To lean into the advice in yesterday's column, I think the problem here is that "immigration" as a policy issue encompasses more than one issue and the public has different attitudes about different pieces. Donald Trump has radically restricted asylum and refugee admissions and has gotten ~zero political backlash for it (notwithstanding the dubious legality and clear immorality of the policy). But the mass deportation program has sparked lots of backlash and doesn't seem especially popular. This was the problem with the suggestion that Democrats shouldn't make an issue about the Abrego case--if the question is, should Trump defy the courts to deport someone who's lived here a long time and has US citizen family to a torture prison in El Salvador, that terrain doesn't favor Trump.
Right, to repeat a key point in the piece: the blsky folks take this literature as cart Blanche to go back to 2020 decriminalizing border crossing policy. Run that again in 2028 and we’re gonna get JD Vance and deserve it.
- this is all concern trolling by people who hate immigrants (wrong)
- moderating on policy necessarily helps out the right by validating them (wrong--though as the article says, see Starmer for how, if you do this badly, the critique can become right)
- Trump's immigration policies are not inevitably popular, he is subject to thermostatic backlash too and is doing unpopular things (right)
- Dems cannot simply cede the ground on immigration and perpetually try to change the subject to health care (right)
Is that last point really true? Seems like dems could just be quietly in favor of immigration for all the correct reasons, but spend little time taking publicly about it.
Republicans have quietly cutting taxes for the rich for what, 60 years, and their reasons are only really explained and defended in elite circles.
I think the reality is that people care more about immigration than they do about tax cuts. There's a baseline level of race anxiety among white people in the United States, and that's complemented by economic/status anxiety among all voters that just makes them highly sensitive to the idea that there's too much immigration. It's just too difficult to avoid talking about it when it's something that is so emotionally resonant.
Class warfare politics about tax cuts on the rich just feel very out of date and have not really succeeded, not because voters *disagree* (they do agree!) but because people are not really that emotionally invested in the class struggle storyline. Most voters are not struggling in an objective sense, and rich people getting richer does not affect their relative status. They are much more sensitive to the idea of people displacing them at their current level of status and pushing them further down the totem pole.
On race anxiety- I think this is misunderstood by the left and thus just reduced to bigotry. And that is a big part of a core minority. But the larger group on the right is actually more concerned with culture. The problem with immigration in this context isn’t about complexion as much as it is about religion, language, food, clothing. You can see this in evidence because when you get immigrants that fully integrate into the local community there is no larger backlash. In fact this is part of the ice deportation backlash- the concern isn’t for the culturally integrated immigrants but rather for those “other” non-integrated (probably falsely characterized) groups. But it isn’t about jim crow era skin color (again, except for a vocal minority or resurgent racists). In solely opposing the racists though, we ignore the concerns of the larger (and indeed also often bigoted) populace that has deep cultural concerns, ironically ceding ground to the racists now gaining power on the right.
Yes, I think it's really true. When an issue is already salient, trying to evade it looks weak and lets the other side's framing dominate. Republicans are hurt a lot by their stance on tax policy.
Edit. That doesn't mean that you don't try to raise the salience of health care (e.g. by encouraging protests or making newsworthy policy proposals) or that you don't try to lower the salience of immigration (e.g. by trying to address border issues before they get out of hand and being choosy about which issues you decide to *raise* the salience of).
On the taxes point- they still broadly discuss cutting taxes for all, regardless of the full truth or impact of the policies. They hardly hide they are in favor of cutting taxes, and proudly will state it benefits the average hard working American. It might even be true in some narrow sense of tax rates, but will come at the costs of services and debt that have net bad effects.
"...helps out the right by validating them (wrong--though as the article says, see Starmer for how, if you do this badly, the critique can become right)"
In other words, real-world experience tells us the critique has thus far been right. But we'd hope that there's some future hypothetical political movement that can "do better" and prove it wrong. This isn't a great position to build your argument on, especially when the whole world depends on it.
Imagine Biden hadn't imposed asylum restrictions and attempted to pass a Senate bill limiting asylum. And imagine Harris had run instead on decriminalizing border crossing. Do you think Harris would have done better or worse? What's your best guess.
Sorry, there's a syntactic ambiguity in the first sentence. What I'm saying is: in our world, Biden took several executive actions to restrict asylum and negotiated a bill with Senate Republicans to do the same. Both he and Harris trumpeted those steps. Imagine, in a counterfactual world, that Biden does none of this, and instead Dems ran in 2024 on a JHW-friendly platform of robust due process rights for asylum seekers and no criminal penalties for crossing the border. Do you think Harris would have done better or worse? Not asking for certainty, just your best guess
I kind of appreciate the zeal of wanting to convince people of your correct views by boldly saying you are correct and why, but like if the center right can't do it, doubt a left message does the trick delivered by people who probably are already in disagreement with on other issues.
The backlash to Trump seems to suggest that Americans are not opposed to cutting down immigration but deporting people who have been here a long time doesn't seem popular because most people think of them as at least, honorary Americans.
Control borders, admit a limited number of people and put demands on them while also giving them opportunities to succeed and integrate - this is still the best approach. The Democrats could adopt it if they stopped being so queasy about the control and order aspect of the equation.
They can also frame it in more pro-America/patriotic ways, by which I mean highlighting the value of integrating into American society. Most of my immigrant friends mirror these sentiments, and find it bizarre when other immigrants have been here for long periods of time and still can't speak English very well or engage with more traditionally American cultural activities.
To be clear, America is a melting pot and the mix of cultures from around the world is a big part of what makes us great, so I'm not saying that they should advocate people showing up here and wearing cowboy hats and eating hamburgers. But a pro-immigration stance that also puts responsibilities on immigrants to come here and integrate effectively strikes me as one that is more palatable than the framing progressives and democrats have utilized in recent years.
It's the politically calculated approach, not the best approach. The best approach is to simply not give a fuck about securing the border, let the CIA worry about foreign threats, and deport illegals when they're detected by the justice system. Just like double staircase requirements, border control is an economically costly safety panic that yields negligible protection in practice.
I agree that control borders are table stakes but I'd **strongly** prefer Democrats go absolutely wild with H-2A and H-2B visas and then crack the fuck down on business owners that still employee illegals (e.g., Arizona's LAWA). I swear that's the way to thread Matt's immigration moderation needle by (1) expanding immigration while (2) following laws to (3) minimizing abusive hiring practices (i.e., Bernie's OG concern) and finally (4) mapping immigration expansion to the economic advantages by increasing GDP. I would make the biggest deal ever of perp walking the business owners too.
I am curious what you think US law actually is for asylum. Because it is a very, very narrow ground for relief that almost certainly isn’t available to the large populations claiming it.
I am aware of the legal standard for asylum. I would not characterize it as "very, very narrow" but it's true that some asylum claims are weak and ought to be rejected, and the more overwhelmed the system is, the harder it is to expeditiously address and reject those claims, and therefore the greater the incentive is to make them. I stand by saying that categorically rejecting asylum claims without considering their individual merits is both legally dubious and clearly immoral. There were better solutions, like putting more resources into expeditiously processing claims. I understand that the ship has sailed on this and I'm not suggesting (as I think was clear from my comment) that Democrats make this an attack line against Trump.
I don’t think you actually know the standard if you believe “some” asylum claims are weak. Almost all of them from Central or South America fail under an objective application of the law, which doesn’t include any category for people escaping poverty or general crime.
1. You're still ignoring the due process/individual determination issue, as Testing123 points out
2. Plenty of asylum claims from Central or South America do not depend on "poverty" or "general crime"--claims from Venezuela, for example (which have high grant rates, see https://tracreports.org/reports/751/), often involve political persecution since there is a repressive dictatorship there. That's at the core of what asylum is about.
3. You cannot base an asylum claim on "general crime" but gang violence can still predicate a successful asylum claim (if it constitutes persecution based on a protected ground).
4. To go back to the first point: we don't have to do battles of intuitions about this. The whole point is that these claims should have been processed before neutral factfinders in an expeditious manner. I am sure many, likely most, would have failed. But some would have succeeded, and that's the point.
1: You overestimate what the law requires, both in terms of process and what rights asylum seekers receive by statute upon applying for asylum. The fundamental problem with the Biden administration is that it increased incentives to file false claims of asylum. For example, his decision to end "remain in Mexico" was not required by federal law. By deciding that anyone who came to the border and said the word "asylum" would be allowed to stay indefinitely pending a decision, including the right to work pending a decision, Biden assured the system would be swamped with so many false claims that the "indefinite" period to review asylum claims would keep getting longer. It essentially became a backdoor temporary worker visa.
2: Sure, there is some political persecution in some places. The problem is that by creating large incentives for false claims, the system was simply unable to process the valid ones.
3: Gang violence itself is not sufficient. If gangs are generally violent, you don't have an asylum claim. This really illustrates the basic point. Progressives believe everyone who is in a bad place should be able to come here (maybe everyone period, but definitely those in bad places). So they twist themselves into knots to make the square peg fit the round hole, deciding that essentially every situation in a third-world country can be described as persecution based on race, nationality, political views, religion or membership in a particular social group, and definitionally believe every third-world government is unwilling or unable to protect people from persecution. But that is not and has never been the law--just a policy of the Biden administration.
4: Asylum seekers aren't really entitled to determinations before "neutral" fact finders. They get a hearing before an immigration judge who works for the executive branch. The system does not envision or require independent judicial fact finding outside of the executive branch of government.
It sounds like you are mostly interested in talking about stuff I am not interested in talking about (and that was not the subject of my comments). Have a nice day.
This seems oddly pedantic, so I'll respond pedantically to say that "some", by definition, just means an unspecified number ("almost all" and "some" are not, definitionally, incompatible). I think JHW was recognizing the validity of your points while addressing why he thinks that your position doesn't undercut his claims at all, and you've responded by shifting away from the points he's making to attack him on some kind of counting error.
As a lawyer, I am sure you're aware that a claim being insufficient to justify asylum doesn't remove the due process protections for adjudicating if it satisfies the standard or not. Even if 99% of people seeking asylum don't actually qualify, the way to reject those claims is to hear them out and then issue a judgment on the merits denying the request.
1) Language matters, and I do not think it is pedantic to respond to language intended to suggest only a small percentage of asylum claims lacked merit to point out that the opposite is true, and only a small percentage of asylum claims have any merit.
2) The "due process" standard is not especially demanding in this context (in other words, very little process is due). The law does not require much. The executive branch decides claims through its own process, which it controls. The applicable laws place all the burdens on the persons seeking asylum. "Due process" is not a magic spell that renders the government incapable of acting, especially in this context involving people who lack US citizenship presenting themselves at our boarders seeking entry. But more importantly here, due process does not require incentivizing the filing of false claims of asylum, as Biden did.
1) Again, I don't think it was intended to suggest only a small % of asylum claims lacked merit. The precise percentages aren't relevant whatsoever to the point he (or I) was making.
2) This is not disputed. I'm not sure what your point is here. Nobody was arguing the due process claims are more demanding than what you're describing.
As JHW said, you seem intent on arguing points unrelated to what other people are discussing. It's bizarre.
Not the lawyer, but I do think the sort of pedantry here is merited. I think the narrative around asylum in lefty spaces does need to strongly move in the direction of being more skeptical of asylum claims.
When Biden was president the standard narrative in the liberal media around the people crossing the border was that they were generally bona fide asylum seekers. I think basically every NYT article about the border included an interview with a migrant where they expressed some humanitarian claim. But these articles never asked very basic questions about such claims. Is the claim true? Does the claim meet the US asylum standard? Does the person need to come to US specifically to be safe?
I think this narrative has landed Democrats in a bad ideological place where they incorrectly feel that enforcing the border means you're somehow collaborating in a system of worldwide persecution.
I'm going to mirror what JHW said to Stonky and say that you seem to be arguing points that aren't related to what I was saying. I'm not really sure why you think pedantry unrelated to the points being discussed has merit as a rebuttal.
I don't disagree with what you're saying at all actually. It's just not related to what I was saying, or what JHW's points were.
It’s good intellectual hygiene to separate which policies you think are good on the merits and which ones are generally popular. I’ve followed Beauchamp for years and there is a consistent inability or unwillingness to make this distinction.
I really do wonder if this is because some people really can’t think through tradeoffs or if this is just an in-group signaling thing.
The public loves flattery above all else. It's difficult to convincingly flatter someone while holding contempt for their beliefs. Therefore, convincing yourself the public's views are similar to your own is a politically useful delusion.
Uh oh I went at least 9 for 10 there (not sure about the inheritance taxes), I think we are in a bubble. What bubble is it? "Economics-informed pro-growth?"
i mean i think this entire article is based on Matt and SB commenters separating things we like from things that are popular. we're mostly all pro-immigration here and if it were popular would be thrilled to raise immigration levels
>I’ve taken a lot of shit over the past several months for having expressed the view that it was a tactical and strategic error to make a big deal out of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, precisely on salience grounds.
For my money, I think this take is/was complicated by the fact that, in addition to immigration, it raised the salience of Trump's position on due process and rule of law questions. While I'm the first to acknowledge that civil libertarianism is not most Americans' number one priority, I expect that it's broadly popular on the merits. Taking the pro position, particularly for someone like Abrego Garcia who was largely a sympathetic figure, seems like a net win to me. I also think there's at least some daylight between Immigration as it relates to the border and Immigration as it relates to internal policing, and Trump is noticeably stronger on the former than the latter.
I think rule of law questions are probably, on balance, well supported in the abstract even if not a top priority for most people. However I do not think Garcia is sympathetic, outside of maybe getting caught up on the wrong side of an overly blunt exercise in law enforcement. In a lot of ways he epitomizes the type of person whose presence in the country is hard to justify (no skills, no education, apparently roughs up his wife, may or may not be involved in other low level criminal activity). Even a pretty pro immigration policy would never look at someone like this and say he is a good addition to the polity.
Polling shows the removal as pretty unpopular. I think the reason why rule of law stuff doesn't poll super well for Dems, is that it's largely abstract to most Americans. It's become less so in the last 9 months, and that's be coincident with a drop in Trump's popularity on issues that touch it.
To be clear I disagree with the way it went down, and I'm glad the administration ultimately abided by the decisions of the courts, brought him back to the country, and is now following normal lawful processes. I'd like to think that even in these difficult times a majority of Americans think that the administration should follow the law.
That's not the same though as having a lot of sympathy for a day laborer who entered illegally, has managed to stick around on a combination of flimsy legal pretext and an overwhelmed immigration enforcement bureaucracy, and still manages to have multiple encounters with law enforcement. In a lot of ways 'getting right' on immigration involves accepting that individuals like this are not viewed particularly positively, including among lawful immigrants, and aren't worth going to the mat over in the policy arena.
Spoken like someone who's never had a bogus charge thrown at them. That's a significant hardship, and it seems awfully convenient. Why didn't they just charge him before if this wasn't them trying to cover for their fuck up? This seems like a facile attitude when ICE is still trying to deport him.
"Do you view Garcia as sympathetic" is probably a pretty valuable diagnostic question, no matter which side you take on it. If you (the general you, not InMD) think it's cut and dried and obvious to everyone, I think you're deluding yourself.
Sure. There's a core question of whether a person thinks this individual is a good candidate to be legally in the country to begin with. I think he isn't and I also think the case that he is involves a lot of ignoring facts and double standards, particularly around spousal abuse, that I doubt his defenders would accept in any other context. But that's all totally independent of whether the government should be permitted to do something to him a court order clearly says it can't.
I mean, I'm on your side on this one. To the extent I see a complicating factor, it's that there might be ten or thirty million people in this country who are equally unsympathetic--or, to maybe be a little colder, never going to be very contributory. At that point I start wondering about my calibration.
Oh I hear you. My policy preference on all of this is some approximation of where the Obama administration was, and I accept that a deal is going to involve a lot of amnesty for a lot of people who I would not under normal circumstances think merit admission. I can accept that in exchange for a secure and sane immigration policy moving forward. What I'm not going to do is play this game where we get all lovey dovey over people who do things we'd all easily agree are pretty low, were we talking about some white redneck.
Yeah that's a detail that keeps popping up in my head as I try to think "is this guy sympathetic to the broader public".
There are probably a lot of male citizens, an awful lot, who have had similar run ins with the law and perhaps even with violent relationship problems. Add in women with similar problems or husbands / boyfriends / fathers / sons with similar problems and I bet we get to a number well above even thirty million.
Whether those same people would be sympathetic based on those similarities is another separate question, but like you said it's notable that this guy may be "below average" as a contributing system, but he's also not way outside the bell curve or anything.
I don't understand why this matters? I've been in plenty of stores where the owners were jerks. That doesn't mean that a different person who is not quite as much a jerk can walk in and take stuff off the shelves. One is legal and one is not...
He just seems like a typical working class person; his wife supported him. Even if you wouldn’t approve an H1B for him nothing he did justified sending him to CECOT “accidentally.” So he is sympathetic in that sense.
He in fact attracted widespread sympathy, probably more than any other immigrant. People had massive protests for him and there was detectable movement against Trump in the polls. Because his minor issues weren’t different from what lots of Americans are like and nobody thought he got a fair shake.
It's very easy, we just apply the protest standard of evidence when evaluating my (proper, objectively correct) views, and we apply the coldhearted pollster standard of evidence when evaluating your (janky, busted, wrongheaded) views.
LLMs say "widespread" represents "well beyond a simple majority, for example, some may consider 75% or 90% as widespread approval".
There's no way Garcia has "widespread" anything. Just 42% said Garcia should be returned from El Salvador and "Overall, 46% said they approve of the way Trump is handling immigration."
The only "widespread" immigration belief is ~ 75% still favor legal status for children brought illegally to the US. But again ... that's only up to 75% and that's the most sympathetic case.
I grit my teeth to the point of creating little diamonds in my mouth, but I have to admit and accept that "what is the widespread understanding of this mushy phrase" is basically the perfect use case for an LLM.
Does anytime think rule of law rhetoric is unpopular? I get that it doesn’t move the needle much, but the strongest case against rule of law rhetoric is that it isn’t worth the opportunity cost, not that it’s unpopular.
I rather like political stability. I also want to hear politicians support political stability without being safetyists across the board. To me personally, having a liberal order where the is political stability and room for individual dynamism is basically the most important thing, so I like to see nuance on this issue, especially in Democratic primaries.
I feel like an awful lot of crime-adjacent movies & TV pretty explicitly send the message that rule of law is bad? I rewatched Beverly Hills Cop recently and most of the movie hinges on "rule of law is dumb and Axel Foley doesn't let it get in the way of him catching bad guys". I also just watched an few episodes of the TV show Tracker, which has the same basic message.
Wasn't that also Captain America's position in Civil War? That the rule of law was bad and he should be able to do what he wants whenever he wants?
I think people generally send very mixed messages about how much they actually like rule of law in practice.
I think this is one of America's biggest cultural mistakes of the past few decades. The number of times the conspiracy theorist or the rogue who doesn't play by the rules is the hero in movies and pop culture is really problematic IMHO. It's awfully hard to convince an inattentive populace that the bureaucrats and career civil servants who do the hard work of plugging away at difficult problems using the policies and procedures we've put in place as safeguards are the actual heroes rather than the "move fast and break everything" folks that Trump lionizes when almost every single popular story is saying those career civil servants are mindless drones who get in the way of real progress.
Hollywood doesn't have an obligation to prop up and support important institutions in America. But it's focus on doing the opposite with it's framing seems to me to have had real impacts.
There's a Vietnamese movie called Furie which is basically a rip off of Taken. It is decent, especially for a Vietnamese movie. But the interesting (to me) part is that because of government censorship you can't really make a movie that implies the police are incompetent or corrupt.
In an American version of the movie, the hero would go to the cops but they'd be useless or even paid off by the bad guys.
But here, the police are actually good and effective ... They're just half a step behind the righteous mom looking for her daughter. (The police show up to arrest all the bad guys about two seconds after the final fight.)
Considering half of the Republican presidents of my lifetime have been entertainers, a lot of elites are probably kidding themselves by being unwilling to admit how much of the general public's understanding of the world is drawn from movies and TV.
I agree, but also recognize that large numbers of the population and many people here are often frustrated by how overly regulated they think things have become.
I don't discount those concerns. I work in government and am very aware of how slow and plodding things can be. Our system isn't perfect. But it's not the corrupt cesspool or Kafkaesque satirical bureaucracy standing in the way of some kind of heroic utopia that our movies and TV typically portray it as.
It's really interesting seeing this divergence in between you and InMD's take on it below. I had never heard of the guy until this morning, so I just did a quick skim.
My guess is the difference is less about the types of people you each find sympathetic and more about the media where you've heard about him, as each portrayal I've skimmed sketches a very different outline, selectively promoting or omitting different facts.
I mainly just follow the MSM. The difference may be that I read the story instead of just the headline, which will usually be something like 'Maryland husband and father wrongfully deported.' All the pertinent info is included, albeit de-emphasized in normal media.
I very much so agree that your opinion on him personally is going to be highly dependent on what you read or, more importantly for the right, watched/listened to.
I think the broader point is that Matt's expertise is policy and not politics. He was straight-up wrong on the politics of that one, and the correct reaction should be a mea culpa and effort to understand *why* he was wrong (see e.g., his old position on the Iraq war) and/or an effort to stick to policy rather than politics. Failing that, I think readers should factor his bad judgement into their reading of his subsequent takes, like this one.
It's too bad Biden's experiment in appeasing the far left had to come at such a disastrous time to enable the rise of Trumpism. I still don't understand WTF they were thinking when they opened the borders when it was clear that was not popular with the majority. In-your-face liberalism has to go.
I do agree with this nit pick. It’s consensus in rational circles that Biden was too late to start calling asylum claims, but he never opened the border and said come on in.
He did end remain in Mexico, which was effectively a decision to say, "come on in and if you say the word 'asylum' you get to stay for a while and work here." I think the incentives were well known at the time as people had started exploiting the asylum system 2014-2017 as the economy improved in the US.
"Mr. Biden signed 17 executive orders — including six immigration-related directives — shortly after being sworn in on Wednesday as the country's 46th president. The Department of Homeland Security also announced it would implement a 100-day moratorium on deportations for immigrants in the U.S. facing removal, and suspended the Trump administration's policy of requiring non-Mexican asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court hearings. "
Title 42 was still in effect at this point. And Remain-in-Mexico was not some longstanding policy but just something Trump did midway through his first term, so unless you think the border was open under GWB and Barack Obama, that doesn't constitute opening the border.
When Obama was president the asylum loophole was not being exploited. When Trump was president it was and he closed it. Biden reversed it, reopening it, with predictable events.
I'm sure that had the loophole been exploited during the term of the "deporter in chief" he would have closed it too.
There were about 20,000 pending asylum claims in 2012, 188,000 in 2014. It just wasn't much of an issue then, though by the end of the Obama administration people were starting to notice the issue. They jumped to 440,000 by 2016.
There were 998,000 asylum claims pending in 2020. It was up to 3,200,000 by the end of the Biden presidency in 2024.
It’s a little jejune to insist on such precision in political speech when something like 4M illegal immigrants took up residence in the US during the Biden Administration.
If we had an open border there would be no need for executive orders just like there are no executive orders about people who want to move between different states. Enforcing things differently or more loosely is not opening the border.
This is a pedantic point. Allowing anyone that claims asylum free range all over the US is tantamount to an open border to the general public, even if everyone agrees it's not an actual open border.
Not pedantic at all. Open border means you get to work legally and don’t have to worry. No asylum seeker thinks their position is the same as an interstate mover even if they weren’t kicked out.
I’m an engineer, not a lawyer. Watching the crowds swarm over the border, riding on top of freight trains, and coming through Darien Gap was EXACTLY my definition of open borders.
If you are not going pick up how the criticism of the in effect Biden border policy, then there is no way for you to talk about it. The effective policy was too chaotic for many people including me. It was disordered and did not seem in any way to catch up with the inherited disorder of the overall system. Lots of people living in limbo and working in the grey area is not what I want for them or the country. So there was a lot of room to clean up the process.
Can you pause for just a second and consider how ridiculous you would consider such a defense of some of Trump's actions. You sound like the reverse of ICE now saying they are just deporting criminals from the country.
The term is pretty obnoxious because immigrating to the US or even getting a visa from a non-waiver country is objectively pretty difficult. Even the easiest routes like marriage take years and have lots of pitfalls. Trekking across Central America to get here and then having to fight for legalization sounds like it’d be even harder. Most Americans wouldn’t be allowed to immigrate to America. “Open borders” is like saying UC Berkeley has open admissions because it’s not Stanford.
Again cynically. Too little too late. But sure, the Republicans were also cynical. It worked because the public know that Dems are still not serious about border control and only support it if they are forced to.
Curious why do you characterize it as cynical? Personally I think they basically misread the situation and backtracked while getting yelled at from different directions.
Seems like this line of argument always winds up admitting that progressives have a point about the value of performative expression and brand messaging. If the public was only concerned about policy, a cynical calculation should have worked.
I disagree here. The refusal to take up the proposed law by Republicans was incredibly cynical. Biden's attempt to pass a statute that was popular was just how government is supposed to work.
The 'loophole' existed due to a significant amount of subjectivity in interpreting the laws and regulations. The standard for the initial screening for asylum is a credible fear of persecution due to being a member of an oppressed group. When these standards were first developed, what they had in mind for oppressed group was: 'Jew in Nazi controlled Europe' And persecution envisioned was the Holocaust. Over time, it was loosened to the point where the 'persecution' could simply be domestic violence, and the 'oppressed group' could be as broad as: Women. While there may be compassionate reasons to do this in any individual case, it shouldn't be too hard to see how the loosens up the standards to the point that an overwhelming number of people show up, and that's exactly what happened.
It wasn’t immediately unpopular. There was certainly sentiment in favor of reversing many of Trump’s policies, and the fact that some of the border controls were justified as pandemic measures meant they would eventually be lifted when the pandemic was over. Biden clearly went too far in the direction of liberalizing immigration, and now Trump is going way too far in the other direction. But immigration was only one of Biden’s problems, the biggest was probably the inability to respond to public unrest and consider changing direction on pretty much anything.
Someone else pointed out on a previous article that it likely had more to do with his Catholic convictions than left-wing appeasement. It's difficult to abide by a sincere reading of the New Testament and not wind up at asylum maximalism. Most leaders of liturgical denominations seem to arrive at similar immigration views to Biden. Heck, just listen to any Pope.
Frankly, I think this article illustrates how half-baked the entire debate around electoral strategy is. In economics we have an expression: "theory before measurement." Twitter pundits really haven't fleshed out any competing theories of electoral strategy, so we're left with empirical studies based on vague intuitions on one side (the "anti-accommodation" side) and post-hoc rationalization on other (the "pro-accommodation" side).
1. How can anyone take this paper seriously? It's asking "does strategy X work in elections"? Consider:
a) "We assess the effectiveness of appeasement in international relations. Leveraging data from the annexation of the Sudetenland, we conclude that appeasement is ineffective."
b) "Does military aggression work? Using the Vietnam War as an event study, we conclude that it does not: U.S. military action in Vietnam led to no substantial improvement in its position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union."
c) "Using a novel dataset of grandmaster-level chess games, we demonstrate that queen sacrifices are surprisingly effective. We propose that players of all levels could benefit from sacrificing their queen for lower-value pieces more often."
Strategies are equilibrium outcomes. Their effectiveness depends on several attributes of the players. This is a poor candidate for causal analysis, and even having a basic model would tell you that.
2. On the other side, I find Matt's attempted debunking to be underwhelming as well. Of course "accommodation" doesn't increase vote share, because that raises the "salience" of a weak issue! Downplay immigration and pivot to Medicaid. No, not like that, idiot! Now you’re doing the "politics of evasion"!
Anyway, the point is: if you don't have a theory that's fleshed out in any degree of detail, then post-hoc it's always possible to wave away criticisms by bringing up some new consideration. And the people on the accommodation side can then also respond by bringing up some other thing that means that *they're* actually correct, and so on. This is just not a reasonable way to advance our understanding of anything.
My grand theory is that civilization advanced when people expand their circle of concern, from family to clan to tribe to nation to eventually world. This has happened basically everywhere and most of the time so it’s not a utopian fantasy. In the long run we should say and do things that foster this and make it the socially prestigious position.
This has happened frequently throughout history, but if you look through the other end of the telescope, it’s a recipe for ever escalating conflicts between ever larger groups. Cain:Abel < Montagues:Capulets < Serbs:Croats < Germany:France Germany:The World and so on.
This ethnonationalism we worry about is the result of a previous expansion of that circle beyond local material concern. Maybe sometimes it’s a mistake, maybe sometimes it’s good, but I don’t think you can establish it as axiomatically positive.
As others have pointed out, this is a case of you excessively lumping, Matt. Immigration is a broad constellation of issues, and Trump's popularity around border security and shutting down asylum claims are different from rounding up people with no due process and sending them to a detention facility in El Salvador.
That really calls in to question, what this whole popularism project is. Is it to prioritize the issues that matter to you or me? Or is it a slavish devotion to opinion polls, for there own sake. For some of us, Trump rounding people up with no due process isn't a "distraction" to impose tax cuts for rich people. It is the thing. It's creeping authoritarianism is going to have very wide reaching effects. It can break our politics. Some of us don't see it ending with folks with unsympathetic asylum claims.
Yeah I feel like Matt is “yada yada yading” the “Trump is creating his own paramilitary force” point. The Garcia case isn’t really about immigration at all, it’s about whether we can make sure we can stop an aspiring authoritarian from completely flaunting the law.
I also think we’re not giving enough attention to the Orban angle. Namely, we somehow have ignored that the GOP telegraphed their plans for the last four years by literally holding events like CPAC in Hungary. And I think the lesson GOP took is that you don’t need to go full Fascist to retain power permanently. You just need to put your thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways to ensure you never lose elections. And part of that is finding ways is chipping away at due process rights for those the regime deems as the opposition.
Quick shout out and thank you to those who came out for the Slow Boring and Steady Habits happy hour on Monday! It was a great time and a genuine pleasure to meet so many of you. Hoping this isn't the last time we see each other.
Question for today's article - if communicating about moderating on immigration is politically costly, but pivoting on immigration is politically necessary, how do you execute a pivot? Like a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it, what good is intending to pivot during an election if you don't talk about it? You need to communicate SOMETHING to the electorate that indicates you have or intend to move on the issue - do you just wait to be attacked for your old position and respond with "yeah actually we're going to enforce border security and reform the asylum process now"?
I think in American politics, since our parties are so stable, the most effective pivots have come when an outsider is able to clearly say "that generation of leadership was dead wrong on this issue, I am much better on it, and voting for me brings along all the stuff you've always liked about my party plus less of the crap you've hated".
The way I understand it is you stop pushing positions loudly. You stop having speakers end every speech with immigration is a human right or implying that demographic turnover is a positive good.
That's correct but I'm not sure that's what the research talked about today says. I think it was saying that you need to keep the salience of your weaker issues low even if you want to communicate that you e moderated on them.
Correct, that is my interpretation as well. You both moderate on issues and stop talking about it and freeze out political actors who won’t shut up. You do not, in fact, do a Sister Soulja moment.
Letting ICE get built out into the Gestapo or letting the government disappear people into foreign gulags are not immigration issues and it's deranged to treat them as such. Keeping these kind of powers out of Stephen Miller's hands is vastly more substantive than the petty politics of immigration. Matt is doing extremely poor quality lumping.
"it was a tactical and strategic error to make a big deal out of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, precisely on salience grounds."
Not if it is just part of a rule of law stance. It was the abduction/deportation that was objectionable, not the mistaken motivation. And the Rubio deportations likewise. Of course this would require making noise about rescinding the "emergency" posers being abused to set tariffs as well.
Wasn't the deportation objectionable precisely because of the rule of law issue? There was a court order in place explicitly granting him withholding of removal to El Salvador.
And can we refrain from referring to arrests as "abductions"? It comes across as unserious or dishonest, and hence undermines the broader argument.
Your criteria are bogus. And at least one of your factual claims is incorrect: There is no right to remain silent or to have an attorney in immigration cases; in criminal cases no rights need to be read at the moment of arrest; and you have no evidence that ICE is not following the procedures required by law after an immigration detention.
The entire claim has a Boy Who Cried Wolf aspect to it which undermines the credibility of criticisms of the actual violations committed by the Administration.
If the government can throw you in jail based on a “civil” violation that weakens the distinction between civil and criminal and just becomes a way to get around the extra due process requirements for criminal violations. Saying the government shouldn’t be allowed to detain people without following criminal or equivalent procedures, at least on US soil, should be a sensible civil liberties position.
And the Albrego Garcia case is evidence that the government isn’t following legal procedures after arrest. Deporting people to third countries when their own countries are willing to take them also seems illegal—it seems like Trump has been lying about people’s own countries not being willing to take them only to then see things like the prisoner swap between Venezuela and El Salvador that clearly showed Venezuela wanted its own citizens back.
What does this have to do with whether the use of the term, "abduction" is accurate?
>becomes a way to get around the extra due process requirements for criminal violations.
But, the whole reason there are extra due process requirements for criminal violations is because the person in question is subject to criminal sanction.
>And the Albrego Garcia case is evidence that the government isn’t following legal procedures after arrest. Deporting people to third countries when their own countries are willing to take them also seems illegal
Perhaps, but Abrego Garcia is not an example thereof, because:
1. He was initially sent to El Salvador, not to a third country.
2. His relief from removal prevents him from being sent to El Salvador, but not to a third country.
And, to clarify the law: A person subject to removal cannot be sent to a country where he is at risk of torture is granted relief from removal to that country. That is true even if he is a mass murderer. But the law obviously does not prevent the government from deporting immigrant mass murderers to countries where they are not at risk of torture. https://immigrationequality.org/asylum/asylum-manual/immigration-basics-relief-under-cat/
I never said anything about a specific right to an attorney or specific right to remain silent.
I said that when engaging with the legitimate forces of the state as a civilian, they generally tell you what the charge is and they identify themselves and they say the terms of the interaction.
What public good is achieved by having immigration enforcement be done by masked people who don't say the charges?
FYI: I think there's another Matthew who comments a lot here and has the same default Orange icon. The only difference is he spells it with a lower case m: matthew. He also has very distinctly libertarian views.
I guess the point is it could be confusing and you might get mistaken for matthew from time to time.
No, masks and unmarked vehicles do not transform an arrest into an abduction. Police in unmarked vehicles make arrests every day, so obviously that factor is meaningless. More importantly, abductors do not bring people to government facilities, issue them charging documents of some sort, and put their names and locations on publicly accessible databases.
Individuals can and should resist being thrown into unmarked vehicles but masked men with deadly force. That's what makes them abductions. We have the right to defend ourselves and it can only be abridged via due process, meaning proper identification and justifications from the arresting officials.
Most of the videos that I have seen show the agents in vests that say police on them. I'm definitely not a fan of the current process, but would like clarity on how much identification is required?
Uniformed officers serving a warrant should have official agency badges with individual numbers in plain sight, and you know, actual uniforms. Generic tactical gear with "POLICE" is not a uniform. Irregular/Plain Clothes officers should be required to present FBI style photo ID badges with their faces visible for comparison purposes before effectuating an arrest.
You are conflating two things: 1) The right to act in self-defense when a reasonable person in your position would believe he is being abducted; and 2) whether an actual abduction has taken place. Those are completely different questions. "If the defendant's beliefs were reasonable, the danger does not need to have actually existed." https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/calcrim/500/505/
There's no version, under due process, or like 3 other amendments, in which a government action that would cause, "a reasonable person in your position would believe he is being abducted", could be a lawful arrest.
If you are wanting to quibble about the difference between an abduction and an unlawful detention I don't really care. Potato potato. There's no difference from the perspective of the person who has to decide if they'll survive asserting their rights.
This is also creating a situation where bad actors can easily imply they're ICE, abduct people off the street, and rape them. It's already starting to happen.
Minor quibble with this article; Trudeau’s immigration policy was “well-managed” only in a narrow sense compared to whatever Biden thought he was doing. Moreover the population increase concentrated in Toronto and Vancouver has driven a massive housing crisis despite aggressive construction.
Lastly, immigration was a massive weakness for the Liberals that was masked by the Trump tariff debacle and Carney’s excellent positioning on that issue. If the liberals maintained a Trudeau era immigration party it would remain a liability.
If Democrats want to win elections, they should support making English the official language and require that immigrants over age 5 be fluent in English. Pew finds that making English the official language has 72% support and only 27% opposition. And 80% of voters say speaking English is a key part of being “truly American,” including 78% of Asians and 75% of Latinos.
It is hard to feel national solidarity with people you cannot talk to. It stings to lose a job opportunity or a potential client because you only speak English. I even find myself nudging my son to study Spanish for practical reasons when educated Americans have studied Latin for centuries. Moderate voters have little interest in blood-and-soil nationalism — they just want to be able to speak to their fellow Americans. The polling shows this very clearly. Democrats should listen.
There are a lot of practical problems here. Does this mean mandating English in Puerto Rico, Guam,Hawaii, the Indian nations and reservations? Not to mention the historically non-English parts of Louisiana or the American southwest.
I don't think mandating English means legally requiring natural born citizens speak English in their private lives.
I do think it's quite reasonable to require that government signage all be provided in English, government publications all be provided in English, public proceedings be conducted in English, so on and so forth. If Puerto Rico wants bilingual road signs or Louisiana wants to offer French court interpreters, that's fine, they can do that.
EDIT: For PR, I'm very willing for some of these requirements to be rolled in gradually, like on a 30+ year timespan.
I don't see preserving culture as a primary reason to make English the official language. It's extremely useful to have a common language used across all of government. It's good to protect the rights of monoglot English-speakers. And encouraging regional language differences is a bad thing; I really don't want a situation in the US like Canada has.
Note that in my comment I didn't say that other languages should be banned in government. If Houston wants to put up road signs that are trilingual English/Spanish/Vietnamese, it can. If Hawaii wants to offer court translations in Hawaiian, it can.
If we wanted the official language to be English we shouldn't have decided that annexing the northernmost part of the Mexican Empire was a good idea. If a nation of immigrants is to have an official language it should have two, English *and* Spanish. Obviously there'd be regional concentrations just like in Canada, but they make it work more or less.
There has been talk of statehood for Puerto Rico, and there is also the fact that Puerto Ricans are US Citizens. I believe Spanish is still the dominant language on the island, so that may be more relevant than the Mexican thing.
PR seems like the most relevant problem; it's one of the only areas where there are a lot of natural-born US citizens with marginal English skills and they're sympathetic.
I support making English (and only English) the official national language, but rolling some of that in slowly in Puerto Rico.
I suspect this problem is self-correcting, English is just so useful and spreads so well.
If the Mexican Empire wanted Spanish to be the official language of Alta California, Santa Fe, and Tejas forever they shouldn't have annexed lands belonging to Comanche, Karankawa, Puebloan, and Pala language speakers.
I strongly disagree with this. I understand the polling, but I think not having a national language is actually important to our national identity in non-trivial ways. I remember learning as a child that America had no official language and I thought it was the most wonderful thing, and I still do. To become a country where English (or even English and Spanish) are the official languages I think would be to give up what makes this country remarkable and special. And most people do speak English or pretty passable English, and their kids certainly speak English so it’s one of those things that doesn’t really impact a large population.
To me, to concede on this after 250 years would be a remarkable tragedy.
We should be teaching Spanish and English from pre-K on, and start a third language like Latin, French, Chinese, etc in high school. Just get rid of dumb stuff like PE to make room for it
Little kids pick up languages so easily. I 100% want English taught everywhere but giving kids exposure to a different language is cheap and effective. Let them take Latin, let them take Spanish.
(As an elementary school kid I heard this about languages and kept trying to learn French but no older people around me took it seriously. I didn't learn until high school and I can do a decent job reading and writing and speak French and Spanish and maybe even Greek, but I'm often at a loss understanding it spoken.)
And I'll be curious to see how this changes way down the road when the auto translation earpieces that are just emerging now come out. Obviously, we're a far way from it now.
There’s a big world out there, knowing other languages is always going to give people a leg up in their careers. But being a native English speaker is a massive advantage; the vast majority of high-paying jobs in all countries require English proficiency, whereas you don’t need to know Spanish or any other language to get a high-paying job. It seems kind an odd thing to complain about.
Yeah it’s rare, but knowing two languages can lead to nice niche employment. I would venture a guess that Lisa C knows some Spanish as an immigration lawyer in California. Picking up conversational pharmacy Spanish helped me at my job when I worked in Memphis.
For many customer facing jobs, it’s necessary. I had to go to my cellular carrier’s physical store not long ago, and the closest one to me is in an immigrant neighborhood. Everyone else there was being helped in Spanish, so I imagine being bilingual was a prerequisite. I think it’s the same at a lot of bank branches.
Latin is considered a dead language and it’ll remain that way irrespective of whether you make idiotic policy changes around fluency in English as a strict requirement for immigrants. Most non native speakers improve over time once they move here. It would be absolutely insane to reject a top researcher because they don’t speak English well enough.
I agree, but please don’t give them lots of teaching responsibilities until they improve their English! I’m good at deciphering thick accents - I was a hard science major, so accents were the rule not the exception - but man, I had a Chinese statistics teacher with very, very limited English proficiency and I gave up on class attendance.
I think applying the literature on salience is complicated by the issue that Trump is president already. Basically none of the populist right parties discussed here won the election and ended up governing, so the left never faced the question of how to respond to their actions in office.
This is a crucial distinction for two reasons. One is that salience in an election campaign is much different from salience based on actual policies. Events are going to appear on the news regardless of what people say about them. Two, in the US at least, people tend to have views that combine opposition to more immigration with opposition to harsh treatment of immigrants (like Albrego Garcia) that are pretty easy to finesse during a campaign but appear again when governing. Probably if Reform wins there will be similar issues there.
So I don't know that you can conclude that much about how to respond to Trump for this (summary of the) literature. I do think it points to ways the Biden administration significantly errored, though.
Considering that the Bipartisan Border Act from last year was immediately shot down by Trump (presumably because he needed to run on immigration for president), and that the GOP clearly has no interest in solving immigration other than legally dubious deportations, I'm wondering where that leaves the Dems at this point from a policy stance. They reached across the aisle to work with Senator Lankford on a fairly conservative piece of legislation only to see the other side spurn them in bad faith. If that isn't accomodationist enough then I'm scratching my head on where the debate goes from here.
If they'd worked with Lankford on that bill in early 2021, it would probably be law now. Immigration would've been a lower salience issue in 2024 and... who knows. Instead, Biden waited until the latter half of 2023 to pursue the bill. By that point, Democrats were deeply underwater on immigration, Trump had re-established his dominance over Republicans, and everyone was looking ahead to November 2024. I've criticized Trump for torpedoing that bill (which I think got a lot of things right, both electorally and on the merits), but the timing of Biden's pivot from super lenient border policy to centrist compromise had more to do with it's failure (both legislatively and electorally) than did the specifics of the policy. It's hard to get Americans upset about Trump's cynical ploy when Biden implemented an unpopular policy for three years before trying to pivot in an election year. Looking forward, the Lankford bill's positions probably should be a guide to Democrats, but they'll have to express/implement it even when it's NOT polically expedient to gain the public's trust on the issue.
This was the third attempt at immigration reform since 2000 that was effectively killed by the immigration restrictionist wing of the GOP. At some point, saying the bill would have passed in 2021 is a bit like being Charlie Brown with the football.
But in 2021, Democrats held both houses of Congress—the restrictionist wing of the GOP did not have the power to stop it, except of course that Democrats would have never accepted anything like the 2023 bill while they controlled the House.
Immigration an interesting issue in my friend group. The few I know who switched over to Trump consistently point out that they think Trump is a terrible person but dems are just out of touch and ineffective on a few issues. At least one of these folks actually told me after Election Day that he changed his mind last minute and went with Kamala. So these are swing voters in the true sense. One issue that pops up with every one of them is immigration. Over the last few years it is a consistent issue where dems are losing voters in my friend group, the generalizability of which I cannot really know. But I think is big. My dad is a consistent Democrat voter but the one thing he consistently disagrees with democrats on is that they “want to give a free pass” to illegal immigrants.
The timing matters. Trump played election year politics but the same bill had a much better chance of passing in 2022 when Biden decided that Harris should “study” the root causes behind the increase in asylum seekers rather than shut down the border.
"The pro-accommodation side’s favorite case study is Denmark, where the Social Democrats moved to the center on immigration and have been in government for a while."
Watch the Swedish elections in 2026 for another future case study. The Social Democrats will win power back after having moved sharply right on immigration, defying the trend of Social Democratic parties outside of Scandinavia.
I do wonder why Scandinavian center-left parties have been quicker at and more successful in moderating on immigration issues compared to elsewhere. Perhaps because we (I'm Swedish) are formally culturally homogenous countries with liberal social values and the large influx of people with little to no schooling (which means few job opportunities) and extremely conservative social values (support for Sharia laws and incidences of so-called honor killings of young women) has been so jarring that not even center-left people can ignore it. Also we are cultures of conflict avoidance, introversion, quiet and polite behavior in public etc, which frankly cannot survive the meeting of people with the opposite values (I often see young immigrant men on public transport screaming into their mobile phones, while all Swedes around them are fuming inside thinking angry thoughts while showing nothing on their faces due to conflict aversion). A bit like Japan.
Sweden for sure has a much longer history of this being a live issue. Sweden was the largest asylum country in Europe per capita (outside very small countries like Cyprus and Malta) way back in 2010. And they have been politically working through a lot of challenges with multiculturalism dating back to the large number of Bosnian refugees in the 90s.
The Albrego Garcia case involved an immigrant but is not really an immigration case per se, it’s a case about whether the government can just rendition people from American soil to foreign prisons without due process and then pursue malicious prosecution when the person wins their case. If that case had succeeded there would be nothing to stop Trump from “accidentally” sending American citizens who criticize Charlie Kirk to something to CECOT; in fact he did talk about sending American citizens there. So that case should be terrifying to regular Americans too (just like how there are now proposals to let Rubio take away American citizens’ passports for their political speech based on the precedent of revoking visas). It was right for Democrats to raise the salience of that issue even if you want a stricter immigration policy per se.
To lean into the advice in yesterday's column, I think the problem here is that "immigration" as a policy issue encompasses more than one issue and the public has different attitudes about different pieces. Donald Trump has radically restricted asylum and refugee admissions and has gotten ~zero political backlash for it (notwithstanding the dubious legality and clear immorality of the policy). But the mass deportation program has sparked lots of backlash and doesn't seem especially popular. This was the problem with the suggestion that Democrats shouldn't make an issue about the Abrego case--if the question is, should Trump defy the courts to deport someone who's lived here a long time and has US citizen family to a torture prison in El Salvador, that terrain doesn't favor Trump.
Right, to repeat a key point in the piece: the blsky folks take this literature as cart Blanche to go back to 2020 decriminalizing border crossing policy. Run that again in 2028 and we’re gonna get JD Vance and deserve it.
The dominant themes I see on Bluesky are:
- this is all concern trolling by people who hate immigrants (wrong)
- moderating on policy necessarily helps out the right by validating them (wrong--though as the article says, see Starmer for how, if you do this badly, the critique can become right)
- Trump's immigration policies are not inevitably popular, he is subject to thermostatic backlash too and is doing unpopular things (right)
- Dems cannot simply cede the ground on immigration and perpetually try to change the subject to health care (right)
Is that last point really true? Seems like dems could just be quietly in favor of immigration for all the correct reasons, but spend little time taking publicly about it.
Republicans have quietly cutting taxes for the rich for what, 60 years, and their reasons are only really explained and defended in elite circles.
I think the reality is that people care more about immigration than they do about tax cuts. There's a baseline level of race anxiety among white people in the United States, and that's complemented by economic/status anxiety among all voters that just makes them highly sensitive to the idea that there's too much immigration. It's just too difficult to avoid talking about it when it's something that is so emotionally resonant.
Class warfare politics about tax cuts on the rich just feel very out of date and have not really succeeded, not because voters *disagree* (they do agree!) but because people are not really that emotionally invested in the class struggle storyline. Most voters are not struggling in an objective sense, and rich people getting richer does not affect their relative status. They are much more sensitive to the idea of people displacing them at their current level of status and pushing them further down the totem pole.
On race anxiety- I think this is misunderstood by the left and thus just reduced to bigotry. And that is a big part of a core minority. But the larger group on the right is actually more concerned with culture. The problem with immigration in this context isn’t about complexion as much as it is about religion, language, food, clothing. You can see this in evidence because when you get immigrants that fully integrate into the local community there is no larger backlash. In fact this is part of the ice deportation backlash- the concern isn’t for the culturally integrated immigrants but rather for those “other” non-integrated (probably falsely characterized) groups. But it isn’t about jim crow era skin color (again, except for a vocal minority or resurgent racists). In solely opposing the racists though, we ignore the concerns of the larger (and indeed also often bigoted) populace that has deep cultural concerns, ironically ceding ground to the racists now gaining power on the right.
It's not about race for the vast majority of people
It's about culture and the time to assimilate
Yes, I think it's really true. When an issue is already salient, trying to evade it looks weak and lets the other side's framing dominate. Republicans are hurt a lot by their stance on tax policy.
Edit. That doesn't mean that you don't try to raise the salience of health care (e.g. by encouraging protests or making newsworthy policy proposals) or that you don't try to lower the salience of immigration (e.g. by trying to address border issues before they get out of hand and being choosy about which issues you decide to *raise* the salience of).
On the taxes point- they still broadly discuss cutting taxes for all, regardless of the full truth or impact of the policies. They hardly hide they are in favor of cutting taxes, and proudly will state it benefits the average hard working American. It might even be true in some narrow sense of tax rates, but will come at the costs of services and debt that have net bad effects.
"...helps out the right by validating them (wrong--though as the article says, see Starmer for how, if you do this badly, the critique can become right)"
In other words, real-world experience tells us the critique has thus far been right. But we'd hope that there's some future hypothetical political movement that can "do better" and prove it wrong. This isn't a great position to build your argument on, especially when the whole world depends on it.
Imagine Biden hadn't imposed asylum restrictions and attempted to pass a Senate bill limiting asylum. And imagine Harris had run instead on decriminalizing border crossing. Do you think Harris would have done better or worse? What's your best guess.
This is a little too complicated for me to understand. Not being annoying, just don't completely follow.
Sorry, there's a syntactic ambiguity in the first sentence. What I'm saying is: in our world, Biden took several executive actions to restrict asylum and negotiated a bill with Senate Republicans to do the same. Both he and Harris trumpeted those steps. Imagine, in a counterfactual world, that Biden does none of this, and instead Dems ran in 2024 on a JHW-friendly platform of robust due process rights for asylum seekers and no criminal penalties for crossing the border. Do you think Harris would have done better or worse? Not asking for certainty, just your best guess
I kind of appreciate the zeal of wanting to convince people of your correct views by boldly saying you are correct and why, but like if the center right can't do it, doubt a left message does the trick delivered by people who probably are already in disagreement with on other issues.
The backlash to Trump seems to suggest that Americans are not opposed to cutting down immigration but deporting people who have been here a long time doesn't seem popular because most people think of them as at least, honorary Americans.
The electorate may vote for whomever they like. My views will remain my views. I'm not going to prostrate myself before the alter of popular opinion.
Control borders, admit a limited number of people and put demands on them while also giving them opportunities to succeed and integrate - this is still the best approach. The Democrats could adopt it if they stopped being so queasy about the control and order aspect of the equation.
They can also frame it in more pro-America/patriotic ways, by which I mean highlighting the value of integrating into American society. Most of my immigrant friends mirror these sentiments, and find it bizarre when other immigrants have been here for long periods of time and still can't speak English very well or engage with more traditionally American cultural activities.
To be clear, America is a melting pot and the mix of cultures from around the world is a big part of what makes us great, so I'm not saying that they should advocate people showing up here and wearing cowboy hats and eating hamburgers. But a pro-immigration stance that also puts responsibilities on immigrants to come here and integrate effectively strikes me as one that is more palatable than the framing progressives and democrats have utilized in recent years.
It's the politically calculated approach, not the best approach. The best approach is to simply not give a fuck about securing the border, let the CIA worry about foreign threats, and deport illegals when they're detected by the justice system. Just like double staircase requirements, border control is an economically costly safety panic that yields negligible protection in practice.
I agree that control borders are table stakes but I'd **strongly** prefer Democrats go absolutely wild with H-2A and H-2B visas and then crack the fuck down on business owners that still employee illegals (e.g., Arizona's LAWA). I swear that's the way to thread Matt's immigration moderation needle by (1) expanding immigration while (2) following laws to (3) minimizing abusive hiring practices (i.e., Bernie's OG concern) and finally (4) mapping immigration expansion to the economic advantages by increasing GDP. I would make the biggest deal ever of perp walking the business owners too.
I am curious what you think US law actually is for asylum. Because it is a very, very narrow ground for relief that almost certainly isn’t available to the large populations claiming it.
I am aware of the legal standard for asylum. I would not characterize it as "very, very narrow" but it's true that some asylum claims are weak and ought to be rejected, and the more overwhelmed the system is, the harder it is to expeditiously address and reject those claims, and therefore the greater the incentive is to make them. I stand by saying that categorically rejecting asylum claims without considering their individual merits is both legally dubious and clearly immoral. There were better solutions, like putting more resources into expeditiously processing claims. I understand that the ship has sailed on this and I'm not suggesting (as I think was clear from my comment) that Democrats make this an attack line against Trump.
I don’t think you actually know the standard if you believe “some” asylum claims are weak. Almost all of them from Central or South America fail under an objective application of the law, which doesn’t include any category for people escaping poverty or general crime.
1. You're still ignoring the due process/individual determination issue, as Testing123 points out
2. Plenty of asylum claims from Central or South America do not depend on "poverty" or "general crime"--claims from Venezuela, for example (which have high grant rates, see https://tracreports.org/reports/751/), often involve political persecution since there is a repressive dictatorship there. That's at the core of what asylum is about.
3. You cannot base an asylum claim on "general crime" but gang violence can still predicate a successful asylum claim (if it constitutes persecution based on a protected ground).
4. To go back to the first point: we don't have to do battles of intuitions about this. The whole point is that these claims should have been processed before neutral factfinders in an expeditious manner. I am sure many, likely most, would have failed. But some would have succeeded, and that's the point.
1: You overestimate what the law requires, both in terms of process and what rights asylum seekers receive by statute upon applying for asylum. The fundamental problem with the Biden administration is that it increased incentives to file false claims of asylum. For example, his decision to end "remain in Mexico" was not required by federal law. By deciding that anyone who came to the border and said the word "asylum" would be allowed to stay indefinitely pending a decision, including the right to work pending a decision, Biden assured the system would be swamped with so many false claims that the "indefinite" period to review asylum claims would keep getting longer. It essentially became a backdoor temporary worker visa.
2: Sure, there is some political persecution in some places. The problem is that by creating large incentives for false claims, the system was simply unable to process the valid ones.
3: Gang violence itself is not sufficient. If gangs are generally violent, you don't have an asylum claim. This really illustrates the basic point. Progressives believe everyone who is in a bad place should be able to come here (maybe everyone period, but definitely those in bad places). So they twist themselves into knots to make the square peg fit the round hole, deciding that essentially every situation in a third-world country can be described as persecution based on race, nationality, political views, religion or membership in a particular social group, and definitionally believe every third-world government is unwilling or unable to protect people from persecution. But that is not and has never been the law--just a policy of the Biden administration.
4: Asylum seekers aren't really entitled to determinations before "neutral" fact finders. They get a hearing before an immigration judge who works for the executive branch. The system does not envision or require independent judicial fact finding outside of the executive branch of government.
It sounds like you are mostly interested in talking about stuff I am not interested in talking about (and that was not the subject of my comments). Have a nice day.
This seems oddly pedantic, so I'll respond pedantically to say that "some", by definition, just means an unspecified number ("almost all" and "some" are not, definitionally, incompatible). I think JHW was recognizing the validity of your points while addressing why he thinks that your position doesn't undercut his claims at all, and you've responded by shifting away from the points he's making to attack him on some kind of counting error.
As a lawyer, I am sure you're aware that a claim being insufficient to justify asylum doesn't remove the due process protections for adjudicating if it satisfies the standard or not. Even if 99% of people seeking asylum don't actually qualify, the way to reject those claims is to hear them out and then issue a judgment on the merits denying the request.
1) Language matters, and I do not think it is pedantic to respond to language intended to suggest only a small percentage of asylum claims lacked merit to point out that the opposite is true, and only a small percentage of asylum claims have any merit.
2) The "due process" standard is not especially demanding in this context (in other words, very little process is due). The law does not require much. The executive branch decides claims through its own process, which it controls. The applicable laws place all the burdens on the persons seeking asylum. "Due process" is not a magic spell that renders the government incapable of acting, especially in this context involving people who lack US citizenship presenting themselves at our boarders seeking entry. But more importantly here, due process does not require incentivizing the filing of false claims of asylum, as Biden did.
1) Again, I don't think it was intended to suggest only a small % of asylum claims lacked merit. The precise percentages aren't relevant whatsoever to the point he (or I) was making.
2) This is not disputed. I'm not sure what your point is here. Nobody was arguing the due process claims are more demanding than what you're describing.
As JHW said, you seem intent on arguing points unrelated to what other people are discussing. It's bizarre.
Not the lawyer, but I do think the sort of pedantry here is merited. I think the narrative around asylum in lefty spaces does need to strongly move in the direction of being more skeptical of asylum claims.
When Biden was president the standard narrative in the liberal media around the people crossing the border was that they were generally bona fide asylum seekers. I think basically every NYT article about the border included an interview with a migrant where they expressed some humanitarian claim. But these articles never asked very basic questions about such claims. Is the claim true? Does the claim meet the US asylum standard? Does the person need to come to US specifically to be safe?
I think this narrative has landed Democrats in a bad ideological place where they incorrectly feel that enforcing the border means you're somehow collaborating in a system of worldwide persecution.
I'm going to mirror what JHW said to Stonky and say that you seem to be arguing points that aren't related to what I was saying. I'm not really sure why you think pedantry unrelated to the points being discussed has merit as a rebuttal.
I don't disagree with what you're saying at all actually. It's just not related to what I was saying, or what JHW's points were.
It’s good intellectual hygiene to separate which policies you think are good on the merits and which ones are generally popular. I’ve followed Beauchamp for years and there is a consistent inability or unwillingness to make this distinction.
I really do wonder if this is because some people really can’t think through tradeoffs or if this is just an in-group signaling thing.
It's one reason he's never broken out of the Vox farm team.
he writes nonsense about foreign policy with even more reckless abandon.
Is it just him and Dylan Matthews that are the remaining charter members now?
No idea...one of the big benefits of Matt and Ezra leaving was never having to look at Vox again. I probably average 3-5 articles per year.
The public loves flattery above all else. It's difficult to convincingly flatter someone while holding contempt for their beliefs. Therefore, convincing yourself the public's views are similar to your own is a politically useful delusion.
spiderman pointing meme
There are plenty of preferred policies of mine that I think are good on the merits that I think would be hugely unpopular:
--lower corporate taxes
--higher excise taxes on sugar, alcohol, carbon
--massive increases in high skilled immigration
--unfettered free trade with allies
--abolishing the NLRB
--legalizing kidney sales
--land value taxes
--cuts to social security payments (especially to high net worth individuals)
--massively high inheritence taxes
--increased IRS budget for enforcement
Uh oh I went at least 9 for 10 there (not sure about the inheritance taxes), I think we are in a bubble. What bubble is it? "Economics-informed pro-growth?"
i mean i think this entire article is based on Matt and SB commenters separating things we like from things that are popular. we're mostly all pro-immigration here and if it were popular would be thrilled to raise immigration levels
>I’ve taken a lot of shit over the past several months for having expressed the view that it was a tactical and strategic error to make a big deal out of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, precisely on salience grounds.
For my money, I think this take is/was complicated by the fact that, in addition to immigration, it raised the salience of Trump's position on due process and rule of law questions. While I'm the first to acknowledge that civil libertarianism is not most Americans' number one priority, I expect that it's broadly popular on the merits. Taking the pro position, particularly for someone like Abrego Garcia who was largely a sympathetic figure, seems like a net win to me. I also think there's at least some daylight between Immigration as it relates to the border and Immigration as it relates to internal policing, and Trump is noticeably stronger on the former than the latter.
I think rule of law questions are probably, on balance, well supported in the abstract even if not a top priority for most people. However I do not think Garcia is sympathetic, outside of maybe getting caught up on the wrong side of an overly blunt exercise in law enforcement. In a lot of ways he epitomizes the type of person whose presence in the country is hard to justify (no skills, no education, apparently roughs up his wife, may or may not be involved in other low level criminal activity). Even a pretty pro immigration policy would never look at someone like this and say he is a good addition to the polity.
Polling shows the removal as pretty unpopular. I think the reason why rule of law stuff doesn't poll super well for Dems, is that it's largely abstract to most Americans. It's become less so in the last 9 months, and that's be coincident with a drop in Trump's popularity on issues that touch it.
To be clear I disagree with the way it went down, and I'm glad the administration ultimately abided by the decisions of the courts, brought him back to the country, and is now following normal lawful processes. I'd like to think that even in these difficult times a majority of Americans think that the administration should follow the law.
That's not the same though as having a lot of sympathy for a day laborer who entered illegally, has managed to stick around on a combination of flimsy legal pretext and an overwhelmed immigration enforcement bureaucracy, and still manages to have multiple encounters with law enforcement. In a lot of ways 'getting right' on immigration involves accepting that individuals like this are not viewed particularly positively, including among lawful immigrants, and aren't worth going to the mat over in the policy arena.
They're throwing a bogus human trafficking charge at him. They're absolutely not playing this by the book.
Like all charges, whether it's bogus or not is a question for the courts to decide.
Spoken like someone who's never had a bogus charge thrown at them. That's a significant hardship, and it seems awfully convenient. Why didn't they just charge him before if this wasn't them trying to cover for their fuck up? This seems like a facile attitude when ICE is still trying to deport him.
"Do you view Garcia as sympathetic" is probably a pretty valuable diagnostic question, no matter which side you take on it. If you (the general you, not InMD) think it's cut and dried and obvious to everyone, I think you're deluding yourself.
Sure. There's a core question of whether a person thinks this individual is a good candidate to be legally in the country to begin with. I think he isn't and I also think the case that he is involves a lot of ignoring facts and double standards, particularly around spousal abuse, that I doubt his defenders would accept in any other context. But that's all totally independent of whether the government should be permitted to do something to him a court order clearly says it can't.
I mean, I'm on your side on this one. To the extent I see a complicating factor, it's that there might be ten or thirty million people in this country who are equally unsympathetic--or, to maybe be a little colder, never going to be very contributory. At that point I start wondering about my calibration.
Oh I hear you. My policy preference on all of this is some approximation of where the Obama administration was, and I accept that a deal is going to involve a lot of amnesty for a lot of people who I would not under normal circumstances think merit admission. I can accept that in exchange for a secure and sane immigration policy moving forward. What I'm not going to do is play this game where we get all lovey dovey over people who do things we'd all easily agree are pretty low, were we talking about some white redneck.
Yeah that's a detail that keeps popping up in my head as I try to think "is this guy sympathetic to the broader public".
There are probably a lot of male citizens, an awful lot, who have had similar run ins with the law and perhaps even with violent relationship problems. Add in women with similar problems or husbands / boyfriends / fathers / sons with similar problems and I bet we get to a number well above even thirty million.
Whether those same people would be sympathetic based on those similarities is another separate question, but like you said it's notable that this guy may be "below average" as a contributing system, but he's also not way outside the bell curve or anything.
I don't understand why this matters? I've been in plenty of stores where the owners were jerks. That doesn't mean that a different person who is not quite as much a jerk can walk in and take stuff off the shelves. One is legal and one is not...
He just seems like a typical working class person; his wife supported him. Even if you wouldn’t approve an H1B for him nothing he did justified sending him to CECOT “accidentally.” So he is sympathetic in that sense.
See above response to John from Va.
He in fact attracted widespread sympathy, probably more than any other immigrant. People had massive protests for him and there was detectable movement against Trump in the polls. Because his minor issues weren’t different from what lots of Americans are like and nobody thought he got a fair shake.
Widespread isn't the same as unanimous or overwhelming.
There may be a large segment of the public who would view him sympathetically, but there may be a larger segment who don't.
Protests aren't the same thing as polls, so it's hard to say for sure.
It's very easy, we just apply the protest standard of evidence when evaluating my (proper, objectively correct) views, and we apply the coldhearted pollster standard of evidence when evaluating your (janky, busted, wrongheaded) views.
LLMs say "widespread" represents "well beyond a simple majority, for example, some may consider 75% or 90% as widespread approval".
There's no way Garcia has "widespread" anything. Just 42% said Garcia should be returned from El Salvador and "Overall, 46% said they approve of the way Trump is handling immigration."
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/americans-us-bring-back-abrego-garcia-views-mixed/story?id=121123625
The only "widespread" immigration belief is ~ 75% still favor legal status for children brought illegally to the US. But again ... that's only up to 75% and that's the most sympathetic case.
I grit my teeth to the point of creating little diamonds in my mouth, but I have to admit and accept that "what is the widespread understanding of this mushy phrase" is basically the perfect use case for an LLM.
Love how we just accepting conservative propaganda as certifiable fact. Gotta love conservative brain rot.
Does anytime think rule of law rhetoric is unpopular? I get that it doesn’t move the needle much, but the strongest case against rule of law rhetoric is that it isn’t worth the opportunity cost, not that it’s unpopular.
I rather like political stability. I also want to hear politicians support political stability without being safetyists across the board. To me personally, having a liberal order where the is political stability and room for individual dynamism is basically the most important thing, so I like to see nuance on this issue, especially in Democratic primaries.
I feel like an awful lot of crime-adjacent movies & TV pretty explicitly send the message that rule of law is bad? I rewatched Beverly Hills Cop recently and most of the movie hinges on "rule of law is dumb and Axel Foley doesn't let it get in the way of him catching bad guys". I also just watched an few episodes of the TV show Tracker, which has the same basic message.
Wasn't that also Captain America's position in Civil War? That the rule of law was bad and he should be able to do what he wants whenever he wants?
I think people generally send very mixed messages about how much they actually like rule of law in practice.
I think this is one of America's biggest cultural mistakes of the past few decades. The number of times the conspiracy theorist or the rogue who doesn't play by the rules is the hero in movies and pop culture is really problematic IMHO. It's awfully hard to convince an inattentive populace that the bureaucrats and career civil servants who do the hard work of plugging away at difficult problems using the policies and procedures we've put in place as safeguards are the actual heroes rather than the "move fast and break everything" folks that Trump lionizes when almost every single popular story is saying those career civil servants are mindless drones who get in the way of real progress.
Hollywood doesn't have an obligation to prop up and support important institutions in America. But it's focus on doing the opposite with it's framing seems to me to have had real impacts.
There's a Vietnamese movie called Furie which is basically a rip off of Taken. It is decent, especially for a Vietnamese movie. But the interesting (to me) part is that because of government censorship you can't really make a movie that implies the police are incompetent or corrupt.
In an American version of the movie, the hero would go to the cops but they'd be useless or even paid off by the bad guys.
But here, the police are actually good and effective ... They're just half a step behind the righteous mom looking for her daughter. (The police show up to arrest all the bad guys about two seconds after the final fight.)
Considering half of the Republican presidents of my lifetime have been entertainers, a lot of elites are probably kidding themselves by being unwilling to admit how much of the general public's understanding of the world is drawn from movies and TV.
I agree, but also recognize that large numbers of the population and many people here are often frustrated by how overly regulated they think things have become.
I don't discount those concerns. I work in government and am very aware of how slow and plodding things can be. Our system isn't perfect. But it's not the corrupt cesspool or Kafkaesque satirical bureaucracy standing in the way of some kind of heroic utopia that our movies and TV typically portray it as.
People want the rule of law for themselves. Not necessarily for other people, especially "bad guys."
"who was largely a sympathetic figure"
It's really interesting seeing this divergence in between you and InMD's take on it below. I had never heard of the guy until this morning, so I just did a quick skim.
My guess is the difference is less about the types of people you each find sympathetic and more about the media where you've heard about him, as each portrayal I've skimmed sketches a very different outline, selectively promoting or omitting different facts.
I mainly just follow the MSM. The difference may be that I read the story instead of just the headline, which will usually be something like 'Maryland husband and father wrongfully deported.' All the pertinent info is included, albeit de-emphasized in normal media.
Most people are just going to read the headline though, which affects the downstream politics.
I very much so agree that your opinion on him personally is going to be highly dependent on what you read or, more importantly for the right, watched/listened to.
I think the broader point is that Matt's expertise is policy and not politics. He was straight-up wrong on the politics of that one, and the correct reaction should be a mea culpa and effort to understand *why* he was wrong (see e.g., his old position on the Iraq war) and/or an effort to stick to policy rather than politics. Failing that, I think readers should factor his bad judgement into their reading of his subsequent takes, like this one.
It's too bad Biden's experiment in appeasing the far left had to come at such a disastrous time to enable the rise of Trumpism. I still don't understand WTF they were thinking when they opened the borders when it was clear that was not popular with the majority. In-your-face liberalism has to go.
They didn't "open the border". People discovered a loophole in American asylum law and it went viral when Biden was president.
I do agree with this nit pick. It’s consensus in rational circles that Biden was too late to start calling asylum claims, but he never opened the border and said come on in.
He did end remain in Mexico, which was effectively a decision to say, "come on in and if you say the word 'asylum' you get to stay for a while and work here." I think the incentives were well known at the time as people had started exploiting the asylum system 2014-2017 as the economy improved in the US.
This is false
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/biden-immigration-executive-orders-daca-reverse-trump-policies/
"Mr. Biden signed 17 executive orders — including six immigration-related directives — shortly after being sworn in on Wednesday as the country's 46th president. The Department of Homeland Security also announced it would implement a 100-day moratorium on deportations for immigrants in the U.S. facing removal, and suspended the Trump administration's policy of requiring non-Mexican asylum-seekers to wait in Mexico for their U.S. court hearings. "
Title 42 was still in effect at this point. And Remain-in-Mexico was not some longstanding policy but just something Trump did midway through his first term, so unless you think the border was open under GWB and Barack Obama, that doesn't constitute opening the border.
When Obama was president the asylum loophole was not being exploited. When Trump was president it was and he closed it. Biden reversed it, reopening it, with predictable events.
I'm sure that had the loophole been exploited during the term of the "deporter in chief" he would have closed it too.
There were about 20,000 pending asylum claims in 2012, 188,000 in 2014. It just wasn't much of an issue then, though by the end of the Obama administration people were starting to notice the issue. They jumped to 440,000 by 2016.
There were 998,000 asylum claims pending in 2020. It was up to 3,200,000 by the end of the Biden presidency in 2024.
“…that doesn't constitute opening the border”
It’s a little jejune to insist on such precision in political speech when something like 4M illegal immigrants took up residence in the US during the Biden Administration.
If we had an open border there would be no need for executive orders just like there are no executive orders about people who want to move between different states. Enforcing things differently or more loosely is not opening the border.
This is a pedantic point. Allowing anyone that claims asylum free range all over the US is tantamount to an open border to the general public, even if everyone agrees it's not an actual open border.
Not pedantic at all. Open border means you get to work legally and don’t have to worry. No asylum seeker thinks their position is the same as an interstate mover even if they weren’t kicked out.
I’m an engineer, not a lawyer. Watching the crowds swarm over the border, riding on top of freight trains, and coming through Darien Gap was EXACTLY my definition of open borders.
If you are not going pick up how the criticism of the in effect Biden border policy, then there is no way for you to talk about it. The effective policy was too chaotic for many people including me. It was disordered and did not seem in any way to catch up with the inherited disorder of the overall system. Lots of people living in limbo and working in the grey area is not what I want for them or the country. So there was a lot of room to clean up the process.
Can you pause for just a second and consider how ridiculous you would consider such a defense of some of Trump's actions. You sound like the reverse of ICE now saying they are just deporting criminals from the country.
I don't think it is if the point is to advocate for specific policy, it's helpful to describe the real life contrast instead of catchy phrases.
I agree, but also when people say this they're really just saying "much easier than I think it should be to get in".
The term is pretty obnoxious because immigrating to the US or even getting a visa from a non-waiver country is objectively pretty difficult. Even the easiest routes like marriage take years and have lots of pitfalls. Trekking across Central America to get here and then having to fight for legalization sounds like it’d be even harder. Most Americans wouldn’t be allowed to immigrate to America. “Open borders” is like saying UC Berkeley has open admissions because it’s not Stanford.
And he did nothing about it until the last minute for cynical electoral reasons.
I mean they tried to pass a law about too...
Again cynically. Too little too late. But sure, the Republicans were also cynical. It worked because the public know that Dems are still not serious about border control and only support it if they are forced to.
Curious why do you characterize it as cynical? Personally I think they basically misread the situation and backtracked while getting yelled at from different directions.
Seems like this line of argument always winds up admitting that progressives have a point about the value of performative expression and brand messaging. If the public was only concerned about policy, a cynical calculation should have worked.
I disagree here. The refusal to take up the proposed law by Republicans was incredibly cynical. Biden's attempt to pass a statute that was popular was just how government is supposed to work.
It seemed like a pretty serious law to me.
The 'loophole' existed due to a significant amount of subjectivity in interpreting the laws and regulations. The standard for the initial screening for asylum is a credible fear of persecution due to being a member of an oppressed group. When these standards were first developed, what they had in mind for oppressed group was: 'Jew in Nazi controlled Europe' And persecution envisioned was the Holocaust. Over time, it was loosened to the point where the 'persecution' could simply be domestic violence, and the 'oppressed group' could be as broad as: Women. While there may be compassionate reasons to do this in any individual case, it shouldn't be too hard to see how the loosens up the standards to the point that an overwhelming number of people show up, and that's exactly what happened.
Actually it went viral during the Trump admin. He was smart enough to shut it down and Biden was not.
It wasn’t immediately unpopular. There was certainly sentiment in favor of reversing many of Trump’s policies, and the fact that some of the border controls were justified as pandemic measures meant they would eventually be lifted when the pandemic was over. Biden clearly went too far in the direction of liberalizing immigration, and now Trump is going way too far in the other direction. But immigration was only one of Biden’s problems, the biggest was probably the inability to respond to public unrest and consider changing direction on pretty much anything.
Tin eared liberalism does anyway. They knew that was an incredibly unpopular stance and did it anyway. Blows my mind.
Someone else pointed out on a previous article that it likely had more to do with his Catholic convictions than left-wing appeasement. It's difficult to abide by a sincere reading of the New Testament and not wind up at asylum maximalism. Most leaders of liturgical denominations seem to arrive at similar immigration views to Biden. Heck, just listen to any Pope.
The cynical argument is that rising labor shortages led them to loosen the tap rather than let wages rise.
Frankly, I think this article illustrates how half-baked the entire debate around electoral strategy is. In economics we have an expression: "theory before measurement." Twitter pundits really haven't fleshed out any competing theories of electoral strategy, so we're left with empirical studies based on vague intuitions on one side (the "anti-accommodation" side) and post-hoc rationalization on other (the "pro-accommodation" side).
1. How can anyone take this paper seriously? It's asking "does strategy X work in elections"? Consider:
a) "We assess the effectiveness of appeasement in international relations. Leveraging data from the annexation of the Sudetenland, we conclude that appeasement is ineffective."
b) "Does military aggression work? Using the Vietnam War as an event study, we conclude that it does not: U.S. military action in Vietnam led to no substantial improvement in its position vis-a-vis the Soviet Union."
c) "Using a novel dataset of grandmaster-level chess games, we demonstrate that queen sacrifices are surprisingly effective. We propose that players of all levels could benefit from sacrificing their queen for lower-value pieces more often."
Strategies are equilibrium outcomes. Their effectiveness depends on several attributes of the players. This is a poor candidate for causal analysis, and even having a basic model would tell you that.
2. On the other side, I find Matt's attempted debunking to be underwhelming as well. Of course "accommodation" doesn't increase vote share, because that raises the "salience" of a weak issue! Downplay immigration and pivot to Medicaid. No, not like that, idiot! Now you’re doing the "politics of evasion"!
https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-new-politics-of-evasion
Anyway, the point is: if you don't have a theory that's fleshed out in any degree of detail, then post-hoc it's always possible to wave away criticisms by bringing up some new consideration. And the people on the accommodation side can then also respond by bringing up some other thing that means that *they're* actually correct, and so on. This is just not a reasonable way to advance our understanding of anything.
My grand theory is that civilization advanced when people expand their circle of concern, from family to clan to tribe to nation to eventually world. This has happened basically everywhere and most of the time so it’s not a utopian fantasy. In the long run we should say and do things that foster this and make it the socially prestigious position.
This has happened frequently throughout history, but if you look through the other end of the telescope, it’s a recipe for ever escalating conflicts between ever larger groups. Cain:Abel < Montagues:Capulets < Serbs:Croats < Germany:France Germany:The World and so on.
This ethnonationalism we worry about is the result of a previous expansion of that circle beyond local material concern. Maybe sometimes it’s a mistake, maybe sometimes it’s good, but I don’t think you can establish it as axiomatically positive.
Amateur players sacrifice their queen plenty as it is. Sure, most such cases are inadvertent sacrifices ..
As others have pointed out, this is a case of you excessively lumping, Matt. Immigration is a broad constellation of issues, and Trump's popularity around border security and shutting down asylum claims are different from rounding up people with no due process and sending them to a detention facility in El Salvador.
That really calls in to question, what this whole popularism project is. Is it to prioritize the issues that matter to you or me? Or is it a slavish devotion to opinion polls, for there own sake. For some of us, Trump rounding people up with no due process isn't a "distraction" to impose tax cuts for rich people. It is the thing. It's creeping authoritarianism is going to have very wide reaching effects. It can break our politics. Some of us don't see it ending with folks with unsympathetic asylum claims.
Yeah I feel like Matt is “yada yada yading” the “Trump is creating his own paramilitary force” point. The Garcia case isn’t really about immigration at all, it’s about whether we can make sure we can stop an aspiring authoritarian from completely flaunting the law.
I also think we’re not giving enough attention to the Orban angle. Namely, we somehow have ignored that the GOP telegraphed their plans for the last four years by literally holding events like CPAC in Hungary. And I think the lesson GOP took is that you don’t need to go full Fascist to retain power permanently. You just need to put your thumb on the scale in all sorts of ways to ensure you never lose elections. And part of that is finding ways is chipping away at due process rights for those the regime deems as the opposition.
Quick shout out and thank you to those who came out for the Slow Boring and Steady Habits happy hour on Monday! It was a great time and a genuine pleasure to meet so many of you. Hoping this isn't the last time we see each other.
Question for today's article - if communicating about moderating on immigration is politically costly, but pivoting on immigration is politically necessary, how do you execute a pivot? Like a tree falling in a forest with no one to hear it, what good is intending to pivot during an election if you don't talk about it? You need to communicate SOMETHING to the electorate that indicates you have or intend to move on the issue - do you just wait to be attacked for your old position and respond with "yeah actually we're going to enforce border security and reform the asylum process now"?
I think in American politics, since our parties are so stable, the most effective pivots have come when an outsider is able to clearly say "that generation of leadership was dead wrong on this issue, I am much better on it, and voting for me brings along all the stuff you've always liked about my party plus less of the crap you've hated".
I'm just a little confused on the take away here.
The way I understand it is you stop pushing positions loudly. You stop having speakers end every speech with immigration is a human right or implying that demographic turnover is a positive good.
That's correct but I'm not sure that's what the research talked about today says. I think it was saying that you need to keep the salience of your weaker issues low even if you want to communicate that you e moderated on them.
Correct, that is my interpretation as well. You both moderate on issues and stop talking about it and freeze out political actors who won’t shut up. You do not, in fact, do a Sister Soulja moment.
Letting ICE get built out into the Gestapo or letting the government disappear people into foreign gulags are not immigration issues and it's deranged to treat them as such. Keeping these kind of powers out of Stephen Miller's hands is vastly more substantive than the petty politics of immigration. Matt is doing extremely poor quality lumping.
"it was a tactical and strategic error to make a big deal out of the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case, precisely on salience grounds."
Not if it is just part of a rule of law stance. It was the abduction/deportation that was objectionable, not the mistaken motivation. And the Rubio deportations likewise. Of course this would require making noise about rescinding the "emergency" posers being abused to set tariffs as well.
Wasn't the deportation objectionable precisely because of the rule of law issue? There was a court order in place explicitly granting him withholding of removal to El Salvador.
And can we refrain from referring to arrests as "abductions"? It comes across as unserious or dishonest, and hence undermines the broader argument.
When you are arrested, the cops wear uniforms, have badge numbers, and read you your rights.
When you are abducted, the perpetrators wear masks, don't say the reason, don't identify themselves, and shove you into a van..
So which one is ICE doing right now?
Your criteria are bogus. And at least one of your factual claims is incorrect: There is no right to remain silent or to have an attorney in immigration cases; in criminal cases no rights need to be read at the moment of arrest; and you have no evidence that ICE is not following the procedures required by law after an immigration detention.
The entire claim has a Boy Who Cried Wolf aspect to it which undermines the credibility of criticisms of the actual violations committed by the Administration.
If the government can throw you in jail based on a “civil” violation that weakens the distinction between civil and criminal and just becomes a way to get around the extra due process requirements for criminal violations. Saying the government shouldn’t be allowed to detain people without following criminal or equivalent procedures, at least on US soil, should be a sensible civil liberties position.
And the Albrego Garcia case is evidence that the government isn’t following legal procedures after arrest. Deporting people to third countries when their own countries are willing to take them also seems illegal—it seems like Trump has been lying about people’s own countries not being willing to take them only to then see things like the prisoner swap between Venezuela and El Salvador that clearly showed Venezuela wanted its own citizens back.
What does this have to do with whether the use of the term, "abduction" is accurate?
>becomes a way to get around the extra due process requirements for criminal violations.
But, the whole reason there are extra due process requirements for criminal violations is because the person in question is subject to criminal sanction.
>And the Albrego Garcia case is evidence that the government isn’t following legal procedures after arrest. Deporting people to third countries when their own countries are willing to take them also seems illegal
Perhaps, but Abrego Garcia is not an example thereof, because:
1. He was initially sent to El Salvador, not to a third country.
2. His relief from removal prevents him from being sent to El Salvador, but not to a third country.
And, to clarify the law: A person subject to removal cannot be sent to a country where he is at risk of torture is granted relief from removal to that country. That is true even if he is a mass murderer. But the law obviously does not prevent the government from deporting immigrant mass murderers to countries where they are not at risk of torture. https://immigrationequality.org/asylum/asylum-manual/immigration-basics-relief-under-cat/
I never said anything about a specific right to an attorney or specific right to remain silent.
I said that when engaging with the legitimate forces of the state as a civilian, they generally tell you what the charge is and they identify themselves and they say the terms of the interaction.
What public good is achieved by having immigration enforcement be done by masked people who don't say the charges?
>What public good is achieved by having immigration enforcement be done by masked people who don't say the charges?
None. But that is a completely different claim.
The claim was that ICE is acting more like criminal abductors than public defenders in a democratic state.
FYI: I think there's another Matthew who comments a lot here and has the same default Orange icon. The only difference is he spells it with a lower case m: matthew. He also has very distinctly libertarian views.
I guess the point is it could be confusing and you might get mistaken for matthew from time to time.
That mathew, as can be seen in this comment, also spells it with only one T. And I don't think he's libertarian at all.
I dunno about the specifics for Garcia, but "masked guys jump out of an unmarked van" is an abduction and this has happened.
No, masks and unmarked vehicles do not transform an arrest into an abduction. Police in unmarked vehicles make arrests every day, so obviously that factor is meaningless. More importantly, abductors do not bring people to government facilities, issue them charging documents of some sort, and put their names and locations on publicly accessible databases.
Individuals can and should resist being thrown into unmarked vehicles but masked men with deadly force. That's what makes them abductions. We have the right to defend ourselves and it can only be abridged via due process, meaning proper identification and justifications from the arresting officials.
Most of the videos that I have seen show the agents in vests that say police on them. I'm definitely not a fan of the current process, but would like clarity on how much identification is required?
Uniformed officers serving a warrant should have official agency badges with individual numbers in plain sight, and you know, actual uniforms. Generic tactical gear with "POLICE" is not a uniform. Irregular/Plain Clothes officers should be required to present FBI style photo ID badges with their faces visible for comparison purposes before effectuating an arrest.
You are conflating two things: 1) The right to act in self-defense when a reasonable person in your position would believe he is being abducted; and 2) whether an actual abduction has taken place. Those are completely different questions. "If the defendant's beliefs were reasonable, the danger does not need to have actually existed." https://www.justia.com/criminal/docs/calcrim/500/505/
There's no version, under due process, or like 3 other amendments, in which a government action that would cause, "a reasonable person in your position would believe he is being abducted", could be a lawful arrest.
If you are wanting to quibble about the difference between an abduction and an unlawful detention I don't really care. Potato potato. There's no difference from the perspective of the person who has to decide if they'll survive asserting their rights.
This is also creating a situation where bad actors can easily imply they're ICE, abduct people off the street, and rape them. It's already starting to happen.
Minor quibble with this article; Trudeau’s immigration policy was “well-managed” only in a narrow sense compared to whatever Biden thought he was doing. Moreover the population increase concentrated in Toronto and Vancouver has driven a massive housing crisis despite aggressive construction.
Lastly, immigration was a massive weakness for the Liberals that was masked by the Trump tariff debacle and Carney’s excellent positioning on that issue. If the liberals maintained a Trudeau era immigration party it would remain a liability.
There is not aggressive construction in Toronto and Vancouver. NIMBYs are hard at work in Canada fighting zoning changes and new construction too.
https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/media-newsroom/news-releases/2025/slowdown-toronto-vancouver-leave-national-housing-starts-flat-first-half-2025
Toronto's housing construction rate is lowest since 1996.
If Democrats want to win elections, they should support making English the official language and require that immigrants over age 5 be fluent in English. Pew finds that making English the official language has 72% support and only 27% opposition. And 80% of voters say speaking English is a key part of being “truly American,” including 78% of Asians and 75% of Latinos.
It is hard to feel national solidarity with people you cannot talk to. It stings to lose a job opportunity or a potential client because you only speak English. I even find myself nudging my son to study Spanish for practical reasons when educated Americans have studied Latin for centuries. Moderate voters have little interest in blood-and-soil nationalism — they just want to be able to speak to their fellow Americans. The polling shows this very clearly. Democrats should listen.
There are a lot of practical problems here. Does this mean mandating English in Puerto Rico, Guam,Hawaii, the Indian nations and reservations? Not to mention the historically non-English parts of Louisiana or the American southwest.
I don't think mandating English means legally requiring natural born citizens speak English in their private lives.
I do think it's quite reasonable to require that government signage all be provided in English, government publications all be provided in English, public proceedings be conducted in English, so on and so forth. If Puerto Rico wants bilingual road signs or Louisiana wants to offer French court interpreters, that's fine, they can do that.
EDIT: For PR, I'm very willing for some of these requirements to be rolled in gradually, like on a 30+ year timespan.
I would be comfortable making Spanish the official language in Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico statehood is problematic because it’s culturally so different
Why sound people can feel good about themselves for “preserving” American culture. Nah I’m good on meaningless symbolism to appease nationalists.
I don't see preserving culture as a primary reason to make English the official language. It's extremely useful to have a common language used across all of government. It's good to protect the rights of monoglot English-speakers. And encouraging regional language differences is a bad thing; I really don't want a situation in the US like Canada has.
Note that in my comment I didn't say that other languages should be banned in government. If Houston wants to put up road signs that are trilingual English/Spanish/Vietnamese, it can. If Hawaii wants to offer court translations in Hawaiian, it can.
If we wanted the official language to be English we shouldn't have decided that annexing the northernmost part of the Mexican Empire was a good idea. If a nation of immigrants is to have an official language it should have two, English *and* Spanish. Obviously there'd be regional concentrations just like in Canada, but they make it work more or less.
The concept of any sort of accommodation for incumbent Spanish speakers due to the Mexican Cession has long been irrelevant.
There has been talk of statehood for Puerto Rico, and there is also the fact that Puerto Ricans are US Citizens. I believe Spanish is still the dominant language on the island, so that may be more relevant than the Mexican thing.
PR seems like the most relevant problem; it's one of the only areas where there are a lot of natural-born US citizens with marginal English skills and they're sympathetic.
I support making English (and only English) the official national language, but rolling some of that in slowly in Puerto Rico.
I suspect this problem is self-correcting, English is just so useful and spreads so well.
Over my dead body.
We're just undoing the colonialist Spanish attempts to wipe out the native language. We should allow them to keep speaking Nahuatl.
If the Mexican Empire wanted Spanish to be the official language of Alta California, Santa Fe, and Tejas forever they shouldn't have annexed lands belonging to Comanche, Karankawa, Puebloan, and Pala language speakers.
I strongly disagree with this. I understand the polling, but I think not having a national language is actually important to our national identity in non-trivial ways. I remember learning as a child that America had no official language and I thought it was the most wonderful thing, and I still do. To become a country where English (or even English and Spanish) are the official languages I think would be to give up what makes this country remarkable and special. And most people do speak English or pretty passable English, and their kids certainly speak English so it’s one of those things that doesn’t really impact a large population.
To me, to concede on this after 250 years would be a remarkable tragedy.
My mom made me take Spanish instead of Latin and I still resent it. Let the boy take Latin. He can pick Spanish up later.
We should be teaching Spanish and English from pre-K on, and start a third language like Latin, French, Chinese, etc in high school. Just get rid of dumb stuff like PE to make room for it
Little kids pick up languages so easily. I 100% want English taught everywhere but giving kids exposure to a different language is cheap and effective. Let them take Latin, let them take Spanish.
(As an elementary school kid I heard this about languages and kept trying to learn French but no older people around me took it seriously. I didn't learn until high school and I can do a decent job reading and writing and speak French and Spanish and maybe even Greek, but I'm often at a loss understanding it spoken.)
How useful is Latin these days?
And I'll be curious to see how this changes way down the road when the auto translation earpieces that are just emerging now come out. Obviously, we're a far way from it now.
It’s useless. It’s much more useful to learn Spanish or English. The purpose of language is to communicate, not show off.
¿Por qué no los dos?
I honestly don't know how people get through med school or law school without it.
I wound up taking Latin and Greek in college and I find it tremendously helpful for reading legal and medical stuff.
You know that there are doctors outside Europe right?
There’s a big world out there, knowing other languages is always going to give people a leg up in their careers. But being a native English speaker is a massive advantage; the vast majority of high-paying jobs in all countries require English proficiency, whereas you don’t need to know Spanish or any other language to get a high-paying job. It seems kind an odd thing to complain about.
Yeah it’s rare, but knowing two languages can lead to nice niche employment. I would venture a guess that Lisa C knows some Spanish as an immigration lawyer in California. Picking up conversational pharmacy Spanish helped me at my job when I worked in Memphis.
For many customer facing jobs, it’s necessary. I had to go to my cellular carrier’s physical store not long ago, and the closest one to me is in an immigrant neighborhood. Everyone else there was being helped in Spanish, so I imagine being bilingual was a prerequisite. I think it’s the same at a lot of bank branches.
Latin is considered a dead language and it’ll remain that way irrespective of whether you make idiotic policy changes around fluency in English as a strict requirement for immigrants. Most non native speakers improve over time once they move here. It would be absolutely insane to reject a top researcher because they don’t speak English well enough.
I agree, but please don’t give them lots of teaching responsibilities until they improve their English! I’m good at deciphering thick accents - I was a hard science major, so accents were the rule not the exception - but man, I had a Chinese statistics teacher with very, very limited English proficiency and I gave up on class attendance.
I think applying the literature on salience is complicated by the issue that Trump is president already. Basically none of the populist right parties discussed here won the election and ended up governing, so the left never faced the question of how to respond to their actions in office.
This is a crucial distinction for two reasons. One is that salience in an election campaign is much different from salience based on actual policies. Events are going to appear on the news regardless of what people say about them. Two, in the US at least, people tend to have views that combine opposition to more immigration with opposition to harsh treatment of immigrants (like Albrego Garcia) that are pretty easy to finesse during a campaign but appear again when governing. Probably if Reform wins there will be similar issues there.
So I don't know that you can conclude that much about how to respond to Trump for this (summary of the) literature. I do think it points to ways the Biden administration significantly errored, though.
Considering that the Bipartisan Border Act from last year was immediately shot down by Trump (presumably because he needed to run on immigration for president), and that the GOP clearly has no interest in solving immigration other than legally dubious deportations, I'm wondering where that leaves the Dems at this point from a policy stance. They reached across the aisle to work with Senator Lankford on a fairly conservative piece of legislation only to see the other side spurn them in bad faith. If that isn't accomodationist enough then I'm scratching my head on where the debate goes from here.
If they'd worked with Lankford on that bill in early 2021, it would probably be law now. Immigration would've been a lower salience issue in 2024 and... who knows. Instead, Biden waited until the latter half of 2023 to pursue the bill. By that point, Democrats were deeply underwater on immigration, Trump had re-established his dominance over Republicans, and everyone was looking ahead to November 2024. I've criticized Trump for torpedoing that bill (which I think got a lot of things right, both electorally and on the merits), but the timing of Biden's pivot from super lenient border policy to centrist compromise had more to do with it's failure (both legislatively and electorally) than did the specifics of the policy. It's hard to get Americans upset about Trump's cynical ploy when Biden implemented an unpopular policy for three years before trying to pivot in an election year. Looking forward, the Lankford bill's positions probably should be a guide to Democrats, but they'll have to express/implement it even when it's NOT polically expedient to gain the public's trust on the issue.
This was the third attempt at immigration reform since 2000 that was effectively killed by the immigration restrictionist wing of the GOP. At some point, saying the bill would have passed in 2021 is a bit like being Charlie Brown with the football.
But in 2021, Democrats held both houses of Congress—the restrictionist wing of the GOP did not have the power to stop it, except of course that Democrats would have never accepted anything like the 2023 bill while they controlled the House.
The filibuster exists.
Democrats have no power right now to pass bills. So worrying about policy to the exclusion of messaging seems to be the wrong approach.
Immigration an interesting issue in my friend group. The few I know who switched over to Trump consistently point out that they think Trump is a terrible person but dems are just out of touch and ineffective on a few issues. At least one of these folks actually told me after Election Day that he changed his mind last minute and went with Kamala. So these are swing voters in the true sense. One issue that pops up with every one of them is immigration. Over the last few years it is a consistent issue where dems are losing voters in my friend group, the generalizability of which I cannot really know. But I think is big. My dad is a consistent Democrat voter but the one thing he consistently disagrees with democrats on is that they “want to give a free pass” to illegal immigrants.
The timing matters. Trump played election year politics but the same bill had a much better chance of passing in 2022 when Biden decided that Harris should “study” the root causes behind the increase in asylum seekers rather than shut down the border.
“Accommodate” sounds like … democracy”
Well, it sounds like reflecting public opinion. Which isn't always that democratic.
"The pro-accommodation side’s favorite case study is Denmark, where the Social Democrats moved to the center on immigration and have been in government for a while."
Watch the Swedish elections in 2026 for another future case study. The Social Democrats will win power back after having moved sharply right on immigration, defying the trend of Social Democratic parties outside of Scandinavia.
I do wonder why Scandinavian center-left parties have been quicker at and more successful in moderating on immigration issues compared to elsewhere. Perhaps because we (I'm Swedish) are formally culturally homogenous countries with liberal social values and the large influx of people with little to no schooling (which means few job opportunities) and extremely conservative social values (support for Sharia laws and incidences of so-called honor killings of young women) has been so jarring that not even center-left people can ignore it. Also we are cultures of conflict avoidance, introversion, quiet and polite behavior in public etc, which frankly cannot survive the meeting of people with the opposite values (I often see young immigrant men on public transport screaming into their mobile phones, while all Swedes around them are fuming inside thinking angry thoughts while showing nothing on their faces due to conflict aversion). A bit like Japan.
Sweden for sure has a much longer history of this being a live issue. Sweden was the largest asylum country in Europe per capita (outside very small countries like Cyprus and Malta) way back in 2010. And they have been politically working through a lot of challenges with multiculturalism dating back to the large number of Bosnian refugees in the 90s.
The Albrego Garcia case involved an immigrant but is not really an immigration case per se, it’s a case about whether the government can just rendition people from American soil to foreign prisons without due process and then pursue malicious prosecution when the person wins their case. If that case had succeeded there would be nothing to stop Trump from “accidentally” sending American citizens who criticize Charlie Kirk to something to CECOT; in fact he did talk about sending American citizens there. So that case should be terrifying to regular Americans too (just like how there are now proposals to let Rubio take away American citizens’ passports for their political speech based on the precedent of revoking visas). It was right for Democrats to raise the salience of that issue even if you want a stricter immigration policy per se.