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The time when Trump sabotaged immigration restrictions, and the alt-right cheered
I’ve long held that most of politics is overwhelmingly dominated by some combination of 1) direct self-interest, and 2) vibes. Any notions of ideological consistency should be regarded as mere “happy accidents” rather than the norm. In the US, this issue cuts roughly equally across both parties. One particularly stark example happened a few months ago with immigration. In short, Trump sabotaged the most conservative immigration reform bill in a generation for blatantly self-serving reasons. This directly contradicts what many of his more hardline alt-right supporters want, yet instead of punishing him for doing this, they actively cheered him on. They simply like Trump’s vibes far more than they like Biden’s vibes, so they convinced themselves that the bill was akin to “surrender” through extremely strained logic.
This episode is rapidly fading from public memory given that the bill didn’t pass, but it’s such a great encapsulation of vibes-based motivated reasoning that I feel it should be highlighted before it’s forgotten completely.
Illegal immigration so far
The chart here shows migrant encounters at the US-Mexico border. While some slip through the cracks and are not counted, this still gives a good sense of the contours of illegal immigration over the past few presidential administrations.
Migrant numbers were quite high during the Bush years, with yearly peaks corresponding to agricultural labor needs.
Obama was quite hawkish on illegal immigration. Numbers were already decreasing from the Bush years, and the economic turmoil from the GFC brought numbers down further. Importantly though, Obama’s enforcement was instrumental in keeping numbers down even as the economy recovered.
Illegal immigration fell to its lowest point at the beginning of Trump’s term, but rapidly increased after that to meeting, then exceeding the numbers under Obama. Numbers crashed again at the onset of COVID.
Illegal immigration has exploded after Biden took office.
There are a couple of points worth noting here. The first is that while enforcement has an undeniable impact on illegal immigration numbers, exogenous factors should also be considered. Periods of economic prosperity in the US act as a “pull” for migrants, while recessions do the opposite. Likewise, civil turmoil in immigrant-sending countries can act as a “push” for migrants, while relative stability again does the opposite. That peak in May 2019 under Trump was due in part to a period of turbulence in Northern Triangle countries.
The second point worth noting is that Trump wasn’t really much better than Obama in countering illegal immigration, contrary to popular belief. This point deserves some elaboration.
Trump and Biden’s border policies
During Trump’s 2016 campaign, immigration was frequently at the forefront despite the historical lows of illegal immigrant activity. Upon ascending to the presidency, Trump at least tried to keep his promise. He signed the infamous “Muslim Ban” in his first week, suspending entry for citizens from 7 predominantly Muslim countries from entering the country for 90 days. He would continue with additional policies throughout his presidency, including preventing sanctuary cities from receiving federal grants, phasing out DACA, implementing a zero-tolerance policy and family separation at the border, creating new restrictions for who could apply for asylum, and many others.
The problem with all of these was that they were executive orders. Executive orders require less political capital to implement since they don’t have to go through congress, but they’re far more brittle and subject to legal challenges or revocation when a president of a different party comes to power. Indeed, practically all of Trump’s EO’s on immigration faced stiff legal hurdles. The Muslim Ban was rejected by courts twice, and only a watered down version passed on the third attempt. The family separation policy and restrictions on asylum were similarly watered down heavily. The policies on sanctuary cities and the phaseout of DACA were basically killed entirely.
Another issue with Trump’s implementation is that it was done with little tact. Any sort of reform will encounter pushback, with bigger changes tending to lead to more of a backlash. This can be mollified somewhat by a good PR campaign. Indeed, the ability to push through substantial reforms without angering huge swathes of the country can be seen as one of the key skills of a successful politicians. Trump and his team did not do a very good job of this. Few efforts were made to get buy-in from moderates. Instead, Trump’s modus operandi was typically controversial unilateral action, followed by doubling down with rhetoric like “shithole countries” that may have flattered his base, but was very poorly received among Democrats and independents. Trump had this problem in many more areas than just immigration, as Scott Alexander noted in 2018.
The end result was that while Trump certainly talked up his immigration policies as successes, most of them were little more than PR stunts. Illegal immigration surged substantially every year for the first three years of his presidency and peaked in 2019 at a level far higher than what Obama ever had. Likewise, legal immigration measured by the number of lawful permanent residents added per year was basically the same as during Obama’s presidency, only dipping substantially in 2020 with the onset of COVID. Furthermore, all of the hostile rhetoric Trump used created a backlash that (at least partially) helped propel Biden to the White House in 2020, and ensured he had a clear mandate to roll back Trump’s policies.
And that’s exactly what Biden did. In his first day in office, he axed the majority of Trump’s executive orders with the stroke of a pen. The first 100 days of Biden’s presidency were defined by “undoing Trump” in practically every area, and in terms of immigration that meant less hostility, fewer rules, and a more welcoming attitude. Cracks began to show almost immediately as illegal immigration soared, and then kept soaring month after month. It surpassed Trump’s worst month, and then kept climbing even higher before settling at a rate unseen in at least the past 3 administrations. December 2023 marked the worst month at nearly 250K encounters, with several preceding months having >200K encounters. For reference, Obama’s second term only saw a brief period above 50K encounters before declining to a steady-state of around 30K-40K encounters.
This rapidly became a political liability for Biden. Despite deploying Kamala Harris with her infamous “do not come” speech, illegal immigration kept increasing and Biden seemed helpless to address it, effectively getting himself caught between a rock (giving fodder to Republicans) and a hard place (alienating his base, reneging on promises, etc.). Ominously, things only seemed to be getting worse. Biden tried to use Trump-era COVID restrictions to limit some immigration through Title 42, but COVID couldn’t be used as a justification forever. What’s more, Biden’s actions significantly worsened a loophole in the system through abuse of a particular asylum designation. This article discusses it in detail. To summarize:
When the DHS encounters an illegal immigrant, it has two options: standard removal, or expedited removal.
Standard removal requires a court case with lawyers present to give evidence, while expedited removal is a streamlined, unreviewable process meant to reduce the burden on the DHS and the court system.
Illegal immigrants can indicate they intend to apply for asylum by establishing “credible fear”. While the threshold to asylum is fairly high, the “credible fear” threshold is very low, which at least starts the process towards asylum and thereby prevents use of expedited removal.
While standard removal is ongoing, the US has 3 options for where to keep them: (1) Parole them out into the US, (2) keep them in ICE detention centers, or (3) kick them back to the country from which they entered from, i.e. Mexico.
Obama did (1), but apparently the loophole wasn’t well-known enough to be a huge issue yet. Trump tried to go after asylum directly, but those efforts mostly fizzled in court. He then tried to do (2), but this caused a huge overcrowding problem as detention centers weren’t built big enough to accommodate the huge influx. After some bad press, he tried to do (3), which sort of worked when courts weren’t throwing spanners into the works, which they did frequently. Biden reverted back to (1), but now it was well-known that you could come to America illegally, utter the magic words “credible fear”, and you’d be let out into the community. Some derisively referred to this as “catch and release”. From this point, some immigrants simply didn’t show up to their court hearing, while others received court dates so far in the future (up to a decade or longer in some cases) that it didn’t matter. This became a vicious cycle, as more immigrants abused this loophole it clogged the courts further and further making the loophole more effective, which further incentivized anyone who wanted to come to the US to give it a try due to this One Crazy Trick ICE Doesn’t Want You To Know About.
The Senate compromise deal
After a few years of spiraling migration problems, it became clear that the center could not hold. Biden capitulated and signaled that he was willing to give concessions to Republicans to get immigration back under control. This willingness coalesced around the same time that an important foreign aid package was being discussed, with some Republicans stretching credulity a bit when they claimed that illegal immigration was functionally indistinguishable from Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Thus, the idea of a “compromise” bill was born, where Biden would give in to Republican demands on immigration in order to get his foreign aid passed. This came to the fore in late January and early February of 2024.
You can read the full text of the bill here, but non-lawyers trying to read actual bills written in thick legalese is like trying decipher jabberwocky growls. A much more scrutable summary is available here.
Division A is all about the foreign aid. This chunk would eventually be passed in April in a standalone vote.
Division B is the immigration part. This was primarily negotiated by Republican Senator James Lankford of Oklahoma. Notably, this would have been the first major immigration reform bill (NOT executive order!) passed since Reagan. Everything else since then has been done through unilateral presidential action or the courts. Since this would have had the backing of Congress, its provisions were quite sweeping compared to the piecemeal efforts that came before. It:
Includes billions of dollars for immigration enforcement, including money for detention centers, 2700 new border agents, asylum case officers to break the vicious cycle, deportation flights, etc. It’s hard to understate how much money this bill would have ladled on to border protections, with the biggest increases going to the usual agencies like ICE and CBP, with smaller chunks going to ones that I wasn’t even aware were part of border enforcement, like FEMA and the US Marshals Service. It also gives case officers a permanent 15% raise over the standard GS schedule of government pay.
Gives a bit of money to USAID for stanching immigration at its source, in the Northern Triangle countries and elsewhere.
Restarts and funds building of Trump’s wall, which Biden canceled early in his presidency.
Modernizes border infrastructure generally, such as adding more sophisticated monitoring equipment and accepting fingerprint cards or biometric submissions for use in immigrant processing. You know, things that would be nice to have given the last major immigration bill is almost 40 years old at this point.
Raises the threshold on “credible fear” substantially to actually close the loophole. Currently, credible fear is evaluated using the lower “significant possibility” standard.
Raises the threshold on asylum generally even after they pass the first hurdle, and it funnels as many cases as possible into the expedited removal process.
Ends “Catch and Release” and formalize the “Remain in Mexico” policy. Those who arrive at ports of entry are placed under government surveillance, while those who arrive between ports of entry are detained outright, with funding provided for new detainment beds.
Establishes an additional asylum bar if there are reasonable grounds to believe an individual could have internally relocated in their country of origin or country of last habitual residence, in lieu of seeking protection in the United States.
Creates a Border Emergency Authority, a “break in case of emergency” power if the border became overwhelmed. This requires the DHS to ignore all asylum requests except those that fall under the Convention Against Torture, which has a high bar. It also further streamlined the expulsion process, allowing for immediate deportation in a range of scenarios. There was to be no public notification for this authority to be enacted, so an immigrant arriving would never be sure if it was active or not. This is the closest the US would come to “closing the border” for an extended period of time that wasn’t due to a national emergency like what happened after the JFK assassination or 9/11. To prevent this emergency tool from simply becoming the new normal, the Authority could only be activated if border encounters exceeded 4000 over a 7 day period. Conversely, it also prevents abuse in the other direction, i.e. a president deciding never to activate it, as it would be required if there were 5000 border encounters over a 7 day period. Note that border encounters were far higher than 5000 when the bill was being debated, so Biden would have had no choice on the matter.
Does NOT include any significant amnesty, even for DREAMers. Almost every serious attempt at reforming immigration had previously settled on the compromise of amnesty for current illegal immigrants in return for enforcement at the border. The most recent major attempt at immigration reform under the Gang of Eight did exactly this. Trump himself acknowledged this political reality in his first State of the Union address in 2018 when he came out in favor of giving amnesty for DREAMers. The fact that this is nowhere to be found in this bill is a significant implicit concession.
There are also a handful of concessions to the Democrats:
Allows processing and conditional permanent residence for Afghan collaborators.
Authorizes an additional 50,000 immigrant visas each year for the next five fiscal years.
Establishes a carveout in some of the rules above for unaccompanied minors, which in 2024 have made up <5% of all encounters.
The Border Emergency Authority requires a lower limit of 4000 encounters per day as discussed above, so a future Republican president wouldn’t be able to use it as the new normal unless there was an actual emergency. It also sunsets after 3 years unless renewed.
Republicans likely wanted restrictions on all asylum claims, but Dems kept a carveout for the Convention Against Torture.
Those concessions are really tiny. The last 3 bullet points are just minor restrictions on the new powers that would be in place. Only the first 2 bullet points are concessions in any meaningful sense. Helping Afghans who collaborated with the US is a one-off now that the war is over, and is a good idea since the US doesn’t want to get a reputation of abandoning those who help it. The 50K new legal immigrants a year is time-limited to 5 years, and is much, much less than the status quo of 200k+ illegal immigrants per month that is happening now. Heck, it would have only been 2-3 months worth of illegal immigrants encountered under average Trump or Obama years, so it’s a very small price to pay.
The bill received endorsement from the National Border Patrol Council, the union that represents Border Patrol agents, endorsed the proposal and said it would drop illegal border crossings nationwide. The group in 2020 endorsed in Trump and has been highly critical of Biden’s border policies.
It’s also interesting to compare this bill to the Border Coalition Letter that was submitted to Congress in 2022. This letter was sent on behalf of a bunch of conservative think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, Conservative Partnership Institute, and several that I’ve never heard of, like the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the SPLC classifies as a hate group. The letter demanded exclusion of amnesty of any type, creating an Authority to immediately expel illegal immigrants, increase restrictions on asylum, mandate resources for the border wall, increase funding for the CBP and ICE, end the abuse of parole authority. The bill shares a striking resemblance to this letter. Granted, it doesn’t do everything, as there are a few carveouts for stuff like asylum under the Convention Against Torture, and the letter also asks for states to overrule the federal government when it comes to border enforcement (something that Texas has been motioning towards recently). But overall, the bill does the vast majority of what was asked for by some of the most conservative immigration groups in the country.
Trump swoops in
So yeah. Trump blew it all up.
The reason he did this was as obvious as it was cynical: he didn’t want Biden to have a “win” on the issue. He wanted to keep the issue in the news as a liability for Biden so he would have a greater chance at winning in November. He didn’t exactly keep his motivations secret. Nor was this the first border bill that Trump sabotaged. The overturning of Roe v Wade is instructive here, as it was a major “dog catches the car” moment. Republicans loved to campaign on restricting abortion, but when the Supreme Court actually handed them the chance to do so, they quickly realized the costs it would entail. What had once been a rallying cry for conservatives turned into a liability, and now the Democrats have the wind at their back on the issue. Why do the same for immigration by actually enacting favorable policies?
Of course, it’s not helpful to be openly cynical to your supporters, so the official reason that Trump, Gaetz, and many others trotted out to oppose the bill related to the Border Emergency Authority. In essence, they boiled the entire bill down to that upper limit threshold of 5000 illegal immigrants per day. The extra enforcement, the money for border agents, the restarting of the wall construction, the closing of the asylum loophole, the end of Catch and Release? None of that mattered. It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
Obviously the bill isn’t perfect. There are legitimate criticisms that could be levied. For instance, Republicans could say that Democrats shouldn’t get any new legal immigration in exchange for fixing the law, even the paltry 50K number that the bill would mandate. But actually analyzing the bill to any serious degree would quickly show how conservative it is, so Republican leaders mischaracterized the bill so heavily that I’d say most reasonable people would classify it as “outright lying”.
In the world of Republican vibes, there’s the idea that conservatives are always the suckers when it comes to immigration. The idea is that Reagan’s bill was supposed to fix the issue, but the Democrats skillfully reneged on their promise. There’s also the idea of the ratchet, that Republicans will compromise with Democrats, and Democrats will get a bunch of concessions but won’t actually fulfill their end of of the bargain, either because the Republicans are RINOs who don’t actually care about limiting immigration, or because the true-believer Republicans are simply outmaneuvered. Then in the next round of dealmaking, more concessions will be given, and on and on it goes until America is overrun with illegals. For example, in the first deal, “illegal aliens” are reclassified as “illegal immigrants”, and amnesty is provided for, say, 3M of them in return for enforcement of the border laws. Then the enforcement doesn’t happen, ten years go by, and another round of negotiations happens. This time “illegal immigrants” is changed to “undocumented persons” and now we need to give amnesty to the first 3M AND the 5M that arrived since then, but in exchange now we’ll totally have enforcement… pinky promise! And then it doesn’t happen again and… you get the picture.
There’s a kernel of truth to that idea, although it’s obviously extremely oversimplified and lacking in nuance. That said, those vibes are powerful enough that compromise is thoroughly delegitimized for the Republican rank-and-file. Trump’s uncompromising vibes in 2016 is a large part of what won him the Republican primary. He sustained those vibes through his presidency with his bombastic executive orders that drove news headlines but did little to fix the underlying issues. Trump used those vibes again to kill this bill, as all he had to do was vaguely point to the 5000 number in the bill, imply that was a concession, and the bill was effectively dead no matter what it actually would have done.
Other concerns with the bill
While the misrepresenting the 5000 number in regards to the Border Emergency Authority was the most frequent criticism by far, there were a couple other, less goofy criticisms that deserve examining.
The first is that Biden already had the tools to solve the border crisis, and therefore this bill wasn’t necessary. This is typically paired with vibey “Republicans cooperate, Democrats defect” arguments that I detailed in the previous section, i.e. that the bill must have been a “trap” of some sort. Vibes aside, there is some degree of truth to this. As we saw earlier in this article, Biden’s policies were indeed principally responsible for the recent explosion in illegal immigration. Probably the clearest remedy would be reimplementing the Remain in Mexico policy that has been shambling along, half dead. Biden attempted to kill this policy early in his presidency, and courts initially agreed he could do so, until they didn’t, so the policy is technically still alive. Reimplementing this would take at least some of the wind out of the vicious cycle in regards to the asylum loophole, although there would still be the omnipresent specter of legal threats, and now Mexico has said it will refuse to cooperate.
The issue with this idea is that even if Biden were to reimplement all of Trump’s executive orders, they still amounted to little more than a bandaid on a bullet hole. Critics of the bill are technically correct in pointing out that there was less blood before Biden ripped off the bandaid, but it’s ludicrous to then assume that the bandaid was all that was ever needed. US immigration law and border enforcement is fundamentally broken in a number of ways, and this bill would have gone a long way in addressing the worst problems. Recall that Trump himself tried to go after asylum laws directly, but his efforts mostly fizzled in the courts.
Another criticism that was sometimes levied is that Republicans should simply hold out for Trump to become president to truly fix immigration. Again, this typically came packaged with vibey concerns that any deal with Democrats must necessarily imply some ratcheting of concessions, and thus the only way to address the issue is unilateral Republican action, headed by a true-believer like Trump. To steelman this idea, the idea that the political capital to solve illegal immigration would evaporate if the issue was successfully mitigated is a sound one. Democrats were only willing to come to the table in the first place due to the extremely tenuous position they found themselves in with the surge of illegal immigration. This bill almost certainly would have solved that surge, which would give Trump less of a mandate to take drastic action if he wins in November.
The most obvious retort to this idea is that Trump is by no means guaranteed to win in November. As of the time of writing, prediction markets give Trump a 47% chance of winning, which we can round up to 50%. This essentially means the Republicans are gambling on a “double or nothing” approach, but even this prospect is unsteady. For starters, how much more could Trump deliver in excess of this bill, even under the best plausible conditions? HR2 is instructive here, which passed the House in 2023 but is not likely to advance any further in the current Congress. As such, it’s essentially a conservative wishlist on immigration. It is indeed stronger than the Senate bill, but it’s not massively stronger. I’d say instead of “double or nothing” it’s more like “10-20% more or nothing”, which has decidedly less of a ring to it. Furthermore, Democratic willingness to capitulate has an expiration date. If the moment isn’t gone already, then it’d definitely be gone when Trump takes office for a second time, which would mean he’d require control of both the House and the Senate to push through a stronger bill. Prediction markets currently give a 74% chance for Republicans to clinch the Senate, which we can round up to 75%, and a 44% chance to win control of the House, which we can again round up to 50%. If results from the races were perfectly independent, simple statistics shows us that Republicans only have <20% chance of achieving a trifecta. Granted, the races almost certainly won’t be uncorrelated with each other, but this still establishes a lower bound of likelihood. In essence, Republicans are gambling at 20-50% odds that they’ll be able to get a bill that’s 10-20% better. Even this is still underselling it, since it would have to go through one major final hurdle: Trump himself. Republicans already had a trifecta from 2017-2019, yet Trump chose not to prioritize immigration other than through flimsy executive orders. Who’s to say he wouldn’t choose to do so again?
The upshot
I’m sure some people will dismiss everything I’ve written here as concern trolling. They’ll assume I’m secretly a Democratic operative who wants to sow discord amongst Republicans. In reality, I’m just someone who actually wants to get immigration under control. Immigration can be a source of strength, but it must be harnessed very carefully to not cause major problems.
This bill represented the most conservative major immigration reform in a generation that actually had a chance at passing, and Donald Trump killed it for purely cynical reasons. This single bill would have done more than every one of Trump’s executive orders put together. Anyone who’s been seriously watching him knows that he’s utterly self-serving, but what was truly revolting was how the anti-immigration wing of the Republican party not only let him get away with it, but actively cheered him on. It’ll likely be totally forgotten too, wrongly dismissed as nothing more than another Democratic trap.
The worst part of the bill was that many of its provisions weren’t permanent. Some parts like closing the asylum loophole were, but the funding for extra agents would eventually run out. Similarly, other provisions like the incoherently reviled Border Emergency Authority were due to sunset in 3, 5, or 10 years. But the correct response would have been for Republicans to reach out at this golden opportunity with both hands and grasp as hard as they could. Then, they should have fought future battles to ensure the provisions were made permanent. Instead, they squandered a period of maximal Democratic vulnerability on the issue, when the Dems were not only willing to give concessions but were actively asking for them.
Illegal immigration has cooled a bit since its apex in December of 2023. In the CBP’s most recent report from March, encounters are down by 45%. This is still massively elevated from where it was before, but it will at least allow Biden to claim he’s on top of the issue. It seems he’s doing this with ad-hoc fixes, like making deals with intermediate countries that are unlikely to really solve much long-term. In killing the bill, Trump has likely undercut one of his attack vectors against Biden somewhat. When pressed in a debate about the issue, Biden can say “I tried to fix it, but you wouldn’t let me”. In the end, few peoples’ minds will be changed, and the most likely outcome no matter who becomes president is that the US continues muddling along with the status quo on immigration, which means more bandaids and can-kicking. In the off chance that an immigration reform bill actually does pass, it will likely be far less conservative than this bill would have been.
I think you're missing key info on the legal fight here. You're presuming the courts are some neutral arbiter here, but there was major forum shopping. All three versions were before the same judge in Hawaii who issued injunctions blocking all three. The judge was a personal friend of Obama an Obama flew out and had lunch with him after he was assigned the case. The 9th wasn't going to overturn so it was blocked until it got to the SCOTUS.
Immigration hawks noticed this and decided that they could forum shop too. So the lawsuits against Biden's policies were all filed in Red friendly districts.
Which goes back to a key point of the bill you left out. All lawsuits would need to be filed in the notoriously politically corrupt DC courts. Future Republican Presidents would likely be blocked from ever using the Border Emergency Authority. All new asylum requirements would be watered down as too strict.
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I mean, all pathologizing talk about 'vibes' and 'direct self interest' should come with some self reflection. The 'Alt Right' hadn't cheered for Trump on immigration since he caved on the Government shutdown in 2018.
I don't think you want to get immigration under control any more than someone in the 'Alt Right'. What you do want is to appear like a concerned and reasonable person as judged by 'the respectable people' representing the mainstream media morality. The 'Alt Right' is a great strawman to stand next to when making such a case, but boy is it transparent when you step outside the mainstream bubble.
You're probably using a more concrete definition of the Alt Right than I am. I'm aware that people like Richard Spencer drifted away from Trump around 2018, but much of the rest of the far right remained loyal to him, including many people who ostensibly wanted to prioritize immigration reform. There's no credible right wing groups that are angry with Trump over his flimsiness on immigration, at least none large enough to be relevant.
Well this is just dead wrong. I absolutely want to crack down on illegal immigration, but even beyond that I want to lower legal immigration as well, which is why I classified the 50K increase per year for 5 years as a "concession", albeit a small one. I reckon many people on the right agree with me on limiting legal immigration, but they know it's highly controversial so they instead pretend they only care about illegal immigration because it's breaking the law or cutting the line. I'm more open with my concerns, in ways that I doubt the "mainstream media morality" would side with.
The rest of the 'Alt Right', which was then the TRS sphere and the odd adjacent social media person, did not remain loyal to Trump. The split came down to who could sustain without Trump and who could not. Which is why you ended up with a small vacuum on the 'far right' for guys like Fuentes to grow. Since they kept up the pretense of supporting Trump and being involved with mainstream GOP politics when the rest dropped it.
Then why don't you reply to what is written? I still don't think you want to get immigration under control any more than someone in the 'Alt Right'. In fact, considering your second paragraph, bringing up the 'Alt Right' makes very little sense outside of the context of you trying to frame your views in a positive light with regards to "mainstream media morality".
I'm really not sure what you want me to reply to. You bolded the Alt Right for a reason that's not clear to me, then you again accuse me of "framing my views in regards to mainstream media morality". I must not understand what you're meaning here.
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Great post. The simple truth is that unless…
…there will be no better deal than this one. That is to say that even if Trump wins, the chance of a better border control bill is minimal at best. If this hill had passed under Trump, he would have signed it. Of course it wouldn’t, because there’s no way Democrats would vote for it in that case.
There is no way this isn’t a mega black pill. But the ultimate black pill is that it’s really all about Trump. There is no ‘national conservative’ movement. There is no ‘Trumpist’ party with a coherent, European-style nationalist policy platform. There’s a Trump personality cult with very little genuine infrastructure behind it, sitting on top of the carcass of the post-Tea Party GOP, which itself is a hollowed-out shell of what it once was even ten years ago. The fact that Trump was personally able to kill this bill is testament to the extent to which service to his personal whims and (perceived) self-interest are now the sole metric by which congressional Republicans are and wish to be judged.
There is no plan, and if there is, Trump doesn’t even seem committed to following it. Sure, I’ll still vote for him, that’s the reality of a two-party system. But no Trump voter should be under any illusions that his second term won’t be him attempting some (likely unsuccessful) crusade against those he believes have wronged him (personally) while behind the scenes very little changes.
“Buh buh buh this doesn’t deport 10/12/15 million illegals”. Yeah, and neither will anything that Donald Trump can, let alone will, accomplish in office. Moreover, if by some stroke of luck this bill had passed and Trump won and decided to become competent, it would afford him MORE power to reduce inflows and impose ZERO meaningful restrictions on additional actions by the president or congress to increase deportations.
Moreover, 50,000 additional immigration visas a year is nothing compared to the current numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, so focusing on this was especially retarded.
Few things make me seethe more than what happened with this bill. As many on the right acknowledge, immigration is the only thing that matters. It is the central issue upon which every other issue ultimately depends. Even a minor shift in the right direction, even something that delays demographic destiny by a few more years buys the right more time. Every single measure that reduces total inflows must pass. Unless, apparently, it might make it a little harder for Donald Trump to win the presidency and accomplish nothing, again.
Thank you for being the only person in this thread who actually agrees with me. It's nice to have at least one person who agrees to make sure I'm not going crazy.
I agree with all the points you wrote.
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The American right is not actually very focused on the country’s demographic makeup, and unless a portal to Nigeria opens up across the southern border I think that’s the right call; migration is mostly people who easily can be productive citizens if they assimilate and care.
I live in Texas. Assimilated Hispanics are everywhere. They’re underrepresented among engineers and doctors and over represented among janitors and that’s fine- the lower average IQ doesn’t stop them from contributing to society because nearly all of them are capable of doing productive non-math heavy work. Lots of Hispanic blood in a future American population isn’t an HBD-wrecking catastrophe.
The issue isn't Hispanics, but the people all over the world that seek to use Latin America as a route to the United States.
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Not saying you in particular, but if right-coded Americans embrace Latin American immigrants (illegal or legal) primarily because said right-coded Americans believe LatAm immigrants can be decent janitors and an ally in the abortion wars (despite, "never ask a Latin American father about his teenage/young adult daughter's 'social' life"), perhaps they deserve to lose and get replaced.
I'm sure Latin American... American... janitors are more productive than a mannequin or dead body. However, net-productivity is what matters when evaluating potential countrymen, and one would need to be substantially above the median US income to be a net-taxpayer. Assimilation is a negative value-add if latinos are but assimilating to the free real estate that lies between the white and black Bell Curves.
Never ask a
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But you just acknowledged that the Hispanics are underrepresented among engineers and doctors. If the broader population becomes more Hispanic, would you not also expect that population to produce fewer people who are capable of becoming engineers and doctors?
An immediate corollary of HBD is that a Brazil-like population leads to Brazil-like conditions.
White and mestizo citizens of Brazil are mostly productive. Brazil’s dysfunction is due to a very high black population(the USA’s is shrinking in relative terms) and institutional factors. We have better institutions and can function with a lower average IQ than we currently have because not everyone needs to be a doctor or an engineer.
Wikipedia says their black population is 10%, i.e. a smaller percentage than what the US has.
But institutions are made of people. They can only be as good as the individuals that comprise them. There's no magic dirt, no magic paper.
If you import the population of Central/South America wholesale, the people who staff your institutions will increasingly resemble the inhabitants of Central/South America, and they will begin to reproduce Central/South American conditions.
But why would we want to?
Institutions have some weight - the difference between North and South Korea isn't their genetics.
I do also think that nations have some ability to absorb foreign migrants without dramatic change. America remains America, and I believe retains some fraction of it's original spirit, despite the native WASP stock having been diluted severely by Irish, Italians, and even G*rmans. But that capacity isn't unlimited and was founded on assumptions that no longer exist.
can you define its "original spirit"?
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But Brazilian pardos have much more African ancestry than mestizos elsewhere in latin America, including many who would be called black in the USA. Only those with entirely black ancestry- which isn’t the majority of the AADOS population- are considered negros(the Brazilian term; ‘black’ is considered offensive there).
There’s no magic dirt, but mesoamericans assimilate much better than anyone else does. Culture matters. Just go look at Russia- high average IQ, culture that inhibits fixing institutions.
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Going deeper into this, the Wikipedia article on the Demographics of Brazil makes it seem as though only those with almost entirely African ancestry are counted as black (at 7.6% of the population) and then indicates that 42% are classified as Pardos (with a mixture of white, indigenous, and black ancestry). The article on Pardo Brazilians includes some genomic analysis that indicates between 10 and 30% African genomic ancestry for Pardos in most areas, and that in many areas, those classified as black have at least 40% European genomic ancestry.
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I'm not sure I understand if HBD has some unified perspective on this. While I see darker hispanics, most hispanics I see are majority European. Is the idea that having too many different races in a country will cause division? Brazil would support that hypothesis, but if it's just about skin color, Chile is reasonably dark and doing pretty well for a LatAm country. Better than Argentina, which is 90% white. If hispanics are underrepresented among engineers and doctors, I'd guess they don't go to college as much, probably because they are poor when they come in from their home countries.
It's because Hispanic is a linguistic category, not a racial one.
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But simply having too many cultures, too many languages, religions, ethnicities in a country (to the point they, put together, outnumber the former dominant group) is bound to make it weaker, IMO, because there will no longer be a consensus on values. There will no longer be anything to hold the country together and it will essentially cease to be a nation in any real sense at all. Every group will have its own shibboleths and taboos which it will lobby its political representatives to codify in law - which will probably get shot down except in all-Muslim (or whatever) towns, but the time and energy wasted on this stuff is time and energy which cannot be used to work on the nation's real problems.
I, for one, would rather euthanize myself than live in such a corpse of a country.
(This situation, multiplied by a million, is also why I firmly believe that no world government can ever work.)
I mean, this has been the reality in American urban areas for the past 150 years at a minimum.
Also, "consensus on values" happen after lots of arguing and sometimes blood over what that consensus actually is. Go ask a WASP on the Upper East Side and and a Italian in Brooklyn in 1869 if there's a consensus on values in New York City.
If that makes America corpse of a country, it's been one since the 1850s
Now I know the response to this from some is, "well, we stopped immigration for forty years," but I don't think that's the reason for what people think happened. If there was truly this massive assimilation, it's more due to the Depression followed up by World War II than a lack of new immigrants from Eastern Europe or China showing up in 1934.
And Americanization programs in public school systems.
I'd make the argument that there 3rd generation woke immigrants and 3rd generation far-right immigrants proof that Americanization still works, just not the same way it worked in 1959.
Basically every Muslim politician of note in the US is uniformly left-wing on social issues. Sounds like those people are assimilating into society just fine.
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what part of the bill forces a hostile administration to reduce immigration at all? the bill may as well be a sieve with all the ways a hostile administration could legally ignore and excuse explicit limits; every single section of the bill which allegedly reduces immigration is actually not mandatory and is able to be set aside under vague, undefined language, like "operational circumstances"
this bill does nothing at all to force a reduction in immigration; it still relies entirely on a friendly executive to reduce immigration, but a friendly executive could already reduce immigration right now and they have for decades under status quo laws by simply enforcing them
which Trump demonstrated with his court upheld policies: require all migrants to be detained or remain outside of US while they await asylum hearings while you reduce and/or eliminate any government money available to support them
it's odd you claim there is no plan when the Trump admin already created a plan, they implemented the plan, and even waited out the court process for it to be upheld, which it was almost entirely
So to reiterate, according to your own comment the bill makes things easier for a friendly executive but doesn’t make anything easier for a hostile executive, and the GOP voted against it because…? That a hostile Dem executive could still keep the doors open is the status quo. Nothing about this bill would make anything worse from a rightist anti-immigration perspective, it would just make things the same to easier for a conservative executive.
If the Republicans were willing to support a bill that made it harder for them to control the border while allowing a hypothetical Democratic presidency to print an unlimited number of extra green cards per year the Dems would be stupid not to vote for it.
You still haven't mentioned a single specific thing which the bill does to force a reduction in immigration; are you just not interested in talking about specifics of the actual bill?
no, my comment does not claim the bill makes things easier for a friendly administration
the bill makes it easier for a hostile executive to legally release migrants into the US and formalizes/codifies the regulatory scheme and legal interpretations of the Biden administration who have repeatedly been losing in court because the current laws make what they're doing illegal for whatever that's worth
it gives tools to a friendly administration which will not meaningfully reduces immigration beyond what is available under current law and in addition actually hamstrings a friendly administration in what they can do with immigration in some ways
(edit: for example, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, a laughably biased and corrupt court, is given sole and original jurisdiction for all judicial challenges from the validity of the law, to the policies written under it, to any decision made under the law; it will be this court which reviews any friendly administration's policies or invocations of these new alleged powers and good luck with that
this is a thing which is regularly overlooked, but it is just so painfully stupid to agree to this sort of thing and it's really telling the GOP couldn't even manage to avoid this)
the bill is worse than the status quo
the fundamental problem is the GOP are clowns, the Democrats realized under the Obama administration that their threats are empty, and this is why they've pushed the accelerator to the floor as soon as they got back into explicit power and the GOP can't even manage to stop expanding programs which explicitly fund Democrats to do it
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The moment Republicans vote for the bill it will be touted as a bipartisan solution/compromise to fix the border crisis. Giving approval to the bill puts their reputation on the line and having it then fail to sufficiently fix the problem would catch them in the fallout and relieve pressure on Biden.
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The timeline is a bit of a mess here. 10 years ago it was 2014. The Tea Party protests were in 2010 and, as far as I know, were quickly co-opted by the mainstream GOP after contributing to its success in the midterms. It was a flash in the pan, basically. 10 years, ago, the GOP was already a post-Tea Party GOP. Also, weren't there periods/terms between 2010-18 when it had a majority in the Senate and the House? There was ample opportunity to do immigration reform.
The Tea Party wasn't coopted by the mainstream GOP, it became the mainstream GOP. When Ted Cruz could force a government shutdown and the Tea Party could force Boehner out of power, they're the ones with the whip hand.
Edit: Lest we forget, the big representative of the GOP 'Establishment' (a vacuous concept to be sure -- Trump is the establishment) this year, Nikki Haley, was elected as a Tea Party Republican, originally.
And, of course, Boehner himself was originally elected all the way back in 1990 as part of a micro-anti-establishment wave with particular bugaboos about corruption and the GOP Establishment being gentleman losers. But, of course of course, they actually were corrupt, gentleman losers when Boehner was elected, having not held Congress in 40 years, and there actually was genuine Congressional corruption he could attack, like the House Bank scandal. It's just an eternal cycle with the Republican Party.
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Sorry, I meant that even ten years ago was already the post-Tea Party GOP.
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I'm 100% with yah on this. Even my little city up here in the corner of the country is getting bankrupted by lying "asylum seekers" that are 100% economic migrants gaming the system. I hate it. I can't believe people are letting it happen and even cheering it on.
...because anyone who doesn't publically "support diversity" is shamed, made a pariah and possibly fired.
Observe the posts in subreddits for individual cities, inquiring about neighborhoods to live in. Every one is looking for a "diverse" area.
Try posting that you want to live in a white neighborhood, and see how quickly you get banned for "bigotry" or "hate speech", with a mod note referring to you as "scum" or some similar endearment.
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I agree with most of what you said, but aren't you an American expat living in London? There seems something a bit off about someone in your position saying that immigration restrictions are the only thing that matters.
I’ve never argued against all immigration. Only against unnecessary and troublesome immigration with deleterious long term consequences. For example, half of London’s social housing stock is occupied by people born outside the UK. By contrast I have almost never used public services and pay three times the country’s median income (at least) in taxes every year. Even then, I would think it reasonable if I and every other immigrant had no right to citizenship, ever.
So there isn’t really any hypocrisy. I’ve even advocated for affluent, high-skilled immigration from other Western countries to the US to do things like break down the AMA’s cartel on physician pay, which is currently like 4x what it is in most other developed countries. It’s disingenuous to suggest that that’s the issue people have with mass immigration.
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Your post has many at best misleading statements and characterizations. I'll try to discuss just one I'm familiar with in some depth:
tl;dr: Both of these claims are simply wrong. No, it doesn't end "catch and release," i.e., quickly releasing people waiting for their immigration hearings. There is a whole section which describes catch-and-release, i.e., "non custodial removal proceedings" and funds it with billions a year under "alternatives to detention" expansion. Not only does it not end it, it mandates supervision under "alternatives to detention" in situations like an adult border migrant who meets initial screening criteria. And it doesn't even actually require "alternative to detention" supervision either.
For context, Congress in the mid 1990s amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to make release of people encountered at the border more difficult. Border migrants were detained unless there was a specific showing on an individual basis their release was necessary due to "urgent humanitarian reasons or any significant public benefit" which historically going back decades meant a high bar almost all would fail to meet. Border patrol encountering border migrants had two options; normal removal proceedings or an expedited removal process. Border migrants in either process were to be detained until their hearing, unless they met the strict requirements for release waiting for their process. Trump enforced this strict requirement for release in the US (release on parole) or they could be released and away the removal process outside the country (remain in Mexico). This policy under current law was upheld.
The Biden administration in July 2021 decided to issue an order which essentially required the border patrol to release border migrants under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (which they did within ~15-30 minutes, see Florida v. US). "Urgent humanitarian reasons or any significant public benefit" meant almost all migrants would now qualify for release. Florida sued and won, the policy was knocked down. The Biden administration came out with a nearly identical policy two months later. Florida sued and won. This went up on appeal and was affirmed at the circuit level. The Biden admin continued along with essentially the same policy and same result anyway.
So, let's move on to this bill. The bill expands release on parole under the expedited removal process. It adds new categories, it adds new discretionary authority to the DHS secretary, it makes "urgent humanitarian reason" into an essentially subjective criteria of the DHS secretary. Instead of formalizing the strict language which was used for decades, it sets out that precedent as its own exception and then adds discretionary authority to the secretary of the DHS to determine what that separate vague language means (a DHS which has argued in court that climate change may satisfy this language). It doesn't even close the one "catch and release" door the Biden admin is currently abusing!
The most damning part for any claim the bill ends "Catch and Release" is that it adds a (b) subsection to section 235 which creates "Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings." Under 235 (b), the DHS Secretary has broad discretion based on undefined "operational circumstances" to require any migrant making an asylum claim to go through this process and mandate release. Unlike the expedited removal proceeding under current law which mandates detention of most asylum claimants, 235 (b) mandates noncustodial supervision under the expanded "alternatives to detention" program which means they will be released. And even then, "alternatives to detention" supervision is not actually mandatory either! The bill allows mandatory release of any border migrant under 235(b) for up to 90 days before any determination whatsoever is completed (currently, the CBP is required to perform an asylum screen before any action is taken). It still gets worse! Any border migrant who failed to be given a "protection determination" within 90 days - there are over 1,000,000 cases on backlog for just initial "fear" screenings before AOs right now - are released and eligible for work permits immediately, and automatically passed on to end review. Wow! This subsection essentially codifies broad swathes of the Biden administration "Asylum Officer" regulatory scheme which is currently in court and likely to lose also.
It is honestly ridiculous to claim this "Ends 'Catch and Release.'" It does no such thing; a hostile administration will not only not be required to stop catch and release, but they're given new tools to justify catching and releasing any migrant found on the border and even mandate it in certain situations!
If you want to argue otherwise, please tell me the exact part of the bill which actually forces a hostile administration, one which has for years ignored court rulings by making slight changes to catch-and-release policies, to stop releasing border migrants into the United States? "We're not doing catch and release, we catch them and then quickly release them under an expanded program which releases them but under government supervision, but also we don't have to do that either" isn't ending catch and release.
The only way this bill ends "catch and release" under a hostile administration is that the Asylum Officers stamp "approved" on every asylum claim and let out the new residents with automatic work permits into the United States.
One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that.
Passing that bill would have been unfathomably stupid strategy to reduce illegals and unfathomably stupid politics at the same time. GOP voters and supporters will recognize this bill as a deep betrayal and failure and will refuse to show up in the 2024 election guaranteeing a Trump loss as well as losses in the House and Senate. It also gives your opposition a win on their worst subject and gives slight truth to media mouthpieces to claim Democrats addressed their worst subject. "Well, I tried" but am still horribly failing and polling about the topic is horrible is in fact much worse than "I got landmark immigration bill through Congress" in terms of electoral strategy.
This bill is so unfathomably stupid and/or duplicitous, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually did come from the desk of a GOP Senator. Yet another example of "is the GOP this dumb or this smart?"
Literally none of this matters.
Almost all illegals are eventually released or make it into the interior. That was true even with Trump’s remain-in-Mexico policy because there is no wall and Trump is no closer to getting Congress to build one than he was this time in 2016. That is to say even migrants turned back eventually make it into the interior, where they’re never deported unless they commit serious violent crime and ICE arrests and deports them which of course only happens to a tiny minority of illegals migrants, and even in those cases most return illegally.
Because of 1 (a fundamental issue which, again, Trump has zero realistic plan to fix), the only difference between handing every migrant a green card (or, hell a passport) and not doing so is one generation. Every child of every single illegal migrant in the US born on US soil is a full citizen of the United States. That’s the trick with ‘amnesty’; it means nothing, because the demographic impact is guaranteed in any case. Birthright citizenship is the ultimate incentive for illegal immigration. Talk about “work permits” is hilarious; their sons and daughters have the same rights and privileges as you.
So, yeah. The only two things that would do “more” than this bill would be a meaningful end to most illegal inflows (impossible without transnational coast to coast impenetrable wall, and even then asylum seekers could just come legally and overstay visas if they could get them) and an end to birthright citizenship (almost certainly impossible without constitutional amendment). So this magic alternative to this bill (which again, would allow a GOP administration to take minor incremental steps to somewhat reduce inflows) does not exist. There is no plan, there never was, and Trump killed it because he didn’t want to give Biden what he felt was some kind of ‘win’, whatever the cost.
It's telling your standard for an alternative for this terrible bill, which you continue to essentially ignore any specifics of and vaguely handwave that it would reduce immigration or even if it doesn't under a hostile administration it would arm a friendly one to do more than is currently possible without making a specific argument for how it would ever do that, is that:
it has to "meaningful end to most illegal inflows"? This bill doesn't do any of that. It doesn't get close to that. It doesn't remotely address birth-right citizenship or any of that. It's even easier to legally (even if we assume a hostile admin would follow the law which they have demonstrably not for over 3 decades) release migrants into the US interior and it provides billions in public dollars to help them do it in addition to providing billions to the web of NGOs which facilitate the migrant inflow straight to the US border. It provides money to finish the Border wall, something which Trump made meaningful progress with, but the bill allows border migrants to knock on the door of the wall and be let in the US legally and doesn't even require a hostile admin to build the wall anyway. The bill may as well be called "Pay Democrats to Import Foreigners Act of 2023."
this bill doesn't even sniff the standard you have set out for what Trump? or whoever must deliver for you to even consider it "a plan," and in doing so you're just revealing this is some isolated demand for rigor for Trump, who is like evil and the worst or whatever, or other plans for reasons we're just left to speculate about
as if the GOP for the last 50 years has been even equal let alone better in addressing this issue; the problem was Democrats figured out Republicans are absolute clowns, called their bluff when they realized the GOP isn't actually going to do anything, and so they illegally imported 15m people in <4 years and the GOP couldn't even muster the fortitude to stop funding it; immigration and a wall wouldn't have even been a serious topic of the 2016 election if Trump didn't make it that way
for those who want to reduce immigration, if this bill is "the plan," then they may as well just admit total defeat and slam the acceleration pedal to the floor because this bill is terrible
I’m not aware of any estimates that the total number of migrants in the last four years has been that high. Most estimates seem to be 6-7 million including illegals.
The estimates giving 6-7 million tend to be based around only CBP encounters, minus explusions/deportations, plus the CBP's own estimate for 'gotaways' or undetected illegal immigration. This isn't the absolute lowest-bound possible -- some number are repeat offenders -- but it's a very low estimate, especially when the CBP is also claiming that its apprehension rate has remained stable from the lowest part of the Trump/COVID lull til today, and as immigration courts have been increasingly swamped.
((And, obviously, this excludes visa overstays.))
I don't think 15m is correct (and it might just be taken from a Trump claim), and most of the ways to get anywhere plausibly close to it depend on some questionable assumptions (eg, declaring some of the weirder refugee categorizations "illegally imported" even if it's not strictly speaking illegal for the immigrants themselves), but the Biden admin numbers are pretty hard to believe.
Are there any estimates from relatively unbiased sources that give a much higher number?
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In addition to the obvious no-trust problems -- there was already wide suspicion that official numbers on undocumented crossings (aka gotaways) were underestimates before the feds had additional cause to massage them down, and there's no judicial authority to require the Border Patrol to actually do something even should they report the real numbers, there's some fun questions about how mandatory 'shall' language gets -- the proposed bill had a number of other wide ceilings to its use that your summary glosses over:
Sure, the additional restrictions you mentioned do exist, but remember the priors here. The Border Emergency Authority is a draconian measures meant to be used sparingly for emergencies, not a "you must meet these criteria to even start deporting illegals" that Trump, Gaetz, and others painted it as. You could strip out the entire Border Emergency Authority and it would still be quite a conservative bill, adding funds for normal enforcement and closing the asylum loophole among other beneficial things. The biggest issue with the BEA is that it sunsets after 3 years so it's only really meant to be used for the current surge, but opponents of the bill keep neglecting to mention that since it screws with their narrative that the BEA is a permanent bad thing.
Despite those restrictions, under the current numbers Biden would be required to use the authority. This would have been a win-win for those who want enforcement. Either he uses the authority and gets illegal immigration under control, which would be good, or he wriggles out of using it, providing fodder for Republicans to say we need an even more draconian measure to stop illegal immigration.
Or else what?
Or else someone sues and gets found to have no standing.
and none of that suing in Texas or Florida, they'll be forced to file the lawsuit in the US District Court for the District of Columbia because the bill gives sole and original jurisdiction to that laughably biased and corrupt court
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I think the Trump strategy is to gamble everything on a big win in the upcoming elections. It's a bit reckless, but it's not stupid. The border issue is hurting Biden with the voters. The Republicans had a choice between a temporary compromise now or a better chance to win enough power to get everything they want in 2025. They chose to go for the win.
You call his decision self-serving, but from a game theory perspective that's the whole point. Trump is inseparable from Trumpism now. If he doesn't win and get rid of his enemies then he'll spend the rest of his life on trial or in jail. For voters who call their representatives Republican-In-Name-Only, it makes perfect sense to support a candidate who can't back down and retire to a comfortable life of wealth and influence.
I addressed this in my paragraph before the last section. Not only does Trump need to win, he'd almost certainly need a trifecta. The odds of this are somewhere between 20-50% based on prediction markets, and any bill they'd be able to clinch would likely only be 10-20% more conservative in the best plausible outcomes. Then, it'd have to pass the final hurdle of Trump actually caring enough to do it. He didn't accomplish any major legislation on the issue even when he had a trifecta and instead focused on other priorities and only did EO's on immigration.
In terms of getting an enduring compromise, it'd almost certainly be easier if they started with this bill, and then just extended it, possibly adding to it slightly if possible. "Hey, remember that bipartisan immigration bill that fixed the border crisis? Let's just extend that" is a pretty easy sell. Even if Trump gets his trifecta and wanted to pass immigration reform, if history is any guide then Trump would screw it up in the long term by doing something like calling it the Subhuman Infestation Removal Act, Democrats would freak out, and they'd revoke it the next time they're in power.
Sure, I understand why Trump is doing it. What I don't like is that the Republican base is just going along with it. They're so enamored with Trump's vibes that they're willing to sacrifice easy, concrete policy wins.
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How to square this with something like @gattsuru’s recent post (and follow-up)? He starts from the assumption that Republicans are, in fact, no longer interested in compromise, attributing it to decades of policy ratchets and plausibly-deniable enforcement. And he provides receipts. If he’s correct, then Congressional stonewalling is a rational response to the failure of previous compromises.
Second, some discussion about whether Trump credibly advanced a different issue: the deep state. That was how I learned about the attempt to create a Schedule F of policy-driven government employees. It was a battle entirely waged within the executive branch. Trump promulgated an XO; Biden rolled it back. Various agencies fumbled to add more regulations which would slow or stop a future return. Never was Congress consulted, of course.
It seems obvious that Congress, by refusing to act, hands more power to the Executive and Judicial branches. But it also seems obvious that Executive power is too fragile to survive an opposing presidency. And there’s a long list of reasons why the Judiciary is not a satisfactory policymaker.
I suspect that relying on Trump’s branding is a strategic blunder. No, it’s relying on one man in general. The Democrats leaned on Obama after 2008, and supposedly it completely eroded their back bench. Now we’re watching the GOP double down on an uncomfortably similar mistake.
I agree, they're obviously not interested in compromise, and in some cases it's for good reasons. That said, even if this bill just added the text about amending asylum rules to the official US laws, this bill would have been worth it. Dealing with asylum stuff is something Trump struggled against for his entire presidency, and he kept failing due to the courts ruling that EO's couldn't override rules of Congress. Had this bill passed, then at least any EO's Trump would enact in his next potential administration would carry much more weight.
When you add in the rest of the bill and compare it to the paltry concessions given to Democrats, the choice to pass it should have been obvious even if the Democrats tried to stonewall it in some (or many) ways.
Couldn't agree more. Candidates should be avatars of the people to enact desired policies. Trump was plausibly this sort of person in 2016 which is why I voted for him then, but he's since proven that he's really not up to the task. The Republican base should have dumped him for Desantis or some other candidate in the 2020 primary. Sure, all candidates have problems, but if they didn't do what was wanted then they should have been dumped too, and the base should have kept dumping candidates until somebody actually enacted policies. Instead, the Republican party has effectively turned into a cult of personality since many Republicans' only barometer of candidate quality is "how much he makes leftists seethe".
Trump won in 2016 because he was a threatening outsider, and that is what the people wanted in an avatar. Desantis can't be that, because he isn't that. No more than Jeff Sessions could have been it, or McCain earlier. The credibility as an outsider is the key
Well, only because he whipped the rest of the centrist (uniparty) Republicans so thoroughly in the primaries. It was his ability to say the unsayable to other Republicans that attracted his wild popularity. Then he conquered the party as the avatar of the people's will, and now the unsayable is the unpleasant threat to our democracy, but being repeated day after day.
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His analysis also ignores the arguments here placed on why Sotomayor shouldn’t retire. I think the consensus came to be if you have a star justice you shouldn’t force them out because you want to strategically gain seats but you want to move the Overton window by having a top tier justice on the bench (more like Ginsberg or Scalia).
The bill was basically a tactical retreat in a losing war. Sure the bill did some good things but it’s on the lose the war trajectory. The GOP needs to change the Overton window. One persons vibes is another persons attempt to change the Overton window.
The correct play was to put the election on immigration as a major issue and try to get support to change the entire system. Perhaps this is a long shot but if you’ve already lost your best play is to buy a lottery ticket.
The bill is like buying an annuity with high inflation. It’s going 0 in time. A riskier investment that can survive inflation is the only viable option.
Surely you mean a tactical victory in a losing war?
How would not passing the bill come closer to that goal?
I can already see it now:
Trump: Biden has been terrible for the border!
Biden: What do you mean, I tried to fix the border but you wouldn't let me!
The result: Nobody's mind is changed. Then maybe Trump wins, he tries more executive orders, but they keep getting mutilated by the courts as they did in his first term.
For winning the election.
You pass the bill. Biden then implements tighter policy for 6 months thru the election claiming victory. Then he uses all the loopholes later to go back to open borders. It’s far better to expose the immigration issue and pass a clean bill after the election.
Also - I opposed the bill before Trump opened his mouth. You are not being honest when you say Trump tanked the bill. The opposition was organic when many of us read the bill and saw how awful it was. Perhaps our system was awful before hand, but this bill doesn’t fix the main issues as many here have pointed out to you.
I meant what I said when I said tactical retreat. This is no victory in this bill. It’s admitting defeat and falling back with little value.
I get it you don’t like Trump. I’ve never voted for Trump. I don’t like his personality. But when I looked at history the dudes always right. He’s earned the goodwill of the American people because he has good judgement. So sure many Americans don’t have time to read the bill and will make decisions on vibes. All of us do this everyday and trust people who have proven trustful because we can’t be knowledgeable in everything. Trump has earned that trusts.
You also when you say Trump did nothing ignore the fact that in 2016 he had no experience and no institutional support. People like me loathed his personality. Now I am on his side. And we have Project 2024 to build out institutional capabilities. The Heritage Foundation is backing him in 2024. Ken Griffin is like begging him for the Treasury Secretary job. He’s got A team support this time.
If you're going to accuse me of lying, please don't strawman me. I never claimed there was no opposition to the bill before Trump came out against it. But whatever prospects the bill had, died when he did.
This is just the double-or-nothing idea I mentioned in my post. Throwing away the biggest win on immigration in a generation, and instead banking on winning the Presidency AND the Senate AND the House AND hoping Trump actually cares about the issue enough to pass actual legislation instead of just trying EOs. Surely the last time he had a trifecta and passed no major legislation on immigration was just a fluke, right? Surely he won't be distracted by settling scores and getting revenge on his perceived enemies, right? And even if all that happens, hoping that Trump is tactful enough to actually do a (supposedly) extreme immigration bill without the Democrats freaking out and repealing it the minute they come into power.
And as everyone else has replied to you it’s really not a double or nothing strategy. The bill doesn’t do anything to prevent the current asylum situation especially if you do not control the Presidency.
It’s a bet to win strategy versus a nothing accomplished.
Maybe you are correct it’s the biggest win on immigration we’ve had. But it doesn’t solve the issue. The failings of the bill just expose how bad are immigration system currently is. The bill solves 5% of the issue and only if you control the Presidency.
I’m starting to think you might just lack political instincts. This is a lot like Russias military doctrine which often involves escalate to deescalate.
I do think the right has a chance to win on the issue. I expect a landslide for Trump in 2024 if the Dems can’t figure out how to cheat.
I just saw this on Twitter, the guy whose literal a lifelong Dem and has been funding anything to prevent Trump from winning is now talking about voting for Trump.
https://twitter.com/cliffordasness/status/1788378439428227209?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Also I would not call it strawmanning you when you explicitly blame Trump for torpedoing the bill. In my opinion the bill was dead before Trump came in. He just read the room that people were pi$$ed off when they read the bill leadership came up with and felt betrayed.
Well there's nothing for me to really argue against here, just "I'm right and you're wrong", an ad-hominem, then "landslide for Trump in 2024!"
I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.
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That was exactly correct. It wasn’t that Trump marshaled the troops. He just skated to where the puck was going.
Also the bill was awful. It wasn’t just the 5,000 number but really cementing control of immigration in the hands of Art 1 judges that would be heavily predisposed to allowing asylum claims.
Short term pause for long term defeat. It isn’t surprising that democrats are leaning into “Trump prevented the border from being fixed” given that it is clear that (1) Dems made the border much worse and are being harmed electorally, and (2) Dems have a strategy of importing voters. This deflecting helps to try to soften the first prong without harming the second.
The den media space then puts out a bunch of “explainers” going into how “the bill was great” ignoring what we’ve seen for decades and then people start in good faith disseminating those explainers.
I sort of hate just stating narrative that it was already dying versus Trump torpedoing it. I remember hating it when there were just rumors of what was in the bill but maybe the actual torpedoing took Trump and the establishment GOP was game. Who got where first I do not know.
The political situation sort of feels to me like the GOP had the high ground in war separating Biden (winning elections) from his food supply, but Biden was raping and pillaging a significant region (facilitating mass immigration today). If we give up the high ground we can protect our villages but it allows Biden access to his farms to resupply his armies (winning elections).
Feels like a retreat to me.
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Calling Cliff Asness a "lifelong Democrat" is disingenuous at the very least. I used to keep CNBC on as background noise when I was in law school and his name rings a bell as the guy who was complaining that one or another of Obama's bailouts was too friendly to workers and not friendly enough to hedge fund billionaires such as himself. Some further internet research shows he was a Rubio supporter in 2016 and a Haley supporter more recently. I don't know what the details of his voter registration are, but he definitely comes across more as one of those never Trump conservatives who Republicans spent the last 8 years assuring us were electorally irrelevant.
You are probably correct. He has funded a lot of the Trump opposition.
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This again? If Biden wanted to cut down on illegal immigration, he could do it now, without any additional Congressional authority. So why is it Trump's fault? Your analysis is riddled with errors, such as:
The Obama administration began counting repeated deportations of the same immigrant as multiple deportations. This was well-known at the time and confounds a simple analysis. Moreover, you neglect to discuss DACA.
If the number of illegal immigrants increases every year, and in 2016 the increase is lower than previous years, that's not a "historical low"!
You then proceed to list many many things Trump did that Obama did not do!
The "shithole countries" remark was not something Trump said in public as part of a "PR" strategy. It was something allegedly said in a closed meeting. Are you saying that Trump is responsible for rumors about him?
So what? You were arguing just a few paragraphs ago that these policies don't matter! Trump's policies didn't do anything, because Obama was better, but then Biden undoes Trump's policies, which makes everything worse!
You should know by now that organizations endorsing bills and proposals is totally cynical, and it really makes me question your ability to digest evidence for your position if you have to point to some organization (that nobody had ever heard about five minutes ago) and say, "see, the authority says so!" This is a common scam politicians run all the time: ideological report cards, union endorsements, lobbyist fact sheets, etc. etc. Who cares?
Hmmm, why didn't conservative Republicans trust a deal that would allow more immigrants in exchange for a promise that this time money would really be spent on the border?
This is reading Trump's mind.
Yeah, "the idea". What happened to California after Reagan's amnesty?
My ideas are nuanced, yours have a kernel of truth, his ideas are extremely oversimplified.
No, I just think you're not very astute.
This was unnecessary to your otherwise very good points.
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... Okay? Ben's not arguing Biden is blameless here, just that Trump is blameworthy. Yes, Biden and the Dems aren't doing this out of sincere care for immigration, they're trading a better chance at getting elected for a concession to the public's policy priorities. Trump should, by the values of his own voters, take the deal and reduce his chance of winning because this would hugely reduce illegal immigration.
Dems make a problem much worse.
Dems then demand “Republicans capitulate on X, Y, and Z and we will slightly partially ameliorate the problem.
If Republicans rightfully say “fuck you,” Democrats then respond “I guess Republicans care more about elections instead of fixing the problem they claim to care about.”
Any party that wouldn’t say “fuck you” is a party that will get rolled. The republicans sole position should’ve been “you broke the border, here is the bill to fix it. If you won’t pass the bill, then you will lose.” The republicans allowed this charade the moment they entertained a “bipartisan bill.”
And OP’s post are proof of that.
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Dems don't need new laws to stop illegal immigration. They aren't enforcing the laws that already exist. Why would passing more laws make Dems enforce them?
The politicians who created the problem, who could stop the problem at any time, are saying they need new powers to stop the problem. The politicians who want to solve the problem say that it's a bad bill. Trump wants to run on the border? But Biden could solve it today.
Biden can deport 15 million people today? The law mitigates some percentage of the legal challenges by pro-migrant groups that would be inevitable (and will be) in any executive-led effort.
sure, Biden can reimplement the Trump policies which required detention in the US or release into foreign countries to await their removal proceedings because these policies have already been upheld in court
and then re-arrest all people he illegally released on parole and have them detained or removed to Mexico to await their removal proceedings
he can do that right now; he of course won't do that because he the Biden admin wants the immigration, they just don't want to suffer the electoral consequences of what he's doing
which legal challenges are mitigated by this bill?
the bill definitely opens other pathways for challenge, e.g., the entirety of 235(b) and process by which applications are reviewed as well as mandatory release into the US under a president who wanted to reduce migrant numbers
the bill may as well be a jobs program for immigration lawyers and provides billions more to those "pro-migrant" groups
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The surge at the border is consequent of Biden's decisions. He can't change those? He could reimplement Remain in Mexico, he could suspend Catch and Release, he could stop granting asylum. He could reimpose the Trump policies he suspended.
In fact, he doesn't need Trump to pass the border bill. If this is a great bill that Democrats are happy to have, they can pass it in the Senate and leave it to the House. They're not even trying this, they don't want to do anything, they just want to run on how Republicans won't do anything. This is maybe the best going scam in American politics: tearily tell the voters that we can't do anything, our hands are tied, unless you vote for me again...
Anything Biden does will be challenged, that's the nature of being president. Why does that mean he can't deport naybody? He could if he wanted to.
Because the left faction of the Democrats hate it and oppose it, which is why they need GOP votes in Congress? I mean this isn’t in any way new. The real question is that if this bill really does nothing and wouldn’t stop any immigration, why did Liz Warren, Bob Menendez, Bernie Sanders, Ed Markey and others vote against it?
Hmm.
This is political sloganeering: Markey wants it both ways, saying yes and no, hoping voters like one answer or the other. If Markey really believed that this is a bad bill, and that Trump killed it, shouldn't he be thanking Trump? Wouldn't he be gloating? No, he just lapses into cliche: American values, better life, cynical Trump, etc.
Markey probably didn't even write his own statement. Someone in his office wrote it, and he signed off after making some changes. Now his statement exists as a fact in the public record I'm supposed to take as evidence of something. But taking it seriously is like trying to understand a LLM: it's just a rationalization for whatever was already decided upon.
(I'm not arguing that Markey wanted the bill to pass and is just giving kayfabe. I am arguing that his position is obviously, blatantly, contradictory. If I had to resolve that contradiction, I imagine that he thinks it was a bad immigration bill, and that his blaming Trump is purely cynical.)
This is my frustration with many discussions about politics here and this conversation in general: I think way too much credence is given to the imaginary fake facts the political world creates. "The bill was a good bill because the Border Patrol endorsed it" is like saying OMB predicts Obamacare will reduce the deficit: these are just press releases. They are treated very cynically by the people who make them. Take again Markey's statement: he wants to blame Donald Trump for leaving the border in chaos, because Trump (supposedly) stopped a bill Markey wanted stopped. Huh?
Which is back to the whole problem with the frame of OP's post: the frame that Trump tanked a good immigration bill was invented by politicos for cynical reasons. We could have given you this great border bill (that we don't want), but Trump stopped us, because he's selfish, while his supporters cheered, because, uh...? It's actually much simpler to assume that conservatives thought it was a bad deal, which explains neatly why they opposed it, why Trump opposed it, and why cons cheered when it was tanked.
You could argue that cons were wrong for thinking it was a bad deal, but the frame here basically accepts, uncritically, a cynical idea pushed by Democrats that they themselves don't believe.
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I addressed this in the post. To summarize, yes, he could fix it now, to at least some degree. Reimplementing the Remain in Mexico would help. The problem with all of these fixes though is that they're bandaids on bullet holes that don't address fundamental issues like this bill would have.
His hawkishness was specifically a reference to this chart. Yes, Obama was also more willing to give amnesty than Republicans ever were.
Multiple people referenced the exact same remark shortly after the meeting was over, so I think it's safe to assume he really said it. If you want to keep contesting that specific statement, just choose any of his other ones. His hostile rhetoric towards immigrants wasn't exactly a secret.
The overarching point on Trump was that his policies were bombastic and good at catching headlines, but that they didn't do much in practice. Comparing the number of illegal immigrant border encounters during Trump's term and Obama's second term is quite similar. Biden was worse than both of them because he tried to go back to Obama's policies, but by then the asylum loophole was well known.
I can grant that in a theoretical alternate universe where Trump didn't do anything on the border, immigration could have surged far worse than it did due to exogenous factors and immigrants catching on to the loophole faster, so Trump's actions might have stopped a surge that would have happened. It's tough to know for sure, but it's plausible.
Multiple senators such as Tillis said this was the reason. Trump himself motioned at the idea on Truth Social when he said he didn't want to "absolve" the Democrats on the issue.
Can it the personal attacks. I enjoy debating people who disagree with me because I think it makes my arguments stronger, but I've had problems in the past with you reverting to personal attacks.
The Biden administration themselves are the people who built the networks that tell immigrants about the asylum loophole. All those organization and NGOs organize this are Biden aligned groups.
And had the bill passed they'd be telling immigrants to claim they were waterboarded, since it is a form of torture that leave no physical evidence on the victim, for which they'd qualify to remain in country.
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But it can't be a PR strategy if it was said in private and not meant to be publicized.
PR doesn't end with just public facing statements. For example, if an organization is established to help the poor but all the workers openly hate poor people, that's a PR issue since news organizations or even just the poor people themselves would eventually realize how much the organization loathed them.
And again, Trump's loathing of illegal immigrants has never been a secret by any means.
It's in the name: Public Relations. Your argument is that Trump's PR was too mean, and damaged the cause of immigration restriction. But when pushed on this you fall back to claiming that Trump hated illegal immigrants. What's the point of blaming his PR then? If Trump hates immigrants, it doesn't matter what his PR is, because by your logic he would still have hurt the cause just by being Trump.
You really seem to want to catch me with supposed double-binds and contradictions instead of actually addressing important points.
If the contradictions are true, then fair enough. Like earlier when you mentioned "hey you say Trump's restrictions didn't do much, but then say that illegal immigration exploded when Biden removed them". I could certainly see why someone would think that was a bit weird so a clarification was justified, and even with that clarification I probably wasn't giving Trump enough credit to what might have happened if he didn't do his EO's.
But this is just a nothingburger. I feel like I'm reading the following: "first you said 'immigration', then fell back to 'illegal immigration'. Aha! A concession! Then you said Trump had bad PR because of saying stuff like 'shithole countries', but he didn't say that in a televised address, meaning it wasn't public, yet PR has the word 'public' in it. A contradiction!"
To the object-level claim here, if Trump says something inflammatory to a group who all then promptly leak it to the press, then yes, that's a PR problem. The two options Trump has are either 1) get his leaky ship in order, or 2) think it but don't say it, or at least say it in ways that aren't so clearly controversial. Every time you hear the media complaining about "dogwhistling", it's just Republicans doing this. But Trump never seem to get the memo, which is why he keeps shooting himself and the cause of immigration restrictions in the foot.
You want to claim that Trump had bad PR, using as an example something that was leaked from a private meeting, assuming he even said it. Trump's PR is bad because of things other people said about him? This is like saying Biden's PR is bad because of "Let's Go Brandon".
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You talked about it, but that doesn't really address it: If illegal immigration got worse after Biden undid Trump's policies (which is Trump's fault because his PR was mean), why can't Biden just redo them? Why are they bandaids? According to your line of argument: Trump's policies, which didn't do anything, and don't work, prevented the Biden mass influx of immigration, which can't be stopped, unless we adopt some new Biden policies (like building a wall). Mhmmm.
Illegal immigrants!
It is also just absurd. So Biden won’t take steps to partially solve a problem because he wants a bigger solution (even though Biden made the problem worse) but the Republicans are stupid for not taking a solution that OP believes will partially solve a problem because Republicans think it will get them a better solution later on?
Who, whom indeed.
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Fairly sure you are technically wrong on “illegals immigrants”. Being intellectually honest when these debates were going on the asylum seekers are “legal”. They are allowed to claim asylum without proof but that status makes them legally allowed to be in the U.S.
But I too just call them illegals immigrants for dramatic effect. But the Biden administration has in fact found a way to make them “legal”. It’s embarrassing that illegal is technically wrong.
Read the Trump comments in the piece Ben linked. They were all Trump remarks clearly about illegals. Ben claims Trump was too mean to immigrants, eliding the difference.
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Again, he could redo them. He could (and should) reimplement Remain in Mexico to at least reduce the current surge somewhat.
But they're mere bandaids because they don't address the root issues, the most major one being the asylum loophole. The best long term fix would be to remove the asylum loophole, which Trump tried to do but failed since he wasn't willing to do more than executive orders on immigration. Remain in Mexico would be better than the status quo, but it would still be subject to periodic legal challenges, as well as Mexico deciding they don't want to keep all these people and helping them enter the US.
Sure, illegal immigrants. The point is that calling them things like "animals", or saying they're "coming from shithole countries" is needlessly inflammatory if the goal is to pass substantive policy.
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The provisions that Republicans want are temporary. The provisions that Democrats want are forever.
So how is this not just another click of the ratchet?
Anyways, the deal was advertised as border security for Republicans in exchange for Ukraine funds, but instead the bill was a weak border compromise with more points for Democrats than Republicans, and Ukraine funds on the side. There is no doubt that Democrats loved the terms of their trap, and would have voted yes for it even without Ukraine in the mix. Democrats have been calling for years to have an asylum "express lane" where even if the conditions are stricter on paper, anyone coached to tell the right lies will breeze right through the process to a "legal" path to permanent residency and citizenship.
The bill hands Democrats exactly what they want, and enshrines a permanent increase in "legal" unrestricted immigration forever. Doing nothing at least leaves all these people in limbo, with no path to legal status forever, and the possibility of eventual deportation.
Don't pass the bill = miniscule chance of deporting them.
Pass the bill = 0% chance of deporting them
Of course Johnson gave away the Ukraine funds in exchange for nothing anyways in the greatest anime betrayal ever, but that's another story for another day.
Again, you do realize all these people’s kids get passports anyway, right? Birthright citizenship renders ambiguous status, doing nothing, limbo blah blah arguments complete bullshit. Any of their children born on US soil are 100% unquestionable Americans under the law. Whether their parents do or don’t get a green card means nothing, these people (quite rightly) care about their descendants more than whether their lives in the US might be slightly easier or not.
What this bill did was allow a future GOP president to create a little more friction. It didn’t make things any easier or harder for the Dems, who can already (and have) left the fence open anyway. But it improves the selection of options a Republican might have.
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All of the provisions that the Democrats received were minor, and they were (as far as I can tell) all temporary, either because they directly expired like the 50K more legal immigrants for 5 years, or because they were minor carveouts in the things Republicans wanted which would expire themselves.
Blatantly false. The increase in legal immigration had an expiration date of 5 years. Check the bill summary or even the full text if you think I'm wrong.
This is what's basically happened in the status quo with Catch and Release, something that the bill would have ended.
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