David Broder has a good piece in the New York Times today about the extremist right-wing government that's now running Italy. Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has certainly moderated her rhetoric since being elected, he says, but underneath you'll still find the same old animating radicalism. This is particularly true of her government's animus toward migrants, which is now shared throughout Europe:
Ms. Meloni’s administration has spent its first months accusing minorities of undermining the triad of God, nation and family, with dire practical consequences for migrants, nongovernmental organizations and same-sex parents....Ms. Meloni’s government isn’t just nativist but has a harsh authoritarian streak, too.
For Italy this is bad enough....In Sweden, a center-right coalition relies on the nativist Sweden Democrats’ support to govern. In Finland, the anti-immigrant Finns Party went one better and joined the government....Conservatives in Britain echo Ms. Meloni’s obsession with favoring birthrates over migration; French anti-immigrant politicians like Éric Zemmour cite Italy as a model of how to “unite the forces of the right”; and even in Germany, the Christian Democrats’ long refusal to consider pacts with the Alternative for Germany is under strain.
It's commonplace to observe that Europe has been more or less at peace for 80 years now—surely a record for the continent. Credit is usually given to wise postwar politicians or to alliance-building projects like the EU, but this misses a more fundamental reason: the ruthless resettlement of ethnic groups to their home countries after World War II. This is not something most people know about—or care to remember—but it happened. And ruthless though it might have been, it accomplished its purpose. With postwar European countries relatively homogeneous, tribal conflicts waned and peace reigned. It's notable that the only exception to Europe's peaceful 80 years came in the former Yugoslavia, where tribal tensions erupted after Josip Broz Tito died and there was no longer a leader with the iron hand to keep them in check.
But 80 years is a long time, and eventually Europe's ethnic homogeneity was bound to break down as more and more migrants made their way in. Every lesson of history suggests that this was certain to ignite, if not wars, tensions short of war. And it has. We can blame right-wing parties all we want, but they've merely been conduits for a historical inevitability.
This is why I don't support the extreme pro-immigrant position adopted over the past decade by the US left. I am, needless to say, decidedly opposed to the deliberate cruelty toward migrants that's manifested by so many Republicans. Our policies should be as humane as possible at all times. But at the same time that we should keep fighting against the baseless fear of migrants from south of the border, a reality-based approach demands recognition that we will never eliminate this fear. We can only mute it, and that only by restricting its flow.
There's a level of migration—legal and otherwise—that's low enough to keep anti-immigrant fervor in check. At a guess, it's about a tenth of a percent of the country's population per year. We're currently at five times that rate, which makes a furious tribal response almost unavoidable.
I admit that this is an ugly conclusion. But short of deliberately embracing a fantasy-based view of the world, I'm not sure what alternative there is.
Kevin seems to have the idea that Europe's conflicts prior to the second half of the 20th century were due to displaced ethnic populations. This is weird. Actually the wars through the preceding centuries were due to raw colonial and European territorial/economic ambitions by main national populations: Spanish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, British. Hitler made scapegoats of the Jews in Germany, but his real objective was taking over all of Europe (especially Russia), not purifying his own country ethnically, or even subsuming German populations (in Czechoslovakia).
This does not mean that mass migration in Europe couldn't lead to problems in the future, but that is not the history for the last few hundred years.
You had a lot of "We speak X and are bound to protect the X speakers in your country!" So it was a useful tool for imperialists.
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I will focus on the US.
It appears that Kevin is arguing that to be realistic we must have a high enough level of homogeneity in a country to forestall anti-immigration fervor.
But the US as a country is already close to a majority minority country. So to be realistic, we must also admit that the goal of homogeneity in the US is unachievable.
So it would seem either we learn to be a successful country with inhomogeneity, or the US is, by Kevin’s argument, doomed.
I believe Trump's term was shithole, not shit show.
I’m Australian so let’s do the math for Oz.
1/10th of a % for Aus population = 1/1000 x 25,690,000 = 25,690 – equivalent to 2141 arrivals per month. That’s the level to keep things in check.
According to graph of this wiki page which goes back to 1976 (missing the 50s and 60s immigration boom when wogs like my family came over), Australia’s monthly arrival of permanent settlers has never been lower than 4,000 arrivals per month = 48,000 per year – remember Australia’s population has been growing all this time so the unavoidable ‘furious tribal response’ threshold would be much lower that 2141 as a result.
Australia’s immigration arrival for permanent settlers has now been over 10,000 per month, 120,000 per year since 2006.
So for the past seventeen years, Australia’s immigration has been at least 4.67 x greater than the level which makes “a furious tribal response almost unavoidable”.
And remember Kevin’s theory is based on migration legal and otherwise.
Can people smarter than me please tell me how this doesn’t prove Kevin’s theory bunk.
Can't add links, here's the wiki page https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_to_Australia#/media/File:ABS-3401.0-OverseasArrivalsDeparturesAustralia-TotalMovementArrivals_CategoryMovement-NumberMovements-PermanentSettlerArrivals-A83808877L.svg
I was going to chime in in with a similar comment about Canada. Is Kevin suggesting Americans are a super-outlier in terms of anti-immigration sentiment? Hostility to immigration is hardly unknown in the US, of course, but the country's history suggests an annual rate of .1 % is drastically low. The long term historical average (going back to 1820) is about .7 percent. And these days we're seeing a much lower rate of natural population increase.
Immigrant = Black in the nether regions of the MAGAtry. It doesn't matter if the immigrant is a Czech genius with big plans for a semi-conductor colossus, he's still going to take "Merkan's jobs".
I am guessing that the underlying difference is the relative wealth and opportunity for the resident population. Tolerance for immigrants and growth is directly tied to how comfortable the locals are.
In the case of the US, the locals feel threatened by stagnant wages, increasing housing costs, lack of good jobs, and lack of upward mobility. The GOP has been very diligent to deflect the blame for those things to immigration, rather than policy that favors business donors over the citizenry.
The current policy of asylum is just impossible. How many people in the world are actually subject to some sort of oppression (including domestic abuse - that might include half the population of Saudi Arabia)? The US can't hold them all. And then how many are not oppressed but would try to enter claiming asylum if they could get to the border? We certainly do not have the capacity to process them all anywhere in the US.
Some people cite the current law on asylum as if it were Holy Writ or in the Constitution. It's just a law and could be changed by reasonable people to establish realistic limits on asylum. Of course Republican politicians are not going to be reasonable, even if leftist immigration extremists were. Republicans prefer to have a chaotic situation as incitement for their base. Republicans have been using racism and religiosity for over fifty years, but racist resistance to immigration is something that is largely new with Trump
Why can't we "hold them all?"
Are you suggesting that we are required to support them since they'll just come here to freeload? If not, we have thousands of square miles of open space. Of course we can "hold them."
What's stopping us is that white people want to remain in charge. The end.
It isn’t just a matter of physical space. Though maintaining habitats for non-human life is important. There’s arable land in which to grow food. Available water. And what I consider the biggest - emissions. The United States has the highest per-capita emissions of virtually any country on the planet. Anyone migrating here will certainly see their emissions increase. The last thing you want is the population of the highest per-capita emissions country increasing.
RJ, that's a very good point, though I doubt it's "front of mind" for many anti-immigrant crazies.
I the water is more of an issue than the land. We have plenty of land, we can build housing on the parts that aren't great for agriculture. Getting water there, however, is a different story.
“The US can't hold them all.”
The 40 least populated states have tons of empty land. Literally Alaska has the population of DC (700,000), but instead of only having 63 sq miles like DC does, Alaska has 586,000 sq miles… suggesting they have room to hold 7B people at densities equal to DC.
Even factoring in water, mountains, etc. we likely can hold them all, we just don’t want to because They Don’t Look Like Us.
You can’t possibly be suggesting that populating Alaska at the density of DC is even remotely a good idea.
No, the suggestion is that there's lots of room on the density chart between those endpoints. Criminy.
So you believe that 330,000 immigrants a year is the idyllic number of immigrants? That number is woefully low and actually unrealistic. Considering we were allowing more than twice as many immigrants the first two decades of the 20th century when the population was one third it is today, my only question is where the hell you get that number from? Is a metric thing? A pretty number to look at? The US can easily absorb 1 million plus a year and frankly we need to for various reasons including giving you the great healthcare care that you just received. Sorry for putting in blunt terms so you can understand.
I don't understand this post. There has been massive resettlements of migrants in France (1.5 million people from Maghreb in France in the sixties or so). Whatever resettlement there is now is small potatoes. Why would a big wave of immigration back then would be less unsettling than a small wave now?
The case of Italy is even more confusing: the country's population is aging and decreasing. They need immigrants.
Racism knows no boundaries. Most of rural and small town America also needs immigrants to not die out, and yet those are exactly the places that hate immigrants the most, mainly because They Don’t Look Like Us.
If having a peaceful society requires having an ethnically homogeneous population then someone needs to explain why incredibly diverse places like Brazil and Morocco haven't blown up yet.
The likelier reason why Euros keep freaking out over immigration is that Euros are exceptionally racist.
Based on Kevin's theory Canada's "furious tribal response" ratio is many times worse than US. What do people think will happen to Canada as a result? Does their policy risk civil war? Need to have some predictions that can be tested in coming decades!
This is the oddest post I have ever seen from Kevin in like 20 years.
First off, there are plenty of things to compare the EU and the US about, but "nativism" is not one of them for a variety of reasons.
The number one reason is that the Native Americans, the actual Americans, had the country taken away from them by force. The current U.S. population is like 100% immigrant, if you only count immigration back like 200 years.
You don't see California flipping out because California has no racial group as a majority, so whomever is immigrating is not adding to the mix.
I never hear anyone, and I would have expected Kevin of the lead poisoning theory to take up this one, discuss how in the world we are supposed to expect to not have an "immigration problem" when Central America is simply falling apart. Its like the state of affairs in those countries does not even exist.
But California is flipping out, just in a uniquely laid back, California way.
Cities are fighting new housing like an encroaching plague, while at the same time demanding leaders DO SOMETHING about homelessness (just not in their communities). They're fighting ADU rules that will bring more traffic and renters (oh, the horror) into their neighborhoods.
If California's cities and neighborhoods could put up gates, they would.
It is not as bad as that. There are some areas that are dragging their feet, but there is also a lot of building going. People are putting in ADUs like crazy. Here, just south of San Francisco, whole blocks have been razed and are being replaced by a mix of offices, housing and retail.
I agree with Kevin in principle. I don’t have a number for a tolerable level of immigration. It seems too high now. I recall recently hearing that something like 10 or 12 percent here are immigrants. That sounds disruptive.
I would favor going to the host countries and making life safe as a way to reduce immigration. If we supported democracy and safety in places like Guatemala and Honduras far fewer of those residents would take the dangerous trek to the US,
As birth rates decline and populations shrink around the developed world, immigration is the key to maintaining and evolving the cultural heritage of a nation, sustaining its economic power, and boosting its global relevance, not the color of the skin of its people.
I’m pretty sure America has had a large percentage of immigrants here since roughly 1492. And somehow, no wars have emerged here except (1) against the British and other groups to gain independence, (2) against other groups (Indians, Mexicans, Hawaiians, etc) to acquire land and (3) internally between mostly Northern whites and Southern whites over the status of immigrants who were forcibly relocated here against their will (aka slaves). Other than those instances, the US has enjoyed lots of immigration and also about 400-600 years of domestic peace, depending on how you classify skirmishes against various groups who we opposed because they had land we wanted not really because they were “immigrating.” I don’t think “immigration” per se is the problem: it’s racism. (Nobody cared enough to wage wars here when most immigrants were “white.”)
You supported his point. The white majority has always been overwhelmingly dominant. That's why armed conflict is rare. But they rioted and passes laws discriminating against Catholics, against Italians, against Irish, against Poles etc. and only grudging admitted those groups as white because the alternative was losing to the really non-whites. That's all tension due to immigration. If you agree to let the South Jim Crow itself and redline a bunch of darkies you don't need to worry.
Wars between organized ethnic groups aren't the only manifestation of bad feeling, and special newb has a good point, imo.
Historically, and in some instances going back to colonial times, we've had strong political and cultural reactions against immigrants when the foreign-born proportion hits about 10% of the total population. The most obvious instance of this was the immigration restriction regime that was in place here from 1924-1965, aka the "national origins" quota system we adopted to keep out the riff-raff and dregs from southern and eastern Europe. Pressure to do this had been building before WWI but it took some time to enact into law.
Said riff-raff wasn't generally conceded to be "white" until really after WW2, the event that epitomized consequences of over-precise racialized thinking-- "race" was fundamentally based on the languages people grew up speaking and caricatures of "traditional" ways of life, where Europeans were concerned. Everybody remembers the skull-measuring physical anthropology, but that was always a pretext for classifying by language/"traditional" way of life and more broadly by visible physical characteristics. (The French, to many of these thinkers, were a race.)
But it was different for non-Europeans. We had separate restrictions on Chinese immigration from the 1880s until WW2 and informal government-to-government restrictions on Japanese immigration from the early 1900s. Filipinos could immigrate after the Spanish-American War but iirc the islands were later part of the "barred Asiatic zone." All were very badly treated in most of the American West and particularly CA; often it was done through local laws and "hygiene" restrictions. (OT, but it's always seemed to me that CA was possibly the most rabidly racist of the non-slaveholding states until the Dust Bowl immigration of whites gave them a reliable majority within the state.)
In place of organized ethnic warfare (which might subsume those skirmishes you mention-- zoot suit riots, say), could we substitute, say, suppression of the German language from 1917? Local and state law and informal organization have been much more potent here than in much of Europe.
What European wars were ignited by migration after the fall of Rome?
A coup in Niger, civil war in Sudan, more insanity in Rwanda, CAR, Kenya, Uganda Nigeria, Mali, and Libya and... Africa is a shit show. Sink those boats bringing the shit show to Europe and the rest of the world. Can’t save everyone. Don’t want to save illiterate assholes from backward countries full of criminals, terrorists, and religious fanatics. We have enough here already.
Do we toss the trafficked sex workers overboard too, or does your concern for them from 2 weeks ago still exist?
DFTT
There is a difference between sex slaves and sex workers, but I’m guessing you don’t care about that when you are their customer.
They are not bringing the shit show, they are fleeing the shit show so they can have a better life. Almost all of them are decent, normal people who will live decent, normal lives if given a chance.
They can also bring the shit shown if criminal elements follow them exploit them or if criminal elements from their country are already here from previous waves. Think the various mafias.
True. Sometimes the shit show is your own family members. You see that a lot with people who move out of shit show neighborhoods. They got out, but they still have friends and family who visit and bring the shit show to them. That's the main objection people have with section 8 housing.
Just last month, people in France put on a shit show. Now you could reply that it is white French who aren’t giving these new arrivals a shot at a decent life and I suppose that is part of the problem for them. It’s just really quite difficult to absorb wave after wave of poor and barely literate migrants even into a wealthy country like France.
Sinking the boats rescuing foreign tourists from the burning Greek islands would provide a better benefit.
That’s some serious self-loathing you’ve got there. Even Mr. Drum has been a European tourist. This concern for the poor and oppressed all over the world is great, but if your goal is to take out tourists to save the refugees, who will help the refugees? It just makes the whole world a shit show.
Bourgeois consumption produced this shit show. Saving the tourists rather than drowning migrants is part of the script to preserve privilege and dominance of the consumer class.
Immigration is the key to national greatness. Restricting immigration restricts our future greatness. I'm all for fixing the system so we have more people coming in a legal and orderly fashion, as opposed to illegal and disorderly; but we should always want more immigrants, and bring in as many as possible.
Immigration is a lot like the abortion issue, either you support it or you don't, at the end of the day the nativists who whine about legal vs. illegal immigration really only want supermodels from Europe and maybe sports stars to be able to enter the US. The US and Europe need more folks to come but stupidly the nativists are in control so we're going to be in a world of hurt without the needed workers.
Social instability drives migration. US policies abroad don't do much to stifle instability and in many instances, we create it.
Yes, I have said on your very pages that massive ethic cleansing happened after WW2. Both here and at MoJo.
Thanks a lot for not giving me credit. >:(
Kevin Drum is a little confused about when that ruthless ethnic cleansing occurred in Europe. He says it was after WWII, but Hitler's plan, expressed in Mein Kampf, was to relocate ethnic people to their homelands and out of Germany, while repatriating Germans to Germany. This was in service to making the surrounding European countries tributory slave states who would provide labor for the economic needs of Germany and its master race. Before there were trains taking Jews to camps, there were trains used to relocate non-Germans out of Germany and remove them to other countries, especially in Eastern Europe. Germanic people living elsewhere in Europe were welcomed back to Germany. The use of such trains to relocate Jews to extermination camps came later in the Reich's history, toward the end of WWII. The massive dislocation Drum refers to was to find missing relatives and permit them to go back to the homes that Germans forced them out of during the war. Germans wanted French people to live in France, Italians to live in Italy, Hungarians to live in Hungary, Poles to live in Poland, and so on. Displaced people at the end of the war wanted to return to their homes and families, not separate along ethnic lines (furthering Hitler's effort).
This relocation effort was Adolf Eichmann's job before the extermination camps were created.
Not a mind-reader, but I'm betting that KD is thinking of what happened after the Allied destruction of that particular little plan. That second round was mainly about expelling Germans from other central and eastern European countries, and the biggest part of that was expulsion from the USSR and Poland, ie from east of the Oder-Neisse boundary line. This reversed a thousand years of Germans moving east, mostly through conquest and forced colonization by the likes of the Teutonic Knights, but some through invited settlement by groups like the Volga Germans, and of course movement of German-speakers within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Hitler's colonizing of Poland by ethnic Germans was part of that, but I don't think that project moved anywhere near as many people. There were other forced transfers inside the USSR, like Crimean Tatars being exiled to Central Asia in 1944, but KD's clearly not referring to that.
I'm completely dubious about KD's argument, but he's right about that second round of ethnic cleansing after the war.
"My grandfather didn't come to this country just to see it overrun by a bunch of immigrants."
-Funny, but true.
But while both my grandparents were immigrants, and I support the idea of immigration, I don't support unlimited immigration. A society consists of laws and many unspoken agreements regarding how to behave and what you can expect, and immigrants often don't share those behaviors and expectations. At some point, immigrants can radically change a society.
Plus, there is the aforementioned fact that Americans are hugely consumptive in terms of natural resources, and adding to their number speeds up the deterioration of the environment. Immigrants can also be a great source of innovations which can get us out of our problems, but I'm not sure at what number of immigrants the balance tips from "favorable" to "unfavorable".
Back in December, 1994, The Atlantic published an article titled "Must It Be the Rest Against the West?", which discussed the novel by Jean Raspail, "The Camp of the Saints", in which Raspail anticipates waves of third-worlders commandeering ships and sailing to Europe.
The article is worth reading.
https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/politics/immigrat/kennf.htm
One last thing: I don't believe that the US has that much more room. Immigrants aren't moving to the empty lands. They are moving to the cities. I read somewhere that Australia already has more people than the continent can support without importing food and other resources.
yikes what a racist post. we should work together to change our attitudes
"There's a level of migration—legal and otherwise—that's low enough to keep anti-immigrant fervor in check."
With respect, no there is not.
Yeah, Fox News is going to highlight every crime by an immigrant, legal or otherwise, to keep their aging white audience enraged.
My family has been having trouble with immigrants ever since they got to this country...Charleston Emerson Winchester, III.
Hat tip to Kevin. It takes a lot of guts to broach this subject, given how off in la la land most of my fellow lefties are when it comes to human tribalism. They're perpetually confused why droves of Americans run into the arms of troglodytes like the Republicans, the only ones willing to give them any language at all to discuss their tribal anxieties without tisk tisking them.
"You don't want to send your white kid to a school that's 95% Hispanic? What are you, a racist?! I mean, Native Americans are the only ones who have a right to complain about immigrants, anyway, amirite? Now if you'll excuse me, I'm heading back to my house that I'm definitely never returning to the Native Americans. But I'm in total solidarity!"
With few exceptions, everybody is racist. There is a wide range of discomfiture and thresholds of one's preferences, which are completely ignored in the public debate. Since that's absent from policy discussions, we end up with a simplistic two-stance situation which is tense, brittle, and does not lead to compromise and moderation.
Agree that Kevin merits applause for facing this forthrightly, especially with the near-perfect lab experiment of WWI and WWII. Before the first, and even after*, many countries were not homogeneous, and that caused problems when irredentism emerged as a powerful force. After WWII it was decided that peoples and borders should be moved to lessen in-country diversity, which seems to be a success over 75 years.
And even that needed further tailoring! Look at the break-up of Czechoslovakia.
* post WWI maps were not as good as they could have been
Honestly, I think this topic would be far more addressable if we'd at long last ditch our national obsession with race. I suspect for most people their "racism" has nothing to do with genetic traits at all, and is simply a lazy mapping of a person's skin tone to a likely culture and class.
Of course lefties learned a long time ago that if things are always discussed in terms of "race", arguments become very black and white (pardon the pun) and are far easier to claim the moral high ground. We should stop that.
If we could try having a national dialog in which the word "race" was prohibited, and simply discussed our tribal friction in terms of competing cultures, I think we could actually begin to understand what's really going on and what we might do to address it.
Of course he's correct. The crackpot "progressives" will hate to hear it though. The open borders crowd.
What lefties are in la la land. Certainly not the Democratic leadership.
I'm not referring to Democratic politicians generally speaking, though at the local level things sometimes get a little "equity at all costs" in ways that create demographic death spirals when the policies crash into the real world...
But yea, I was referring to the rank and file... about 90% of the people commenting in this thread, etc.
This is one of the most wrongheaded and frankly weird posts I've ever seen from Kevin. I seriously question Kevin's bit of history re Europe post WW II and even more question his magical arbitrary low number of immigrants the US can absorb. Ellis Island ring a bell ? There were far more people coming to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century (obviously as a pctage) than we are allowing now and they were mostly southern and eastern Europeans who didn't look or sound like the vast majority of people already here. And the country had already absorbed large numbers of immigrants from Germany, Ireland and Scandinavia earlier in the 19th century. We wound up becoming a much better country as a result, no ? Moreover climate change is going to make this migration from the third world to the first an inevitability so we better figure out how to make this work. I would argue that trying to shut the doors is far more likely to cause conflict than facing reality and figuring out how to do this better.
I'm well aware of the historical record, and argument for, stability with mostly homogenous populations (culture or ethnicity). And for decades have thought post-1965 *legal* immigration has been too much too fast.
In any event, ponder this comment from liberal Harvard professor Steven Levitsky. (My EMPHASIS)
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 CANT 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."
I would have taken the stable immigration level rather higher - but I think that there is a big disctinction between high skilled and low skilled immigration - we can absorb higher skilled immigrants much more easily. The fields I have worked in are heavily impacted by educated immigrants. I remember a Swedish or Danish study that looked at breakeven time for immigrants to be a net positive to society (done a decade or so ago). Their estimates were ~ 20 years for uneducated immigrants from the Middle East, and a few months for educated immigrants from North America. I expect similar numbers here, and that leaves aside the cultural conflict issues.
This idea that only high skilled immigrants can be absorbed is belied by the fact that many states in the current USA are struggling to find service workers and farm workers. Restaurants are closing, it is hard to find anyone to pick agricultural crops, the construction industry lacks workers, factories are lobbying to hire children because they cannot find adult workers. FL has just shot itself in its foot by enacting restrictions on immigrant workers. These workers are at the low end of the skill ladder but we are all feeling the impact of their scarcity in our workforce, as we wait months for an appointment at a body shop to get car repairs. These low skilled immigrant staff members are largely invisible to the white nationalists who think we are better off without them, but those living in states like California with a large agricultural industry know how important immigrants are to our ongoing economic prosperity. It isn't only "compassion" that leads liberals to support reasonable immigration (no one supports open borders, to my knowledge). It is in our national self-interest to welcome and train immigrants to bolster our aging workforce.
Most immigrants live in neighborhoods with others of their culture and language until they become assimilated and feel comfortable living in the wider society. This is a process that may take more than one generation. In the meantime, they are not hurting anyone else by doing so and helping them is a win-win situation. Immigrants do not bring crime or disease but have lower crime rates than mainstream society and are more likely to be preyed upon than hurting others.
I agree with those who suggest that if Americans were to travel more often in other countries, they might feel more "comfortable" with immigrants here and be less likely to oppress those who are ultimately a boon to our nation. That is what happens in Europe, where students take a year off between college and high school to travel the world with other young people, learning to feel comfortable in a multi-cultural environment. Kevin Drum also neglects the strong effort put into creating a sense of unity among people living in the member nations of the EU, beginning in the early grades of school in each country. The USA is isolated by its oceans, which is a bad thing when it comes to the need to participate in a diverse global economy. Hence the right wing attacks on globalism, not just immigration. Isolationism is more than just restricting who can come here, but Kevin Drum is not adept at analyzing the data he graphs or thinking about the complexities of whatever situaton his wandering attention focuses upon from day to day.
If someone had a brain fart that resulted in a theory like today's, the next step would be a literature search to find out what actual experts think about this topic. But that might require some work. Easier to pull theories out of one's butt and proclaim them as likely without testing them against reality or other people's research.
"This is why I don't support the extreme pro-immigrant position adopted over the past decade by the US left"
"a reality-based approach demands recognition that we will never eliminate this fear. We can only mute it, and that only by restricting its flow."
I'd like to know which "extreme" position this is, and what Kevin considers reality-based.
This is the immigration bill that Biden and Democrats backed on his very first day in office, and which never got past the Republican filibuster:
https://www.menendez.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/USCitizenshipAct2021BillText.pdf
"To provide an earned path to citizenship, to address the root causes of
migration and responsibly manage the southern border, and to reform
the immigrant visa system, and for other purposes. "
Go through it and tell me what part of it you consider extreme or not reality-based, especially when the alternatives over the last decade or so by Republicans are basically to turn the border into the Berlin wall 2.0 while making it as hard as possible for people to legally immigrate to the US by any means unless they are white and/or rich.
Here is the most recent example:
https://www.speaker.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/BorderSec_Imm_FA_xml.pdf
"To secure the borders of the United States, and for other
purposes. "
Do you honestly think the latter is the non-extreme, reality-based solution moving forward that will keep anti-immigrant fervor in check?
Ever since Obama's immigration reform plan in 2012, which included similar provisions to those in the bill backed by Biden, fell through when Rubio torpedoed it after he was one of the sponsors, and realized that being an immigration hardliner was needed if he wanted a shot as Presidential candidate in 2014, there has been zero interest on the right for anything that isn't basically more razor wire, walls, and armed guards at the border, basic human rights be damned.
"There's a level of migration—legal and otherwise—that's low enough to keep anti-immigrant fervor in check"
Pick any issue, and no matter what it is, that "low enough level" is always a moving target that moves ever further no matter how much you try to accommodate the supposedly totally not racist/bigoted sentiment that fuels the right on basically every issue nowadays.
Amen. Every time someone says crazy lefties are for "open borders", that person should have to define exactly what they think open borders are and 10 Democratic politicians are in favor of that.
There's a lot more to tribalism than identifying with a nation-state, and I think this argument neglects that phenomenon of scale. Tribalism sub-divides as much as it leads us to large-group identifications. And there is no one optimal level of tribe for us to identify with. It's variable.
Every European nation-state I can think of has had, and still has, major and sometimes violent regional rivalries and hard feelings. Think of Catalonia and the Basque region in Spain, which has involved violence and terrorism (and not that long ago, eithr). Think of Italy, where a movement in the north calls for cutting off Italy south of Rome. Think of Germany, where even now people in one region can't stand people from the next region over (heck, the next valley over).
There are strong pressures that can work against this localizing tribalism. Nation-states have quite explicitly acted as homogenizing influences over the past maybe 350-400 years, but the flip side of that is the larger-scale nationalist tribalism Kevin talks about.
But we are forgetting the Cold War, people. It divided Europe-- most of the world-- into two big tribes and was a fundamental division. Then thirty years ago it was gone, poof! The "European idea"-- expanded EU, Schengen, euro currency-- is an attempt to fill the void. But until Putin's Russia just up and wantonly invaded Ukraine, what was the opposing tribe? There wasn't one. Now maybe there is; only time will tell. Without a fundamental tribal division to organize around, the way is open for energizing tribalism at all kinds of levels.
This is not to minimize or deny anything about the actual migration issue for Europe or for us. These are real things. But. How something that so dominated and shaped life and institutions could disappear from consciousness so completely is a marvel.
Wild guesses at the level of immigration that is acceptable for the nativists/bigots seems like a fools game.
Feels similar to wise sages who can intuit just the right level of spending cuts, public resource reductions, deregulation and tax cuts for billionaires that will appease the far right economic crazies.
Or the geniuses that knew that overruling Roe would cause the extremists to settle down and work on public health improvements and 'abortion compromises'.
This doesnt seem wise.
Immigrant anxiety--xenophobia and racism are the flour, with the yeast the capitalist "News" that competes for eyeballs. Mass slander against desperate people is a nice niche market for the sociopaths in the right wing news-o-sphere.
BUT, the left's inability to ever say illegal immigration is bad loses them many people in the middle. Only zealots are willing to ignore the benefits of everyone adhering to the rule of law. Immigration zealots are a small fraction of the left but oh boy, they are a passionate bunch.
BUT, I always point out to my conservative curious friends that asking for amnesty is a legal means to enter our country. Want to change it, change the freakin' law. Multiple times in the last two decades conservatives held all power in the elected federal government and proposed nothing of substance. And yet, they want to demonize desperate children at the border? What a joke.
As for Kevin's point about 'not having enough room', well that is complete nonsense. I was surprised to read it.
FWIW it's worth between 1860 and 1920 the average percentage of of foreign born Americans was between 13 and 15 percent. There was a huge pushback against immigration in the 1920s I know, but still 60 years of higher immigration did not destroy us, indeed I think it made us better. We are in the midst of another rise in foreign born Americans, though still not equal to that last period.
We need to deal with it, rationally but also hopefully.
I think Kevin is betraying the mostly natural tendency toward conservatism that comes with age. I get it. I'm older than he and I struggle with some of the changes going on. One key part of that conservatism is the assumption that human nature is immutable and therefore our tribal nature - and we are a tribal species and that is evidenced all the time even here among the mostly progressive commenters. But I think a lot of what comes under the heading "humanism" or even "the enlightenment" is a push back against that notion that we can't change.
As others have noted, Kevin's theory - if it's true at all - doesn't apply to the US (or Canada, or Australia) because our nations are not ethnically-based. That we happened to been settled mostly by WASPs (once we kicked the natives out) does give rise to racism against subsequent immigrants, but it doesn't have the kind of force it has if your country is actually named for the native ethnic group, and defined by that group as much as by its geographic boundaries. If that's got to change, it's got to change; but it'll require a lot of resetting of mental categories that many people will find difficult to make: hence they go for these nationalist parties to try to prevent it.
There was a time in our history when Irish, Italians, Germans, Scandinavians were each considered to be distinct "races" (that word race was applied to what we now consider to be ethnicity). That these people have been absorbed into the larger white race seems to be forgotten.
There has lately been a focus on the demographic trend of Hispanics becoming Republicans and changing their Hispanic census designation to White (Caucasian) as they do so. There are several notable Hispanics among White Supremacist leaders in the US and among the mass shooters who have killed in the name of white supremacy. How is it that white supremacists accept these members while the larger society cannot wrap its mind around immigration?
It may seem obvious to blame reaction against immigrants on the immigrants' own differences, but it seems likely that a combination of expectations and disappointments fueling an exaggerated sense of grievance is behind the targeting of minorities, and not the actual characteristics or skin color of those being stigmatized. The intertwining of white supremacy and misogyny is another clue that this may have little to do with immigrants and a lot to do with a power struggle in which Republicans are losing power in a variety of ways and do not want to adjust to a society in which they play a lesser role. Look at the current focus on gender roles, which may seem to have nothing to do with immigration at all, but similarly reflects a larger struggle against change (brought by new understanding of biology, not who lives where).
It seems to me that we are seeing a war between those who accept change and those who do not. Because change is inevitable and is occurring faster now than in the past, this may be where we should put our effort and concern, not border walls that can only be symbolic even for conservatives.
+10