable arguments get them fairly heard on full evidentiary records and with full due process, you need all the people making fraudulent arguments to be kept out of the system. And even if you don't agree with that, that's what the public's going to think, especially on an issue like immigration where there's a not entirely unfounded suspicion that some folks like the idea of asylum being a proxy for lifting restrictions on legal immigration that they do not approve of in the first place.
I agree with this analysis. But my assumption is that only a very small portion of X actually makes it to the US border. Most stay put and endure the persecution. Some move internally and a few move to a neighboring country. So I suspect the factors you cite are increasing the proportion of X that shows up in the US. In which case a large increase in applications is not evidence of an increase in the proportion of fraudulent applications.
Also, the first sources on Google give a 30-50% approval rate for SSDI. So that's not a great counterexample - I would tend to think both systems could use more resources, but that rejected applications are probably an inevitable part of administering these programs. There are varying degrees of merit, the standards are very subjective, and obviously the amount of real no-merit fraud is greater than zero.
Tagging this to come back to later re: Social Security screening and disabled people waiting years for benefits.
Same as how you need to arrest people who smoke fent on the subway if you want to make urbanism appeal to people.
This was an extremely long-winded way of saying “lawyers and judges are so disconnected from material reality that we just don’t need to think about what’s feasible or the consequences of an infeasible legal regime”.
In real life, if the consequence of running a classifier with a 99% true positive rate (in your words “a 1% chance that the person will be prosecuted”) is millions of extremely expensive false positives, that’s a bad classifier. But for lawyers, that’s just someone else’s problem.
"This is why the lower credible fear interview threshold makes sense, and is not atypical in the legal world."
I agree that the threshold should be lower than the regular one. If 100% of people passing credible fear got asylum I'd expect that we were absolutely leaving people out.
Conversely, if 1% of people passing credible fear got asylum, that would clearly be too low a standard.
20% to me seems to be too low _given that we're overwhelmed_. (If we were not overwhelmed, and 20% was working, I'd leave it alone).
I also do pro bono immigration cases, and I concur for the most part. There are many people with not-unreasonable fear of discrimination or violence for a lot of reasons (domestic violence victims and LGBT being the most common examples). Does that rise to the level of persecution, or is it just a crappy lot in life?
I would like decisions on social group persecution to have some precedental value so the same arguments don’t need to be adjudicated over and over again. It eats up a ton of resources.
This is one of the things I’ve found extremely confusing - clearly these cases should all be boilerplate by now. How many different flavors of “I’m running away from Venezuela” can there possibly be? How is it that every one of these people needs an actual trial with an actual judge - and that the judge can’t just plow through the cases like they do for other boilerplate issues?
Given your experience/expertise, what reforms would you propose to address the situation? Do you think the number of border crossings and/or individuals flowing into the country needs to be reduced, or is it more about humanely processing the people who do come no matter the number?
I struggle with this. We consider ourselves a decent country and the law allows people to seek asylum. And being a desirable destination for people seeking asylum because we have a great and prosperous country is a good thing and certainly better than being a country where a person would think "what hope would I have there?".
A few thoughts:
Some long term things we can do are to really press countries on human rights, like LGBT rights, and also dropping sanctions on places like Venezuela where we are *trying* to break their economy. Obama had reduced the flow significantly up to 2016 and this was part of it. The flow increased substantially under Trump pre-COVID.
Shorter term, resources are obviously needed to process cases faster, and that is happening slowly. In my area, a new immigration court is opening in Lowell MA, and asylum officers have been added to Boston, and there are signs of processing moving faster. I agree with one of the main points, which is that delays hurt the legally best cases, and benefit the legally worst. And a long-delay system creates different incentives.
I would expand legal pathways and numbers, and maybe change the visa mix, e.g., to phase out siblings as a category for family petitioning -- it takes 15+ years anyway now.
I would also allow a form of asylum application from abroad (technically, it's only called asylum if you are here, and refugee if you are not here).
Maybe expand a kind of diversity visa for the most needy places to encourage more people to apply from home and wait.
The idea we can fix the immigration system by fixing other countries is hand waving bullshit at best and neo-colonialism at worst.
Fix the asylum system and leave other countries alone!
Thanks for the thoughtful and thorough response. I largely agree with the sentiment and proposals you're putting forth, but I think you and I represent a vision of immigration that is largely divorced from the average voter's views on the issue, so our vision is not politically tenable unfortunately. I think common sense compromises that try and maintain as much human dignity and expanded opportunity while simultaneously taking into account most people's apprehension surrounding widespread immigration are the best that can be hoped for.
Our policy toward Venezuela has failed but how do we press countries without sanctions though? And I think Venezuela is so f'd that economically, socially, and politically that I'm not even sure lifting sanctions would stop the outflow of migrants.
So thinking of Cuba - where our sanctions (or blockade, depends on who ask!) has famously failed for decades - one thing we could do is instead try to bolster our credibility in the region.
We obtained Guantanamo in pretty unsavory way - we swooped in at the end of a 30-year fight for independence ending in 1898, we vetoed their drafts constitution, and pressed to get an indefinite possession of this military base - and we have used it in ways not exactly applauded by human rights groups.
It's politically infeasible to hand back that land (as America did in the 1970s with the Panama Canal) to an undemocratic regime - but I like the idea of transforming Guantanamo Bay into a world-class tropical disease research that brings top scientists from all over the Western hemisphere to try to produce breakthrough research on tropical diseases that afflict countries in the hemisphere. It would transform a place known for American human rights abuses into a symbol of American-led regional collaboration.
Asylum applications dropped pretty fast under Trump. That is so well documented, it is practically common knowledge. They understood the political environment and quit coming. Please show some data for stating that it increased under Trump.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/200061/number-of-refugees-arriving-in-the-us/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/01/16/border-apprehensions-of-migrant-families-have-risen-substantially-so-far-in-2018/
Sometimes it is hard to know what to believe. Is there a difference between the number of apprehensions that aren't let in vs. the number of actual arrivals? Can anyone explain? The pew research paper is talking about whole families vs. individuals for the most part, but point to a total increase as well, I don't know how to reconcile these 2 points of data.
Matt writes: "So I want to conclude by arguing that conservatives should see that Democrats have made real concessions here..."
As long as the Democratic Party sees improving the asylum system and reducing illegal immigration as a **concession**, this issue will continue to be a huge benefit to Republicans, regardless of their cynical and short-sighted actions.
Biden should go ahead and take the Section 212(f) action that Trump took and see if the courts decide it is illegal. Same as he did with student loan forgiveness. Show that this is a crisis and the Administration is on the side of securing the border by any legal means.
You protest too much - everyone was hunky dory with this bill, Senator Lankford (hardly an immigration dove) was clearly satisfied with the concessions Murphy made, but Orange Man reminded them of the political calculus and they We Have Always Been At War With Eurasia-d the bill.
I guarantee if Biden even tried to take 212f action not only would he of course catch flak from his own party for doing something he very obviously said previously was illegal, the GOP would scramble to reframe it as negatively as possible.
So long as the GOP is willing to leverage immigration as cynically as possible it's going to be very hard. They've done a great job making immigration a heads I win tails you lose situation. Border chaos when a Dem is in charge means we need to be tougher so vote Republican, border chaos when a Republican is in charge means we need to be even tougher so vote Republican. They would hate for this issue to go away.
I agree that taking this issue back from a cynical Trump-led GOP will be difficult. And it won’t work for lots of people. Hence, my suggestion that Biden should act without waiting for the House GOP conference. Drop the opposition to Texas putting up barriers. Take the 212(f) action. Call a press conference and send a full-throated message against spurious asylum claims.
In this comments section over the past few years, many have wanted a Sista Soulja moment from the President. This is the perfect timing (9 months from the election) and the perfect issue to do that.
No, no, no. This is not a messaging problem. I am tired of hearing this idea that Biden needs to change messaging. And I'm tired of hearing about Trump.
Biden didn't invite the leader of the House to a private meeting to discuss red lines and concessions like he did with the debt ceiling. That's the story here. Speaker Johnson said several times during December that he needed to be more involved, and dropped blatant hints to the press that he was considering inviting himself over to the White House (WHICH IS A SIGN YOU SHOULD BRING HIM OVER).
Biden didn't do this. We can speculate as to why, but as a simple factual matter, this bill was dead in December without actual discretion between the guy needed to introduce it and the Democratic-led Senate and Presidency.
The White House wants to pass this bill. If inviting Mike Johnson over would have given them a shot at passing it, then they would've done it.
But they didn't because Mike Johnson doesn't control the GOP caucus, Trump does. And Trump didn't want to pass the bill. That's the crux of it.
No, they invited him later in mid-January after the Senate details were already pretty much done to basically just sit there and reiterate why the bill was likely dead. This was before Trump weighed in. Speaker Johnson had been saying all of December that the White House was ignoring him and any Senate bill was currently dead in the water. He never revised his assessment later on from this.
Now maybe it would've failed if the White House had taken him in for talks in December with Schumer! Maybe Republicans are simply too far apart from Democrats to get this kind of bill to happen. I'm not saying it would've succeeded. I'm simply saying Johnson was repeatedly telling them he was not getting any buy-in the month before January and before Trump did his usual Trump show.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-case-for-the-immigration-deal?r=5pw2a&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49610372
I think that's just giving Mike Johnson way too much credit as a good-faith negotiator, rather than a partisan hack. And again, I'm assuming the White House would love to get this bill passed and if meeting with Mike Johnson right now would get it across the finish line in something resembling it's current form, I'm sure they would.
So… you’re saying they should have invited him despite him saying the deal is dead.
It really sounds to me like Biden did the right thing here and the only thing he could have done better involves a Predator drone.
I'm sorry this reads as some "Meet The Press" what happened good ole days when Tip O'Neil and Ronald Reagan could pass bipartisan bills over a glass of scotch.
There are good faith negotiators on the GOP side in the senate and House. But Mike Johnson has very clearly demonstrated he's not one of them and not really interested in being one. There's a reason that a number of House GOP politicians are looking for a discharge petition to try to get Ukraine/Israel funding passed. They clearly themselves don't see Johnson as a good faith House Leader/negotiator but almost certainly don't want another protracted fight for House speaker again, especially since it could end up with someone worse like Jim Jordan.
I think you misunderstand what John wants from Biden - not ”messaging” but leadership. Go it alone and fix the border chaos. Dems need to change tack on immigration policy - not to win, not to ”neutralize the issue”, not to pander - but because it’s the correct thing to do. And also popular.
A leader doesn’t let the border chaos continue, he doesn’t grudgingly accept compromises with Republicans but comes out with plans of his own. Real, tough, workable plans that do not cater to pie-in-the-sky progressives
"Go it alone and fix the border chaos."
This comes awfully close to the Green Lantern fantasy. The idea that Biden by himself can "fix the border crisis," I dunno man. By invoking 212(f)? And it will immediately be blocked by the courts, just like happened with Trump.
> By invoking 212(f)?
Yes, he should do a version of that.
> And it will immediately be blocked by the courts, just like happened with Trump.
As Matt says, eventually the Supreme Court may agree. But anyway, the point is to show effort, not just act helpless.
I agree there are immediate acts Biden could take and Johnson obviously outlined them in a letter to Biden during the December Senate negotiating. But I think Biden didn't fail to get Johnson's buy-in because of a lack of X, Y, then tough-nosed press conference.
Biden failed to get Speaker Johnson's buy-in on the details a la debt ceiling because he literally didn't try to.
I agree with the narrow point about inviting Johnson over. But Republicans' lied their tail off about what this bill did and took the position that the only acceptable route would be to pass their MESSAGING bill (HR2), a bill that was never even intended to become law. So I don't think not meeting with Johnson was the hold up here.
Johnson was not going to override his majority to bring a bill to the floor they hate because he would be dumped from his job a day later.
F**k Mike Johnson. Joe Biden doesn’t owe him the time of day. He won’t even be Speaker in 9 months, anyway. To hell with that clown.
Well Biden desperately needed a border deal to salvage his re-election campaign he is currently losing so maybe this was not the right attitude?
What Matt also didn’t mention is that the border stuff was supposed to be the price of Ukraine aid. So the MAGA crowd in the House were already supposed to swallow a bunch of money for Ukraine as well as the compromise border bill - it was never going to work.
Maybe the Senate should pick up HR2?
Sure. I'll support that. I want double the currently talked about amount of aid for Ukraine, though. I, too, have a price.
I think that's the exact attitude the House Republicans are taking toward Joe Biden...
Why he hasn’t been taken out in a drone strike by now I have no idea (and we will regret our government’s dereliction of duty in this matter)
You've done this before and it's not cool.
Mike Johnson was never going to go against the Trump dictum. It wasn't because he wasn't invited to the White House. In any case, "Mike Johnson" doesn't exist; he's an avatar for rotating small factions of the House Republican caucus who wish to block things they hate.
I keep hearing this position that the House literally has no head, but if that's true, it must follow there was no way Trump could've killed this deal.
Because that would mean there's no party in the House to introduce it. That doesn't sound right to me! Let's take a look at what Johnson was saying across all of December before Trump let out a peep:
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-case-for-the-immigration-deal?r=5pw2a&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49610372
This doesn't make any sense. Indeed they have a symbolic head one that parrots the consensus in the caucus, or at least the views of the deciding voting bloc in that caucus. That's all Johnson was doing. The dude obviously is no Nancy Pelosi -- or even a Newt Gingrich. He's a sock puppet.
I’ve seen others ask you for support of your claim that this was the problem; I imagine you’re still working on that, so I’ll ask something different. If what you’re saying is true, how is it an indictment of Biden, rather than Johnson? Once the bill goes to the House, the House can pass their own version and then they’re in the negotiation. Why is “kill the whole thing, we’re not addressing this issue this year” an acceptable response?
I have avoided opining too hard on Biden because I'm aware he's a political leader with a coalition, and I trust Matt is telling me the truth when he says breaking from the comprehensive 2013-style vision is a real lift that upsets some Democrats. My main objection is the idea this bill's time of death was when Trump weighed in on his 2024 election. The evidence is not there, because it was dead for a while. That said, I cannot prove for certain there was a path to get this bill to happen. I am trying to honestly argue that any serious path would've had to deeply involve Johnson's policy asks from the get-go, and that clearly didn't happen.
The thrust of my argument rests on the evidence that Johnson was saying any talks were dead in the water across all of December. He was repeatedly complaining the White House wasn't taking him seriously, and he didn't get a meeting until mid-January where it looks like he was just allowed to explain why the current details he has heard is likely dead in the water. You don't have to be a Republican to see the Sunday evening right-wing hatefest of the bill was a long time coming with no plan from Johnson to refute it or have major shareholders in the House GOP push back. I thank you for your patience and charity, and direct you to my play by play of Johnson's statements here, starting on December 5th:
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-case-for-the-immigration-deal?r=5pw2a&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49610372
EDIT: Minor style, changed "dead" to "time of death" just to be clear here.
You don’t understand how this negotiation took place. Senators, not the White House, negotiated it. Those senators asked Johnson to join — he did not.
Johnson made clear the White House had to own the process. He not only sent them a letter on any possible executive steps to show credibility, but had it passed to the press that he was considering asking for an invite to the White House, which is a pretty strong hint what had to happen.
However, another thing that is true, and the White House is aware of, is that the Senate GOP has members desperate for a Ukraine aid deal. Republicans cannot pretend they were all on the same page as a party about this; Johnson and McConnell obviously disagree on how "default/bipartisan" the Ukraine aid is vs a "partisan" ask to be balanced by some items in HR 2. That is part of how the Senate process was bipartisan in the first place. And how Biden wisely seized the messaging game on this while the Speaker remained cold even as passed some details by Senate GOP.
He didn’t bring up border reform because he can’t pass it on the floor with a majority of republican voting for it because they don’t want border reform because of trump. This is the weakest speaker in 5 decades at least. He has had 6 rule votes go down in his short tenure. He has only passed bills on suspenion essentially only.
This is all wishcasting here. Johnson will not pass border reform because he fears losing his speakership, not because Joe Biden didn’t invite him over for coffee. You can ask members of congress and they will tell you that the death of this package is due to speaker Johnson’s fragility, not some weird face saving letter Johnson sent to Joe Biden.
This is absolutely incorrect. Biden should ask for an evening to address the nation. He should lay out the facts, as Matt has here, and make it clear that Republicans have decided to embrace chaos rather that taking yes for an answer. Show the nation that one side has decided to hand the nation over to Trump for his political interests while the other is trying, willing to be reasonable, and willing to work with people on the other side.
The crazies won’t believe him. We simply have to write them off-there is no saving them from their lunacy. But the middle still has the opportunity to deny the crazies power, and can be persuaded.
No, those Oval Office addresses don't work, as other commenters show.
He *should* make this a big point in the March 7 SOTU where he points to the stonefaced Republicans sitting on their hands, saying "*Those* are the people who *want* chaos on the border while I was standing by with my pen to sign into law the steps we need to solve this problem!" and the Democrats (well, most of them) leap to their feet and cheer wildly.
I suspect the networks would refuse to carry such an address on the grounds that it would be improperly favoring a particular political viewpoint, same as the networks refused to carry Obama's immigration speech in 2014: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/20/obama-immigration-speech-shunned-networks
Perhaps not, but obviously their choice not to cover it would be simply because they don’t like his administration rather than not wanting to “favor a particular political viewpoint.” They chose to air politicians, especially speeches by the president, all the time. They all aired Trump’s boarder security speech on January 8, 2019, for example.
I'm stating what was widely reported as the networks' justification for refusing to carry Obama's speech:
“There was agreement among the broadcast networks that this was overtly political,” a network insider told Politico Playbook at the time. “The White House has tried to make a comparison to a time that all the networks carried President Bush in prime time, also related to immigration [2006]. But that was a bipartisan announcement, and this is an overtly political move by the White House.”
https://www.thewrap.com/that-time-broadcast-networks-declined-to-air-president-obamas-primetime-immigration-speech-in-2014/
You can disbelieve what was said, but my statement was that those were the "grounds" the networks would refuse it on, not that it was the true ulterior motive for them to refuse to carry such an address.
This would be a good idea also.
Disagree. It’s effectively a very old Joe Biden whining about how he can’t fix the problem because of mean Republicans.
The border is in crisis, at least in part because of actions by the Biden administration. If Biden is to have any chance of re-election, he needs to actually fix the problem. Either executive action, or a border bill so juicy the Republican house can’t pass it up.
1) He literally can’t fix it by executive action. Trump couldn’t fix it by executive action. The steps Republicans demand are unfunded-funding they blocked. How have people made it through high school without a basic understanding of our federal government?
2) Republicans got almost everything they have asked for, but killed it anyhow. Republicans plainly want the issue more than they want a solution.
It's absolutely about politics. But Biden has been studiously ignoring the border for three years. Why should Republicans bail him out in an election year, just so he can go back to ignoring the border in 2025? If this were 2021, then I'd be on board with Republicans accepting a compromise like this.
The bill makes reforms that don’t end Election Day. You may not like Joe Biden. But if you don’t want to legislate controversial issues because there is an election, then you don’t want to legislate controversial issues.
It’s only a controversial issue in the minds of far left Democrats. Don’t listen to them. The overwhelming majority of Americans want an end to the chaos and controlled immigration.
The bill contains provisions that require action even if the President in 2025 wants to "ignore" the issue.
I also love the cynicism of your point that Republicans, who have been screaming about the border as an absolute catastrophe for at least 8 years, shouldn't do something to improve the situation simply because it would be perceived as "bailing out" Joe Biden. You'd think if they actually believed it was the nightmare they've been claiming it was then this could easily be framed as "we skillfully forced Biden to do something he didn't want to do in order to address this very serious issue."
Stuff like this makes me think that in March, 2020, if Hilary Clinton was President and GOP controlled the House and/or Senate (very likely scenario for a variety of reasons), there's a pretty decent chance at least in the first attempt a stimulus bill wouldn't pass. I think eventually one would pass* once enough GOP politicians saw what was happening with the stock market (and their stock portfolios), but I'm guessing it would be much more akin to 2009; much smaller than the $2 trillion needed, tilted towards tax cuts for white collar professionals and upper class and probably very little enhanced unemployment.
*this is my fig leaf of hope as to why we won't breach the debt ceiling (I'm definitely in the camp of getting rid of the whole thing btw). That enough GOP donors still have the ear of enough GOP politicians to tell them that breaching the debt ceiling would be disaster for their stock portfolios.
The negotiations started before it was an "election year"
If Republicans think they'll do a better job of solving the issue if they hold a (narrow) trifecta next year, well, they're wrong. This was a Republican bill. Sometimes you just have to take the win.
Unless they *want* border chaos under any and all circumstances. Maybe they do but at some point that may blow up in their faces.
They bailed him out in an election year by shooting the deal down. The Democrats won the political debate over the bill once they agreed to make concessions. At that point, regardless of what the Republicans decided to do on the bill, it became a win-win for the Dems.
Unfortunately the opposite is true. https://newrepublic.com/article/178951/poll-biden-blamed-border-deal-galvanize-democrats
This is something Mitch McConnell (or someone close to Mitch) discovered back in 2009; Bipartisanship almost always benefits the President over anyone in the opposition party and failure to pass bipartisan bills almost always results in more blame being apportioned to the President (doesn't help that Biden and especially Obama both ran explicitly as uniters who can get stuff done with the opposition party. Though in Biden's case kind of true).
It's a huge problem politically because it creates the very political incentives we just witnessed. Even when one side explicitly says they are tanking a bill for insanely cynical reasons, majorities of the public invariably blame the President (would probably the same if a non crazy GOP President was in power) over anyone else.
I think that article misses my point. Yes, the public is going to blame the Democrats more than the Republicans for the bill's failure - that's been a well-known and widely-covered phenomenon for 15 years. But the public would have blamed the Democrats even more if they had not made concessions and had not maneuvered the Republicans into sabotaging the bill. Therefore, the concessions made to bring the bill into existence were a net positive for Democrats compared to the status quo ante.
Also, while the article doesn't really go to this at all, I think a lot of people are overestimating how much it would have benefited Democrats if they successfully passed the bill. They'd benefit some, but it's not as if the Republicans would have stopped attacking them, nor is it the case that the border would have been totally "fixed" between now and Election Day. The amount the Democrats would have benefited would have been pretty comparable to the amount they are benefiting now *relative to status quo ante* by getting a deal on the bill that the Republicans then shot down.
I disagree. I think the border being a disaster will (correctly) be laid at Biden's feet between now and November. Trump will be able to point to the simple fact that the border was relatively fine when he was president, and it is a disaster under Biden, without any legislative change. Biden's argument that he needs a new law will be trumped by Trump pointing out that he didn't need a new law.
But the Republicans also would have done that even if the border bill had passed. Either way, their attacks are blunted *relative to the status quo ante of when the Democrats weren't making concessions.* Now that the concessions are a matter of public record, the issue is still negative for Democrats, but less negative than it was pre-concessions, and equally less negative regardless of whether the Republicans agree to the bill or not.
OK, I agree that the *bill* is a net political positive for democrats, but the bill is minor compared to the overall *issue* of immigration. And I don't think the bill moved the needle much on the overall perception of the issue.
No, this was an own goal by the Republicans. The Democrats don't need to own this issue; they just need to cut down the Republicans' advantage on this. Up to now, it was a slam dunk for the Republicans that the Democrats had no answer to. Now, due to (the usual) Republican stupidity, every time they bring up the border the Democrats have at least enough of an answer to win over some voters on the issue.
This is the opportunity to make it a heads Democrats win, tails Republicans lose.
The *leader of the House* repeatedly said he was in fact, not very hunky dory with the bill. In December. Before the Orange Man opined on it!
Do you have a link to that? The bill was still being negotiated in December, nobody knew what was in it, and the only articles I can see from December are Johnson calling on the President to take Executive Action. The letter he sent to Biden on December 21st only mentions that bipartisan negotiations are ongoing, but says nothing negative about them. So what's the basis of your claim that Johnson spent months telling Biden that he wasn't okay with the bill prior to a) the bill's details actually being negotiated and settled upon; b) disclosed to Johnson (or anyone else) such that he could opine on them; and c) Trump coming out and saying (without knowing or caring what was in the bill) that it should be dead on arrival in the House for purely political reasons?
Johnson's letter is a pretty obvious outline of his caucuses grievances; the White House is the executor of anything that will be passed and they don't think it's serious about executing current laws to deter spurious asylum claims coming into the US. This means, if there is a bill to happen, the White House has to get serious. Johnson was never going to say no to the bill before it was announced. But he was signaling in January prior to the bill's announcement, similar to his letter, that the White House had to take up the lead rather than punting to the Senate's Ukraine concerns if they wanted House GOP to vote on it.
Trump came out and said the bill was dead with Republicans. He was correct, but we had already arrived at that situation prior to his announcement. In part, because the Senate GOP and House GOP do not agree on the political nature of Ukraine Aid.
"While a bipartisan group of Senators has begun extensive negotiations over the past few weeks to try to find a compromise, they have not yet been able to finalize an agreement. Statutory reforms designed to restore operational control at our southern border must be enacted, but the crisis at our southern border has deteriorated to such an extent that significant action can wait no longer. It must start now, and it must start with you."
That's all he said about the negotiations in the bill. He literally says there are bipartisan negotiations happening and that legislation must be enacted. He also accuses the Biden administration of needing to do more on its own, sure, but you claimed that he made these grand statements denouncing the bill as far back as December. Now you say it's January. Do you have a link to those statements? Again, I'm looking for any support for your claim that this had to do with some sort of negotiating faux pas on the Biden admin's part that excluded Johnson. What's the basis of the claim that "we had already arrived at that situation prior to his announcement"? McConnell was leaked to have said to his caucus that the bill was basically a good bill that would have passed until the politics changed after Trump came out against it- was McConnell wrong/lying?
This response of yours seems all over the place relative to what you said previously. First he was saying back in December, now it's January. Before, he was saying that he was not hunky dory with the bill back in December. Now he was never going to be against it until the terms had been released. Do you have a clear timeline of what happened and what people were saying as this process played out?
Sure. Here's where I'm reading into Johnson in December as signaling a negotiation between Ukraine aid and immigration is not at all hunky dory.
December 5th: Speaker Johnson's letter clarifies that HR 2 items must be considered in talks alongside any serious Ukraine funds, which he also believes must have various caveats attached on details and objectives.
The Hill[1] reports this is too far apart right now. "Yet even the potential concessions that angered the CHC fell well short of Johnson’s vision. ... Democrats see many of the provisions in H.R. 2 as non-starters, and it was passed with no Democratic votes."
So *Trump has not made a noise about Ukraine-Border talks* to the press, and The Hill is making clear to readers this is unlikely to go forward in December. This is great reporting because it drives home that the parties really do disagree on what successful immigration policy will even look like, because Republicans want less movement into the country while Democrats stress the disorder of the current process. It's a solid read.
The same reporting[1]: "By sticking to the House GOP’s right flank on border demands, Johnson is sending a message to the Senate that a supplemental resembling the administration’s first proposal is dead in the water in the House."
Dead in the water. One might hope Johnson will start sending a very clear different message later when we get to the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy negotiation. But this is the default we are starting with, straight from the guy in charge of the House of Reps.
December 12th: Politico reports [2] that Ukraine's leader Zelenskyy is meeting with Johnson and Jeffries in the House. It notes Johnson is refusing to extend the House legislative session despite asks from the Senate. Then we get this quote:
'“Here we are on the eve, virtually, of Christmas and the end of the year, and the White House, as we talk this morning, has not moved in our direction on that issue,” Johnson said. “And I’ve told them very clearly where we stand.”'
So a week has passed and in Johnson's view, the White House is making no moves to him despite his statement about the Senate process so far. He makes clear he views the Senate and White House as co-equal participants in any success: "The House members will work. We’ve shown that over and over and over, but we’re not getting any cooperation from the White House and the Senate Democrats at all." [2] Sounds like this compromise is not happening in the House so far. Dead in the water still.
A fun precursor of the current White House PR on immigration is also in the Politico Playbook PM story, but about Biden impeachment inquiry. Relaying NBC News reporting, Politico says that the White House has 'blistering new memo, accusing Johnson of “taking marching orders” from Trump by pursuing the vote.' This is obviously how they're going to handle immigration not going their way too.
December 21st: NBC News reports that "With Congress gone for the year with no border deal, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., on Thursday sent a scathing letter to President Joe Biden, blaming him for the border crisis and urging him to take a number of executive actions." Clear executive actions are outlined over what it would mean for the White House to take the House seriously. Not releasing migrants with court dates. Restricting parole use by the president. Resuming border wall construction. And here's the killer line "It must start now, and it must start with you."
This isn't some weirdo in the House GOP caucus on a power trip. It's the leader of the House saying what has to happen for him to even consider revising his previous statements saying that this Senate process is dead in the water. The NBC story makes clear that the White House is choosing to ignore this letter and praise the Senate process at the end of the story. As you note, the letter acknowledges the Lankford-Sinema-Murphy process, but it does not meaningfully show any optimism in this talk. Given Johnson's previous explicit statements on the Senate process, it's fair to say we're still at "dead in the water" status.
January 10th: NBC News reports [4] Biden has now spoken with Johnson on the phone. We also learn there's no in-person meeting happening. "A senior Biden administration official said the White House has not closed the door to an in-person meeting between Biden and Johnson, but no such meeting has been scheduled." This is after Johnson went to the border in the prior week demanding Biden take executive actions to show any willingness to see legislation happen, as he laid out in his Dec. 21st letter. There's basically no update in this story of any actual legislative process happening between Johnson and the White House. It's a phone call.
January 17th: Johnson is finally given a meeting at the White House to reiterate the HR 2 elements. It does not sound like there's much of any breakthrough or joined discussion with the Senate. CNN reports [5] 'Despite the White House and Democrats rejecting H2, Johnson insisted Wednesday night that it be the basis of any immigration deal. “I think we had productive discussion today at the White House because I told them, it doesn’t matter to me what you label it, I don’t care what you call it, HR 2, but those elements are really important,” he said.' Then we get the kill-shot once again as we heard in December.
"If the bill looks like some of the things that have been rumored, of course it’s dead in the House, because it wouldn’t solve the problem."
I'm going to leave the story here. I think this is a detailed and thorough explanation of what is going on. The CNN story concludes with the Speaker discussing how he will avoid a government shutdown (this is a new and frankly, welcome trend for House Republicans with a Democratic president in my opinion.)
But before we even get to Johnsons's House GOP letter and other moves to say this bill is dead, I'm going to reiterate, Johnson explicitly said he was not getting taken seriously in the legislative process and that anything the Senate was going to do was dead in the water. This has been going on since early December, and nothing Johnson has said indicates a change from that default position. Trump, as usual, showed up at the end and took credit with Democrats shaking their heads and saying "oh there he goes again, ending a good deal for politics."
But we can look at what the Speaker of the House actually said two months ago and see for ourselves if this is true, and Trump seized control of a caucus from a Speaker excited and optimistic about the Senate's attempt to bridge the partisan divide on the immigration and Ukraine aid issues. The opposite was always the case, and it has been the entire time. Even if you think Speaker Johnson is the worst person ever or the House Republicans are traitors, it doesn't change the facts. He told you all along, well before January.
Notes:
[1] https://thehill.com/homenews/house/4342873-johnson-ukraine-funding-border-security/
[2] https://www.politico.com/newsletters/playbook-pm/2023/12/12/zelenskyy-faces-a-stalemate-on-the-hill-00131325
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/house-speaker-mike-johnson-calls-biden-take-executive-actions-border-rcna130805
[4] https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/biden-speaker-mike-johnson-talk-border-security-shutdown-threats-rcna133282
[5] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/17/politics/johnson-immigration-deal-house-senate/index.html
*crickets*
Johnson is a tool. He needed the bill to die in the Senate because it was unlikely he could have stopped it in the house before Trump weighed in.
Democrats thought McCarthy was a tool! This didn't stop Biden from inviting McCarthy to talk debt ceiling in the White House, despite Biden's statements to his party that only a clean bill would happen.
At any rate, there is no "ignore the House Speaker if you don't like him" clause in Article I.
Small groups of Senators or House members very frequently negotiate initial packages that then get a hearing on the floor of Congress and don't involve senior leadership at the initial drafting phase. McConnell nor Schumer were directly involved. The objection that the closed door negotiations didn't involve Johnson seems bizarre to me given the 200 year history of legislation being negotiated in precisely the way this legislation was negotiated without anyone freaking out about how it violated Article I or something.
I didn't say it violated Article I, just that you need the House vote on the bill, and the debt ceiling is the vision of that actually coming true between the House GOP and Biden making promises to their respective voters.
No, it was pretty clear before Trump weighed in that Johnson would have been unable to keep his caucus together and jam the bill. It would have passed the house over his objections.
It's true the Biden White House could say, "we were unaware the House GOP Speaker will not allow bills without the buy-in of enough people in his caucus."
But they wisely haven't said that. Because nobody following Congress would be able to stop laughing.
Lankford is a cheap labor shill as are most Republicans in Congress...who would happily sluice more people into the country faster if they could vote off the record.
This is the basic problem. "reform" for liberals and the cheap labor lobby means much higher legal limits. Since they have tried and failed repeatedly to achieve that (most voters want the same or lower limits) "reform" looks like speeding up the asylum process which means accelerating the number of claims we admit or don't admit but don't deport.
The funny thing is that social democratic parties in Scandinavia - who US progressives often praise and seem to want to emulate - have all taken a sharp turn to the right on immigration policy since 2015 (the social democrats in Denmark did so already ten years before that). I never hear about this in the US debate, which can be a bit myopic at times and helped by us Europeans participating in the comment section :)
The party leader of the Social Democratic Party in Sweden - the most electorally succesful left wing party in the Western world post-ww2 - nowadays regularly lambasts the centre-right government for having had a liberal migration policy in the past and try to rewrite history and position her own party as being for a ”responsible”, i.e. strict, migration policy. The Social Democratic Party in Denmark goes further and talks about having net zero immigration the coming decade. I think the latter party goes way too far but this is just to show that there is a space for left wing politics that is restrictive on immigration policy. It took a crisis for them to wake up (particularly in Sweden) but now they see it as a cornerstone of Nordic social democracy. It’s not just tactical, they see that immigration must be controlled and limited so that we can properly take care of those who arrive (housing, jobs, citizenship, language etc).
Please tell your ”open borders”-progressive friends that they should take a closer look at Scandinavian center left politics on this issue.
I tell people all the time that the European experience is instructive on how this plays out politically. The US has a much greater capacity to absorb immigrants but not an unlimited one. At a certain point the same dynamics will kick in for any democratic system of government. Citizenship has to mean something, even in the most liberal societies.
No, this thinking is childish. If the natural result of an approach to a particular policy is cascading political crisis and ultimately an even more difficult to resolve crisis of faith in the liberal order then it is not workable. Blowing up a system that allows for positive reform is not something any liberal or progressive minded person should be interested in.
It’s easy to be morally pure and principled when one refuses to deal with the actual reality. In actual reality there is almost always such a thing as capacity, and only by acknowledging this can one help people in a sustainable way that works.
The answer to insufficient capacity for your immigration flows is to improve your capacity, not restrict your immigration.
Why? Surely both options should be on the table. The capacity may not be technocratic, it may be cultural (how good society is at assimilation, for example)
Open borders is a policy that some progressives like, but it's at least as closely associated with libertarians as progressives. I sympathize with it, but am worried about the political fallout. I do think that libertarians are more likely to stick on it as a matter of central principle than most progressives.
Who are the progressives who are for open borders? I mean, I know some who are Jill Stein voters. But which Democrats in some position of power think that we should let in anyone who wants to come in?
Guy who wants bipartisanship and border reform, but only so long as there’s no politics in the legislative process. Best of luck.
While I agree that too many Democrats don't see illegal immigration as a problem that needs to be solved, saying that Biden should do something that is clearly illegal makes no sense.
While the student loan forgiveness issue seems comparable superficially, I don't think it actually is. There was a plausible (though I didn't agree it) argument for the student loan forgiveness, whereas I just don't see how one could plausibly argue that 212f is legal.
Additionally, the argument that the Biden admin has put forward is that the issue needs to be solved legislatively. Executive action undermines that correct argument.
Exactly. I have trouble taking any analysis seriously that doesn't acknowledge that Biden could be doing a lot more now to stem illegal immigration. He's only looking for a fig leaf now that his very blind eye to illegal immigration is a problem even in blue cities.
Deathbed conversions are still real conversions.
Maybe so, but election year ones aren't.
Doesn't hurt to try. :)
Just this morning I read this from Marc Thiessen:
>Here is the reality: Republicans have something Biden wants — aid for Ukraine. To get it, he needs to give them something they want (and need) — major concessions on border security. Even the many House Republicans who want to help Ukraine need those concessions to do so, so that the anti-Ukraine right cannot accuse them of caring more about Ukraine’s borders than our own.
>The reason the Senate border deal is going nowhere was that it was an immigration reform compromise, not a border concession. Republicans were being asked to approve a border-security package they found woefully insufficient — and then approve the aid to Ukraine that Biden wants. That was never going to fly. In fact, it backfired — losing the votes of pro-Ukraine Republicans in the Senate. Passing Ukraine aid is the Republicans’ concession. The Democrats’ concession has to be securing the border.
He's arguing that (as totally f-ed as this is), giving aid to Ukraine is a huge concession from the GOP, while the Democrats aren't actually making any concessions at all by supporting legislation that would completely shut down the asylum system when the number of border crossings exceeds some threshold number.
I don't see the problem here as Democrats viewing "improving the asylum system and reducing illegal immigration" as concessions—the problem here is that the Republicans view any form of compromise as concessions.
Thiessen goes on to move the goal posts again by arguing that the real objection is the humanitarian aid to Ukraine, but the point is crystal clear: "Compromise" means Republicans getting everything they want even when they can't even articulate what they actually want; and nothing the Democrats offer is truly a concession on their part because it might benefit them politically.
It's mind boggling, especially when you consider that Senate republicans want Ukraine aid too! So for some reason the republicans in the House, with the slimmest possible majority, are the ones that get to control every single facet of the American political process simply because they're so disorganized and petty that they can't be relied upon to behave like real legislators? It's ludicrous to watch this debate play out.
I actually think that Republicans are acting perfectly rational by responding to incentives. The problem is that the overriding incentive is to be re-elected, which necessarily means they cannot get crosswise with MAGA. Trump wields absolute power over elected Republicans because he effectively created a personality cult within the GOP that will believe and do whatever he says. And that cult clearly has no interest in policy; they view everything as cynical political maneuvering to get Trump back into the White House.
What the rest of us see as moving goal posts, the inability to articulate policy goals, bad-faith negotiations and voting on unconstitutional culture-war legislation is viewed inside the cult as "fighting" and is it is the point. Voters now place equal blame on Democrats and Republicans and more blame on Biden than Trump for the failure to pass the border-Ukraine deal, which accomplishes the actual goal. They do not actually care about immigration, the sovereignty of Ukraine or anything else; they care about re-electing Trump, full stop.
I don't know why House Democrats (and some Republicans) haven't already started the discharge petition process for the aid bill yet. Why delay even a second?
If Johnson is the obstacle, go around him.
Difficult people always get more power over accommodating people because they know they can get their way with intransigence but it usually blows up in the long run.
The fact that Marc Thiesen (in theory) styles himself as a neoconservative Republican makes this all the more galling. In theory, the people in this country who should be most in favor of aid to Ukraine full stop with no strings attached are people like Thiessen.
I mean this came out years ago from Jane Mayer. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/jane-mayer-savages-marc-t_n_508310
Its just really hard not to see Thiessen as nothing but a complete hack.
I don't think he is a hack. I feel for sorry for conservative intellectuals who are watching everyone around them turn into cultists.
I also find it interesting to watch people like him try to synthesize some kind of coherent framework or ideology from the pure chaos that is the modern Republican party. They really cannot see that it is a personality cult run by an amoral narcissist because that would mean accepting that the erstwhile Republican president truly does not care about anything or anyone but himself and will never, ever put party or country or principles over his own interests.
The thing that really just happened is that Trump killed legislation that was good for everyone but him because it hindered his own short-term goal of winning the next election, which itself is only in service of his goals of escaping accountability and making himself richer and also maybe revenge and the sadistic pleasure of breaking people's spirits. So the Thiessens of the world have to synthesize some non-crazy explanation that involves Republicans adhering to some kind of principle. He ends the column by saying that Europe will pay for humanitarian aid, so all you have to do to get Johnson to bring a bill to the floor is to strip out everything but straight military aid for Ukraine. You see, because Conservatives wouldn't just let an autocrat annex a country, they're still hawks—and really it's the bleeding heart liberals who are at fault.
To be fair, House Republicans were not asked what they wanted or included in the negotiations at all.
So I don’t think they are the only ones operating in bad faith.
I agree the failure of the immigration bill cannot be correctly analysed without including Ukraine aid that House Republicans also didn’t like.
They just impeached the DHS secretary over their gripes over "The Border" and even then couldn't articulate exactly what they want or think should have been done differently.
The Republican party is evil.
"Republicans demand concessions for agreeing to pull drowning child from well."
Yes. this is like the "concessions" in the budget negotiations. When lightning strikes and Republicans actually want something sensible, let yourself be STRUCK!
There’s a very basic disagreement between people who want more immigration to this country and people who want less. That encourages people to think of any change to the status quo as either a win or a loss that requires offsets. The asylum status quo is that we have a defacto immigration path for, e.g. teenagers fleeing gang violence in Central America, even though pro-immigration groups could never pass a law creating a visa category with the same effect. It’s a dysfunctional way to think about and run a country, but welcome to America.
That's not what was intended.
Rebs will keep moving the goal posts no matter what Dems do, as we have seen.
The concession is spending money on punitive police state programs that make people's lives worse, rather than improve the system in ways that give people the opportunity to make their life better.
It's almost like you wanted to make this point, and worked yourself back to doing it using his words.
As a purely political point I am not sure that's better than attacking the Republicans for cynically killing the bipartisan bill.
I would want turn up the salience on that aspect and then announce some sort of executive actions in a televised address, with a safe third country angle and whatever resource shifting to case adjudication you can get away with.
As a legal immigrant, I’m never going to be ok with the Democratic Party’s casual indifference towards illegal immigration. The problem with this attitude is something that Matt has warned about - anti-any-immigration politicians will use this opportunity to gain power and shut down or reduce legal immigration along with illegal immigration. Reducing legal immigration would be a terrible idea.
At this point, continued legal immigration could happen, but with serious internal deportation enforcement. The latter has been diminishing since Obama's first term. There are simply too many people here illegally with American spouses and children who have lived here near a decade or more. So each president since then has reduced enforcement, culminating in Biden's total pause of deportation in his first 100 days (which sent a clear message to asylum seekers.)
And that means legal immigration cannot get buy-in from hawks, who cannot be promised there will be serious enforcement. This is why immigration has soured; if you can't get insurance on your new car, you can't drive it. The inability to drive it does not make a new car unhelpful, useless, "poison", etc as an inherent quality. But you're stuck at that point. I suspect JD Vance's visa bond idea might help address this. But I can see why Democrats and Republicans increasingly refer to illegal and legal immigration in the same breath. The line between the two has steadily blurred due to a lack of willing enforcement, and now millions of (legal) asylum claimants in the country.
Those of us who remember Simpson Mazzolli realize that there is always amnesty first, enforcement never.
Politically yes, maybe. Conceptually we could be recruiting the world's talent w/o fixing the border.
Yes, we need a skills approach. I refer you to the man who unites the Ukraine hawks in the Senate GOP desperate for a deal and the border hawks in the House GOP who hate Biden's management of the asylum and parole process. Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) produced a RAISE Act outlining such an approach during the Trump years. I suspect we'll see him involved in any successful big immigration changes in the future, if not voting himself on the final deal.
There's already a skills based program with a huge backlog. The solution is to clear the backlog and remove or increase the current quotas.
Both!
Man, this isn't going to be a popular opinion around here, but it seems to me that the groups are right on the merits. It sure seems to me that working under the table is a much better lot in life than what a lot of asylum claimants are escaping, regardless of whether they officially meet the bar to qualify. And it seems to me that this is an issue of more humanitarian importance than most things that the U.S. does things about. And concerns about the actual consequences of "border insecurity" seem fairly overblown. Most of the arguments for why we need to let fewer people in just seem really flimsy and not grounded in the actual welfare of actual human beings.
Of course, the median voter doesn't agree with me about any of this, which is why the issue is an electoral liability for Biden, so the consequentialistically right thing to do is throw these people under the bus for the sake of not handing the country to Donald Trump. And it's good that Democrats are trying to do this. But man, it sure is a ruthless trolley-problem calculus, and I think it's probably good for our souls to remember the kinds of tradeoffs we're making when we endorse things like this.
I'm not really sure why I'm making this post about What's Morally Right in the Ruthlessly Pragmatic Politics Forum; it's not like saying any of this out loud is helpful from a short-term political perspective. But I don't know where else people both care about the moral consequences of public policy, and also understand that successfully implementing good public policy in a democracy requires message discipline and compromise and whatnot. And in the long run, I think it's better if people who care about making things better bear both of those things in mind at the same time.
It's "morally better" that a nation's collective decision about whom it wants to let in is just disregarded? Do you then just think that national borders are immoral? You're right that that is not a popular opinion.
I find it odd that the "collective decision" framing is only used for immigration and not for other public policy issues. Like, Matt has written here before about how the Jones Act is bad, and most commenters agree, but it's also a "collective decision" in the sense that it was a democratically passed law and any attempt to fix it would be unpopular at least at first. Yet no one seems to view this as a point in its favor.
I'd like to better understand whether the difference is that the status quo is an unintended consequence of the laws on the books (but is that not also true of the Jones Act?), or whether anti-immigration sentiment is more universal and deeper-rooted than economic protectionism for shipbuilders (probably true in some sense but I suspect more of a difference in degree than in kind), or something else.
The collective decision framing was used because you explicitly argued that it’s good for asylum seekers to be allowed in to the country despite not meeting the legal bar for entry.
More generally, the “collective decision” framing gets brought up more in discussions of immigration because immigration is an area where leftists frequently advocate for outright ignoring the laws on the books. (Although with progressive prosecutors increasingly choosing not to prosecute people for clear violations of the law, I suspect the “collective decision” framing will increasingly be used in discussions of crime as well.)
With elected prosecutors this isn't a problem because a prosecutor who exercises discretion in a way that the voters don't like won't be reelected.
Also, I do in fact think that, on the merits, ignoring political feasibility, the U.S. in particular ought to permit most people in the world (with some exclusion criteria like criminal records) to show up at a point of entry, come in, and start working, as was the case during the pre-1924 period when America grew up into what it is today. This doesn't mean abolishing national borders, we could still have other kinds of border controls. I'm agnostic about whether other rich countries should do this; the U.S. is a nation of immigrants in a way that the rich countries of Europe are not, and seems to be better at assimilation.
"I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still."
—Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation
I disagree with Reagan on a ton of things, but those are beautiful, inspirational words. I really *want* us to be able to take in anyone who wants to come and who shares our values! Just, that's not going to work on a practical level. Witness the clusterfudge in NYC in Chicago after just a handful of immigrant buses arrived.
As an aside, how did we, as a country, go from Ronal Reagan to Agent Orange?
"Just, that's not going to work on a practical level. Witness the clusterfudge in NYC in Chicago after just a handful of immigrant buses arrived."
If only we had a book on how to improve our regulatory structures so that we can accommodate a gigantic growth in our population. It could even be titled after what our population be if we did allow in anyone who wanted: "One Billion Americans".
There are many ways in which 2024 America is fundamentally different from 1924 America. For example, it is much easier to travel long distances now than it was in 1924, so basically the world is on the US border today. Moreover, there was no governmental social safety net to speak of in 1924. I don't know whether, on balance, unrestricted migration is an economic good, but we can surely make migration economically better (for us) by picking and choosing whom we admit.
With regard to the Jones Act (which you mention in another comment), I don't think that collective decision-making is as applicable. A tiny minority of Americans know what that Act is, and an even smaller minority understand its economic consequences. On the other hand, a large number of Americans have opinions about immigration, and their concerns come from much more than economics. (And, as long as the Jones Act is on the books, I guess it should be enforced, painful as it is to say.)
I’d agree with this, considering the economic and cultural dynamism of the U.S. I think it could afford to be more open to immigrants, especially hispanics who have a similar religion and whose culture and language is already well representer in the country. But it needs to be controlled, as you also point out.
I'll absolutely embrace the unpopular opinion here. It's illegitimate for any State to exclude people from entry. The role of the state is to defend the rights of the people within it's borders, as long as the people entering are respecting those rights then the state has no claim against them. I don't care how strong the popular democratic demand for economic protectionist border policy is, it's not just. Liberalism > democracy.
So according to your view the island of Malta should be willing to accept 10 million refugees from a culturally, religiously and linguistically distant country? Sorry but I think your highly theoretical and idealistic ”liberalism” breaks down when it comes into contact with reality (granted the Malta example is also hypothetical but not impossible if they declared tomorrow that the borders were fully open in accordance with your political philosophy)
Presumably the people of Malta have property rights, which is all you actually need to resolve the hypothetical.
That just seems like a classic example of libertarian idealism meeting reality. If 10 million refugees just showed up in a country of 500 thousand people, there would be a massive housing crisis, people homeless everywhere. It'd be bad for the residents and bad for the refugees. People retreating into their property wouldn't solve for that.
The United States on the other hand, has much more of a capacity to welcome refugees, it just takes better policymaking to ensure that it doesn't end up like the crisis we have now.
Sure, whatever exogenous circumstance suddenly dumped 10 million refugees into Malta is surely some kind of dramatic catastrophe. There's no good outcome to that. That's fundamentally different from immigration mediated by the draw of expected economic opportunity.
Libertarians never have to bow to practical realities. It's one of the hallmarks of the ethos, actually.
"Libertarianism is the best political philosophy except for two things: foreign policy and children." - Ramesh Ponnuru
Not if the refugees are on publicly owned property or else taking over privately owned land beyond the capacity of the state apparatus to prevent.
If the refugees are violating the property rights of the people it is absolutely the State's duty to intervene.
How does a country restricting who can live in it differ conceptually from a gated community or co-op with exclusive ownership over a given land parcel and a majoritarian incumbent equity holder capable of binding all members including as to restraints on ingress and alienation as far as the legitimacy of the exercise of such rights?
Roughly... people have private property rights. State-ish entities don't("Public property" of sovereign entities being a distinct and complicated concept I'm ignoring here). You can certainly drive down to levels of abstraction where that gets really muddy. If the co-op owns the land in a corporate style arrangement then I suppose they can be as exclusionary as they want, but I've also said before around here that a lot of the powers claimed by HOAs are horseshit because you can't actually contract your property rights away while retaining ownership.
I guess I don't see why one needs to get hung up on the notion of ownership or not -- the recognition of estates less than freehold are about as far from atypical as you can get.
While I appreciate your response what I'm getting at here is that there doesn't seem to be any natural boundary to the expansion of a privately-owned, territorially-delimited majoritarianly-administered system of administration for the common good of equityholders. But it seems weird that as long as we call, e.g., Singapore, a "state" this suddenly places implicit bounds on the legitimacy of entry and exit rights, but not if we call it a "corporation." Cruise ships seem to be state-like entities in many respects but we don't say that they have to let everyone in.
(See also first five paragraphs here) https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/04/next-door-in-nodrumia/ )
The answer is that if you governed a whole big community (somewhere people couldn't easily leave) by this kind of private property rights, it would be illegitimate. There's no reason this kind of private association needs to be democratic, or to respect personal freedom. In fact old arguments for monarchy often relied on this kind of argument (and some libertarians still make it). But small-r republicanism says that a political community should not be run as anyone's private possession.
From the SSC link:
"the Nodrumia Corporation, which owns all the property in the area. The corporation distributes usage rights via a legal instrument that looks suspiciously like private property: people who own usage rights keep them forever, can do whatever they want with the land, and can freely transfer and sell them to others."
I fundamentally don't think you can do that. Property rights are more like natural rights that proceed from ownership, not something that is contractually severable. Just like you can't rightly contract yourself into slavery.
The fundamental distinctions between the State and the State Like Corporate Entity are substantial. The SLCE is beholden to the shareholders, and also bound by whatever the state is that it exists within. If the SLCE doesn't exist within a state, then it's just a state with the same obligations of legitimacy. I guess I can imagine some hypothetical self-sustaining corporate arrangement in which all the shareholders reside on the property of the SLCE where you could, I guess, contractually force a shareholder to sell their stake based on their conduct and then expel them, but again you would need a state to expel them into that case. Like, a cruise ship can kick you off the boat, but because they're not a state they can't just throw you in the brig and let you rot.
You can't get out of the obligations of statehood by calling yourself a corporation and you can't be a corporation without a state to recognize, constrain, and legitimate you.
A gated community doesn't usually say that no one is allowed to have guests.
There are so many reasons for objecting to unrestricted migration, and only some of them relate to economic protectionism. I also disagree that open borders have anything to do with liberalism (perhaps libertarianism, but, even then, only very extreme libertarians support open borders).
On a practical level, consider the reasonable connection that has been drawn between out-of-control borders and the rise of populist authoritarianism.
Freedom of movement is absolutely a core liberal right.
This is obviously all wildly unpopular, people are dangerously tribal/populist about this stuff in particular and I'm not actually convinced our constitutional order is sufficiently robust to suppress the tyranny of the majority here, so Matt's right that this is a good bill and the asylum system is broken. We should fix the asylum system because it strengthens the constitutional order. Then we should let as many people in as we can get away with.
Freedom of movement is a right to leave, not a right to come. Much like if I don't let you leave my house, that's kidnapping, but if I don't invite you to my house that's not a crime.
I feel like you're conflating private property rights, which the state doesn't really have, and some version of "right to exit"/the 4th Amendment, with freedom of movement, which is a thoroughly distinct thing.
If we let goods and capital move freely, then we should not treat labor from those places differently.
I am all for more free trade Schengen type areas.
Bleh, I'm very pro immigration, but also recognize there is a substantive difference between goods/services and people. If a good shows up, we don't recognize a governmental obligation to care for it the way we do for a person.
Are you a “liberal” (i.e., progressive or center-left) or a libertarian? If a libertarian, okay, your position is at least internally coherent even if I disagree with it.
But if you’re a liberal then your position has serious problems. Liberals accept the legitimacy of the State’s restricting people’s personal freedoms in service of certain higher goods. See, eg, progressive taxation to fund the welfare state, regulation of private enterprise to serve workers’ and environmental interests, or restrictions on freedom of association to prevent racial discrimination. I don’t think you can argue with the claim (whether or not you think it is a bad thing) that high levels of immigration can radically alter the culture of a society. I see wanting to preserve the culture of one’s society as a perfectly legitimate desire, on par with the other desires the liberal state routinely curtails personal freedoms to serve. Because that desire is legitimate, even assuming people possess this alleged right to total freedom of movement, the liberal state can infringe on that right in order to protect the society and culture of the community already existing within its borders.
There's no definition of "liberal" that includes using the state to "preserve the culture of one’s society". The absolute core tenet of liberalism is pluralism. Cultural preferences are all equal before the law in a liberal system. The "state can infringe on that right in order to protect the society and culture of the community already existing" is like, borderline blood and soil stuff.
You're simply wrong--liberal countries use the power of the state to preserve their culture all the time. Some cultures believe in female genital mutilation--may we preserve a culture that rejects such practices by criminalizing them? Obviously. Or go back to my previous examples. Some cultures think racism is acceptable. Nonetheless, a liberal state may violate the freedom of association to outlaw racist employment practices--that is, it may use the power of the state to try and protect and encourage a culture that does not engage in racism. Even your very preference for a liberal social order is itself a cultural preference which the state protects (by enforcing freedom of religion, separation of church and state, freedom of speech, etc.).
You can't handwave away the entirely legitimate desire to protect one's culture by scaremongering about "blood and soil." If so many Westerners immigrated to Japan such that Japan became 50% Western and non-Japanese speaking, would Japanese people who complained about the massive change in their culture be bad racists engaging in problematic "blood and soil" politics? I think most people can see when presented with this hypothetical that such grievances would at the very least be legitimate and understandable, even if they nonetheless thought the Westerners should be allowed to immigrate.
The reason for the state to criminalize genital mutilation is not because there's some superior "liberal" culture to be preserved. It's because because in a liberal society the state exists to suborn cultural preferences to the rights of the individual being mutilated.
Please get Joe Biden to say that and put it in a commercial!
I can't imagine why he would do something so stupid, but it's hardly like I haven't seen politicians say unimaginably stupid things before.
This is why I *explicitly stated* in my original comment that he should throw the migrants under the bus in order to win the election. If we can't keep straight in our own heads the difference between good politics and good policy, we won't be able to rightly choose which tradeoffs to support going forward.
The problem is this argument, if accepted, proves way too much.
> It's "morally better" that a nation's collective decision about ________
You can fill in the blank here with anything. Some things we think it's morally ok to fill in ("the capital gains tax rate"), some things we don't ("whether women are allowed to vote").
You need a better moral basis than a nation's collective decision here.
These are not Syrian villagers whose homes are being bombed. Most of the "asylum seekers" just want a better life but the system we have makes finding those who ARE being persecuted difficult.
I agree with you, but why aren’t they entitled to try and create a better life? If the pathways to legal immigration weren’t so restrictionist and broken, presumably they’d go about it that way. But that’s not an option.
Of course they are entitled to try. Our system should take advantage of this to let in the people most likely to make American lives better. And this includes SOME admitted on humanitarian grounds and asylum grounds w/o regard to their making an economic contribution.
But until we HAVE that kind of system, let's enforce our bad laws with as much humanity and cost effectiveness as we can because that is the best/only way to ever changing the system.
Something something One Billion Americans.
Actually, if we were NOT in a geopolitical rivalry with China, I would not be AS focused on getting to merit based immigration. But that adds spice to all my fast inclusive growth urges.
Why are unskilled American workers supposed to give up the rents they lucked into by being born in a prosperous country?
http://m.quickmeme.com/meme/3sb2pi
No one would think I was trolling if I said rich Americans don’t want to give up their inheritance to the IRS, they would think me lame for stating the obvious.
Yet when I point out that poor Americans-- who inherited mainly the right to work in a prosperous economy-- don’t want to give up their rents, I am suspected of trolling.
Hysterical.
Given that Matt and much of the readership has noted distain for rent-seeking behavior - yes, it does seem like trolling to argue in favor of it.
You phrased your comment as a combative rhetorical question, so I wasn't sure if you are trolling either. Had you bluntly said "unskilled Americans don't want to give up the rents they lucked into" then we would agree. You are correct; that is indeed the reason why we have borders.
edit. I replaced "poor" with "unskilled"
Of course it's better, that's why people exert effort and risk their lives for a chance to do it. The question is whether it's politically sustainable. I think it is not. Support for border control is extremely widespread and support for rule of law especially by immigrants is also strong. So if you swim against that tide, your coalition will lose out.
The problem here is that the case for immigration, which is good, isn't actually a case for the asylum system, which is bad, and conflating them taints both.
When I read this I get a sense of a highly intelligent and empathetic person who lives in a world of abstract principles. I agree with you, in that world, sitting in my armchair at night. In the actual world we actually inhabit people have ties to their land, religion, culture, language etc and any political/legal philosophy that ignores this is a mere thought experiment.
As I wrote in response to someone else, Malta with 500k inhabitants could welcome 10 million immigrants from a vastly different culture tomorrow and it would mean that the island was completely overpopulated and Maltese culture would more or less disappear. The economy would probably crash in the short term (maybe gain long term but probably not), lawlessness and mistrust between citizens would skyrocket, there would possibly be a civil war breaking out when unhappy Maltese try to ”take their country back”, the welfare state would be overburdened, housing crisis would be acute and people would live in tents everywhere, garbage collection would break down etc etc. Yes this is also a thought experiment but the only reason it hasn’t become reality is because no actual country has implemented the immigration policy that follows from your abstract principles. If they would it would.
I would also encourage you to ponder the possibility of helping people close to where they are rather than moving them across the globe. A restrictive immigration policy can be combined with highly generous aid and support abroad.
I noted elsewhere that I'm not uncomplicatedly in favor of European countries doing this. But I'm not worried about America being swamped by immigrants who replace American culture with something else, because American culture *already is* made of immigrant cultures, and meanwhile has a good track record of assimilating individual immigrants, including during the pre-1924 era of mass immigration. There are plenty of places in the U.S. where taco trucks on every corner *is* the culture. As for total population numbers, well, we're already 650 times bigger than Malta, and our host wrote a book about how it would be good if instead we were more like 2000 times bigger, so those concerns seem lesser than in Malta's case.
I'm also in favor of more generous foreign aid, but I'm actually not sure that the case for that is stronger than for less restrictive immigration policy. Helping people by giving them stuff can be hard to do effectively, while allowing them to better their lot by using their existing productive capacity in a place that can better harness it is more robust, in the sense that it relies on fewer assumptions about what works.
I read your argument as more abstract and principled in defense of open borders, which I disagree with. I agree, however, with your assessment of the capacity of the U.S. to welcome more asylum migrants (in a controlled fashion) than they currently do.
"As I wrote in response to someone else, Malta with 500k inhabitants could welcome 10 million immigrants from a vastly different culture tomorrow"
This conflates a *sudden sharp* rise in immigration with a *large long-term secular increase* in immigration. It is true that Malta probably could not house 10500k people next year. It is probably true that Malta could house 750k people next year, either because 250k people immigrated, or because the 500k people all paired up and made a baby. Repeat either course of action over a decade, and Malta now has 2M people. *Immigration* here is irrelevant: either you have the capacity to absorb a sudden increase in the number of people or you don't, and a small island country like Malta doesn't.
But the US isn't a small island country. If all 330M Americans paired up and had four kids over the next decade, we'd be at 1G Americans, independent of immigration. Now, Americans aren't going to do that: we're not all Amish or Orthodox Jews, and our TFR is in fact below-replacement-level. But we have enough land to support that many people and we should have the infrastructure and regulatory system to accommodate if people suddenly changed their behavior that way.
Of course, an open-borders system would lead to much larger swings in immigration flows,* with some years everyone deciding to immigrate to Australia and other years everyone immigrating to the US. But 1G Americans is ⅛ the world population. I'd say more than 7 in every 8 people (*in the world*) has enough local ties that they don't want to emigrate, or is too poor to pay for a plane ticket to the US.
* I'm assuming here that social media means immigrant decisions about selecting their destination will be highly correlated. If not, then the reverse is actually true: a larger median immigration flow will be a relatively steadier one.
It isn't actually humanitarian to say that anyone who gets here and knows the right words to say to game an asylum officer gets in. What this means in practice is that middle class people who can pay smugglers get in. It's something similar to how well off college applicants can game college admissions essays.
The difference, I think, is that college is inherently positional; if a lot more people were let in, it would be less valuable. Immigration isn't like that.
Of course, I'd also like to do what I can to help the less-savvy people, but if there's an opportunity to help some but not all of the people who need helping, I think we should generally err on the side of taking it.
That's wrong. Since the justification for this is fairness, fairness in the process does matter.
Letting in the entire Venezuelan middle class because they know how to manipulate the system isn't some great humanitarian act- it's confirming that connections and money matters more than need.
Plus, if it results in a shutdown of or backlash against asylum, the victims will be the people actually fleeing persecution whom we agreed to take in under international treaties.
Even among refugees from actual wars, the people who are able to successfully make it out and make an asylum claim in a Western country thousands of miles away are more likely to be tied to losing military/government side than powerless victims.
I used to think more like you do, but the stories of public services being overwhelmed by a huge and sudden influx in many towns have made me think that in fact the state does have some responsibility to moderate how and where people immigrate.
One big issue rarely discussed is that we have a presumption that if we let someone in they can just go anywhere. But it doesn't have to be that way. I'm not sure people on visas have the same right to travel that citizens do, and it's possible that we could condition visas on people having to live in a particular area for a particular length of time or as the condition of renewing the visa.
One thing Greg Abbott is actually right about is it isn't fair that Texas specifically has to absorb all the migrants. It really can overwhelm their social services. People we let into the country, including asylum applicants, are a shared responsibility. And we should think about a system where they are diffused more throughout the country or placed in areas where more labor is needed rather than just everyone crosses and crowds the Texas border towns.
Yeah, that dynamic is real and isn't great. I see it as a consequence of the U.S.'s Matryoshka government; if each municipality in the broad geographical area were handling a share of migrants in proportion to its population, then things would be fine, but there's no one with the authority to make that happen.
Oh yeah the groups are absolutely right here on the merits. The problem is the voters are not. (Another reason why liberalism > democracy)
Undemocratic liberalism is an oxymoron. Yes, there is a need to balance democracy and liberalism, including anti-majoritarian institutions like SCOTUS to mediate against sudden swings in popular mood. But ultimately democracy has to prevail. Non-democratic states are inherently unstable; in the end the people will have their way.
No you're absolutely right -- but democracy isn't ipso facto always good for the reason you mentioned. SCOTUS decisions that we like -- Roe, Obergefell, Bostok, etc. -- were undemocratic but ultimately led us to having a more free and liberal society.
The problem with this is as always it's in the eye of the beholder. Which is why at some level the court decisions will only stand if they gain democratic support. Otherwise they end up being reversed like the death penalty was banned and then allowed again.
Yeah that's totally fair -- and there are some issues where the general public has a better/more liberal view than politicians (weed and sports betting, for example).
Laws work better when they have democratic legitimacy, but that doesn't change the fact that the median American would probably like to see fewer immigrants, even if we're talking about engineers from India who pay a lot in taxes and never commit crimes.
Sure, the median American would like to have more government services and pay fewer taxes. Its up to elites generally and politicians specifically to formulate a realistic governing policy.
Its just really important that the public be willing to accept that governing policy, and with immigration its clear that the existing status quo is not acceptable to the median American. Between the competing visions proposed by the parties, the public seems more inclined to accept the Republican approach on the issue.
The INA only passed by lying to the voters. I still think raising the quota on immigration from Asia from 100 per year was a good idea. Huge amount of cope here where people somehow believe that prior American immigration policy enjoyed broad support
Can you provide more specifics? Not everyone knows all of the history here.
The country quotas were so absurdly low that they would often go unfilled, because no one wanted to waste their time applying for 1 of 200 slots. Abolishing them was pushed as a symbolic gesture to show commitment to civil rights - IIRC RFK reassured a hearing that Asian inflows would stabilize at under 5k/year. The heavy focus on family reunification was pitched as a way to bring southern- and eastern-europeans over. 35 years later, a grand total of 6% of Americans wanted immigration levels increased:
http://tinyurl.com/2p7ktrww
Voters have always had terrible views on this stuff
It certainly helped that the issue was of low salience though, no?
Yeah it was even better when the media would make an incredibly effective demagogic issue low salience by not covering it
But what about if we have both liberalism and democracy in a system called a liberal democracy???
**Brains explodes**
(Whatever you're trying to hide in your interpretation of liberalism is prolly pretty distasteful, and you know it.)
"Liberal democracies" are systems of government in which liberalism protects the rights of the people from democracy.
That would be my preference!
(edit: in reference to your edit about how my beliefs are secretly distasteful, I'm more than happy to explain any policy preferences I have. I just happen to be to the left of most of the country on the topic of immigration)
Well good thing you can vote on it!
Funny how that works.
Problem is most people who vote are not nearly as welcoming to immigrants as I am.
Yeah, the problem really is a lot of people don't necessarily agree with you.
If I had my druthers, I'd let them in, absolutely - all other things being equal. But doing so is causing a huge backlash and imperiling a bunch of _other_ things I like as well, and potentially imperiling the immigration system over all.
When Trump was trying to kick people out, immigration got more popular - now that the border feels overwhelmed, it is less popular.
Get it under control and it will probably be more popular again.
Amen. Considering Matt is the person who wrote "One Billion Americans", I suspect Matt also agrees with a lot of what you said. I think he's being realistic (as you are) about the politics.
I will say that something Matt sort of notes, your vision (which I support) is a lot more sustainable if we actually had more funding for courts to adjudicate these cases. That's the thing, even if you are a supporter of increased immigration and allowing more asylum seekers in you'd still want more funding for these cases to be adjudicated in a timely manner as those asylum seekers sit in this legal limbo for years which means they are ripe for exploitation by various industries. And let's be real here; that is clearly one of the reasons why despite rhetoric GOP has not done more to fully reform the border. Yes there are the basic political incentives (chaotic border is better for GOP even if their president is in charge), but also there's a lot of GOP donors who are perfectly happy with the status quo as it means cheap exploitable labor.
This (either the article or the bill) doesn't seem to talk about the actual problem here, which is the mismatch between the conditions people are fleeing (violence, discrimination, and poverty, but driven by low state capacity, organized crime, and broad societal attitudes towards eg women or LGBT people) and the circumstances that asylum law was written for (the Holocaust).
What is the mismatch exactly?
Violence and discrimination driven by broad societal attitudes basically describes the Holocaust. I realize there are no state-run death camps in Central America but that seems like an exceedingly high bar.
Asylum wasn't envisioned as a general solution to help people escape awful situations, but was instead created to avoid the specific horrors of high-state-capacity governments employing industrial methods towards systematic persecution and extermination of targeted minorities.
And yet industrial scale violence tends to create large numbers of refugees. The U.S. would never take in all the Uighurs. Indeed, we refused to take in more than a token number of Jews in 1945. If all the displaced Jews in Europe had come to the US in 1945, it would have caused a “migrant crisis” that neither party would have tolerated. In fact, Israel exists in its present form largely because the US/Canada/Argentina/Australia were unwilling to take in large numbers of displaced Jews in 1945.
Asylum law is more a balm for liberal scruples about not averting the holocaust (and a salve eastern block intellectuals) than a practical solution to mass dislocations caused by ethnic cleansing.
Remember asylum isn't the only form of refugee resettlement.
That's not (and has never been) the legal standard for asylum claims.
It's close to it. Asylum is about being TARGETED for persecution, not living in a generally crappy place. Targeting CAN happen in places with low state capacity but most migrants from poor countries are not targeted.
"systematic persecution and extermination" is not even close to the asylum standard. It's true that being in a targeted group is a requirement.
I think Dilan's point is that the law was written intending for that to be the standard, but poor drafting made it ambiguous.
But surely it has been widened? Also it was the original context.
Above all it was clear the idea was to let people escape terror to safe countries nearby, not to move across the world in sea in search of a better life. The latter should be handled by regular immigration policy.
Right, but discrimination against LGBT people by their neighbors and violence aimed at forcing boys to join gangs fit awkwardly in the statutory language.
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.
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 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.
One other partly semantic point: is the border really not secure? Or just overwhelmed? My suspicion is that the ratio of people who get to the interior without any CBP encounter is as low as ever.
I see photos of people lined up to get in, and many people I have talked to, even when they cross between checkpoint, they just wait to get picked up, or actively seek out a CBP officer to turn themselves over.
The border was legit not secure in 1980 when people crossed back and forth all the time. They were mostly Mexican, and when caught, were just released back -- this is the real origin of the term "catch and release" vis a vis immigration, but that term keeps getting altered. The research seems solid that the border strengthening measures of the late 1980s made the cost of crossing higher, and discouraged people from returning after they made some money here.
Yeah, one irony of the mostly successful effort to secure the border is that it enlarged the undocumented population because people who previously were migrant workers became (de facto) permanent residents.
Yes this. Bad-faith commenters use the number of *encounters* as a proxy for illegal immigration, but that makes no sense. We could pull all CBP officers from the border tomorrow and encounters would go to zero, but that obviously wouldn't solve any actual problem.
I think that there is a solid majority in America for a “high fences and large gates” immigration policy. High fences means enforcing rules and protecting borders, which protects the native population but also rule-following potential immigrants and legitimate asylum seekers. Large gates means permitting legal immigrants to meet our moral, economic and social needs. That can mean special programs for Afghan translators, graduate electrical engineering students, nurses or simply some level of family reunification entries, provided it is thoughtful as to the societal benefits. It seems that a lot of politicians on the left could make this case and many on the right would agree, though there may be pushback as to how large the “gates” should be.
For me the "high fences" is mainly a way to "wider gates." I want us to reframe immigrating as mainly a growth-promoting policy (good for us) with as much much humanitarian/asylum (good for the immigrants) as is politically feasible.
I think that is a legitimate sell. It also probably means de-emphasizing family reunification as a factor. That has political implications, and is much more likely to annoy the left than the right.
I agree. Except for spouses (My case) :)
Yeah, family immigration is the real hidden landmine in immigration policy. Because immigrant groups love it but it is really in many ways the worst way to do immigration-- it lets in people who are often relatively privileged, because of an accident of birth, who neither have skills, fill particular employment needs, or are fleeing persecution. If we restricted it we could reallocate those slots for much more compelling cases, but it would be an enormous fight to do it.
I sometimes listen to Pod Save America when I'm in the mood for the frothiest Progressive hyperbole. Their interview Senator Murphy was really interesting. I was expecting more pushback from them but they were generally supportive. Their post interview discussion ~ acknowledged how effective (brilliant maybe, there's not a transcript) the sanctuary city busing has been at changing the immigration politics and how comprehensive immigration reform is just off the table until the boarder crossing volume returns to Obama levels. In Chicago, I've seen it first hand really change the salience of the issue. Interesting they're picking it up national / blue state level.
https://crooked.com/podcast/trump-border-chaos/
I hate to say it, but this move by Abbott was pretty brilliant.
Yes, Abbott sounds like a d-bag from what I know of him, but this move of his was a masterstroke.
He didn't get into a shouting match with the mayors of progressive cities/governors of blue states over immigration. He took them at their word, literally. "Oh, so immigrants/asylum seekers are the best thing about America and anyone who says otherwise is a racist? Fine, here you go, I'll send you a bunch of busloads of immigrants fresh from the Mexican border, YOU have fun housing and feeding and otherwise caring for them!" Later, when NYC mayor and others protested, "What's the problem? I thought you loved immigrants? What are you, some kind of *xenophobic racist*?!?!"
It's genuinely shocking to me how effective this has been and, in particular, that Abbott has kept it up in such a sustained fashion. I'm curious as to how much it's costing Texas to buy this volume of bus tickets and, given the sheer number of migrants that have reportedly arrived from Texas in various other cities, I kind of want to know what percentage of Texas' population pre-2023 was composed of fresh immigrants! (A news story in a local Denver outlet earlier this week said that Denver has received over 38,000 Venezuelan migrants in the last year.)
I'm pretty sure a one-way bus ticket costs less than sheltering and feeding an immigrant for n months, where n > 1.
Yes, but how much sheltering and feeding of immigrants was Texas doing? I had always figured that once someone was released from ICE, they were on their own for figuring out any sort of housing, etc.
In all fairness, I don't know the answer to your question, but even if you're a callous d-bag like Abbott, your state will incur *some* costs from having a bunch of desperately poor immigrants suddenly appear. If nothing else, sick people will show up in your local ER, and by law, they can't be denied emergency life-saving care.
Chicago has received 30k from Texas arriving on buses. More coming through O'Hare. Currently all 27 shelters are full and the police stations are providing overflow. They're now converting shuttered CVS and Walgreen's locations to shelter beds. IL as a state has now spent over $500m on just migrant care.
https://news.wttw.com/2024/01/04/chicago-paid-least-138m-care-migrants-2023-far-less-projections-data
NYT article showing the strain on Denver - city starting to cut park services due to cost of support for incoming migrants, with impacts on hospitals and education system as well. It's not just refusal to build housing, none of our service systems are built to scale up this quickly. This is not sustainable, and the drift on this topic by the Biden admin is baffling. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/12/us/denver-colorado-migrants.html
Our rec centers are closing one day a week. Heaven help the government who takes away Zumba classes from the upper middle class. The situation is going to go really sour very soon.
Abbott’s approach, though, is truly amoral and unAmerican. You don’t fob off your problems on another state so that they can share the pain. If that were the case, California, Oregon and Washington should send their homeless to Texas and Florida while Kentucky and West Virginia should send their opiate addicts to Connecticut and Wisconsin. Using those who are in greatest need as political cannon fodder is just sick.
I think Abbott's strategy is probably purely political and I'm more familiar with Chicago so I don't know what Texas was and is currently doing to support the migrants that are in Texas ... BUT ... Just 30k migrants have constrained every resource in Chicago. There's 40k in Denver and probably 60k in NYC. Maybe more elsewhere. It's probably the *more* compassionate outcome that we're spreading the burden out across these major cities. Said differently -- how the heck could Texas have absorbed these 130k if 30k is crippling Chicago? Isn't this the best solution?
Even if it is purely political, this is literally what the sanctuary cities / states signed up for. No one made them pass the bills at gunpoint. Regardless of Abbott as a person it takes serious chutzpah to fault him for calling out a voluntarily-made bluff.
Look, I don't like Abbott, but can you see that you're inadvertently making his case for him? You just implicitly compared immigrants to homeless people and opiate addicts. That is the diametrical opposite of the standard progressive line about "Immigrants make America stronger and better! Bring on lots of immigrants!" Abbott simply said to the people of NYC and Chicago, "Here they are, you've got what you said you wanted."
Also more succinctly, the sanctuary cities / states basically volunteered for this. You don't get to affirmatively pass legislation in support of accommodating illegal immigrants and then complain when you're asked to accommodate illegal immigrants.
Cue "BUT THEY'RE ASYLUM SEEKERS!"
Also, there really is a disproportion issue here. Border states- and much more specifically, border towns- have to absorb the flows. Some of the crossings occur onto private ranches and such. And the numbers overwhelm local social services.
I disagree with Abbott on almost everything but he's right this is a shared responsibility. It's not just something where you can fob it all off on Texas border towns and say "here, you deal with this".
Said the same at ~ the same time. I just think this busing is probably the outcome *given* the current volume. The migrants are getting access to much better conditions.
Not really, it's a pretty straightforward case of making people put their money where their mouth is.
I did not realize that migrants were sleeping in shelters funded by state/local governments or on the streets until Abbott started busing migrants to other cities. I guess I assumed that the federal government was somehow providing funds for food and shelter.
It's extremely frustrating how much of the immigration problem devolves back to blue cities' pathological refusal to build more housing.
But doesn’t the asylum rights regime say that asylum claimants should apply in the first safe country. That is Mexico, not the US. So why does the US accept asylum applicants from people passing through Mexico? I realize that Mexico can’t handle all asylum immigrants themselves and I do think that the US and Canada should take a share of them but it should be strictly controlled and with quotas in accordance with the political willingness of the native population. Anything else is undemocratic, will lead to failed integration and is likely to lead to a right wing backlash anyway.
This is incidently how Sweden drastically cut immigration from outside of Europe since 2018. They refused to process claims from people travelling up through Europe. Now all serious political parties want a EU wide solution with strong border control and asylum centres at the border or outside of Europe. US liberals/progressives need to cop on and create a similar framework unless they welcome the far right into power, who will abolish asylum rights in total.
The Biden Administration already imposed a bar to asylum eligibility for people who traversed a third country (with some relatively narrow exceptions for danger) and who crossed the border without authorization. It didn't change the picture fundamentally because you still can't remove people if they pass a reasonable fear screening; even asylum-ineligible people can't be removed into danger. And these days because of overwhelmed capacity most migrants don't go through asylum screenings at all. It's a resources problem, it's not about eligibility on the back end.
Another bill scuttled after so much effort solely due to the moral depravity of elected Republicans.
Contrarian nihilism is a disgusting worldview.
I lean rightward and have disagreements over what is optimal or not about the bill, but I think there's an outright factual error going on here, which is the claim Trump killed the bill.
Obviously it is beneficial to Trump and to Democrats to believe Trump killed the bill. But in December, Speaker Johnson made clear that just as McCarthy was brought to the White House to lay out the debt ceiling bill (having gotten his caucus to vote on an alternative bill), Johnson should be brought to White House talks to merge some of their objectives in House Resolution 2 with the Senate and White House objectives on Ukraine funding.
This didn't happen. Johnson was given various updates (which he did not speak approvingly of) from GOP Senate negotiators, but it was clear early on this was not going as planned. Johnson repeatedly warned the Senate bill would not go forward in the House before making such a declaration when the bill went public that Sunday evening in January. All but the last step took place without a public word from Trump, complicating the theory that Trump was the driving force in the House GOP and not their leader (who repeatedly cited HR 2 as the reason to take him seriously a la debt ceiling talks.)
I could speculate why Biden did not emulate the debt ceiling approach, but I won't. I could suggest the GOP Senate had older members desperate for a Ukraine deal, but that's besides the point. It's entirely reasonable for Democrats to want to flip the script on an issue they're bleeding on in an election year. But it simply isn't accurate that this bill reflected engagement with the House majority (which killed not only the 2013 but 2005 reform proposals.) It was clear this bill was dead in December to most serious observers of Congress before Trump got publicly involved.
Whatever the "engagement," they killed a better than nothing bill. If that was a political mistake, as I hope it will turn out to be, that's politics!
I'm not going to sit here and cry to Biden that he's being a political leader and working the media process to help his re-eleection odds. He's the president, they all do that! I'm going to stick by what I said, which is Johnson repeatedly made clear in December that he was getting no buy-in for the House to ever seriously consider bringing this bill to a vote. There is no point in pretending Trump is the reason this bill died when we have an entire month prior to visit public statements of the guy running the House of Representatives.
If you want to argue the House GOP and Senate GOP have an awkward disconnect on how partisan Ukraine aid is or isn't, that's fine too. I have no quarrel with that complaint.
https://open.substack.com/pub/matthewyglesias/p/the-case-for-the-immigration-deal?r=5pw2a&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=49610372
My complaint is just with the House GOP leadership. Johnson could have brought it to a vote to see if even a few Republicans would put country above party. If his decision was not influenced by Trump, then ALL the blame falls on him.
I think more of the electorate is for ZERO new entries, legal or illegal, than is generally acknowledged. And not just far right voters. I disagree with the position but any policymaking needs to begin with a grasp of the number of those voters that exist.
I'd be surprised by that. Do you have polling that shows that?
The best I I found was https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx
On the whole, do you think immigration is a good thing or a bad thing for this country today? Around 25% say it bad on the whole. Also it show about 25% want LEGAL immigration decreased
I guess that doesn’t seem like more than *I’d* acknowledge, don’t know about “generally.”
That is among the polls i was using. What is interesting that i wouldn't have guessed is that it appears we are generally back to traditional levels of negativity on immigrants. The Trump era pushed Democrats to the left on this for 6-8 years.
What exactly is the Democratic hang up with enforcing immigration vigorously? Do they actually think their Hispanic voters love people flooding across the southern border and therefore are going to vote Democrat? What about their Black voters, they’re not going to be so thrilled with unfettered illegal immigration. Do they actually think these illegals are going to be naturalized and become Democratic voters? What is their theory of the case of why they’re so traditionally loathe to work on immigration enforcement?
I don't think this is actually correct. Every comprehensive immigration reform proposal boosted enforcement. Obama aggressively pursued border enforcement. Biden has been trying various approaches to resolve the border crisis without gutting asylum since he came into office.
It's true that there are left-wing people who are poorly disposed to immigration enforcement though. It's a matter of principle, not political gain: some people think freedom of movement is a basic human right, or that immigration restrictions unfairly discriminate based on place of birth, or that deporting long term residents because they don't have papers violates equality principles. I'm pretty sympathetic to the last argument and I know others who are sympathetic to all of them. But it's not a view that has been embraced by mainstream Democrats.
The remain in Mexico policy was the only way to prevent the asylum process from being (ab)used by every Tom, Dick and Harry capable of physically making it to the border. Once that got branded as "kids in cages" it was all over.
Last one:
Many of these people believe in the goodness and justness of America, and many are religious Christians or at least have a strong cultural Christianity -- they believe the US will do right by them, and many also believe that God/Jesus will protect them. They sometimes say things like "America is a good place, they will understand" or "I just put my trust in God to help me." Unfortunately for them, they may actually be putting their trust in people like Trump, S Miller, and G Abbott.*
Also underrated and underreported is how many people would much rather go home and really view this as a desperate measure. Home is home, even if it's a poor country. And life in the US, for poorer people in particular, can be difficult. I have encountered a bunch of Haitians over the years where they say a family member returned voluntarily to Haiti, the poorest country in the hemisphere, because that's where home is.
*As a person who lost his Christian faith ages ago, in part because of the conflict between the professed faith and the actions of so many who professed it, this belief versus the true reality of people who publicly proclaim their Christianity makes me sad and a little angry.
The U.S. could do so much more to lift Latin American countries out of semi-poverty. It would also benefit the U.S. itself in a myriad ways. Let China oursource their production to Vietnam, focus on your own backyard (”nearshoring”). Bonus point is you don’t have to deal with violent extremists attacking boats.
171 comments before 830am CST. It's gonna be one of those days here in the ole comments section!
This is definitely one of those days where getting sleep means no hope of keeping up with the thread. I'll just have some scattered upvotes and then see everyone in the afternoon.