The anti-immigration comments on this thread made me angry but i don't have time to round up the links i'd need to engage in a sufficiently ~popularist~ way, so i'll just say: has Amy Wax talked to, like, one Asian ever? Like, a single one. How could you possibly sustain the idea that Asian potential immigrants (people with a set of heritages spanning MORE THAN HALF OF HUMANITY) are a monolith? As usual, the thing that astounds about racism is its sheer stupidity.
"don't have time to round up the links i'd need to engage in a sufficiently ~popularist~ way"
Ask them if they are fine paying more taxes to deal with an aging population. If there's one thing that the GOP agrees on, it's that taxes should not be raised by a single cent. They might cosplay at populism, but it's a lie.
I agree with your political opinion. But I think it's telling that all these answers are either definitional (what is an Asian, more rational yet beside the point), economic (totally beside the point) or party political (irrelevant), when her questions are mostly legal philosophical.
Eli, have you been on a college campus recently? The kids seem to be creating an "Asian" identity, which never existed in their home countries. Wax may be racist swine, but in this respect she is quite representative of a liberal campus environment.
I spent far more time than I’d like to admit arguing in the comment thread of Glenn Loury’s Substack (where the Wax interview and follow up appeared) that yes, it IS racist to (effectively) say “Asians suck and we need fewer of them in America.” People have lost their minds. I look forward to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, on whose board Glenn Loury sits, releasing a statement against Wax (won’t hold my breath…)
Loury personally has made a statement against Wax - ""I thought that Amy's comments, in places, were outrageous," Loury told CNN in a statement Wednesday. "I said as much during the interview what she said about the Asians could have been said, and was said, about the Jews not so long ago. Today we call that antisemitism.""
Are we trying to win an argument or persuade people? You can win the immigration argument by demonstrating how objectively beneficial immigration is to the USA but you will not persuade large tracts of the Right. Why? Because for the New Right culture is paramount.
This is beyond Trump. For many on the New Right it is about preserving what they perceive as Western Civilization (Christendom, Enlightenment legacy, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian classical texts). They view the Western world as a heritage to be celebrated and conserved. They see themselves as the true conservatives. Old school conservatives of the type Noah illustrated who may compromise on immigration have failed to persuade many on the Right.
Within their worldview the Left is actively trying to dismantle this Western heritage. They see immigration as a tool of the Left to accomplish this dismemberment. Don’t believe me? Check out sites like The American Conservative, The Federalist or even take a moment to peruse Gab. Many on the New Right genuinely feel they are not racist.
If you want to build a governing coalition to enhance immigration you need to engage with this thinking. Hard to persuade but can be done.
You have to genuinely think like a Centrist and not dismiss the Right as “racist” you won’t persuade the Right to embrace immigration this way and you could very well lose elections.
Good luck to Progressives in passing immigration reform with that mindset. The ascendant view on the Right is that Western Civilization is under siege and must be preserved. Progressive views are popular in certain enclaves in America but I’d wager that a plurality of the states leans more towards the Right which is getting more outspoken about its views.
You won’t command the Senate or Presidency with strong Progressive views.
I'm not advocating for either or. I actually find the classic conservative view much more realistic. Progressivism is a good negative to the classic conservative magnetic pole, but it has proven to be an empty, almost nihilistic positive because it hinges on the belief that the world is mind and can be changed at will. That's a nice theory but history hasn't quite worked that way (so they try to re-write history to fit their theory).
What we're really dealing with is an ideological mumbo-jumbo where nobody knows the reasons for what they believe, or what exactly it is they believe apart from a couple of outcomes they want to see. But they make up for this by believing all the more strongly.
If the GOP could stop being such miserable, prejudiced fucks then they'd find that Asians can be a part of their coalition. As Wax notes, they are being targeted by the DEI-industrial complex which uses affirmative action to keep their numbers in institutions down. Look at how the wokes have decided that Asians are "white-adjacent."
The Dems use affirmative action to toss political patronage to black people. However, it is unpopular among most demographics as seen in Proposition 16 and Proposal 2 in MI. In the former, only blacks were in favor even though elite opinion heavily pushed it and outspent the "no" side by 16-1. This isn't a progressive vs moderate Dem issue either. The progressives are the wokes who think that not matching the demographic composition is a hate crime, and the moderates are the machine politicians who can't get over when the party was liberal whites + blacks and the whites needed to buy off the blacks instead of giving them real political power.
So TLDR: the GOP has an opportunity to grab Asians from the Dem coalition due to Dems own stupidity.
IMO, AA was a woeful misstep. Blacks would have been far better served by a push for real housing deseg; housing is upstream of education inequity anyways. The idea that education was going to create a virtuous cycle within "the hood" instead of become "a way to escape the hood" was always naively fucking stupid.
One only needs to look to Malaysia and India to see how it gets turned into political patronage and degrades institutions. But American exceptionalism, right?
"Blacks would have been far better served by a push for real housing deseg; housing is upstream of education inequity anyways."
They'd be better served by not putting the priorities of the patronage machine above black peoples, but we are talking about the party that would rather put up "in this house..." signs than build more houses.
>>It’s fine if it’s a way to escape the hood instead of creating a virtuous cycle within the hood.
Perhaps, as a marginal policy. I'm not against policies that help people; in the wake of Civil Rights/Jim Crow, some modest form of AA may have been morally justified. But it was sold as a cure-all, an easier-to-achieve alternative to get the same results as the harder fight of deseg. And AA was already a political liability, and only got worse as time went on: you can only sell a policy that appears to violate the literal meaning of 14A for so long. But, as tends to happen, yesterday's temporary band-aid became today's sacred cow.
The moral is, don't oversell marginal policies just because the logical conclusion is that you also need to do something else that's really hard.
>>It’s more important that people do well, not places.
No. You've got that backwards. Places doing well make people who do well. AA doesn't "work" because it *doesn't* matter whether Harvard or Hood Community Tech is doing well; AA works precisely because Harvard is a far healthier place than Hood Fucking Community Tech. And the people who get out of the hood because they went to Harvard, don't go right back to the hood, which on any macro level (IE at the level necessary for any kind of policy to honestly be expected to work) will lead to a depopulation spiral.
I'm not trying to deny that major arbitrages like that which drove the Great Migration don't ever exist or that no one should take advantage of them. I'm just saying that their existence is no justification to abandon entire neighborhoods. It's impossible to send the entire hood to Harvard, and depopulating the hood is just going to progressively immiserate everyone who's left. And anyways, in what universe is it even morally acceptable to allow such a miserable place as "the hood" in the first place? It's one thing to acknowledge that we don't bear any personal responsibility for how it got there; but it's another to insist that we don't need to bother trying to make it a stronger place.
Go ahead. Name for me any way to make "[a person] do well". I guarantee you, it involves them going to a *place* that is already doing well. It's not an either-or, it's a circle of life: places make people, and people make places. *We* are the people in this equation, so we need to make the places. When we don't, we get the hood. When we do, we get Harvard.
> If the GOP could stop being such miserable, prejudiced fucks then they'd find that Asians can be a part of their coalition. As Wax notes, they are being targeted by the DEI-industrial complex which uses affirmative action to keep their numbers in institutions down. Look at how the wokes have decided that Asians are "white-adjacent."
What you say makes a lot of sense. I do sometimes wonder whether the GOP are just too stupid to understand these elementary facts.
As far as I can see, they *have* picked up on it, and they've tried to capitalize on it, it's just that Asian-Americans who are on the fence don't find much else in the GOP's platform to be attractive, and the GOP isn't willing to compromise on those things which would make it attractive to them.
It's basically, "See, look, the left hates you because of AA, so you should vote for us!". Which is a pitch that maybe works for dumb white folks, and doesn't annoy the handful of Asian and Latino fervent anti-communists who are already Republicans, but doesn't do much for my old lab partner Jimmy who was skeptical of the hard left because he DID grow up more or less "white-adjacent" and the insult hits a little close to home, and had some generally conservative sensibilities, maybe even voted for Romney, but would die before voting for the MAGA GOP.
"“If you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. In medicine, they’re sort of the new Jews, I guess, but these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now"
I hate to break it to her, but diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives hurt Asian applicants to medical schools.
I know they’ve since backtracked, but the “emerging democratic majority” thesis really was one of the most politically poisonous ideas of the last 20 years.
I’m hopeful that as the GOP coalition becomes (slowly) more diverse that it’s reflexive opposition to immigration subsides.
I probably largely agree with you, but I'm not hopeful about GOP opposition to immigration.
Opposition to "racism" may well recede from what are debatably already fairly low levels. But there was always be immigrants who don't speak or act or dress just like the natives. And immigrants who are just poorer and have low job-skills. Right now the majority of anti-immigrant sentiment is based on perceived cultural differences, voting foremost among them from diehard GOP political operatives. A smaller share and decreasing share is based on skin color or other immutable characteristics.
You can look backward in US history, or outwards around the globe now, to see that opposition to immigrants doesn't need to have anything to do with skin color. The big anti-immigrant laws of the 1920s in America were passed to prevent Southern and Eastern European immigration. The know-nothings were anti-Irish. Brexit was about Polish plumbers and Romanian gardeners. In S Africa the "bad" immigrants are from Zimbabwe. In Japan the hardcore Xenophobes are most angry about Koreans. And so on...
Tl;dr: A rainbow-colored GOP is perfectly capable of being anti-immigrant.
In some ways I'd see the transition from racist and nativist to only nativist as a huge win for the GOP and America. Right now the GOP would likely not object to immigrants from, say, Norway (all 12 of them).
Removing the racial aspect of this would help us move to an Australian or Canadian-style points-based system. Right now the very idea of immigration is poisonous.
Is Amy Wax truly representative of those who think the immigration system needs to be reformed (so that we don't get the free-for-all that we're now seeing at the border)? Racism should clearly have no part of the discussion on immigration, but it's not unreasonable to propose moving toward a Canadian or Australian style that prioritises the kinds of immigrants, regardless of race or ethnicity, who can best help the country grow. Immigration is a privilege, not a right.
BTW, both John Judis and Ruy Texeira have recanted the views expressed in "The Emerging Democratic Majority": https://newrepublic.com/article/144547/redoing-electoral-math-argued-demographics-favored-democrats-wrong (Ironically, Hispanic support for the GOP continues to grow despite their evident hostility to increased immigration). Demographic determinism appears to be overcome by assimilation (which is a good thing).
Unfortunately, we may have to wait a few more elections before the two parties respond more aggressively to these assimilationist trends. Because of racial gerrymandering, each party has its base in safe districts—for Democrats, the big cities where 30 to 40 percent are foreign-born, and for Republicans, the white exurban South and Appalachia.
So far, both parties are simply reaching out to the mixed-race working-class melting pot areas without rethinking their post-’70s base strategies. Indeed, they are doubling down on them, hoping that mobilizing their urban or Southern bases will enable them to minimize their outreach to the new melting pot that is emerging in many parts of the country. In the short term, that will perpetuate today’s divisions and potentially reelect Donald Trump (or someone like him). But longer term, changing demographics suggest a very different, and less divisive, sort of politics.
I think it's telling that the single biggest remaining obstacle to integration for many undocumented people is their undocumented status. They can't engage as citizens. Even just going to an ESL class is dangerous if you never know whether ICE will be standing outside.
I am an immigrant....and I wish discussions about immigration made distinctions among level of skills and education of immigrants, otherwise it's a near useless conversation.
Noah, this is a great post, it seems like a no-brainier that the US needs more immigration to make up for the low fertility rates. This phenomenon is obviously playing out globally, so the US with its historical pro-immigration policies has an advantage.
However, one angle I have never understood is why Indian immigrants (I am one) from the upper-castes (I am not) rationalize simultaneously favoring Democrats in the US, and PM Modi (Hindu right-winger) in India? This inconsistency is very puzzling.
I don't really find it puzzling. To put it bluntly, if you are a Hindu Indian, Modi is 'for your cultural group' in India while the Democrats are 'for your cultural group' (insofar as that group is the big POC group) in America. Many if not most people vote in this way.
But wouldn't that normally lead to cognitive dissonance: favoring a secular multi-cultural political regime in US, AND simultaneously favoring a ethno-religious nationalist back home?
Well, from a rational perspective, if one was primarily concerned with the interests and prominence of Hindus as a group, then this dual position would make rational sense no? Similar to US Jews supporting ethno-nationalist Israel but also voting Democrat.
But yes if someone sees themselves as intellectually consistent in their view of politics (i.e. 'I am a liberal') then yes it could cause cognitive dissonance. But I think most people are able to get over cognitive dissonance quite easily! I would say it's almost a requirement to be successful in politics in fact.
Obviously in reality people have more complex motivations than their group's cultural prominence, and some people are not very concerned at all about the prominence of their cultural group. But it is clearly a big factor for many people.
Ok, that makes sense, I'll have to think more about this. But it does align with the odd phenomenon of so many Indian-American academics at the Ivies being very upper castes (often Brahmin) and doing activism on US-centric issues/ implicit racism/ identity politics without acknowledging that they're (if one uses their analytical lens on them) one of the most historically privileged groups of humans to exist with millennia of oppression (usually the Dalits and other minorities being the target) behind them.
My not-particularly-informed guess is it's simple human nature. Some are just not too reflective and don't catch the inconsistency. Others might realize it but as long as they personally benefit it's fine to them.
To be clear - I don't base that on any special knowledge of Modi or Indian voters. It's just a cynical observation of human nature and how we can often be selfish or thoughtless..
This is late, but it's not true that Modi only gets support from upper castes, whether in the US or India. Modi himself is a Shudra, and it's largely thanks to him that the BJP has gained huge amounts of votes from the lower castes and generally shed its reputation as the Brahmin party. People who still claim the BJP is anti-Dalit have not been following the statistics.
Also, you make a mistake in assuming that the "right wing" in India is equivalent to the right wing in America. Even if liberal Western media like the New York Times is largely critical of Modi, many of the things that the so-called Indian Right supports would be considered liberal here. For instance, Modi is in favor of woman's rights like abortion, is supportive if not neutral over LGBT issues, and is a supporter of pro-climate policy like solar power. So basically, supporting both the Democrats and the BJP is not necessarily inconsistent. Many immigrants support their home country no matter the party in power, and Indians aren't much different in that regard.
This seems very inconsistent and hypocritical to me: to simultaneously support a multi-cultural secular US AND a Hindutva party led by the guy who oversaw the Gujrat pogroms. The caveat (that Mark Rise points out) is that it is easier to overcome this cognitive dissonance by rationalizing along more pragmatic nationalistic/ religious lines. I.e. in both cases my in-group benefits even if the positions are logically and morally incompatible. Modi's "Ache din" is much more compatible with MAGA.
Lol what? How is achche din compatible with MAGA? The full phrase translates to “good days are about to come,” which sounds more like Obama’s Hope and Change slogans. For a poor, developing country, it is a perfectly anodyne slogan.
But anyway, I still disagree that supporting both parties is inconsistent, unless you believe that every country should be a carbon copy of one another. Because of differing histories and culture, you can want your mother country and home countries to be governed differently. The US is a 300 year old country explicitly founded by deists to nullify the Catholic-Protestant conflict of the Old World. India, despite its modern statehood, is the inheritor of a 3,000 year old civilization and the birthplace of four major world religions. Therefore, it’s fair for Indian Americans to want that religious heritage reflected more explicitly in Indian governance while supporting the irreligious Democrats in the US.
As another commenter pointed out, it’s essentially the same logic when American Jews support Israel being a Jewish state while also supporting the Democrats. If it’s okay for Jews, why not for Indians?
I think you're de facto agreeing with me with this statement: "it’s fair for Indian Americans to want that religious heritage reflected more explicitly in Indian governance while supporting the irreligious Democrats in the US. "
It is hypocritical, but the rationalization is totally understandable considering what benefits the in-group. Its a different matter that hundreds millions of Indian non-Hindu minorities disagree.
Hypocritical is really the wrong word to use here. It implies that Indian Americans are somehow being malicious or duplicitous. As I've noted, it is perfectly valid to want different countries to be governed according to different ideologies. E.g. I can support the monarchy in the UK while supporting republicanism in the US.
It is hypocritical when you factor in the constitutions of these countries: India is a constitutional republic with strict separation of state and religion. Advocating for a Hindutva ideology, i.e. rule by majority religion is literally against the constitution. Similarly the US constitution (1st amendment) prohibits mixing State and religion.
The UK is a different case, its is a unitary system with parliamentary government under a constitutional monarchy.
Israel is even more different, it has no constitutional separation of state and religion, in fact it is established as a Jewish state.
Bottom line, advocating for a Hinduism as the state religion, i.e., adopting Hidutva ideology would be unconstitutional. The founding fathers of India and US were wiser than most realize.
I would agree that more legal immigration is a good thing; with one caveat - we need to address housing supply first.
The supply of goods & services is not fixed; but the supply of housing is. We just had a year of 0% population growth and a 23% increase in house prices. This isn’t healthy and a new source of demand isn’t a good idea.
The economist class should be spending a LOT more time talking about housing. The lack of supply is a primary driver of so much of what ails us: anti-immigration rhetoric, inflation, wealth inequality, reduced family mobility, homelessness, mediocre productivity, etc.
I see the occasional article on the need for more housing but that’s it. Where’s the outrage? The table pounding? The “letter signed by 200 economists to the President?
I don't think it's as simple as an "either-or". For example, I live in a community with a lot of immigration - legal and illegal - and it put a lot of pressure on the housing market, enough that a lot of building was done in the last 20 years.
I think an "Overfeed The Beast" strategy might work in housing; that is, to be explicit, a strategy of adopting maximal population growth in order to stress housing supply and encourage building.
Obviously some communities have gotten this right. But in aggregate we’ve gotten it very wrong.
The strategy here isn’t complex, as you suggest. What’s lacking is the table-pounding outrage from the intellectual class. My hunch is too many of them are essentially captured by their own portfolios of housing assets. This is how we stagnate.
I would say the opposite. Practically everyone I talk to in my daily life is not all that agitated about housing. The most agitation I do see is from intellectual-class characters like Noah and Matt Yglesias.
I spent 20 years in LA - housing was top-of-mind for virtually everyone in their 20 to 40s. When people moved to Texas or Idaho or wherever, housing was always a top reason. The only people I can think of who didn't seem agitated were 50-somethings who owned property or younger people who had been in the same apartment for a decade and had some version of rent control.
Where I live now, no one is particularly agitated by housing, probably because it's still affordable.
I didn't say people around here weren't agitated. Just that they aren't pounding the table for reform. It's not the central issue that Mark was insisting it should be made into.
I for one agree. But 70 years of suburban expansion have meant that even in the heart of my nice little walkable seaside downtown, we're desperately outnumbered by NIMBY assholes in the surrounding areas, and the only hope is an old-school political machine that mostly ignores the NIMBYs in Robert-Moses-style and does whatever corrupt shit lines its pockets, rather than listen to Millennials like me. Thus, the Millennials around here like me don't really bother agitating on housing; they just thank our lucky stars for our handful of overpriced Yuppy Fishtanks and call it a day...
I would wager a guess that you’re talking to homeowners who quite enjoy low-risk capital gains but bemoan inequality, inflation, low productivity etc. Which is exactly the problem - decision makers are captured by self interest. Resistance to something like expanded immigration is to be expected when the leadership class is clearly working off a playbook informed by rent-seeking.
Resistance is to be expected on literally any issue, but I don't think it wholly explains the problem. Even assuming larger-than-usual overlap in this specific arena, it's impossible that homevoters would perfectly overlap with homeowners.
IMO, even ignoring our trenchant vetocracy, our rigidly two-party system is simply unable to effectively shut down the modest resistance there is, or keep from excessively enabling it.
The only place where "Asian" "or "Hispanic" exists is in the US. Such a pity so much of intellectual sparring and time is spent on a non-existent (and convenient) version of humanity. The Silicon Valley desi (Indian) knows as little about the desi guy who is selling merchandise in Queens and the Chinese academic in Boston knows as little about a Chinese restaurant owner in LA!
I just read up on Amy Wax and would strongly encourage everyone to do the same before just labeling her. Approach it from an epistemological point of view. Not a political one of labels and what can and cannot be said within the Overton Window. She makes no biological claims on race. Her biggest question - how do we know that liberal democracy can survive if a nation is made up of immigrants who do not believe in liberal democracy? This is a theoretical question worth debating.
She also says that some cultures, historically, have put a lot of value on empiricism. To others, empiricism is a non-starter. This, too, is probably more of a realist statement than a racist one.
To make a case for immigration based on economics is not really engaging with what she talks about, which is much more foundational. What is the nature of a nation? What is culture? And what is the role of history in the shaping of a culture? Everyone likes easy answers, including her. The right approach, to me, would be to engage with all ideas, positive and negative, dialectically, so to speak.
To my knowledge, no. But this is obviously not something anyone could empirically study, it's way too un-PC, even if it would provide evidence that this general group is liberal democratic. Can I imagine an argument that says would 50m mainland Chinese and 50m South Asians still prefer about liberal democracy over economic gain, seeing as the PRC clearly doesn't embody liberal values and India/Pakistan are veering towards religio-authoritarianism? Yes, I can.
I'm not sure what you're responding to because I said nothing of the kind. But this is generally the nature of discussion - it's like speaking into a void.
I'll be glad to stand corrected on mainland Chinese democratic fervor if you provide the evidence, as you so elegantly put it.
If you believe liberal democracy matters, then surely it is relevant evidence as to what mainland Chinese citizens actually want that none of them voted to be governed by the PRC. If you take its rule as an expression of Chinese popular will, then it seems like you’re saying there is no difference between liberal democracy and dictatorship. In which case perhaps it is people of *your* culture who should be kept out of the country?
Brilliant. Nothing like an American liberal to lift the veil of Gramsci's false consciousness and tell people what they really think. As a matter of fact, having spent a lot of time in China, most Chinese in person and in media are raving nationalists, loathe the US and believe their system is superior. The only real resistance in the past few decades against Chinese autocratic rule came from the... wait for it, Falun Gong.
The anti-immigration comments on this thread made me angry but i don't have time to round up the links i'd need to engage in a sufficiently ~popularist~ way, so i'll just say: has Amy Wax talked to, like, one Asian ever? Like, a single one. How could you possibly sustain the idea that Asian potential immigrants (people with a set of heritages spanning MORE THAN HALF OF HUMANITY) are a monolith? As usual, the thing that astounds about racism is its sheer stupidity.
There's always a few.
"don't have time to round up the links i'd need to engage in a sufficiently ~popularist~ way"
Ask them if they are fine paying more taxes to deal with an aging population. If there's one thing that the GOP agrees on, it's that taxes should not be raised by a single cent. They might cosplay at populism, but it's a lie.
I agree with your political opinion. But I think it's telling that all these answers are either definitional (what is an Asian, more rational yet beside the point), economic (totally beside the point) or party political (irrelevant), when her questions are mostly legal philosophical.
Eli, have you been on a college campus recently? The kids seem to be creating an "Asian" identity, which never existed in their home countries. Wax may be racist swine, but in this respect she is quite representative of a liberal campus environment.
I spent far more time than I’d like to admit arguing in the comment thread of Glenn Loury’s Substack (where the Wax interview and follow up appeared) that yes, it IS racist to (effectively) say “Asians suck and we need fewer of them in America.” People have lost their minds. I look forward to the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, on whose board Glenn Loury sits, releasing a statement against Wax (won’t hold my breath…)
Loury personally has made a statement against Wax - ""I thought that Amy's comments, in places, were outrageous," Loury told CNN in a statement Wednesday. "I said as much during the interview what she said about the Asians could have been said, and was said, about the Jews not so long ago. Today we call that antisemitism.""
I have not watched the interview but it seems pretty bad. Very disappointed in Loury for platforming her. Did he push back on her garbage?
Not much… mostly “hey your negative stereotypes are true but what about all these positive stereotypes too?”
Yikes. My respect for Loury just dropped significantly.
Human beings’ capacity for rank hypocrisy never ceases to amaze.
Great post. Also recommend Matthew Yglesias’ book “One Billion Americans”.
Noah reviewed that a while back, actually: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/book-review-one-billion-americans
Let me be a little contrarian here:
Are we trying to win an argument or persuade people? You can win the immigration argument by demonstrating how objectively beneficial immigration is to the USA but you will not persuade large tracts of the Right. Why? Because for the New Right culture is paramount.
This is beyond Trump. For many on the New Right it is about preserving what they perceive as Western Civilization (Christendom, Enlightenment legacy, Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian classical texts). They view the Western world as a heritage to be celebrated and conserved. They see themselves as the true conservatives. Old school conservatives of the type Noah illustrated who may compromise on immigration have failed to persuade many on the Right.
Within their worldview the Left is actively trying to dismantle this Western heritage. They see immigration as a tool of the Left to accomplish this dismemberment. Don’t believe me? Check out sites like The American Conservative, The Federalist or even take a moment to peruse Gab. Many on the New Right genuinely feel they are not racist.
If you want to build a governing coalition to enhance immigration you need to engage with this thinking. Hard to persuade but can be done.
You have to genuinely think like a Centrist and not dismiss the Right as “racist” you won’t persuade the Right to embrace immigration this way and you could very well lose elections.
It is exactly this Western Civilization that progressivism wants to deconstruct and tear down. So the lines are quite clearly drawn aren't they?
This is what Zemmour says in France. Anyone can be French, but French-ness is Judeo-Christian, Greco-Roman and the enlightenment.
Good luck to Progressives in passing immigration reform with that mindset. The ascendant view on the Right is that Western Civilization is under siege and must be preserved. Progressive views are popular in certain enclaves in America but I’d wager that a plurality of the states leans more towards the Right which is getting more outspoken about its views.
You won’t command the Senate or Presidency with strong Progressive views.
I'm not advocating for either or. I actually find the classic conservative view much more realistic. Progressivism is a good negative to the classic conservative magnetic pole, but it has proven to be an empty, almost nihilistic positive because it hinges on the belief that the world is mind and can be changed at will. That's a nice theory but history hasn't quite worked that way (so they try to re-write history to fit their theory).
What we're really dealing with is an ideological mumbo-jumbo where nobody knows the reasons for what they believe, or what exactly it is they believe apart from a couple of outcomes they want to see. But they make up for this by believing all the more strongly.
If the GOP could stop being such miserable, prejudiced fucks then they'd find that Asians can be a part of their coalition. As Wax notes, they are being targeted by the DEI-industrial complex which uses affirmative action to keep their numbers in institutions down. Look at how the wokes have decided that Asians are "white-adjacent."
The Dems use affirmative action to toss political patronage to black people. However, it is unpopular among most demographics as seen in Proposition 16 and Proposal 2 in MI. In the former, only blacks were in favor even though elite opinion heavily pushed it and outspent the "no" side by 16-1. This isn't a progressive vs moderate Dem issue either. The progressives are the wokes who think that not matching the demographic composition is a hate crime, and the moderates are the machine politicians who can't get over when the party was liberal whites + blacks and the whites needed to buy off the blacks instead of giving them real political power.
So TLDR: the GOP has an opportunity to grab Asians from the Dem coalition due to Dems own stupidity.
IMO, AA was a woeful misstep. Blacks would have been far better served by a push for real housing deseg; housing is upstream of education inequity anyways. The idea that education was going to create a virtuous cycle within "the hood" instead of become "a way to escape the hood" was always naively fucking stupid.
"IMO, AA was a woeful misstep."
One only needs to look to Malaysia and India to see how it gets turned into political patronage and degrades institutions. But American exceptionalism, right?
"Blacks would have been far better served by a push for real housing deseg; housing is upstream of education inequity anyways."
They'd be better served by not putting the priorities of the patronage machine above black peoples, but we are talking about the party that would rather put up "in this house..." signs than build more houses.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/07/18/as-frustration-builds-among-black-democrats-alternatives-are-limited/?sh=7b4bb8287e5d
>>It’s fine if it’s a way to escape the hood instead of creating a virtuous cycle within the hood.
Perhaps, as a marginal policy. I'm not against policies that help people; in the wake of Civil Rights/Jim Crow, some modest form of AA may have been morally justified. But it was sold as a cure-all, an easier-to-achieve alternative to get the same results as the harder fight of deseg. And AA was already a political liability, and only got worse as time went on: you can only sell a policy that appears to violate the literal meaning of 14A for so long. But, as tends to happen, yesterday's temporary band-aid became today's sacred cow.
The moral is, don't oversell marginal policies just because the logical conclusion is that you also need to do something else that's really hard.
>>It’s more important that people do well, not places.
No. You've got that backwards. Places doing well make people who do well. AA doesn't "work" because it *doesn't* matter whether Harvard or Hood Community Tech is doing well; AA works precisely because Harvard is a far healthier place than Hood Fucking Community Tech. And the people who get out of the hood because they went to Harvard, don't go right back to the hood, which on any macro level (IE at the level necessary for any kind of policy to honestly be expected to work) will lead to a depopulation spiral.
I'm not trying to deny that major arbitrages like that which drove the Great Migration don't ever exist or that no one should take advantage of them. I'm just saying that their existence is no justification to abandon entire neighborhoods. It's impossible to send the entire hood to Harvard, and depopulating the hood is just going to progressively immiserate everyone who's left. And anyways, in what universe is it even morally acceptable to allow such a miserable place as "the hood" in the first place? It's one thing to acknowledge that we don't bear any personal responsibility for how it got there; but it's another to insist that we don't need to bother trying to make it a stronger place.
Go ahead. Name for me any way to make "[a person] do well". I guarantee you, it involves them going to a *place* that is already doing well. It's not an either-or, it's a circle of life: places make people, and people make places. *We* are the people in this equation, so we need to make the places. When we don't, we get the hood. When we do, we get Harvard.
> If the GOP could stop being such miserable, prejudiced fucks then they'd find that Asians can be a part of their coalition. As Wax notes, they are being targeted by the DEI-industrial complex which uses affirmative action to keep their numbers in institutions down. Look at how the wokes have decided that Asians are "white-adjacent."
What you say makes a lot of sense. I do sometimes wonder whether the GOP are just too stupid to understand these elementary facts.
As far as I can see, they *have* picked up on it, and they've tried to capitalize on it, it's just that Asian-Americans who are on the fence don't find much else in the GOP's platform to be attractive, and the GOP isn't willing to compromise on those things which would make it attractive to them.
It's basically, "See, look, the left hates you because of AA, so you should vote for us!". Which is a pitch that maybe works for dumb white folks, and doesn't annoy the handful of Asian and Latino fervent anti-communists who are already Republicans, but doesn't do much for my old lab partner Jimmy who was skeptical of the hard left because he DID grow up more or less "white-adjacent" and the insult hits a little close to home, and had some generally conservative sensibilities, maybe even voted for Romney, but would die before voting for the MAGA GOP.
"“If you go into medical schools, you’ll see that Indians, South Asians are now rising stars. In medicine, they’re sort of the new Jews, I guess, but these diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives are poisoning the scientific establishment and the medical establishment now"
I hate to break it to her, but diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives hurt Asian applicants to medical schools.
I know they’ve since backtracked, but the “emerging democratic majority” thesis really was one of the most politically poisonous ideas of the last 20 years.
I’m hopeful that as the GOP coalition becomes (slowly) more diverse that it’s reflexive opposition to immigration subsides.
I probably largely agree with you, but I'm not hopeful about GOP opposition to immigration.
Opposition to "racism" may well recede from what are debatably already fairly low levels. But there was always be immigrants who don't speak or act or dress just like the natives. And immigrants who are just poorer and have low job-skills. Right now the majority of anti-immigrant sentiment is based on perceived cultural differences, voting foremost among them from diehard GOP political operatives. A smaller share and decreasing share is based on skin color or other immutable characteristics.
You can look backward in US history, or outwards around the globe now, to see that opposition to immigrants doesn't need to have anything to do with skin color. The big anti-immigrant laws of the 1920s in America were passed to prevent Southern and Eastern European immigration. The know-nothings were anti-Irish. Brexit was about Polish plumbers and Romanian gardeners. In S Africa the "bad" immigrants are from Zimbabwe. In Japan the hardcore Xenophobes are most angry about Koreans. And so on...
Tl;dr: A rainbow-colored GOP is perfectly capable of being anti-immigrant.
In some ways I'd see the transition from racist and nativist to only nativist as a huge win for the GOP and America. Right now the GOP would likely not object to immigrants from, say, Norway (all 12 of them).
Removing the racial aspect of this would help us move to an Australian or Canadian-style points-based system. Right now the very idea of immigration is poisonous.
Is Amy Wax truly representative of those who think the immigration system needs to be reformed (so that we don't get the free-for-all that we're now seeing at the border)? Racism should clearly have no part of the discussion on immigration, but it's not unreasonable to propose moving toward a Canadian or Australian style that prioritises the kinds of immigrants, regardless of race or ethnicity, who can best help the country grow. Immigration is a privilege, not a right.
BTW, both John Judis and Ruy Texeira have recanted the views expressed in "The Emerging Democratic Majority": https://newrepublic.com/article/144547/redoing-electoral-math-argued-demographics-favored-democrats-wrong (Ironically, Hispanic support for the GOP continues to grow despite their evident hostility to increased immigration). Demographic determinism appears to be overcome by assimilation (which is a good thing).
Unfortunately, we may have to wait a few more elections before the two parties respond more aggressively to these assimilationist trends. Because of racial gerrymandering, each party has its base in safe districts—for Democrats, the big cities where 30 to 40 percent are foreign-born, and for Republicans, the white exurban South and Appalachia.
So far, both parties are simply reaching out to the mixed-race working-class melting pot areas without rethinking their post-’70s base strategies. Indeed, they are doubling down on them, hoping that mobilizing their urban or Southern bases will enable them to minimize their outreach to the new melting pot that is emerging in many parts of the country. In the short term, that will perpetuate today’s divisions and potentially reelect Donald Trump (or someone like him). But longer term, changing demographics suggest a very different, and less divisive, sort of politics.
I think it's telling that the single biggest remaining obstacle to integration for many undocumented people is their undocumented status. They can't engage as citizens. Even just going to an ESL class is dangerous if you never know whether ICE will be standing outside.
I am an immigrant....and I wish discussions about immigration made distinctions among level of skills and education of immigrants, otherwise it's a near useless conversation.
Noah, this is a great post, it seems like a no-brainier that the US needs more immigration to make up for the low fertility rates. This phenomenon is obviously playing out globally, so the US with its historical pro-immigration policies has an advantage.
However, one angle I have never understood is why Indian immigrants (I am one) from the upper-castes (I am not) rationalize simultaneously favoring Democrats in the US, and PM Modi (Hindu right-winger) in India? This inconsistency is very puzzling.
I don't really find it puzzling. To put it bluntly, if you are a Hindu Indian, Modi is 'for your cultural group' in India while the Democrats are 'for your cultural group' (insofar as that group is the big POC group) in America. Many if not most people vote in this way.
But wouldn't that normally lead to cognitive dissonance: favoring a secular multi-cultural political regime in US, AND simultaneously favoring a ethno-religious nationalist back home?
Well, from a rational perspective, if one was primarily concerned with the interests and prominence of Hindus as a group, then this dual position would make rational sense no? Similar to US Jews supporting ethno-nationalist Israel but also voting Democrat.
But yes if someone sees themselves as intellectually consistent in their view of politics (i.e. 'I am a liberal') then yes it could cause cognitive dissonance. But I think most people are able to get over cognitive dissonance quite easily! I would say it's almost a requirement to be successful in politics in fact.
Obviously in reality people have more complex motivations than their group's cultural prominence, and some people are not very concerned at all about the prominence of their cultural group. But it is clearly a big factor for many people.
Ok, that makes sense, I'll have to think more about this. But it does align with the odd phenomenon of so many Indian-American academics at the Ivies being very upper castes (often Brahmin) and doing activism on US-centric issues/ implicit racism/ identity politics without acknowledging that they're (if one uses their analytical lens on them) one of the most historically privileged groups of humans to exist with millennia of oppression (usually the Dalits and other minorities being the target) behind them.
My not-particularly-informed guess is it's simple human nature. Some are just not too reflective and don't catch the inconsistency. Others might realize it but as long as they personally benefit it's fine to them.
To be clear - I don't base that on any special knowledge of Modi or Indian voters. It's just a cynical observation of human nature and how we can often be selfish or thoughtless..
This is late, but it's not true that Modi only gets support from upper castes, whether in the US or India. Modi himself is a Shudra, and it's largely thanks to him that the BJP has gained huge amounts of votes from the lower castes and generally shed its reputation as the Brahmin party. People who still claim the BJP is anti-Dalit have not been following the statistics.
Also, you make a mistake in assuming that the "right wing" in India is equivalent to the right wing in America. Even if liberal Western media like the New York Times is largely critical of Modi, many of the things that the so-called Indian Right supports would be considered liberal here. For instance, Modi is in favor of woman's rights like abortion, is supportive if not neutral over LGBT issues, and is a supporter of pro-climate policy like solar power. So basically, supporting both the Democrats and the BJP is not necessarily inconsistent. Many immigrants support their home country no matter the party in power, and Indians aren't much different in that regard.
This seems very inconsistent and hypocritical to me: to simultaneously support a multi-cultural secular US AND a Hindutva party led by the guy who oversaw the Gujrat pogroms. The caveat (that Mark Rise points out) is that it is easier to overcome this cognitive dissonance by rationalizing along more pragmatic nationalistic/ religious lines. I.e. in both cases my in-group benefits even if the positions are logically and morally incompatible. Modi's "Ache din" is much more compatible with MAGA.
Lol what? How is achche din compatible with MAGA? The full phrase translates to “good days are about to come,” which sounds more like Obama’s Hope and Change slogans. For a poor, developing country, it is a perfectly anodyne slogan.
But anyway, I still disagree that supporting both parties is inconsistent, unless you believe that every country should be a carbon copy of one another. Because of differing histories and culture, you can want your mother country and home countries to be governed differently. The US is a 300 year old country explicitly founded by deists to nullify the Catholic-Protestant conflict of the Old World. India, despite its modern statehood, is the inheritor of a 3,000 year old civilization and the birthplace of four major world religions. Therefore, it’s fair for Indian Americans to want that religious heritage reflected more explicitly in Indian governance while supporting the irreligious Democrats in the US.
As another commenter pointed out, it’s essentially the same logic when American Jews support Israel being a Jewish state while also supporting the Democrats. If it’s okay for Jews, why not for Indians?
I think you're de facto agreeing with me with this statement: "it’s fair for Indian Americans to want that religious heritage reflected more explicitly in Indian governance while supporting the irreligious Democrats in the US. "
It is hypocritical, but the rationalization is totally understandable considering what benefits the in-group. Its a different matter that hundreds millions of Indian non-Hindu minorities disagree.
Hypocritical is really the wrong word to use here. It implies that Indian Americans are somehow being malicious or duplicitous. As I've noted, it is perfectly valid to want different countries to be governed according to different ideologies. E.g. I can support the monarchy in the UK while supporting republicanism in the US.
It is hypocritical when you factor in the constitutions of these countries: India is a constitutional republic with strict separation of state and religion. Advocating for a Hindutva ideology, i.e. rule by majority religion is literally against the constitution. Similarly the US constitution (1st amendment) prohibits mixing State and religion.
The UK is a different case, its is a unitary system with parliamentary government under a constitutional monarchy.
Israel is even more different, it has no constitutional separation of state and religion, in fact it is established as a Jewish state.
Bottom line, advocating for a Hinduism as the state religion, i.e., adopting Hidutva ideology would be unconstitutional. The founding fathers of India and US were wiser than most realize.
I would agree that more legal immigration is a good thing; with one caveat - we need to address housing supply first.
The supply of goods & services is not fixed; but the supply of housing is. We just had a year of 0% population growth and a 23% increase in house prices. This isn’t healthy and a new source of demand isn’t a good idea.
The economist class should be spending a LOT more time talking about housing. The lack of supply is a primary driver of so much of what ails us: anti-immigration rhetoric, inflation, wealth inequality, reduced family mobility, homelessness, mediocre productivity, etc.
I see the occasional article on the need for more housing but that’s it. Where’s the outrage? The table pounding? The “letter signed by 200 economists to the President?
I don't think it's as simple as an "either-or". For example, I live in a community with a lot of immigration - legal and illegal - and it put a lot of pressure on the housing market, enough that a lot of building was done in the last 20 years.
I think an "Overfeed The Beast" strategy might work in housing; that is, to be explicit, a strategy of adopting maximal population growth in order to stress housing supply and encourage building.
Obviously some communities have gotten this right. But in aggregate we’ve gotten it very wrong.
The strategy here isn’t complex, as you suggest. What’s lacking is the table-pounding outrage from the intellectual class. My hunch is too many of them are essentially captured by their own portfolios of housing assets. This is how we stagnate.
I would say the opposite. Practically everyone I talk to in my daily life is not all that agitated about housing. The most agitation I do see is from intellectual-class characters like Noah and Matt Yglesias.
Where do you live?
I spent 20 years in LA - housing was top-of-mind for virtually everyone in their 20 to 40s. When people moved to Texas or Idaho or wherever, housing was always a top reason. The only people I can think of who didn't seem agitated were 50-somethings who owned property or younger people who had been in the same apartment for a decade and had some version of rent control.
Where I live now, no one is particularly agitated by housing, probably because it's still affordable.
Connecticut, suburbs about an hour north of NYC.
I didn't say people around here weren't agitated. Just that they aren't pounding the table for reform. It's not the central issue that Mark was insisting it should be made into.
I for one agree. But 70 years of suburban expansion have meant that even in the heart of my nice little walkable seaside downtown, we're desperately outnumbered by NIMBY assholes in the surrounding areas, and the only hope is an old-school political machine that mostly ignores the NIMBYs in Robert-Moses-style and does whatever corrupt shit lines its pockets, rather than listen to Millennials like me. Thus, the Millennials around here like me don't really bother agitating on housing; they just thank our lucky stars for our handful of overpriced Yuppy Fishtanks and call it a day...
I would wager a guess that you’re talking to homeowners who quite enjoy low-risk capital gains but bemoan inequality, inflation, low productivity etc. Which is exactly the problem - decision makers are captured by self interest. Resistance to something like expanded immigration is to be expected when the leadership class is clearly working off a playbook informed by rent-seeking.
Resistance is to be expected on literally any issue, but I don't think it wholly explains the problem. Even assuming larger-than-usual overlap in this specific arena, it's impossible that homevoters would perfectly overlap with homeowners.
IMO, even ignoring our trenchant vetocracy, our rigidly two-party system is simply unable to effectively shut down the modest resistance there is, or keep from excessively enabling it.
Like myself?
The only place where "Asian" "or "Hispanic" exists is in the US. Such a pity so much of intellectual sparring and time is spent on a non-existent (and convenient) version of humanity. The Silicon Valley desi (Indian) knows as little about the desi guy who is selling merchandise in Queens and the Chinese academic in Boston knows as little about a Chinese restaurant owner in LA!
I just read up on Amy Wax and would strongly encourage everyone to do the same before just labeling her. Approach it from an epistemological point of view. Not a political one of labels and what can and cannot be said within the Overton Window. She makes no biological claims on race. Her biggest question - how do we know that liberal democracy can survive if a nation is made up of immigrants who do not believe in liberal democracy? This is a theoretical question worth debating.
She also says that some cultures, historically, have put a lot of value on empiricism. To others, empiricism is a non-starter. This, too, is probably more of a realist statement than a racist one.
To make a case for immigration based on economics is not really engaging with what she talks about, which is much more foundational. What is the nature of a nation? What is culture? And what is the role of history in the shaping of a culture? Everyone likes easy answers, including her. The right approach, to me, would be to engage with all ideas, positive and negative, dialectically, so to speak.
"question - how do we know that liberal democracy can survive if a nation is made up of immigrants who do not believe in liberal democracy"
Is there any evidence that Asian-Americans do not do so?
To my knowledge, no. But this is obviously not something anyone could empirically study, it's way too un-PC, even if it would provide evidence that this general group is liberal democratic. Can I imagine an argument that says would 50m mainland Chinese and 50m South Asians still prefer about liberal democracy over economic gain, seeing as the PRC clearly doesn't embody liberal values and India/Pakistan are veering towards religio-authoritarianism? Yes, I can.
2022: "Maybe Asians are secretly anti-democratic. We don't know. But we should keep them out"
1840:"Maybe the Irish are plotting to impose a Catholic theocracy. We don't know. But we should keep them out."
Attitudes like yours are what led to Japanese internment.
I'm not sure what you're responding to because I said nothing of the kind. But this is generally the nature of discussion - it's like speaking into a void.
I'll be glad to stand corrected on mainland Chinese democratic fervor if you provide the evidence, as you so elegantly put it.
If you believe liberal democracy matters, then surely it is relevant evidence as to what mainland Chinese citizens actually want that none of them voted to be governed by the PRC. If you take its rule as an expression of Chinese popular will, then it seems like you’re saying there is no difference between liberal democracy and dictatorship. In which case perhaps it is people of *your* culture who should be kept out of the country?
Brilliant. Nothing like an American liberal to lift the veil of Gramsci's false consciousness and tell people what they really think. As a matter of fact, having spent a lot of time in China, most Chinese in person and in media are raving nationalists, loathe the US and believe their system is superior. The only real resistance in the past few decades against Chinese autocratic rule came from the... wait for it, Falun Gong.
Articles like these are why I subscribe! Please keep up the great work.
Hey Noah - do you feel the NIMBY mindset plays into this more broadly?
Meaning culture war / assimilation - sure
But deeper intrinsic opposition is the cause of the NIMBY - “we don’t need more people”