There is a non-trivial cohort of left intellectuals who believe that even criminals are themselves victims of unjust, racist, late-stage capitalist society which drove them to desperation. For them, deporting criminals is basically an evil act that promotes the inhumane system further.
The question is how much influence do ideas like these have on mainstream Democratic politicians and their policies. It is a party with a heavy academic wing which isn't exactly ideologically moderate, so I would say "enough of an influence that it becomes an electoral problem".
When Biden has to apologize for calling Jose Antonio Ibarra "illegal," a thrice deported Venezuelan who murdered Laken Riley in a botched rape attempt, it's pretty clear Progs have been setting the Democrats agenda on immigration for the past few years.
"It's pretty clear Progs have been setting the Democrats agenda on immigration for the past few years"
???? Let's look at ACTUAL POLICY from Biden's years. He kept Title 42 in place at his own volition for an extra year and a half (an extra year after that was compelled by courts because Biden otherwise realized it was bad policy which encouraged recidivism but GOP states sued), he surged resources to the border to manage the unprecedented wave of migrants, negotiated with Mexico to deny Venezuelans visa-free entree who couldn't easily be deported to Mexico, denied asylum at the beginning of his term unless one was formally enrolled in the Remain in Mexico program (which btw incentivize illegal immigration from desperate migrants), etc.
I get that the correction about labeling someone "illegal" is cringe but using that as encompassing Biden's entire immigration policy gives a factually wrong impression and is frankly dumb.
Another thing I forgot was Biden pushing for that bipartisan Border Bill co-authored by Senator Lankford. Are we supposed to believe that Progressives favored Lankford's bill who is a GOP senator BTW??
I guess we could treat this as an unanswerable question. Alternatively, I guess you could look at the policy platforms of most mainstream Democratic candidates to answer it.
I think you’re missing a key third plank — a legitimate guest worker program. During the Bush administration, a bipartisan committee came up with a good proposal that ultimately got shot down by Republicans. Honestly, I think because dysfunctional immigration suits their purposes. You cannot get Americans to do certain jobs, like pick peppers. Trust me, I’ve tried. Immigrants don’t take our jobs. They do things nobody else is willing to do. Temporary workers are a win-win. They make a fortune in their eyes. Our economy benefits. And then they go home.
And we have to acknowledge the need for some sort of amnesty program as well. I've always felt that if an illegal immigrant can show that they've been in the country for five years, have committed no crimes (even a parking ticket), have a job and have been paying taxes, and have learned English, then they are "in." The liberal media outlets do immigrants a disservice when reporters interview illegals who have clearly been here awhile but can't speak English. That does not go over well with conservative media consumers.
Most minor crimes have statutes of limitations. The police can't show up to your house and give you a ticket because you drove 10 miles over the speed limit eight years ago. They can't arrest a 50 year old for painting graffiti or shoplifting when they were 19. At some point prosecuting old crimes becomes counterproductive. There are a few crimes that are so serious that they have no statute of limitations, but illegal border crossings seem more like a minor crime than a major one.
Because it's unrealistic to expect that we'll deport all currently illegal immigrants. That seems to be Trump's plan, but how's that going for him so far?
Which is why there needs to be some kind of penalty. A large, but feasible to pay fine seems to make the most sense to me. Prove you’ve paid taxes. Pay a $10k fine. Activists and community groups can raise the money. If you’ve paid that off and been here 10 years, you get a green card. Maybe the amnesty makes you ineligible for citizenship. I think you could make something like this work and incentivize a lot of people coming forward.
I see your point, but sympathize with those who don’t want to reward people for crossing the border illegally. That goes back to Noah’s point about it essentially creating an open border.
I agree that we wouldn't want to create an incentive for continued illegal immigration, so an amnesty would have to be part of comprehensive immigration reform.
The problem with this is that we have had many iterations of a deal where we did "one last amnesty, and then we finally started enforcing the border law"
it never actually ended up being one final amnesty
I think from a game theory perspective this idea is just a non-starter, it would have been the best choice if those with concerns could trust the promise, but they can't
I don't like guest worker programs. If someone is good enough to come in this country and perform menial labor, they are good enough to become citizens. When farmers clamor for a guest worker program because Americans are "too mouthy," it's pretty clear that the point is to have an exploitable underclass completely dependent on their employer.
My ideal system would have every work-permitting visa allow application for permanent residency after three years. Work visas would be 3 years long, firing the worker would result in their return to the country of origin but also cause the company to lose the visa fee. Workers would be periodically interviewed to check that basic labor laws are being followed. For temp or seasonal work, my guess is you would get specialized visa companies that act as the employers, like temp agencies today.
Immigration is not for the immigrants benefit. It is for the admitting country's benefit, and I see no benefit to taking on the Social Security and Medicare expenses of their retirement. If they are willing to come and work for pay and then go home, then that is plenty. If anybody who can do unskilled labor is "good enough" to get in then we would have to let in billions of people.
1. No desire to live in a Gulf petrostate with some permanent imported underclass dying to build me my aviary. If you don't want to pay their social security, you don't need their work. They'll be paying into the system same as anyone else.
2. What are you going to do when they have kids here? Or are you only allowing men in? Can you see any downsides to regularly shipping in swarms of unattached young men with no prospects?
3. No, we do not have to allow everyone in. Anyone importing someone on a work visa should pay a reasonably substantial fee. The amount of immigration will naturally stabilize when the demand for immigrant labor drops, because it will no longer be worth it to businesses to pay the fee.
I think birthright citizenship is the stupidest immigration policy imaginable, which is why nobody in Europe has it. If I were setting immigration policy that would be the first thing to go. If they have a kid with a US citizen / permanent resident, the kid should be a citizen. If they have a kid with another temporary visa holder then the kid goes back with the parents when their visas are expired.
I think the US has been enormously successful over the past two hundred years, and our willingness to accept immigrants has been a huge part of the formula. In a world of declining birth rates, the ability to accept and integrate immigrants is moving from "really, really important" to "existential". Europe, with less ability to do this, is in a bad place.
As a general rule, when someone points to the US's most successful policies and says "if I'd been in charge, I wouldn't have done that," I guess I find it helpful in evaluating the wisdom of their positions going forward.
Policies need to change to reflect a changing reality. It was one thing to allow unlimited immigration when the country was so empty the government was literally giving away land to anyone on the one condition that they live on it for a few years. There were also no welfare or entitlements whatsoever at that time so a new citizen did not add any cost to the state.
Things are different now. Every new immigrant is going to cost the state money if they end up on some form of government assistance. And he cost to support them in retirement via Social Security and Medicare is massive. So unlike immigration in the past it is incredibly important to do a cost / benefit analysis. Denmark did and found that many immigrants were a massive drain on the system and then put in place a much more restrictive policy https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20211218_EUC232.png
As for immigration that passes a cost / benefit analysis I am fine with that, but as far as I can tell nobody has even done that analysis here, and admitting millions of refugees (mostly filing fraudulent asylum claims) who are consuming welfare spending from the moment they enter cearly does not pass the test. I'm not against immigration. I'm against stupid immigration policy that does not benefit the country, and our current policy is very much that.
You make a good point. Temp worker comes in, gets pregnant, birthright citizenship (which is settled law), then the mother gets fast tracked to stay. I would only say, don’t let perfect get in the way of good. A few people will always take advantage. They are the exception. I don’t know how it would fall across all industries, but in agriculture, it must be 90% males. There are females on the packing lines. Construction, again, is nearly all male. You can poke holes in anything.
I’ll give one example that stood out to me. I was an agricultural researcher back in 05 or so. (I retired in 22.). I had a Vidalia onion trial where I needed to clip the onions, measure each circumference, and weigh each plot. It was very labor intensive. I checked in with the local temp agency and learned the going rate was $7 or maybe $7.50. I offered $10. That morning, I had a full crew of 10 people or maybe 15, all that I had requested. Vidalias are harvested in April/May, so it wasn’t even hot yet. They trudged their way through it that morning. I overheard a couple of them comparing notes on the qualities of the various nearby county jails. We broke for lunch. When it was time to go again, I only had one person come back. I had to abandon the trial. I told the guy to bill me for the rest of the day and told him to enjoy the afternoon off.
Over my career, I have spoken to countless produce growers. They pay the immigrants (some legal, some not) minimum wage in addition to providing room and board. It’s required. In addition, the efficient workers can actually earn more because they get a chip for every bucket they pick. If the chips add up to more than minimum wage, they get the bonus. Many of them do. Produce growers will gladly hire Americans to do this type of work, but you rarely see them. On the other hand, their necessary labor supports many higher paying jobs, including the guys driving the tractors, quality control, sales positions, truck drivers, box makers, etc. We will lose this very large industry without immigrants to pick and pack our produce.
That was a long-winded answer, but you know, you asked…
I know this is a long shot, but once robots can do all the menial labor that people don’t want to do, a big leg of the low skill immigration goes away (of course this leaves the question who’s gonna pay into our Medicare and SS system?)
1. Flood the market with illegals who have no other options to lower wages
2. Offer US citizens slightly more than the new "going rate"
3. When they don't want to work for that money say "but Americans don't want these jobs"
4. Then when people complain about this system say "but who will pick the cotton?," wait, sorry, I got it mixed up with last time. This time we say "we will lose this very large industry without immigrants to pick and pack our produce"
But we won't actually lose that industry. AI says that an onion picker will pick 100-300 onions per hour. So let's say that we double the wage from $17 to $35 an hour to get US citizens interested. That means each onion will cost 6-18 cents more than it does now, and everybody will be fine.
you can't just raise the price of a good and expect to increase revenue. The market is not perfectly efficient, but the market in onions is certainly efficient enough that if growers could raise prices by $0.20 and see increased revenue, they already would have done so. increasing price will just decrease revenue.
That's right. Basic supply/demand. The additional 12 cents per onion will be split between the consumer and the farmer. Farmer's profit per onion will go down and the total number of onions sold will decrease. I skipped this part in the analysis because the change in cost is so tiny that the effect on the market will obviously be minimal, not the "lose the whole industry" nonsense that was being claimed.
Something difficult about this issue in particular is that the general public's knowledge of the immigration system as it actually exists is extremely low. Most people don't interact with the immigration system or understand much about how it works, which means the public makes a lot of baseline assumptions about legal immigration that are just wrong.
Many of the public seem to assume that there exists within our immigration system some "right way" for a person to enter the country. They imagine this way might involve waiting in a line, proving your economic capabilities, or similar,. Many voters with strong opinions on immigration would be deeply surprised at what the actual specifics of legal immigration looks like, how cruel and arbitrary and impossible the system can be for a normal person to navigate even when they do everything right.
I still remember the nightmares I had when going through the system with my immigrant spouse. Years of waiting and expense and planning, punctuated by moments when a random government bureaucrat can decide to tear apart your family for any reason or no reason at all. It was maddening to hear Republicans talk about "Joe Biden's open border" while living through that process, a process few Americans would ever accept if it were visited on them personally.
One reason you see some very strong left-partisans on this issue is because people who actually try to interact with the federal immigration system in good faith often become radicalized against it.
I guess my practical concern here is that the gap between policy and vibes can become very wide when people care deeply about immigration but deal with the system so little in their personal lives. If the Democratic nominee for 2028 runs on Noah's proposed policy, will he actually get any credit on this issue? Or will his Republican opponents simply lie about him and smear his policies as "Open borders" while average joes who don't pay attention to immigration nod along?
Getting rid of the land acknowledgements would certainly be nice. But it's sometimes hard to tell if the policy Democrats propose even matters much at all. Most people don't know or care what the current policy is, they just vaguely dislike foreigners and law-breaking and vote based on vague ideas and vibes.
I'm currently glad we went the honest way because it reduces the chance of him being dragged away by masked goons and held in an American concentration camp, but the fact that it doesn't eliminate that chance is disturbing.
But I want it to be hard to immigrate. I think the vast majority of applicants should be rejected. The demand is very high so we should insist that only the most valuable applicants be admitted.
That's fine, but I honestly have never gotten the impression that most Americans want legal immigration to be a painful massive bureaucratic nightmare. Most people I talk to about my story are shocked by how difficult and frightening legal immigration is even when you do everything right, and my story is tame in the scheme of things.
I honestly think the idea that national borders should be national prisons is pretty rare. I think most Americans like the idea of being able to become part of another country if they're genuinely willing to invest in being a citizen there, and I think most Americans would other people willing to invest in America to become part of us.
People generally do not like lawbreaking, and this issue gets very polarized on law-and-order lines. But the actual arguments for restricting legal immigration are much softer, even on the right. It's telling that even the Millerites have to lie constantly about how much they want to restrict legal immigration, because America just won't get behind the idea that we should kick out a bunch of law-abiding students and scientists and spouses.
I agree. I don't want it to be hard in that it is a bureaucratic nightmare. I want it to be hard in that the standards for admission are very high. But the decision should be made quickly. Most of those Americans who like the idea of being able to move to another country quite literally like the idea. If they try to make it more than an idea they will very quickly run into the immigration authorities in that other country who are, with very few exceptions, much stricter than our own. It's incredibly presumptuous to think that you should just be able to go and live in someone else's country without presenting any more of a value proposition than that you would just like to "invest" your time in joining them.
Shouldn't it be just as hard to be a birthright citizen then? If the goal is selectivity for value, we should make all Americans take a test and prove that they are "valuable to the nation", and those falling below the mark should be expelled. The "value" of a median American will increase over time if expose ourselves to this selective pressure on a global scale.
While I agree that Democrats need to settle on a unified message on immigration, the fact that the Cygnal poll gets the visual while the Gallup poll doesn't, suggests that you are putting your thumb on the scale a bit.
Because the Gallup poll tells a significantly different story than the Cygnal one.
"Please tell me whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following proposals. Deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country?"
Favor: (Strongly or regular) Oppose: (Strongly or regular)
2025: 38% vs 59%
2024: 47% vs 51%
2019: 37% vs 61%
2016: 32% vs 62%
Please tell me whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following proposals. Allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time
Favor: (Strongly or regular) Oppose: (Strongly or regular)
2025: 78% vs 21%
2024: 70% vs 30%
2019: 81% vs 18%
2016: 84% vs 15%
This does not show a consensus around "Deport all illegal immigrants regardless of other criminal status."
Somehow, "deport all illegal immigrants now" went from 38% vs. 59% in 2025 to 61% vs. 34% in 2026? Also, this is Cygnal (Who?) vs. Gallup (80+ years in the polling business).
I feel like your basic integrity forced you to link to the Gallup poll, but your sense of what makes a good argument meant that you didn't want to put up the actual Gallup numbers in the main body of the text.
Cygnal has the Democrats leading in the generic Congressional ballot by 4 points, right in line with the NYTimes and is rated A by Nate Silver, who thinks says they have a bias of 2 points towards Democrats overall in its polling
Republican pollsters will often attempt to play elections straight, because there's accountability in the outcome. But come on man. Go to their website. Click around for two minutes. They make zero pretense as to what they're about, which is generating Republican propaganda. They don't need you to pretend on their behalf.
I see what you’re saying. It’s interesting that Cygnal did a few Trump approval polls last spring when his ratings were still net positive then stopped
Thank you. I strongly disagree with Noah’s proposal to deport every illegal immigrant and to make that the stated policy of the Democratic Party. Most of the polls I see suggest that most Americans agree, and that number is going up.
Noah is fighting the war of yesterday, not the war of tomorrow.
A reasonable path to legal status is fair and just, good for the country and the economy, good for families, and good for local communities.
I don't think the suggestion here is to deport every illegal immigrant, but rather if you are caught being here illegally for whatever reason then you should be deported. The vast majority won't actually be caught and deported. It's kind of like we deal with every other low level crime. We know that most people will get away with it, and we don't waste a ton of resources or violate everybody's rights to try to eliminate it, but when you do catch people the law must be enforced.
I would not support that. You would instantly be breaking up families and deporting contributing members of society. Not to mention the gray zone of what constitutes being here illegally.
I would add to this mix the October 2025 national survey of 1,530 registered voters by The Argument asking which policy proposals would make voters more comfortable with increased levels of immigration, the results of which indicated that increased crime and disorder were the overwhelming concern of most voters, and that "improved vetting" to eliminate criminals and "terrorists" (RIP Renee Good) from entering would make most voters more favorably disposed to immigration.
>> but they have flouted the American people’s democratic will
Noah, come on, this is fucking bullshit.
The current system is a broken hodgepodge that hasn’t been updated in decades. Its basic structure shares the same DNA as the original 1920’s KKK backlash policy.
When my ancestors came here, they had to wait 3-4 years TOPS. The earliest ones were given Indian land in Missouri by the literal fucking government for their trouble!
It’s fundamentally illegitimate, un-American, and was NEVER a conscious democratic choice made by ANY electorate since the 60’s, let alone by anything remotely fucking resembling today’s electorate, that today’s waiting period ought to be anywhere from 7-27 years. It’s an accident coming from kludge after kludge being piled on top of it.
The only thing being “flouted” is how stupid and immoral the American people are for being ignorant of how long the “line” they’re so mad about people jumping, actually IS.
I would agree that Noah concedes too much as to deportations.
However, I think you are picking on the wrong line of his piece. People may not always think clearly about it, but the sense that the law is on your side but it is being flouted -- this is an enraging and radicalizing thing.
Laws are not void simply because they are several decades old. They are not void because you or I disagree or think they are stupid or feel they are not congruent with the America we favor.
And, truth be told, immigration law has been updated many times since the 60s -- much of the rage in MAGA goes back to their perception that compromise legislation back during the Reagan presidency giving amnesty to the pre-'82 undocumented but cracking down on employers and the border was a double cross, and the crackdown never occurred. They had negotiated a deal within the democratic process, but the law was largely unenforced. This became a source of radicalization. (It was mostly business Republicans who stabbed them in the back, by the way, which goes a long way to explaining the eventual hostile takeover of the GOP. Ironically, Trump's big show in blue cities is to a large extent a way of hiding the fact that he has decided to shield rural employers from the law -- history repeating itself.)
The fundamental truth remains, though, that a majority of Americans do not actually know how long “the line” IS.
Imagine you are living in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, waiting near the front of a line to get through a checkpoint into a safe zone — or you may even be a soldier guarding the checkpoint —regardless, what matters is that from your vantage point, the line is so long, it stretches down and around the end of the block. You cannot see how long it is beyond that.
Somewhere between 7 and 27 miles away, where the line finally ends, a horde of zombies is approaching. The people there at the back, rather than get their faces bitten off and join the ranks of the undead, start sprinting towards the front of the line. The wave of recognition of mortal danger spreads faster than the people can actually run, and so others closer to the front start running. All order begins to break down.
The checkpoint COULD have let in everyone long before the zombies ever got near. In fact, many of those zombies themselves were doomed to add their might to the ranks of the damned, because this line and others like it in other places were so slow. The primary culprit at the checkpoints all this time has been that each checkpoint only had a single lane for admittance to entry. The citizens inside had plenty of natural resources to build a great, grand society, with towers to house everyone comfortably and at population densities that were still absurdly sparse compared to before the zombie apocalypse.
Now, if YOU — the person at the front of the line, or the lone soldier guarding the checkpoint, or even the lazy, secure citizen — sat around getting mad at all of the people suddenly rushing the line, solely because you couldn’t see what all the fuss was about 7-27 miles away… I’m sorry, but that’s on YOU. YOU have failed to see the danger around the bend, a danger that threatens your safety and security as well. YOU have failed to explore the world around you — at any time, you could have logged on to a drone camera showing you the zombie horde. You may have even seen it, but you were too busy listening to the safe zone’s warden bluster on about how we had to strip-search every entrant 20 times before letting them in, instead of adopting some reasonably sane quarantine protocols. YOU could see that the cause, whatever it was, was out of your sight. That doesn’t give you carte blanche to get as angry as you please; at bare minimum, it gives you a moral duty to either reserve judgment, or, if action is demanded by circumstances of the emergency, to do the least amount of harm.
Getting indignant, enraged, radicalized, is a natural human response to seeing people rushing the line without any cause in sight. That does NOT absolve ANYONE of the moral responsibility to look past their indignance, to ask WHY.
It strikes me that this is an argument for anarchy, a direct attack on the very concept of law, certainly of democratically determined law.
If the only laws that apply are the ones where YOU are convinced that the majority of citizens properly understand the situation... then very little law remains.
When? Weed is still illegal at the federal level, but the law is sparsely enforced. Plenty of states have dispensaries operating in the open. Why does one instance of law flouting go practically unremarked while the other foments rage and radicalization?
Seems to me that I remember them locking up people for insane lengths of time for simple possession. I'd say that the history of marijuana enforcement over my lifetime has been an excellent example of radicalizing people into a wild overreaction.
Immigration is different. It has always been ruled by the courts that immigration is exclusively under federal control (remember this was the same argument that Democrats used against Texas and Florida when Biden was in office). There is no such precedent for drug laws. And there has been no explicitly issued policy that the government has decided not to enforce immigration law. Instead it has been done dishonestly.
And most importantly, there has been no significant public outrage over the DOJ's decision to allow states to regulate marijuana. This is indicative that the DOJ's policy has the approval of the general public. Whereas the decision not to enforce immigration law has caused widespread public backlash leading to election losses, which indicates that the government's decision not to enforce immigration law does not have the approval of the general public.
I agree that Democrats need to lose the anti-enforcement vibes – it doesn't just lose them the center, it takes away their credibility to make a deal. I also think employment-side enforcement needs to be stepped up: E-Verify, but strengthened. But that can only come in conjunction with a generous amnesty.
However, I'm flabbergasted that you so casually advocate ripping 14 million people from their homes and livelihoods, people that are part of our communities, that in many cases have raised American children – all for the sake of political expedience. The undocumented have built our homes, made our food, cared for our elderly. We have tolerated their employment for decades because they were cheap labor, and now we think we have the moral status to change our minds?
I'm also shocked there is so little pushback in the comments to you. Trump has won. The undocumented are now considered sub-human.
I’m flabbergasted that you so casually advocate rewarding 14 million people for breaking the law because they got away with it for years.
No one forced them to come here, they chose to break the law to get into the USA. I’m sorry that their past choices might leave them in a terrible situation, but that’s what bad choices do.
I say that as someone who is an advocate for increasing (and simplifying) legal immigration. I want the USA to be the land of opportunity for large numbers of legal and law abiding immigrants.
The US Congress has repeatedly refused to make even the toothless E-Verify a mandate, despite evidence that it worked. Employer enforcement actions were for decades in the teens... yearly, for the whole country. It's hard to think that this wasn't a choice. One hand of our collective psyche is scolding immigrants for their law-breaking, while the other enjoys the fruits of these same immigrants cheap labor.
Were you "flabbergasted" when Ronald Reagan "rewarded" millions of illegal immigrant residents with amnesty when he advocated for and signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?
Reagan created an expectation of the possibility of another amnesty, which has been exacerbated by various political actors over decades. Those political actors have helped create a situation where many see no possibility of avoiding an amnesty.
I don’t see why an amnesty has to occur, especially as it will create an expectation of future amnesties for those who evade immigration law long enough.
So how is this different than the Republican’s accusation of ‘advocation for open borders?’
‘Oh, America secures its border and only let certain people the privilege of being here, but if you so happens to be here illegally and contributes with no crimes, you can just stay here. Full stop’.
Effectively, this idea robs America the will on who get to be in and allowed residency. You could advocate for it, sure, but let’s not pretend it’s not just ‘open-border’. How is this not seen by other electorates as ‘anti-enforcement vibes’ as you put it?
I mean yeah. "Almost anybody who wants to come in can" is genuinely what I believe would be the best policy.
In most cases immigrants are a net benefit to the country. Anything short of maximum permissiveness is shooting ourselves in the foot. Noah as an economist should know this.
Masks are antithetical to the liberal notion of a self-governing citizenry. Moreover, we all learn as toddlers that bad guys wear masks. If you are wearing a mask (whether you are a federal agent or occupying a college quad), ordinary people on both sides are going to think you’re up to no good. Democrats should make “no masks” the rallying cry of any liberal immigration enforcement reforms.
Well, the original mask bans in American cities were specifically targeted at KKK members wearing those comical pointed white hoods as they tried to frighten the public without showing their faces, knowing their ideology is shameful.
Funny you say that. Leftist Will Stancil recently posted saying that ICE should claim they wear masks because they want to stop the spread of long COVID and watch their opposition crumble to infighting.
I'm reminded that Richard Hanania said that even at "the height of the BLM riots", police didn't find it necessary to wear masks. Given that, yes, no masks, and that should also be endorsed by conservatives (if you can find any of them any more).
First, be clear on the distinction between civil and criminal violations and the means of enforcement each requires. "Being" in the US without proper documentation is a civil violation. It in no way requires armed and masked thugs to whisk people away to undisclosed locations. Apprehending and imprisoning people who have committed crimes (and especially violent crimes) is another matter. And being a US citizen while in the United States is neither a civil nor a criminal violation...yet somehow that is where the bulk of the armed and masked agents are spending their time
What's so self-defeating about the "stolen land" rhetoric is that the most powerful moral engine of liberalism is the politics of inclusion - the idea that we should permit more types of humans to participate in the benefits of living in our society. That doesn't work very well if we despise what we're including people in on the grounds that it's an illegitimate settler colonial project.
As for deporting every single illegal immigrant, I have to wonder how many voters will change their minds once the consequences of removing more than 11 million people from the population begin showing up.
Anyway, on the basis of this "poll," you're telling us we must deport someone who came here when they were two years old and spent the last 20 years cleaning houses. Or wait, we must make them unemployable until they self-deport to a country they have no memory of.
I oppose open borders and I'm moderate on immigration. But this post is really pretty bad and ignores everything that makes immigration a hard problem. When you're proposing things that will dramatically alter the lives of millions of people and fundamental aspects of the U.S. economy, you have some obligation to think more seriously. And not hang your political prescriptions on a nakedly Republican pollster whose findings are completely the opposite of reputable polling.
I think a lot of “smart” approaches to immigration fundamentally miss the mark because the electorate is dumb and wants the impossible (i.e., they want all their groceries in one bag but they don’t want the bag to be heavy)
Would a coldly rational, bureaucratic, but humane system of business audits and fines conducted by trained accountants and not buffoons in masks and camo be more effective at driving out illegal immigrants? Yes, absolutely. Would the voters be happy when all their favorite restaurants close, and the poultry prices at the grocery skyrocket, and no one can afford lawn care or pool maintenance or snow removal or auto repair? No, they’d be furious.
Unfortunately I think the sweet spot for the average American swing voter is probably “we have access to a lot of cheap illegal labor, but also pretend we’re a nation of laws by some highly visible kinetic actions against some illegal immigrants, but also no citizens are ever caught up in that kinetic action”
Yes. The rational equilibrium is something like (1) retain access to this labor by "legalizing" that labor through a work permit system that lets people contribute to society while making a better life for themselves; (2) allow the subset of those workers who want to pursue a path to US citizenship apply for it and pass through some set of hard but reasonable tests, including no criminal activity, etc., subject to some sort of overall "cap" that will be set by Congress and move up and down based on the public mood, native US population growth (or shrinkage), "high-skilled" immigration at the top end of the economy, etc. This is close to the "deal" enacted in 1986, but it is more explicitly setting a boundary between those who are willing and able to contribute to the economy (a benefit for most Americans) and the forms of irregular immigration that are perceived to create disorder and (real) crime, which are the issues the vast majority of voters really care about. We have a hard time reaching this equilibrium because we are stuck between a bunch of nativist assholes who love to play with guns, and a bunch of leftwing assholes who want to deny the legitimacy of borders, law enforcement, capitalism, ...etc.
That sounds fine to me, I just don’t think the electorate wants this issue solved and put away, I think both sides really enjoy talking about it and fighting about it and neither really has an incentive to compromise an inch. Rs think it’s electoral rocket fuel because the electorate is racist (sure) and Ds think it’s electoral rocket fuel because tomorrow’s electorate is less white and non-white people are a savior who will deliver them from their conservative countrymen (that theory isn’t panning out well but Dems believe it as fervently as fundamentalist Christians believe in the Second Coming)
Yeah - we may have to wait until both parties are polling terribly on their respective approaches before they do the sensible thing. I do think we're getting closer to that point...
Game theory implies that one or the other failing parties in the dyad will innovate at the expense of the other, so there is an incentive to end the game, take the benefits of being perceived as rational, reasonable and "bipartisan" and move on to more fruitful battlefields where you enjoy better tactical advantages against you opponent. We don't have a shortage of those...
I think you may underestimate the extent to which working class people in "real America" resent the legal immigration process creating new elites who are seen as other, especially because they aren't Christian. There's real resentment there as well. I say this as the son of a gun range manager in rural Missouri who is also married to a product owner at Pepsi who was born in Punjab.
How do you plan on addressing the anger over the H1-B situation?
I don't know if I think that particular thread is powerful, but there's definitely a driver in that "working class" people, those who are paid basically for diligently doing some unpleasant task rather than for some particular skill, have been moving downward in the income/status distribution, and naturally they dislike it. (I can't tell from the statistics I've seen whether their real income has dropped over the past few decades, but they definitely have been losing out *relatively*.)
This can easily generate resentment toward the educated elites -- and after all, Harvard is still run by a lot of old white American men. Of course, if the country is importing distinctly "other" educated elites and slotting them in at the high end of the status ladder, that's even worse.
It's not clear what can be done about this. The decline in the economic value of "traditional working class labor" seems to be irreversible; the only way to stop the shift in relative status is to deliberately lower the value of highly-educated work, which means driving it to other countries and turning the US into a backwater. But there are always people who would prefer being a medium-sized frog in a small pond to being a small frog in a big pond.
This has been a dynamic throughout American history, dating back to well before "The Founding". The over-arching systemic response has been to tell the "nativists" to pound sand, because we're trying to grow a country here. This leads to occasional violent conflict between the nativists and the immigrants (including here black Americans migrating internally from South to North and West), and fosters various forms of popular prejudice (of which anti-semitism based on the relative economic success of Jewish Americans seems to be the most durable, but is now rivaled on the right by anti-Indian sentiment based on the relative economic success of Indian immigrants). It also leads to occasional political movements centered around nativist panic (Know-Nothings, Immigration Restriction League, Chinese Exclusion Act(s), KKK of the 1920s, MAGA of the 2020s, etc.). But generally speaking, "pound sand" has been the appropriate response to this kind of nativism, because we are, in fact, still trying to build a vibrant, economically successful country here.
"Job training" is the "pound sand" of the late 20th century, along with "get a college education" and "learn to code." There is always going to be a residuum of people who are not able or willing to participate at the level they would prefer in a rapidly changing economy. But that happens with or without the nativism. The nativist schtick is to blame their inability or unwillingness to participate on immigrants (legal or illegal) who don't "belong here", even when they can participate.
I have an additional suggestion: One of the problems with the current asylum seeker process is that there are not enough judges to evaluate all the cases and this has created a large backlog. I believe that the cases are being processed in chronological order, which results in applicants being in limbo for several years - which makes it attractive to come into the country and get in that very long, slow line.
But what if we reversed the process and started evaluating cases starting with the most recent and then going backwards? If a person knew that coming into the country now and seeking asylum would result in a hearing in days, and not years, there would be less incentive to come in to the country when you know you don't have a valid claim. And if people start self-selecting, just like Noah's recommendation to hold employers to do a better job of screening their hiring, then the reduced influx of new cases will help to start processing the many existing cases.
This may not seem "fair" to our normal belief in the "get in line" way to treat people, but I think the positive result would be worth violating this norm.
There aren’t enough immigration judges to handle the asylum backlog. My idea is that when a migrant makes asylum claims they should get a work permit, but also have to pay a big monthly fee (over $1000 or over 50% of their income, whichever is greater). When they get a hearing, if their claim is judged to be valid (fear of harm from their home country’s government) they get most of those fees back and a green card, if their claim judgment is negative, then the government keeps the fees (which pay for the system) and the person is deported immediately.
I don’t understand how Noah’s asylum reform would work, where he says illegal immigrants can no longer apply for asylum, but can still apply if they show up at a port of entry. The people sneaking across the Rio Grande or climbing desert walls would just line up at Juarez and walk over the bridge to the El Paso crossing gate. Unless claiming asylum means they still have to stay in Mexico until their hearing, which I guess is the “remain in Mexico” policy.
Half of people are less than averagely altruistic and impartial and all of them get a vote. Social media, the first truly decentralised mass media, has amplified this fact. Political elites have been bypassed and the standards of humanistic, universalist debate they were schooled to accept, and that progressives were best at, have been replaced with parochialism, slogans and memes. Progressives have to find a vocabulary and a platform somewhere between these two extremes. This is what Obama did. He succeeded electorally by casting his progressive arguments in the cadences of evangelical Christianity and by erring on the 'conservative' side in key areas of policy - e.g. addressing blue collar concerns about illegal immigration (without putting an army of thugs on the streets of cities that hadn't voted for him, it should be noted).
….While issuing decrees like DAPA and DACA that flooded the border and subverted the law.
It is called saying one thing and doing another, and I agree that is the Dems best hope. Worked in Virginia. Problem is getting it to work again once people figure it out
No. He said he'd do two things and he did two things: deporting recent and criminal illegal immigrants (c. 3 million deported during his presidency) while reducing deportation of illegal immigrants who had built a life and had children born in the US. A civilized and effective policy. If it's double standards to try to address the immigration problem without betraying your own moral standards, then I guess the Dems are guilty as charged. 'Suffer the little children to come unto me' didn't mean 'make children suffer'. You get that, right?
Obama did only “two things”? That’s not even a straw man.
When illegal decrees that subverted the law were signed with the phone and pen there were thousands of little children who were raped, abused or killed on their way to the border, unaccompanied . That is a lot of suffering. Hey, but it’s worth it for that activist support in the ground game no?
Uh oh! Hit a target there didn't I. So those crimes were Obama's responsibility, not that of the rapists or the parents who sent their children unaccompanied to the border? If that's the case, then gun crimes are the responsibility of gun manufacturers and the gun lobby? I don't know what that last sentence means. What's a 'ground game'?
What's discouraging to me is how reasonable the solutions seem to be. America could just do this, or, instead, what it has done: create chaos in its communities. And why on earth haven't employers who hire illegal workers been charged?
because nobody actually wants the economic consequences of doing that. people saying on a poll that they want to deport all illegal immigrants is cheap talk.
Well, some states have required E-Verify, meaning all employers need to verify each new hire using that system. E-Verify is just an automated system for quickly determining if the information on an I-9 employee form has valid documents.
Documents for an I9 can either be one class A (passport, passport card or green card) or both a class B (photo identification) and a class C (employment right) document. Which type of document to use is up the employee only, the employer or government cannot specify this. Only when a Class A document is used does the employer have to verify that the photo matches, so many employees use a drivers license (class B) and a social security card (class C) and since drivers licenses are easily faked, and no validation of the photo is required, and social security cards are even more easily faked with a stolen number, there still end up many verified workers that aren’t actually legally allowed to work.
Because first, there’s no database for them to check that says “here are the ‘illegal immigrants’.” Secondly, many people are here “legally” because of absurdly low standards under Mayorkas to claim asylum or other basis to enter, and resolving their claims takes many years. Third, employers are entitled to rely on things like drivers’ licenses and SSNs which are handed out like candy. The Democrats made it insanely easy to come in and stay a very long time. You can’t look to employers to do the anti-immigration job for the citizenry.
While interesting and well meaning, I am afraid that a left that believes that there should be no limits to illegal immigration, that has governors and mayors protecting arrested criminals from ICE and deportation, and sees illegal immigrants in states without any voter ID laws as de facto citizens that can vote and reelect these same leaders into office, could never move to the more moderate position you propose. It takes leadership on the left that agrees with your more reasonable position to promote this and lead the left in this direction. And you see even past leaders on the left, like Obama and Clinton, who deported millions, used to support ICE, and defended our borders, now join the riotous crowds of resistance who now reject the past claims and principles of these Democratic presidents and leaders. Who is the reasonable voice on the left that will promote this better approach to immigration? I think Rahm Emanuel is the only person I see at this time, and he doesn't seem to be getting any traction on the left.
> a left that believes that there should be no limits to illegal immigration
And you don't have to very far left before you find a lot of people who (effectively, if not consciously) think there should be no limits. For instance, I read the Boston Globe, which is a liberal newspaper but not strikingly leftist by US standards. But I've seen a bunch of times the phrase "people fleeing persecution, war, or poverty" used to describe immigrants. If you think about it, those three categories are totally different with regard to immigration law, and thus with regard to our stated immigration policies: those fleeing persecution have a right to asylum; those fleeing war can get TPS if they're lucky enough that the President decides to grant it; those fleeing poverty are "economic migrants" and are the people that immigration policy (of all countries) deliberately excludes.
This idea on the left that the US should be the universal place of refuge for everybody whose life is bad where they are is the mirror of the idea on the right that all brown immigrants should be excluded. They make it hard to assemble a compromise that works even halfway.
>The second thing Democrats can do is to close the asylum loophole that allows illegal immigrants to become legal residents simply by requesting asylum. ... Anyone on the planet can show up at a U.S. port of entry and request asylum. That’s a good law, and we should keep it. In addition, anyone who simply takes a plane to America on a tourist visa can request asylum once inside the country. That’s fine. What’s far more problematic is that anyone who crosses the border illegally is entitled to request asylum without any discrimination against their application due to the fact that they entered illegally!
This is not entirely accurate, and hence it ignores some important policy considerations.
Someone who shows up at a port of entry without a visa and requests asylum is not automatically permitted to enter. Rather, they are placed n expedited removal and must pass a credible fear screening. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/expedited-removal/ The Biden Administration eventually extended that to cover anyone apprehended within 100 miles of the border within 2 weeks of entering. Simultaneously, the Administration implemented use of the CBP_One app for migrants to make appointments to enter; those migrants were not given credible fear interviews but instead were given notice to appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. They could then file asylum applications as a defense to deportation.
Under current law, if a person is n the US illegally, but have not been caught, they can file an application for asylum with the USCIS. They must file within one year of entry, unless an exception applies (either some unusual event prevented them from filing, such as being hit by a bus, or a change in circumstances in their home country, ie, the country recently began persecuting members of the migrant's race, religion, etc) That application is adjudicated by a USCIS asylum officer. If the application is denied, the applicant is sent to immigration court for a deportation hearing, where their asylum application is reviewed again by an immigration judge. Hence, they get two bites at the apple.
So, the current system incentivizes illegal immigrants to "come out of the shadows" by filing an asylum application. But it also incentivizes sneaking and avoiding the border patrol. Noah's recommendation of denying those who enter illegally the ability to apply for asylum eliminates the second (bad) incentive, but also eliminates the first (good) incentive.
My point is that getting the policy correct is a challenge (and it is not as if there was no illegal immigration before the asylum system was adopted. Perhaps ironically, the Biden policy of extending expedited removal while exempting those who used CBP-One probably strikes a good balance, IF cases in immigration court can be sped up. (Note that the extension of expedited removal was of questionable legality under current law)
There is a non-trivial cohort of left intellectuals who believe that even criminals are themselves victims of unjust, racist, late-stage capitalist society which drove them to desperation. For them, deporting criminals is basically an evil act that promotes the inhumane system further.
The question is how much influence do ideas like these have on mainstream Democratic politicians and their policies. It is a party with a heavy academic wing which isn't exactly ideologically moderate, so I would say "enough of an influence that it becomes an electoral problem".
When Biden has to apologize for calling Jose Antonio Ibarra "illegal," a thrice deported Venezuelan who murdered Laken Riley in a botched rape attempt, it's pretty clear Progs have been setting the Democrats agenda on immigration for the past few years.
"It's pretty clear Progs have been setting the Democrats agenda on immigration for the past few years"
???? Let's look at ACTUAL POLICY from Biden's years. He kept Title 42 in place at his own volition for an extra year and a half (an extra year after that was compelled by courts because Biden otherwise realized it was bad policy which encouraged recidivism but GOP states sued), he surged resources to the border to manage the unprecedented wave of migrants, negotiated with Mexico to deny Venezuelans visa-free entree who couldn't easily be deported to Mexico, denied asylum at the beginning of his term unless one was formally enrolled in the Remain in Mexico program (which btw incentivize illegal immigration from desperate migrants), etc.
I get that the correction about labeling someone "illegal" is cringe but using that as encompassing Biden's entire immigration policy gives a factually wrong impression and is frankly dumb.
Another thing I forgot was Biden pushing for that bipartisan Border Bill co-authored by Senator Lankford. Are we supposed to believe that Progressives favored Lankford's bill who is a GOP senator BTW??
I guess we could treat this as an unanswerable question. Alternatively, I guess you could look at the policy platforms of most mainstream Democratic candidates to answer it.
The answer to that question is on page 1 of the Democratic party platform: https://democrats.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/FINAL-MASTER-PLATFORM.pdf
In short, they run the place.
"Undocumented" immigration?
Next up: Shoplifting as "undocumented shopping"!
I think you’re missing a key third plank — a legitimate guest worker program. During the Bush administration, a bipartisan committee came up with a good proposal that ultimately got shot down by Republicans. Honestly, I think because dysfunctional immigration suits their purposes. You cannot get Americans to do certain jobs, like pick peppers. Trust me, I’ve tried. Immigrants don’t take our jobs. They do things nobody else is willing to do. Temporary workers are a win-win. They make a fortune in their eyes. Our economy benefits. And then they go home.
And we have to acknowledge the need for some sort of amnesty program as well. I've always felt that if an illegal immigrant can show that they've been in the country for five years, have committed no crimes (even a parking ticket), have a job and have been paying taxes, and have learned English, then they are "in." The liberal media outlets do immigrants a disservice when reporters interview illegals who have clearly been here awhile but can't speak English. That does not go over well with conservative media consumers.
Why amnesty for someone who successfully concealed their violation of the law for 5 years?
I’m sympathetic to plans that increases legal immigration and against plans that reward people who broke the law.
Most minor crimes have statutes of limitations. The police can't show up to your house and give you a ticket because you drove 10 miles over the speed limit eight years ago. They can't arrest a 50 year old for painting graffiti or shoplifting when they were 19. At some point prosecuting old crimes becomes counterproductive. There are a few crimes that are so serious that they have no statute of limitations, but illegal border crossings seem more like a minor crime than a major one.
Because it's unrealistic to expect that we'll deport all currently illegal immigrants. That seems to be Trump's plan, but how's that going for him so far?
That is unrealistic, but still sneaking in and hiding for 5 years can't be a path to legal status because it is a terrible incentive.
Which is why there needs to be some kind of penalty. A large, but feasible to pay fine seems to make the most sense to me. Prove you’ve paid taxes. Pay a $10k fine. Activists and community groups can raise the money. If you’ve paid that off and been here 10 years, you get a green card. Maybe the amnesty makes you ineligible for citizenship. I think you could make something like this work and incentivize a lot of people coming forward.
I see your point, but sympathize with those who don’t want to reward people for crossing the border illegally. That goes back to Noah’s point about it essentially creating an open border.
I agree that we wouldn't want to create an incentive for continued illegal immigration, so an amnesty would have to be part of comprehensive immigration reform.
The problem with this is that we have had many iterations of a deal where we did "one last amnesty, and then we finally started enforcing the border law"
it never actually ended up being one final amnesty
I think from a game theory perspective this idea is just a non-starter, it would have been the best choice if those with concerns could trust the promise, but they can't
I don't like guest worker programs. If someone is good enough to come in this country and perform menial labor, they are good enough to become citizens. When farmers clamor for a guest worker program because Americans are "too mouthy," it's pretty clear that the point is to have an exploitable underclass completely dependent on their employer.
My ideal system would have every work-permitting visa allow application for permanent residency after three years. Work visas would be 3 years long, firing the worker would result in their return to the country of origin but also cause the company to lose the visa fee. Workers would be periodically interviewed to check that basic labor laws are being followed. For temp or seasonal work, my guess is you would get specialized visa companies that act as the employers, like temp agencies today.
Immigration is not for the immigrants benefit. It is for the admitting country's benefit, and I see no benefit to taking on the Social Security and Medicare expenses of their retirement. If they are willing to come and work for pay and then go home, then that is plenty. If anybody who can do unskilled labor is "good enough" to get in then we would have to let in billions of people.
1. No desire to live in a Gulf petrostate with some permanent imported underclass dying to build me my aviary. If you don't want to pay their social security, you don't need their work. They'll be paying into the system same as anyone else.
2. What are you going to do when they have kids here? Or are you only allowing men in? Can you see any downsides to regularly shipping in swarms of unattached young men with no prospects?
3. No, we do not have to allow everyone in. Anyone importing someone on a work visa should pay a reasonably substantial fee. The amount of immigration will naturally stabilize when the demand for immigrant labor drops, because it will no longer be worth it to businesses to pay the fee.
I think birthright citizenship is the stupidest immigration policy imaginable, which is why nobody in Europe has it. If I were setting immigration policy that would be the first thing to go. If they have a kid with a US citizen / permanent resident, the kid should be a citizen. If they have a kid with another temporary visa holder then the kid goes back with the parents when their visas are expired.
Maybe you should consider emigrating to a country whose cultural and civic traditions better align with your views.
I think the US has been enormously successful over the past two hundred years, and our willingness to accept immigrants has been a huge part of the formula. In a world of declining birth rates, the ability to accept and integrate immigrants is moving from "really, really important" to "existential". Europe, with less ability to do this, is in a bad place.
As a general rule, when someone points to the US's most successful policies and says "if I'd been in charge, I wouldn't have done that," I guess I find it helpful in evaluating the wisdom of their positions going forward.
Policies need to change to reflect a changing reality. It was one thing to allow unlimited immigration when the country was so empty the government was literally giving away land to anyone on the one condition that they live on it for a few years. There were also no welfare or entitlements whatsoever at that time so a new citizen did not add any cost to the state.
Things are different now. Every new immigrant is going to cost the state money if they end up on some form of government assistance. And he cost to support them in retirement via Social Security and Medicare is massive. So unlike immigration in the past it is incredibly important to do a cost / benefit analysis. Denmark did and found that many immigrants were a massive drain on the system and then put in place a much more restrictive policy https://www.economist.com/sites/default/files/images/print-edition/20211218_EUC232.png
As for immigration that passes a cost / benefit analysis I am fine with that, but as far as I can tell nobody has even done that analysis here, and admitting millions of refugees (mostly filing fraudulent asylum claims) who are consuming welfare spending from the moment they enter cearly does not pass the test. I'm not against immigration. I'm against stupid immigration policy that does not benefit the country, and our current policy is very much that.
What happens when they give birth in US while they are here?
You make a good point. Temp worker comes in, gets pregnant, birthright citizenship (which is settled law), then the mother gets fast tracked to stay. I would only say, don’t let perfect get in the way of good. A few people will always take advantage. They are the exception. I don’t know how it would fall across all industries, but in agriculture, it must be 90% males. There are females on the packing lines. Construction, again, is nearly all male. You can poke holes in anything.
When you say "I've tried" how did you try? What was the wage you offered?
I’ll give one example that stood out to me. I was an agricultural researcher back in 05 or so. (I retired in 22.). I had a Vidalia onion trial where I needed to clip the onions, measure each circumference, and weigh each plot. It was very labor intensive. I checked in with the local temp agency and learned the going rate was $7 or maybe $7.50. I offered $10. That morning, I had a full crew of 10 people or maybe 15, all that I had requested. Vidalias are harvested in April/May, so it wasn’t even hot yet. They trudged their way through it that morning. I overheard a couple of them comparing notes on the qualities of the various nearby county jails. We broke for lunch. When it was time to go again, I only had one person come back. I had to abandon the trial. I told the guy to bill me for the rest of the day and told him to enjoy the afternoon off.
Over my career, I have spoken to countless produce growers. They pay the immigrants (some legal, some not) minimum wage in addition to providing room and board. It’s required. In addition, the efficient workers can actually earn more because they get a chip for every bucket they pick. If the chips add up to more than minimum wage, they get the bonus. Many of them do. Produce growers will gladly hire Americans to do this type of work, but you rarely see them. On the other hand, their necessary labor supports many higher paying jobs, including the guys driving the tractors, quality control, sales positions, truck drivers, box makers, etc. We will lose this very large industry without immigrants to pick and pack our produce.
That was a long-winded answer, but you know, you asked…
I know this is a long shot, but once robots can do all the menial labor that people don’t want to do, a big leg of the low skill immigration goes away (of course this leaves the question who’s gonna pay into our Medicare and SS system?)
1. Flood the market with illegals who have no other options to lower wages
2. Offer US citizens slightly more than the new "going rate"
3. When they don't want to work for that money say "but Americans don't want these jobs"
4. Then when people complain about this system say "but who will pick the cotton?," wait, sorry, I got it mixed up with last time. This time we say "we will lose this very large industry without immigrants to pick and pack our produce"
But we won't actually lose that industry. AI says that an onion picker will pick 100-300 onions per hour. So let's say that we double the wage from $17 to $35 an hour to get US citizens interested. That means each onion will cost 6-18 cents more than it does now, and everybody will be fine.
you can't just raise the price of a good and expect to increase revenue. The market is not perfectly efficient, but the market in onions is certainly efficient enough that if growers could raise prices by $0.20 and see increased revenue, they already would have done so. increasing price will just decrease revenue.
That's right. Basic supply/demand. The additional 12 cents per onion will be split between the consumer and the farmer. Farmer's profit per onion will go down and the total number of onions sold will decrease. I skipped this part in the analysis because the change in cost is so tiny that the effect on the market will obviously be minimal, not the "lose the whole industry" nonsense that was being claimed.
Something difficult about this issue in particular is that the general public's knowledge of the immigration system as it actually exists is extremely low. Most people don't interact with the immigration system or understand much about how it works, which means the public makes a lot of baseline assumptions about legal immigration that are just wrong.
Many of the public seem to assume that there exists within our immigration system some "right way" for a person to enter the country. They imagine this way might involve waiting in a line, proving your economic capabilities, or similar,. Many voters with strong opinions on immigration would be deeply surprised at what the actual specifics of legal immigration looks like, how cruel and arbitrary and impossible the system can be for a normal person to navigate even when they do everything right.
I still remember the nightmares I had when going through the system with my immigrant spouse. Years of waiting and expense and planning, punctuated by moments when a random government bureaucrat can decide to tear apart your family for any reason or no reason at all. It was maddening to hear Republicans talk about "Joe Biden's open border" while living through that process, a process few Americans would ever accept if it were visited on them personally.
One reason you see some very strong left-partisans on this issue is because people who actually try to interact with the federal immigration system in good faith often become radicalized against it.
I guess my practical concern here is that the gap between policy and vibes can become very wide when people care deeply about immigration but deal with the system so little in their personal lives. If the Democratic nominee for 2028 runs on Noah's proposed policy, will he actually get any credit on this issue? Or will his Republican opponents simply lie about him and smear his policies as "Open borders" while average joes who don't pay attention to immigration nod along?
Getting rid of the land acknowledgements would certainly be nice. But it's sometimes hard to tell if the policy Democrats propose even matters much at all. Most people don't know or care what the current policy is, they just vaguely dislike foreigners and law-breaking and vote based on vague ideas and vibes.
Your spouse's mistake was trying to do things the honest way instead of asylum scamming like a smart person would.
Had he/she claimed asylum, he/she would've instantly received free legal immigration assistance from many NGOs.
I'm currently glad we went the honest way because it reduces the chance of him being dragged away by masked goons and held in an American concentration camp, but the fact that it doesn't eliminate that chance is disturbing.
We didn't need to make the legal process such byzantine bullshit so as to incentivize scamming! Seems stupid of us to set things up that way
Excellent comment.
But I want it to be hard to immigrate. I think the vast majority of applicants should be rejected. The demand is very high so we should insist that only the most valuable applicants be admitted.
That's fine, but I honestly have never gotten the impression that most Americans want legal immigration to be a painful massive bureaucratic nightmare. Most people I talk to about my story are shocked by how difficult and frightening legal immigration is even when you do everything right, and my story is tame in the scheme of things.
I honestly think the idea that national borders should be national prisons is pretty rare. I think most Americans like the idea of being able to become part of another country if they're genuinely willing to invest in being a citizen there, and I think most Americans would other people willing to invest in America to become part of us.
People generally do not like lawbreaking, and this issue gets very polarized on law-and-order lines. But the actual arguments for restricting legal immigration are much softer, even on the right. It's telling that even the Millerites have to lie constantly about how much they want to restrict legal immigration, because America just won't get behind the idea that we should kick out a bunch of law-abiding students and scientists and spouses.
I agree. I don't want it to be hard in that it is a bureaucratic nightmare. I want it to be hard in that the standards for admission are very high. But the decision should be made quickly. Most of those Americans who like the idea of being able to move to another country quite literally like the idea. If they try to make it more than an idea they will very quickly run into the immigration authorities in that other country who are, with very few exceptions, much stricter than our own. It's incredibly presumptuous to think that you should just be able to go and live in someone else's country without presenting any more of a value proposition than that you would just like to "invest" your time in joining them.
Shouldn't it be just as hard to be a birthright citizen then? If the goal is selectivity for value, we should make all Americans take a test and prove that they are "valuable to the nation", and those falling below the mark should be expelled. The "value" of a median American will increase over time if expose ourselves to this selective pressure on a global scale.
While I agree that Democrats need to settle on a unified message on immigration, the fact that the Cygnal poll gets the visual while the Gallup poll doesn't, suggests that you are putting your thumb on the scale a bit.
Because the Gallup poll tells a significantly different story than the Cygnal one.
"Please tell me whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following proposals. Deporting all immigrants who are living in the United States illegally back to their home country?"
Favor: (Strongly or regular) Oppose: (Strongly or regular)
2025: 38% vs 59%
2024: 47% vs 51%
2019: 37% vs 61%
2016: 32% vs 62%
Please tell me whether you strongly favor, favor, oppose or strongly oppose each of the following proposals. Allowing immigrants living in the U.S. illegally the chance to become U.S. citizens if they meet certain requirements over a period of time
Favor: (Strongly or regular) Oppose: (Strongly or regular)
2025: 78% vs 21%
2024: 70% vs 30%
2019: 81% vs 18%
2016: 84% vs 15%
This does not show a consensus around "Deport all illegal immigrants regardless of other criminal status."
Somehow, "deport all illegal immigrants now" went from 38% vs. 59% in 2025 to 61% vs. 34% in 2026? Also, this is Cygnal (Who?) vs. Gallup (80+ years in the polling business).
I feel like your basic integrity forced you to link to the Gallup poll, but your sense of what makes a good argument meant that you didn't want to put up the actual Gallup numbers in the main body of the text.
You can see Cygnal's customers here, in case you're wondering why they're coming up with results diametrically opposed to other more reputable pollsters: https://www.opensecrets.org/campaign-expenditures/vendor?cycle=2022&vendor=Cygnal+LLC
Cygnal has the Democrats leading in the generic Congressional ballot by 4 points, right in line with the NYTimes and is rated A by Nate Silver, who thinks says they have a bias of 2 points towards Democrats overall in its polling
Republican pollsters will often attempt to play elections straight, because there's accountability in the outcome. But come on man. Go to their website. Click around for two minutes. They make zero pretense as to what they're about, which is generating Republican propaganda. They don't need you to pretend on their behalf.
I see what you’re saying. It’s interesting that Cygnal did a few Trump approval polls last spring when his ratings were still net positive then stopped
Thank you. I strongly disagree with Noah’s proposal to deport every illegal immigrant and to make that the stated policy of the Democratic Party. Most of the polls I see suggest that most Americans agree, and that number is going up.
Noah is fighting the war of yesterday, not the war of tomorrow.
A reasonable path to legal status is fair and just, good for the country and the economy, good for families, and good for local communities.
I don't think the suggestion here is to deport every illegal immigrant, but rather if you are caught being here illegally for whatever reason then you should be deported. The vast majority won't actually be caught and deported. It's kind of like we deal with every other low level crime. We know that most people will get away with it, and we don't waste a ton of resources or violate everybody's rights to try to eliminate it, but when you do catch people the law must be enforced.
I would not support that. You would instantly be breaking up families and deporting contributing members of society. Not to mention the gray zone of what constitutes being here illegally.
FAIR AND JUST? For who? The whiny twats you had whine with last night? Get your head out of your ass.
I would add to this mix the October 2025 national survey of 1,530 registered voters by The Argument asking which policy proposals would make voters more comfortable with increased levels of immigration, the results of which indicated that increased crime and disorder were the overwhelming concern of most voters, and that "improved vetting" to eliminate criminals and "terrorists" (RIP Renee Good) from entering would make most voters more favorably disposed to immigration.
>> but they have flouted the American people’s democratic will
Noah, come on, this is fucking bullshit.
The current system is a broken hodgepodge that hasn’t been updated in decades. Its basic structure shares the same DNA as the original 1920’s KKK backlash policy.
When my ancestors came here, they had to wait 3-4 years TOPS. The earliest ones were given Indian land in Missouri by the literal fucking government for their trouble!
It’s fundamentally illegitimate, un-American, and was NEVER a conscious democratic choice made by ANY electorate since the 60’s, let alone by anything remotely fucking resembling today’s electorate, that today’s waiting period ought to be anywhere from 7-27 years. It’s an accident coming from kludge after kludge being piled on top of it.
The only thing being “flouted” is how stupid and immoral the American people are for being ignorant of how long the “line” they’re so mad about people jumping, actually IS.
I would agree that Noah concedes too much as to deportations.
However, I think you are picking on the wrong line of his piece. People may not always think clearly about it, but the sense that the law is on your side but it is being flouted -- this is an enraging and radicalizing thing.
Laws are not void simply because they are several decades old. They are not void because you or I disagree or think they are stupid or feel they are not congruent with the America we favor.
And, truth be told, immigration law has been updated many times since the 60s -- much of the rage in MAGA goes back to their perception that compromise legislation back during the Reagan presidency giving amnesty to the pre-'82 undocumented but cracking down on employers and the border was a double cross, and the crackdown never occurred. They had negotiated a deal within the democratic process, but the law was largely unenforced. This became a source of radicalization. (It was mostly business Republicans who stabbed them in the back, by the way, which goes a long way to explaining the eventual hostile takeover of the GOP. Ironically, Trump's big show in blue cities is to a large extent a way of hiding the fact that he has decided to shield rural employers from the law -- history repeating itself.)
The fundamental truth remains, though, that a majority of Americans do not actually know how long “the line” IS.
Imagine you are living in the middle of a zombie apocalypse, waiting near the front of a line to get through a checkpoint into a safe zone — or you may even be a soldier guarding the checkpoint —regardless, what matters is that from your vantage point, the line is so long, it stretches down and around the end of the block. You cannot see how long it is beyond that.
Somewhere between 7 and 27 miles away, where the line finally ends, a horde of zombies is approaching. The people there at the back, rather than get their faces bitten off and join the ranks of the undead, start sprinting towards the front of the line. The wave of recognition of mortal danger spreads faster than the people can actually run, and so others closer to the front start running. All order begins to break down.
The checkpoint COULD have let in everyone long before the zombies ever got near. In fact, many of those zombies themselves were doomed to add their might to the ranks of the damned, because this line and others like it in other places were so slow. The primary culprit at the checkpoints all this time has been that each checkpoint only had a single lane for admittance to entry. The citizens inside had plenty of natural resources to build a great, grand society, with towers to house everyone comfortably and at population densities that were still absurdly sparse compared to before the zombie apocalypse.
Now, if YOU — the person at the front of the line, or the lone soldier guarding the checkpoint, or even the lazy, secure citizen — sat around getting mad at all of the people suddenly rushing the line, solely because you couldn’t see what all the fuss was about 7-27 miles away… I’m sorry, but that’s on YOU. YOU have failed to see the danger around the bend, a danger that threatens your safety and security as well. YOU have failed to explore the world around you — at any time, you could have logged on to a drone camera showing you the zombie horde. You may have even seen it, but you were too busy listening to the safe zone’s warden bluster on about how we had to strip-search every entrant 20 times before letting them in, instead of adopting some reasonably sane quarantine protocols. YOU could see that the cause, whatever it was, was out of your sight. That doesn’t give you carte blanche to get as angry as you please; at bare minimum, it gives you a moral duty to either reserve judgment, or, if action is demanded by circumstances of the emergency, to do the least amount of harm.
Getting indignant, enraged, radicalized, is a natural human response to seeing people rushing the line without any cause in sight. That does NOT absolve ANYONE of the moral responsibility to look past their indignance, to ask WHY.
It strikes me that this is an argument for anarchy, a direct attack on the very concept of law, certainly of democratically determined law.
If the only laws that apply are the ones where YOU are convinced that the majority of citizens properly understand the situation... then very little law remains.
I just don’t want to be ruled by a particularly stupid form of the dead hand of the past.
"this is an enraging and radicalizing thing"
When? Weed is still illegal at the federal level, but the law is sparsely enforced. Plenty of states have dispensaries operating in the open. Why does one instance of law flouting go practically unremarked while the other foments rage and radicalization?
Seems to me that I remember them locking up people for insane lengths of time for simple possession. I'd say that the history of marijuana enforcement over my lifetime has been an excellent example of radicalizing people into a wild overreaction.
It is legal under state law. And the DOJ has released an official policy that they will defer to state law on this matter: https://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/resources/3052013829132756857467.pdf
Immigration is different. It has always been ruled by the courts that immigration is exclusively under federal control (remember this was the same argument that Democrats used against Texas and Florida when Biden was in office). There is no such precedent for drug laws. And there has been no explicitly issued policy that the government has decided not to enforce immigration law. Instead it has been done dishonestly.
And most importantly, there has been no significant public outrage over the DOJ's decision to allow states to regulate marijuana. This is indicative that the DOJ's policy has the approval of the general public. Whereas the decision not to enforce immigration law has caused widespread public backlash leading to election losses, which indicates that the government's decision not to enforce immigration law does not have the approval of the general public.
I agree that Democrats need to lose the anti-enforcement vibes – it doesn't just lose them the center, it takes away their credibility to make a deal. I also think employment-side enforcement needs to be stepped up: E-Verify, but strengthened. But that can only come in conjunction with a generous amnesty.
However, I'm flabbergasted that you so casually advocate ripping 14 million people from their homes and livelihoods, people that are part of our communities, that in many cases have raised American children – all for the sake of political expedience. The undocumented have built our homes, made our food, cared for our elderly. We have tolerated their employment for decades because they were cheap labor, and now we think we have the moral status to change our minds?
I'm also shocked there is so little pushback in the comments to you. Trump has won. The undocumented are now considered sub-human.
I’m flabbergasted that you so casually advocate rewarding 14 million people for breaking the law because they got away with it for years.
No one forced them to come here, they chose to break the law to get into the USA. I’m sorry that their past choices might leave them in a terrible situation, but that’s what bad choices do.
I say that as someone who is an advocate for increasing (and simplifying) legal immigration. I want the USA to be the land of opportunity for large numbers of legal and law abiding immigrants.
The US Congress has repeatedly refused to make even the toothless E-Verify a mandate, despite evidence that it worked. Employer enforcement actions were for decades in the teens... yearly, for the whole country. It's hard to think that this wasn't a choice. One hand of our collective psyche is scolding immigrants for their law-breaking, while the other enjoys the fruits of these same immigrants cheap labor.
Were you "flabbergasted" when Ronald Reagan "rewarded" millions of illegal immigrant residents with amnesty when he advocated for and signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986?
No, I was a child with approximately zero awareness of politics.
It's worth reviewing the history and seeing whether you feel the same way.
I answered what you asked.
If you’d like an answer to what you meant to ask:
Reagan created an expectation of the possibility of another amnesty, which has been exacerbated by various political actors over decades. Those political actors have helped create a situation where many see no possibility of avoiding an amnesty.
I don’t see why an amnesty has to occur, especially as it will create an expectation of future amnesties for those who evade immigration law long enough.
I didn't ask...anything after you said you were too young. But thanks for the response.
So how is this different than the Republican’s accusation of ‘advocation for open borders?’
‘Oh, America secures its border and only let certain people the privilege of being here, but if you so happens to be here illegally and contributes with no crimes, you can just stay here. Full stop’.
Effectively, this idea robs America the will on who get to be in and allowed residency. You could advocate for it, sure, but let’s not pretend it’s not just ‘open-border’. How is this not seen by other electorates as ‘anti-enforcement vibes’ as you put it?
I mean yeah. "Almost anybody who wants to come in can" is genuinely what I believe would be the best policy.
In most cases immigrants are a net benefit to the country. Anything short of maximum permissiveness is shooting ourselves in the foot. Noah as an economist should know this.
The only scalable and cost-effective mode of enforcement is through the employer side, and I argue here that it is feasible though, of course, nothing will be 100% effective: https://williamgadea.substack.com/p/getting-past-cruelty-theatre-to-a
First: No masks.
Masks are antithetical to the liberal notion of a self-governing citizenry. Moreover, we all learn as toddlers that bad guys wear masks. If you are wearing a mask (whether you are a federal agent or occupying a college quad), ordinary people on both sides are going to think you’re up to no good. Democrats should make “no masks” the rallying cry of any liberal immigration enforcement reforms.
I agree federal agents should be prohibited from wearing masks given the power they weld, and how much perception and accountability matter.
But it's a different story for ordinary citizens who are not acting on behalf of the state.
Well, the original mask bans in American cities were specifically targeted at KKK members wearing those comical pointed white hoods as they tried to frighten the public without showing their faces, knowing their ideology is shameful.
Of course citizens cannot/should not be prohibited from wearing masks at a protest. It’s just terrible politics.
Funny you say that. Leftist Will Stancil recently posted saying that ICE should claim they wear masks because they want to stop the spread of long COVID and watch their opposition crumble to infighting.
I'm reminded that Richard Hanania said that even at "the height of the BLM riots", police didn't find it necessary to wear masks. Given that, yes, no masks, and that should also be endorsed by conservatives (if you can find any of them any more).
First, be clear on the distinction between civil and criminal violations and the means of enforcement each requires. "Being" in the US without proper documentation is a civil violation. It in no way requires armed and masked thugs to whisk people away to undisclosed locations. Apprehending and imprisoning people who have committed crimes (and especially violent crimes) is another matter. And being a US citizen while in the United States is neither a civil nor a criminal violation...yet somehow that is where the bulk of the armed and masked agents are spending their time
What's so self-defeating about the "stolen land" rhetoric is that the most powerful moral engine of liberalism is the politics of inclusion - the idea that we should permit more types of humans to participate in the benefits of living in our society. That doesn't work very well if we despise what we're including people in on the grounds that it's an illegitimate settler colonial project.
As for deporting every single illegal immigrant, I have to wonder how many voters will change their minds once the consequences of removing more than 11 million people from the population begin showing up.
I like that the Cygnal poll was helpfully captioned with "Democrats live in another reality," in case there was some question about their politics. But if there was some doubt, you can see their customers here: https://www.opensecrets.org/campaign-expenditures/vendor?cycle=2022&vendor=Cygnal+LLC
Anyway, on the basis of this "poll," you're telling us we must deport someone who came here when they were two years old and spent the last 20 years cleaning houses. Or wait, we must make them unemployable until they self-deport to a country they have no memory of.
I oppose open borders and I'm moderate on immigration. But this post is really pretty bad and ignores everything that makes immigration a hard problem. When you're proposing things that will dramatically alter the lives of millions of people and fundamental aspects of the U.S. economy, you have some obligation to think more seriously. And not hang your political prescriptions on a nakedly Republican pollster whose findings are completely the opposite of reputable polling.
Noah's lack of subtlety and reflective thought around BOTH the land acknowledgement issue and the "deport everybody" bandwagon is truly shocking.
I think a lot of “smart” approaches to immigration fundamentally miss the mark because the electorate is dumb and wants the impossible (i.e., they want all their groceries in one bag but they don’t want the bag to be heavy)
Would a coldly rational, bureaucratic, but humane system of business audits and fines conducted by trained accountants and not buffoons in masks and camo be more effective at driving out illegal immigrants? Yes, absolutely. Would the voters be happy when all their favorite restaurants close, and the poultry prices at the grocery skyrocket, and no one can afford lawn care or pool maintenance or snow removal or auto repair? No, they’d be furious.
Unfortunately I think the sweet spot for the average American swing voter is probably “we have access to a lot of cheap illegal labor, but also pretend we’re a nation of laws by some highly visible kinetic actions against some illegal immigrants, but also no citizens are ever caught up in that kinetic action”
Yes. The rational equilibrium is something like (1) retain access to this labor by "legalizing" that labor through a work permit system that lets people contribute to society while making a better life for themselves; (2) allow the subset of those workers who want to pursue a path to US citizenship apply for it and pass through some set of hard but reasonable tests, including no criminal activity, etc., subject to some sort of overall "cap" that will be set by Congress and move up and down based on the public mood, native US population growth (or shrinkage), "high-skilled" immigration at the top end of the economy, etc. This is close to the "deal" enacted in 1986, but it is more explicitly setting a boundary between those who are willing and able to contribute to the economy (a benefit for most Americans) and the forms of irregular immigration that are perceived to create disorder and (real) crime, which are the issues the vast majority of voters really care about. We have a hard time reaching this equilibrium because we are stuck between a bunch of nativist assholes who love to play with guns, and a bunch of leftwing assholes who want to deny the legitimacy of borders, law enforcement, capitalism, ...etc.
That sounds fine to me, I just don’t think the electorate wants this issue solved and put away, I think both sides really enjoy talking about it and fighting about it and neither really has an incentive to compromise an inch. Rs think it’s electoral rocket fuel because the electorate is racist (sure) and Ds think it’s electoral rocket fuel because tomorrow’s electorate is less white and non-white people are a savior who will deliver them from their conservative countrymen (that theory isn’t panning out well but Dems believe it as fervently as fundamentalist Christians believe in the Second Coming)
Yeah - we may have to wait until both parties are polling terribly on their respective approaches before they do the sensible thing. I do think we're getting closer to that point...
If both parties are polling poorly than there is still no need to compromise, all political power is relative in a zero-sum game
Game theory implies that one or the other failing parties in the dyad will innovate at the expense of the other, so there is an incentive to end the game, take the benefits of being perceived as rational, reasonable and "bipartisan" and move on to more fruitful battlefields where you enjoy better tactical advantages against you opponent. We don't have a shortage of those...
I think you may underestimate the extent to which working class people in "real America" resent the legal immigration process creating new elites who are seen as other, especially because they aren't Christian. There's real resentment there as well. I say this as the son of a gun range manager in rural Missouri who is also married to a product owner at Pepsi who was born in Punjab.
How do you plan on addressing the anger over the H1-B situation?
I don't know if I think that particular thread is powerful, but there's definitely a driver in that "working class" people, those who are paid basically for diligently doing some unpleasant task rather than for some particular skill, have been moving downward in the income/status distribution, and naturally they dislike it. (I can't tell from the statistics I've seen whether their real income has dropped over the past few decades, but they definitely have been losing out *relatively*.)
This can easily generate resentment toward the educated elites -- and after all, Harvard is still run by a lot of old white American men. Of course, if the country is importing distinctly "other" educated elites and slotting them in at the high end of the status ladder, that's even worse.
It's not clear what can be done about this. The decline in the economic value of "traditional working class labor" seems to be irreversible; the only way to stop the shift in relative status is to deliberately lower the value of highly-educated work, which means driving it to other countries and turning the US into a backwater. But there are always people who would prefer being a medium-sized frog in a small pond to being a small frog in a big pond.
AI will eventually lower the value of "highly-educated work", but then again AI + robotics will continue to lower the value of working class labor.
This has been a dynamic throughout American history, dating back to well before "The Founding". The over-arching systemic response has been to tell the "nativists" to pound sand, because we're trying to grow a country here. This leads to occasional violent conflict between the nativists and the immigrants (including here black Americans migrating internally from South to North and West), and fosters various forms of popular prejudice (of which anti-semitism based on the relative economic success of Jewish Americans seems to be the most durable, but is now rivaled on the right by anti-Indian sentiment based on the relative economic success of Indian immigrants). It also leads to occasional political movements centered around nativist panic (Know-Nothings, Immigration Restriction League, Chinese Exclusion Act(s), KKK of the 1920s, MAGA of the 2020s, etc.). But generally speaking, "pound sand" has been the appropriate response to this kind of nativism, because we are, in fact, still trying to build a vibrant, economically successful country here.
I think something other than telling them to pound sand is the right solution.
Training to something more useful? (Robot repairman?) or make sure their children have gainful skills.
Hard part is u less you are a math wiz who can do AI, nothing else looks like a guarantee.
"Job training" is the "pound sand" of the late 20th century, along with "get a college education" and "learn to code." There is always going to be a residuum of people who are not able or willing to participate at the level they would prefer in a rapidly changing economy. But that happens with or without the nativism. The nativist schtick is to blame their inability or unwillingness to participate on immigrants (legal or illegal) who don't "belong here", even when they can participate.
I have an additional suggestion: One of the problems with the current asylum seeker process is that there are not enough judges to evaluate all the cases and this has created a large backlog. I believe that the cases are being processed in chronological order, which results in applicants being in limbo for several years - which makes it attractive to come into the country and get in that very long, slow line.
But what if we reversed the process and started evaluating cases starting with the most recent and then going backwards? If a person knew that coming into the country now and seeking asylum would result in a hearing in days, and not years, there would be less incentive to come in to the country when you know you don't have a valid claim. And if people start self-selecting, just like Noah's recommendation to hold employers to do a better job of screening their hiring, then the reduced influx of new cases will help to start processing the many existing cases.
This may not seem "fair" to our normal belief in the "get in line" way to treat people, but I think the positive result would be worth violating this norm.
There aren’t enough immigration judges to handle the asylum backlog. My idea is that when a migrant makes asylum claims they should get a work permit, but also have to pay a big monthly fee (over $1000 or over 50% of their income, whichever is greater). When they get a hearing, if their claim is judged to be valid (fear of harm from their home country’s government) they get most of those fees back and a green card, if their claim judgment is negative, then the government keeps the fees (which pay for the system) and the person is deported immediately.
I don’t understand how Noah’s asylum reform would work, where he says illegal immigrants can no longer apply for asylum, but can still apply if they show up at a port of entry. The people sneaking across the Rio Grande or climbing desert walls would just line up at Juarez and walk over the bridge to the El Paso crossing gate. Unless claiming asylum means they still have to stay in Mexico until their hearing, which I guess is the “remain in Mexico” policy.
Half of people are less than averagely altruistic and impartial and all of them get a vote. Social media, the first truly decentralised mass media, has amplified this fact. Political elites have been bypassed and the standards of humanistic, universalist debate they were schooled to accept, and that progressives were best at, have been replaced with parochialism, slogans and memes. Progressives have to find a vocabulary and a platform somewhere between these two extremes. This is what Obama did. He succeeded electorally by casting his progressive arguments in the cadences of evangelical Christianity and by erring on the 'conservative' side in key areas of policy - e.g. addressing blue collar concerns about illegal immigration (without putting an army of thugs on the streets of cities that hadn't voted for him, it should be noted).
….While issuing decrees like DAPA and DACA that flooded the border and subverted the law.
It is called saying one thing and doing another, and I agree that is the Dems best hope. Worked in Virginia. Problem is getting it to work again once people figure it out
No. He said he'd do two things and he did two things: deporting recent and criminal illegal immigrants (c. 3 million deported during his presidency) while reducing deportation of illegal immigrants who had built a life and had children born in the US. A civilized and effective policy. If it's double standards to try to address the immigration problem without betraying your own moral standards, then I guess the Dems are guilty as charged. 'Suffer the little children to come unto me' didn't mean 'make children suffer'. You get that, right?
Obama did only “two things”? That’s not even a straw man.
When illegal decrees that subverted the law were signed with the phone and pen there were thousands of little children who were raped, abused or killed on their way to the border, unaccompanied . That is a lot of suffering. Hey, but it’s worth it for that activist support in the ground game no?
Uh oh! Hit a target there didn't I. So those crimes were Obama's responsibility, not that of the rapists or the parents who sent their children unaccompanied to the border? If that's the case, then gun crimes are the responsibility of gun manufacturers and the gun lobby? I don't know what that last sentence means. What's a 'ground game'?
What's discouraging to me is how reasonable the solutions seem to be. America could just do this, or, instead, what it has done: create chaos in its communities. And why on earth haven't employers who hire illegal workers been charged?
because nobody actually wants the economic consequences of doing that. people saying on a poll that they want to deport all illegal immigrants is cheap talk.
Well, some states have required E-Verify, meaning all employers need to verify each new hire using that system. E-Verify is just an automated system for quickly determining if the information on an I-9 employee form has valid documents.
Documents for an I9 can either be one class A (passport, passport card or green card) or both a class B (photo identification) and a class C (employment right) document. Which type of document to use is up the employee only, the employer or government cannot specify this. Only when a Class A document is used does the employer have to verify that the photo matches, so many employees use a drivers license (class B) and a social security card (class C) and since drivers licenses are easily faked, and no validation of the photo is required, and social security cards are even more easily faked with a stolen number, there still end up many verified workers that aren’t actually legally allowed to work.
Thanks. That’s a helpful clarification.
Because first, there’s no database for them to check that says “here are the ‘illegal immigrants’.” Secondly, many people are here “legally” because of absurdly low standards under Mayorkas to claim asylum or other basis to enter, and resolving their claims takes many years. Third, employers are entitled to rely on things like drivers’ licenses and SSNs which are handed out like candy. The Democrats made it insanely easy to come in and stay a very long time. You can’t look to employers to do the anti-immigration job for the citizenry.
While interesting and well meaning, I am afraid that a left that believes that there should be no limits to illegal immigration, that has governors and mayors protecting arrested criminals from ICE and deportation, and sees illegal immigrants in states without any voter ID laws as de facto citizens that can vote and reelect these same leaders into office, could never move to the more moderate position you propose. It takes leadership on the left that agrees with your more reasonable position to promote this and lead the left in this direction. And you see even past leaders on the left, like Obama and Clinton, who deported millions, used to support ICE, and defended our borders, now join the riotous crowds of resistance who now reject the past claims and principles of these Democratic presidents and leaders. Who is the reasonable voice on the left that will promote this better approach to immigration? I think Rahm Emanuel is the only person I see at this time, and he doesn't seem to be getting any traction on the left.
> a left that believes that there should be no limits to illegal immigration
And you don't have to very far left before you find a lot of people who (effectively, if not consciously) think there should be no limits. For instance, I read the Boston Globe, which is a liberal newspaper but not strikingly leftist by US standards. But I've seen a bunch of times the phrase "people fleeing persecution, war, or poverty" used to describe immigrants. If you think about it, those three categories are totally different with regard to immigration law, and thus with regard to our stated immigration policies: those fleeing persecution have a right to asylum; those fleeing war can get TPS if they're lucky enough that the President decides to grant it; those fleeing poverty are "economic migrants" and are the people that immigration policy (of all countries) deliberately excludes.
This idea on the left that the US should be the universal place of refuge for everybody whose life is bad where they are is the mirror of the idea on the right that all brown immigrants should be excluded. They make it hard to assemble a compromise that works even halfway.
>The second thing Democrats can do is to close the asylum loophole that allows illegal immigrants to become legal residents simply by requesting asylum. ... Anyone on the planet can show up at a U.S. port of entry and request asylum. That’s a good law, and we should keep it. In addition, anyone who simply takes a plane to America on a tourist visa can request asylum once inside the country. That’s fine. What’s far more problematic is that anyone who crosses the border illegally is entitled to request asylum without any discrimination against their application due to the fact that they entered illegally!
This is not entirely accurate, and hence it ignores some important policy considerations.
Someone who shows up at a port of entry without a visa and requests asylum is not automatically permitted to enter. Rather, they are placed n expedited removal and must pass a credible fear screening. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/expedited-removal/ The Biden Administration eventually extended that to cover anyone apprehended within 100 miles of the border within 2 weeks of entering. Simultaneously, the Administration implemented use of the CBP_One app for migrants to make appointments to enter; those migrants were not given credible fear interviews but instead were given notice to appear in immigration court for deportation proceedings. They could then file asylum applications as a defense to deportation.
Under current law, if a person is n the US illegally, but have not been caught, they can file an application for asylum with the USCIS. They must file within one year of entry, unless an exception applies (either some unusual event prevented them from filing, such as being hit by a bus, or a change in circumstances in their home country, ie, the country recently began persecuting members of the migrant's race, religion, etc) That application is adjudicated by a USCIS asylum officer. If the application is denied, the applicant is sent to immigration court for a deportation hearing, where their asylum application is reviewed again by an immigration judge. Hence, they get two bites at the apple.
So, the current system incentivizes illegal immigrants to "come out of the shadows" by filing an asylum application. But it also incentivizes sneaking and avoiding the border patrol. Noah's recommendation of denying those who enter illegally the ability to apply for asylum eliminates the second (bad) incentive, but also eliminates the first (good) incentive.
My point is that getting the policy correct is a challenge (and it is not as if there was no illegal immigration before the asylum system was adopted. Perhaps ironically, the Biden policy of extending expedited removal while exempting those who used CBP-One probably strikes a good balance, IF cases in immigration court can be sped up. (Note that the extension of expedited removal was of questionable legality under current law)