“why Bush and Obama pushed for a comprehensive immigration reform solution.” That should read “Bush, Obama, and Biden…” Biden had a bipartisan bill moving forward until Trump torpedoed it to hold that issue for his campaign.
Your solution doesn't resolve the problem of the disparity in wealth between US and other countries. I believe that disparity has widened over the years. If not, it's because of globalization and remittances.
You’re correct, of course, but your column ignores the inherent racism in Trump’s policy (and in the views of many of his supporters). A lot of what I hear from people who support his immigration policies (including people in my own family, alas) amounts to “brown people are bad and they scare me, so I want them gone.”
Note that I didn’t say that everyone who supports his policy is racist. But I’ve listened to too many people who definitely are. And Trump himself has used horribly derogatory language about immigrants from Mexico and places that he called “shithole countries.” Sounds kinda racist to me. You also are using “open borders person” as a straw man argument against anyone (like me) who opposes what Trump is doing. I support prioritizing immigration enforcement against people who have committed serious crimes here. I also oppose just rounding up all the guys who show up in a Home Depot parking lot in the morning looking for day work.
It is continually weird to me that so many immigration hawks support a "fix" in the form of basically permanent work visas with no chance at citizenship that are one of the main causes of the lack of integration in Europe, while what we've done in the US, while messy has led to far more integration and assimilation (even today - again, things are basically how they've always worked - 1st gen speaks mostly lingua franca, 2nd gen is a mix, 3rd gen is mostly English, and 4th gen has to take classes for the lingua franca) than Europe has been able to pull off.
Obviously, it's not all just that, but I think trying to grab something that definitely hasn't worked just because it means the people you don't want to become citizens will never become citizens is not the great idea immigration hawks think it is.
No, I actually don't think a reactionary right-wing theocratic dictatorship that has 80% of it's population as basically a second-class citizenry at best and a slave class at worst as a nice enough place just because some people post some nice pictures on IG.
Slave class? Really? I have a chiropractor friend who used to live in our neighborhood who moved there and loves it. Have you ever been there? I have. It’s fantastic.
I’d like to see Matt engage with the dangers of having a permanent legal underclass in the US, a development which work permits and other programs of “partial admission” seem likely to trigger.
“Under the table” income in the US includes more than $600 billion in unpaid taxes for 2021, per IRS analysis. That’s not cleaning ladies or lawn mowers or busboys.
Why not? Even if we just limit that to only the low end estimate of undocumented workers, which is like 12 million, that’s only around $50k/yr average, which is well below the median wage. Basic logic fail here.
I was going to blame Fox News coming on the air, but I see that didn't happen until 1996. My best guess is therefore that reporting around California Proposition 187 raised the salience of illegal immigration in the national discourse.
Immigrants should pay a 5% higher tax rate, which is placed into a general fund at the municipal level and paid out to the citizens of the town. Voila, all immigration cultural concerns disappeared 🫥
I said nothing of amnesty, and I’m OK to put a cap on the special tax of $1m per person if Jensen asks, but otherwise I think it’d be really fun to see different communities roll out the red carpet to try and get him to move there!
“Our strategy to revitalize this dying rust belt city? Do whatever it takes to get Jensen Huang to move here! Does he want to be mayor? Every street named after him? A Taiwanese night market on every corner? Do whatever it takes!”
Instead of trying to get photo ops getting arrested, maybe Dems could try and work on an immigration compromise that would be popular with 80% of the electorate:
* Close border permenantly
* End sanctuary cities permenantly
* End welfare medicaid and other social services for illegals
* Deportations of recent (within 4yr) migrants
* Amnesty if you came in as a child
* Amnesty for parents of citizens
* Amnesty with 10+ years of self sufficiency, law abiding etc
Its really not that difficult except they would have to actually cooperate with the elected president of the USA
Last I checked the GOP has a trifecta. I will bet good money that if they put forth a bill with all of the provisions you have in place it will pass the Senate and House with plenty of Dem support. You know very well that Amnesty has been a red line for the GOP since Bush-II and so no GOP house or Senate can ever originate a bill with Amnesty in it. Once you provide Amnesty, there is no need for sanctuary. So what you propose is basically a Democratic bill not a GOP bill.
No Democrat justifies the need for sanctuary on those terms. If you are committed to misunderstanding your opponents arguments, no one can convince you otherwise.
At any rate, the bill you propose will never be put forth by today's GOP so we are wasting our time here.
Thats not arguments its how California and other sanctuaries run. Police departments are unable to work with ICE unless there is a warrant issued. Illegal immigrant drug dealers get caught and get released to reoffend.Thats just the facts. Its a terrible and unpopular policy, except in certain extreme segments of the left.
But if congressional Dems dropped their extreme positions, there could be room for marginal compromise.
There is no need to argue with me. Just get Mike Johnson to put forth the bill with exactly the provisions you laid out and we will see what happens. I bet there is a supermajority behind it. The ball is in your court. Thanks!
Right on. Keep telling the Dems to keep up the hysterics and avoid taking any centrist compromise or 80% positions. Been working great for you thus far .
The left - the AFL-CIO, Bernie Sanders, the progressive caucus - all used to be opposed to low wage under the table exploited labor, until they started being called racist. The rich left wants cheap nannies and housekeepers. And the very far left want borderless socialism.
"Stricter enforcement, including both border security and e-verify and other measures to make it harder for employers to hire workers who are here illegally.
A program of legalization, whereby people who can demonstrate they’ve been here for a while and/or have some substantial links to the community and no criminal record can secure legal status — probably including the payment of fines or other monetary penalties.
A shift in forward-looking legal immigration to make it easier for employers to meet labor market needs and/or to improve the skill ratio of the future flow of immigrants."
I think this is good, but asylum also needs to be addressed.
The 2024 election signaled very clearly that the migration spike under Biden inconvenienced poorer Americans as well as previous waves of immigrants working in low wage sectors.
The popular vote red wave we saw in blue states and border regions where local services were clearly strained indicates at a minimum that the rate of new migration was too high to maintain stability. Of course America is a huge country and can absorb many millions of people if it makes plans to do so but Biden level migrant arrivals were too high to accommodate organically with no such plan in place.
This in turn means that if current enforcement deports roughly 40-50% of the recent migrant wave that could significantly reduce the inconvenience faced by existing lower wage workers. Part of that will be in the form them receiving higher wages and while it will add to CPI inflation, it may workout fine for them on balance.
The upper middle class subscribers to slow-boring were never really impacted either way and we did not foresee the wave of low wage discontent in 2024, so we should not discount that isolated instances of cruelty dramatized in the news could be masking a wave of relief and improved wellbeing among lower wage Americans as they bargain for higher wages and the services they use are freed up.
which in sum, is why immigration reform will more-or-less never happen, and Trump's mass deportation policy will never happen, nor will scaring people to self-deport once he backs off. Trump is going back and forth because it's all a dead end. Personally, I think what will happen is the border crossing swill remain low, the undocumented population will age as the Biden surge gets embedded in the workforce and communities, and life will go on. The politicians will rail but like abortion for 49.5 years, the "best" outcome politically will be rhetoric remains just that. What the civil unrest has made clear in the last two weeks is that not only are mass deportations illogical, they also immediately produce violent conflict as both ICE agents and protestors/resistors come ready for bear. Seems unlikely to last.
The "good" news in all of this is the more Trump waffles on tariffs and immigration, the less he moves the ball on anything else. No doubt a lot lot lot of damage is being done, but his strategy was to move quickly rather than slowly, and as that approach meets inevitable limits, time for the slow approach runs out.
After reading this, I went back to Matt's March piece, "It's Time to Take AI Job Loss Seriously." What feels like it's missing from today's analysis is that piece's prediction of massive unemployment approaching. Today's piece seems to anticipate an economy that operates pretty much as it always has, rather than one heading toward an employment cliff. On some level, assuming the massive job cuts that are coming (and cutbacks in hiring that have already started) are going to result in people being pushed down the job ladder--to lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs, or unemployment--and thus a massive increase in welfare state needs, on some level doesn't it make sense to restrict immigration and encourage self-deportation (logically, not morally), since doing so anticipates reducing the coming pressure on the social safety net?
4. exempt immigrant farm workers from minimum wage laws.
I approve of this "now more than ever" take. Bigly
“why Bush and Obama pushed for a comprehensive immigration reform solution.” That should read “Bush, Obama, and Biden…” Biden had a bipartisan bill moving forward until Trump torpedoed it to hold that issue for his campaign.
Your solution doesn't resolve the problem of the disparity in wealth between US and other countries. I believe that disparity has widened over the years. If not, it's because of globalization and remittances.
You’re correct, of course, but your column ignores the inherent racism in Trump’s policy (and in the views of many of his supporters). A lot of what I hear from people who support his immigration policies (including people in my own family, alas) amounts to “brown people are bad and they scare me, so I want them gone.”
It also misses the ethics of the brain drain from poorer countries.
Sounds like my typical convo with an open borders person.
Me: shifting the supply of low wage workers to the right lowers the market clearing wage.
Them: You racist.
Note that I didn’t say that everyone who supports his policy is racist. But I’ve listened to too many people who definitely are. And Trump himself has used horribly derogatory language about immigrants from Mexico and places that he called “shithole countries.” Sounds kinda racist to me. You also are using “open borders person” as a straw man argument against anyone (like me) who opposes what Trump is doing. I support prioritizing immigration enforcement against people who have committed serious crimes here. I also oppose just rounding up all the guys who show up in a Home Depot parking lot in the morning looking for day work.
It is continually weird to me that so many immigration hawks support a "fix" in the form of basically permanent work visas with no chance at citizenship that are one of the main causes of the lack of integration in Europe, while what we've done in the US, while messy has led to far more integration and assimilation (even today - again, things are basically how they've always worked - 1st gen speaks mostly lingua franca, 2nd gen is a mix, 3rd gen is mostly English, and 4th gen has to take classes for the lingua franca) than Europe has been able to pull off.
Obviously, it's not all just that, but I think trying to grab something that definitely hasn't worked just because it means the people you don't want to become citizens will never become citizens is not the great idea immigration hawks think it is.
Have you ever been to Abu Dhabi? Only 20% of the place are citizens. The rest are non-citizens. Seems like a nice enough place to me.
No, I actually don't think a reactionary right-wing theocratic dictatorship that has 80% of it's population as basically a second-class citizenry at best and a slave class at worst as a nice enough place just because some people post some nice pictures on IG.
Slave class? Really? I have a chiropractor friend who used to live in our neighborhood who moved there and loves it. Have you ever been there? I have. It’s fantastic.
I’d like to see Matt engage with the dangers of having a permanent legal underclass in the US, a development which work permits and other programs of “partial admission” seem likely to trigger.
“Under the table” income in the US includes more than $600 billion in unpaid taxes for 2021, per IRS analysis. That’s not cleaning ladies or lawn mowers or busboys.
Why not? Even if we just limit that to only the low end estimate of undocumented workers, which is like 12 million, that’s only around $50k/yr average, which is well below the median wage. Basic logic fail here.
Probably a dumb question, but what happened to immigration opinions around about 1994 that never really fully recovered?
I was going to blame Fox News coming on the air, but I see that didn't happen until 1996. My best guess is therefore that reporting around California Proposition 187 raised the salience of illegal immigration in the national discourse.
Immigrants should pay a 5% higher tax rate, which is placed into a general fund at the municipal level and paid out to the citizens of the town. Voila, all immigration cultural concerns disappeared 🫥
Only illegal immigrants given amnesty or all immigrants even if they are legal? Should Jensen Huang the immigrant CEO of NVIDIA pay 5% more taxes?
I said nothing of amnesty, and I’m OK to put a cap on the special tax of $1m per person if Jensen asks, but otherwise I think it’d be really fun to see different communities roll out the red carpet to try and get him to move there!
“Our strategy to revitalize this dying rust belt city? Do whatever it takes to get Jensen Huang to move here! Does he want to be mayor? Every street named after him? A Taiwanese night market on every corner? Do whatever it takes!”
Instead of trying to get photo ops getting arrested, maybe Dems could try and work on an immigration compromise that would be popular with 80% of the electorate:
* Close border permenantly
* End sanctuary cities permenantly
* End welfare medicaid and other social services for illegals
* Deportations of recent (within 4yr) migrants
* Amnesty if you came in as a child
* Amnesty for parents of citizens
* Amnesty with 10+ years of self sufficiency, law abiding etc
Its really not that difficult except they would have to actually cooperate with the elected president of the USA
Last I checked the GOP has a trifecta. I will bet good money that if they put forth a bill with all of the provisions you have in place it will pass the Senate and House with plenty of Dem support. You know very well that Amnesty has been a red line for the GOP since Bush-II and so no GOP house or Senate can ever originate a bill with Amnesty in it. Once you provide Amnesty, there is no need for sanctuary. So what you propose is basically a Democratic bill not a GOP bill.
Wrong. There is no amnesty for criminals in any compromise. Cities will no longer be able to release criminal illegals back onto the streets.
No Democrat justifies the need for sanctuary on those terms. If you are committed to misunderstanding your opponents arguments, no one can convince you otherwise.
At any rate, the bill you propose will never be put forth by today's GOP so we are wasting our time here.
Thats not arguments its how California and other sanctuaries run. Police departments are unable to work with ICE unless there is a warrant issued. Illegal immigrant drug dealers get caught and get released to reoffend.Thats just the facts. Its a terrible and unpopular policy, except in certain extreme segments of the left.
But if congressional Dems dropped their extreme positions, there could be room for marginal compromise.
Nah, MAGA people don't compromise.
There is no need to argue with me. Just get Mike Johnson to put forth the bill with exactly the provisions you laid out and we will see what happens. I bet there is a supermajority behind it. The ball is in your court. Thanks!
Right on. Keep telling the Dems to keep up the hysterics and avoid taking any centrist compromise or 80% positions. Been working great for you thus far .
The left - the AFL-CIO, Bernie Sanders, the progressive caucus - all used to be opposed to low wage under the table exploited labor, until they started being called racist. The rich left wants cheap nannies and housekeepers. And the very far left want borderless socialism.
"Stricter enforcement, including both border security and e-verify and other measures to make it harder for employers to hire workers who are here illegally.
A program of legalization, whereby people who can demonstrate they’ve been here for a while and/or have some substantial links to the community and no criminal record can secure legal status — probably including the payment of fines or other monetary penalties.
A shift in forward-looking legal immigration to make it easier for employers to meet labor market needs and/or to improve the skill ratio of the future flow of immigrants."
I think this is good, but asylum also needs to be addressed.
The 2024 election signaled very clearly that the migration spike under Biden inconvenienced poorer Americans as well as previous waves of immigrants working in low wage sectors.
The popular vote red wave we saw in blue states and border regions where local services were clearly strained indicates at a minimum that the rate of new migration was too high to maintain stability. Of course America is a huge country and can absorb many millions of people if it makes plans to do so but Biden level migrant arrivals were too high to accommodate organically with no such plan in place.
This in turn means that if current enforcement deports roughly 40-50% of the recent migrant wave that could significantly reduce the inconvenience faced by existing lower wage workers. Part of that will be in the form them receiving higher wages and while it will add to CPI inflation, it may workout fine for them on balance.
The upper middle class subscribers to slow-boring were never really impacted either way and we did not foresee the wave of low wage discontent in 2024, so we should not discount that isolated instances of cruelty dramatized in the news could be masking a wave of relief and improved wellbeing among lower wage Americans as they bargain for higher wages and the services they use are freed up.
which in sum, is why immigration reform will more-or-less never happen, and Trump's mass deportation policy will never happen, nor will scaring people to self-deport once he backs off. Trump is going back and forth because it's all a dead end. Personally, I think what will happen is the border crossing swill remain low, the undocumented population will age as the Biden surge gets embedded in the workforce and communities, and life will go on. The politicians will rail but like abortion for 49.5 years, the "best" outcome politically will be rhetoric remains just that. What the civil unrest has made clear in the last two weeks is that not only are mass deportations illogical, they also immediately produce violent conflict as both ICE agents and protestors/resistors come ready for bear. Seems unlikely to last.
The "good" news in all of this is the more Trump waffles on tariffs and immigration, the less he moves the ball on anything else. No doubt a lot lot lot of damage is being done, but his strategy was to move quickly rather than slowly, and as that approach meets inevitable limits, time for the slow approach runs out.
After reading this, I went back to Matt's March piece, "It's Time to Take AI Job Loss Seriously." What feels like it's missing from today's analysis is that piece's prediction of massive unemployment approaching. Today's piece seems to anticipate an economy that operates pretty much as it always has, rather than one heading toward an employment cliff. On some level, assuming the massive job cuts that are coming (and cutbacks in hiring that have already started) are going to result in people being pushed down the job ladder--to lower-skilled, lower-paying jobs, or unemployment--and thus a massive increase in welfare state needs, on some level doesn't it make sense to restrict immigration and encourage self-deportation (logically, not morally), since doing so anticipates reducing the coming pressure on the social safety net?
Yes! This is the single best comment in the thread, and I wish it was at the top.