Immigrants as problem, immigrants as solution (extended track)
Illegal immigration is less the problem than the symptom
So, yesterday’s post (same title) got me a quick retort on LinkedIn from somebody I can’t say I really know and so I’m not going to assign any intent to it. It read:
Illegal immigration is the problem.
Now, you can take reply that along many lines (positive, negative, mocking, agreeing, etc.), which kind of makes it a perfect response, I must admit. You, the commentator, “solve” the problem tout de suite — almost like the author made a simple grammatical mistake (A: Ah sir? You dropped this modifier. B: Why, thank you! My mistake.).
My gut reaction was to be a bit pissed off, which is something I have to remember the next time I do exactly the same thing to somebody else. But, on closer examination, I realized that was unnerved me was that the post I authored left me completely open to that simple retort.
I resemble that remark!
In Friday’s newsletter, I was writing a good-impact-of-immigration-in-general post and the easiest way to reply to that was to note the subset issue (either positively or negatively). Those you-neglected-to-mention replies can really get to you, and that one did mostly as a sign of my laziness in delivering that post.
[Understand that I despise lazy writing — particularly my own. When my kids and I watch a movie, our worst criticism is blurt out “That’s just lazy writing!”]
What I should have said is this: The GOP under Trump and Vance are demonizing immigration in general and not just the illegal kind.
What do I mean by that?
We (meaning mostly the Right today) make legal immigration excruciatingly hard. For the average immigrant, they have a better chance at winning the Powerball lottery.
Seriously.
CATO: Why Legal Immigration Is Nearly Impossible
By making it SOOO hard, we encourage illegal immigration out of desperation. Moreover, once here, these undocumented are fearful of returning home, which they would naturally do whenever the work dried up, because getting back in is so damn hard.
In short, we make immigration a wicked problem when it doesn’t have to be that bad.
We do that for two reasons — or should I say, deeper causes:
Keeping immigration that hard/illegal allows all sorts of US businesses to exploit undocumented workers. Nasty, I know. But you look around your life and see numerous industries where this logic prevails — to our benefit as consumers.
A lot of us Americans (both White and non-White) dislike non-White foreigners coming here. Whites fears the racial change, and recent non-White immigrants (with some validation) fear the competition — as they have throughout our nation’s history (the last-in being the most virulent anti-immigrant activists).
See your “Gangs of New York” history:
Now, understand: illegals or undocumented represent a quarter of our present foreign-born population.
Those percentages above haven’t changed since 2017 (illegal percentage is now 27%, meaning roughly 3 out of 4 are still legal), and we’re now up to about 51-52M foreign-born, which is 15-16% of our total population. But yeah, these are all historically high numbers, meaning the trend is clear.
We added about 5m foreign-born under Biden in the last two years alone — the biggest short-term increase ever, and yeah, the big influx of illegals constituted over half of that increase, which can be thought of along three lines:
This is mostly due to those sympathetic/weak Dems letting them in.
This is mostly due to Great White Hope Trump choking off that flow prior, along with the depressing impact of COVID, leading to a rebound “explosion.”
All of the above.
Check out this chart from the conservative Center for Immigration Studies report from earlier this year:
When I look at this chart (understanding that it is capturing the growth rate of all foreign-born, meaning legals and illegals), I see a low starting point triggered by the Great Recession, and then I see a clear ramping up across Obama that, sans Trump, looks like it would have continued right along to something approaching the Biden year totals. Not as absolutely high but probably not that far off.
Understand: there is the demand from abroad to come here and then there is our willingness to accommodate that demand. The former will — under decent or better economic conditions — remain strong, with climate change rendering it far stronger. As for the latter (our accommodation), that ebbs and flows with administrations, and the more we yo-yo between Left and Right, the more that growth rate will yo-yo.
Trump clearly clamped down on immigration (legal and illegal), and then COVID just cratered it. So, you could describe the stunning rebound along the lines of “revenge vacationing”— i.e., a frustrated build-up of demand that went a bit crazy once the pandemic ended.
I could buy that to some extent. I could also buy the notion that plenty of Latinos (who make up about two-thirds of that flow, with Mexicans being only 1 out of 6, on average) view the Biden interregnum as something not to be passed-up — lest you miss the window of opportunity before Trump returns to power.
As a final bit: there is the reality that Venezuela’s ongoing collapse and our harsh sanctions (plenty of which came under Trump) is a big contributor to this bulge.
WAPO: Trump White House was warned sanctions on Venezuela could fuel migration
But back to my point about the GOP fearing immigration in general and not just the illegal variety. We have all sorts of conservatives worrying about Americans not having enough babies and thus declining as a population.
If that’s THE BIG problem, then immigration (both legal and illegal) is a solution … unless it’s the wrong kind of solution.
Or put it this way: say that entire foreign-born population in the US were coming here legally but were still around 90-95% non-European in character (aka, from “shithole” countries, per Trump), would the GOP Hard Right be okay with that?
I don’t think so.
We have, admittedly, made a deal with the demographic “devil”: to retain our relative national youth, we are importing a younger population from those regions sending out migrants today (Latin America, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East).
From America’s New Map:
America remains demographically blessed because we are still more fertile than almost all our competitors, while our capacity to absorb immigrants is second to none. We therefore age less rapidly than the rest of this century’s superpowers, marking America as the Dorian Gray of great powers. Like that fictional English character who cheated aging by selling his soul, America sacrifices its long-established racial identity (European origin) to stave off the rapid aging that now afflicts virtually every other advanced economy.
As a result, when America looks at its own portrait, there is a growing gap between a privileged White image long maintained and a multicultural reality that can no longer be denied.
This is the core social dynamic driving our polarized politics of today:
As I constantly argue, this century-fast transformation of America’s racial makeup is profound and unprecedented. This is no roadmap for managing this, and yeah, it strains our Constitution built for another era.
From America’s New Map:
This is where shared concerns for the preservation of identity collide: inside America, diversity means relatively fewer Whites, thus diminishing White privilege. Outside America, globalization means the rise of the non-White East and South, thus diminishing Western/White power. For decades, globalization reflected the unstoppable spread of Westernization, but now it connotes its retreat in the face of the same them relegating “true Americans” to minority status.
All this fearmongering prevents Americans from reasonably discussing what is going on. Latino migrants continue to flock to our border. Many of them are climate refugees, and their numbers will only grow significantly with time. If America does nothing to manage this dynamic at the source, our country will be incredibly stressed by this desperate northward migration. Like any species confronted by climate change, America can move (Hello Canada!), adapt (ideally by growing our Union southward and northward), or die (hollowing our democracy to the point of autocracy).
Faced with those limited options, I choose adaptation and believe most Americans will do the same when such decisions are suitably contextualized.
Describing immigration as foreign governments emptying their prisons and insane asylums … that is not suitable contextualization.
Now, historically, immigration is far more tolerable so long as America’s middle class remains strong and upward mobility is widely preserved.
To quote — from my own book — one of my favorite books ever:
America’s Civil War is often described as our nation’s “second revolution,” not just for ending slavery but for subsequently ushering a middle class into political prominence. According to economist Benjamin Friedman in his 2005 book, The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth, American democracy has thereafter functioned best when that middle class has experienced sustained economic growth. Conversely, our politics succumb to Americans’ worst instincts when that middle class suffers income stagnation. Surveying Europe’s history, the author demonstrates that America is hardly alone in this pattern.
Friedman argues that Americans fundamentally shortchange our democracy when we “think of economic growth in terms of material considerations versus moral ones.” Within the American model of economic integration, material advance “more often than not fosters greater opportunity, tolerance of diversity, social mobility, commitment to fairness, and dedication to democracy.”
So, now we begin to see where things stand in America (and why I wrote America’s New Map:
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