Maybe they can build credibility on this issue by letting ICE into the courthouses to immediately deport those who lose their immigration cases. They won't, because they want ICE to look bad when they have to resort to grabbing people off the street, but it's what they'd do if they were serious.
They could also try to build some credibility with the adjacent issue of locking up non-immigrant criminals who commit serious crimes, instead of us having a story every week of some guy with 14 priors committing a murder. And if they use the insanity defense, go back to the old system of institutionalizing them instead of going "oh well, better let them go free since they're not competent to stand trial."
Right? Imagine the optics (the horror?) of local law enforcement officials working in tandem (GASP) to hand over actual, convicted criminals to ICE/Federal officials for deportation rather than loudly and proudly undermining them in the name of Sanctuary City type shit. Combine that with actually leaving law abiding, tax paying illegal immigrants the fuck alone and VIOLA! They might just win an election some time.
I appreciate what you’re saying - and I agree that immigration was a vital part of American history and will be vital again - but I think you’re missing a lot.
Immigration hasn’t always been a huge part of the US. We alternate between times of high immigration and low. The low periods often correspond to periods when people, for valid reasons, have had enough with the high periods. We’ve just left an unprecedented high period of illegal immigration. I think Democrats are just going to have to leave this topic alone for a generation. And above all stop talking about how important it is that we get back to high levels of immigration.
When Ds DO talk about immigration, they’ve got to stop with two of the arguments you bring up here: the “don’t arrest illegal immigrants who are just peacefully working” or “illegal immigrants who have been in the country a long time.” If I were to bet I’d put a lot of money on these two arguments to be the next two to collapse in the public’s mind.
“Peacefully working” (and its cousin “but they arrested him AT HIS JOB”) is not a valid excuse to be in the country illegally. If I go to France - or anywhere else on earth - the rule isn’t that I can work as long as I don't murder anyone. It’s just not how immigration law works. Americans don’t WANT people to work illegally, at least not in the numbers we’re seeing. Again, for good reasons.
And the “been in the country for a long time”… right or wrong, right now it feels like illegal immigrants are in the country for a long time because the system for deporting them is so broken that you can just skip court appearances with no repercussions, or make terrible asylum arguments and keep your court dates spinning, and next thing you know it’s been ten years and you’ve got a pre-formed group of activists saying that it’s too late, should have done it earlier. If we want to pass some sort of amnesty bill, it needs to be done quietly, and it’s going to have to have republican support.
People are pissed, for good reason, and I suspect they aren’t going to listen to the Ds if they try to explain how, this time, they’re going to get it right. We’re just going to have to deal with the subject being toxic for a long time.
That Bryan Caplin article from the other day - is that what inspired this? - was hilariously bad and ill-timed for today’s moment. Its basic message was “mass immigration does wonderful things for wealth and productivity overall. Yes, there are always some losers in the process - why not make them Americans?”
I always wonder if the "but they've been here working for a while" crowd would accept my response that "ok and I've been here forever and work, I just don't want to fully comply with all the tax laws or other 'procedural' requirements". Something tells me they wouldn't be so quick to hand wave away these low-trust behaviors.
I think a lot of the "weak men create hard times, hard times creates strong men..." fomulation is overwrought and silly, but Ds would be really wise to remember that all their wonderful social programs only work in high trust, high social cohesion environments.
As it stands now, Democrats seem like they're happy to import millions of undocumented workers only to keep their children out of the fields, not because it is a 'net good'.
We are actually seeing "good times create weak men" right now.
The thing is, the "weakness" is in their minds, but everybody thinks if they go and lift fucking weights while continuing to read at a fourth grade level then they're not the problem.
As soon as our impossibly badass grandfathers died and stopped reminding us DAILY what fascism is, stopped reminding us what totalitarian Communism is, stopped reminding us WHY WE DO the shit we do in a democracy, we were like, "so, fascism, yeah? Cool? The status quo is as bad as things can be, right? It's time to be a deranged utopian?" That's fuckin' weakness.
And send your own fucking kids to "the fields" if you think it's so important that the native born are represented there.
"Impossibly badass grandfathers" -- oh, you have no idea how badass we are, now do you, retard?
I tell you what, if you want to see 10 Americans eating sawdust... Go down to your nearest trailer park. Pick up those green cans of shelf-stable Parmesan. You want to see ten Americans eating ratshit? Those same trailer trash eat peanut butter cups, right? You've never been to a peanutbutter factory, have you? Send the allergic straight to the hospital. You ever been to a mudder? What they had to draft folks for back in World War II? We do for fun.
Yes, we're Doughboys, fat and stupid (Amerifats is the current term). But don't underestimate us. We're stronger than you think. I pick husk raspberries myself (they're wild AND invasive), so don't you talk about "sending kids to the fields" -- I'm happy enough to sit there myself.
You're a badass because you eat the same canned, processed food most Americans do, and you think one of those self-indulgent "tough-guy" marathons where someone pokes you with a cattle-prod at the end somehow makes you made of the same stuff as people who got forced into getting shipped to the other side of the planet to get shot, blown apart, or eaten by a shark?
Oh, and the cherry on top is that you're so fucking based that you're not afraid to call someone a "retard" on Substack?
You think I eat e coli every damn day? As I said upthread, I pay premium for my vegetables. If you want to think of me as a hippie (they were right wing before the drugs, ya know?) you can. Why shouldn't I eat the best quality food for my money? (That's still high choice, prime is for suckers). Now it's pumpkin season, so I'm off to bake a pie (eat fruit pie nearly every day, I do).
Or you can just identify me as "cooks for the allergic." I don't pet dogs, either -- again, allergies. You got allergies bad when the skin test puts you into anaphylactic shock, and the doctor watches your entire back swell up.
Oh, and I'll go ahead and contradict myself. Pre 1950 or so, people didn't die of heart attacks and cancer so much. They died of Stomach Cancer. So maybe we're not so metal after all.
I've walked 20 miles carrying my tent and food, past bears -- because the only way I was getting home was trucking on by (we couldn't afford alternate transportation).
You were speaking world war II, not vietnam. My grandfather ate steaks the whole time in Germany, in World War II -- where he went after being drunk on duty and mouthing off to the Commanding Officer. A reminder: the germans were eating sawdust.
Do you really not see a difference between those two things?
Between "procedural requirements" that amount to most people giving up a portion of their income that they can spare (and in most cases would probably be less a considerable amount if nobody was being taxed in the first place) in order to fund the government, versus ones that mean people desperate for a better life, yet who haven't a prayer of getting through our immigration system any time soon because they aren't high-skilled, who may have endured some grueling trek up through Central America to avoid being murdered by the drug cartel that runs their town, will now have to wait it out as coyote bait?
You see, that's the issue. It's not that we're ok, in general, with not following the rules. It's just that we find it more understandable in some cases than others. It's that we have an understanding that we're all lucky as hell to be born in America and that we did nothing to earn it, and we want to be able to give that gift to as many people as is feasible, as it was given to our ancestors.
Yeah, we understand that we probably can't accommodate everyone who wants to cone here. But that doesn't change nor invalidate the fact that we're sensitive to this particular group of people's situation and the hurdles they face in ways that simply don't apply to native-born Americans complaining about having to pay income tax.
"we did nothing to earn it" is atomized blank-slate-ism trying to sound reasonable. Do you believe strangers have as much say in raising you children as you do? Maybe you also believe in setting the estate tax at 100% for everyone? If not, then it does matter who your parents are.
The reason populists are making electoral gains worldwide is because they at least pretend that we should take care of our own people first, which includes not diluting the wages of our own people with infinity immigrants at all skill levels, not giving immigrants equal priority in social safety nets, not ruining social trust. And it works both ways: If you don't care for your own people, maybe they decide not to care for you either, disloyalty repaid in kind.
What does it even mean to be a citizen of a country if your government doesn't prioritize your interests over foreigners'? Aren't you just fungible cattle in that case?
I agree with your critique. Democrats cannot win with any of 'imbe' suggestions. Immigration policies are not singular or simple and requires thoughtful strategic government oversight.
With ongoing and intensifying climate disasters, exploitative and destructive natural resource extraction constantly ramping up for one great last push that never ends, and small and large scale wars and terror I don't think politicians in any remotely stable nation are going to be able to let immigration alone for a generation or two.
It's going to remain a big issue. It might be dealt with by the US bribing Mexico with vast sums to keep their own and other countries migrants under decent employment and quality of life (or more likely lock, key, and wall,)
But it's going to be costly and probably inhumanely destructive one way or the other.
This essay is so obviously, glaringly full of intelligence and common sense on immigration advice for Democrat politicians that it has absolutely no chance of being accepted and adopted . . . at least until a few more electoral thumpings.
Another important piece of this is how the Democrats can keep big corporations from weaponizing that same "best and brightest" message to bring in cheap foreign labor, citing fake shortages. I know Trump is trying to crack down on H1Bs but it seems like O-1s/L1s/body shops too are rife with abuse.
Of course offshoring is a big issue too and that can't be solved via immigration policy, but Dems definitely need to appear sympathetic to this problem as well.
I can't help but scoff at all these takes that are like "Democrats need these incredibly nuanced policy proposals with extremely specific provisions" when Republicans literally no longer have a party platform, and no longer make even the slightest feint towards intellectual or ideological consistency. I think the problem may not be what you think it is.
I mean, there's a very real sense of fear and anxiety among both the blue and white collar workforces over this issue. And the Republicans extremely non-nuanced view of "send them all back" is a lot more palatable to these people than what they think the democratic position is, which is "infinity migrants forever." That's why we have to win their trust back and prove we actually thought this through.
If people think the Democratic position is "infinity migrants forever" then I don't think we need any specific policy to displace that, just a lot of rhetoric about "a limited number of migrants, sometimes" and a throughline to the people who need to hear it. No need to call out alphanumeric visa designations. I am all in favor of well-crafted policy but it's pretty obvious politics has never had less to do with policy.
That "throughline" is actually 90%+ of what our problem is. Most people who hate Democrats receive almost all of their information through anti-Democratic propaganda. Like, where do you think people GOT the idea that Democrats want "infinity migrants forever"? Maybe it's that news channel everybody watches and believes that says Democrats love letting illegals into the country to rape your daughters? But no, I'm sure if Dems start talking about the right kind of visas...
If Democrats change their message in the middle of the forest and Fox News keeps telling your grandpa they eat babies, why did they bother changing their message?
Respectfully, I think swing voters are smarter than you give them credit for. People probably got the idea that Democrats want infinity migration because immigration numbers shot up under Biden and he used the hell out of his TPS authority. Why else would we have seen such a stark red shift from border counties and cities where they dumped a bunch of migrants?
"People probably got the idea that Democrats want infinity migration because immigration numbers shot up under Biden and he used the hell out of his TPS authority."
People elected Donald Trump with immigration as the most stated primary motivation in 2016.
We can pretend Joe Biden invented Democrats' problems with immigration, I guess. Everybody blames him for everything else about an election they didn't even let him run in. Like, maybe if Jeff wants to move on from Joe Biden he can write about it in a way that doesn't shit on Joe Biden and make people who have not internalized the "we are the bad party" narrative's eyes twitch a little. "All I ever do is talk about how horrible my party is and the vibes are SO BAD!"
You don't actually have to "admit a mistake" to change course. You just change course. Has Donald Trump not taught us THAT, of all things? Admitting a mistake in the context of our hyperspace politics is just saying "I am bad, and made a bad choice." If one party does that sometimes, and the other party never does, the party that never says they made a mistake will win. Because the other party DID NOT ATTEMPT TO PERFORM POLITICS.
Democrats simply do not perform politics, and when they do their base gets mad at them for it.
I'm sorry, Kelsey, obviously a lot of this is going beyond the scope of what you're talking about, and a lot of it is just raw frustration. HARD disagree on the intelligence of swing voters, though. They are fucking dumb as shit, and Republicans know it.
I get it. the double standard is extremely frustrating and demoralizing. Which is why I think we should stop creating more problems for ourselves by letting the far left append us to looney tunes policy positions but that's a discussion for another day.
I got it after the Hurricane in North Carolina, where the last plane to Asheville (preHurricane) dropped off immigrants, with NO notice to the residents. The immigrants had nowhere prepped to stay, nothing. And that was by design. The government DARED liberals to say "not in our backyard."
Perhaps if you stopped paying 4x the normal rent to house immigrants in places where the normal workers ain't got enough jobs... Ya might remember where your ass is without a mirror (and, with a little luck, understand what "there are no roads" means, unlike the North Carolinan State Government. It means you use asses, or mules as the case might be -- and you don't have them hauling bottled water (thanks FEMA))
Of course, politics always favors protecting Americans from competition from foreigners willing to do the work for less. At least with manufacturing, the government can do something about it, though in regard to China, it didn't. (OTOH, if the work wasn't moved to China, it would have been substantially automated here. There's not really any way to make low-skilled work pay well in the US any more.)
But most of the sorts of cheap foreign labor that come in on H1-B's do sorts of work that they could do in their home countries and e-mail to the US. So if the workers don't come here, the work will go there. And an ambitious engineering graduate of IIT in India is a lot worse competition for me than that same graduate in the US -- if he's in the US, he's paying US cost of living and will demand to be paid accordingly, if he's in India, he's paying Indian cost of living and will settle for a lower wage.
I work in tech, and my understanding is this isn't an either/or. You need a liaison in the US whose role it is to triage the outsourced employees whether this person is hired via H1B or brought over through an L1. That's how you ensure quality of the work product. I've also seen an employer engage in active fraud during the PERM process (writing a job ad that was so specifically tailored it was obviously for one person) so I'm happy that SOMEONE is cracking down even if it had to be Trump.
"Of course, politics always favors protecting Americans from competition from foreigners willing to do the work for less."
Yes, but Americans have also decided, simultaneously, that all they care about is things being cheap, so here we are. In the dumbest fucking country to ever exist.
YES YES YES! Why can't we agree that border security and a sound, working immigration policy is a good thing without being accused of having a white robe and hood in the closet. And secondly, that advocating for a sound immigration policy that is workable and facilitates immigrants coming in to work here doesn't mean you're trying to give the country away.
We are generally of one mind on this. The idiocy of the Democratic position is that the huge surge in immigration under Biden was stopped abruptly in June 2024 when Biden, reading the political tea leaves, stopped the admission of asylum claimants (who wouldn't claim asylum as opposed to swimming a river and hiking a desert). So if the pre 6/24 position was not wrong, why did it change.
The reality is that asylum for things like gang violence or spousal abuse are usually impossible to prove, and the courts are so backed up, that essentially it is just giving people a 'get out of jail, free' card.
Now where I might pick a bone with you, is the selection process, as the grandchild of poor immigrants, I somewhat prefer the "poor, tired, huddled masses" over the current scheme where if you have $1M to invest in some business, you go to the head of the line. Canada does that imo to a fault and they get lots of rich people moving there, who would otherwise enjoy a prosperous life where they are. There is a train of thought that it isn't good to take the poor, but I suggest that it is a good thing that poor people come here, work their butts off doing jobs many Americans wont do, and then their children work hard and prosper. The American dream, nuh?
> “we won’t just admit any dickweed” truly is the primary message.
Yeah, but that's radical. There's some large slice of the Left that wants the US to be the universal refuge, to admit all "people fleeing persecution, war, and poverty" (as I've seen it phrased in the Boston Globe a few times). (But of course, we have treaty obligations to admit people fleeing persecution, whereas people fleeing poverty are "economic migrants" and are precisely the people immigration law (around the world) is designed to keep out.) From that point of view, the error of the Biden administration was adopting the progressive view of what immigration law should be, and there's going to be a lot of pushback to the Democrats advocating a policy that benefits *us* rather than benefiting *them*.
The most telling poll on immigration imo is this one from RMG that notes that 74% of Americans think legal immigration is good but illegal immigration is bad.
What the further left people falsely claim is that all the people arguing for more border security are against immigration, nativist haters, but only 8% are opposed to all immigration.
It would be interesting if some centrist democrats made a big push for E-verify enforcement as part of their campaigns. This issue is a huge immigration loophole that conservatives have been happy to leave open, since a lot of businesses like to take advantage of those workers. Why not try to turn the immigration issue around on them? There's no coherent reason to demonize immigrants to the degree MAGA does, but also be fine with offering them illegal employment.
Obviously this isn't going to happen in blue states, but perhaps some of the red and purple state senate candidates could get some traction with this.
This 1000%. The fact that the crowd who is "undecided" until a month before a general election favors Rs on immigration, and yet doesn't see how it's the low-tax/regulation-at-all-costs Rs who have most benefited from and fostered illegal immigration (a la Mar a Lago dishwashers), is what makes me think very dark thoughts about our cherished electorate.
Can we at least have a secret little conspiratorial coven that goes off to the side and talks about how Biden's immigration policies were as good economically as they were bad politically, or are we just going to keep going with "never give ourselves credit for anything and assume everything we've ever done is bad"?
The things that people think Republicans are right about are mostly things where Democrats haven't told people that THEY are right about, or that Republicans are wrong. Like, they seriously, literally, never for one second in 2023-2024 tried to be like "wait, so, hold on, what's the problem?" or spin anything. Just, "how can we convince people to vote for us, even though they hate us, which they obviously should, because after all, I hate myself?"
I'm sympathetic to just "giving up" on immigration, because it's not really THAT important to me, and Republicans have triangulated it expertly (does anybody remember that this was 0% a partisan issue 20 years ago?). But if we took that approach to every issue then there wouldn't be any point to any of this. So it gives me a little pause when I see people ready to just throw shit away that they have barely even tried to argue for.
Much like not not texting your love interest back is usually the best way to make sure they stay interested in you, Dems just need to give up on the American people for a while. Then see how badly said American people come back crawling to them with a "you still kinda like me, right?" face...
Do Americans, by and large, want the illegals deported, en masse?
Yep.
And then, every legitimate, law-abiding Republican wants the opportunity to say "Not Jose." To stand up and say, "I'm proud to have Jose in my community. Bring him back legal-like."
Small towners, in general, are distrustful of strangers. They want a good look at you, to see if you're legit, or if you're one of those "bad cityfolk" who are on drugs or violent or whatever.
So, they got a chance to meet a lot of hardworking "people from other places"... Let 'em speak. Create a system where "everyone gets in legally" (and the undocumented actually can get in a little before other people), but the people that want the ability to say "This one! I want this one in my community!" -- they get that.
Is this an organization trainwreck? Yep. Don't care. People are pissed off, and we're spending the equivalent of what the Ukraine spends a year on military, on ICE. Think about that for a moment -- we're already on military footing.
Let's at least be reasonable, and let the good folks turn legit.
I like where your head's at on this, but how do the "people that want the ability to say 'This one! I want this one in my community!'" get that? What's the selection method?
I'm sure we already have the system for "character witnesses" in court. And, whatever we're doing, this will be semi-courtlike (aka if someone REALLY has a grudge against the person, they can show up and say "here's why Marlena shouldn't be allowed to come back.")
About as "courtlike" as appealing your housing assessment. Character Witnesses don't need to show up in person, the overworked government guy is there to search government records to make sure the "newly legal" immigrant doesn't have a violent criminal record.
To be fair, you might say "you're only allowed to be a character witness for 5 people" or something like that. (This prevents some looney liberal from being witness to every single person in the world, seen or unseen. It doesn't prevent the local hotdog maker from passing out fivers to the rest of town, so that he can get his workers back.)
(We actually had something like this for immigration around World War II, where you had to have a "sponsor" in America).
Please note: with this system, we will maintain the minimum wage. No More Slaves. I do expect some businesses to go under.
I recall the first democratic primary in 2020 so clearly. I knew we were driving the car straight off the cliff on this issue. Every single candidate on stage that night essentially declared open borders. They didn’t say it like that, but what they all said is that nobody would be deported for sneaking into the country. And on top of that, if you managed to sneak in we would give you free health care. So yes, while there was still technically a border there and hypothetical resistance to entry, the signal to the world was to get your ass in here any way you can and you can stay forever! And free shit!
"About the 14M ish...etc, there is little to say that is satisfying...etc."? I slogged through this surly, grumpy (if mostly on target) take down of Biden's immigration policy to see this? I mean, why'd you bother writing the article?
I think when people stress about politicians not apologizing they forget that the pols who succeed while doing that are notably NOT associated with the failures of the past in the public imagination. “WE messed up but I! will fix it” is the key.
Ofc that can be cope I’m not saying we shouldn’t aggressively try to repair the conversation. But if the next Clinton or Obama or w/e is in the horizon it’s not gonna be shown by Chuck Schumer becoming more liked
Two days after this column we learn House Democrats are planning to add an ICE tracker app to their own website. This is such a a flagrant and absurd step to take, it's almost like they are the caricature that Republicans make them out to be. Your rage over this stupid stunt of theirs (and their punking of your advice) should be legendary. Somehow I am sure you will work some Trump jokes in there but this is borderline treasonous.
I am curious as to what you think someone who isn't as deep in the tank for Democrats as you are should take this? This seems so provocative that arrests seem like the only proper response.
“Deport people here illegally who commit serious crimes” also seems like a bit of low-hanging policy fruit.
Good point -- yes.
Maybe they can build credibility on this issue by letting ICE into the courthouses to immediately deport those who lose their immigration cases. They won't, because they want ICE to look bad when they have to resort to grabbing people off the street, but it's what they'd do if they were serious.
They could also try to build some credibility with the adjacent issue of locking up non-immigrant criminals who commit serious crimes, instead of us having a story every week of some guy with 14 priors committing a murder. And if they use the insanity defense, go back to the old system of institutionalizing them instead of going "oh well, better let them go free since they're not competent to stand trial."
Right? Imagine the optics (the horror?) of local law enforcement officials working in tandem (GASP) to hand over actual, convicted criminals to ICE/Federal officials for deportation rather than loudly and proudly undermining them in the name of Sanctuary City type shit. Combine that with actually leaving law abiding, tax paying illegal immigrants the fuck alone and VIOLA! They might just win an election some time.
I appreciate what you’re saying - and I agree that immigration was a vital part of American history and will be vital again - but I think you’re missing a lot.
Immigration hasn’t always been a huge part of the US. We alternate between times of high immigration and low. The low periods often correspond to periods when people, for valid reasons, have had enough with the high periods. We’ve just left an unprecedented high period of illegal immigration. I think Democrats are just going to have to leave this topic alone for a generation. And above all stop talking about how important it is that we get back to high levels of immigration.
When Ds DO talk about immigration, they’ve got to stop with two of the arguments you bring up here: the “don’t arrest illegal immigrants who are just peacefully working” or “illegal immigrants who have been in the country a long time.” If I were to bet I’d put a lot of money on these two arguments to be the next two to collapse in the public’s mind.
“Peacefully working” (and its cousin “but they arrested him AT HIS JOB”) is not a valid excuse to be in the country illegally. If I go to France - or anywhere else on earth - the rule isn’t that I can work as long as I don't murder anyone. It’s just not how immigration law works. Americans don’t WANT people to work illegally, at least not in the numbers we’re seeing. Again, for good reasons.
And the “been in the country for a long time”… right or wrong, right now it feels like illegal immigrants are in the country for a long time because the system for deporting them is so broken that you can just skip court appearances with no repercussions, or make terrible asylum arguments and keep your court dates spinning, and next thing you know it’s been ten years and you’ve got a pre-formed group of activists saying that it’s too late, should have done it earlier. If we want to pass some sort of amnesty bill, it needs to be done quietly, and it’s going to have to have republican support.
People are pissed, for good reason, and I suspect they aren’t going to listen to the Ds if they try to explain how, this time, they’re going to get it right. We’re just going to have to deal with the subject being toxic for a long time.
That Bryan Caplin article from the other day - is that what inspired this? - was hilariously bad and ill-timed for today’s moment. Its basic message was “mass immigration does wonderful things for wealth and productivity overall. Yes, there are always some losers in the process - why not make them Americans?”
I always wonder if the "but they've been here working for a while" crowd would accept my response that "ok and I've been here forever and work, I just don't want to fully comply with all the tax laws or other 'procedural' requirements". Something tells me they wouldn't be so quick to hand wave away these low-trust behaviors.
I think a lot of the "weak men create hard times, hard times creates strong men..." fomulation is overwrought and silly, but Ds would be really wise to remember that all their wonderful social programs only work in high trust, high social cohesion environments.
As it stands now, Democrats seem like they're happy to import millions of undocumented workers only to keep their children out of the fields, not because it is a 'net good'.
We are actually seeing "good times create weak men" right now.
The thing is, the "weakness" is in their minds, but everybody thinks if they go and lift fucking weights while continuing to read at a fourth grade level then they're not the problem.
As soon as our impossibly badass grandfathers died and stopped reminding us DAILY what fascism is, stopped reminding us what totalitarian Communism is, stopped reminding us WHY WE DO the shit we do in a democracy, we were like, "so, fascism, yeah? Cool? The status quo is as bad as things can be, right? It's time to be a deranged utopian?" That's fuckin' weakness.
And send your own fucking kids to "the fields" if you think it's so important that the native born are represented there.
"Impossibly badass grandfathers" -- oh, you have no idea how badass we are, now do you, retard?
I tell you what, if you want to see 10 Americans eating sawdust... Go down to your nearest trailer park. Pick up those green cans of shelf-stable Parmesan. You want to see ten Americans eating ratshit? Those same trailer trash eat peanut butter cups, right? You've never been to a peanutbutter factory, have you? Send the allergic straight to the hospital. You ever been to a mudder? What they had to draft folks for back in World War II? We do for fun.
Yes, we're Doughboys, fat and stupid (Amerifats is the current term). But don't underestimate us. We're stronger than you think. I pick husk raspberries myself (they're wild AND invasive), so don't you talk about "sending kids to the fields" -- I'm happy enough to sit there myself.
Oh Christ, you again.
You're a badass because you eat the same canned, processed food most Americans do, and you think one of those self-indulgent "tough-guy" marathons where someone pokes you with a cattle-prod at the end somehow makes you made of the same stuff as people who got forced into getting shipped to the other side of the planet to get shot, blown apart, or eaten by a shark?
Oh, and the cherry on top is that you're so fucking based that you're not afraid to call someone a "retard" on Substack?
You're a self-parody.
You think I eat e coli every damn day? As I said upthread, I pay premium for my vegetables. If you want to think of me as a hippie (they were right wing before the drugs, ya know?) you can. Why shouldn't I eat the best quality food for my money? (That's still high choice, prime is for suckers). Now it's pumpkin season, so I'm off to bake a pie (eat fruit pie nearly every day, I do).
Or you can just identify me as "cooks for the allergic." I don't pet dogs, either -- again, allergies. You got allergies bad when the skin test puts you into anaphylactic shock, and the doctor watches your entire back swell up.
Oh, and I'll go ahead and contradict myself. Pre 1950 or so, people didn't die of heart attacks and cancer so much. They died of Stomach Cancer. So maybe we're not so metal after all.
I've walked 20 miles carrying my tent and food, past bears -- because the only way I was getting home was trucking on by (we couldn't afford alternate transportation).
You were speaking world war II, not vietnam. My grandfather ate steaks the whole time in Germany, in World War II -- where he went after being drunk on duty and mouthing off to the Commanding Officer. A reminder: the germans were eating sawdust.
Do you really not see a difference between those two things?
Between "procedural requirements" that amount to most people giving up a portion of their income that they can spare (and in most cases would probably be less a considerable amount if nobody was being taxed in the first place) in order to fund the government, versus ones that mean people desperate for a better life, yet who haven't a prayer of getting through our immigration system any time soon because they aren't high-skilled, who may have endured some grueling trek up through Central America to avoid being murdered by the drug cartel that runs their town, will now have to wait it out as coyote bait?
You see, that's the issue. It's not that we're ok, in general, with not following the rules. It's just that we find it more understandable in some cases than others. It's that we have an understanding that we're all lucky as hell to be born in America and that we did nothing to earn it, and we want to be able to give that gift to as many people as is feasible, as it was given to our ancestors.
Yeah, we understand that we probably can't accommodate everyone who wants to cone here. But that doesn't change nor invalidate the fact that we're sensitive to this particular group of people's situation and the hurdles they face in ways that simply don't apply to native-born Americans complaining about having to pay income tax.
"we did nothing to earn it" is atomized blank-slate-ism trying to sound reasonable. Do you believe strangers have as much say in raising you children as you do? Maybe you also believe in setting the estate tax at 100% for everyone? If not, then it does matter who your parents are.
The reason populists are making electoral gains worldwide is because they at least pretend that we should take care of our own people first, which includes not diluting the wages of our own people with infinity immigrants at all skill levels, not giving immigrants equal priority in social safety nets, not ruining social trust. And it works both ways: If you don't care for your own people, maybe they decide not to care for you either, disloyalty repaid in kind.
What does it even mean to be a citizen of a country if your government doesn't prioritize your interests over foreigners'? Aren't you just fungible cattle in that case?
I agree with your critique. Democrats cannot win with any of 'imbe' suggestions. Immigration policies are not singular or simple and requires thoughtful strategic government oversight.
With ongoing and intensifying climate disasters, exploitative and destructive natural resource extraction constantly ramping up for one great last push that never ends, and small and large scale wars and terror I don't think politicians in any remotely stable nation are going to be able to let immigration alone for a generation or two.
It's going to remain a big issue. It might be dealt with by the US bribing Mexico with vast sums to keep their own and other countries migrants under decent employment and quality of life (or more likely lock, key, and wall,)
But it's going to be costly and probably inhumanely destructive one way or the other.
This essay is so obviously, glaringly full of intelligence and common sense on immigration advice for Democrat politicians that it has absolutely no chance of being accepted and adopted . . . at least until a few more electoral thumpings.
Another important piece of this is how the Democrats can keep big corporations from weaponizing that same "best and brightest" message to bring in cheap foreign labor, citing fake shortages. I know Trump is trying to crack down on H1Bs but it seems like O-1s/L1s/body shops too are rife with abuse.
Of course offshoring is a big issue too and that can't be solved via immigration policy, but Dems definitely need to appear sympathetic to this problem as well.
I can't help but scoff at all these takes that are like "Democrats need these incredibly nuanced policy proposals with extremely specific provisions" when Republicans literally no longer have a party platform, and no longer make even the slightest feint towards intellectual or ideological consistency. I think the problem may not be what you think it is.
I mean, there's a very real sense of fear and anxiety among both the blue and white collar workforces over this issue. And the Republicans extremely non-nuanced view of "send them all back" is a lot more palatable to these people than what they think the democratic position is, which is "infinity migrants forever." That's why we have to win their trust back and prove we actually thought this through.
If people think the Democratic position is "infinity migrants forever" then I don't think we need any specific policy to displace that, just a lot of rhetoric about "a limited number of migrants, sometimes" and a throughline to the people who need to hear it. No need to call out alphanumeric visa designations. I am all in favor of well-crafted policy but it's pretty obvious politics has never had less to do with policy.
That "throughline" is actually 90%+ of what our problem is. Most people who hate Democrats receive almost all of their information through anti-Democratic propaganda. Like, where do you think people GOT the idea that Democrats want "infinity migrants forever"? Maybe it's that news channel everybody watches and believes that says Democrats love letting illegals into the country to rape your daughters? But no, I'm sure if Dems start talking about the right kind of visas...
If Democrats change their message in the middle of the forest and Fox News keeps telling your grandpa they eat babies, why did they bother changing their message?
Respectfully, I think swing voters are smarter than you give them credit for. People probably got the idea that Democrats want infinity migration because immigration numbers shot up under Biden and he used the hell out of his TPS authority. Why else would we have seen such a stark red shift from border counties and cities where they dumped a bunch of migrants?
"People probably got the idea that Democrats want infinity migration because immigration numbers shot up under Biden and he used the hell out of his TPS authority."
People elected Donald Trump with immigration as the most stated primary motivation in 2016.
We can pretend Joe Biden invented Democrats' problems with immigration, I guess. Everybody blames him for everything else about an election they didn't even let him run in. Like, maybe if Jeff wants to move on from Joe Biden he can write about it in a way that doesn't shit on Joe Biden and make people who have not internalized the "we are the bad party" narrative's eyes twitch a little. "All I ever do is talk about how horrible my party is and the vibes are SO BAD!"
You don't actually have to "admit a mistake" to change course. You just change course. Has Donald Trump not taught us THAT, of all things? Admitting a mistake in the context of our hyperspace politics is just saying "I am bad, and made a bad choice." If one party does that sometimes, and the other party never does, the party that never says they made a mistake will win. Because the other party DID NOT ATTEMPT TO PERFORM POLITICS.
Democrats simply do not perform politics, and when they do their base gets mad at them for it.
I'm sorry, Kelsey, obviously a lot of this is going beyond the scope of what you're talking about, and a lot of it is just raw frustration. HARD disagree on the intelligence of swing voters, though. They are fucking dumb as shit, and Republicans know it.
I get it. the double standard is extremely frustrating and demoralizing. Which is why I think we should stop creating more problems for ourselves by letting the far left append us to looney tunes policy positions but that's a discussion for another day.
I got it after the Hurricane in North Carolina, where the last plane to Asheville (preHurricane) dropped off immigrants, with NO notice to the residents. The immigrants had nowhere prepped to stay, nothing. And that was by design. The government DARED liberals to say "not in our backyard."
Perhaps if you stopped paying 4x the normal rent to house immigrants in places where the normal workers ain't got enough jobs... Ya might remember where your ass is without a mirror (and, with a little luck, understand what "there are no roads" means, unlike the North Carolinan State Government. It means you use asses, or mules as the case might be -- and you don't have them hauling bottled water (thanks FEMA))
Of course, politics always favors protecting Americans from competition from foreigners willing to do the work for less. At least with manufacturing, the government can do something about it, though in regard to China, it didn't. (OTOH, if the work wasn't moved to China, it would have been substantially automated here. There's not really any way to make low-skilled work pay well in the US any more.)
But most of the sorts of cheap foreign labor that come in on H1-B's do sorts of work that they could do in their home countries and e-mail to the US. So if the workers don't come here, the work will go there. And an ambitious engineering graduate of IIT in India is a lot worse competition for me than that same graduate in the US -- if he's in the US, he's paying US cost of living and will demand to be paid accordingly, if he's in India, he's paying Indian cost of living and will settle for a lower wage.
I work in tech, and my understanding is this isn't an either/or. You need a liaison in the US whose role it is to triage the outsourced employees whether this person is hired via H1B or brought over through an L1. That's how you ensure quality of the work product. I've also seen an employer engage in active fraud during the PERM process (writing a job ad that was so specifically tailored it was obviously for one person) so I'm happy that SOMEONE is cracking down even if it had to be Trump.
"Of course, politics always favors protecting Americans from competition from foreigners willing to do the work for less."
Yes, but Americans have also decided, simultaneously, that all they care about is things being cheap, so here we are. In the dumbest fucking country to ever exist.
Your American (indian) slave works as long as the company wants. You don't. He has no labor protections (they can always just send him back).
Off-shoring is NOT an issue now, any more than it was when we sent most of our manufacturing outside of the US.
YES YES YES! Why can't we agree that border security and a sound, working immigration policy is a good thing without being accused of having a white robe and hood in the closet. And secondly, that advocating for a sound immigration policy that is workable and facilitates immigrants coming in to work here doesn't mean you're trying to give the country away.
We are generally of one mind on this. The idiocy of the Democratic position is that the huge surge in immigration under Biden was stopped abruptly in June 2024 when Biden, reading the political tea leaves, stopped the admission of asylum claimants (who wouldn't claim asylum as opposed to swimming a river and hiking a desert). So if the pre 6/24 position was not wrong, why did it change.
The reality is that asylum for things like gang violence or spousal abuse are usually impossible to prove, and the courts are so backed up, that essentially it is just giving people a 'get out of jail, free' card.
Now where I might pick a bone with you, is the selection process, as the grandchild of poor immigrants, I somewhat prefer the "poor, tired, huddled masses" over the current scheme where if you have $1M to invest in some business, you go to the head of the line. Canada does that imo to a fault and they get lots of rich people moving there, who would otherwise enjoy a prosperous life where they are. There is a train of thought that it isn't good to take the poor, but I suggest that it is a good thing that poor people come here, work their butts off doing jobs many Americans wont do, and then their children work hard and prosper. The American dream, nuh?
> “we won’t just admit any dickweed” truly is the primary message.
Yeah, but that's radical. There's some large slice of the Left that wants the US to be the universal refuge, to admit all "people fleeing persecution, war, and poverty" (as I've seen it phrased in the Boston Globe a few times). (But of course, we have treaty obligations to admit people fleeing persecution, whereas people fleeing poverty are "economic migrants" and are precisely the people immigration law (around the world) is designed to keep out.) From that point of view, the error of the Biden administration was adopting the progressive view of what immigration law should be, and there's going to be a lot of pushback to the Democrats advocating a policy that benefits *us* rather than benefiting *them*.
Yes and Dems are nowhere near even thinking about bucking the universal refuge progressive wing, so it's gonna be a long slog.
The most telling poll on immigration imo is this one from RMG that notes that 74% of Americans think legal immigration is good but illegal immigration is bad.
What the further left people falsely claim is that all the people arguing for more border security are against immigration, nativist haters, but only 8% are opposed to all immigration.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/poll-vast-majority-of-americans-think-legal-immigration-is-necessary/ar-AA1LORQQ
It would be interesting if some centrist democrats made a big push for E-verify enforcement as part of their campaigns. This issue is a huge immigration loophole that conservatives have been happy to leave open, since a lot of businesses like to take advantage of those workers. Why not try to turn the immigration issue around on them? There's no coherent reason to demonize immigrants to the degree MAGA does, but also be fine with offering them illegal employment.
Obviously this isn't going to happen in blue states, but perhaps some of the red and purple state senate candidates could get some traction with this.
This 1000%. The fact that the crowd who is "undecided" until a month before a general election favors Rs on immigration, and yet doesn't see how it's the low-tax/regulation-at-all-costs Rs who have most benefited from and fostered illegal immigration (a la Mar a Lago dishwashers), is what makes me think very dark thoughts about our cherished electorate.
> We’ve always had immigrants
You talk about the troubles in the Know-Nothing era of the 1850a but don't forget that Benjamin Franklin was fretting about German immigration in 1753, twenty years before we were a country: https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/letter-to-peter-collinson/
I’d love to meet those “swarthy Germans,” of which my ancestors were!
Can we at least have a secret little conspiratorial coven that goes off to the side and talks about how Biden's immigration policies were as good economically as they were bad politically, or are we just going to keep going with "never give ourselves credit for anything and assume everything we've ever done is bad"?
The things that people think Republicans are right about are mostly things where Democrats haven't told people that THEY are right about, or that Republicans are wrong. Like, they seriously, literally, never for one second in 2023-2024 tried to be like "wait, so, hold on, what's the problem?" or spin anything. Just, "how can we convince people to vote for us, even though they hate us, which they obviously should, because after all, I hate myself?"
I'm sympathetic to just "giving up" on immigration, because it's not really THAT important to me, and Republicans have triangulated it expertly (does anybody remember that this was 0% a partisan issue 20 years ago?). But if we took that approach to every issue then there wouldn't be any point to any of this. So it gives me a little pause when I see people ready to just throw shit away that they have barely even tried to argue for.
Much like not not texting your love interest back is usually the best way to make sure they stay interested in you, Dems just need to give up on the American people for a while. Then see how badly said American people come back crawling to them with a "you still kinda like me, right?" face...
You can have the baby and the bathwater.
Do Americans, by and large, want the illegals deported, en masse?
Yep.
And then, every legitimate, law-abiding Republican wants the opportunity to say "Not Jose." To stand up and say, "I'm proud to have Jose in my community. Bring him back legal-like."
Small towners, in general, are distrustful of strangers. They want a good look at you, to see if you're legit, or if you're one of those "bad cityfolk" who are on drugs or violent or whatever.
So, they got a chance to meet a lot of hardworking "people from other places"... Let 'em speak. Create a system where "everyone gets in legally" (and the undocumented actually can get in a little before other people), but the people that want the ability to say "This one! I want this one in my community!" -- they get that.
Is this an organization trainwreck? Yep. Don't care. People are pissed off, and we're spending the equivalent of what the Ukraine spends a year on military, on ICE. Think about that for a moment -- we're already on military footing.
Let's at least be reasonable, and let the good folks turn legit.
I like where your head's at on this, but how do the "people that want the ability to say 'This one! I want this one in my community!'" get that? What's the selection method?
I'm sure we already have the system for "character witnesses" in court. And, whatever we're doing, this will be semi-courtlike (aka if someone REALLY has a grudge against the person, they can show up and say "here's why Marlena shouldn't be allowed to come back.")
About as "courtlike" as appealing your housing assessment. Character Witnesses don't need to show up in person, the overworked government guy is there to search government records to make sure the "newly legal" immigrant doesn't have a violent criminal record.
To be fair, you might say "you're only allowed to be a character witness for 5 people" or something like that. (This prevents some looney liberal from being witness to every single person in the world, seen or unseen. It doesn't prevent the local hotdog maker from passing out fivers to the rest of town, so that he can get his workers back.)
(We actually had something like this for immigration around World War II, where you had to have a "sponsor" in America).
Please note: with this system, we will maintain the minimum wage. No More Slaves. I do expect some businesses to go under.
I recall the first democratic primary in 2020 so clearly. I knew we were driving the car straight off the cliff on this issue. Every single candidate on stage that night essentially declared open borders. They didn’t say it like that, but what they all said is that nobody would be deported for sneaking into the country. And on top of that, if you managed to sneak in we would give you free health care. So yes, while there was still technically a border there and hypothetical resistance to entry, the signal to the world was to get your ass in here any way you can and you can stay forever! And free shit!
"About the 14M ish...etc, there is little to say that is satisfying...etc."? I slogged through this surly, grumpy (if mostly on target) take down of Biden's immigration policy to see this? I mean, why'd you bother writing the article?
I think when people stress about politicians not apologizing they forget that the pols who succeed while doing that are notably NOT associated with the failures of the past in the public imagination. “WE messed up but I! will fix it” is the key.
Ofc that can be cope I’m not saying we shouldn’t aggressively try to repair the conversation. But if the next Clinton or Obama or w/e is in the horizon it’s not gonna be shown by Chuck Schumer becoming more liked
Two days after this column we learn House Democrats are planning to add an ICE tracker app to their own website. This is such a a flagrant and absurd step to take, it's almost like they are the caricature that Republicans make them out to be. Your rage over this stupid stunt of theirs (and their punking of your advice) should be legendary. Somehow I am sure you will work some Trump jokes in there but this is borderline treasonous.
I am curious as to what you think someone who isn't as deep in the tank for Democrats as you are should take this? This seems so provocative that arrests seem like the only proper response.