After listening to 680 people in 61 focus groups over three years, Patrick Healy of the New York Times thinks Donald Trump has a good chance of winning. Inflation is one of the big reasons, but immigration might be even bigger:
What I’ve heard has left me thinking that Democratic Party leaders have deeply underestimated the mood of the electorate on immigration — that more people than Democrats realize want something serious, even draconian, done to remove undocumented migrants and secure the border. If it takes an authoritarian Trump administration to do it, then so be it, some of these voters feel. The degree of their anger can be unsettling to contemplate.
....That could look like Mr. Trump getting re-elected this week and, using any means he can, perhaps including the military, rounding up undocumented immigrants, putting them in militarized camps and deporting them, with more Americans than you would think going along with it. Such a move would devastate our sense of America as a sanctuary, erode our norms, fracture the tacit acceptance that immigrants do a lot of jobs that many Americans don’t want to do. It would redefine us as a society.
I think Healy is half right: Democrats have seriously blown it on immigration over the past decade, but it won't ultimately doom Harris.
Democrats haven't always been as soft on immigration as they've become. Without adopting Donald Trump's ruthless methods, Barack Obama kept a fairly tight lid on illegal immigration. In fact, border encounters were lower under Obama than they were under Trump:
Now, Obama had an easier job than either Trump or Biden. Coming off the Great Recession, job demand was negative or zero for Obama's entire term, so there just wasn't a lot of pressure on the border. But job demand grew during Trump's administration until the pandemic killed it, and then skyrocketed during Biden's term.
That said, Democrats overreacted to Trump's immigration hawkery in 2016, moving way to the left and adopting positions nearly indistinguishable from open borders. Ironically, in 2020 Biden remained moderate on immigration, but pressure from the Democratic base kept him from responding aggressively to the huge surge on the border after he took office.
It could be that there wasn't much Biden could do. When job demand surges, the market is going to find a way to satisfy it. And it's true that some kind of comprehensive reform is the only real answer. Still, none of that defends Biden's unwillingness to at least acknowledge the surge in illegal immigration and try to do something about it. This is the minimum the public expects.
My rule of thumb—like it or not—is that people will accept annual migration rates of about a quarter of a percent of the country's population. In the US that comes to 800,000 or so. Legal immigration is already above that, so when you add a big surge of illegal immigration an angry tribal response is almost inevitable. Democrats make a big mistake when they try to pretend this away.
Kevin's case for US economic control of immigration is not as good as he claims. Immigration did not respond to increasing job opening in the later Obama-Trump years. The more recent job demand is partly recovery from covid, and I think partly due to distorted reports - if overall demand in the economy were really as high as that wages should have gone up.
When immigration was mostly from Mexico lots of people did move in and out. Now people are coming from further away - are they going to go back to Venezuela if jobs dry up - which they apparently have? But migration has always gone in waves, probably just because people move in masses, like other social animals - nobody wants to be left behind. Anyway I suspect that the current wave will die down, just as past waves have.
Polls are somewhat contradictory and changeable, but a strong majority still supports immigration in general and eventual citizenship for those now here, but also control of the border, for example:
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2024/06/06/immigration-attitudes-and-the-2024-election/
Obama, Biden and Harris have attempted to steer a middle course, that is follow the will of the people, if there is such a thing with the current polarization. Support for deportation has grown, but if Republicans actually try it that could change very fast as people find out what it really means. Trump's immigration claims are mainly a rallying point for racism in general - he relies on specific claims (eating pets for example) which are phony.
Wages did.
https://ycharts.com/indicators/us_average_hourly_earnings#:~:text=US%20Average%20Hourly%20Earnings%20is,3.99%25%20from%20one%20year%20ago.
I think tomorrow will go much like four years ago and in the end we will have defeated evil, and after that both evil and the popular media will fail to notice this is because evil is wrong.
Gaza's more likely to be a problem than immigration.
Re: Gaza. That's my feeling, too.
Regarding immigration, George RR Martin had a post on his blog the other day about growing up in Bayonne, NJ back in the day when it was possible for Americans in his city to get along in spite of their religious and ethnic differences.
He closed with a photo of the Statue of Liberty and the text of A New Colossus.
https://georgerrmartin.com/notablog/2024/10/31/lift-the-torch/
Surely there are still Americans who are moved positively by this vision of immigration.
Really? I know some groups (e.g. young people, Muslims, Palestinian Americans) feel passionately about Gaza. But it seems like their numbers are a tiny fraction compared to people that are concerned about illegal immigration. Immigration is basically a mainstream concern whereas passion for Gaza is limited to a much narrower slice of the electorate.
*Fear of* immigration is a mainstream concern, thanks to relentless demagoging. The number of people actually impacted by undocumented immigrants (losing a job to, or being victimized in a crime by) is minuscule compared to the excess numbers of people impacted by anthropogenic climate change (wildfires, landslides, floods, cyclonic storms …). Yet tens of millions will vote for the candidate who will make the latter problem worse.
Sure, there's a lot of people who have been whipped into a dumbass frenzy over immigration but it's not clear whether the Ds or the Rs will benefit the most from this. Gaza is hurting only the Ds because Biden is the POTUS and Biden has been sending all the bombs to Israel for the last year.
That's pretty stupid. People can be concerned about issues without being "whipped into a dumbass frenzy". It's a legitimate issue that the majority of the electorate agrees needs to be addressed. Have all the voters that are motivated by abortion rights been "whipped into a frenzy".
I agree the Biden Administration was three years too late in acting on the border the way they have, especially when they tried to basically ignore the problem rather than bite the bullet like they did earlier this year even in spite the activists group, who, it's been discovered, pretty much only speak for those who fund them and few thousand people on a mailing list.
"If it takes an authoritarian Trump administration to do it, then so be it, some of these voters feel. The degree of their anger can be unsettling to contemplate.
Fine then. If that's what they want, then they can vote for it and they can be the ones held responsible for the consequences that follow. And to say "we didn't think it wasn't going to be that bad" when the rhetoric and plans all pointed in that direction is a damning indictment of their intelligence.
I mean my state's Senator Ron Johnson was at a GOP Hispanic outreach center in Milwaukee saying "don't worry, it's not going to be that bad. They're not going to deport all those people" and yet you have many people who would be immigration czars in a Trump Administration planning how they're going to use the National Guard to start rounding up people, isn't just talking out two-sides of one's mouth, it's willfull blindness. They want something done, there are policies that can get things done to their satisfaction (and are being done as crossing have declined) yet they're going to vote for the most extreme policies to deal with the situation which could wind up really hurting the country. They've been warned and if they don't want to listen, damn them all. I don't care.
So lemme get this straight: They were three years late because you're lying about what they did?
Like, so 'nothing' is 'get a bill that would have fixed it to Congress to be blocked by Republicans?'
Once again Kevin leaves out the most important factor:
We start with Sidi Mohamed Abdallahi shooting a Jewish man. Abdallahi is an illegal immigrant. The mainstream press is very very cautious about tiptoeing around that fact (read eg https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/31/us/chicago-jewish-man-shooting-hate-crime-terrorism-charges/index.html and see the circumlocutions they use).
And THIS is why people are fed up! The endless lies, the refusal to acknowledge the obvious.
Add to this the anti-semitism (supported by the Democratic Party, endorsed by Kamala Harris, the week it took Mayor Brandon Johnson to finally get around to condemning the shooting. I believe Kamala Harris has still not condemned the attack.)
And of course, call it stupid if you want, but we have arrayed against that the killing of Peanut the squirrel, after 10 government employees raided his caregiver's house for five hours. The contrast between the energy shown when it's time to deal with some meddling busybody's complaints about an animal vs the lack of interest in dealing with criminal illegal immigrants is fairly striking.
And yes, yes, you can make all sorts of excuses (different departments, blah blah), all of that misses the picture that a lot of people look at this and see a government with an utterly insane set of priorities and morals: Everything for illegal immigrants (preferably from US-hostile countries), nothing for Jews or animals, or people just living their life without bothering anyone else. And it does not sit well.
Ahh, yes, showing up to spout bigotry and lie about immigrants is why people are fed up?
Because you'e lying about the risk of immigrants?
Well, the article is also unclear as to whether the Jewish man was ‘shot’; it says he was ‘shot at’; the charges against the shooter do not suggest that the victim was injured by a gunshot, and the victim left the hospital the afternoon of the incident, which took place in the morning.
How are ‘the government’s priorities’ an issue here? The shooter has been charged with multiple crimes. Whether politicians or the media ‘condemn’ him is immaterial and are not actions of the government.
President Trump' had a policy and agreement with Mexico to allow asylum seekers to stay on the south side of the border while waiting for adjudication of their cases. There was a large population of migrants waiting at the border that grew while Trump was president. Biden had to deal with this deferred amount of migrants that would have crossed into the US before 2021 and is being 'blamed' for this increase by the man who created the problem.
Yep.
And the man who blocked any funding and new rules to deal with it.
"That said, Democrats overreacted to Trump's immigration hawkery in 2016, moving way to the left and adopting positions nearly indistinguishable from open borders."
Kevin, when your crazy friend is standing at the ledge of a building telling you deluded stories about how he can fly, you are supposed to talk them away from the ledge, not entertain the idea that perhaps your friend has a point because the view from up there could be considered nice.
No, because it's abortion, stupid.
From a previous post by Drum:
" California’s birth rate is at its lowest in a century. If the economy is to grow and prosper, as almost all Americans say they want it to, additional workers must come from somewhere else."
Immigration is such a convoluted subject.
Keep in mind we cannot "close" the border - doing so would deprive cattlemen in CA, TX, Nev and AZ of Rio Grande water. THAT would cause quite an uproar.
We could, I believe direct the flow of immigrants to specific areas with carefully place walls and/or barricades. But even this would only mitigate the problem slightly. E-verify must (MUST) be strengthened but republican businesses won't have that.
They had a border solution that was bipartisan but partisan politics doomed it until the republicans could get credit for it
Its as simple as that
Zero population growth for the win!
https://www.backgroundbriefing.org/2021/06/01/background-briefing-june-1-2021/
Background Briefing with Ian Masters interview, June 1, 2021
Steven Levitsky, a Professor of Government at Harvard University and author with Daniel Ziblatt of How Democracies Die, joins us. We discuss the open letter at the New America Foundation he and 100 other experts on democracy signed, “Statement of Concern: The Threat to American Democracy and the Need for National Voting and Election Administration Standards”
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
"I think there's a deeper problem, one is that our parties have become intensely polarized, deeply, deeply polarized so you see behavior like this, a willingness to believe conspiracies, a willingness to act on those conspiracies, a willingness to violate the law, even to use violence against political rivals. [...] I think it's exacerbated in the United States case because it is an asymmetric polarization because of who the Republican party represents.
The Republican party represents the demographic group, the social and cultural group, that founded and dominated this nation for two centuries. White Christian men, in effect. And the loss not only of the electoral majority, the electoral dominance of white Christians in this country, but also the social status, the dominant social status of white Christians, which if you go back even half a century, when I was a kid, white Protestants really filled every top position in every social, political, cultural, economic hierarchy in the country. In over 50 years that's changed dramatically. That is deeply threatening. And that is fundamentally what I think is polarizing our country. There are very few societies - I can't name a single democracy in the world - that has undergone a transition in which a dominant ethnic group loses its majority and loses its dominant status. That's a major, major transformation and I think that ultimately that's what's fueling [it], exacerbated by social media, but if you want to get at the root causes, it's that transition."
"Democrats overreacted to Trump's immigration hawkery in 2016, moving way to the left and adopting positions nearly indistinguishable from open borders."
This sounds like absolute nonsense. Maybe it isn't, but in this post, Mr. Drum's inner Orange County Republican is doing the typing.
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