Funding immigration enforcement now means funding paramilitary groups with a penchant for arresting Democrats. This is toxic to bipartisan reform.
ICE agents handcuffed Senator Alex Padilla during a DHS press event. They arrested a Massachusetts judge for allegedly helping an immigrant avoid removal. They detained the NYC Comptroller for “obstructing” a raid. Republicans have openly called for prosecuting mayors of sanctuary cities. This is worse than anything university DEI committees have done. It’s one step from Peronism.
When ICE acts like wannabe MAGA brownshirts, Democrats might rationally choose to starve the immigration enforcement beast. Immigration hawks are overplaying their hand — and they’re pushing the U.S. toward a place where policy dies and power decides.
The only people who seem to be honest about immigration enforcement are those with the worst opinions.
Normie Dems (like me) won't say we're for open borders but view any deportation of a non-violent person as evil.
Normie center-right folks have fewer issues with deportations but like to pretend that those being deported are mostly criminals and welfare queens.
Stephen Miller types are actually willing to say, yes, we will be deporting people who came here illegally and are working low wage jobs to help their family. I would respect the honesty if it wasn't so antithetical to my beliefs.
The Lankford bill was pretty good too. Too bad our current President destroyed the chance to get a good bipartisan solution, albeit partial, to immigration passed. As I recall, the Democrats were all on board for it.
It was timed poorly. If they had introduced it in 2022, Trump would not have been able to block it. At that time, the Biden administration clearly thought that spitting in the faces of voters was the better policy.
Democrats can’t think clearly about immigration because really thinking it through would force a contradiction they don’t want to face. Truly open borders would attract 50, maybe 150 million people within a decade. That level of upheaval would terrify almost everyone — but if you value anti-racism uber alles, then you have to suppress that fact. You don’t endorse the upheaval, but you can’t oppose it either. So you end up with a politics of studied vagueness.
I feel like a defining characteristic of 21st century American politics is that dems are incoherent on immigration and the GOP is incoherent on health care.
Look, I consider myself anti-racist (not in the Kendian sense of looking for racism under every bush, just, in the very straightforward sense of "racism is bad"), and I certainly don't want 50-150 million new people moving here suddenly, both for reasons of social cohesion (such as it is in these Disunited States, sigh) and infrastructure (where would all these people live? Where would their children go to school?). I never wanted open borders. I paid a lot of money and filled out a LOT of forms so that I could live here legally, first as an F-1 student, then a Green Card holder, and then a citizen.
See also the old lefty talking point: "You can have a strong social safety net or you can have open borders, pick one." I pick a strong social safety net.
You are quite intelligent and have a grossly accurate view of political economy. You understand how many people could benefit by performing menial labor in the U.S. and can afford a one-way, off peak ticket with inconvenient layovers.
I don’t know that Matt’s substantive policy views are moderate overall - he is moderate in terms of tactics, and he is liberal rather than socialist on economic issues, but I think the overall policy demand is as radical as many others, just not quite in the same direction (and he’s not as pushy about it).
When we start ignoring practicality, it is easy to agree. Immigrants would be great if they shared my values! The problem is, outside of northwestern europe, relatively few people do.
You're wrong in assigning "open borders" to the Democrats generally. Both border bills that the GOP shutdown that Democrats supported had restrictions just not the absolute restrictions that some of the GOP base wanted.
It doesn't necessarily, but the two concepts are related because one of the valid reasons you would not necessarily want fully open borders is it really would effect rapid changes to the culture and anti-racist dogma says you aren't supposed to care about that.
I wouldn’t mind hearing anecdotes about the spectrum of where Dems are on open borders. I think it isn’t a super common view that we shouldn’t have any restrictions or that asylum should be an end run around statutory quotas.
If you write a book called One Billion Americans, either you endorse something very close to open borders, or you are a liar or you are a fool. Matt’s main intuition is solid: mass demand to immigrate exists.
Matt has been very clear in the face of popular opposition, he’s not suggesting the Dems take this as an actual position. As a constancy that need to be combatted, that’s 100% straw
I think there's a world where open borders works, don't know about your numbers but do agree that the world we live in wouldn't be kind to truly open borders in the here and now for the US from the US perspective.
I think actually a lot of “normie Dems” would be OK with deportations that included notice and a hearing, as opposed to be grabbed off the street and thrown on a plane before they have time to call their family. Of course we would need to actually spend some money on hiring people to process deportation orders (and while we’re at it, asylum claims, which are not all “bogus”).
Yeah, a lot of this discourse ignores Obama's deportation record and the fact that deporting a record number of people bought him insufficient legitimacy on immigration enforcement with Congressional Republicans.
I think the consensus on the right is that those "deportation" numbers are misleading, due to a technicality in counting procedures the Obama administration exploited, and in reality he wasn't nearly as much of an immigration hawk as portrayed and presided over a significant decline in actual interior enforcement compared to the Bush administration. Example:
Not that familiar with the specifics of the debate myself, but on first glance that view seems to be basically correct. That said, it is funny how quickly the right forgot that and started using "Obama did it too!" as a defense of Trump once he took office...
He "deported" people by turning them around at the border instead of letting them in. Interior enforcement/removals fell. So better than Biden, whose staff were often la Raza racists, but not the greatest. He at least did not let masses of people into the country. Biden's mass parole (well, his staff's, don't think real Biden would have approved) were just ways to get people in and offer them a chance to adjust status.
The main point of contention was a pathway to citizenship. If the amnesty was - just don't apply the 10 year ban and let people apply for visas through legal means while giving them some temporary visas, there would be less opposition. Democrats are not willing to budge on that, even though it would help a lot of illegal immigrants who can adjust status using some family immigration category.
I'm not a democrat (or a normie), but I'll make a case for open borders.
Having actually gone through the immigration process, I am confident that it effectively screens out criminals and the unemployable (and people with tuberculosis). In addition to TB tests and medical examination, we had to provide records from local police departments saying we hadn't committed any crimes. And that we had never overstayed a visa. Plus a bunch of other stuff. Also, since we were applying for a sponsored visa, said sponsor had to sign a contract promising to pay back the US government for any benefits received, e.g., if the visa holder received medicaid or whatever.
Not all visas categories have the same rigor, but you get the idea---it screens out people who have committed or are likely to commit crimes, not work or get stick and soak up benefits, etc.
So here is my detailed, step-by-step plan:
Step one: lift caps on visas to meet the actual demand for immigrant labor (skilled and unskilled).
There isn't a second step. We just do that and then let the market and existing immigration laws sort out the rest. Like, if you commit a crime you get deported. But if you stick around long enough and don't commit crimes or violate the terms of your visa, you can apply for permanent residence. You pay taxes, but you don't qualify for any entitlements (until you earn permanent residence). You know, just the current immigration laws, but with more visas; open borders.
I suppose some people will argue that a big influx of immigrants will be destabilizing. But recent history suggests that it is propagandists getting people in small towns all worked up about immigrants in faraway cities that are the destabilizing force.
As a former consular officer in a high-fraud, high immigration visa country, I can assure you it absolutely does not screen out the unemployable. Because we are not allowed to use the likely to become a public charge part of the law for immigrant visas (we should, Trump might change that), and if there is an affidavit of support, and the family-based (which is the majority) applicant otherwise qualifies, you have to let them in. But of course, affidavits of support have never actually been enforced, and there is massive fraud with them. They are the kind of policy high immigration supporting Democrats love -- something that purports to ensure the intending immigrant will not become a burden, but which is never going to attract the interest of a DA in enforcing.
Most Americans have zero idea about the actual U.S. immigration system, the fact that we mass-import poverty and terrible cultural norms, and the reality of the fraud and abuse within the system. We desperately need a new system that stops chain migration (especially from places like Somalia) and focuses on educated, quality immigrants within a nuclear family that generate positive economic gains and who can assimilate rapidly.
George Orwell describes a particular kind of bourgeois socialist who, despite advocating for the proletariat and passing moral judgement on those who disagree, still strives not to make a sound while eating soup. They belong to the educated class and, on a visceral level, think the proletariat is gross; Orwell wonders how long they would continue their moralizing after being punched in the face by a drunk fish porter in a pub.
He wrote about that dynamic in the 1930's, but it captures the modern discourse around immigration well. Plenty of progressives will excoriate people online for not supporting mass migration because of the plight of the oppressed. But their actual interactions with the people they are so broken-hearted over are limited to Thomas Friedman esque episodes with cab drivers.
The reverse is also true. Plenty of conservatives will excoriate people online for supporting lawlessness and inviting low-class criminals to invade the US. But they have no idea that the nice chap at the diner is one of those illegals; besides, they'd be livid at the cost of beef if meat packing plants didn't employ legions of undocumented workers.
So you can focus on immigrant visas from Somalia, or wherever, and cast the whole system as the mass importation of poverty to make your case. And I'll counter that I and my family are the products of anchor babies and chain migration (also called birthright citizenship and family reunification). We also hold advanced STEM degrees and pay taxes.
There is, though, a middle ground that Matt is trying to find where we don't moralize at each other, catastrophize or flatten everything to binary categories of right and wrong.
What I want is instead of "vibe legislating" our way to the broken system we have with outdated policies and arbitrary caps, let's issue enough visas to remove the incentive to work illegally, to have enough doctors to staff hospitals, to keep importing Sergey Brins and Elon Musks. And if the current system doesn't properly filter out the unemployable, then focus efforts there instead spending taxpayer money to have masked thugs round people up at their jobs and tell us they are criminals.
This isn't a defense of "open borders", this is an argument for significantly more legal immigration. (Which I agree with.) You could not enact this plan in conjunction with "open borders", because all those rules and restrictions you listed rely on people not just walking across the border unannounced.
If you are going to define "open borders" as having *no* rules or restrictions, then I suppose you'd have to define "closed borders" as *total* restriction on border crossings. And I think the number of people arguing that the US should adopt the border policies of North Korea is small and should be ignored, same as those arguing that we should just not have borders at all.
I take open borders to mean something like the European Union's Schengen Area. That is, you can move freely across the borders, but there are rules and restrictions. For example, if you have a residence permit in France you can visit Germany, but you can only legally work in France. But if you hold French citizenship you can both visit and work in Germany. I'm arguing for something like an American version of that---don't artificially restrict visas through statutory caps, let the market figure out many work / educational / tourist / etc. visas to issue. And also have some vetting process for issuing them.
In this situation, people can wander across the border I suppose, but if they commit crimes they'll still be arrested. And since there will be enough work visas to meet demand, there will be no incentive to hire undocumented workers. The few businesses that choose to do so anyway are probably doing so for exploitative reasons, so ramp up enforcement on that end.
I think I'm a bit to the left of a normie dem but I don't think of legal deportations as evil, more just wasteful. I would like to a whole lot more legal immigration (though not unlimited) as well as credible border enforcement, and I think that's overall a coherent view.
Crucially, if you're flexible with allowing lots of legal immigration, deportations don't really damage the economy.
The issue is that the median voter also wants less legal immigration. And with that hard constraint, deportations ARE economically disastrous.
Count me as the rare person who thinks that deporting people who come to work low wage jobs, while regrettable, is necessary both for reasons of political pragmatism and to keep domestic low wage workers (many of whom are immigrants themselves) from suffering lower wages.
We import massive number of low-wage legal immigrants, and then force them to compete with massive numbers of low-wage illegals. Putting aside my hatred of the U.S. immigration system and what it actually does, forcing legal immigrants to compete against illegals is horrible public policy and makes it much harder for the people who come legally to get ahead.
Agreed. I'm far more concerned that Stephen Miller is an authoritarian ghoul who wants to turn DoJ into the gestapo than I am with any of the policy implications of immigration.
Is your contention that he was not handcuffed by federal agents? Or that it was not ICE, but instead individuals from some other federal or state agency? If the latter, I fail to see how this particular hairsplitting impacts David's point that you can interpret the actions of various federal agencies as trending toward "wannabe MAGA brownshirts."
Credible news accounts said it was Secret Service and FBI personnel who detailed the wayward senator. Interpreting what happened as acts by “wannabe MAGA brownshirts” is absurd.
You are correct that they may have tiptoed up to, but not violated, Padilla's congressional immunity under the Speech and Debate clause. But it's still not good to quasi-arrest a senator at a *press conference* for *just asking questions*.
ETA: A lot of people are liking this post, so please consider reading Know Your Rites' rather persuasive replies below. If I had to summarize his argument, I would say that there are a lot of government press conferences (the State of the Union, Rose Garden speeches, etc.) that participants are heavily incentivized to disrupt and that we rely on the government performing without disruption so that we can know government policy. In my ideal world, Noem would have taken Padilla's questions and responded substantively, but also in my ideal world the current president would be making sound, reasoned policy, so this situation wouldn't have come up.
Instead of doing media politics on the merits of soft nullification of federal law enforcement by state and local officials (the decade plus context to the provocative ICE arrests happening now) we should just trim legal immigration a bit in exchange for some legal status for long-term unauthorized immigrants. I believe Matt Yglesias mentioned this idea on the Weeds years ago, but I can't find the episode. He floated the idea alongside Senator Cotton's RAISE Act and AOC's defense of unauthorized immigrants as a kind of compromise he doesn't see mentioned.
Now, the obvious following problem is you'd get is a lot more overstays incentivized once you start giving legal status to the unauthorized, but we could solve this with Senator JD Vance's visa bond proposal[1]. In short, people put a large lump sum forward to get a visa, and receive that money back when it is confirmed they've left the country. If they overstay their visa and disappear into the interior, they don't get the money back and we have a financial tie to help find and deport.
I could see this being coded as a hot new restrictionist idea at the outset, but actually allowing Democrats lobby for more immigration in the long term as the bonds gain a slight positive budget impact if the government can invest it in our bond market and keep the gains. Even if Republicans coded the bonds to not be allowed in reconciliation scoring (an obvious preemptive move they should take) the bond idea once cemented will probably make immigration be seen more positively and under control of national interest by lay voters.
> we should just trim legal immigration a bit in exchange for some legal status for long-term unauthorized immigrants.
Just to put some numbers on this idea, we issue around a million green cards per year. Looking at 2023 for example, 1.17m were issued, with ~65% (755k) going to family members of existing US citizens and 17% (195k) for employment. The remaining 18-19% (220k) go for refugees, diversity lottery, and a few other special cases. I think there would be a lot of pushback to trimming the first two categories substantively, whereas the last could be cut to zero (and indeed, Trump cut it a lot). So let's say you can cut 250k. Pew says there are 11m illegal immigrants in the country (as of 2022) and, at least according to one source I found, as many as 6-7m have been here more than 10 years, meaning it would have to be a decades-long program to cover everyone (let alone any new ones who age into this group, which are guaranteed to be more than 250k). I think it might have been an interesting trade for dreamers, but even there, if you don't stabilize the numbers you're drawing from, it will never be enough.
Well yes, formalizing the Dreamers through Congress would actually be a good idea. It would correct the original escalation of Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 dramatic readings that started with Obama.
We'd have to put in the bond visa policy and commit to not expanding legal immigration with some Democratic votes to avoid a repeat of Bidenwave. Probably the only way to make a deal work. But I don't know how many Democrats want to put stricter sufficiency requirements for foreign parents of Americans receiving visas, for example.
You say "no amnesty." Okay. What about the 11 million people in the country without the government's permission? Do you commit the manpower and money to remove them, yes or no?
Too much of the immigration debate seems to consist of "Somebody needs to do something! No, not THAT!"
Regarding the 11 million: Enact a policy that bars any public monies being spent or required to spent as of a date certain in the non-distant future. For example, say that as of 1/1/2028, no illegal alien is allowed to be in public school, or a university or receive a driver's license. Eliminate all "sanctuary" policies. Also, as of 6 months prior to that same date, every employer is required to use e-verify with fines for non-compliance beginning at $200K per person, which increase by 20% per additional illegal immigrant employed.
This won't push all them to leave, but it will do so for a substantial majority.
In the absence of bipartisan consensus, the government in charge should enforce the current law. Obviously, they can choose to take it easy and kick the problem to the next administration.
Yes this is the unfortunate thing about One Billion Americans; Democrats becoming more pro-immigration has not made them more New Dealer but more Jacksonian. What do you do with a competitive political opponent who believes in softly nullifying federal immigration law? It's a good question.
I suspect one answer is you can't do a repeat of Trump 1 where you're hawkish via executive policy but nothing gets passed in Congress. So the policy that is passed has to be extensive, has to rule out certain things, and I suspect that means just a repeat of 2013 comprehensive reform as Yglesias desires today is off the table. Hence my bond idea and trading cuts to legal immigration for some normalization of long-standing illegal immigrants.
When you consider the extensive artistic merits of Breakin' 2: Electric Bugaloo, this doesn't seem so bed. Unfortunately however, the comprehensive reform package advocated by Matt would prevent this from occurring. E-verify, which Dems would be happy to support (Republicans have always balked at it) would mean there wouldn't be jobs for illegal immigrants.
"We do this today and give amnesty to current illegals. This attracts a lot more people to immigrate illegally."
Certainty of arrest dissuades street robbers much more than the duration of imprisonment. Likewise, I suspect most illegal immigrants don't care about their chances at an eventual amnesty, but only about the likelihood of interdiction as they sneak into the country.
This boils down to who can afford the bond, which by default will not include the unskilled and uneducated. The net effect is increased skilled and educated immigration which if tied to specific skills this country needs would make sense but more oil sheiks and moneyed elite are not known to pick crops, hang drywall,clean hotel rooms or mow your lawn.
This is true, but we have a large population of illegal immigrants who will continue doing those forms of labor, especially if we formalize them over time.
The key revolves around the definition of comprehensive immigration reform/border security. Matt noting the favorable American jobs market in relation to the rest of the world is the driving force. Bonds do not address the bottom end of the economic ladder either within the country or outside. Money based bonds by default effect only an higher skill level best addressed by other methods and result in another agency/ cost base to track down and deport a class of immigrants who are not a major issue and less likely to default. Or in worse case the program is set up such it becomes and income source for some federal department without accompanying any of its noble goals.
No, Europe has it right,* and I don't see why a European approach would be any less politically feasible here. Each time you catch a otherwise-law-abiding illegal immigrant, you have to deport that person, so that there's no moral hazard associated with skipping the paperwork. But you also issue an extra visa to someone who filled out the paperwork from that country, because clearly your immigration policy isn't letting in everyone who would be a credit to the community.
(Visa bonds seem like a good idea, but also could be applied under any immigration regime so I'm not arguing about them.)
Don't get me wrong, the way the administration is enforcing immigration laws is stupid and cruel for all the reasons Matt just explained in this article. But Padilla and Lander, at least, were engaged in deliberate acts of civil disobedience, and they knew doing so opened them up to arrest.
The current administration's immigration policy is terrible, and ICE arresting Democrats while enforcing that policy creates such terrible optics for them that we should absolutely be courting more such arrests. But fundamentally what's happening is that Democrats keep forcing them to choose between backing down (which would significantly weaken their ability to carry out their immigration policies) or arresting the Democrats knowingly breaking the law to interfere (which creates terrible optics).
Calibrate your rhetoric, please. Not everything is the end of democracy, nor even necessarily a portent of the end of democracy. Here, the Trump administration is basically just doing what any administration trying to enact a mass deportation program would end up being forced to do if the opposing party kept throwing their bodies in the way.
We've cried wolf too many times, and this here ain't a wolf.
Gandhi was engaged in deliberate acts of civil disobedience. It does not follow that the British should have mechanically enforced imperial law, or that doing so would appeal to Congress sympathizers. Dems are mildly provoking ICE and the fools are taking the bait.
I completely agree with this. I'm just saying, calibrate your rhetoric.
Normies don't think it's a sign of the end of democracy when ICE arrests someone who is deliberately interfering with a legitimate arrest. Normies do, however, tend to be influenced by the moral courage of someone who willingly courts prosecution in order to make a stand against an unjust law.
I approve of what Padilla and Lander did, and I disapprove of the Trump admin's reaction. I just am so goddamn sick of us screaming "wolf" like it's the only word in our dictionary.
I’m for simply raising the legal caps. They’re unreasonably low and create the specter of a problem of “lawbreaking” even when we have plenty of capacity to handle the various surges that come our way. And the surges are heightened because of the constant cycles of crackdowns and leniency — demand gets pent up during the crackdowns, making the next period of leniency look worse than it would have been.
This is no way to run a motherfucking railroad. This entire fucking time, the last 40 years, we could’ve had a wholly legal cohort of immigrants waiting their turn and doing things the right way, if only Reagan’s reform had set the limits at a reasonable level.
Like NIMBY, this is a man-made problem exacerbated by morons whose first instinct is to do the exact fucking opposite of the optimal policy solution, and the plain truth that they should sometimes — if not OFTEN — be ignored is the primary case for the small-r republican principle.
I believe the rising temperatures in the Southern parts of the world have exacerbated migration North both into the US and Europe. These conditions were not “normal” 20 years ago but in the interim they have pushed more people to migrate. IMO Both Liberal Dems and Right Wing Reps are being hysterical. 😩 Considering the effort and time it takes an immigrant to understand English, learn US History to answer questions and pay about $7thousand for the Citizenship Exam, how reasonable is it to project large numbers will both become Citizens and join the Democratic Party. On the other hand, Compassion is good for our souls but needs Reality for our Country with something like the Lankford Plan.
The actual flows have not been anywhere close to America’s historical highs as a percentage of the population. Even this most recent surge was pretty reasonably within my proposed “1% per year” limit, perhaps right up against it. We aren’t in danger of any type of collapse — the economy BOOMED from the migration, it was the only thing keeping us out of a freaking recession.
And zooming out to the big picture of climate migration… on pretty much EVERY trajectory, it will only get worse, which would only drive more migration. I’d rather have it be orderly and controlled NOW than be utterly overwhelmed LATER. All those immigrants now — and their children — would be an absolutely critical labor pool for holding the line against any kind of true major border crisis (IE attempted migration in excess of 1-5% population) later on.
I agree we need orderly migration. My view is people are people regardless of nationality or skin color. For most of the immigrants now here who are key to our work force, I would assign a work permit and number and not worry about them overwhelming one political party.
Unfortunately, Americans of the 1920s seem to have disagreed with that, as they voted in politicians who hermetically sealed the borders for close to 40 years...
And that's on top of the fact that global travel was orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive back then, and there were no smartphones or social media encouraging people to make the trek...
Such ingratitude. I work my fingers to the bone to create fresh gags every morning, with no help from our hosts. I wake up before 6a, read the new piece as soon as I hear the paper hit the front steps, and then get to work. I hunt for some irrelevant detail, tangential to the point Matt is trying to make, and try to craft the worst, the most imbecilic take on it I can. And that’s only half the job — then there’s getting the formulation right. This particular “aphorism” went through five drafts, because I could not get the joke to land — too wordy, too explainy, too obscure, and so on. Is it “take from” or “take away from”? “Immigrants” or “the immigrants”? And all this between 6a and 6:15a!
My cleaning lady was picked up by ICE at a courthouse about a month ago. She overstayed her visa but is married to a naturalized citizen (I went to their wedding!) and has been trying to ‘get legal’ since. I don’t know how else to help besides continuing to use her husband’s services as he tries to both keep up the business while also working to get her released. I’m stunned.
I came here as an immigrant from India decades ago, granted through a much more privileged (but complex) visa to GC to citizen process. My husband’s ancestors came here through a ‘step off a boat from Germany in the 1890s and just make sure you’re not diseased’ process.
Canada and Australia might have better legal immigration pathways, and so might a few Latin American countries, but I would be surprised if any other country does.
No, I did not since I don't even know if that's true. I suspect we are not especially unusual in our legal pathways or our deportation practices, but it seems to vary a lot by country. But I do know this much: it's nowhere near the case that "everywhere else has better legal immigration pathways".
I don't know. But I do know that the U.S. makes it VERY hard to emigrate here legally for low-skilled workers. The post-1965 standard vs pre-1965 establishes conditions and requirements that, I believe, make it close to impossible for them and therefore, they try and find illegal workarounds such as overstaying visas. Indians are the second largest offenders these days.
I take your point and it sounds like a terrible situation at the personal level. But I was asking the question genuinely because I'm not sure there are any developed countries that make it easy for low-skilled workers to emigrate legally or without risk of deportation.
And I appreciate that entirely. My two thoughts around that, I guess, are: a) Without some way to allow low-wage laborers to come to the U.S. legally, even if it's some form of temporary guest worker status, we are just continually shooting ourselves in the foot both economically and also dooming ourselves to a perpetual undocumented/underclass. We have the largest economy in the world, we are different than other countries in all the ways people (like Matt Y.) have documented so our immigration standards should be, too. And b) most Europeans who came here before 1965, i would argue, were pretty low-skilled. But the country and economy not only accommodated them, they made the U.S. the most astounding economy in the history of the world. Ironically, I'm actually a Brahmin (hate that stuff, can't escape it, reap the privilege) and my lily-white husband's ancestors were like, welsh miners and chaps trying to escape conscription into the Kaiser's army. And my family were the ones who had to show bank balances, job/education offers, insurance proof, health certificate, blahdiblah...go figure.
I agree that bipartisan immigration reform remains the right policy path. However I think this piece misses the biggest underlying issue, which MY is usually really good about picking up on, that being 'rule of law.'
I'd compare illegal immigration in most cases to something like stealing a candy bar. It's a crime and people shouldn't do it, even if, at the end of the day most people understand that there are diminishing returns, and beyond a certain point it can be counter productive, to get really worked up about the most hard-core enforcement possible of laws against relatively minor crimes (note, there is and will always remain a bigger than most people like to admit group that says give 'em the metaphorical chair).
The problems begin when cynical actors realize the difficulty of enforcement of minor crimes and begin violating them in mass. We saw this with social breakdowns and issues with retail during Covid, and we've been seeing it for the better part of the decade by employers and illegal immigrants themselves, who while in the majority of cases are broadly sympathetic, are still human beings with agency who know they are doing something wrong (except maybe when national level politicians keep telling them a settlement is coming, thereby incentivizing more to come). It's also not totally made up that many jurisdictions have had struggles involving new arrivals, to the point that it creates issues and inconveniences for legal citizens, for whom saying 'well think of the GDP' is about as persuasive as saying 'well at the end of the it's just a candy bar' when it comes to the theft issue.
Even bigger picture, I'd also suggest that there is no other issue where the broader left would stand up for law breaking on an economic basis. The fact that so many do has its own ramifications that aren't good for our polity or rule of law generally, and it plays into the most reactionary forces who are at the moment ascendant.
Bottom line is if you want more and/or better immigration the only legitimate way to effectuate it is through legislation passed by Congress. My big hope for a silver lining of a Trump administration is that he makes a big brutish show of force, but then declares 'victory' and quietly agrees to pass some level of reform, due to economic pressure. I think it would be good for the country for Democrats to be ready to meet him there should that opportunity arise.
Americans don’t take the rule of law seriously — not really. In Europe, the speed limit is 130 km/h, and if you go 140, you’ll probably get a ticket. In Georgia, the limit might be 70 mph, but you can do 84 and rarely get stopped. In the U.S., the drinking age is 21 — but no one enforces it seriously unless someone crashes a car. Meanwhile, in Europe, it’s 18 or 19, and actually enforced.
Passing laws people routinely ignore is a cultural choice. It doesn’t mean we should start enforcing everything strictly — that would be miserable. It means we should criminalize fewer things and enforce those few things consistently. That’s what the rule of law actually looks like.
It absolutely does mean we should enforce everything strictly and get rid of - or change - laws that we don’t want to enforce. Prosecutorial discretion was a mistake. And it’s led to your local CVS having shampoo under bullet proof glass.
Prosecutorial discretion is essential and even in Europe there's such a thing as the cop not writing you a ticket because it turns out you are rushing your kid to the hospital.
I don’t see graffiti and pickpocket addled Europe as a good stalwart for the “rule of law” lol. Europe is in many ways worse than the US at maintaining order.
So perhaps as a good faith beginning, the Republicans could cancel their efforts to destroy institutions' capacity to prosecute white collar crime, tax evasion, and fomenting insurrection against the government.
Sure, sure, excusing illegal entry into the country because the other side does bad things is a mug's game but it really is nauseating to have to listen to these goons whine about the rule of law.
"It absolutely does mean we should enforce everything strictly and get rid of - or change - laws that we don’t want to enforce."
I've recently found Heath's "The challenge of policing minorities in a liberal society" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopp.12313), especially but not exclusively §5 ("Am I being detained, officer?"), offers a rather persuasive counterargument.
Essentially, lots of disagreements can escalate to violence unless the police step in. But it's practically impossible to write laws with adequate specificity to determine who should give way in the disputes. To take a silly example, maybe some 30-year-old is stomping all over and destroying kids' castles in a public playground sandbox. All the kids are upset, and you, as a parent, ask him to stop. He gives you the finger. Now what? Destroying sand castles isn't illegal; lots of kids have fun doing it. Playing in the sandbox as an adult isn't illegal either, since some parents like to help their kids build. But surely it's better for you to be able to call the police than to try to punch this guy out yourself?
I don’t think prosecutorial discretion is always a mistake. There are some things that you want a very clear and precise policy for, that should be enforced exactly as written, best if it’s enforced by a 1940s computer that can only handle one or two “if” lines and nothing else. But there are other things where you want the law to ban bad things and allow good things, and a smart human can usually recognize which is which in any particular circumstance they are familiar with, but it’s very hard to write the full set of cases in advance (or even train into a neural network).
That’s certainly how you want things like copyright enforcement to work, but also laws like “reckless driving” or “attempted murder” (especially vs self defense).
I would argue that speeding on highways, the drinking age on or near college campuses, and jaywalking reflect a small number enumerable exceptions to a desire for strict enforcement rather than a generalized contempt for the rule of law. The examples are somewhat unique in that one can violate the law while basically preserving the norm they codify (partcularly for speeding and jaywalking, and while college drinking is more on the rules side of rules vs. norms breaking I think the Sabbath dodge in that case is to more-or-less-accurately treat it as a separate and distinct reference class.)
In the particular case of speeding, it's also often the case that going faster than the posted speed limit isn't breaking the law per se.
For example, Massachusetts defines speeding as not operating at a reasonable and safe speed: with at most two exceptions, posted speed limits aren't relevant beyond the courts using them to roughly calibrate whether there's a presumption that a given speed is reasonable and safe. The definite exception to this is the 30 mph limit in a "thickly settled" area, which applies anywhere there's a certain density of residential driveways (whether signed as such or not) and exceeding this is defined to be outside the bounds of "reasonable and safe". The other one was the MassPike: the Turnpike proper was considered private property (to the point of paying property tax to the towns) and taking the ticket at entry to the highway was agreeing that the posted/announced limits defined reasonable and safe. Since the reorganization of the Turnpike into MassDOT and other changes, I'm not sure this still applies (e.g. I don't know if they still specifically announce when the Turnpike speed limit is reduced in storms).
Believe it or not, parts of Oklahoma are close to this. Not for reasons of trust or social cohesion, but because they can take advantage of everyone’s internalized norms around mild speeding to raise revenue.
When you go to places like Tokyo do you reel in disgust at how nothing is locked up at their local convenience store or that trains are clean and streets are orderly? Do you yearn to see drug addicts and homeless bothering tax paying citizens on their way to work?
I’m sorry to be dramatic, but I sincerely consider people like you to be the worst type of people in the world. You stand in opposition to anything that is good and right in this world.
Think about it another way. America has the highest incarceration rate of the western world by a country mile. You would have a credible argument calling it over criminalization. That doesn’t mean we want the reverse - disorder and chaos. But there are other antidotes to disorder than punitive Justice.
2. Do we have a higher incarceration rate than Japan or Singapore because our laws are more harsh or because we have more criminals? Because that is two totally different situations.
We should all care because you don’t keep trying the same broken solution over and over again. You look around you and see crime. Fine. So do I. But if your only solution is punitive justice, you’re ignoring other effective ways of reducing the cycle of crime.
I am, in fact, quite glad for the numerous ways in which or society is healthier than Japan's demographic quagmire. That culture is a fucking basket case and the insane degree of social control is part of the problem. Obviously America doesn't handle all it's flavors of disfunction effectively, but the idea that the state should be oriented towards making the culture more like Japan is deranged madness.
I’m begging you to realize that, as a progressive, your tolerance for crime and general disorder is much higher than the overall population and that most people would - in a heartbeat - choose the order in Tokyo over that of any American city. The way they have to “choose” it is by moving into the suburbs when they have children, because people like you will prevent American cities from ever being hospitable for families because of your suicidal empathy for the worst members of society and hatred of the most productive members.
I hope he doesn’t mind me answering for him: Dave is a libertarian. I think you might be new here—welcome if so!—so consider not making judgments about people until you’ve gotten a chance to see what their deal is.
Right. Most Lefty stuff is just legitimate, sometimes weird positions on policy debate, but the notion that a more disorderly society is preferable is both unpopular and substantively evil. Yes there are limits-- if we got anywhere near Singapore I would stand with the Left-- but enforcing public order is generally good and people who violate legitimate social norms against theft and vandalism and public drug use and similar should be stopped from doing so by the state.
Agree, Democrats' arguments about due process and rule of law in the immigration area are weaker because their claims that they would be OK with immigration enforcement lack credibility.
There's been a defacto work permit policy for many years as no one ever implemented e-verify. This is a certain sense of unfairness to withdraw the defacto permission, but it never had legal standing and is inherently unstable because of the incentives it creates and politically.
The Democrats should take a half a loaf, status regularization without "a path to citizenship" if they can get it.
The Republicans have zero interest in any bipartisan compromise on immigration. The Democrats, as we saw last year (and during Obama), do.
All discussions about what a good compromise may look like, while interesting, have all the real world consequences of discussions about implementing a Georgian land value tax.
Personally I feel like this situation is a strong illustration of why I fight with the serious anti-"disorder"/tough on crime people around here. The line between "we need super thorough enforcement of cigarette taxes" and licking Stephen Miller's boots is a thin one. Pretextual, stop and frisk style nonsense petty crime enforcement is intolerable in fundamentally the same way masked secret police paramilitary units demanding your papers are.
People should never prostrate themselves so thoroughly before the state.
Please know I say this as someone who believe it or not is broadly sympathetic to your stances on this kind of issue but I think facts and history show that you have things completely backwards.
The kind of restraint that the state would ideally show is completely dependent on society being generally orderly and having high levels of social trust. The more you push for toleration of disorder and low level lawlessness the more you invite the hardliners to take over. As I said in my comment below, this is something the founders grappled with, hence the idea of ordered liberty.
I should be clear that my problem with "super thorough enforcement of cigarette taxes" isn't so much the enforcement as the cigarette taxes. When you allow a bunch of puritans or Salafists or Christian nationalists or public health fetishists to pass a bunch of statutes against social nuisances you open the door to the creation of enforcement apparatuses that are just waiting to be hijacked by demagogic psychopaths like Stephen Miller.
This equilibrium where we criminalize a bunch of petty nuisances and then modulate enforcement based on variations in "social trust" is a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I think you have a point about the dangers of building the architecture of the police state, combined with over criminalization. In doing that you risk that one day someone is going to come along and use it for terrible ends.
However I'd also say that you have to deal with the fact that (i) agree or disagree with the policy, many of these laws came about for some reason or another, and (ii) those laws went through the democratic process and under our system of government, until new laws go through the process, are the only rules with legitimacy. There's a parallel to this where you get hard-core Randian or Road to Serfdom types who think we could just eliminate Social Security or Medicare tomorrow without there being an organic demand from the citizenry for the government to set something up to support and provide medical care to those no longer capable of working.
My point is that the only way to deal with the concerns you're raising, which I do think are valid, is to play the game, not to defect or fan mass defection in hopes of coming out on top on the other side of the crisis. To take it back to immigration, we are now in that crisis, and rather than backing down, we have a government that is willing to metaphorically shoot the human shields that were allowed in by the millions under the theory that no one would ever have the stomach to enforce the law as it stands.
I basically entirely agree with the democratic process of comprehensive immigration reform as laid out by Matt in the OP. Seems like good policy and a solid political compromise. Where I object is the sense that people should roll over for Stephen Miller's secret police in the present in the name of the "rule of law". That's too much deference to democracy. It's bootlicking for the tyranny of the majority.
I know you keep repeating "cigarette taxes" because of Eric Garner, but you're not making any point there. Of course cigarettes need to be taxed. Of course selling loosies needs to be illegal. And of course it's possible -- in fact, very easy -- to enforce that law without choking any unarmed people to death.
In fact, as you tease apart this notion that what Eric Garner was doing shouldn't have been a crime, you realize how much it represents the Democratic pathologies on this topic. In this idea, we have to abandon the streets to low-level crime, because enforcing any laws inherently means fatal violence. Have good police? Impossible, we'll simply abolish them.
Nah, rather than just casually dismissing low-level criminal statues, I'm gonna casually dismiss your dystopian idea. You wanna have a society, you do it with laws and police. (See how easy it is to structure an "argument" that way?)
Yes and the line between “let’s never enforce any laws on littering or graffiti” and “anyone can be a permanent resident forever as soon as they set foot in the country” also seems to be a “thin one”
retail theft deprives a company of property, so a breakdown in the rule retail of law leads to negative impacts on retailers (and consumers).
traffic violations increase injuries and damage property, so a breakdown in the rule of law leads to negative impacts on drivers and pedestrians.
I’m not sure there’s a clear connection between your average immigration violation and a negative impact. As Matt lays out, immigration on net is win-win.
I understand the importance of ‘rule of law’ and the appeal of wanting law abidingness, but immigration seems to be a case where the law seems very disconnected from actual negative impacts; when we strictly enforce laws like this, it looks arbitrary and capricious.
Rule of Law is a means to an end and needs to be grounded in a desired outcome, not just premised on ‘welp the law says this, we must enforce it’. When the law is broken and disconnected from reality, the law needs to be rewritten.
I think there are many people in LA who held your view about ‘rule of law’ but who have changed their opinion when they see the havoc being created in their community by enforcement, and no clear positive effects from enforcement.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. If you disagree with the law you change the law. You don't try to maneuver around it or outright ignore it in hopes of creating facts on the ground. And you definitely don't spend years telegraphing out that breaking the law is OK so go ahead and do it and eventually there will be an amnesty. No one wants to hear it but people who took that approach are every bit as responsible for what's happening to those caught up in this mess.
I think it’s similar to underage drinking. The direct, negative impacts on other people from someone drinking underage are vague and attenuated. There are very few people advocating for lowering the drinking age, but there’s also zero appetite for the type of enforcement measures that it would take to truly enforce the law. As a result, drinking by 18-20 year olds is widespread in America and I don’t think this threatens the rule of law.
I actually think underage drinking is massively dangerous. It's literally the first thing that ever killed friends of mine that I experienced in my life, and the death tolls are pretty massive.
In reality under 21 year olds should not drink and the reason everyone talks so much trash about the drinking age is upper and professional class people often violated it and have massive survivor biases about the whole thing.
But in fact the 21 year old drinking age is correct and MADD has the statistics to prove this.
> As a result, drinking by 18-20 year olds is widespread in America and I don’t think this threatens the rule of law.
I completely and utterly disagree. A number of problems are downstream of underage drinking, such as traffic fatalities and injuries, sexual assault, binge drinking (more common in underage drinkers), and interference with brain development. That we turn a blind eye to this should shame us all.
It's an interesting situation where I actually agree that lowering the drinking age might be part of a larger recipe to dealing with those kinds of problems. At the same time I also think it's pretty self evident that if tomorrow we just stopped enforcing age restriction laws against liquor stores and underage drinkers that the consequences of that would be pretty negative.
Indeed, if we don't have the will to enforce the laws as they are, we should at least rewrite them to cover the most dangerous cases and then vigorously enforce them.
Lowering the drinking age would kill lots of people. It's a fantasy solution produced by the survivor bias of people who drank too much too young and actually could have had their odds of survival increased had someone stopped them.
I give that a big maybe and where one falls on how good a parallel depends on whether you see the immigration violation as a discrete or an ongoing act.
However I think that the ability to tolerate some underage drinking also depends on how tight a lid is on it, and how well managed alcohol laws are generally. When a bunch of 19 year olds are punished for getting caught with beer (which does happen, don't ask me how I know) no one treats it like a human rights violation and you don't have a really loud activist core of a major political party chanting 'no human is under age.' If that happened I think there would be a weakening of deterrence and a corresponding increase in publicly visible problems related to under age drinking, that may eventually result in a crack down. It's not like we've never seen similar instances of that from prohibition to MADD in the 80s, both of which, like immigration, had elements of overkill and moral panic attached to them.
All of this is to say that liberalism in policy rests in significant part on orderliness of practice. This is a concept that goes back to the founding.
The negative impact is that we have created an abject and precarious underclass that is exploited because they cannot appeal to the law.
It creates parallel economies and societies and slows assimilation. It allows communities of people to be preyed on and trafficked by criminals. This obviously has effects on civil society at large, especially when there's no expectation that the people who come here want to, and are able to, become fellow citizens.
And the 'benefit' that people claim is that you get to pay people a less than fair, less than legal, wage in conditions where they have no recourse if they are abused or hurt.
If we had set out to create this system, liberals and progressives would be screaming about living wages, racial justice, and worker protection. But the only argument I see is that we need cheap labor so it's fine. Or 'they want to do the work!' as if this is benevolent.
As the grandchild of people who “did the work” to come here legally over a large period of time (despite most of our family living north of the border for centuries), I find this whole conversation pretty revealing.
It feels like the majority of you feel like illegal immigration is a “net win” in large part because you don't live anywhere close to the border, and you don't see the damage trampling on people’s property and the overwhelming of social services and schools do to the communities where illegal immigrants settle. Its bad. Its hard. Schools have worse outcomes. Smart kids get cast aside as schools try to deal with the overload; same in medical care, legal assistance for the poor, etc. It’soverwhelming (literally)
Not to mention its unfair to those who did things the right way. Let’s put all the illegal immigrant kids in your schools, overwhelm your social services, and see how it goes. Oh, wait, we did that (well, TX Gov Abbot did)
and NYC, Chicago, etc., howled bloody fracking murder.
I'm all for legal immigation, and a fair bit of it. Let’s let people in on the basis of their ability to fill work gaps, on the top and bottom of the economic scale. Let’s stop letting people in because their sister or mom got in before them but they aren't going to be a contributor to society. We are going to need people in a big way as boomers die off, but there has to be a coherent, democratically law making way to do it, or it breeds anarchy (which is appealing on some level to some of you, I know)
Allowing people to become citizens and run rampant on towns close to the border because we are sympathetic to their plight is a long term loser. It degrades the rule of law, the coherence of social order, and the social ties that bind us all.
Can you expand on the last sentence? I agree that non-enforcement of immigration laws is less favorable for illegal immigrants than liberalizing the laws would be (and I’m in favor of liberalizing the laws). But are you arguing that in the absence of immigration reform, deporting the immigrants is to their benefit?
I think LP is saying that in any other circumstance, many liberals and progressives would be appalled at the conceptual framework of allowing migrants to perform labor without full protections under law.
But in the American "as it is" circumstance, liberals and progressives will grasp for the argument that these workers "want to do the work" or "we need *someone* to pick the fruit," and sort of push off the social security, worker insurance, overtime questions to the side.
I don't think he's saying deporting illegal aliens/undocumented workers is to their benefit, but rather, liberal arguments are not benevolent/in the strain of human dignity arguments
I think that if there were a liberal/progressive who supported reducing immigration enforcement but opposed making it easier to immigrate legally, this hypocrisy/inconsistency argument would have weight, because that would be outright support of exploitive conditions. In practice, though, I think 100% of liberals and progressives who want to reduce immigration enforcement also want to reform the immigration system to make it easier to immigrate legally. In that context, going easier on illegal immigrants is a "less-bad option" rather than an affirmative stance in favor of exploitation.
If there were evidence that on net, illegal immigrants are harmed relative to not being able to immigrate at all—as, for instance, prostitutes or child laborers are arguably worse off than they would be if they were prohibited from doing that work—that would be a substantial argument. Absent that, I don't think it's at all contrary to progressive values to say that aggressive immigration enforcement is worse for immigrants than a more lenient stance would be.
I suppose, from my point of view, holding those policy preferences without any power is sort of just accepting the status quo in practice.
And the status quo might be the "less-bad-option" in raw material analysis, but it isn't very principled! Without the sound principled foundation, you expose these workers to the capriciousness (and cruelty!) of the State. A la, Donald Trumps' current enforcement regime.
I guess it's like, could you dispute a dejure regime that isn't enforced creates a defacto underclass of labor that is trading its labor+risk for better wages? That labor is not granted its full 1st/4th/5th/6th amendment rights? It's excluded from wide swathes of labor laws?
Just saying we don't support that doesn't relieve the tension.
The negative impact about uncontrolled immigration is that eventually a majority of people flip out about it - in pretty much every country on the planet. Then they support extremists. So let’s do immigration closer to what Australia and Canada do.
Closer to Canada? This seems surprising given that Canadians were so furious over issues downstream of the recent Liberal term’s support of largescale immigration that they were willing to elect the Conservatives by historic margins (until Trump came along again).
People are "allowed" to do a lot of things -- spank their kids, vote for Donald Trump, root for the Yankees, think it's important for the US to be primarily white -- that they will nonetheless be strongly criticized for.
I dunno, until very recently, in the West, immigration has been one thing that normal voters have had virtually zero control over. For better or for worse, no matter what public opinion was, the policy of virtually every Western country has been “more immigrants from developing countries”
I agree that for the reasons Matt stated, almost every rich country has had immigration from poorer countries. I don't see what that has to do with my post.
People have literally not been allowed to shape their country’s immigration policies (and thereby demographic composition).
And no, it hasn’t been “almost every rich country”. Only Western countries. East Asian and oil countries are very selective on the types of immigrants they select.
In a democratic republic, people vote for their representatives who act on their behalf. If they are unhappy with their representatives actions, they should elect different people.
Tebs of millions of people think that it's very bad to do those things.
My point is that you are allowed to do all of them, and lots of people do in fact do them, but they're things that I think are bad and will criticize you for. That's how society works.
Lots of people say "you're not allowed to say/think/do X" when they really mean they want to be free from criticism for doing it.
It's kind of meaningless if hundreds of millions of people think that these are normal things to do. People are free to criticize whatever but they're absolutely meaningless to the intended person if the broader society that they are part of accepts them as normal behavior. You can only shame another person in your in group by this kind of criticism. Most people will just be annoyed and ask you to fuck off because they're part of the broader normie group that doesn't think they did anything wrong.
Also, you're not going to criticize anyone outside your in group in person for any of these things. These are just things you can say online because there are no consequences.
“In 2020, Asian Americans had a 113-point lead over whites and a 290-point lead over blacks on the SAT. Asian women surpassed white male earnings that year.
They make excellent immigrants, not just in America.
For example, 64% of Vietnamese in Germany manage to join the most advanced of the three types of German secondary schools. That is 5 times more often than for Turkish immigrants and 20 percentage points higher than for Germans.
In 2016, the crime rate of Japanese people living in Germany was only a fifth of that of native Germans. Of the more than 35,000 Japanese people living in Germany, only 164 were suspects in criminal investigations. For comparison, of the approximately 20,000 Algerians living in Germany in 2016, 11,138 were suspects in criminal investigations. In other words, Algerians were 115 times more likely to be suspects of a crime than Japanese people.”
Normal people: “wow, we should get more East Asian immigrants.
The entire American immigration apparatus: “no, no! That’s racist! There’s obviously root causes that are leading to these results even though this pattern literally holds for every country in the world”
Many people dislike mass immigration because they don't want to see large changes in their communities - especially short-term. Immigration restrictionists may have different cultural expectations (regarding music or noise or dress) than immigrants, they may have different views on social issues (either more or less conservative), they may not like hearing other languages spoken or having to use other languages to conduct their daily activities. Maybe they don't even like being reminded of other religions.
You can agree or not with these tastes. But they are tastes, they're not all necessarily bad, and violating them does have impact.
Hell, I’m an immigrant myself and *I* dislike it. My family immigrated to the U.S. because my father really appreciated and liked American anglo/WASP culture. He’s literally a brown, middle eastern immigrant and last time he visited me in the city he was distraught by how much the culture and demographics had shifted.
Or maybe they just disagree with you on the things that make it great. In my father’s opinion what makes it great is hard work, the idea that you can improve in society through grit, and general openness to strangers (especially relative to Northern Europeans who are much more cold). I think you can have that without the negative aspects of culture such as littering, playing music loudly on public transportation, fare evasion, open drug use, shoplifting, etc
My grandmother (and sort of my mother and aunt) are also immigrants, and while not totally hardliners, are pretty hawkish on the subject, especially compared to sentiments at SB.
"Rule of Law is a means to an end and needs to be grounded in a desired outcome"
Actually, I'm going to disagree on this one. If you can bind later-you or parts of your coalition to do something you generally don't support, then you can better perform horse-trading and create political compromises to otherwise-unsolvable questions. The point of having laws is to bind oneself that way.
I'd go farther and say the rule of law is something that binds everyone to the same society, regardless of individual values, political agendas or coalitions. Tying laws to politics(which yes policy are laws) unfortunately sours people on the idea of rule of law, so long as it selectively enforced, changed based on culture. For good reason laws should not remain in stone but the core of idea of "rule of law" or even "natural law" is that is precisely not the rule of man. That is something other than a political compromise but almost religious or divine, and not something that can be manipulated by a ruling party to serve their own goals. Of course this was always aspirational and not really every achievable. At the same time people care more about outcomes than anything else. As the old wilhoit's law quote: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” This applies in general not really to conservatism but to law in general by fact that enforcement is rarely equal or across the board in outcomes and for a lot of people that completely deligimatizes the entire purpose of "all men being equal under the law" which is kind of the foundation of the country. Rule of law needs to be principled but outcomes and the perceived fairness and morality of the laws and outcomes of laws need to be equal consideration or law tends to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the public. What this means to me is if you really don't have the ability to enforce the law, in a way that the broad public finds acceptable or has very disruptive economic consequences, the laws either need to change, or not really enforced because as David Abbott noted people don't actually care about the rule of law in the abstract but people do care how it affects them and their community and that depends on positive-sum outcomes.
Maybe a better analogy is it is like not returning a library book. It's not a great thing, it can have effects on other people, but on the other hand it can have a positive effect (you might finish the book). And the best way to handle it is with periodic amnesties rather than Draconian enforcement.
Like I said, I'm down with a deal and have been down with a deal (including one involving a lot of amnesty) since W was president, but it is only workable when there is sufficient enforcement to avoid mass rule breaking in hopes of prompting another amnesty. If everyone thinks we are perpetually on the cusp of amnesty there will be no incentive to follow the rules, ever. That's where we've been sitting.
I was told Democrats are only capable of talking about one thing at a time and raising the salience of immigration is bad. Why are you letting the BBB pass by raising the salience of immigration Matt? Do you just not care about poor people on Medicaid?
To add on to what TR02 said, Matt has been relentless is saying over the past couple of weeks, to much pushback both in The Discourse and even here among Slow Borers, that Democrats and Trump foes should be pressing much harder against the bill trying to be passed in Congress, and pressing much less against Trump's immigration policy.
I wouldn't say inside joke, but part of the local jargon is to talk about the "salience" of issues to the public, and part of our talk of strategy is to say that someone ought to talk more about issues where the public seems to trust Democrats more, in order to raise the salience of those issues in public discourse.
I vaguely recall that there was talk back in 2017 or so, saying that all the talk about Trump's meanness, norm violation, and appeal to xenophobes backfired by calling attention to Trump -- raising his salience, in the parlance -- and raising the salience of issues where Trump had a surprising amount of support, but the consensus among right-thinking people was that those views were unacceptable.
Josh your comment really made me laugh. Stick around to hear the words “downstream of” and “thermostatic” more than you ever have. Also “the Baumol effect”, whatever that is.
I kid, this is a great comment section otherwise I’ve made terrible life choices recently with the amount of time I spend in here. But it definitely has a certain vocabulary.
I wish Democrats were public in what they wanted the law to be. Not just for existing illegal migrants but those in the future as well. As far as I can tell, the idea is: if you make it to U.S. soil and don’t commit any crimes for X years, you get to be a resident forever. I’d love them to clarify this stance. What is the number of years? Let’s encode it in law! I hate this idea of quasi-legality by lack of enforcement (which Democrats love across the board).
I don't agree with the premise that Democrats are somehow holding anything up. It's the never amnesty people. Also to pretend like there is some monolithic Democrat's opinion is wrong. It's a big tent. That being said I'll speak for myself I'm a Democrat that thinks that open borders and the socialist safety net I want are incompatible and I pick the safety net. I also accept that any changes need to be very slow or the economy cooks off faster than any benefit accrues. For example there needs to be time for farms to purchase equipment that automated certain tasks or change crops from ones that cant be easily automated to ones that can.
I would let people do what they want, but enforce at the corporate level. Any enforcement at the person level just causes a shadow legal system where people are afraid of the police and courts. It's also easier to fine a company than put anyone in jail.
I'd cap and trade temporary employee permits so if a company was caught employing people who can't legally work they could purchase a permit for them to do so whose price would rise with each month they haven't solved the problem.
Increase legal immigration dramatically where those people are excluded from the social safety net for 2 years.
Of course Democrats are also holding things up. It is entirely possible to reform America's immigration system without even talking about amnesty. Democrats aren't especially interested in that, though. They want a "grand bargain" and won't give America a modern skill based immigration system unless it also handles amnesty, Dreamers, and the rest of the bagel.
> It is entirely possible to reform America's immigration system without even talking about amnesty.
Is it? How?
The only three options I see are 1. (status quo) Illegal immigrants who live a shadow life, unable to avail themselves of the normal institutions of our society, 2. Mass deportation, 3. Some pathway to regularization.
Which one of those options are you envisioning for your "entirely possible" reform?
I mean ... this is what the article is about? Matt laid out the comprehensive immigration reform plan, in the article you're commenting on. Seems weird to then comment "I wish someone would lay out the plan!", no?
He absolutely doesn’t. He says people that have “substantial links to community and no criminal record” (by which of course he means violent crime, it would be mean and icky to deport people that commit endless property crimes) should be able to secure legal status. This is the same vagueness that in essence means you can step foot in the country and be a resident forever if you just lay low. Strengthening e-verify also means nothing if blue states refuse to use it.
... you are disagreeing with details of the plan in the article rather than arguing that the article does not outline a plan.
I think what's going on here is that it's not that Democrats (like Matt Y) won't say publicly what they want the law to be, it's that you disagree with them about what the law should be, but then somehow conclude that because they don't have the same views of what it should be, they haven't publicly expressed any views at all. But that's not true.
Well, they pushed for the immigration bill last year, so that's a pretty good answer for what they wanted the law to be.
Of course, they could lay out what they would want in a truly comprehensive immigration reform bill, but really why? Its chances of becoming law in a world with the present Republican party are zero.
No, no. Tell me this. Let’s say you get your way and we have mass amnesty. What happens to the next 500k illegal immigrants that undoubtedly make their way to the U.S. and don’t commit any violent crime (just shoplift and litter and evade fares for public transit - quality of life crimes that Democrats don’t think matter).
Democrats will once again decry any attempts at enforcing immigration law towards these people, and they will become de facto permanent residents until another round of mass amnesty.
But what does this have to do with "I wis..h Democrats were public in what they wanted the law to be."?
I don't think you're going to agree with them about what the law should be, and that's fine, you have a different ideology than they do, that's expected and normal in a liberal society.
But that you disagree with them about what the law should be doesn't mean that they aren't saying what they think the law should be.
Yeah, there seems to be an unwillingness to confront the idea that the more restrictive you make immigration, the more people you are going to push underground. As long as the US economy remains strong and we have a land border with Latin America, there will be demand for people to move to the US from Central America and Mexico and people in the US willing to hire them. Enforcement can play a role in illegal immigration rates, but pretending that an enforcement-first approach will actually get us to permanent illegal immigration rates that restrictionists want is fundamentally unrealistic.
Yes, enforcement should be at the underground economy level, not the human level. Paying people under minimum wage is illegal for the employer not the employee. Same here.
Its almost as if both parties retain power by being as vague about their policies as they can be in order to get elected. Surely vibes will solve everything!
It’s more like, both parties contain hundreds of millions of people who disagree with each other about a lot of things, even if they share some core commitments!
Immigration might be one of those issues that sort of in a way runs against the “popularist” Yglesias mindset. Namely, it’s been in the GOP’s self interest for decades to never actually try to solve the issue. What Trump did last summer to undermine the immigration bill in Congress was just making blatant what was always known. It has been politically in GOP’s self interest to never actually address the issue of immigration. Having immigration be this “chaotic” legal grey area that actually helps keep wages low in a number of industries is actually the political sweet spot.
I can’t emphasize enough that the immigration paradigm of the last 30 years exists as it does because huge numbers of people mostly (though not solely by any means) in the GOP like it this way. In other words, there’s “popularist” position is in a lot ways to keep this issue as chaotic as possible.
A more accurate term might be "captured by special interests."
Which happens a lot in politics. A special interest that cares a lot about an issue can often get what they want, even if it makes policy less coherent, or if it means concentrated benefit for the special interest and diffuse cost (often larger in aggregate) spread out over lots of people who have other concerns, are less focused on this one issue, or are less organized (in the sense of having an advocacy organization, not in the sense of being organized people).
I have to wonder what your opinion on Roe V. Wade is, then. That was also an issue that gave the GOP political capital for a long, long time, but it was eventually overturned.
I was exactly thinking that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've used the phrase "the dog who caught the car" to describe what happened post Dobbs (I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. In fact I'm probably quoting an opinion writer and not realizing it).
The pre Dobbs paradigm not only allowed GOP politicians to use maximalist rhetoric and vote for what they thought were "message" bills (I have no doubt that a lot of voters for those total ban bills that went into effect as soon as Dobbs passed were from state legislatures who never actually thought the bill would ever become law), but allowed the debate to focus on more "edge" case situations; partial birth abortion and 3rd trimester abortion being two biggies.
Don't get me wrong - I think to the GOP, immigration is another "gift that keeps on giving" so to speak; they can sit on their hands and do nothing about it, and it will predictably pay dividends come election time. In fact, this seems to be Dump's biggest selling point.
The Dobbs decision just struck me as an obvious counter to this idea, which makes me wonder if these "unwinnable" cultural issues indeed have a shelf-life, or if there was just some weird set of circumstances that led to Dobbs.
The legal Right and Federalist Society, which are not the same thing as the GOP and populist Right, were against Roe from the very beginning. So yes, there were some weird set of circumstances that led to Dobbs.
I'm a little confused by your statement. I understand that the Right has been against Roe from the beginning, and I think they understood this as a dominant carrot-and-stick cultural issue which they could continue to exploit in election season.
Are you saying there are factions of the Right which have opposed the overturning of the ruling?
Based on evidence from state referenda and other state legislation, there are definitely factions of the Right, especially the populist Right, that want abortion to be legal and do not like the consequences of overturning Roe. The Federalist Society and legal Right, which are different factions than the populist Right, always wanted to overturn Roe regardless of the consequences.
This seems a both true and not the point? You could say that its beneficial for healthcare to remain the same way in the US. Its works reasonably well for most people, but is a constant annoyance that serves as a good issue for Democrats.
Except Democrats and Republicans actually care about these issue, even if they are conflicted on the details!
One thing that well-intentioned American policy entrepreneurs and lobbyists will have to get used to, now that we live in a semi-authoritarian polity, is a concept that people who live in honest-to-goodness dictatorships have long been used to: namely, the concept known as "Good Tsar, Bad Boyars."
The way it works is that if you think President Trump is doing something terrible and want him to change course, you must not under any circumstances attack him directly and by name. Instead, you attack the "boyar" within his government who represents the terrible policy (the boyars were the senior aristocrats who served in the highest reaches of the Imperial Russian bureaucracy).
In other words, you never say "Trump is doing something terrible on immigration." Instead, you say "Stephen Miller is plotting against Trump and leading him astray on immigration. It's a betrayal of Trump's covenant with his voters to improve the economy. Therefore the Stephen Miller faction is wrong and treasonous and the faction represented by Secretary of Agriculture Rollins is patriotic and correct."
Matt Yglesias, knowingly or not, has started to employ this concept. But it's useful for the rest of us to know that the concept has a name, it has a long history, and while it's not necessarily something they teach to Ivy League poly sci majors, it seems to work!
This reminds me of the inverse of this that happens in sports: owners love it when the fans boo their representative in the commissioner, because that means they're not directly booing them instead.
I have a pet theory that over time, all arguments take a leftwing posture.
You've seen a lot on the MAGA right make arguments that it's hypocritical for Dems to make the "who's gonna pick our crops" argument because it's inherently exploitative and directionally similar to slavery. I just wish Dems were comfortable saying, actually no, that is not exploitation because these people are choosing to do it freely and it's obviously superior to the alternative.
People are often more concerned with avoiding the grotesque than avoiding actual exploitation. Buying a poor Indian’s kidney is a positive-sum transaction. But Western countries ban it because it feels icky and it puts human scarcity on display in a way people would rather not confront. Same with prostitution, child labor, dangerous jobs. None of these are “exploitative” by your definition — people choose them, and they’re often better than the alternative — but they violate aesthetic or moral taboos we treat as more important than consent.
It's a very good point, but that line of argument seems to lack clear boundaries between what is and is not exploitation.
I don't particularly like my job, but I make six figures as a consultant working from home aligning PowerPoint slides. Am I exploited? I'm only doing this because I feel I need to to afford the life I want. It seems like like my (very fortunate) situation is largely a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, from a worker picking our strawberries.
Yea, progressives advocated for minimum wage laws, social security, humane working conditions...to say "well its okay to run around these laws for foreigners" seems bad.
But with sufficiently strong labor markets, wage and labor regulations are largely unnecessary. (Like, it's hard to argue that the minimum wage is an important protection when less than 1% of full time workers make it)
Labor markets were pretty tight over the last decade or so and most wage gains went to lower-income workers. We didn't institute any major new wage or labor regulations.
Just because you aren't on the particular margin of "most likely to relocate for a wage increase" doesn't mean that employers aren't affected by people who are willing to relocate for a wage increase.
I've seen the Marx-influenced definition of exploitation, that all labor is exploited if the employer makes a profit, rather than letting the employee take home the full value of their work product (minus the necessary cost of materials consumed, etc). By this definition, you are exploited, as is almost everyone -- with exceptions, perhaps, for workers who are overpaid or underperform, such that their employer is losing money on them. But this sort of exploitation is not a bad thing -- a worker can be doing a satisfying job for good pay, with the ability to change jobs if they want, while being part of a team that makes high-value products or services. They are "exploited" in the definition I stated here, but it doesn't seem reasonable to say that they are taken advantage of, abused, badly off, etc. As Joan Robinson said, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
But if the above definition doesn't capture the connotations of exploitation, what is a better way of defining it? I'd say that the connotation-consistent definition needs to limit "exploitation" to situations that are unfair, where the exploited person is suffering for another person's benefit, and where the exploitative arrangement is truly not beneficial for the exploited person. That still passes the buck to some degree -- when is the situation "unfair"? If the exploited person does not benefit -- compared to what alternative?
The Marxist theory of exploitation suggests that the immigrant falafel stand owner is the capitalist class while NFL quarterbacks are the exploited proletariat.
Indeed. In fact, star athletes, top software engineers, etc. are perhaps the most exploited people in the world, in terms of dollars of profit made by their employers.
But as I mentioned, if you define exploitation this way, it is not necessarily a bad thing for the "exploited" worker.
There aren't clear boundaries. Consider two massage parlors staffed by Asian immigrants. One includes rubbing the client's genitals in the service, the other does not and only rubs everywhere else.
What, specifically, is more exploitative about the one that includes the genital touching?
I suspect that if the employees had reasonable alternative opportunities for employment, those in the latter category would flee their present job more quickly than those in the former.
I don't think either group can easily flee their jobs due to immigration status, control of their passports, living circumstances, etc. (And indeed, if someone proposed cleaning up the Asian massage industry generally, without regard to whether the people in the parlors are having sex, I'd favor that.)
But I don't think the rubbing of the genitals is really that relevant to whether they are being exploited. (Put another way, a high end masseuse without immigration or trafficking issues who charges a lot for her services is not being exploited if she provides a "happy ending" as compared to a similarly situated masseuse who does not.)
"...but that line of argument seems to lack clear boundaries between what is and is not exploitation." Selling your first kidney is (probably) not exploitation. \S
Recently on Truth Social that DC Draino guy had a few posts that came thiiiis close to some of Matt's main points above. He called for an entity of some sort that "certifies" businesses that hire zero illegal immigrants (wonder what he thinks of E-Verify).
He also acknowledged that Americans would simply would not work for the low-wages paid to immigrants (good point!). But, then he blamed the farming industry for paying low wages and suggested they should pay their workers more (actually this is pretty progressive).
He failed, however, to acknowledge the effect this would have on food prices etc.
And the fact that in practice, rounding up agricultural workers just leaves crops rotting in fields since the wage you would need to pay Americans to move and do that work is so high that farmers can't be economically viable.
These people can be guest workers. Why on earth would you want to decrease the human capital of the country by guaranteeing citizenship to the descendants of some of the lowest human capital people in the world into perpetuity. Sometimes to us conservatives it feels like Democrats are speed running “turn America into a third world country”.
“…the descendants of some of the lowest human capital people in the world…
Do you believe they’re genetically deficient or something? That their children, properly educated and raised as Americans, would nonetheless be congenitally unable to be productive citizens?
Here’s the reason why I don’t think the gambit makes sense:
If you’re right, and we’re all blank slates and entirely a product of our environment, then who cares if we import high or low skill immigrants? The result is the same.
If I’m right, and intelligence has at least some sort of genetic component, then importing mass low human capital is an unmitigated disaster and the reverse is a huge boon.
So even if you put 5% probability on me being right, you should oppose the mainstream Dem policy of mass Central American immigration.
The argument is not that there's a "blank slate". The argument is that the differences within nationalities swamp out any difference between nationalities. You'd rather take the smartest 5% of the stupidest nationality than the stupidest 5% of the smartest nationality.
Is it though? The descendants of Mexican immigrants do worse than other ethnicities on a host of outcomes. People typically make this claim without any proof.
Read some Garett Jones! A country’s outcome is very closely linked to its human capital - and intelligence is a very, very strong product for human capital.
Yes, believe it or not, not everyone is a 1960s style blank-slatist like you. Some of us believe that intelligence is heritable.
The children of the millions of low skill immigrants we decided to turn into permanent citizens have very poor educational and work outcomes. Usually even leftists understand this, but they predictably blame it on racism of course.
> The children of the millions of low skill immigrants we decided to turn into permanent citizens have very poor educational and work outcomes.
Source?
Regardless, I think this idea that you can soft-eugenics your way to an elite society is almost certain to fail due to intermixing as well as mean reversion. I do think we can justifiably select immigrants based on their own skills to meet current labor market needs, which may include both high- and low-skilled jobs as we see fit.
There has also been roughly half a generation of assimilation for the median Latino kid born here. The last several rounds of convergence on social norms, educational attainment, and incomes took longer.
Plenty of people were still bitching about the shifty, lazy Eye-talians in 1935, 10 years after we curtailed the arrival of new immigrants from Italy.
By 1945, rather fewer complaints about their kids.
Had we been listening to the racial supremacists the whole time the country would be under half as populous, immensely less prosperous, and liberalism and democracy globally would be a pipedream.
Smaller populations, sure, but Singapore and UAE have absolutely improved their society substantially by ongoing but strict immigration.
PISA releases stats for performance by immigrant vs native populations and any country that has better scores for native than immigrant (every Western country) is performing a slow suicide ritual.
About 85% of my ancestors came from one of the following three places and times: Ireland and Scotland in 1680-1750, the Upper Rhineland in 1820-50, and Calabria in 1880-1910.
This is entirely typical of white Americans. It doesn't smack of "high-human capital origins," and yet here I am with a masters in a STEM field and a very comfortable six-figure income, most of my family's branches having become middle-class by the 1920's.
Similar story for my family, except it’s France / Germany / England / Scotland / Ireland / Netherlands / Wales. About half were French peasants who emigrated to the Saint Lawrence Valley in New France in the late 1500s / early 1600s, were mostly farmers or lumberjacks for the next couple centuries, then mill workers, and almost entirely PMC after WWII.
Admit that I haven't read the entire thread, but what makes you think people working in low skill jobs are low intelligence? Talk to them and many of them were educated in their home countries. It takes some resources to even make it to the US.
yeah I get that, and personally I'm all for screening to try to maximize the human capital of our population.
But conservatives need to realize that's going to mean letting a lot more Indian data engineer immigrants into this country. Outside of, like, Richard Hanania, I never see human capital-focused conservatives support policies like that.
Can someone tell me what is wrong with my napkin math on why the economic impact of ending illegal immigration can’t be that high?
Let’s say:
11 million illegals
2/3s of them work
Their average income is $25k
A citizen or legal immigrant would want 50% more money to do the same work.
So, if all illegal labor became illegal (either because of deportations or because of amnesties and then the newly legal immigrants wanting American-level wages), employers would need to pay an additional $92 billion for labor, which is 0.34% of US GDP.
That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t seem catastrophic either. Of course the costs would be disproportionately borne by a few sectors (agriculture, construction, child care), at least at first. But overall I don’t see how it’s that bad.
Of course all of these numbers are estimates and you could plausibly 2x this result - but I don’t see how you could 10x it.
Also your math is wrong not 50% more but double or triple. The physical work required for agriculture and construction(particularly in states that are expensive and produce a ton of agriculture like California and rely heavily on undocumented in cheap states to build like Texas) would make it so people would absolutely demand 55-60.000 at a bare minimum and as I mention above the capital because of materials and other non-labor costs in addition to doubling or tripling the price of labor would double those costs for consumers so it may not be 10 times more expensive for food and housing but it could it easily be four to six times more expensive and I don't think the average consumer is willing to put up with that.
I think the argument isn't about GDP but costs. The three sectors that you mention would bare the most cost also have also the most effects on people's budgets and daily lives(food, housing and child care) which are all essential for most people(unless you don't have kids) but prices would rise at a level much higher than wages would and the fact those three industries are pretty tight in terms of labor but high in the amount of capital that needs to spent to make them work, would absolutely mean that the prices for the consumer would far outstrip wage gains when about anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the workforce in those industries are either undocumented and/or foreign born(even if legal are worried about being caught in dragnet if they aren't white looking). This is where the rubber meets the road and concerns about illegal immigration and inflation get to impasse. Because these three industries are so critical to most people and are the ones that bare the cost and in choice between making ending illegal immigration and the actual economic impact when people see prices on housing and food go even higher and could be double what inflation was in 2021-2022 people will go back to the de-facto agreement that those three critical industries absolutely rely on illegal immigration and no one is actual willing to bare the cost that it would actually take to give those jobs to legal immigrants and citizens.
I do get the worry from them. My ideal immigration scenario would be to try not to overly rock the boat in terms of ethnic composition of the country while pulling in top tier human capital from around the world.
That being said, it’s irrelevant. Your position puts you to the right of any and all Dem politicians and actual Dem policy that would be hijacked by the groups. At least it’s a conversation within conservative circles. In actual Dem political circles talking merit based immigration is a sin. (Pelosi famously called it “condescending”).
Yes I agree -- dems don't like talking about this.
My preferred immigration policy is simple, we let basically anyone in who:
1. Has high human capital
2. Will pay more in taxes than they collect in benefits
3. Wants to be an American and identifies with our Western and American values
4. Assimilates to our cultural norms (e.g. we should test not just knowledge of civics but also, like, who won the college football playoff last year)
You pass all 4 points of criteria and take the oath of citizenship, then I think you should be considered just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
A very good piece, but with one big flaw. I disagree strongly in terms of having many immigrants here on permanent work permits (which also, of course, taps into Trump's current obsession with ending automatic citizenship for anyone born here--if your parents are here with work permits, do their children born here automatically become citizens?). If you look at countries like Qatar or even Germany with large numbers of people with permanent work permits who can't vote, and have little incentive to integrate into society, that's a bifurcated country I don't want to live in.
At least in the US we have birthright citizenship. The worst issue in those countries is that they have an extreme second class citizenship status that lasts generations or indefinitely.
Immigration reform will almost certainly need to be bipartisan to pass. Frontline Democrats will know that a partisan immigration reform bill will likely cost them re-election, not to mention the filibuster.
So if that is the price of Republican support, it is likely worth it. Although I don't know if there is anything Dems could offer that could get Republicans on board to improve the status quo.
Another option to get R's on board is to create legal status if immigrants pay a fee, agree to sign away any rights to "welfare" programs, and agree to pay a higher tax to fund social security. Most immigrants would likely agree to that deal, as it would still be better than going back to their home country.
Some place like the UAE, where 88% of the inhabitants are expatriates, doesn't seem like that terrible a place to live. I don't see why we couldn't do something like that in the USA. Imagine if the whole USA was as rich and prosperous as Dubai.
One enduring mystery to me is why immigration restrictionists don’t care more about foreign aid, and spreading prosperity and stability throughout developing countries. It seems so obviously aligned with their interests.
Apparently it isn’t! (This was a surprise to me, intuitively I think that position makes sense.).
Google is failing me at the moment and trying only show me articles about the effect of immigration on native-born US worker wages but there’s a Vox article from a while back about studies showing that *on current margins* increases in wealth in Central American countries actually positively correlate with increased immigration flows - it turns out that there’s a margin at which more income puts you in the category “still desperately poor relative to the U.S., but now rich enough to pay people smugglers to get you there” that dominates the effect of said income making immigration relatively less desirable.
Paul Collier, a development economist, wrote a book called Exodus which explains this effect in considerable detail. There's essentially a curve where as incomes rise the ability to migrate rises then eventually the willingness to migrate falls away. Such that neither the very poorest or the very richest countries tend to have all that many emigrants. One big pull factor is that once enough people make it to a particular country they establish a diaspora which makes it easier for others to follow as they will find a ready made support network.
The gap in incomes between the richest first world countries and even middling developing world countries is so large that even with many years of 10-15% growth it would take a long time to get to the softer part of the curve. And the US has been growing faster than many countries, even while starting from a much higher base. Demand to live in the first world is essentially unlimited.
I wonder if the increased wealth in Central America is coming from remittances, though? If your relatives who emigrated to the U.S. are making money and sending it home, it might seem more appealing to emigrate yourself.
I think the answer that would come most closely to passing an ideological turing test would be that countries have a duty to prioritize their citizens over others, because a nation is fundamentally just the collection of those citizens. And that this applies to both who we let into the country and how we spend our tax revenue.
The West is very very good at spreading prosperity through globalisation, and very very bad at spreading it down the barrel of a gun. The key is to do the former more and the latter less.
I’m surprised to hear this take from you since I feel like enough has been written about PEPFAR in the last few months to convince people it’s been highly effective. Am I reading what you’re saying too broadly?
Realistically? No, not really. The massive drops you describe mostly came from the rapid rise of China and India, with a lesser bump from Latin America beginning to cease it's long history of mis-rule. Globalization was the root cause for the bulk of it. Foreign aid was largely an afterthought, with more impact on diplomacy than on development
And the US had nothing to do with globalization? It seems like we promoted globalization heavily by lowering trade barriers, admitting China to the WTO, and enforcing peaceful shipping lanes by being the dominant naval power.
This part of the discussion was about USAID, not about our impact on the world in general. In addition to the pro-globalization initiatives you describe, I would rank our development and promotion of communications and information technology as even more important drivers of globalization. Between all of that, we've driven the greatest decrease in global poverty the world has ever known, and because of how it was done most of the world (and a lot of our own left) can barely acknowledge it.
Fair point, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the protests that came with the dismantling of USAID. I do think that free-trade and offshoring has clearly raised living standards in other countries. However to the extent that offshoring has concentrated in China, I wonder if the opportunity to positively impact Latin America has been reduced compared to what might have been possible otherwise.
This assumes a relationship between "foreign aid" and "spreading prosperity and stability throughout developing countries" that there just isn't all that much evidence for.
PEPFAR saves lives, but I see very little sign that it spreads prosperity and even less that it creates stability.
We should be clear-eyed about how much "development of foreign countries such that a meaningfully different number of people would like to leave them and come to the US" we have been able to do.
It's hard to prove a negative, but I think improving health and well being absolutely brings prosperity eventually. I think very few places are actually Malthusian in any sense in the world right now.
My gut tells me that the Stephen Miller types are immigration restrictionists and foreign aid opponents for the same reason. Their ingroup is American citizens (who, perhaps, look a certain way, talk a certain way, pray a certain way, vote a certain way...) and they don't see why the ingroup should do anything to help anyone else.
I think one should be careful of psychoanalyzing political opponents. I bet 100% even Miller (who I think is an atrocious moron) never thinks of "in groups" and "out groups". That's intellectual sounding language liberals invented in a deliberate attempt to make conservatives sound racist.
I bet the belief, more fairly, is something like this: American citizenship should be a robust concept and the government should be focused on the interests of Americans, including not only their material interests but some sense of preservation of American culture, including its views on work, its religious traditions, and its shared values. Immigration, they think, is bad because it brings in lots of people who haven't been inculcated with all that. Foreign aid is bad because it is not directed towards the interests of Americans.
Normally I'd be with you on this, but Stephen Miller is actually just kind of a nut. I knew people who went to HS with him, and he was basically the same kind of nut back then, or so I was told.
TBC I am not arguing about the definition of "racism". (Miller would meet my definition of a racist.)
I am arguing against "Republicans think like X" and the "X" is a description deliberately chosen by ideologues using clinical language in an attempt to make their opponents sound as bad as possible, rather than an actual fair description of how they think.
The answer to almost any “why don’t people who want X support ideologically-opposite but potentially effective policy Y” is “because people are not consistent consequentialists.”
Which is bad — more people should be consequentialalists — but not limited to the Other Team.
You only need to reduce push factors if you can't reduce the pull factors. Hardline restrictionists want an immigration enforcement regime effective (and for a sizeable portion, brutal) enough that the pull factor diminishes. Then from that point it doesn't matter if they still want to leave their home country, they won't be going to the restrictionists country and its probably someone elses problem (you actually see this in places like South Africa and Mexico where there are growing anti-immigration movements due to people just settling for the middle income country).
This is the same ideology as offering free buses because asking for fares causes people to assault bus drivers. We shouldn’t need to beg and bribe to have the law be followed.
I disagree—I think it’s possible to both enforce the laws and also care about the root causes of crime. If we care about reducing crime, including illegal immigration, we should care not only about enforcement but other potential avenues for reducing it.
For illegal immigration? For the US, I think political instability in Latin America and lack of development contribute. Is there more we could do to help these aspects? I would think so. Externalizing enforcement such as through Mexico blocking the flow of migrants is also possible, presumably more so if there is something in it for Mexico via diplomacy, trade deals etc.
Didn't have time to read all the comments, so someone else probably made this point, but:
This is yet another case of logical inconsistency/trying to eat your cake and have it.
Let's leave aside for now any cultural implications of widespread illegal immigration and the local effects on infrastructure, like housing and schooling. Illegal immigrants are willing to work "under the table," often in crappy conditions (slaughterhouses, crop picking), and for crappy wages, because it's still better than what they would get at home, and they won't report being mistreated by their employers for fear of being sent home.
If these immigrants were legalized, whether as permanent residents or legal temporary workers, they could/would get paid higher and report being mistreated/crappy working conditions. This is a good thing, but it also partly obviates the benefits to American economy of having them here!
This has troubled me for a long time. Basically, our super-wealthy (by world standards) lifestyle depends on the existence of a poor, exploited underclass. Being a bleeding-heart liberal, I don't like this at all, and I don't know what the solution is. Husband and I are well-off, and speaking only for myself, I would be willing to pay more for groceries that came with a sort of "Fair Labor" sticker equivalent of fair trade tea and chocolate, like, "This US-grown produce was grown and harvested by workers who are here legally and who are treated fairly and earn decent wages." But I'm guessing I'm very much in the minority here.
Illegal immigrants are like people driving around DC with fake plates. They are an offense against law abiding citizens and legal immigrants. We need to enforce the law or change it. But this wink and nod shit has to end.
Your analogy would work better if there were a bunch of low-paying but necessary jobs that only drivers with illegal license plates were willing to do.
They are only low paying because there are people willing to work for low pay. If they were deported wages would have to rise just as they did when immigration collapsed during Covid and as a result wages for the bottom quintile surged.
1. How much manual labor have you done in your life? Immigrants are working 12-18 hour shifts on farms, roofing, meatpacking, and other jobs that the huge majority of Americans simply don't want to do. I've heard estimates that the number of illegal immigrants in farms and on construction sites approaches 40% nationally. If they all disappeared overnight, the US would economically collapse- native workers are not stepping in to take those jobs. There's not a critical mass of natives who want to work that hard, frankly
2. If you really raised the wages & thus the costs for industries like commercial farming, that operate on thin margins, food prices would rise substantially and millions of poor Americans would go hungry
*Every* rich country uses cheap migrant labor. You may not like that, but that's countries IRL actually operate. There is no realistic alternative
They don't, your information is wrong. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan rely heavily on migrant labor in the exact same industries. At least 1 in 4 European farm workers are migrants- and their working conditions are terrible. (1) (2) One study found immigrants make up 67% of Germany's construction workers. (3) 80% of the German meatpacking industry are migrants, working up to 16 hours a day for low wages. (4)
Japan imports migrant agricultural and construction workers. (5) South Korea imported over a million migrants just last year, where they work in 'dirty dangerous and difficult' jobs that young Koreans no longer want to do. (6) They frequently work over 10 hours a day, 28 days a month. (7) South Korea specifically imports migrants for their agriculture, fishing, construction and manufacturing sectors. (8) Taiwan imports over 700k migrant workers for factories, construction, and fishing boats. (9)
Matt failed to point out that we nearly had what he's arguing for back in the Obama administration. And it wasn't Democrats that kept it from happening, it was the Republicans.
Even now it's not Democratic positions that keep it from happening, but Republicans being against any path to legalization.
I agree to some extent but not fully. I think if Democrats budged on what amnesty means, it would definitely move the needle. It could be something as simple as they won't be subject to the 10 year ban and allowed to adjust status by applying for a visa/green card. Those who have family here - spouses and kids of US citizens would certainly benefit from this. Legalization with a path to citizenship has been a no go for Republicans. That doesn't imply that other forms of amnesty or legalization are not possible.
I think this is all about public disorder; far, far more than anything else.
Whenever there’s a surge in an illegal crossings, people living around the border deal with a humanitarian crisis. Red State governors bussing migrants to big blue cities was the most persuasive political stunt I’ve ever seen.
That chart of people’s attitudes on immigration changing? That’s when the busses showed up in Chicago and NYC, and the media reported extensively on how overwhelming and disruptive it was for them to deal with it. It’s like that in El Paso and Laredo and San Antonio every time there’s a wave and nobody talks about it or cares, but as soon as they experienced the humanitarian crisis themselves blue city attitudes changed.
I think all that the overwhelming majority of Americans want is *orderly* migration. They don’t have any problem with immigrants filling out the bottom of the job spectrum in large numbers. If those people are employed and housed, that’s fine. What they don’t want is families living in the park and begging on the street corner.
I think legal immigration is a good thing, and we should work to increase it. But we have to understand that’s hard work, and we have to do the hard work. We should be doing something like a heartland visa program to distribute immigrants around the country, especially to places that have lost population and have space. We should be doing ESL classes and such to help assimilation. We have to make sure we are not sending waves of people so large they overwhelm the local schools and services in the places they’re going to. We have to fix housing supply so that when people show up the housing market doesn’t spike.
All of those things are doable, and would greatly benefit Americans as well as the immigrants. But it’s a lot of hard work. If the either party made “let’s do this right” their serious policy, I think they could persuade voters that’s better than “lock the border.” But when the democrats shrug at the disorder and scold people for not having more empathy, they shouldn’t be surprised that voters vote against them.
Funding immigration enforcement now means funding paramilitary groups with a penchant for arresting Democrats. This is toxic to bipartisan reform.
ICE agents handcuffed Senator Alex Padilla during a DHS press event. They arrested a Massachusetts judge for allegedly helping an immigrant avoid removal. They detained the NYC Comptroller for “obstructing” a raid. Republicans have openly called for prosecuting mayors of sanctuary cities. This is worse than anything university DEI committees have done. It’s one step from Peronism.
When ICE acts like wannabe MAGA brownshirts, Democrats might rationally choose to starve the immigration enforcement beast. Immigration hawks are overplaying their hand — and they’re pushing the U.S. toward a place where policy dies and power decides.
The only people who seem to be honest about immigration enforcement are those with the worst opinions.
Normie Dems (like me) won't say we're for open borders but view any deportation of a non-violent person as evil.
Normie center-right folks have fewer issues with deportations but like to pretend that those being deported are mostly criminals and welfare queens.
Stephen Miller types are actually willing to say, yes, we will be deporting people who came here illegally and are working low wage jobs to help their family. I would respect the honesty if it wasn't so antithetical to my beliefs.
I feel like there is no more obvious solution in public policy than the bipartisan gang of 8 compromise in 2014.
The Lankford bill was pretty good too. Too bad our current President destroyed the chance to get a good bipartisan solution, albeit partial, to immigration passed. As I recall, the Democrats were all on board for it.
It was timed poorly. If they had introduced it in 2022, Trump would not have been able to block it. At that time, the Biden administration clearly thought that spitting in the faces of voters was the better policy.
Democrats can’t think clearly about immigration because really thinking it through would force a contradiction they don’t want to face. Truly open borders would attract 50, maybe 150 million people within a decade. That level of upheaval would terrify almost everyone — but if you value anti-racism uber alles, then you have to suppress that fact. You don’t endorse the upheaval, but you can’t oppose it either. So you end up with a politics of studied vagueness.
I feel like a defining characteristic of 21st century American politics is that dems are incoherent on immigration and the GOP is incoherent on health care.
Exactly.
Look, I consider myself anti-racist (not in the Kendian sense of looking for racism under every bush, just, in the very straightforward sense of "racism is bad"), and I certainly don't want 50-150 million new people moving here suddenly, both for reasons of social cohesion (such as it is in these Disunited States, sigh) and infrastructure (where would all these people live? Where would their children go to school?). I never wanted open borders. I paid a lot of money and filled out a LOT of forms so that I could live here legally, first as an F-1 student, then a Green Card holder, and then a citizen.
See also the old lefty talking point: "You can have a strong social safety net or you can have open borders, pick one." I pick a strong social safety net.
You are quite intelligent and have a grossly accurate view of political economy. You understand how many people could benefit by performing menial labor in the U.S. and can afford a one-way, off peak ticket with inconvenient layovers.
I don't think "Democrats" are in favor of open borders. Perhaps you're thinking of a different group of people.
Matt is. Any concessions are tactical. And he’s moderate.
Yes, and I'm in favor of universal disarmament and everyone living together in peace. Any concessions I make on this are tactical.
me too!!
I don’t know that Matt’s substantive policy views are moderate overall - he is moderate in terms of tactics, and he is liberal rather than socialist on economic issues, but I think the overall policy demand is as radical as many others, just not quite in the same direction (and he’s not as pushy about it).
When we start ignoring practicality, it is easy to agree. Immigrants would be great if they shared my values! The problem is, outside of northwestern europe, relatively few people do.
You're wrong in assigning "open borders" to the Democrats generally. Both border bills that the GOP shutdown that Democrats supported had restrictions just not the absolute restrictions that some of the GOP base wanted.
"Anti-racism" does not imply open borders.
It doesn't necessarily, but the two concepts are related because one of the valid reasons you would not necessarily want fully open borders is it really would effect rapid changes to the culture and anti-racist dogma says you aren't supposed to care about that.
I wouldn’t mind hearing anecdotes about the spectrum of where Dems are on open borders. I think it isn’t a super common view that we shouldn’t have any restrictions or that asylum should be an end run around statutory quotas.
On asylum, it was definitely the case that Biden officials saw it as a cheat code and did not act against it.
But that is not the _only_ reason someone might think it's good to enforce borders.
Who is in this “Democrats” proposing unlimited immigration? Is there any significant audience for that? I don’t thing 1 Billion Matt endorsed that.
You can’t win elections with straw man arguments
If you write a book called One Billion Americans, either you endorse something very close to open borders, or you are a liar or you are a fool. Matt’s main intuition is solid: mass demand to immigrate exists.
"Open borders" and "massive amounts of legal immigration" are not the same thing. It does not require being a liar or a fool to say so.
Matt has been very clear in the face of popular opposition, he’s not suggesting the Dems take this as an actual position. As a constancy that need to be combatted, that’s 100% straw
I think there's a world where open borders works, don't know about your numbers but do agree that the world we live in wouldn't be kind to truly open borders in the here and now for the US from the US perspective.
I think actually a lot of “normie Dems” would be OK with deportations that included notice and a hearing, as opposed to be grabbed off the street and thrown on a plane before they have time to call their family. Of course we would need to actually spend some money on hiring people to process deportation orders (and while we’re at it, asylum claims, which are not all “bogus”).
Yeah, a lot of this discourse ignores Obama's deportation record and the fact that deporting a record number of people bought him insufficient legitimacy on immigration enforcement with Congressional Republicans.
I think the consensus on the right is that those "deportation" numbers are misleading, due to a technicality in counting procedures the Obama administration exploited, and in reality he wasn't nearly as much of an immigration hawk as portrayed and presided over a significant decline in actual interior enforcement compared to the Bush administration. Example:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/02/obama-administration-inflating-deportation-numbers-andrew-stiles/
Not that familiar with the specifics of the debate myself, but on first glance that view seems to be basically correct. That said, it is funny how quickly the right forgot that and started using "Obama did it too!" as a defense of Trump once he took office...
Eh, if your main reference is the National Review, I doubt you can call that a consensus.
He "deported" people by turning them around at the border instead of letting them in. Interior enforcement/removals fell. So better than Biden, whose staff were often la Raza racists, but not the greatest. He at least did not let masses of people into the country. Biden's mass parole (well, his staff's, don't think real Biden would have approved) were just ways to get people in and offer them a chance to adjust status.
The main point of contention was a pathway to citizenship. If the amnesty was - just don't apply the 10 year ban and let people apply for visas through legal means while giving them some temporary visas, there would be less opposition. Democrats are not willing to budge on that, even though it would help a lot of illegal immigrants who can adjust status using some family immigration category.
I'm not a democrat (or a normie), but I'll make a case for open borders.
Having actually gone through the immigration process, I am confident that it effectively screens out criminals and the unemployable (and people with tuberculosis). In addition to TB tests and medical examination, we had to provide records from local police departments saying we hadn't committed any crimes. And that we had never overstayed a visa. Plus a bunch of other stuff. Also, since we were applying for a sponsored visa, said sponsor had to sign a contract promising to pay back the US government for any benefits received, e.g., if the visa holder received medicaid or whatever.
Not all visas categories have the same rigor, but you get the idea---it screens out people who have committed or are likely to commit crimes, not work or get stick and soak up benefits, etc.
So here is my detailed, step-by-step plan:
Step one: lift caps on visas to meet the actual demand for immigrant labor (skilled and unskilled).
There isn't a second step. We just do that and then let the market and existing immigration laws sort out the rest. Like, if you commit a crime you get deported. But if you stick around long enough and don't commit crimes or violate the terms of your visa, you can apply for permanent residence. You pay taxes, but you don't qualify for any entitlements (until you earn permanent residence). You know, just the current immigration laws, but with more visas; open borders.
I suppose some people will argue that a big influx of immigrants will be destabilizing. But recent history suggests that it is propagandists getting people in small towns all worked up about immigrants in faraway cities that are the destabilizing force.
As a former consular officer in a high-fraud, high immigration visa country, I can assure you it absolutely does not screen out the unemployable. Because we are not allowed to use the likely to become a public charge part of the law for immigrant visas (we should, Trump might change that), and if there is an affidavit of support, and the family-based (which is the majority) applicant otherwise qualifies, you have to let them in. But of course, affidavits of support have never actually been enforced, and there is massive fraud with them. They are the kind of policy high immigration supporting Democrats love -- something that purports to ensure the intending immigrant will not become a burden, but which is never going to attract the interest of a DA in enforcing.
Most Americans have zero idea about the actual U.S. immigration system, the fact that we mass-import poverty and terrible cultural norms, and the reality of the fraud and abuse within the system. We desperately need a new system that stops chain migration (especially from places like Somalia) and focuses on educated, quality immigrants within a nuclear family that generate positive economic gains and who can assimilate rapidly.
George Orwell describes a particular kind of bourgeois socialist who, despite advocating for the proletariat and passing moral judgement on those who disagree, still strives not to make a sound while eating soup. They belong to the educated class and, on a visceral level, think the proletariat is gross; Orwell wonders how long they would continue their moralizing after being punched in the face by a drunk fish porter in a pub.
He wrote about that dynamic in the 1930's, but it captures the modern discourse around immigration well. Plenty of progressives will excoriate people online for not supporting mass migration because of the plight of the oppressed. But their actual interactions with the people they are so broken-hearted over are limited to Thomas Friedman esque episodes with cab drivers.
The reverse is also true. Plenty of conservatives will excoriate people online for supporting lawlessness and inviting low-class criminals to invade the US. But they have no idea that the nice chap at the diner is one of those illegals; besides, they'd be livid at the cost of beef if meat packing plants didn't employ legions of undocumented workers.
So you can focus on immigrant visas from Somalia, or wherever, and cast the whole system as the mass importation of poverty to make your case. And I'll counter that I and my family are the products of anchor babies and chain migration (also called birthright citizenship and family reunification). We also hold advanced STEM degrees and pay taxes.
There is, though, a middle ground that Matt is trying to find where we don't moralize at each other, catastrophize or flatten everything to binary categories of right and wrong.
What I want is instead of "vibe legislating" our way to the broken system we have with outdated policies and arbitrary caps, let's issue enough visas to remove the incentive to work illegally, to have enough doctors to staff hospitals, to keep importing Sergey Brins and Elon Musks. And if the current system doesn't properly filter out the unemployable, then focus efforts there instead spending taxpayer money to have masked thugs round people up at their jobs and tell us they are criminals.
This isn't a defense of "open borders", this is an argument for significantly more legal immigration. (Which I agree with.) You could not enact this plan in conjunction with "open borders", because all those rules and restrictions you listed rely on people not just walking across the border unannounced.
If you are going to define "open borders" as having *no* rules or restrictions, then I suppose you'd have to define "closed borders" as *total* restriction on border crossings. And I think the number of people arguing that the US should adopt the border policies of North Korea is small and should be ignored, same as those arguing that we should just not have borders at all.
I take open borders to mean something like the European Union's Schengen Area. That is, you can move freely across the borders, but there are rules and restrictions. For example, if you have a residence permit in France you can visit Germany, but you can only legally work in France. But if you hold French citizenship you can both visit and work in Germany. I'm arguing for something like an American version of that---don't artificially restrict visas through statutory caps, let the market figure out many work / educational / tourist / etc. visas to issue. And also have some vetting process for issuing them.
In this situation, people can wander across the border I suppose, but if they commit crimes they'll still be arrested. And since there will be enough work visas to meet demand, there will be no incentive to hire undocumented workers. The few businesses that choose to do so anyway are probably doing so for exploitative reasons, so ramp up enforcement on that end.
I think I'm a bit to the left of a normie dem but I don't think of legal deportations as evil, more just wasteful. I would like to a whole lot more legal immigration (though not unlimited) as well as credible border enforcement, and I think that's overall a coherent view.
Crucially, if you're flexible with allowing lots of legal immigration, deportations don't really damage the economy.
The issue is that the median voter also wants less legal immigration. And with that hard constraint, deportations ARE economically disastrous.
Count me as the rare person who thinks that deporting people who come to work low wage jobs, while regrettable, is necessary both for reasons of political pragmatism and to keep domestic low wage workers (many of whom are immigrants themselves) from suffering lower wages.
We import massive number of low-wage legal immigrants, and then force them to compete with massive numbers of low-wage illegals. Putting aside my hatred of the U.S. immigration system and what it actually does, forcing legal immigrants to compete against illegals is horrible public policy and makes it much harder for the people who come legally to get ahead.
You didn't list the entire political spectrum but broadly moderate centrists are in favor of legal immigration and against illegal immigration.
Agreed. I'm far more concerned that Stephen Miller is an authoritarian ghoul who wants to turn DoJ into the gestapo than I am with any of the policy implications of immigration.
“ICE agents handcuffed Senator Alex Padilla…”
No they didn’t.
Is your contention that he was not handcuffed by federal agents? Or that it was not ICE, but instead individuals from some other federal or state agency? If the latter, I fail to see how this particular hairsplitting impacts David's point that you can interpret the actions of various federal agencies as trending toward "wannabe MAGA brownshirts."
Credible news accounts said it was Secret Service and FBI personnel who detailed the wayward senator. Interpreting what happened as acts by “wannabe MAGA brownshirts” is absurd.
Good point. They were gentle, thoughtful, kind and considerate folks doing the forcing to the floor and handcuffing a US Senator.
Did they do anything wrong?
You are correct that they may have tiptoed up to, but not violated, Padilla's congressional immunity under the Speech and Debate clause. But it's still not good to quasi-arrest a senator at a *press conference* for *just asking questions*.
ETA: A lot of people are liking this post, so please consider reading Know Your Rites' rather persuasive replies below. If I had to summarize his argument, I would say that there are a lot of government press conferences (the State of the Union, Rose Garden speeches, etc.) that participants are heavily incentivized to disrupt and that we rely on the government performing without disruption so that we can know government policy. In my ideal world, Noem would have taken Padilla's questions and responded substantively, but also in my ideal world the current president would be making sound, reasoned policy, so this situation wouldn't have come up.
If you force someone to the ground and handcuff them you'd better have a damn good reason.
Unsurprising if true? Yes. Absurd? No.
They were present to protect the secretary from physical threats. What’s absurd about that?
That wasn’t what you called absurd. What you called absurd was assuming these were ICE agents.
Instead of doing media politics on the merits of soft nullification of federal law enforcement by state and local officials (the decade plus context to the provocative ICE arrests happening now) we should just trim legal immigration a bit in exchange for some legal status for long-term unauthorized immigrants. I believe Matt Yglesias mentioned this idea on the Weeds years ago, but I can't find the episode. He floated the idea alongside Senator Cotton's RAISE Act and AOC's defense of unauthorized immigrants as a kind of compromise he doesn't see mentioned.
Now, the obvious following problem is you'd get is a lot more overstays incentivized once you start giving legal status to the unauthorized, but we could solve this with Senator JD Vance's visa bond proposal[1]. In short, people put a large lump sum forward to get a visa, and receive that money back when it is confirmed they've left the country. If they overstay their visa and disappear into the interior, they don't get the money back and we have a financial tie to help find and deport.
I could see this being coded as a hot new restrictionist idea at the outset, but actually allowing Democrats lobby for more immigration in the long term as the bonds gain a slight positive budget impact if the government can invest it in our bond market and keep the gains. Even if Republicans coded the bonds to not be allowed in reconciliation scoring (an obvious preemptive move they should take) the bond idea once cemented will probably make immigration be seen more positively and under control of national interest by lay voters.
[1] https://www.foxnews.com/politics/sen-vance-bill-would-require-immigrants-deposit-15k-prevent-overstay
> we should just trim legal immigration a bit in exchange for some legal status for long-term unauthorized immigrants.
Just to put some numbers on this idea, we issue around a million green cards per year. Looking at 2023 for example, 1.17m were issued, with ~65% (755k) going to family members of existing US citizens and 17% (195k) for employment. The remaining 18-19% (220k) go for refugees, diversity lottery, and a few other special cases. I think there would be a lot of pushback to trimming the first two categories substantively, whereas the last could be cut to zero (and indeed, Trump cut it a lot). So let's say you can cut 250k. Pew says there are 11m illegal immigrants in the country (as of 2022) and, at least according to one source I found, as many as 6-7m have been here more than 10 years, meaning it would have to be a decades-long program to cover everyone (let alone any new ones who age into this group, which are guaranteed to be more than 250k). I think it might have been an interesting trade for dreamers, but even there, if you don't stabilize the numbers you're drawing from, it will never be enough.
https://usafacts.org/answers/how-many-immigrants-get-green-cards-every-year/country/united-states/
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
https://www.fwd.us/news/pathway-to-citizenship/
Well yes, formalizing the Dreamers through Congress would actually be a good idea. It would correct the original escalation of Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 dramatic readings that started with Obama.
We'd have to put in the bond visa policy and commit to not expanding legal immigration with some Democratic votes to avoid a repeat of Bidenwave. Probably the only way to make a deal work. But I don't know how many Democrats want to put stricter sufficiency requirements for foreign parents of Americans receiving visas, for example.
Here’s what would happen:
We do this today and give amnesty to current illegals.
This attracts a lot more people to immigrate illegally.
Initially we have the policies you have to prevent this, especially under a Republican administration.
Dem administration comes in and they decide not to enforce the policies that are deemed too harsh.
We get another million or so people illegally in the country here.
Amnesty 2, Electric Boogaloo
Rinse and repeat
What then, do YOU propose to do?
You say "no amnesty." Okay. What about the 11 million people in the country without the government's permission? Do you commit the manpower and money to remove them, yes or no?
Too much of the immigration debate seems to consist of "Somebody needs to do something! No, not THAT!"
Regarding the 11 million: Enact a policy that bars any public monies being spent or required to spent as of a date certain in the non-distant future. For example, say that as of 1/1/2028, no illegal alien is allowed to be in public school, or a university or receive a driver's license. Eliminate all "sanctuary" policies. Also, as of 6 months prior to that same date, every employer is required to use e-verify with fines for non-compliance beginning at $200K per person, which increase by 20% per additional illegal immigrant employed.
This won't push all them to leave, but it will do so for a substantial majority.
I would simply do what developed countries known for public order and safety do with their illegal immigrants.
Please state plainly what that is.
*crickets*
In the absence of bipartisan consensus, the government in charge should enforce the current law. Obviously, they can choose to take it easy and kick the problem to the next administration.
One Billion Americans!
Yes this is the unfortunate thing about One Billion Americans; Democrats becoming more pro-immigration has not made them more New Dealer but more Jacksonian. What do you do with a competitive political opponent who believes in softly nullifying federal immigration law? It's a good question.
I suspect one answer is you can't do a repeat of Trump 1 where you're hawkish via executive policy but nothing gets passed in Congress. So the policy that is passed has to be extensive, has to rule out certain things, and I suspect that means just a repeat of 2013 comprehensive reform as Yglesias desires today is off the table. Hence my bond idea and trading cuts to legal immigration for some normalization of long-standing illegal immigrants.
When you consider the extensive artistic merits of Breakin' 2: Electric Bugaloo, this doesn't seem so bed. Unfortunately however, the comprehensive reform package advocated by Matt would prevent this from occurring. E-verify, which Dems would be happy to support (Republicans have always balked at it) would mean there wouldn't be jobs for illegal immigrants.
"We do this today and give amnesty to current illegals. This attracts a lot more people to immigrate illegally."
Certainty of arrest dissuades street robbers much more than the duration of imprisonment. Likewise, I suspect most illegal immigrants don't care about their chances at an eventual amnesty, but only about the likelihood of interdiction as they sneak into the country.
This boils down to who can afford the bond, which by default will not include the unskilled and uneducated. The net effect is increased skilled and educated immigration which if tied to specific skills this country needs would make sense but more oil sheiks and moneyed elite are not known to pick crops, hang drywall,clean hotel rooms or mow your lawn.
This is true, but we have a large population of illegal immigrants who will continue doing those forms of labor, especially if we formalize them over time.
The key revolves around the definition of comprehensive immigration reform/border security. Matt noting the favorable American jobs market in relation to the rest of the world is the driving force. Bonds do not address the bottom end of the economic ladder either within the country or outside. Money based bonds by default effect only an higher skill level best addressed by other methods and result in another agency/ cost base to track down and deport a class of immigrants who are not a major issue and less likely to default. Or in worse case the program is set up such it becomes and income source for some federal department without accompanying any of its noble goals.
No, Europe has it right,* and I don't see why a European approach would be any less politically feasible here. Each time you catch a otherwise-law-abiding illegal immigrant, you have to deport that person, so that there's no moral hazard associated with skipping the paperwork. But you also issue an extra visa to someone who filled out the paperwork from that country, because clearly your immigration policy isn't letting in everyone who would be a credit to the community.
(Visa bonds seem like a good idea, but also could be applied under any immigration regime so I'm not arguing about them.)
* I know. I can't believe I wrote that either.
Don't get me wrong, the way the administration is enforcing immigration laws is stupid and cruel for all the reasons Matt just explained in this article. But Padilla and Lander, at least, were engaged in deliberate acts of civil disobedience, and they knew doing so opened them up to arrest.
The current administration's immigration policy is terrible, and ICE arresting Democrats while enforcing that policy creates such terrible optics for them that we should absolutely be courting more such arrests. But fundamentally what's happening is that Democrats keep forcing them to choose between backing down (which would significantly weaken their ability to carry out their immigration policies) or arresting the Democrats knowingly breaking the law to interfere (which creates terrible optics).
Calibrate your rhetoric, please. Not everything is the end of democracy, nor even necessarily a portent of the end of democracy. Here, the Trump administration is basically just doing what any administration trying to enact a mass deportation program would end up being forced to do if the opposing party kept throwing their bodies in the way.
We've cried wolf too many times, and this here ain't a wolf.
Gandhi was engaged in deliberate acts of civil disobedience. It does not follow that the British should have mechanically enforced imperial law, or that doing so would appeal to Congress sympathizers. Dems are mildly provoking ICE and the fools are taking the bait.
I completely agree with this. I'm just saying, calibrate your rhetoric.
Normies don't think it's a sign of the end of democracy when ICE arrests someone who is deliberately interfering with a legitimate arrest. Normies do, however, tend to be influenced by the moral courage of someone who willingly courts prosecution in order to make a stand against an unjust law.
I approve of what Padilla and Lander did, and I disapprove of the Trump admin's reaction. I just am so goddamn sick of us screaming "wolf" like it's the only word in our dictionary.
If you read carefully I wasn’t. I merely said ICE’s actions problematize bipartisan immigration reform, which is shamefully obvious
>Funding immigration enforcement now means funding paramilitary groups with a penchant for arresting Democrats
This you?
>It’s one step from Peronism.
How about this?
>they’re pushing the U.S. toward a place where policy dies and power decides.
Or this?
Are you seriously denying that "these acts are a threat to democracy" was a central part of your intended message?
These acts move us one step closer to Argentina. If your point is some Ds are willing to play brinksmanship games, I agree.
Those people who were arrested were breaking the law. Be a LEO and experience the danger of people interfering with arrests.
“…a place where policy dies and power decides” is clearly what Trump is aiming for. “Policy” is for wonks/nerds/sissies.
This is the wrong use of Peronism, it's different than just over the counter authoritarianism.
I’m against self-deportation.
When immigrants deport immigrants, they’re taking jobs from Americans!
I’m for simply raising the legal caps. They’re unreasonably low and create the specter of a problem of “lawbreaking” even when we have plenty of capacity to handle the various surges that come our way. And the surges are heightened because of the constant cycles of crackdowns and leniency — demand gets pent up during the crackdowns, making the next period of leniency look worse than it would have been.
This is no way to run a motherfucking railroad. This entire fucking time, the last 40 years, we could’ve had a wholly legal cohort of immigrants waiting their turn and doing things the right way, if only Reagan’s reform had set the limits at a reasonable level.
Like NIMBY, this is a man-made problem exacerbated by morons whose first instinct is to do the exact fucking opposite of the optimal policy solution, and the plain truth that they should sometimes — if not OFTEN — be ignored is the primary case for the small-r republican principle.
I mean, open border seemed to work fine before 1924.
It’s not exactly open border. I still want emergency limits — maybe 1% of population per year.
I just don’t see the point in illegalizing so many people in otherwise normal conditions.
I believe the rising temperatures in the Southern parts of the world have exacerbated migration North both into the US and Europe. These conditions were not “normal” 20 years ago but in the interim they have pushed more people to migrate. IMO Both Liberal Dems and Right Wing Reps are being hysterical. 😩 Considering the effort and time it takes an immigrant to understand English, learn US History to answer questions and pay about $7thousand for the Citizenship Exam, how reasonable is it to project large numbers will both become Citizens and join the Democratic Party. On the other hand, Compassion is good for our souls but needs Reality for our Country with something like the Lankford Plan.
The actual flows have not been anywhere close to America’s historical highs as a percentage of the population. Even this most recent surge was pretty reasonably within my proposed “1% per year” limit, perhaps right up against it. We aren’t in danger of any type of collapse — the economy BOOMED from the migration, it was the only thing keeping us out of a freaking recession.
And zooming out to the big picture of climate migration… on pretty much EVERY trajectory, it will only get worse, which would only drive more migration. I’d rather have it be orderly and controlled NOW than be utterly overwhelmed LATER. All those immigrants now — and their children — would be an absolutely critical labor pool for holding the line against any kind of true major border crisis (IE attempted migration in excess of 1-5% population) later on.
I agree we need orderly migration. My view is people are people regardless of nationality or skin color. For most of the immigrants now here who are key to our work force, I would assign a work permit and number and not worry about them overwhelming one political party.
Unfortunately, Americans of the 1920s seem to have disagreed with that, as they voted in politicians who hermetically sealed the borders for close to 40 years...
And that's on top of the fact that global travel was orders of magnitude more difficult and expensive back then, and there were no smartphones or social media encouraging people to make the trek...
How long have you had a mole in SB editorial so you can come up with snappy aphorisms beforehand hmm??
“… beforehand….”
Such ingratitude. I work my fingers to the bone to create fresh gags every morning, with no help from our hosts. I wake up before 6a, read the new piece as soon as I hear the paper hit the front steps, and then get to work. I hunt for some irrelevant detail, tangential to the point Matt is trying to make, and try to craft the worst, the most imbecilic take on it I can. And that’s only half the job — then there’s getting the formulation right. This particular “aphorism” went through five drafts, because I could not get the joke to land — too wordy, too explainy, too obscure, and so on. Is it “take from” or “take away from”? “Immigrants” or “the immigrants”? And all this between 6a and 6:15a!
A mole — I should be so lucky!
My cleaning lady was picked up by ICE at a courthouse about a month ago. She overstayed her visa but is married to a naturalized citizen (I went to their wedding!) and has been trying to ‘get legal’ since. I don’t know how else to help besides continuing to use her husband’s services as he tries to both keep up the business while also working to get her released. I’m stunned.
I came here as an immigrant from India decades ago, granted through a much more privileged (but complex) visa to GC to citizen process. My husband’s ancestors came here through a ‘step off a boat from Germany in the 1890s and just make sure you’re not diseased’ process.
It just all feels unfair.
How do our peer countries handle that sort of situation?
You want us to respond “they deport her,” but an equally true response is “they have better legal immigration pathways in the first place”
Canada and Australia might have better legal immigration pathways, and so might a few Latin American countries, but I would be surprised if any other country does.
No, I did not since I don't even know if that's true. I suspect we are not especially unusual in our legal pathways or our deportation practices, but it seems to vary a lot by country. But I do know this much: it's nowhere near the case that "everywhere else has better legal immigration pathways".
Which sort of situation?
Your cleaning lady.
I don't know. But I do know that the U.S. makes it VERY hard to emigrate here legally for low-skilled workers. The post-1965 standard vs pre-1965 establishes conditions and requirements that, I believe, make it close to impossible for them and therefore, they try and find illegal workarounds such as overstaying visas. Indians are the second largest offenders these days.
I take your point and it sounds like a terrible situation at the personal level. But I was asking the question genuinely because I'm not sure there are any developed countries that make it easy for low-skilled workers to emigrate legally or without risk of deportation.
And I appreciate that entirely. My two thoughts around that, I guess, are: a) Without some way to allow low-wage laborers to come to the U.S. legally, even if it's some form of temporary guest worker status, we are just continually shooting ourselves in the foot both economically and also dooming ourselves to a perpetual undocumented/underclass. We have the largest economy in the world, we are different than other countries in all the ways people (like Matt Y.) have documented so our immigration standards should be, too. And b) most Europeans who came here before 1965, i would argue, were pretty low-skilled. But the country and economy not only accommodated them, they made the U.S. the most astounding economy in the history of the world. Ironically, I'm actually a Brahmin (hate that stuff, can't escape it, reap the privilege) and my lily-white husband's ancestors were like, welsh miners and chaps trying to escape conscription into the Kaiser's army. And my family were the ones who had to show bank balances, job/education offers, insurance proof, health certificate, blahdiblah...go figure.
I agree that bipartisan immigration reform remains the right policy path. However I think this piece misses the biggest underlying issue, which MY is usually really good about picking up on, that being 'rule of law.'
I'd compare illegal immigration in most cases to something like stealing a candy bar. It's a crime and people shouldn't do it, even if, at the end of the day most people understand that there are diminishing returns, and beyond a certain point it can be counter productive, to get really worked up about the most hard-core enforcement possible of laws against relatively minor crimes (note, there is and will always remain a bigger than most people like to admit group that says give 'em the metaphorical chair).
The problems begin when cynical actors realize the difficulty of enforcement of minor crimes and begin violating them in mass. We saw this with social breakdowns and issues with retail during Covid, and we've been seeing it for the better part of the decade by employers and illegal immigrants themselves, who while in the majority of cases are broadly sympathetic, are still human beings with agency who know they are doing something wrong (except maybe when national level politicians keep telling them a settlement is coming, thereby incentivizing more to come). It's also not totally made up that many jurisdictions have had struggles involving new arrivals, to the point that it creates issues and inconveniences for legal citizens, for whom saying 'well think of the GDP' is about as persuasive as saying 'well at the end of the it's just a candy bar' when it comes to the theft issue.
Even bigger picture, I'd also suggest that there is no other issue where the broader left would stand up for law breaking on an economic basis. The fact that so many do has its own ramifications that aren't good for our polity or rule of law generally, and it plays into the most reactionary forces who are at the moment ascendant.
Bottom line is if you want more and/or better immigration the only legitimate way to effectuate it is through legislation passed by Congress. My big hope for a silver lining of a Trump administration is that he makes a big brutish show of force, but then declares 'victory' and quietly agrees to pass some level of reform, due to economic pressure. I think it would be good for the country for Democrats to be ready to meet him there should that opportunity arise.
Americans don’t take the rule of law seriously — not really. In Europe, the speed limit is 130 km/h, and if you go 140, you’ll probably get a ticket. In Georgia, the limit might be 70 mph, but you can do 84 and rarely get stopped. In the U.S., the drinking age is 21 — but no one enforces it seriously unless someone crashes a car. Meanwhile, in Europe, it’s 18 or 19, and actually enforced.
Passing laws people routinely ignore is a cultural choice. It doesn’t mean we should start enforcing everything strictly — that would be miserable. It means we should criminalize fewer things and enforce those few things consistently. That’s what the rule of law actually looks like.
`europe' is not monolith. if you think that traffic laws are enforced the same way in germany as they are in sicily, then you are delusional.
It absolutely does mean we should enforce everything strictly and get rid of - or change - laws that we don’t want to enforce. Prosecutorial discretion was a mistake. And it’s led to your local CVS having shampoo under bullet proof glass.
Prosecutorial discretion is essential and even in Europe there's such a thing as the cop not writing you a ticket because it turns out you are rushing your kid to the hospital.
I don’t see graffiti and pickpocket addled Europe as a good stalwart for the “rule of law” lol. Europe is in many ways worse than the US at maintaining order.
So perhaps as a good faith beginning, the Republicans could cancel their efforts to destroy institutions' capacity to prosecute white collar crime, tax evasion, and fomenting insurrection against the government.
Sure, sure, excusing illegal entry into the country because the other side does bad things is a mug's game but it really is nauseating to have to listen to these goons whine about the rule of law.
"It absolutely does mean we should enforce everything strictly and get rid of - or change - laws that we don’t want to enforce."
I've recently found Heath's "The challenge of policing minorities in a liberal society" (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jopp.12313), especially but not exclusively §5 ("Am I being detained, officer?"), offers a rather persuasive counterargument.
Essentially, lots of disagreements can escalate to violence unless the police step in. But it's practically impossible to write laws with adequate specificity to determine who should give way in the disputes. To take a silly example, maybe some 30-year-old is stomping all over and destroying kids' castles in a public playground sandbox. All the kids are upset, and you, as a parent, ask him to stop. He gives you the finger. Now what? Destroying sand castles isn't illegal; lots of kids have fun doing it. Playing in the sandbox as an adult isn't illegal either, since some parents like to help their kids build. But surely it's better for you to be able to call the police than to try to punch this guy out yourself?
Sandcastle stomping in the presence of the children who built them sounds a lot like disorderly conduct / breach of the peace to me.
I don’t think prosecutorial discretion is always a mistake. There are some things that you want a very clear and precise policy for, that should be enforced exactly as written, best if it’s enforced by a 1940s computer that can only handle one or two “if” lines and nothing else. But there are other things where you want the law to ban bad things and allow good things, and a smart human can usually recognize which is which in any particular circumstance they are familiar with, but it’s very hard to write the full set of cases in advance (or even train into a neural network).
That’s certainly how you want things like copyright enforcement to work, but also laws like “reckless driving” or “attempted murder” (especially vs self defense).
I would argue that speeding on highways, the drinking age on or near college campuses, and jaywalking reflect a small number enumerable exceptions to a desire for strict enforcement rather than a generalized contempt for the rule of law. The examples are somewhat unique in that one can violate the law while basically preserving the norm they codify (partcularly for speeding and jaywalking, and while college drinking is more on the rules side of rules vs. norms breaking I think the Sabbath dodge in that case is to more-or-less-accurately treat it as a separate and distinct reference class.)
In the particular case of speeding, it's also often the case that going faster than the posted speed limit isn't breaking the law per se.
For example, Massachusetts defines speeding as not operating at a reasonable and safe speed: with at most two exceptions, posted speed limits aren't relevant beyond the courts using them to roughly calibrate whether there's a presumption that a given speed is reasonable and safe. The definite exception to this is the 30 mph limit in a "thickly settled" area, which applies anywhere there's a certain density of residential driveways (whether signed as such or not) and exceeding this is defined to be outside the bounds of "reasonable and safe". The other one was the MassPike: the Turnpike proper was considered private property (to the point of paying property tax to the towns) and taking the ticket at entry to the highway was agreeing that the posted/announced limits defined reasonable and safe. Since the reorganization of the Turnpike into MassDOT and other changes, I'm not sure this still applies (e.g. I don't know if they still specifically announce when the Turnpike speed limit is reduced in storms).
I lived and drove in MA for many years and never knew any of this!
Those laws are very idiosyncratic to Massachusetts. In most of America speeding is very much an infraction and in cities it is very under-enforced.
Most states define it by reasonable and prudent/safe (as in the Uniform Vehicle Code e.g. https://azleg.gov/ars/28/00701.htm, https://www.legis.state.pa.us/WU01/LI/LI/CT/HTM/75/00.033.061.000..HTM, https://law.justia.com/codes/california/code-veh/division-11/chapter-7/article-1/section-22350/ (et seq, which explicitly allows argument that exceeding the posted limit was still reasonable and prudent)), though many define a posted limit as a maximum reasonable and safe speed.
I shall point this out to the next cop who pulls me over for exceeding the speed limit.
learning the amount by which you can exceed the high way speed limit without getting a ticket is something that happens in most cultures, i bet.
indeed, but the deltas vary dramatically
yes. are there good examples where it is zero?
people in denmark drive pretty close to 130, like 3 over is wild
Believe it or not, parts of Oklahoma are close to this. Not for reasons of trust or social cohesion, but because they can take advantage of everyone’s internalized norms around mild speeding to raise revenue.
Does Europe now enforce the drinking age? They certainly didn't a generation ago, but perhaps things have changed.
It starts with the parent who, when your kid takes a candy bar, makes him take the melting chocolate up to Customer Service and fess up.
Yep, the problem is overcriminalization.
When you go to places like Tokyo do you reel in disgust at how nothing is locked up at their local convenience store or that trains are clean and streets are orderly? Do you yearn to see drug addicts and homeless bothering tax paying citizens on their way to work?
I’m sorry to be dramatic, but I sincerely consider people like you to be the worst type of people in the world. You stand in opposition to anything that is good and right in this world.
Think about it another way. America has the highest incarceration rate of the western world by a country mile. You would have a credible argument calling it over criminalization. That doesn’t mean we want the reverse - disorder and chaos. But there are other antidotes to disorder than punitive Justice.
1. Who cares?
2. Do we have a higher incarceration rate than Japan or Singapore because our laws are more harsh or because we have more criminals? Because that is two totally different situations.
We should all care because you don’t keep trying the same broken solution over and over again. You look around you and see crime. Fine. So do I. But if your only solution is punitive justice, you’re ignoring other effective ways of reducing the cycle of crime.
I am, in fact, quite glad for the numerous ways in which or society is healthier than Japan's demographic quagmire. That culture is a fucking basket case and the insane degree of social control is part of the problem. Obviously America doesn't handle all it's flavors of disfunction effectively, but the idea that the state should be oriented towards making the culture more like Japan is deranged madness.
I’m begging you to realize that, as a progressive, your tolerance for crime and general disorder is much higher than the overall population and that most people would - in a heartbeat - choose the order in Tokyo over that of any American city. The way they have to “choose” it is by moving into the suburbs when they have children, because people like you will prevent American cities from ever being hospitable for families because of your suicidal empathy for the worst members of society and hatred of the most productive members.
I hope he doesn’t mind me answering for him: Dave is a libertarian. I think you might be new here—welcome if so!—so consider not making judgments about people until you’ve gotten a chance to see what their deal is.
Right. Most Lefty stuff is just legitimate, sometimes weird positions on policy debate, but the notion that a more disorderly society is preferable is both unpopular and substantively evil. Yes there are limits-- if we got anywhere near Singapore I would stand with the Left-- but enforcing public order is generally good and people who violate legitimate social norms against theft and vandalism and public drug use and similar should be stopped from doing so by the state.
I love the days when I get to be a a deranged urban progressive around here. LMAO
"I’m sorry to be dramatic"
Don't be sorry; just don't do it. No one's forcing you to hit "Reply" after you've drafted out your thoughts.
"but I sincerely consider people like you to be the worst type of people in the world."
Maybe consider distinguishing between intellectual disagreement and personal virtue.
Agree, Democrats' arguments about due process and rule of law in the immigration area are weaker because their claims that they would be OK with immigration enforcement lack credibility.
There's been a defacto work permit policy for many years as no one ever implemented e-verify. This is a certain sense of unfairness to withdraw the defacto permission, but it never had legal standing and is inherently unstable because of the incentives it creates and politically.
The Democrats should take a half a loaf, status regularization without "a path to citizenship" if they can get it.
Most large companies use e-Verify.
The illegal immigrants I know work for restaurants, farms, and other small businesses, so that tracks.
The Republicans have zero interest in any bipartisan compromise on immigration. The Democrats, as we saw last year (and during Obama), do.
All discussions about what a good compromise may look like, while interesting, have all the real world consequences of discussions about implementing a Georgian land value tax.
Personally I feel like this situation is a strong illustration of why I fight with the serious anti-"disorder"/tough on crime people around here. The line between "we need super thorough enforcement of cigarette taxes" and licking Stephen Miller's boots is a thin one. Pretextual, stop and frisk style nonsense petty crime enforcement is intolerable in fundamentally the same way masked secret police paramilitary units demanding your papers are.
People should never prostrate themselves so thoroughly before the state.
Please know I say this as someone who believe it or not is broadly sympathetic to your stances on this kind of issue but I think facts and history show that you have things completely backwards.
The kind of restraint that the state would ideally show is completely dependent on society being generally orderly and having high levels of social trust. The more you push for toleration of disorder and low level lawlessness the more you invite the hardliners to take over. As I said in my comment below, this is something the founders grappled with, hence the idea of ordered liberty.
I should be clear that my problem with "super thorough enforcement of cigarette taxes" isn't so much the enforcement as the cigarette taxes. When you allow a bunch of puritans or Salafists or Christian nationalists or public health fetishists to pass a bunch of statutes against social nuisances you open the door to the creation of enforcement apparatuses that are just waiting to be hijacked by demagogic psychopaths like Stephen Miller.
This equilibrium where we criminalize a bunch of petty nuisances and then modulate enforcement based on variations in "social trust" is a catastrophe waiting to happen.
I think you have a point about the dangers of building the architecture of the police state, combined with over criminalization. In doing that you risk that one day someone is going to come along and use it for terrible ends.
However I'd also say that you have to deal with the fact that (i) agree or disagree with the policy, many of these laws came about for some reason or another, and (ii) those laws went through the democratic process and under our system of government, until new laws go through the process, are the only rules with legitimacy. There's a parallel to this where you get hard-core Randian or Road to Serfdom types who think we could just eliminate Social Security or Medicare tomorrow without there being an organic demand from the citizenry for the government to set something up to support and provide medical care to those no longer capable of working.
My point is that the only way to deal with the concerns you're raising, which I do think are valid, is to play the game, not to defect or fan mass defection in hopes of coming out on top on the other side of the crisis. To take it back to immigration, we are now in that crisis, and rather than backing down, we have a government that is willing to metaphorically shoot the human shields that were allowed in by the millions under the theory that no one would ever have the stomach to enforce the law as it stands.
I basically entirely agree with the democratic process of comprehensive immigration reform as laid out by Matt in the OP. Seems like good policy and a solid political compromise. Where I object is the sense that people should roll over for Stephen Miller's secret police in the present in the name of the "rule of law". That's too much deference to democracy. It's bootlicking for the tyranny of the majority.
I know you keep repeating "cigarette taxes" because of Eric Garner, but you're not making any point there. Of course cigarettes need to be taxed. Of course selling loosies needs to be illegal. And of course it's possible -- in fact, very easy -- to enforce that law without choking any unarmed people to death.
In fact, as you tease apart this notion that what Eric Garner was doing shouldn't have been a crime, you realize how much it represents the Democratic pathologies on this topic. In this idea, we have to abandon the streets to low-level crime, because enforcing any laws inherently means fatal violence. Have good police? Impossible, we'll simply abolish them.
Nah, municipal vice taxes are absolutely not a thing that needs to exist. You wanna tax the externality you do it at the manufacturer level.
Nah, rather than just casually dismissing low-level criminal statues, I'm gonna casually dismiss your dystopian idea. You wanna have a society, you do it with laws and police. (See how easy it is to structure an "argument" that way?)
Yes and the line between “let’s never enforce any laws on littering or graffiti” and “anyone can be a permanent resident forever as soon as they set foot in the country” also seems to be a “thin one”
retail theft deprives a company of property, so a breakdown in the rule retail of law leads to negative impacts on retailers (and consumers).
traffic violations increase injuries and damage property, so a breakdown in the rule of law leads to negative impacts on drivers and pedestrians.
I’m not sure there’s a clear connection between your average immigration violation and a negative impact. As Matt lays out, immigration on net is win-win.
I understand the importance of ‘rule of law’ and the appeal of wanting law abidingness, but immigration seems to be a case where the law seems very disconnected from actual negative impacts; when we strictly enforce laws like this, it looks arbitrary and capricious.
Rule of Law is a means to an end and needs to be grounded in a desired outcome, not just premised on ‘welp the law says this, we must enforce it’. When the law is broken and disconnected from reality, the law needs to be rewritten.
I think there are many people in LA who held your view about ‘rule of law’ but who have changed their opinion when they see the havoc being created in their community by enforcement, and no clear positive effects from enforcement.
I have no idea what you are trying to say. If you disagree with the law you change the law. You don't try to maneuver around it or outright ignore it in hopes of creating facts on the ground. And you definitely don't spend years telegraphing out that breaking the law is OK so go ahead and do it and eventually there will be an amnesty. No one wants to hear it but people who took that approach are every bit as responsible for what's happening to those caught up in this mess.
I think it’s similar to underage drinking. The direct, negative impacts on other people from someone drinking underage are vague and attenuated. There are very few people advocating for lowering the drinking age, but there’s also zero appetite for the type of enforcement measures that it would take to truly enforce the law. As a result, drinking by 18-20 year olds is widespread in America and I don’t think this threatens the rule of law.
I actually think underage drinking is massively dangerous. It's literally the first thing that ever killed friends of mine that I experienced in my life, and the death tolls are pretty massive.
In reality under 21 year olds should not drink and the reason everyone talks so much trash about the drinking age is upper and professional class people often violated it and have massive survivor biases about the whole thing.
But in fact the 21 year old drinking age is correct and MADD has the statistics to prove this.
TBH it wouldn't hurt us to raise the *driving* age, too.
> As a result, drinking by 18-20 year olds is widespread in America and I don’t think this threatens the rule of law.
I completely and utterly disagree. A number of problems are downstream of underage drinking, such as traffic fatalities and injuries, sexual assault, binge drinking (more common in underage drinkers), and interference with brain development. That we turn a blind eye to this should shame us all.
It's an interesting situation where I actually agree that lowering the drinking age might be part of a larger recipe to dealing with those kinds of problems. At the same time I also think it's pretty self evident that if tomorrow we just stopped enforcing age restriction laws against liquor stores and underage drinkers that the consequences of that would be pretty negative.
Indeed, if we don't have the will to enforce the laws as they are, we should at least rewrite them to cover the most dangerous cases and then vigorously enforce them.
Lowering the drinking age would kill lots of people. It's a fantasy solution produced by the survivor bias of people who drank too much too young and actually could have had their odds of survival increased had someone stopped them.
I give that a big maybe and where one falls on how good a parallel depends on whether you see the immigration violation as a discrete or an ongoing act.
However I think that the ability to tolerate some underage drinking also depends on how tight a lid is on it, and how well managed alcohol laws are generally. When a bunch of 19 year olds are punished for getting caught with beer (which does happen, don't ask me how I know) no one treats it like a human rights violation and you don't have a really loud activist core of a major political party chanting 'no human is under age.' If that happened I think there would be a weakening of deterrence and a corresponding increase in publicly visible problems related to under age drinking, that may eventually result in a crack down. It's not like we've never seen similar instances of that from prohibition to MADD in the 80s, both of which, like immigration, had elements of overkill and moral panic attached to them.
All of this is to say that liberalism in policy rests in significant part on orderliness of practice. This is a concept that goes back to the founding.
It kills a lot of people when these bozos get in a car, though.
The negative impact is that we have created an abject and precarious underclass that is exploited because they cannot appeal to the law.
It creates parallel economies and societies and slows assimilation. It allows communities of people to be preyed on and trafficked by criminals. This obviously has effects on civil society at large, especially when there's no expectation that the people who come here want to, and are able to, become fellow citizens.
And the 'benefit' that people claim is that you get to pay people a less than fair, less than legal, wage in conditions where they have no recourse if they are abused or hurt.
If we had set out to create this system, liberals and progressives would be screaming about living wages, racial justice, and worker protection. But the only argument I see is that we need cheap labor so it's fine. Or 'they want to do the work!' as if this is benevolent.
It also has a negative impact on those who would like to come on temporary work permits but don't want to come illegally.
As the grandchild of people who “did the work” to come here legally over a large period of time (despite most of our family living north of the border for centuries), I find this whole conversation pretty revealing.
It feels like the majority of you feel like illegal immigration is a “net win” in large part because you don't live anywhere close to the border, and you don't see the damage trampling on people’s property and the overwhelming of social services and schools do to the communities where illegal immigrants settle. Its bad. Its hard. Schools have worse outcomes. Smart kids get cast aside as schools try to deal with the overload; same in medical care, legal assistance for the poor, etc. It’soverwhelming (literally)
Not to mention its unfair to those who did things the right way. Let’s put all the illegal immigrant kids in your schools, overwhelm your social services, and see how it goes. Oh, wait, we did that (well, TX Gov Abbot did)
and NYC, Chicago, etc., howled bloody fracking murder.
I'm all for legal immigation, and a fair bit of it. Let’s let people in on the basis of their ability to fill work gaps, on the top and bottom of the economic scale. Let’s stop letting people in because their sister or mom got in before them but they aren't going to be a contributor to society. We are going to need people in a big way as boomers die off, but there has to be a coherent, democratically law making way to do it, or it breeds anarchy (which is appealing on some level to some of you, I know)
Allowing people to become citizens and run rampant on towns close to the border because we are sympathetic to their plight is a long term loser. It degrades the rule of law, the coherence of social order, and the social ties that bind us all.
Can you expand on the last sentence? I agree that non-enforcement of immigration laws is less favorable for illegal immigrants than liberalizing the laws would be (and I’m in favor of liberalizing the laws). But are you arguing that in the absence of immigration reform, deporting the immigrants is to their benefit?
I think LP is saying that in any other circumstance, many liberals and progressives would be appalled at the conceptual framework of allowing migrants to perform labor without full protections under law.
But in the American "as it is" circumstance, liberals and progressives will grasp for the argument that these workers "want to do the work" or "we need *someone* to pick the fruit," and sort of push off the social security, worker insurance, overtime questions to the side.
I don't think he's saying deporting illegal aliens/undocumented workers is to their benefit, but rather, liberal arguments are not benevolent/in the strain of human dignity arguments
I think that if there were a liberal/progressive who supported reducing immigration enforcement but opposed making it easier to immigrate legally, this hypocrisy/inconsistency argument would have weight, because that would be outright support of exploitive conditions. In practice, though, I think 100% of liberals and progressives who want to reduce immigration enforcement also want to reform the immigration system to make it easier to immigrate legally. In that context, going easier on illegal immigrants is a "less-bad option" rather than an affirmative stance in favor of exploitation.
If there were evidence that on net, illegal immigrants are harmed relative to not being able to immigrate at all—as, for instance, prostitutes or child laborers are arguably worse off than they would be if they were prohibited from doing that work—that would be a substantial argument. Absent that, I don't think it's at all contrary to progressive values to say that aggressive immigration enforcement is worse for immigrants than a more lenient stance would be.
I suppose, from my point of view, holding those policy preferences without any power is sort of just accepting the status quo in practice.
And the status quo might be the "less-bad-option" in raw material analysis, but it isn't very principled! Without the sound principled foundation, you expose these workers to the capriciousness (and cruelty!) of the State. A la, Donald Trumps' current enforcement regime.
I guess it's like, could you dispute a dejure regime that isn't enforced creates a defacto underclass of labor that is trading its labor+risk for better wages? That labor is not granted its full 1st/4th/5th/6th amendment rights? It's excluded from wide swathes of labor laws?
Just saying we don't support that doesn't relieve the tension.
The negative impact about uncontrolled immigration is that eventually a majority of people flip out about it - in pretty much every country on the planet. Then they support extremists. So let’s do immigration closer to what Australia and Canada do.
Precisely.
"If Liberals Won't Enforce Borders, Fascists Will." is probably the most salient quote of the 21st century.
Closer to Canada? This seems surprising given that Canadians were so furious over issues downstream of the recent Liberal term’s support of largescale immigration that they were willing to elect the Conservatives by historic margins (until Trump came along again).
Fair point, but it took them much longer to get there because the immigration was more regulated and selective.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that people are allowed to care about the demography of the country they inhabit.
People are "allowed" to do a lot of things -- spank their kids, vote for Donald Trump, root for the Yankees, think it's important for the US to be primarily white -- that they will nonetheless be strongly criticized for.
I dunno, until very recently, in the West, immigration has been one thing that normal voters have had virtually zero control over. For better or for worse, no matter what public opinion was, the policy of virtually every Western country has been “more immigrants from developing countries”
I agree that for the reasons Matt stated, almost every rich country has had immigration from poorer countries. I don't see what that has to do with my post.
People have literally not been allowed to shape their country’s immigration policies (and thereby demographic composition).
And no, it hasn’t been “almost every rich country”. Only Western countries. East Asian and oil countries are very selective on the types of immigrants they select.
This seems pretty ahistorical. The Chinese Exclusion Act was in effect for almost 50 years.
That ended in 1940s though - the current Western regime of mass migration started in the 1960s/70s no?
It’s not one thing. Normal voters don’t have control over anything other than ballot measures.
In a democratic republic, people vote for their representatives who act on their behalf. If they are unhappy with their representatives actions, they should elect different people.
"spank their kids, vote for Donald Trump, root for the Yankees"
It's interesting that absolutely none of those things will be criticized by normal people who live outside the progressive epistemic bubble.
Not true: The Yankees are almost universally loathed by all right-thinking men from outside the NY Metro area. Criminals love the Yankees, too.
I think the thread is clearly about normal people.
We disagree about many things but I'm glad you're on my side on this point.
You're not a baseball fan, I take it?
That’s correct.
Tebs of millions of people think that it's very bad to do those things.
My point is that you are allowed to do all of them, and lots of people do in fact do them, but they're things that I think are bad and will criticize you for. That's how society works.
Lots of people say "you're not allowed to say/think/do X" when they really mean they want to be free from criticism for doing it.
It's kind of meaningless if hundreds of millions of people think that these are normal things to do. People are free to criticize whatever but they're absolutely meaningless to the intended person if the broader society that they are part of accepts them as normal behavior. You can only shame another person in your in group by this kind of criticism. Most people will just be annoyed and ask you to fuck off because they're part of the broader normie group that doesn't think they did anything wrong.
Also, you're not going to criticize anyone outside your in group in person for any of these things. These are just things you can say online because there are no consequences.
From Alex Kruel’s Substack today:
“In 2020, Asian Americans had a 113-point lead over whites and a 290-point lead over blacks on the SAT. Asian women surpassed white male earnings that year.
They make excellent immigrants, not just in America.
For example, 64% of Vietnamese in Germany manage to join the most advanced of the three types of German secondary schools. That is 5 times more often than for Turkish immigrants and 20 percentage points higher than for Germans.
In 2016, the crime rate of Japanese people living in Germany was only a fifth of that of native Germans. Of the more than 35,000 Japanese people living in Germany, only 164 were suspects in criminal investigations. For comparison, of the approximately 20,000 Algerians living in Germany in 2016, 11,138 were suspects in criminal investigations. In other words, Algerians were 115 times more likely to be suspects of a crime than Japanese people.”
Normal people: “wow, we should get more East Asian immigrants.
The entire American immigration apparatus: “no, no! That’s racist! There’s obviously root causes that are leading to these results even though this pattern literally holds for every country in the world”
It’s the low/mid/high curve meme
https://x.com/Noahpinion/status/1934704061414285781
Try to pass a bill that restricts immigration to whites only and then we’ll talk.
Many people dislike mass immigration because they don't want to see large changes in their communities - especially short-term. Immigration restrictionists may have different cultural expectations (regarding music or noise or dress) than immigrants, they may have different views on social issues (either more or less conservative), they may not like hearing other languages spoken or having to use other languages to conduct their daily activities. Maybe they don't even like being reminded of other religions.
You can agree or not with these tastes. But they are tastes, they're not all necessarily bad, and violating them does have impact.
Hell, I’m an immigrant myself and *I* dislike it. My family immigrated to the U.S. because my father really appreciated and liked American anglo/WASP culture. He’s literally a brown, middle eastern immigrant and last time he visited me in the city he was distraught by how much the culture and demographics had shifted.
And this sort of thing is reflected in voting. Plenty of voters of color agree with Republicans on immigration.
Many people like American culture, but don't really understand what makes it great.
Or maybe they just disagree with you on the things that make it great. In my father’s opinion what makes it great is hard work, the idea that you can improve in society through grit, and general openness to strangers (especially relative to Northern Europeans who are much more cold). I think you can have that without the negative aspects of culture such as littering, playing music loudly on public transportation, fare evasion, open drug use, shoplifting, etc
I agree with this, but don't understand why demographics changing would be a negative - him and you being here are part of that demographic change!
My grandmother (and sort of my mother and aunt) are also immigrants, and while not totally hardliners, are pretty hawkish on the subject, especially compared to sentiments at SB.
"Rule of Law is a means to an end and needs to be grounded in a desired outcome"
Actually, I'm going to disagree on this one. If you can bind later-you or parts of your coalition to do something you generally don't support, then you can better perform horse-trading and create political compromises to otherwise-unsolvable questions. The point of having laws is to bind oneself that way.
I'd go farther and say the rule of law is something that binds everyone to the same society, regardless of individual values, political agendas or coalitions. Tying laws to politics(which yes policy are laws) unfortunately sours people on the idea of rule of law, so long as it selectively enforced, changed based on culture. For good reason laws should not remain in stone but the core of idea of "rule of law" or even "natural law" is that is precisely not the rule of man. That is something other than a political compromise but almost religious or divine, and not something that can be manipulated by a ruling party to serve their own goals. Of course this was always aspirational and not really every achievable. At the same time people care more about outcomes than anything else. As the old wilhoit's law quote: "Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.” This applies in general not really to conservatism but to law in general by fact that enforcement is rarely equal or across the board in outcomes and for a lot of people that completely deligimatizes the entire purpose of "all men being equal under the law" which is kind of the foundation of the country. Rule of law needs to be principled but outcomes and the perceived fairness and morality of the laws and outcomes of laws need to be equal consideration or law tends to lose legitimacy in the eyes of the public. What this means to me is if you really don't have the ability to enforce the law, in a way that the broad public finds acceptable or has very disruptive economic consequences, the laws either need to change, or not really enforced because as David Abbott noted people don't actually care about the rule of law in the abstract but people do care how it affects them and their community and that depends on positive-sum outcomes.
Maybe a better analogy is it is like not returning a library book. It's not a great thing, it can have effects on other people, but on the other hand it can have a positive effect (you might finish the book). And the best way to handle it is with periodic amnesties rather than Draconian enforcement.
Like I said, I'm down with a deal and have been down with a deal (including one involving a lot of amnesty) since W was president, but it is only workable when there is sufficient enforcement to avoid mass rule breaking in hopes of prompting another amnesty. If everyone thinks we are perpetually on the cusp of amnesty there will be no incentive to follow the rules, ever. That's where we've been sitting.
e-Verify is your friend.
I agree wholeheartedly!!
I was told Democrats are only capable of talking about one thing at a time and raising the salience of immigration is bad. Why are you letting the BBB pass by raising the salience of immigration Matt? Do you just not care about poor people on Medicaid?
Thank you for raising the salience of Medicaid with this comment!
I'm new here. Is there some kind of inside joke with the word, "salience?"
I've read the word more in the past couple months than in the previous decade of my life.
To add on to what TR02 said, Matt has been relentless is saying over the past couple of weeks, to much pushback both in The Discourse and even here among Slow Borers, that Democrats and Trump foes should be pressing much harder against the bill trying to be passed in Congress, and pressing much less against Trump's immigration policy.
I wouldn't say inside joke, but part of the local jargon is to talk about the "salience" of issues to the public, and part of our talk of strategy is to say that someone ought to talk more about issues where the public seems to trust Democrats more, in order to raise the salience of those issues in public discourse.
I vaguely recall that there was talk back in 2017 or so, saying that all the talk about Trump's meanness, norm violation, and appeal to xenophobes backfired by calling attention to Trump -- raising his salience, in the parlance -- and raising the salience of issues where Trump had a surprising amount of support, but the consensus among right-thinking people was that those views were unacceptable.
Josh your comment really made me laugh. Stick around to hear the words “downstream of” and “thermostatic” more than you ever have. Also “the Baumol effect”, whatever that is.
I kid, this is a great comment section otherwise I’ve made terrible life choices recently with the amount of time I spend in here. But it definitely has a certain vocabulary.
Also welcome!
lol thank you. I can certainly appreciate good jargon.
I wish Democrats were public in what they wanted the law to be. Not just for existing illegal migrants but those in the future as well. As far as I can tell, the idea is: if you make it to U.S. soil and don’t commit any crimes for X years, you get to be a resident forever. I’d love them to clarify this stance. What is the number of years? Let’s encode it in law! I hate this idea of quasi-legality by lack of enforcement (which Democrats love across the board).
I don't agree with the premise that Democrats are somehow holding anything up. It's the never amnesty people. Also to pretend like there is some monolithic Democrat's opinion is wrong. It's a big tent. That being said I'll speak for myself I'm a Democrat that thinks that open borders and the socialist safety net I want are incompatible and I pick the safety net. I also accept that any changes need to be very slow or the economy cooks off faster than any benefit accrues. For example there needs to be time for farms to purchase equipment that automated certain tasks or change crops from ones that cant be easily automated to ones that can.
I would let people do what they want, but enforce at the corporate level. Any enforcement at the person level just causes a shadow legal system where people are afraid of the police and courts. It's also easier to fine a company than put anyone in jail.
I'd cap and trade temporary employee permits so if a company was caught employing people who can't legally work they could purchase a permit for them to do so whose price would rise with each month they haven't solved the problem.
Increase legal immigration dramatically where those people are excluded from the social safety net for 2 years.
Of course Democrats are also holding things up. It is entirely possible to reform America's immigration system without even talking about amnesty. Democrats aren't especially interested in that, though. They want a "grand bargain" and won't give America a modern skill based immigration system unless it also handles amnesty, Dreamers, and the rest of the bagel.
> It is entirely possible to reform America's immigration system without even talking about amnesty.
Is it? How?
The only three options I see are 1. (status quo) Illegal immigrants who live a shadow life, unable to avail themselves of the normal institutions of our society, 2. Mass deportation, 3. Some pathway to regularization.
Which one of those options are you envisioning for your "entirely possible" reform?
It's fun to come onto message boards and say provocative things, huh?
I mean ... this is what the article is about? Matt laid out the comprehensive immigration reform plan, in the article you're commenting on. Seems weird to then comment "I wish someone would lay out the plan!", no?
He absolutely doesn’t. He says people that have “substantial links to community and no criminal record” (by which of course he means violent crime, it would be mean and icky to deport people that commit endless property crimes) should be able to secure legal status. This is the same vagueness that in essence means you can step foot in the country and be a resident forever if you just lay low. Strengthening e-verify also means nothing if blue states refuse to use it.
Who says he doesn’t care about property crime? This is the guy with a hard-on for traffic enforcement we’re talking about
... you are disagreeing with details of the plan in the article rather than arguing that the article does not outline a plan.
I think what's going on here is that it's not that Democrats (like Matt Y) won't say publicly what they want the law to be, it's that you disagree with them about what the law should be, but then somehow conclude that because they don't have the same views of what it should be, they haven't publicly expressed any views at all. But that's not true.
Well, they pushed for the immigration bill last year, so that's a pretty good answer for what they wanted the law to be.
Of course, they could lay out what they would want in a truly comprehensive immigration reform bill, but really why? Its chances of becoming law in a world with the present Republican party are zero.
No, no. Tell me this. Let’s say you get your way and we have mass amnesty. What happens to the next 500k illegal immigrants that undoubtedly make their way to the U.S. and don’t commit any violent crime (just shoplift and litter and evade fares for public transit - quality of life crimes that Democrats don’t think matter).
Democrats will once again decry any attempts at enforcing immigration law towards these people, and they will become de facto permanent residents until another round of mass amnesty.
Rinse and repeat.
I'm just saying that Democrats were/are in favor of good legislation that would take back control of the border and Republicans aren't.
no, no! You must argue about a future hypothetical situation! We are interested in a discussion of principles, not reality.
But what does this have to do with "I wis..h Democrats were public in what they wanted the law to be."?
I don't think you're going to agree with them about what the law should be, and that's fine, you have a different ideology than they do, that's expected and normal in a liberal society.
But that you disagree with them about what the law should be doesn't mean that they aren't saying what they think the law should be.
That encourages illegal immigration and an underground economy, sound bad to me.
Instead we should have a sane guest worker program that is easy to apply/enforce, and have a cap set realistically based on actual demand.
Yeah, there seems to be an unwillingness to confront the idea that the more restrictive you make immigration, the more people you are going to push underground. As long as the US economy remains strong and we have a land border with Latin America, there will be demand for people to move to the US from Central America and Mexico and people in the US willing to hire them. Enforcement can play a role in illegal immigration rates, but pretending that an enforcement-first approach will actually get us to permanent illegal immigration rates that restrictionists want is fundamentally unrealistic.
Yes, enforcement should be at the underground economy level, not the human level. Paying people under minimum wage is illegal for the employer not the employee. Same here.
"I wish Democrats were public in what they wanted the law to be."
I don't think Democrats have a consensus on this, any more than Republicans do.
Its almost as if both parties retain power by being as vague about their policies as they can be in order to get elected. Surely vibes will solve everything!
It’s more like, both parties contain hundreds of millions of people who disagree with each other about a lot of things, even if they share some core commitments!
Immigration might be one of those issues that sort of in a way runs against the “popularist” Yglesias mindset. Namely, it’s been in the GOP’s self interest for decades to never actually try to solve the issue. What Trump did last summer to undermine the immigration bill in Congress was just making blatant what was always known. It has been politically in GOP’s self interest to never actually address the issue of immigration. Having immigration be this “chaotic” legal grey area that actually helps keep wages low in a number of industries is actually the political sweet spot.
I can’t emphasize enough that the immigration paradigm of the last 30 years exists as it does because huge numbers of people mostly (though not solely by any means) in the GOP like it this way. In other words, there’s “popularist” position is in a lot ways to keep this issue as chaotic as possible.
The GOP policy is not "popularist". The majority position is better organized immigration with a path to legalization for long term undocumenteds.
A more accurate term might be "captured by special interests."
Which happens a lot in politics. A special interest that cares a lot about an issue can often get what they want, even if it makes policy less coherent, or if it means concentrated benefit for the special interest and diffuse cost (often larger in aggregate) spread out over lots of people who have other concerns, are less focused on this one issue, or are less organized (in the sense of having an advocacy organization, not in the sense of being organized people).
I have to wonder what your opinion on Roe V. Wade is, then. That was also an issue that gave the GOP political capital for a long, long time, but it was eventually overturned.
I was exactly thinking that. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've used the phrase "the dog who caught the car" to describe what happened post Dobbs (I'm pretty sure I'm not alone. In fact I'm probably quoting an opinion writer and not realizing it).
The pre Dobbs paradigm not only allowed GOP politicians to use maximalist rhetoric and vote for what they thought were "message" bills (I have no doubt that a lot of voters for those total ban bills that went into effect as soon as Dobbs passed were from state legislatures who never actually thought the bill would ever become law), but allowed the debate to focus on more "edge" case situations; partial birth abortion and 3rd trimester abortion being two biggies.
Don't get me wrong - I think to the GOP, immigration is another "gift that keeps on giving" so to speak; they can sit on their hands and do nothing about it, and it will predictably pay dividends come election time. In fact, this seems to be Dump's biggest selling point.
The Dobbs decision just struck me as an obvious counter to this idea, which makes me wonder if these "unwinnable" cultural issues indeed have a shelf-life, or if there was just some weird set of circumstances that led to Dobbs.
The legal Right and Federalist Society, which are not the same thing as the GOP and populist Right, were against Roe from the very beginning. So yes, there were some weird set of circumstances that led to Dobbs.
I'm a little confused by your statement. I understand that the Right has been against Roe from the beginning, and I think they understood this as a dominant carrot-and-stick cultural issue which they could continue to exploit in election season.
Are you saying there are factions of the Right which have opposed the overturning of the ruling?
Based on evidence from state referenda and other state legislation, there are definitely factions of the Right, especially the populist Right, that want abortion to be legal and do not like the consequences of overturning Roe. The Federalist Society and legal Right, which are different factions than the populist Right, always wanted to overturn Roe regardless of the consequences.
This seems a both true and not the point? You could say that its beneficial for healthcare to remain the same way in the US. Its works reasonably well for most people, but is a constant annoyance that serves as a good issue for Democrats.
Except Democrats and Republicans actually care about these issue, even if they are conflicted on the details!
I enjoyed the Ezra Klein / Ehud Olmert podcast. There was an exchange that basically went:
Klein: Explain how you think a two-state solution is possible
Olmert: Because every other option is impossible
Klein: But you still haven't explained how a two state solution is possible
So it goes apparently with comprehensive immigration reform.
it struck me as a tragic case of inability to adapt to changing circumstances.
One thing that well-intentioned American policy entrepreneurs and lobbyists will have to get used to, now that we live in a semi-authoritarian polity, is a concept that people who live in honest-to-goodness dictatorships have long been used to: namely, the concept known as "Good Tsar, Bad Boyars."
The way it works is that if you think President Trump is doing something terrible and want him to change course, you must not under any circumstances attack him directly and by name. Instead, you attack the "boyar" within his government who represents the terrible policy (the boyars were the senior aristocrats who served in the highest reaches of the Imperial Russian bureaucracy).
In other words, you never say "Trump is doing something terrible on immigration." Instead, you say "Stephen Miller is plotting against Trump and leading him astray on immigration. It's a betrayal of Trump's covenant with his voters to improve the economy. Therefore the Stephen Miller faction is wrong and treasonous and the faction represented by Secretary of Agriculture Rollins is patriotic and correct."
Matt Yglesias, knowingly or not, has started to employ this concept. But it's useful for the rest of us to know that the concept has a name, it has a long history, and while it's not necessarily something they teach to Ivy League poly sci majors, it seems to work!
This reminds me of the inverse of this that happens in sports: owners love it when the fans boo their representative in the commissioner, because that means they're not directly booing them instead.
I have a pet theory that over time, all arguments take a leftwing posture.
You've seen a lot on the MAGA right make arguments that it's hypocritical for Dems to make the "who's gonna pick our crops" argument because it's inherently exploitative and directionally similar to slavery. I just wish Dems were comfortable saying, actually no, that is not exploitation because these people are choosing to do it freely and it's obviously superior to the alternative.
People are often more concerned with avoiding the grotesque than avoiding actual exploitation. Buying a poor Indian’s kidney is a positive-sum transaction. But Western countries ban it because it feels icky and it puts human scarcity on display in a way people would rather not confront. Same with prostitution, child labor, dangerous jobs. None of these are “exploitative” by your definition — people choose them, and they’re often better than the alternative — but they violate aesthetic or moral taboos we treat as more important than consent.
It's a very good point, but that line of argument seems to lack clear boundaries between what is and is not exploitation.
I don't particularly like my job, but I make six figures as a consultant working from home aligning PowerPoint slides. Am I exploited? I'm only doing this because I feel I need to to afford the life I want. It seems like like my (very fortunate) situation is largely a difference of degree, not a difference of kind, from a worker picking our strawberries.
This is an argument against wage and labor regulations writ large.
Yea, progressives advocated for minimum wage laws, social security, humane working conditions...to say "well its okay to run around these laws for foreigners" seems bad.
yeah I guess it kinda is.
But with sufficiently strong labor markets, wage and labor regulations are largely unnecessary. (Like, it's hard to argue that the minimum wage is an important protection when less than 1% of full time workers make it)
That might be true for laptop workers, but most workers are geographically fenced to a large degree, and the work cannot come to them.
I cannot uproot my family and sell my house and move away from people who might need my support for an extra buck an hour.
And labor conditions are remarkably sticky unless the State gets involved.
Basically, you're ignoring the first half of the TwenCen where we discovered these things and made efforts to fix them.
Labor markets were pretty tight over the last decade or so and most wage gains went to lower-income workers. We didn't institute any major new wage or labor regulations.
Just because you aren't on the particular margin of "most likely to relocate for a wage increase" doesn't mean that employers aren't affected by people who are willing to relocate for a wage increase.
Defining exploitation in a good way is tricky.
I've seen the Marx-influenced definition of exploitation, that all labor is exploited if the employer makes a profit, rather than letting the employee take home the full value of their work product (minus the necessary cost of materials consumed, etc). By this definition, you are exploited, as is almost everyone -- with exceptions, perhaps, for workers who are overpaid or underperform, such that their employer is losing money on them. But this sort of exploitation is not a bad thing -- a worker can be doing a satisfying job for good pay, with the ability to change jobs if they want, while being part of a team that makes high-value products or services. They are "exploited" in the definition I stated here, but it doesn't seem reasonable to say that they are taken advantage of, abused, badly off, etc. As Joan Robinson said, the misery of being exploited by capitalists is nothing compared to the misery of not being exploited at all.
But if the above definition doesn't capture the connotations of exploitation, what is a better way of defining it? I'd say that the connotation-consistent definition needs to limit "exploitation" to situations that are unfair, where the exploited person is suffering for another person's benefit, and where the exploitative arrangement is truly not beneficial for the exploited person. That still passes the buck to some degree -- when is the situation "unfair"? If the exploited person does not benefit -- compared to what alternative?
The Marxist theory of exploitation suggests that the immigrant falafel stand owner is the capitalist class while NFL quarterbacks are the exploited proletariat.
Indeed. In fact, star athletes, top software engineers, etc. are perhaps the most exploited people in the world, in terms of dollars of profit made by their employers.
But as I mentioned, if you define exploitation this way, it is not necessarily a bad thing for the "exploited" worker.
There aren't clear boundaries. Consider two massage parlors staffed by Asian immigrants. One includes rubbing the client's genitals in the service, the other does not and only rubs everywhere else.
What, specifically, is more exploitative about the one that includes the genital touching?
I suspect that if the employees had reasonable alternative opportunities for employment, those in the latter category would flee their present job more quickly than those in the former.
I don't think either group can easily flee their jobs due to immigration status, control of their passports, living circumstances, etc. (And indeed, if someone proposed cleaning up the Asian massage industry generally, without regard to whether the people in the parlors are having sex, I'd favor that.)
But I don't think the rubbing of the genitals is really that relevant to whether they are being exploited. (Put another way, a high end masseuse without immigration or trafficking issues who charges a lot for her services is not being exploited if she provides a "happy ending" as compared to a similarly situated masseuse who does not.)
"...but that line of argument seems to lack clear boundaries between what is and is not exploitation." Selling your first kidney is (probably) not exploitation. \S
Recently on Truth Social that DC Draino guy had a few posts that came thiiiis close to some of Matt's main points above. He called for an entity of some sort that "certifies" businesses that hire zero illegal immigrants (wonder what he thinks of E-Verify).
He also acknowledged that Americans would simply would not work for the low-wages paid to immigrants (good point!). But, then he blamed the farming industry for paying low wages and suggested they should pay their workers more (actually this is pretty progressive).
He failed, however, to acknowledge the effect this would have on food prices etc.
And the fact that in practice, rounding up agricultural workers just leaves crops rotting in fields since the wage you would need to pay Americans to move and do that work is so high that farmers can't be economically viable.
These people can be guest workers. Why on earth would you want to decrease the human capital of the country by guaranteeing citizenship to the descendants of some of the lowest human capital people in the world into perpetuity. Sometimes to us conservatives it feels like Democrats are speed running “turn America into a third world country”.
“…the descendants of some of the lowest human capital people in the world…
Do you believe they’re genetically deficient or something? That their children, properly educated and raised as Americans, would nonetheless be congenitally unable to be productive citizens?
I can't believe I'm agreeing with that total libtard Ken in MIA again.
You have occasional flashes of brilliance.
Here’s the reason why I don’t think the gambit makes sense:
If you’re right, and we’re all blank slates and entirely a product of our environment, then who cares if we import high or low skill immigrants? The result is the same.
If I’m right, and intelligence has at least some sort of genetic component, then importing mass low human capital is an unmitigated disaster and the reverse is a huge boon.
So even if you put 5% probability on me being right, you should oppose the mainstream Dem policy of mass Central American immigration.
The argument is not that there's a "blank slate". The argument is that the differences within nationalities swamp out any difference between nationalities. You'd rather take the smartest 5% of the stupidest nationality than the stupidest 5% of the smartest nationality.
Sure - but right now we’re taking the lowest human capital from poor countries! That is Dem policy whenever they’re in power.
That's not your argument! Your argument is:
A citizen of a country that has a higher math PISA score than the U.S.
AND
that country has higher amount of welfare than the U.S. (PPP adjusted)
Which is an argument to take in a lot of stupid Japanese people and to exclude a bunch of smart Nigerians!
"Made substantial efforts to come to America" is generally a strong filter for the sort of people that make productive Americans.
Is it though? The descendants of Mexican immigrants do worse than other ethnicities on a host of outcomes. People typically make this claim without any proof.
You do know, don’t you, that skill is not conferred by intelligence?
Read some Garett Jones! A country’s outcome is very closely linked to its human capital - and intelligence is a very, very strong product for human capital.
Yes, intelligence is one factor of human capital. But it’s not the only one.
Yes, believe it or not, not everyone is a 1960s style blank-slatist like you. Some of us believe that intelligence is heritable.
The children of the millions of low skill immigrants we decided to turn into permanent citizens have very poor educational and work outcomes. Usually even leftists understand this, but they predictably blame it on racism of course.
> The children of the millions of low skill immigrants we decided to turn into permanent citizens have very poor educational and work outcomes.
Source?
Regardless, I think this idea that you can soft-eugenics your way to an elite society is almost certain to fail due to intermixing as well as mean reversion. I do think we can justifiably select immigrants based on their own skills to meet current labor market needs, which may include both high- and low-skilled jobs as we see fit.
There has also been roughly half a generation of assimilation for the median Latino kid born here. The last several rounds of convergence on social norms, educational attainment, and incomes took longer.
Plenty of people were still bitching about the shifty, lazy Eye-talians in 1935, 10 years after we curtailed the arrival of new immigrants from Italy.
By 1945, rather fewer complaints about their kids.
Had we been listening to the racial supremacists the whole time the country would be under half as populous, immensely less prosperous, and liberalism and democracy globally would be a pipedream.
Smaller populations, sure, but Singapore and UAE have absolutely improved their society substantially by ongoing but strict immigration.
PISA releases stats for performance by immigrant vs native populations and any country that has better scores for native than immigrant (every Western country) is performing a slow suicide ritual.
The thing about all the eugenics/racial supremacy bullshit is that if you project it backward, its explanatory power is near to nil.
Does that indicate that maybe there's something wrong with your model of the world?
Of course not, why should smart folks like you have to engage in empiricism or self-reflection?
[ITS_THE_CHILDREN_WHO_ARE_WRONG.GIF]
I am a descendant of low-skill immigrants. You probably are too.
About 85% of my ancestors came from one of the following three places and times: Ireland and Scotland in 1680-1750, the Upper Rhineland in 1820-50, and Calabria in 1880-1910.
This is entirely typical of white Americans. It doesn't smack of "high-human capital origins," and yet here I am with a masters in a STEM field and a very comfortable six-figure income, most of my family's branches having become middle-class by the 1920's.
Similar story for my family, except it’s France / Germany / England / Scotland / Ireland / Netherlands / Wales. About half were French peasants who emigrated to the Saint Lawrence Valley in New France in the late 1500s / early 1600s, were mostly farmers or lumberjacks for the next couple centuries, then mill workers, and almost entirely PMC after WWII.
Admit that I haven't read the entire thread, but what makes you think people working in low skill jobs are low intelligence? Talk to them and many of them were educated in their home countries. It takes some resources to even make it to the US.
come on, man.
Even among low-skilled immigrants, the process of uprooting your life selects for people with a lot of drive and determination
Not enough to overcome the initial selection of being a poor Central American laborer. Look at PISA results! The stats don’t lie.
yeah I get that, and personally I'm all for screening to try to maximize the human capital of our population.
But conservatives need to realize that's going to mean letting a lot more Indian data engineer immigrants into this country. Outside of, like, Richard Hanania, I never see human capital-focused conservatives support policies like that.
Can someone tell me what is wrong with my napkin math on why the economic impact of ending illegal immigration can’t be that high?
Let’s say:
11 million illegals
2/3s of them work
Their average income is $25k
A citizen or legal immigrant would want 50% more money to do the same work.
So, if all illegal labor became illegal (either because of deportations or because of amnesties and then the newly legal immigrants wanting American-level wages), employers would need to pay an additional $92 billion for labor, which is 0.34% of US GDP.
That’s not nothing, but it doesn’t seem catastrophic either. Of course the costs would be disproportionately borne by a few sectors (agriculture, construction, child care), at least at first. But overall I don’t see how it’s that bad.
Of course all of these numbers are estimates and you could plausibly 2x this result - but I don’t see how you could 10x it.
You talking about moving 7+ million Americans from their current jobs to new jobs. What are we going to do about the jobs they leave?
Also your math is wrong not 50% more but double or triple. The physical work required for agriculture and construction(particularly in states that are expensive and produce a ton of agriculture like California and rely heavily on undocumented in cheap states to build like Texas) would make it so people would absolutely demand 55-60.000 at a bare minimum and as I mention above the capital because of materials and other non-labor costs in addition to doubling or tripling the price of labor would double those costs for consumers so it may not be 10 times more expensive for food and housing but it could it easily be four to six times more expensive and I don't think the average consumer is willing to put up with that.
I think the argument isn't about GDP but costs. The three sectors that you mention would bare the most cost also have also the most effects on people's budgets and daily lives(food, housing and child care) which are all essential for most people(unless you don't have kids) but prices would rise at a level much higher than wages would and the fact those three industries are pretty tight in terms of labor but high in the amount of capital that needs to spent to make them work, would absolutely mean that the prices for the consumer would far outstrip wage gains when about anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of the workforce in those industries are either undocumented and/or foreign born(even if legal are worried about being caught in dragnet if they aren't white looking). This is where the rubber meets the road and concerns about illegal immigration and inflation get to impasse. Because these three industries are so critical to most people and are the ones that bare the cost and in choice between making ending illegal immigration and the actual economic impact when people see prices on housing and food go even higher and could be double what inflation was in 2021-2022 people will go back to the de-facto agreement that those three critical industries absolutely rely on illegal immigration and no one is actual willing to bare the cost that it would actually take to give those jobs to legal immigrants and citizens.
I do get the worry from them. My ideal immigration scenario would be to try not to overly rock the boat in terms of ethnic composition of the country while pulling in top tier human capital from around the world.
That being said, it’s irrelevant. Your position puts you to the right of any and all Dem politicians and actual Dem policy that would be hijacked by the groups. At least it’s a conversation within conservative circles. In actual Dem political circles talking merit based immigration is a sin. (Pelosi famously called it “condescending”).
Yes I agree -- dems don't like talking about this.
My preferred immigration policy is simple, we let basically anyone in who:
1. Has high human capital
2. Will pay more in taxes than they collect in benefits
3. Wants to be an American and identifies with our Western and American values
4. Assimilates to our cultural norms (e.g. we should test not just knowledge of civics but also, like, who won the college football playoff last year)
You pass all 4 points of criteria and take the oath of citizenship, then I think you should be considered just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
Honestly mine is even looser:
You can become an American if you’re:
A citizen of a country that has a higher math PISA score than the U.S.
AND
that country has higher amount of welfare than the U.S. (PPP adjusted)
Looking strictly within our own borders, your model would prioritize dumb people from Massachusetts over geniuses from Kentucky.
A very good piece, but with one big flaw. I disagree strongly in terms of having many immigrants here on permanent work permits (which also, of course, taps into Trump's current obsession with ending automatic citizenship for anyone born here--if your parents are here with work permits, do their children born here automatically become citizens?). If you look at countries like Qatar or even Germany with large numbers of people with permanent work permits who can't vote, and have little incentive to integrate into society, that's a bifurcated country I don't want to live in.
At least in the US we have birthright citizenship. The worst issue in those countries is that they have an extreme second class citizenship status that lasts generations or indefinitely.
Immigration reform will almost certainly need to be bipartisan to pass. Frontline Democrats will know that a partisan immigration reform bill will likely cost them re-election, not to mention the filibuster.
So if that is the price of Republican support, it is likely worth it. Although I don't know if there is anything Dems could offer that could get Republicans on board to improve the status quo.
Another option to get R's on board is to create legal status if immigrants pay a fee, agree to sign away any rights to "welfare" programs, and agree to pay a higher tax to fund social security. Most immigrants would likely agree to that deal, as it would still be better than going back to their home country.
Some place like the UAE, where 88% of the inhabitants are expatriates, doesn't seem like that terrible a place to live. I don't see why we couldn't do something like that in the USA. Imagine if the whole USA was as rich and prosperous as Dubai.
I invite you to compare the GDP per capita of the UAE and the US (or New York City and Dubai, if you prefer)
Can you say more about the economic states of non-citizen workers in those countries? Of course, if you in the UAE, nonvoting is not a big issue, no?
One enduring mystery to me is why immigration restrictionists don’t care more about foreign aid, and spreading prosperity and stability throughout developing countries. It seems so obviously aligned with their interests.
It's not a mystery at all, though: the ven diagram of "restrictionists" and "immoral xenophobes" has a very large overlap.
F- on ideological Turing test.
Sometimes the uncharitable reading is correct, I’m sorry to say.
Apparently it isn’t! (This was a surprise to me, intuitively I think that position makes sense.).
Google is failing me at the moment and trying only show me articles about the effect of immigration on native-born US worker wages but there’s a Vox article from a while back about studies showing that *on current margins* increases in wealth in Central American countries actually positively correlate with increased immigration flows - it turns out that there’s a margin at which more income puts you in the category “still desperately poor relative to the U.S., but now rich enough to pay people smugglers to get you there” that dominates the effect of said income making immigration relatively less desirable.
Paul Collier, a development economist, wrote a book called Exodus which explains this effect in considerable detail. There's essentially a curve where as incomes rise the ability to migrate rises then eventually the willingness to migrate falls away. Such that neither the very poorest or the very richest countries tend to have all that many emigrants. One big pull factor is that once enough people make it to a particular country they establish a diaspora which makes it easier for others to follow as they will find a ready made support network.
The gap in incomes between the richest first world countries and even middling developing world countries is so large that even with many years of 10-15% growth it would take a long time to get to the softer part of the curve. And the US has been growing faster than many countries, even while starting from a much higher base. Demand to live in the first world is essentially unlimited.
I wonder if the increased wealth in Central America is coming from remittances, though? If your relatives who emigrated to the U.S. are making money and sending it home, it might seem more appealing to emigrate yourself.
On the policy maker side, it's same reason Stephen Miller hated the janitors at his school: he's a petty man.
I think the answer that would come most closely to passing an ideological turing test would be that countries have a duty to prioritize their citizens over others, because a nation is fundamentally just the collection of those citizens. And that this applies to both who we let into the country and how we spend our tax revenue.
We are very bad at spreading prosperity and stability in developing countries, and probably should stop trying.
The West is very very good at spreading prosperity through globalisation, and very very bad at spreading it down the barrel of a gun. The key is to do the former more and the latter less.
It turns out some combination of liberalism, democracy, and capitalism is quite successful at making people richer.
I’m surprised to hear this take from you since I feel like enough has been written about PEPFAR in the last few months to convince people it’s been highly effective. Am I reading what you’re saying too broadly?
I have not seen anyone argue that PEPFAR fostered prosperity, only that it was morally urgent and probably improved our image around the globe.
Do you think US-supported efforts have anything to do with the massive drop in global poverty, infant mortality, etc in recent decades?
Realistically? No, not really. The massive drops you describe mostly came from the rapid rise of China and India, with a lesser bump from Latin America beginning to cease it's long history of mis-rule. Globalization was the root cause for the bulk of it. Foreign aid was largely an afterthought, with more impact on diplomacy than on development
And the US had nothing to do with globalization? It seems like we promoted globalization heavily by lowering trade barriers, admitting China to the WTO, and enforcing peaceful shipping lanes by being the dominant naval power.
This part of the discussion was about USAID, not about our impact on the world in general. In addition to the pro-globalization initiatives you describe, I would rank our development and promotion of communications and information technology as even more important drivers of globalization. Between all of that, we've driven the greatest decrease in global poverty the world has ever known, and because of how it was done most of the world (and a lot of our own left) can barely acknowledge it.
Fair point, though you wouldn’t have been able to tell from the protests that came with the dismantling of USAID. I do think that free-trade and offshoring has clearly raised living standards in other countries. However to the extent that offshoring has concentrated in China, I wonder if the opportunity to positively impact Latin America has been reduced compared to what might have been possible otherwise.
This assumes a relationship between "foreign aid" and "spreading prosperity and stability throughout developing countries" that there just isn't all that much evidence for.
I mean PEPFAR has been a godsend (or should I say “was”?).
PEPFAR saves lives, but I see very little sign that it spreads prosperity and even less that it creates stability.
We should be clear-eyed about how much "development of foreign countries such that a meaningfully different number of people would like to leave them and come to the US" we have been able to do.
As a humanitarian intervention, yes. As far as bringing prosperity and stability? No, of course not, and that wasn't it's intent.
It's hard to prove a negative, but I think improving health and well being absolutely brings prosperity eventually. I think very few places are actually Malthusian in any sense in the world right now.
My gut tells me that the Stephen Miller types are immigration restrictionists and foreign aid opponents for the same reason. Their ingroup is American citizens (who, perhaps, look a certain way, talk a certain way, pray a certain way, vote a certain way...) and they don't see why the ingroup should do anything to help anyone else.
I think one should be careful of psychoanalyzing political opponents. I bet 100% even Miller (who I think is an atrocious moron) never thinks of "in groups" and "out groups". That's intellectual sounding language liberals invented in a deliberate attempt to make conservatives sound racist.
I bet the belief, more fairly, is something like this: American citizenship should be a robust concept and the government should be focused on the interests of Americans, including not only their material interests but some sense of preservation of American culture, including its views on work, its religious traditions, and its shared values. Immigration, they think, is bad because it brings in lots of people who haven't been inculcated with all that. Foreign aid is bad because it is not directed towards the interests of Americans.
Normally I'd be with you on this, but Stephen Miller is actually just kind of a nut. I knew people who went to HS with him, and he was basically the same kind of nut back then, or so I was told.
This is basically the Steve Sailer position, which he calls "citizenism." It's intellectually defensible, but there's no doubt he's also racist.
TBC I am not arguing about the definition of "racism". (Miller would meet my definition of a racist.)
I am arguing against "Republicans think like X" and the "X" is a description deliberately chosen by ideologues using clinical language in an attempt to make their opponents sound as bad as possible, rather than an actual fair description of how they think.
It’s not a mystery. That’s how normal people think - not to give money to random strangers.
The answer to almost any “why don’t people who want X support ideologically-opposite but potentially effective policy Y” is “because people are not consistent consequentialists.”
Which is bad — more people should be consequentialalists — but not limited to the Other Team.
You only need to reduce push factors if you can't reduce the pull factors. Hardline restrictionists want an immigration enforcement regime effective (and for a sizeable portion, brutal) enough that the pull factor diminishes. Then from that point it doesn't matter if they still want to leave their home country, they won't be going to the restrictionists country and its probably someone elses problem (you actually see this in places like South Africa and Mexico where there are growing anti-immigration movements due to people just settling for the middle income country).
True, Costa Ricans don’t like the Venezuelans.
This is the same ideology as offering free buses because asking for fares causes people to assault bus drivers. We shouldn’t need to beg and bribe to have the law be followed.
I disagree—I think it’s possible to both enforce the laws and also care about the root causes of crime. If we care about reducing crime, including illegal immigration, we should care not only about enforcement but other potential avenues for reducing it.
Such as?
For illegal immigration? For the US, I think political instability in Latin America and lack of development contribute. Is there more we could do to help these aspects? I would think so. Externalizing enforcement such as through Mexico blocking the flow of migrants is also possible, presumably more so if there is something in it for Mexico via diplomacy, trade deals etc.
Or just keep doing what we’re doing.
https://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/illegal-border-crossings-february-decline-trump
Didn't have time to read all the comments, so someone else probably made this point, but:
This is yet another case of logical inconsistency/trying to eat your cake and have it.
Let's leave aside for now any cultural implications of widespread illegal immigration and the local effects on infrastructure, like housing and schooling. Illegal immigrants are willing to work "under the table," often in crappy conditions (slaughterhouses, crop picking), and for crappy wages, because it's still better than what they would get at home, and they won't report being mistreated by their employers for fear of being sent home.
If these immigrants were legalized, whether as permanent residents or legal temporary workers, they could/would get paid higher and report being mistreated/crappy working conditions. This is a good thing, but it also partly obviates the benefits to American economy of having them here!
This has troubled me for a long time. Basically, our super-wealthy (by world standards) lifestyle depends on the existence of a poor, exploited underclass. Being a bleeding-heart liberal, I don't like this at all, and I don't know what the solution is. Husband and I are well-off, and speaking only for myself, I would be willing to pay more for groceries that came with a sort of "Fair Labor" sticker equivalent of fair trade tea and chocolate, like, "This US-grown produce was grown and harvested by workers who are here legally and who are treated fairly and earn decent wages." But I'm guessing I'm very much in the minority here.
Illegal immigrants are like people driving around DC with fake plates. They are an offense against law abiding citizens and legal immigrants. We need to enforce the law or change it. But this wink and nod shit has to end.
Your analogy would work better if there were a bunch of low-paying but necessary jobs that only drivers with illegal license plates were willing to do.
They are only low paying because there are people willing to work for low pay. If they were deported wages would have to rise just as they did when immigration collapsed during Covid and as a result wages for the bottom quintile surged.
1. How much manual labor have you done in your life? Immigrants are working 12-18 hour shifts on farms, roofing, meatpacking, and other jobs that the huge majority of Americans simply don't want to do. I've heard estimates that the number of illegal immigrants in farms and on construction sites approaches 40% nationally. If they all disappeared overnight, the US would economically collapse- native workers are not stepping in to take those jobs. There's not a critical mass of natives who want to work that hard, frankly
2. If you really raised the wages & thus the costs for industries like commercial farming, that operate on thin margins, food prices would rise substantially and millions of poor Americans would go hungry
*Every* rich country uses cheap migrant labor. You may not like that, but that's countries IRL actually operate. There is no realistic alternative
Yet other first world countries survive with much stricter immigration systems. How is it that they don’t sufffer these parade of horrible?
I mean, by as moderates love to say when lefties praise Europe, by being much poorer and less dynamic than the US.
They don't, your information is wrong. Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan rely heavily on migrant labor in the exact same industries. At least 1 in 4 European farm workers are migrants- and their working conditions are terrible. (1) (2) One study found immigrants make up 67% of Germany's construction workers. (3) 80% of the German meatpacking industry are migrants, working up to 16 hours a day for low wages. (4)
Japan imports migrant agricultural and construction workers. (5) South Korea imported over a million migrants just last year, where they work in 'dirty dangerous and difficult' jobs that young Koreans no longer want to do. (6) They frequently work over 10 hours a day, 28 days a month. (7) South Korea specifically imports migrants for their agriculture, fishing, construction and manufacturing sectors. (8) Taiwan imports over 700k migrant workers for factories, construction, and fishing boats. (9)
1. https://www.oxfam.org/en/press-releases/millions-migrant-farm-workers-exploited-europes-fields-says-oxfam
2. https://www.europarl.europa.eu/RegData/etudes/BRIE/2021/689347/EPRS_BRI(2021)689347_EN.pdf
3. https://iccimmigration.ca/the-growing-role-of-workers-with-immigration-backgrounds-in-germanys-labor-market/
4. http://www.atina.org.rs/en/exploited-workers-europe%E2%80%99s-slaughterhouses
5. https://www.ide.go.jp/library/Japanese/Event/Reports/pdf/20240822_Yamada.pdf?_previewDate_=null&revision=0&viewForce=1
6. https://www.iowapublicradio.org/news-from-npr/2024-07-06/a-deadly-fire-exposes-the-lack-of-protection-for-migrant-workers-in-south-korea
7. https://www.amnesty.org/fr/wp-content/uploads/2021/06/asa250042014en.pdf
8. https://www.npr.org/2021/06/02/1001194446/as-workforce-ages-south-korea-increasingly-depends-on-migrant-labor
9. https://publications.lawschool.cornell.edu/jlpp/2023/11/04/a-story-of-exclusion-foreign-migrant-workers-in-taiwan/
Migrants meaning snuck into Germany? Taiwan importing 700k is entirely different from 700k sneaking in.
We all know that Americans are simply thrilled to pay more for their groceries and restaurant meals!
That’s totally true. Deserve to get it good and hard and all that.
Matt failed to point out that we nearly had what he's arguing for back in the Obama administration. And it wasn't Democrats that kept it from happening, it was the Republicans.
Even now it's not Democratic positions that keep it from happening, but Republicans being against any path to legalization.
In 1986 we found out that amnesty first doesn’t work. Thank goodness the Obama Amnesty didn’t pass.
... because the Republicans killed the enforcement provisions.
The Cheney Bushitler wing supported Joe Biden.
A better term would be legalization. And I'd argue that 1986 did work, but nothing was done to increase legal immigration.
I agree to some extent but not fully. I think if Democrats budged on what amnesty means, it would definitely move the needle. It could be something as simple as they won't be subject to the 10 year ban and allowed to adjust status by applying for a visa/green card. Those who have family here - spouses and kids of US citizens would certainly benefit from this. Legalization with a path to citizenship has been a no go for Republicans. That doesn't imply that other forms of amnesty or legalization are not possible.
We shouldn't use the term amnesty. Some people interpret it as someone "getting away with something".
We need to change happy to glad and puppy to small dog.
This is not 2020. I’m done with word policing.
This isn't policing it's marketing.
Got it. Legalization is not important to me. I’ll accept whatever the bipartisan consensus is.
I think this is all about public disorder; far, far more than anything else.
Whenever there’s a surge in an illegal crossings, people living around the border deal with a humanitarian crisis. Red State governors bussing migrants to big blue cities was the most persuasive political stunt I’ve ever seen.
That chart of people’s attitudes on immigration changing? That’s when the busses showed up in Chicago and NYC, and the media reported extensively on how overwhelming and disruptive it was for them to deal with it. It’s like that in El Paso and Laredo and San Antonio every time there’s a wave and nobody talks about it or cares, but as soon as they experienced the humanitarian crisis themselves blue city attitudes changed.
I think all that the overwhelming majority of Americans want is *orderly* migration. They don’t have any problem with immigrants filling out the bottom of the job spectrum in large numbers. If those people are employed and housed, that’s fine. What they don’t want is families living in the park and begging on the street corner.
I think legal immigration is a good thing, and we should work to increase it. But we have to understand that’s hard work, and we have to do the hard work. We should be doing something like a heartland visa program to distribute immigrants around the country, especially to places that have lost population and have space. We should be doing ESL classes and such to help assimilation. We have to make sure we are not sending waves of people so large they overwhelm the local schools and services in the places they’re going to. We have to fix housing supply so that when people show up the housing market doesn’t spike.
All of those things are doable, and would greatly benefit Americans as well as the immigrants. But it’s a lot of hard work. If the either party made “let’s do this right” their serious policy, I think they could persuade voters that’s better than “lock the border.” But when the democrats shrug at the disorder and scold people for not having more empathy, they shouldn’t be surprised that voters vote against them.