Good episode. But I do want to challenge Regan's argument in particular. She argues (I think?) that if pri&immigration advocates leaned more into border enforcement, that they would create more polical capital for legal immigration reform. I am a frequent listener to the Ezra Klein Show and the story he tells would make that possibility seem quite unlikely.
Barack Obama deported record amounts of illegal immigrants. Among left-wing critics even became known as the "deported in chief". His policies led to extremely low illegal crossing rates. Ezra characterized this move as way to "buy credibility" for comprehensive immigration reform. Did this work? It doesn't seem so. After 8 years of "Deported in Chief" Obama the GOP nominated Donald Trump, a candidate that gave no credit to Obama's effords and certainly had no interest in immigration reform. Trump would rather create fake and racist narratives about Barack not being a natural born citizen.
Perhaps this narrative is missing something, but as it stands I find it quite persuasive for the notion that combating illegal immigration is not effective at moving the Overton window in favour of more liberal legal immigration policy.
In 2024, the % of Americans who said the country should decrease immigration came in at 55%. Guess when it was last that high? October 2001 (not surprising given what happened the previous month).
The number of unauthorized immigrants has declined since 2005 until it started increasing in 2020 again.
The data are basically consistent with what you'd expect - increase in illegal immigration decreases support for immigration. No one thinks it's the only factor that affects support for immigration.
Are you disputing the extent to which public opinion cashes out in immigration policy? If so, that's an argument against talking much about immigration at all, which is fine but doesnt land one way or the other.
There's good evidence that other factors not associated with immigrants themselves can lead to immigrant backlash. For instance, "leave" votes in the UK can be explained by China shock in vulnerable regions, but not by immigration patterns in the regions. But immigration was nevertheless one of the primary reasons given by leave voters.
Those polling figures actually *do* correlate pretty well with the number of illegal border crossings at any time. But I have to reconcile that with the election of Trump in 2016, more or less the apparent maximum of immigration acceptance. So maybe I really do think national aggregate public opinion doesn't cash out in the current polarized environment. Instead you work according to a majority-of-the-majority principle. So long as the majority of Democrats favor immigration and the majority of Republicans oppose it, the question is which of those parties is in power. For the former will always support immigration, and the latter will always oppose it. Talking about immigration could still be valuable to the extend that it changes the majority opinion within those parties and/or sway elections.
That might be wrong still, but it is the best model I can muster.
Thanks Arie! Yeah, I think Vaish was also making that point but this is helpful context which pushes against that intuition.
That said, in Canada, where we have never had a real illegal immigration problem we are able to have more productive conversations about legal immigration policy in a way we’re not in the US. I wonder if this is the sort of issue which, because of its emotional salience, would need to be dealt with for like a generation before anti-immigration folks or even those in the middle on the issue would emotionally feel that we “had the border under control” and could talk more about legal immigration and what we want that to look like.
If you look at western countries in general, it's not clear at all that illegal immigration rate correlates strongly with immigrant backlash. Canadian politics is a lot like American politics - except more liberal. As if California became its own country. I think this explains its pro-immigration attitudes well enough. I'd expect an independent California to also accept lots of legal migrants, even though it has a large illegal immigrant population as well.
> If you look at western countries in general, it's not clear at all that illegal immigration rate correlates strongly with immigrant backlash.
One of the correlates is how the immigrants behave themselves.
Except looking at, or even talking about, the correlates of how an immigrant is likely to behave himself is racist, ablist, Islamophobic, etc, and thus taboo in polite society. As such, the official discussion ends up beating around the bush, and overly fixated on the legal/illegal distinction.
> Barack Obama deported record amounts of illegal immigrants. Among left-wing critics even became known as the "deported in chief". His policies led to extremely low illegal crossing rates.
Anyone on the ground can tell you that's total BS.
Hint: even if you manage to massage official statistics to tell people that what they see with their own lying eyes is wrong, the result will simply be that people stop trusting official statistics.
For another example, see the people trying to deny the massive increase in crime caused by "Defund the Police".
There is definitely too much obsession with rights, particularly on the left. "Immigrant rights" more generally is an annoying obsession - even my dating app profiles have it as a cause to list. So yes, I agree with you about that.
But that being said, it does seem to me that there is significant *harm* that is entailed by certain forms of deportation. If Trump's plans entail deporting *lots* of people with roots in the US going back decades, family, friends, etc; I think there is an extent to which this could be an unacceptably extreme harm, regardless of what opinions one has on the contributions of immigrants.
As for your point about selection effects and law breaking, I *really* don't buy into this. Illegal border crossing simply isn't normed like that, it's just not that kind of law - not to mention that to their perspective it's a law of a wealthy, foreign country that just protects it's lucky citizens! And there is no obvious harm. *Even if* they really are "taking" jobs from someone, that's only because they are accepting of lower pay! It's hard to justify the claim that anyone actually chooses not to come to the US on this account. This claim is more of a right-wing propaganda tactic. I don't completely reject the possibility of selection effects - and I favor more high skilled immigration - but to my knowledge, the observed selection effects are mostly positive? Openness to experience, challenging the status quo of birthplace, is (likely) correlated with enterprenural tendencies, though I'm not super well read on this.
First, the methods Trump says he would want to use to deport people are unethical and yes, I do think there’s harm to removing people who are established here - but that applies to legal immigrants as well. Many legal residents do not end up on a path to citizenship and eventually leave, even after becoming established here and even if they’re beneficial to the county. If we want to have an immigration policy that gives citizenship to anyone who’s been a resident for X number of years, legal or unauthorized, we should discuss that - but we’ll need to get democratic support to do that!
As things are, I don’t think it’s worth spending large amounts to do mass deportations, but I also think the default assumption should be that we deport unauthorized immigrants when we become aware of them, because without some chance of deportation there really is no immigration policy at all.
On selection effects-sure, you can come up with ways that being willing to break the law is positive for risk taking etc, but I doubt that it correlates with nothing negative. To be clear, I don’t think most illegal immigrants are bad people at all, I think most came for economic opportunity, but there are so so many people around the world who also want to come here for those reasons but don’t under the current system. And really our point is easier to make than that - we’re just saying that since not everyone who would like to come here each year can, we have to filter in some way, and that we think we can do a better job of selection than filtering on willingness to come illegally.
One problem is that a democratic discussion on immigration would result in significantly less immigration than a lot of people in government want. Thus they use various means to bend the rules to get more people into the country, one way or another.
As such those who want less immigration have concluded that the people pushing a more pro-immigration policy, in any form, are arguing in bad faith.
Good episode. But I do want to challenge Regan's argument in particular. She argues (I think?) that if pri&immigration advocates leaned more into border enforcement, that they would create more polical capital for legal immigration reform. I am a frequent listener to the Ezra Klein Show and the story he tells would make that possibility seem quite unlikely.
Barack Obama deported record amounts of illegal immigrants. Among left-wing critics even became known as the "deported in chief". His policies led to extremely low illegal crossing rates. Ezra characterized this move as way to "buy credibility" for comprehensive immigration reform. Did this work? It doesn't seem so. After 8 years of "Deported in Chief" Obama the GOP nominated Donald Trump, a candidate that gave no credit to Obama's effords and certainly had no interest in immigration reform. Trump would rather create fake and racist narratives about Barack not being a natural born citizen.
Perhaps this narrative is missing something, but as it stands I find it quite persuasive for the notion that combating illegal immigration is not effective at moving the Overton window in favour of more liberal legal immigration policy.
In 2024, the % of Americans who said the country should decrease immigration came in at 55%. Guess when it was last that high? October 2001 (not surprising given what happened the previous month).
The number of unauthorized immigrants has declined since 2005 until it started increasing in 2020 again.
The data are basically consistent with what you'd expect - increase in illegal immigration decreases support for immigration. No one thinks it's the only factor that affects support for immigration.
Are you disputing the extent to which public opinion cashes out in immigration policy? If so, that's an argument against talking much about immigration at all, which is fine but doesnt land one way or the other.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/647123/sharply-americans-curb-immigration.aspx
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/
There's good evidence that other factors not associated with immigrants themselves can lead to immigrant backlash. For instance, "leave" votes in the UK can be explained by China shock in vulnerable regions, but not by immigration patterns in the regions. But immigration was nevertheless one of the primary reasons given by leave voters.
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/brexit/2016/11/23/globalisation-and-brexit-areas-that-voted-to-leave-were-most-affected-by-the-chinese-import-shock/
Those polling figures actually *do* correlate pretty well with the number of illegal border crossings at any time. But I have to reconcile that with the election of Trump in 2016, more or less the apparent maximum of immigration acceptance. So maybe I really do think national aggregate public opinion doesn't cash out in the current polarized environment. Instead you work according to a majority-of-the-majority principle. So long as the majority of Democrats favor immigration and the majority of Republicans oppose it, the question is which of those parties is in power. For the former will always support immigration, and the latter will always oppose it. Talking about immigration could still be valuable to the extend that it changes the majority opinion within those parties and/or sway elections.
That might be wrong still, but it is the best model I can muster.
Thanks Arie! Yeah, I think Vaish was also making that point but this is helpful context which pushes against that intuition.
That said, in Canada, where we have never had a real illegal immigration problem we are able to have more productive conversations about legal immigration policy in a way we’re not in the US. I wonder if this is the sort of issue which, because of its emotional salience, would need to be dealt with for like a generation before anti-immigration folks or even those in the middle on the issue would emotionally feel that we “had the border under control” and could talk more about legal immigration and what we want that to look like.
If you look at western countries in general, it's not clear at all that illegal immigration rate correlates strongly with immigrant backlash. Canadian politics is a lot like American politics - except more liberal. As if California became its own country. I think this explains its pro-immigration attitudes well enough. I'd expect an independent California to also accept lots of legal migrants, even though it has a large illegal immigrant population as well.
> If you look at western countries in general, it's not clear at all that illegal immigration rate correlates strongly with immigrant backlash.
One of the correlates is how the immigrants behave themselves.
Except looking at, or even talking about, the correlates of how an immigrant is likely to behave himself is racist, ablist, Islamophobic, etc, and thus taboo in polite society. As such, the official discussion ends up beating around the bush, and overly fixated on the legal/illegal distinction.
> Barack Obama deported record amounts of illegal immigrants. Among left-wing critics even became known as the "deported in chief". His policies led to extremely low illegal crossing rates.
Anyone on the ground can tell you that's total BS.
Hint: even if you manage to massage official statistics to tell people that what they see with their own lying eyes is wrong, the result will simply be that people stop trusting official statistics.
For another example, see the people trying to deny the massive increase in crime caused by "Defund the Police".
There is definitely too much obsession with rights, particularly on the left. "Immigrant rights" more generally is an annoying obsession - even my dating app profiles have it as a cause to list. So yes, I agree with you about that.
But that being said, it does seem to me that there is significant *harm* that is entailed by certain forms of deportation. If Trump's plans entail deporting *lots* of people with roots in the US going back decades, family, friends, etc; I think there is an extent to which this could be an unacceptably extreme harm, regardless of what opinions one has on the contributions of immigrants.
As for your point about selection effects and law breaking, I *really* don't buy into this. Illegal border crossing simply isn't normed like that, it's just not that kind of law - not to mention that to their perspective it's a law of a wealthy, foreign country that just protects it's lucky citizens! And there is no obvious harm. *Even if* they really are "taking" jobs from someone, that's only because they are accepting of lower pay! It's hard to justify the claim that anyone actually chooses not to come to the US on this account. This claim is more of a right-wing propaganda tactic. I don't completely reject the possibility of selection effects - and I favor more high skilled immigration - but to my knowledge, the observed selection effects are mostly positive? Openness to experience, challenging the status quo of birthplace, is (likely) correlated with enterprenural tendencies, though I'm not super well read on this.
First, the methods Trump says he would want to use to deport people are unethical and yes, I do think there’s harm to removing people who are established here - but that applies to legal immigrants as well. Many legal residents do not end up on a path to citizenship and eventually leave, even after becoming established here and even if they’re beneficial to the county. If we want to have an immigration policy that gives citizenship to anyone who’s been a resident for X number of years, legal or unauthorized, we should discuss that - but we’ll need to get democratic support to do that!
As things are, I don’t think it’s worth spending large amounts to do mass deportations, but I also think the default assumption should be that we deport unauthorized immigrants when we become aware of them, because without some chance of deportation there really is no immigration policy at all.
On selection effects-sure, you can come up with ways that being willing to break the law is positive for risk taking etc, but I doubt that it correlates with nothing negative. To be clear, I don’t think most illegal immigrants are bad people at all, I think most came for economic opportunity, but there are so so many people around the world who also want to come here for those reasons but don’t under the current system. And really our point is easier to make than that - we’re just saying that since not everyone who would like to come here each year can, we have to filter in some way, and that we think we can do a better job of selection than filtering on willingness to come illegally.
How about we at least stop putting resources into actively encouraging illegal immigration as the Biden administration has been doing?
One problem is that a democratic discussion on immigration would result in significantly less immigration than a lot of people in government want. Thus they use various means to bend the rules to get more people into the country, one way or another.
As such those who want less immigration have concluded that the people pushing a more pro-immigration policy, in any form, are arguing in bad faith.