A bunch of thoughts and evidence on immigration
I've been writing about this for a while.
Anti-ICE riots are continuing in L.A., with protests spreading to some other cities. It remains to be seen how big the movement will become, or how harsh Trump’s reprisals will be. In the meantime, the rhetoric on social media around the whole immigration issue is getting pretty hyperbolic. Here are noted right-wing pundits Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk:
And here’s a DSA leader:
And here was another popular tweet I saw:
Meanwhile, early polling shows that Americans generally disapprove of both Trump’s deportation policies and the protests against them:
I wrote up my basic thoughts on the issue yesterday. Basically, Trump’s deportation policy has been haphazard, cruel, clumsy, largely pointless, and occasionally lawless. But protests that wave Mexican flags, torch cars, and denounce the United States of America will only lend credence to Trump’s story about immigration being an “invasion”, and ultimately hurt the cause they’re trying to help.
But in fact, I have lots more thoughts on the immigration issue in general, and I’ve written a bunch of posts about it over the years. So I thought I’d re-up a bunch of those. I’ve grouped them by topic.
On why Americans are angry about immigration
The most important topic to address, of course, is why Trump’s restrictive stance on immigration, and his plans for mass deportation, have become so popular. I wrote a pair of posts in late 2023 and early 2024 showing that yes, Americans are indeed angry about immigration:
My basic hypothesis is that the asylum loophole — the ability of would-be immigrants to illegally cross the border, turn themselves in to the authorities, and be allowed to stay in the U.S. to wait for their asylum hearing — has led to a flood of quasi-legal low-skilled immigration.
Why are Americans mad about this? My argument is that this form of quasi-legal immigration makes it seem like the democratic will of the American people is being flouted, which makes Americans feel disempowered and disenfranchised:
That’s my hypothesis concerning the median voter. But there’s a very different reason that the MAGA movement itself hates immigration — not just of the illegal variety, but all types. The “Great Replacement” theory, which holds that liberals are importing immigrants in order to demographically drown and disempower the white race and the Republican party, has become canon on the right, turning immigration into the right’s core culture-war issue:
This belief is the biggest single reason why the issue will be so hard to resolve.
On why America needs mass immigration
In my opinion, Americans are justified in feeling angry about the kind of quasi-legal immigration we’ve been getting over the past few years. But at the same time, I think it’s pretty clear that economically, the U.S. needs large-scale immigration in order to support its economy:
Small declining towns especially need immigrants. Without immigrants, they’ll wither away:
I think Matt Yglesias has the right idea. We should care what type of people we let into the country, and how, but ultimately we want a country that’s growing instead of shrinking, and a country that has a big domestic market instead of a small one:
On why America needs skilled immigration
The U.S. needs large numbers of immigrants, but we also need the best and the brightest if we’re going to hope to compete with China. A year ago I wrote a post with Minn Kim laying out the case:
And back in 2022, Alec Stapp and Jeremy Neufeld wrote a great guest post with some concrete ideas about how to encourage skilled immigration:
You’ll notice that right-wing pundits like Matt Walsh and Charlie Kirk are against all immigration from “third-world” countries, including skilled immigration. This echoes a blowup that occurred last Christmas between various factions of the online right over the issue of Indian immigration (Indians being America’s most highly-skilled immigrant group on average, but also coming from a poor country). I wrote a post weighing in on why Indian immigration has been awesome for America:
The Trump administration has also been trying to restrict the flow of foreign students into the country. I recently wrote a post about why that’s bad:
Finally, there’s an argument that skilled immigration hurts the countries that lose access to their top talent. Back in 2023 I wrote a post about why, surprisingly, the opposite is usually true:
On the economic effects of immigration
Immigration is now a culture-war issue first and foremost, but economic arguments still matter. In one of my first posts on this blog, I wrote about the mountain of evidence showing that immigration doesn’t reduce wages for the native-born:
One of Trump’s big arguments in his successful reelection campaign was that immigrants are raising rents and other costs for Americans, and that mass deportations would make everything cheaper. I wrote a couple of posts explaining why this is probably wrong:
On the other hand, some progressives argued that the big surge in quasi-legal immigration under Biden was a factor in bringing inflation down in 2023 and 2024. I also think this is highly unlikely to be the case:
Essentially, I think immigrants are mostly unrelated to the inflation issue, as much as some people would love to link the two.
On the social effects of immigration
Since immigration is now more of a sociocultural issue than an economic one, it’s important to understand the social impacts as well. It’s interesting that while much of MAGA’s hatred is directed at Hispanic immigrants coming from Mexico and Central America, Hispanic Americans themselves have trended toward the Republican party and become more supportive of restrictive immigration policies.
I interpret this as Hispanics basically following the same path as the Irish and the Italians before them; as Hispanic Americans as a group become more economically successful, they feel more patriotic, less aligned with immigrant co-ethnics, and more well-established in American society:
In fact, Leah Boustan and Ran Abramitzky have written a whole book about how today’s immigrants are following basically the same path of cultural assimilation and upward economic mobility as their South and East European predecessors a century ago. I interviewed Boustan here:
In order to win Hispanics back, I think progressives need to stop talking about immigrants as an oppressed class, and go back to telling the positive, triumphalist story of opportunity and upward mobility that they used to tell whenever the immigration issue came up:
Meanwhile, the right’s attempts to scare Americans about this or that group of immigrants is pretty reprehensible, and rarely if ever based in fact:
Basically, Americans have a right to be mad about how immigration has been done in recent years, and progressives shift toward viewing immigration as a social justice issue isn’t helping. But the cure that MAGA is selling is a bad one, and will have negative social as well as economic consequences for our nation.
Adam Tooze has a great write up taking the position that the administration's escalations are a deliberate and considered tactic to shore up his core base in the face of flagging support for his tax, trade, and broader economic policies. I'm not American (am married to one) and don't live in America but please please please I hope you guys figure it all out. I miss the America of the 90s and am rooting for you all.
If Democrats want to win on immigration in the court of public opinion against Trump, they badly need a national leader who can get these activists to step back. Clearly, they won’t listen to Newsom. When deportations happen after following due process, there’s not much activists can do besides highlighting through personal stories how it’s affecting communities because that’s the current law. Whenever either side has overreached, there’s been voter backlash. If there’s one issue where Trump has a clear mandate, it’s to stop illegal immigration. His approval rating on immigration started to fall when he refused to follow due process and started harassing legal immigrants and international students.
I’m very pissed off with Democrats for not fixing skilled immigration when they had a chance (there used to be bipartisan consensus on this under Bush and Obama) and always lumping it with illegal immigration because of pressure from groups like the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Their tactics failed and now it’ll be impossible to pass any kind of narrowly targeted legislation to fix the skilled immigration issues for many years to come.