"But I recognize that to do so ethically requires a tremendous effort, and a lot of expense, to achieve linguistic and social and economic integration for those migrants"
You think migrants in a new country should or must integratate socially or linguistically?
Yes, this is sarcasm. I lived in Japan for years, and I am here to tell you if you are unwilling or unable to integrate culturally or linguistically, you have exactly zero business trying to live in another country.
Freddie's previous piece on immigration was about exactly that:
"As a Big Fan of Immigration, I Recognize the Utility of Assimilation
liberals are disarmed in their defenses of immigration because they cannot admit that past examples of successful immigration have involved migrants conforming to their new culture
It's not "tedious" for people who have to live that reality on the ground. It's absolutely essential.
Around the world, politics is not a big circle jerk that American progressives in the Acela Corridor have reduced it to. It is something that has to do with the way people think in the real world, and manifest those thoughts and feelings into real world desires.
These are real issues, and they have massive real world political impacts, precisely because they have had real world personal and social impacts.
Fair enough. My take on the assimilation issue is that its a no-brainer, as part a major component of immigrating IS assimilation. How this lost traction is due to the political card game it gets reduced to...and here we are
As PJ O'Rourke wrote, immigrants want to come from where money isn't to where money is. But it doesn't take an economist to understand that means there's less money to go around. There is a price; whether the natives of a country or the immigrants to that country pay it, there is a debate to be had. Dodging it gets us where we are now.
Mass migration crushes wages, impoverishes the working class, increases housing costs, degrades the environment, fuels social/racial tension/animosity leading to, ultimately, a coercive, oppressive empire or internecine war. Furthermore, the only successful, densely populated nations are a select number of European and East Asian nations, for the rest of the world the eventual reality is Lagos, Calcutta, Bombay, Soweto, maybe (at best) Mexico City. Only a midwit, comfortable, smug, scribbling "Marxist" (or a soulless, deracinated, libertarian, uber-capitalist) could could wish to visit such a horror show upon any people.
I always go to a place where I think about how someone feels who’s trying to immigrate legally. How would that person feel while watching 10 million asylum seekers jump the line while they wait patiently, jumping through the many hoops of legal immigration?
I can answer that question, because I know a ton of people doing it.
They fucking hate it, and it more than often translates into burning hatred for the people who knowingly take advantage of it, as well as for the politicians who provide perverse incentives for breaking the law and punishing those who abide by it.
Democrats are scratching their heads wondering why open border bullshit wasn't a slam dunk win with Latino voters, but apparently, never actually talked to any Latino voters who have seriously salty takes on this issue.
Listening to voters is something they might yet learn, but I'm not optimistic. In my state, some Democrats are doing "listening tours," which is either hilarious or a tiny step in the right direction, depending on one's viewpoint.
By insisting that anything other than de facto open borders was by definition racist (because Trump was for immigration restrictions), Team D played right into Trump’s sweaty little hands.
Or also consider that Trump was right - and that this is not 4D chess, that Trump has a completely normie take on the issue that is, and always was, broadly understood to be a consensus opinion in the United States outside the richest and most progressive urban areas.
Team D largely lets their hate for Trump set their policies for them.
Trump could announce that 2+2=4 and Team D would issue a rebuttal. I honestly don't understand why Trump doesn't troll this, tell his supporters that he breathes oxygen, does it every day, best stuff ever, good American oxygen, in fact. He breathes it right now between phrases.
Team D would set to asphyxiating themselves in response. "Not today Satan!"
The thing that buck breaks blue-no-matter-who shitlibs in the Acela Corridor is that Trump is quite often right - and is completely in the consensus of normie opinion.
But as you note, the American left, especially in the most moneyed pockets of the Acela Corridor, must always pretend that catering to what their social and economic inferiors want is bad.
Revolution! Resistance! Burn it all down!
The worst thing I can say about Trump is that he's very usually right, but that he's an asshole about it. Which was literally his brand for decades - decades! - before he even decided to get into politics in the first place!
I would say he's 'usually' right about the things that most non-politicians know to be right...which is a very low bar. And doesn't really move the needle on practical competency and leadership for anyone other than those who just like to see a president stick it to those hack politicians.
I mean, take NATO funding for example. Of course we pay the lion's share of that shit, because it's historically been in our best interest to do so. It served very well as a social, political, and economic (especially economic) bulwark against Soviet influence in those same three areas, as well as promoting American influence globally - like enforcing the dollar standard over everyone. It was (and still is to a lesser degree) a relatively cheap way to enforce American financial power, all while (mostly) looking like an angel doing it. It really helped to keep money flowing into our corporate coffers. Looking at it that way, paying out so much to NATO was a relatively cheap and effective way to go about it. IF one thinks prioritizing American corporate profits is a net good that is...
When Trump points out that we pay more than our fair share for NATO, that sounds like an obvious mistake to regular Joe Americans. And they aren't totally wrong to think that, especially in a time of decreasing wages and increasing costs of living. But it wasn't just a bunch of idiot politicians who came up with that idea, it was just one part of a coordinated and intentional plan to help grow American hegemony after the carnage of WW2. That most of it was and is siphoned off to Wall Street and corporations is another story, but even accounting for that siphoning it did help to artificially keep American standards of living high for decades long after Nuremberg courts were quiet. Especially if you were middle class and white...which is also another story.
That being said, the asshole part of Trump does way more damage than you might think. By definition assholes care for little beyond their own image and ego, and that certainly fits Trump. That he's willing to be brutally honest about things doesn't make him somehow admirable, because he's only being honest about things in order to get his way on something that serves his own image and ego. I mean, do you think the guy really gives a shit about anything or anyone in Panama, or Greenland, or Gaza? He's just doing all of that get journalists and Libs panties in a bunch so he can either a) win points from his base, which boosts his ego, or b) distract them so he can get something else he wants while they aren't looking.
There's a reason why some women fall prey to asshole guys - it's because there's a fine line between confidence and asshole and often it's hard to tell the difference. Trump is little different, he just figured out how to do it on a grand scale. Despite how willing he is to call out all of the obvious political hypocrisies under the sun, he's not doing it out of any kind of moral high ground, or even sense of common decency. He's just doing it to feed his own bottomless ego. And by the way, being honest about being an asshole for decades does not somehow excuse one from being an asshole, it just means we shouldn't be surprised about it.
The real gripe about Trump was that he said the quiet parts out loud.
Now that the United States is rapidly dropping any pretense to being anything other than an empire, it is no longer seen as necessary to keep up the polite fictions and pious lies, which is why there is less objection to Trump now than in 2016.
Besides, he has shown that he can be easily managed.
Trump is very obviously not 'usually right'. He says stuff that's blatantly wrong all the time! You've built up an image of him in your own mind where you ignore all the wrong stuff he says or dismiss it as hyperbole or perhaps think of it as 4D chess or whatever
We just spent four years being officially forced to pretend a number of things that were self-evidently untrue were actually true, including topics that cannot be mentioned here.
Trump is wrong from time to time, but won in no small part for his ability to break with the bullshit and come out and say things everyone knew were actually true and correct.
The political left was forced into a corner where it had to try to keep up with their own kayfabe bullshit that everyone could see through because ... what was the alternative? Saying the obvious true things could give aid and comfort to MAGA chuds (God forbid), so they doubled down, and got high on their own supply.
Trump is right about a whole lot of things, and the American left might regain some credibility if they stopped pretending that he MUST be wrong be virtue of being a Bad Man all the time.
I know two people intimately who have gone through the immigration process, legally, and this has never been something that they gnash their teeth about. Possibly because they understand and empathize with people trying to immigrate.
They probably also have some perspective on the number of people who will be granted asylum (not many) and the types of lives they will be forced to live as immigrants. The uncertainty, limitations, and disrespect that comes with it. Also the absolute bureaucratic nightmare of the immigration process. Take a few visits to an immigration office, have an interview or two and you'll understand how demeaning the whole process is (I have).
In my experience fury against illegal immigrants from legal is widespread. At the very least it should be obvious that mass illegal immigration is likely to usher in an era of public sentiment that acts to restrict legal immigration numbers.
I don't doubt that some legal immigrants are upset about illegal immigration, and feel personally affronted. I was simply noting that that opinion is not uniform among legal immigrants. We're dealing with anecdata here so there's no point in getting upset on other's behalf.
I think the more relevant question is whether Democratic assumptions about how minority groups would vote based on immigration enforcement may have led them to some major miscalculations this last November.
My husband and I were separated for over a year while we waited for his legal immigration paperwork to be processed (2021), and then, we had to wait another year for him to legally work, so we were living off of my salary alone, which was difficult and made us put off starting a family, of course; and during that time, he also was unable to travel outside of the US (so no family visit time, even if we could have afforded it). It continues to be difficult now that he can work with visa renewals and paperwork and documenting our relationship and paying large fees. It's easier for wealthier people who can afford a lawyer to take care of some of this; but it's still tough for them too, because of the waiting, etc. What frustrates us most is the health benefits to the illegal migrants, especially those having children upon entering and not paying any medical bills.
I agree with most of what Freddie writes here, to be sure. And while I did not vote for Trump, my experience dealing with Leftest open-borders or you-are-evil types has definitely given me some grey hairs.
The dirty little secret of liberal America is that it has believed in the Great Replacement Myth just as strongly as the right does, seeing the arrival of nonwhite majority as a political deus ex machina that eliminates all opposition and contestation of its worldview.
Immigration politics have always been viewed through that lens, on both sides. It's a fight over how many blue votes can be added to the mix from across the border.
The 2024 Election has to be the end of that viewpoint for anyone looking at it rationally. Actually existing nonwhite voters are rapidly fleeing the politics of cosmopolitan identarian solidarity, there is no Permanent Democratic Majority at the end of the rainbow no matter how open the borders are.
In theory that ought to lead us to a much MUCH more healthy place on immigration politics. We shall see.
Not only that, the myth was initially promulgated by Obama era Dem wunderkind Ruy Teixera who phrased it as "emerging majority" (translation, "LOL SUCK IT WHITE VOTER CHUDS LOLOL") but in hindsight, would now also kindly like to let everyone know that he was merely misunderstood, and also, wrong.
The American political left - against all reason - put all of their chips on this, and screamed, nay, howled, when it predictably went bust.
That's not Donald Trump's fault. That's not MuH RaCiSM!'s fault. That's their own fault.
So how will they course correct? Can they even course correct? Will they just keep screaming at the normies and calling them all bigots? What's the play here now, exactly?
There isn't one. The Ds are done. They never did anything, and they never do. Its all optics. The Democratic Party since Carville/Stephanpolous/Clinton/Gore sold its soul. And here we are...
Are there any mammals (or vertebrates of any kind) that don't recognize territory and defend those boundaries in some way? I feel like no borders and free movement everywhere is a pretty big ask.
The no borders stuff doesn't make sense to me other than as some kind of utopian fantasy where you remove all human emotion and thousands of years of human phycological evolution. Do you have some kind of representative government at all? Humans have a natural tendency to coalesce into like-minded groups and it seems inevitable, if borders were to be erased, that they'd just come right back again. Its so far out there in relation to the real world we live in that I don't even know why anyone would bother to bring it up.
Somebody who knows more about the subject than me would be able to give an answer, but isn't that why there are sizable ethnic enclaves in places like Iraq or Iran? For centuries those places were under the rule of large national empires that allowed free movement. People moved en masse adhering to group ties like language and religion.
Even in the US you have Chinatowns, Dominican neighborhoods, etc.
If you just think about all the issues that manifest when trying to govern a country like ours with so many different ethnicities and sub-cultures etc. and trying to divvy out limited resources where everyone doesn't feel like they're getting shafted then multiply that by the entire world population and then I don't know what you get because I'm not that smart but its a fun thought experiment for some sociology class. *end run-on sentence*
"The no borders stuff doesn't make sense to me other than as some kind of utopian fantasy where you remove all human emotion and thousands of years of human phycological evolution. "
Agreed.
Freddie: "The nation-state is a fiction, and a very recent one, invented for the benefit of capital and imperialism."
To Freddie: As a naïf re the wonders of a nationless world, I got stuck right here. I didn't see your answer further below; I suppose it's off-topic. So I'm left asking such things as ...
-- How does power concentrate for the benefit of the powerless after the current (but waning) power centers (nations) are no longer keeping each other in check?
-- What is the plan for eradicating human nature in a power vacuum? Should we anticipate kinder and gentler warlords, once they are properly educated?
-- How is the iron law of oligarchy eradicated without figuring out, maybe for the first time in history, what to do with psychopaths and sociopaths, who seem to me our actual perennial problem here, no matter the political system?
The whole "nation-state is a recent fiction..." bit is a non-sequitur. If that is the opener intended to suggest that "the correct state of things is we are all merely humans" then it's ignoring the millennia of humans dividing into groups for the benefit of control and prosperity, most typically more for those on top of a hierarchy than those at the bottom.
The forgotten issue, the dead issue - that it would not even surface here, even as a litle nod: the environment.
"For decades, Americans have not had a desire for an ever-larger population. This is suggested by polls over the years. In 1974, 87 percent of respondents to a Roper poll said they did not wish the country had more people. A 1971 poll by the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future found that 22 percent felt U.S. population should be smaller than it was then, which was close to 200 million. As long ago as 1947, when U.S. population was 140 million, Gallup found that 55 percent of Americans believed the country would be "worse off' with more people."
People can have values that are not reducible to either economics or "racism".
Some people just don't want everything to be crowded. Sure, the market or libertarian urbanists love pictures of Taipei.
That's aesthetic, nothing more. Once you grant that, you have to allow that aesthetics may operate for other people, in a different way.
I don't think there has really ever been a more signal example of the way that politicians, of both parties, using one another in a curious embrace, utterly ignored the will of the American people, than on population and immigration. I guess that goes perfectly well with a command economy, though. It's funny to think they were more successful at exactly that, than were the Soviets.
I'm tempted to think that at least the D party itself has understood all of this for quite some time given the numbers of deportations under Obama/Biden. It's not like Dems have been especially soft on undocumented immigrants.
First of all, Obama has been the defacto leader of the Democratic party since he took office. All of these strategic and messaging shifts bore his seal of approval (until last November - LOL).
Obama was the deporter in chief, but also sent the message in the Great Big Stupid George Floyd National Moment that it's probably bad and racist that we aren't letting the entire world in the United States, which predictably, bubbled down through the party's decision making apparatus until the feels and messages became actual policy.
That the policy part was stupid, politically suicidal, etc. was irrelevant until Trump trounced them. Now it's a panic.
Dems were hard for about a second, and soft for a good eight years or so (because "Trump bad").
I guess on my end it just seems like there has always been a disconnect between rhetoric and actual policy on the part of Dem leaders, 2020 being no exception of course. Deportations under Biden were at a 10-year high in 2024, which means both Biden and Obama can claim larger rates of enforcement than Trump. I get that there's something to be said for the rhetoric undercutting the message that the public can entrust immigration enforcement to a Dem, but when you have actual enforcement numbers that show there is no shortage of it, I feel like it should complicate the idea that Dems are somehow comprehensively failing to "face reality". The Progressive public maybe, but actual policymakers seem to be under no such illusions.
Also, let's be fair and call out the utter refusal of R's to offer any kind of meaningful policy change in legal immigration that would bring those workers into an above-board status. George W found out the hard way that his own party would torpedo any kind of immigration reform and scream about AMNESTY!!! the minute the pragmatics of dealing with undocumented immigrants and labor realities were broached.
Biden and Senate Republicans also found out the hard way when candidate Trump blew up the bipartisan immigration deal in 2024. Only Congress can fix immigration because fixing it will cost a lot of money.
That's such a superficial metric. Are you just trolling? The amnesty situation is a shit show. There's still 11M illegal migrants in the USA. It's only going to get worse as global warming crushes the global south. You're just trolling.
Who cares if there are millions of desperate people at the border as long as they're at the border?
It's not the job of the US to eradicate poverty and want across the globe. The job of the US is to make sure that all of the people fleeing that poverty and want don't enter the US.
Are there still a lot of people in the US that need to be deported? Absolutely. But the other half of the equation is making sure that no more illegals enter into the country to bolster the population of the soon to be deported. Trump obviously considers the border situation to be a big win for his administration and I think he's right.
Are you serious? He told Republicans in Congress not to pass the bill, so they didn't.
[From NBC News 07-FEB-2024]
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was elected in 2010 to replace Joe Biden, said that in those nearly 14 years he has never seen a McConnell-backed deal collapse so quickly with the GOP.
“It surprises me,” he said.
But Trump’s hammering of the deal, while he uses immigration as a campaign issue, and his demands that Republicans reject it won the day. On Tuesday, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a member of McConnell’s leadership team and one of several prospects to replace him as leader, rejected the border bill, saying, “Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis.”
It's kayfabe. Neither party is interested in doing anything significant on immigration because the status quo benefits the rich and powerful. Wages stay down and there's an underclass to villainize. Occasionally, there's a show of sending away more or fewer, but there's no will to do the difficult task of creating a less shitty immigration system. Doesn't help that it's such a political football.
Witness Eric Adams, mayor of New York, flipping from proudly touting his city as a sanctuary to declaring that "immigration will destroy this city." What changed? Oh, yeah -- the southern states started shipping the immigrants to New York. Everyone (but especially the left) has vast, expansive, generous notions of the good they want to do for the world -- until the bill arrives.
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher
Talking about moral obligations without ever considering the costs is simply magical thinking. It doesn't work.
'If you express this just slightly differently, you can see that it’s exceptionally racist. “You know what would be great? If we let a bunch of people of color into our country and have them do hard, dangerous, demeaning jobs. And get this! We’re going to sneak them in secretly, so they won’t be protected by minimum wage laws, OSHA, regulations on work hours and overtime, and all manner of other labor protections. And most of them are going to be paying into Medicare and Social Security but won’t ever be able to practically draw from those programs that they’ve contributed to. They’ll also be constantly subject to personal, economic, and sexual exploitation because they won’t be able to call the police due to their undocumented status. Why, you might as well call them slaves! This is all very enlightened and liberal btw.”'
It absolutely blows my mind that political left in this country has embraced needing a perpetual underclass to do labor for us. "Who are you gonna pay $5 an hour to now, you bigots?" is *wild.*
I had always understood this argument as one designed to appeal to the caricature the left has of the ownership class: it's not that the left thinks we should have these laborers making sub minimum wage; it's that they think the ownership class will be hurt by the lack of cheap labor. Oh, and it's a moral swipe at the ownership class for basically exploiting slave labor.
Maybe the times have changed though? Or maybe I never really understood their argument in the first place.
Question, not rhetorical, but in earnest- do you believe that the rhetoric of Democrats, Chris Murphy for example, bragging about how Biden deported more immigrants than Trump makes any kind of sense politically? Like, will it gain them votes? What should their rhetoric be? Should they just lay low while this is the current worm's turn?
It makes zero sense. Anyone with even a basic understanding of numbers can see how incredibly stupid decisions by the Biden administration led to an explosion of illegal immigration, at which point even barely exceeding the Trump status quo on deportations was meaningless because it allowed in countless more illegal entrants than it sent back.
It makes no sense politically because it's self-evidently stupid and wrong to all but the dumbest of American voters.
If you are asking "what is the proper messaging to convey a political idea nearly everyone recognizes is wrong and dishonest", you are asking the wrong question.
Sigh. Nice skirting of my question. Self-evident to whom? To the millions who simply didn't vote? Asking a legitimate question about what should their message be in order to win elections, not asking for pompous bombast from a fellow subscriber.
Liberals, especially where I live in the Acela Corridor, do this quite a lot. They have a difficult time divorcing words from actions, and more disastrously, the intentions words convey from what can, or should, be done.
So let me make this plain:
The left does not have a "messaging" problem on immigration. The "no human is illegal" messaging was quite clear. Their deliberate decisions to conflate economic migrants with political asyless was quite clear.
We got it. The "message" was not their problem.
Their problem is that Americans think the substance of these positions is bullshit, and they don't support it politically. No amount of "messaging" is going to correct that.
Well, I think it would be wise to craft a cogent policy on immigration, no? And given low turn out, generally, I suspect that having a message that addresses immigration might be wise, no? In addition to other messages that address people's material anxieties. I agree that Sanders had the correct stance on the inherent problems that immigration posed to America workers- is that the better message? You're not really engaging in any kind of good faith conversation. You're just pulling your pud and being a dick.
John Fetterman is catching a lot of heat right now because he voted for Pam Bondi.
He also endorsed Trump's Gaza plan.
If the D's nominate him in 2028 they stand a chance. Otherwise forget it. If you want to win in a Trumpian era you have got to take Trumpian positions.
That the senate's leading Democrat - who actually is making sense politically has brain damage, and who was apparently cured of AOC style shitlib posturing after an inpatient stay in a psychiatric hospital - suggests once again that the problem might not be Fetterman himself, but rather, Fetterman's party.
There is a lot of glee right now in conservative media because of the most recent DNC election. Why? At least one reason is a belief that Democraric leadership believes that they had the right positions and all they needed was more effective messaging to win in 2024. One, to a lot of people that reads as seriously out of touch. Two, that's what the Democrats tried in 2024 with attempts to gaslight the public on the issues of the economy and immigration and it failed miserably.
To answer your question the message needs to be "Deport, deport, deport". And the policy needs to follow.
Sorry, but you're barking up the wrong tree here. I voted for Bernie in both 2016 and 2020 primaries and believe firmly that he would easily have won had he been the nominee in 2016. Not even going down the peculiarities of Pennsylvania politics with you- and I know them quite well having grown up in Pittsburgh.
I am very close with a lot of legal Brazilian immigrants here, and if there is one thing that unites them, it's their incandescent anger at people who jump the border and use bullshit asylum claims, coached by well funded NGOs, to skip the line they spent years and a small fortune, to do legally.
I am not exaggerating when I say some of them would kill them if they could. The very white, rich, American left has zero understanding of the "brown folx" they think they're speaking for.
The immigration issue is just one of the many things that has, quite deservedly, crushed the spine of the American political left. Trump did this again today with keeping biological males out of girls sports, an issue on which 80% of Americans agree with his position, but the Democratic party and their affiliated special interest groups decided it was a hill to die upon.
On Twitter, the progressive midwits are insisting, confusingly, that Trump is a senile retard (who, somehow?) keeps outwitting them, but have no basic ability to look at themselves and see that the interests advanced by very progressive, and very well moneyed, interest groups are resoundingly unpopular with the American public.
Of course, they pivoted to "the American people are stupid, savage bigots" - but surprisingly, that's not a winning approach in politics.
So what now? What's the play, guys? Is there any scenario in which you might admit that the maximilally progressive position might, in fact, actually not be the right one after all?
You cannot have a viable system of immigration without acknowledging a simple concept.
There are things about the culture of the place you're fleeing from that turned it into a place worth fleeing from.
There are things about the culture of the place you're fleeing to that turned it into a place worth fleeing to.
As a resident of the place you fleeing to, I like living here for the same reasons you want to live here, therefore it is in my best interest that you not bring any of the things with you that turned the place you're fleeing from into a place worth fleeing from, and that you adopt the things that turned the place you're fleeing to into a place worth fleeing to.
Integration must always and forever be the absolute condition of immigration.
"It's just their culture and you have to respect it." No I don't, actually. You got on a plane and dropped yourself into a foreign country to get away from that culture. The actual thing that made our country attractive to live in was our intolerance of the things that made your country unattractive to live in. Leave them behind, and we can be neighbors. Don't leave them behind, and we cannot be neighbors.
When the immigration enthusiasts understand this, we'll be able to work toward a better immigration system. Because they don't understand this, they will keep losing to the majority of normies who like having a nice country and want to keep it that way.
More than this, the onus is on the recent arrival to understand the conditions that made this a place worth coming to.
I lived in Japan, and in the late Showa era (late 80's/90's), I couldn't walk down the street in Nagoya, or even Tokyo, without cops pulling me aside, and asking me to show my passport to prove I'm here legally. And I always did. All conversations were in Japanese, and I never got angry. Because I knew that was part of the deal.
Heh, one of my friends was a Japanese riot cop. He told me that whenever he needed to bump up his arrest stats he'd find a foreigner and ask them for their passport.
If they didn't have it he would scream at them in Japanese for a minute, and then take them down to the station where they'd have to write a report apologizing for their transgression.
Yup. And God forbid you got caught doing anything illegal, or even socially unacceptable in the presence of authority. As a foreigner, all eyes were always on you, so you had to walk the straight and narrow, and make sure you were on your best behavior. Foreigners are simply guests in Japan. It's not like the US. You will be treated very well as a foreign resident, but only IF you act like a model guest.
The word "things" is doing alot of heavy lifting here. In my experience those "things" that people refer to on the conservative end of the political spectrum are often just "stuff that annoys me" or makes them uncomfortable, not things that have any meaningful bearing on the larger foundational culture of America, and are often couched in the same level of poorly constructed pseudo-intellectual rhetoric that the left sometimes displays wrt race/gender/etc concerns, just in the opposite direction.
I have a theory that Americans smile at each other so much compared to other countries because it transcends language in signifying that you mean no harm.
In my work place I have co-workers from Russoa, Hungary, China, Pakistan, India, France, Ireland, Mexico, Columbia, Korea, Japan, Canada, the UK, sub saharan Africa, Israel, Poland, etc. etc.
New immigrants need to understand that the US is a genuinely diverse place and a common language is not guaranteed. So smile a lot.
Perhaps, but I'm specifically talking about things like protestant work ethic, punctuality, obeying the law, honesty, peaceful conflict resolution through neutral third party arbiters such as the legal system, and respect for the commons (i.e. not defacing, littering, or damaging public property). At minimum, at the *bare* minimum, holding immigrants to the same standards as the rest of us, and not giving them a free pass to violate the social norms that have created the society that we enjoy living in, and that they want to enjoy living in, is called for.
which immigrants are violating these? and which citizens uphold them? You'll need to be more specific. Our culture hasn't been that for a very long time.
These are all valid concerns FB and the issues are not only complex and nuanced they’re also classically American dual-use issues. That being, under the guise of some
feigned moral imperative there exists the real and always more horrible and practical reasons that suit the wealthy elite class. The refreshing thing about Trump is he is so unabashedly the quintessential ugly-American that he doesn’t even try and hide it like the establishment Dems always do. Instead he lets his mildewed freak flag fly with borderline psychopathy being his most cherished personal attribute. His recent Gaza proposal of making it into an American occupied genocideatopia is the clearest backdrop to frame the immigration argument because it’s through that perverted lens one can truly begin to see the size of the brain worm that affects so many Americans. The spice really does flow and riding that worm is what we all will have to endure for four more years.
The two things that seems to always get lost in this discussion are that we are actively encouraging migrants to come/stay here as our economy benefits from migrants working here illegally AND a huge number of those migrants suffer immeasurably to fill those roles.
How we got here: Trump controlled both sides of Congress for two years during his first term and failed to take any meaningful action to address immigration (he did manage to build ~50 miles of new wall along the border). Then Biden ignored the issue until it exploded. And Trump's current PR campaign fails to note that his deportation numbers today at best mirror Obama's stats. Deportations are not going to solve this issue and I suspect that Trump does not have the interest or focus needed to actually pass any meaningful legislation.
Lefty/Dems/Liberals/Progressives need to care about immigration because immigrants have suffered for decades as the Left ignored the topic. Getting here is incredibly dangerous and enriches gangs along the way. Upon arrival, illegal immigrants are exploited while those with legal asylum status are prevented from working. Letting more people get pulled into this broken system is not a coherent policy.
Our current structure is a failure for immigrants and for U.S. citizens and the blame for this falls evenly across the political spectrum. Open borders is not a viable political stance nor is demonizing people who have come here to improve their lives.
Lock down the border, deport violent criminals, create a path for legal workforce participation for those who are here, pass immigration laws that allow for time limited work in the US in places where that labor is most needed, and establish ways to become a US citizen and/or temporary worker that encourage legal migration.
"But I recognize that to do so ethically requires a tremendous effort, and a lot of expense, to achieve linguistic and social and economic integration for those migrants"
You think migrants in a new country should or must integratate socially or linguistically?
You *monster*.
Yes, this is sarcasm. I lived in Japan for years, and I am here to tell you if you are unwilling or unable to integrate culturally or linguistically, you have exactly zero business trying to live in another country.
Freddie's previous piece on immigration was about exactly that:
"As a Big Fan of Immigration, I Recognize the Utility of Assimilation
liberals are disarmed in their defenses of immigration because they cannot admit that past examples of successful immigration have involved migrants conforming to their new culture
Freddie deBoer
Jan 31, 2025"
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/as-a-big-fan-of-immigration-i-recognize
And that piece was equally as tedious. These are non-issues, made to look like issues for political card games. Only the House wins.
It's not "tedious" for people who have to live that reality on the ground. It's absolutely essential.
Around the world, politics is not a big circle jerk that American progressives in the Acela Corridor have reduced it to. It is something that has to do with the way people think in the real world, and manifest those thoughts and feelings into real world desires.
These are real issues, and they have massive real world political impacts, precisely because they have had real world personal and social impacts.
Fair enough. My take on the assimilation issue is that its a no-brainer, as part a major component of immigrating IS assimilation. How this lost traction is due to the political card game it gets reduced to...and here we are
Tell that to the Swedes
For the general public this stuff is just common sense.
But for the denizens of the ivory tower and USAID it's actually a point for debate (and cancelation).
As PJ O'Rourke wrote, immigrants want to come from where money isn't to where money is. But it doesn't take an economist to understand that means there's less money to go around. There is a price; whether the natives of a country or the immigrants to that country pay it, there is a debate to be had. Dodging it gets us where we are now.
Mass migration crushes wages, impoverishes the working class, increases housing costs, degrades the environment, fuels social/racial tension/animosity leading to, ultimately, a coercive, oppressive empire or internecine war. Furthermore, the only successful, densely populated nations are a select number of European and East Asian nations, for the rest of the world the eventual reality is Lagos, Calcutta, Bombay, Soweto, maybe (at best) Mexico City. Only a midwit, comfortable, smug, scribbling "Marxist" (or a soulless, deracinated, libertarian, uber-capitalist) could could wish to visit such a horror show upon any people.
Okay, so what’s your problem? /sarcasm
I always go to a place where I think about how someone feels who’s trying to immigrate legally. How would that person feel while watching 10 million asylum seekers jump the line while they wait patiently, jumping through the many hoops of legal immigration?
I don’t expect they’d be very happy about it.
I can answer that question, because I know a ton of people doing it.
They fucking hate it, and it more than often translates into burning hatred for the people who knowingly take advantage of it, as well as for the politicians who provide perverse incentives for breaking the law and punishing those who abide by it.
Democrats are scratching their heads wondering why open border bullshit wasn't a slam dunk win with Latino voters, but apparently, never actually talked to any Latino voters who have seriously salty takes on this issue.
Listening to voters is something they might yet learn, but I'm not optimistic. In my state, some Democrats are doing "listening tours," which is either hilarious or a tiny step in the right direction, depending on one's viewpoint.
By insisting that anything other than de facto open borders was by definition racist (because Trump was for immigration restrictions), Team D played right into Trump’s sweaty little hands.
Or also consider that Trump was right - and that this is not 4D chess, that Trump has a completely normie take on the issue that is, and always was, broadly understood to be a consensus opinion in the United States outside the richest and most progressive urban areas.
Team D largely lets their hate for Trump set their policies for them.
Trump could announce that 2+2=4 and Team D would issue a rebuttal. I honestly don't understand why Trump doesn't troll this, tell his supporters that he breathes oxygen, does it every day, best stuff ever, good American oxygen, in fact. He breathes it right now between phrases.
Team D would set to asphyxiating themselves in response. "Not today Satan!"
The thing that buck breaks blue-no-matter-who shitlibs in the Acela Corridor is that Trump is quite often right - and is completely in the consensus of normie opinion.
But as you note, the American left, especially in the most moneyed pockets of the Acela Corridor, must always pretend that catering to what their social and economic inferiors want is bad.
Revolution! Resistance! Burn it all down!
The worst thing I can say about Trump is that he's very usually right, but that he's an asshole about it. Which was literally his brand for decades - decades! - before he even decided to get into politics in the first place!
I would say he's 'usually' right about the things that most non-politicians know to be right...which is a very low bar. And doesn't really move the needle on practical competency and leadership for anyone other than those who just like to see a president stick it to those hack politicians.
I mean, take NATO funding for example. Of course we pay the lion's share of that shit, because it's historically been in our best interest to do so. It served very well as a social, political, and economic (especially economic) bulwark against Soviet influence in those same three areas, as well as promoting American influence globally - like enforcing the dollar standard over everyone. It was (and still is to a lesser degree) a relatively cheap way to enforce American financial power, all while (mostly) looking like an angel doing it. It really helped to keep money flowing into our corporate coffers. Looking at it that way, paying out so much to NATO was a relatively cheap and effective way to go about it. IF one thinks prioritizing American corporate profits is a net good that is...
When Trump points out that we pay more than our fair share for NATO, that sounds like an obvious mistake to regular Joe Americans. And they aren't totally wrong to think that, especially in a time of decreasing wages and increasing costs of living. But it wasn't just a bunch of idiot politicians who came up with that idea, it was just one part of a coordinated and intentional plan to help grow American hegemony after the carnage of WW2. That most of it was and is siphoned off to Wall Street and corporations is another story, but even accounting for that siphoning it did help to artificially keep American standards of living high for decades long after Nuremberg courts were quiet. Especially if you were middle class and white...which is also another story.
That being said, the asshole part of Trump does way more damage than you might think. By definition assholes care for little beyond their own image and ego, and that certainly fits Trump. That he's willing to be brutally honest about things doesn't make him somehow admirable, because he's only being honest about things in order to get his way on something that serves his own image and ego. I mean, do you think the guy really gives a shit about anything or anyone in Panama, or Greenland, or Gaza? He's just doing all of that get journalists and Libs panties in a bunch so he can either a) win points from his base, which boosts his ego, or b) distract them so he can get something else he wants while they aren't looking.
There's a reason why some women fall prey to asshole guys - it's because there's a fine line between confidence and asshole and often it's hard to tell the difference. Trump is little different, he just figured out how to do it on a grand scale. Despite how willing he is to call out all of the obvious political hypocrisies under the sun, he's not doing it out of any kind of moral high ground, or even sense of common decency. He's just doing it to feed his own bottomless ego. And by the way, being honest about being an asshole for decades does not somehow excuse one from being an asshole, it just means we shouldn't be surprised about it.
Hoe is neglecting their defense budgets for decades working out for Europe now in the aftermath of Ukraine?
The real gripe about Trump was that he said the quiet parts out loud.
Now that the United States is rapidly dropping any pretense to being anything other than an empire, it is no longer seen as necessary to keep up the polite fictions and pious lies, which is why there is less objection to Trump now than in 2016.
Besides, he has shown that he can be easily managed.
Trump is very obviously not 'usually right'. He says stuff that's blatantly wrong all the time! You've built up an image of him in your own mind where you ignore all the wrong stuff he says or dismiss it as hyperbole or perhaps think of it as 4D chess or whatever
We just spent four years being officially forced to pretend a number of things that were self-evidently untrue were actually true, including topics that cannot be mentioned here.
Trump is wrong from time to time, but won in no small part for his ability to break with the bullshit and come out and say things everyone knew were actually true and correct.
The political left was forced into a corner where it had to try to keep up with their own kayfabe bullshit that everyone could see through because ... what was the alternative? Saying the obvious true things could give aid and comfort to MAGA chuds (God forbid), so they doubled down, and got high on their own supply.
Trump is right about a whole lot of things, and the American left might regain some credibility if they stopped pretending that he MUST be wrong be virtue of being a Bad Man all the time.
To be fair, Trump would never announce that 2+2=4, since it leaves out his cut.
2+2=3.75. But actually make it 3.50. But actually I'm keeping the 2.
I know two people intimately who have gone through the immigration process, legally, and this has never been something that they gnash their teeth about. Possibly because they understand and empathize with people trying to immigrate.
They probably also have some perspective on the number of people who will be granted asylum (not many) and the types of lives they will be forced to live as immigrants. The uncertainty, limitations, and disrespect that comes with it. Also the absolute bureaucratic nightmare of the immigration process. Take a few visits to an immigration office, have an interview or two and you'll understand how demeaning the whole process is (I have).
In my experience fury against illegal immigrants from legal is widespread. At the very least it should be obvious that mass illegal immigration is likely to usher in an era of public sentiment that acts to restrict legal immigration numbers.
I don't doubt that some legal immigrants are upset about illegal immigration, and feel personally affronted. I was simply noting that that opinion is not uniform among legal immigrants. We're dealing with anecdata here so there's no point in getting upset on other's behalf.
I think the more relevant question is whether Democratic assumptions about how minority groups would vote based on immigration enforcement may have led them to some major miscalculations this last November.
My husband and I were separated for over a year while we waited for his legal immigration paperwork to be processed (2021), and then, we had to wait another year for him to legally work, so we were living off of my salary alone, which was difficult and made us put off starting a family, of course; and during that time, he also was unable to travel outside of the US (so no family visit time, even if we could have afforded it). It continues to be difficult now that he can work with visa renewals and paperwork and documenting our relationship and paying large fees. It's easier for wealthier people who can afford a lawyer to take care of some of this; but it's still tough for them too, because of the waiting, etc. What frustrates us most is the health benefits to the illegal migrants, especially those having children upon entering and not paying any medical bills.
I agree with most of what Freddie writes here, to be sure. And while I did not vote for Trump, my experience dealing with Leftest open-borders or you-are-evil types has definitely given me some grey hairs.
Welcome to the U.S. :)
The dirty little secret of liberal America is that it has believed in the Great Replacement Myth just as strongly as the right does, seeing the arrival of nonwhite majority as a political deus ex machina that eliminates all opposition and contestation of its worldview.
Immigration politics have always been viewed through that lens, on both sides. It's a fight over how many blue votes can be added to the mix from across the border.
The 2024 Election has to be the end of that viewpoint for anyone looking at it rationally. Actually existing nonwhite voters are rapidly fleeing the politics of cosmopolitan identarian solidarity, there is no Permanent Democratic Majority at the end of the rainbow no matter how open the borders are.
In theory that ought to lead us to a much MUCH more healthy place on immigration politics. We shall see.
Not only that, the myth was initially promulgated by Obama era Dem wunderkind Ruy Teixera who phrased it as "emerging majority" (translation, "LOL SUCK IT WHITE VOTER CHUDS LOLOL") but in hindsight, would now also kindly like to let everyone know that he was merely misunderstood, and also, wrong.
https://www.city-journal.org/article/review-of-where-have-all-the-democrats-gone
Politicians playing politics.
That is indeed the name of the game. Politics.
The American political left - against all reason - put all of their chips on this, and screamed, nay, howled, when it predictably went bust.
That's not Donald Trump's fault. That's not MuH RaCiSM!'s fault. That's their own fault.
So how will they course correct? Can they even course correct? Will they just keep screaming at the normies and calling them all bigots? What's the play here now, exactly?
There isn't one. The Ds are done. They never did anything, and they never do. Its all optics. The Democratic Party since Carville/Stephanpolous/Clinton/Gore sold its soul. And here we are...
The answer was always You Never Bet Against The House.
Are there any mammals (or vertebrates of any kind) that don't recognize territory and defend those boundaries in some way? I feel like no borders and free movement everywhere is a pretty big ask.
The no borders stuff doesn't make sense to me other than as some kind of utopian fantasy where you remove all human emotion and thousands of years of human phycological evolution. Do you have some kind of representative government at all? Humans have a natural tendency to coalesce into like-minded groups and it seems inevitable, if borders were to be erased, that they'd just come right back again. Its so far out there in relation to the real world we live in that I don't even know why anyone would bother to bring it up.
Somebody who knows more about the subject than me would be able to give an answer, but isn't that why there are sizable ethnic enclaves in places like Iraq or Iran? For centuries those places were under the rule of large national empires that allowed free movement. People moved en masse adhering to group ties like language and religion.
Even in the US you have Chinatowns, Dominican neighborhoods, etc.
If you just think about all the issues that manifest when trying to govern a country like ours with so many different ethnicities and sub-cultures etc. and trying to divvy out limited resources where everyone doesn't feel like they're getting shafted then multiply that by the entire world population and then I don't know what you get because I'm not that smart but its a fun thought experiment for some sociology class. *end run-on sentence*
The pictured Darien Gap is a border anyone's got to respect.
"The no borders stuff doesn't make sense to me other than as some kind of utopian fantasy where you remove all human emotion and thousands of years of human phycological evolution. "
Agreed.
Freddie: "The nation-state is a fiction, and a very recent one, invented for the benefit of capital and imperialism."
To Freddie: As a naïf re the wonders of a nationless world, I got stuck right here. I didn't see your answer further below; I suppose it's off-topic. So I'm left asking such things as ...
-- How does power concentrate for the benefit of the powerless after the current (but waning) power centers (nations) are no longer keeping each other in check?
-- What is the plan for eradicating human nature in a power vacuum? Should we anticipate kinder and gentler warlords, once they are properly educated?
-- How is the iron law of oligarchy eradicated without figuring out, maybe for the first time in history, what to do with psychopaths and sociopaths, who seem to me our actual perennial problem here, no matter the political system?
Anyone?
The whole "nation-state is a recent fiction..." bit is a non-sequitur. If that is the opener intended to suggest that "the correct state of things is we are all merely humans" then it's ignoring the millennia of humans dividing into groups for the benefit of control and prosperity, most typically more for those on top of a hierarchy than those at the bottom.
The forgotten issue, the dead issue - that it would not even surface here, even as a litle nod: the environment.
"For decades, Americans have not had a desire for an ever-larger population. This is suggested by polls over the years. In 1974, 87 percent of respondents to a Roper poll said they did not wish the country had more people. A 1971 poll by the U.S. Commission on Population Growth and the American Future found that 22 percent felt U.S. population should be smaller than it was then, which was close to 200 million. As long ago as 1947, when U.S. population was 140 million, Gallup found that 55 percent of Americans believed the country would be "worse off' with more people."
People can have values that are not reducible to either economics or "racism".
Some people just don't want everything to be crowded. Sure, the market or libertarian urbanists love pictures of Taipei.
That's aesthetic, nothing more. Once you grant that, you have to allow that aesthetics may operate for other people, in a different way.
I don't think there has really ever been a more signal example of the way that politicians, of both parties, using one another in a curious embrace, utterly ignored the will of the American people, than on population and immigration. I guess that goes perfectly well with a command economy, though. It's funny to think they were more successful at exactly that, than were the Soviets.
I'm constantly saying this is a factor -- and no one listens to me, haha.
Some dude in plaid flannel in Montana probably likes his population density just how it is, thanks.
I'm tempted to think that at least the D party itself has understood all of this for quite some time given the numbers of deportations under Obama/Biden. It's not like Dems have been especially soft on undocumented immigrants.
First of all, Obama has been the defacto leader of the Democratic party since he took office. All of these strategic and messaging shifts bore his seal of approval (until last November - LOL).
Obama was the deporter in chief, but also sent the message in the Great Big Stupid George Floyd National Moment that it's probably bad and racist that we aren't letting the entire world in the United States, which predictably, bubbled down through the party's decision making apparatus until the feels and messages became actual policy.
That the policy part was stupid, politically suicidal, etc. was irrelevant until Trump trounced them. Now it's a panic.
Dems were hard for about a second, and soft for a good eight years or so (because "Trump bad").
https://youtube.com/shorts/TiNAT-Gve64?si=oLTdxWXukJ9YFnQf
I guess on my end it just seems like there has always been a disconnect between rhetoric and actual policy on the part of Dem leaders, 2020 being no exception of course. Deportations under Biden were at a 10-year high in 2024, which means both Biden and Obama can claim larger rates of enforcement than Trump. I get that there's something to be said for the rhetoric undercutting the message that the public can entrust immigration enforcement to a Dem, but when you have actual enforcement numbers that show there is no shortage of it, I feel like it should complicate the idea that Dems are somehow comprehensively failing to "face reality". The Progressive public maybe, but actual policymakers seem to be under no such illusions.
Also, let's be fair and call out the utter refusal of R's to offer any kind of meaningful policy change in legal immigration that would bring those workers into an above-board status. George W found out the hard way that his own party would torpedo any kind of immigration reform and scream about AMNESTY!!! the minute the pragmatics of dealing with undocumented immigrants and labor realities were broached.
One, deportation under Biden were high because illegal immigration was out of control.
Two, Biden's policy in 2024 changed once election season came around and his team realized illegal immigration was going to be a huge campaign issue.
Biden and Senate Republicans also found out the hard way when candidate Trump blew up the bipartisan immigration deal in 2024. Only Congress can fix immigration because fixing it will cost a lot of money.
How does the number of interceptions at the southern border now compare to 2022 or 2023?
Looks to me like the issue is fixed.
That's such a superficial metric. Are you just trolling? The amnesty situation is a shit show. There's still 11M illegal migrants in the USA. It's only going to get worse as global warming crushes the global south. You're just trolling.
Who cares if there are millions of desperate people at the border as long as they're at the border?
It's not the job of the US to eradicate poverty and want across the globe. The job of the US is to make sure that all of the people fleeing that poverty and want don't enter the US.
Are there still a lot of people in the US that need to be deported? Absolutely. But the other half of the equation is making sure that no more illegals enter into the country to bolster the population of the soon to be deported. Trump obviously considers the border situation to be a big win for his administration and I think he's right.
How did Trump "blow up" a bill when he has no function in gov't?
Remember, Biden defeated him in '20.
Are you serious? He told Republicans in Congress not to pass the bill, so they didn't.
[From NBC News 07-FEB-2024]
Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., who was elected in 2010 to replace Joe Biden, said that in those nearly 14 years he has never seen a McConnell-backed deal collapse so quickly with the GOP.
“It surprises me,” he said.
But Trump’s hammering of the deal, while he uses immigration as a campaign issue, and his demands that Republicans reject it won the day. On Tuesday, Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., a member of McConnell’s leadership team and one of several prospects to replace him as leader, rejected the border bill, saying, “Americans will turn to the upcoming election to end the border crisis.”
"Dems were hard for about a second, and soft for a good eight years or so (because "Trump bad")."
I genuinely did not need that particular visual.
<insert image of Chuck Schumer>
I am going to hurl.....
"Dems were hard for about a second, and soft for a good eight years or so (because "Trump bad")."
My wife tells me the same thing
Lol.
I see what you did there!
It's kayfabe. Neither party is interested in doing anything significant on immigration because the status quo benefits the rich and powerful. Wages stay down and there's an underclass to villainize. Occasionally, there's a show of sending away more or fewer, but there's no will to do the difficult task of creating a less shitty immigration system. Doesn't help that it's such a political football.
Witness Eric Adams, mayor of New York, flipping from proudly touting his city as a sanctuary to declaring that "immigration will destroy this city." What changed? Oh, yeah -- the southern states started shipping the immigrants to New York. Everyone (but especially the left) has vast, expansive, generous notions of the good they want to do for the world -- until the bill arrives.
"The problem with socialism is that eventually you run out of other people's money." -- Margaret Thatcher
Talking about moral obligations without ever considering the costs is simply magical thinking. It doesn't work.
'If you express this just slightly differently, you can see that it’s exceptionally racist. “You know what would be great? If we let a bunch of people of color into our country and have them do hard, dangerous, demeaning jobs. And get this! We’re going to sneak them in secretly, so they won’t be protected by minimum wage laws, OSHA, regulations on work hours and overtime, and all manner of other labor protections. And most of them are going to be paying into Medicare and Social Security but won’t ever be able to practically draw from those programs that they’ve contributed to. They’ll also be constantly subject to personal, economic, and sexual exploitation because they won’t be able to call the police due to their undocumented status. Why, you might as well call them slaves! This is all very enlightened and liberal btw.”'
Yes, thank you.
It absolutely blows my mind that political left in this country has embraced needing a perpetual underclass to do labor for us. "Who are you gonna pay $5 an hour to now, you bigots?" is *wild.*
I had always understood this argument as one designed to appeal to the caricature the left has of the ownership class: it's not that the left thinks we should have these laborers making sub minimum wage; it's that they think the ownership class will be hurt by the lack of cheap labor. Oh, and it's a moral swipe at the ownership class for basically exploiting slave labor.
Maybe the times have changed though? Or maybe I never really understood their argument in the first place.
Question, not rhetorical, but in earnest- do you believe that the rhetoric of Democrats, Chris Murphy for example, bragging about how Biden deported more immigrants than Trump makes any kind of sense politically? Like, will it gain them votes? What should their rhetoric be? Should they just lay low while this is the current worm's turn?
It makes zero sense. Anyone with even a basic understanding of numbers can see how incredibly stupid decisions by the Biden administration led to an explosion of illegal immigration, at which point even barely exceeding the Trump status quo on deportations was meaningless because it allowed in countless more illegal entrants than it sent back.
Yeah- not exactly my question. More interested in what should the messaging be.
It makes no sense politically because it's self-evidently stupid and wrong to all but the dumbest of American voters.
If you are asking "what is the proper messaging to convey a political idea nearly everyone recognizes is wrong and dishonest", you are asking the wrong question.
Sigh. Nice skirting of my question. Self-evident to whom? To the millions who simply didn't vote? Asking a legitimate question about what should their message be in order to win elections, not asking for pompous bombast from a fellow subscriber.
So again- what would a winning immigration policy look like and what would winning messaging be about said policy sound like.
You are mistaking "messaging" for substance.
Liberals, especially where I live in the Acela Corridor, do this quite a lot. They have a difficult time divorcing words from actions, and more disastrously, the intentions words convey from what can, or should, be done.
So let me make this plain:
The left does not have a "messaging" problem on immigration. The "no human is illegal" messaging was quite clear. Their deliberate decisions to conflate economic migrants with political asyless was quite clear.
We got it. The "message" was not their problem.
Their problem is that Americans think the substance of these positions is bullshit, and they don't support it politically. No amount of "messaging" is going to correct that.
I think you missed the part where Trump made this his #1 issue and crushed it.
What are we pivoting to here, Amanda? "BuT WhaT AbOuT ThoSe WhO diD nOt VoTe?"
Are we imagining those non-voters are, somehow, inexplicably, more dovish on the open borders question than the average person who did vote?
That doesn't make very much sense, honestly.
Well, I think it would be wise to craft a cogent policy on immigration, no? And given low turn out, generally, I suspect that having a message that addresses immigration might be wise, no? In addition to other messages that address people's material anxieties. I agree that Sanders had the correct stance on the inherent problems that immigration posed to America workers- is that the better message? You're not really engaging in any kind of good faith conversation. You're just pulling your pud and being a dick.
John Fetterman is catching a lot of heat right now because he voted for Pam Bondi.
He also endorsed Trump's Gaza plan.
If the D's nominate him in 2028 they stand a chance. Otherwise forget it. If you want to win in a Trumpian era you have got to take Trumpian positions.
Lol. The guy who's brain has turned to mush from a stroke, and will likely change party affiliation. Mmm ok.
If you're not interested in the answer why even ask the question?
One of Fetterman's huge problems is going to be partisans on his left flank that refuse to moderate/compromise. You might want to think about that.
Well, for one thing I didn't ask for a candidate, mate.
You can't make the short jump to "somebody that talks like Fetterman"?
That the senate's leading Democrat - who actually is making sense politically has brain damage, and who was apparently cured of AOC style shitlib posturing after an inpatient stay in a psychiatric hospital - suggests once again that the problem might not be Fetterman himself, but rather, Fetterman's party.
I have to admit that I like Fetterman. Anybody who mentions "truck nuts" in an interview with the NY Times is all right by me.
He did that? Shit, he's got my vote.
There is a lot of glee right now in conservative media because of the most recent DNC election. Why? At least one reason is a belief that Democraric leadership believes that they had the right positions and all they needed was more effective messaging to win in 2024. One, to a lot of people that reads as seriously out of touch. Two, that's what the Democrats tried in 2024 with attempts to gaslight the public on the issues of the economy and immigration and it failed miserably.
To answer your question the message needs to be "Deport, deport, deport". And the policy needs to follow.
Sorry, but you're barking up the wrong tree here. I voted for Bernie in both 2016 and 2020 primaries and believe firmly that he would easily have won had he been the nominee in 2016. Not even going down the peculiarities of Pennsylvania politics with you- and I know them quite well having grown up in Pittsburgh.
Fetterman stands a chance because he is an outsider. Right now the national mood is decidedly anti-establishment.
All of the South and Central America cannot enter our borders. That is a fact. But I stand by my statements in the last immigration thread.
Immigrants are often more aligned with ideal American values than our own citizens, and if that's not integration, I don't know what is.
I am very close with a lot of legal Brazilian immigrants here, and if there is one thing that unites them, it's their incandescent anger at people who jump the border and use bullshit asylum claims, coached by well funded NGOs, to skip the line they spent years and a small fortune, to do legally.
I am not exaggerating when I say some of them would kill them if they could. The very white, rich, American left has zero understanding of the "brown folx" they think they're speaking for.
Bingo. Sooo bingo.
The immigration issue is just one of the many things that has, quite deservedly, crushed the spine of the American political left. Trump did this again today with keeping biological males out of girls sports, an issue on which 80% of Americans agree with his position, but the Democratic party and their affiliated special interest groups decided it was a hill to die upon.
On Twitter, the progressive midwits are insisting, confusingly, that Trump is a senile retard (who, somehow?) keeps outwitting them, but have no basic ability to look at themselves and see that the interests advanced by very progressive, and very well moneyed, interest groups are resoundingly unpopular with the American public.
Of course, they pivoted to "the American people are stupid, savage bigots" - but surprisingly, that's not a winning approach in politics.
So what now? What's the play, guys? Is there any scenario in which you might admit that the maximilally progressive position might, in fact, actually not be the right one after all?
You cannot have a viable system of immigration without acknowledging a simple concept.
There are things about the culture of the place you're fleeing from that turned it into a place worth fleeing from.
There are things about the culture of the place you're fleeing to that turned it into a place worth fleeing to.
As a resident of the place you fleeing to, I like living here for the same reasons you want to live here, therefore it is in my best interest that you not bring any of the things with you that turned the place you're fleeing from into a place worth fleeing from, and that you adopt the things that turned the place you're fleeing to into a place worth fleeing to.
Integration must always and forever be the absolute condition of immigration.
"It's just their culture and you have to respect it." No I don't, actually. You got on a plane and dropped yourself into a foreign country to get away from that culture. The actual thing that made our country attractive to live in was our intolerance of the things that made your country unattractive to live in. Leave them behind, and we can be neighbors. Don't leave them behind, and we cannot be neighbors.
When the immigration enthusiasts understand this, we'll be able to work toward a better immigration system. Because they don't understand this, they will keep losing to the majority of normies who like having a nice country and want to keep it that way.
More than this, the onus is on the recent arrival to understand the conditions that made this a place worth coming to.
I lived in Japan, and in the late Showa era (late 80's/90's), I couldn't walk down the street in Nagoya, or even Tokyo, without cops pulling me aside, and asking me to show my passport to prove I'm here legally. And I always did. All conversations were in Japanese, and I never got angry. Because I knew that was part of the deal.
I bought the ticket, I took the ride.
Heh, one of my friends was a Japanese riot cop. He told me that whenever he needed to bump up his arrest stats he'd find a foreigner and ask them for their passport.
If they didn't have it he would scream at them in Japanese for a minute, and then take them down to the station where they'd have to write a report apologizing for their transgression.
Yup. And God forbid you got caught doing anything illegal, or even socially unacceptable in the presence of authority. As a foreigner, all eyes were always on you, so you had to walk the straight and narrow, and make sure you were on your best behavior. Foreigners are simply guests in Japan. It's not like the US. You will be treated very well as a foreign resident, but only IF you act like a model guest.
The word "things" is doing alot of heavy lifting here. In my experience those "things" that people refer to on the conservative end of the political spectrum are often just "stuff that annoys me" or makes them uncomfortable, not things that have any meaningful bearing on the larger foundational culture of America, and are often couched in the same level of poorly constructed pseudo-intellectual rhetoric that the left sometimes displays wrt race/gender/etc concerns, just in the opposite direction.
I have a theory that Americans smile at each other so much compared to other countries because it transcends language in signifying that you mean no harm.
In my work place I have co-workers from Russoa, Hungary, China, Pakistan, India, France, Ireland, Mexico, Columbia, Korea, Japan, Canada, the UK, sub saharan Africa, Israel, Poland, etc. etc.
New immigrants need to understand that the US is a genuinely diverse place and a common language is not guaranteed. So smile a lot.
Perhaps, but I'm specifically talking about things like protestant work ethic, punctuality, obeying the law, honesty, peaceful conflict resolution through neutral third party arbiters such as the legal system, and respect for the commons (i.e. not defacing, littering, or damaging public property). At minimum, at the *bare* minimum, holding immigrants to the same standards as the rest of us, and not giving them a free pass to violate the social norms that have created the society that we enjoy living in, and that they want to enjoy living in, is called for.
which immigrants are violating these? and which citizens uphold them? You'll need to be more specific. Our culture hasn't been that for a very long time.
Stephan: Brilliant. (Read in Guinness ad voice.)
Outstanding piece! you really nailed it, Freddie!
I am going to share this with my peeps.
These are all valid concerns FB and the issues are not only complex and nuanced they’re also classically American dual-use issues. That being, under the guise of some
feigned moral imperative there exists the real and always more horrible and practical reasons that suit the wealthy elite class. The refreshing thing about Trump is he is so unabashedly the quintessential ugly-American that he doesn’t even try and hide it like the establishment Dems always do. Instead he lets his mildewed freak flag fly with borderline psychopathy being his most cherished personal attribute. His recent Gaza proposal of making it into an American occupied genocideatopia is the clearest backdrop to frame the immigration argument because it’s through that perverted lens one can truly begin to see the size of the brain worm that affects so many Americans. The spice really does flow and riding that worm is what we all will have to endure for four more years.
The two things that seems to always get lost in this discussion are that we are actively encouraging migrants to come/stay here as our economy benefits from migrants working here illegally AND a huge number of those migrants suffer immeasurably to fill those roles.
How we got here: Trump controlled both sides of Congress for two years during his first term and failed to take any meaningful action to address immigration (he did manage to build ~50 miles of new wall along the border). Then Biden ignored the issue until it exploded. And Trump's current PR campaign fails to note that his deportation numbers today at best mirror Obama's stats. Deportations are not going to solve this issue and I suspect that Trump does not have the interest or focus needed to actually pass any meaningful legislation.
Lefty/Dems/Liberals/Progressives need to care about immigration because immigrants have suffered for decades as the Left ignored the topic. Getting here is incredibly dangerous and enriches gangs along the way. Upon arrival, illegal immigrants are exploited while those with legal asylum status are prevented from working. Letting more people get pulled into this broken system is not a coherent policy.
Our current structure is a failure for immigrants and for U.S. citizens and the blame for this falls evenly across the political spectrum. Open borders is not a viable political stance nor is demonizing people who have come here to improve their lives.
Lock down the border, deport violent criminals, create a path for legal workforce participation for those who are here, pass immigration laws that allow for time limited work in the US in places where that labor is most needed, and establish ways to become a US citizen and/or temporary worker that encourage legal migration.
That would involve passing laws, which America has been allergic to for decades.
Trump handled illegal immigration through executive action so the case for new laws was diminished.