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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31395 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.

But I don't think the math works out? Anyone want to check this?

~2.7 mil made legal from 1986 law seems to be the common estimate. Here claims 1.6 million applied in California. This report says that 90% were approved. But critically, just because you're made legal doesn't mean you can vote! The same report said that as of 2001, only a third had naturalized. Generally speaking, only half of immigrants ever fully naturalize. That means in the 15 years after the amnesty, only in the ballpark of 500-700k voters were likely added to California rolls. Here we can see that Latinos in general do skew Democratic, but the gap varies by year, anywhere from an 9 to 52% gap. Is that enough to make a difference? In 1996, with that biggest gap, that would be 250k-350k (very ballpark) swing votes, but the margin of victory was at the lowest around 350k in 1988 (about 250k at most according to the gap that year, but I think this was far too soon for the naturalization numbers to swell even that large, since the process takes a few years even for legal residents). Every other election had a gap of well over a million votes! So if you go on and match up the years and the Hispanic vote gap, the effect is even less, often dramatically less: 2004 we see 9% or about 60 thousand votes of delta, versus a margin of victory of around 1.25 million votes, so a very small fraction.

So even the poster child of amnesty doesn't seem to fit with the narrative. Okay, sure, fine, when you drill down to more local elections, not just presidential ones, it can make a difference. But overall, California's blue-ness seems to only be very slightly due to the amnesty bill. If I were a fact-checker, I think I'd say "mostly false" -- the math VERY plainly does NOT work, and doesn't fit with history, but there might be some nugget of plausibility buried. I think you can still, despite these clear factual falsehoods, in good faith make an argument that granting citizenship is a bald-faced political power grab, but I think there are other, stronger explanations. In this sense, the general ideas behind "great replacement theory" might hold some water on the cultural side, but in terms of the actual mechanisms of governance, consider me quite underwhelmed.

Note that the same could not be said for DC statehood -- that's something that in my opinion couldn't possibly be less nakedly partisan and also wildly unconstitutional. I bring it up here as a sort of rough proxy or prior for the general claim about power grabs being real/something to be worried about. When it came up in 2021, 37 senators co-sponsored the legislation. Allowing for some good faith there too (no taxation without representation?), I'd say you can conclude that maybe half of all politicians are willing to make such a power grab? But there's a reason 37 senators is not enough to pass a bill. Once you reach the neighborhood of 45, the difficulty goes up exponentially, so beware accidentally "intuitively" weighting support by the simple number of cosponsors. So again, this seems to suggest that there's a lot more going on than vote-buying.

So the whole idea is far from wild fancy, but the way it's being made, and the framing seems plain partisan warfare. And remember, demographics is NOT destiny! Hispanic voters aren't even necessarily permanent, locked-in Democratic voters, only a few tweaks to the Republican party (which almost happened in 2004ish) would make the platform appeal to plenty of them. For all the noise about how you can "buy votes" via specific, targeted policies, I don't see much anecdotal evidence of that being the case. For example, would-be student loan aid recipients I know don't seem to weight it all that heavily in their decision of who and how to vote -- other things overshadow it by a lot. Polling data suggests the same is broadly true of Hispanics, even if they were to receive generous amnesty. See for example one reason why no one talks about Puerto Rico being admitted as a state: besides the fact that Puerto Ricans somewhat don't want it, neither big party is actually convinced they would in fact be the ones to get the votes. It's a wild-card they don't want to deal with.

So I am seeing people like Elon Musk repeat stuff (tweet here) about Democrats deliberately offering some sort of citizenship-for-votes scheme. Laying aside that there are other reasons besides nefarious ones to want to give legal status at least (not even necessarily citizenship) to people who have lived here in some cases for decades, he had a pretty specific claim, that the 1986 amnesty law flipped California blue effectively forever.

This is not the main thrust of your post but I've been on Twitter myself a bit lately and Elon Musk really is not a high quality poster. Charitably I think he just doesn't really spend that much time on high quality political discussions and his political diet seems to be heavily weighted by low effort right wing shitposters. The guy is running several very large companies, I'm not knocking his intelligence or whatever, but his posting is very low quality. I wouldn't take anything he says that seriously. I don't think I've ever seen a political take by him that even reaches the median post, not even top level post, of this forum. I really would quite like to like musk, he's culturally on my side by being someone who builds impressive things, but he's definitely not pumping out impressive political takes.

He's most often scanning the headline, trusting the shitposters, and then hitting repost. I did follow him at some point, but you can tell that he's starting to panic and resorting to just filling up feeds with a repost of Wow and This is insane instead of adding even a lukewarm take or analysis to anything.

As you said, he's busy. I sometimes have to just punch out a link to a thoughtful article to my reports at work instead of warming it up for them in the microwave with some Thought Leadership. But yeah, he's not a high quality source of information.

Probably true. He's out there retweeting quite a lot of partisan stuff. Maybe he was pent-up from being (for Elon) relatively circumspect for a few years before? Surprised me still though, because the tweet wasn't just off the cuff in the sense that it's seven (twitter-sized) paragraphs long (!!)

The guy is running several very large companies

No, he isn't.

He's put some world class people in charge of his various companies to run them. Elon Musk is maybe the single best identifier and motivator of talent the world has ever seen. He's done some majorly impressive things across very different industries.

And he really wants to be seen as an genius engineer. Which is super sad to me. Dude is a world class talent picker and he has a reality distortion field that turns well adjusted smart people into cult members in their obedience.

But check out his Twitter avatar. Dude's self-conception is already out of this world.

Yes and no. I didn’t read the Musk biography by Isaacson, but I read last weekend the new book “Reentry” by Eric Berger about SpaceX from 2010 - 2022. There is also a prequel “Liftoff” about SpaceX early times. I can both recommend glowingly. He truly did build SpaceX from the ground up. He did know nothing about rockets so he learned everything he could and even Russian rocketry manuals! Since Twitter he became more absent though (which Berger counts as a big negative), first because he focuses so much on the business of the new company but also because he is addicted to tweets.

Anyway this is of lesser importance. Aquota point was that garbage in produces garbage out, and I think Musk is victim to that on X. Snarky soundbite discussions (or mastodon or thread) are rotting the brain of everyone not counterbalancing it with more deeper longform material.

I don’t know him, maybe I am unfair to him and he does have deep discussions with very important people in the Bay Area we could never even dream about reaching. He could just phone Nobel prize tier economists to invite them to dinner! Hire policy experts. Or ask any Senator about their opinions. But instead he shitposts when he is bored.

I'm always amused by this argument because my parents, who became legal via the 1986 amnesty, have voted red down the line in every election

my father still insists Nixon was the best president in history

it's true there were more people in the US fleeing communism during that time, so they would be more inclined to vote Republican

what about today? Venezuelan immigrants are in the news, guessing the ones who ever feel inclined to vote won't be so impressed by the way Democrats sound

While you might think that today's illegal immigrants are the reliable Republican voters of the future, this is a vanishingly rare viewpoint.

Most Republicans and Democrats view immigrants as a solid blue voting block. The stats seem to bear this out.

wouldn't surprise me, just sharing my personal anecdote

Aren't Venezuelans a fairly D constituency? Republicans are gaining among Mexicans and Puerto Ricans and ahead among Cubans but I thought Venezuelans were still fairly strong Democrats?

I supposed it'd only make sense--Democrats love to advertise themselves as the party that will protect democracy, that's probably all you need to win over a constituency that was effectively prevented from using democracy to remove the tyrant of the country they fled.

The math is much more generous for swing states. A few ten thousand votes in the right swing states and you have a new electoral coalition. The Biden administration is bringing in millions.

Again, the process to actually obtain votes is

  1. apply to be made legal (X million)

  2. be made legal (1986: 90% accepted)

  3. apply for and be given citizenship (1986 cohort: about a third by 15 years, up to half over lifetime, probably much less immediately)

  4. register to vote

  5. actually vote (I think I misplaced this in my original, oops, this is combined with 4; overall turnout for eligible adults is 66% but some sources say naturalized citizens might vote more, others claim less. Might have to dig up where I got that original source.)

  6. have more of the new voters vote D than R (if so, how much?) (OP laid out how many, but last major election it was +33% D)

  7. was the net gain, if present, larger than the margin of victory?

You only actually get an effect when you reach the last step. You're acting like you can just skip from 1 to 7 and poof, permanent Democratic hegemony! Some of those steps take years, and many math-wise aren't nearly as strong as you might imply. Going backwards, to assemble, say, 20,000 votes, enough to swing a very close swing state, you'd need (20,000) / (33% current Hispanic net +D margin) / (66% of citizens who vote) / (33% who became an actual citizen) / (90% who applied for legal status) = about 310,000 applicants needed. Of course IRL this would lag as the naturalization process usually takes a bit.

So sure, overall plausible in a swing state. Georgia apparently has about 340,000 per that source, so right there on the line, though 2020 was a real squeaker and not that common. Most swing states don't have millions of immigrants, either, and there are plenty of non-swing states too to talk about. That's important when talking about Senate control -- remember, a permanent Democratic electoral stranglehold like Elon posted about would require at least a 2/3rds margin in the Senate, in all practical likelihood. And again, you need the Senate in the first place to even pass legislation giving this pathway to citizenship.

Even in the unlikely event that Democrats took control of the Senate (quite unlikely this cycle, Montana is toast) and House and Presidency and actually pass a bill to do a change like this...

Senate appointments rotate on a staggered basis only a third at a time rotating two years apart, so at least one cycle if not many more would take place before these new voters even showed up! Boy were the Founders smart. That's long enough for public opinion, if merited, to swing against Democrats for making an allegedly naked partisan power grab, more than offsetting any gained votes, it seems to me in that scenario. And even if you pass all those gauntlets, I'd pose the final question: didn't the process work anyways? As a country we're allowed to set our laws including citizenship, though of course the history of what that means and naturalization in general is actually a matter of some great debate, I will grant you.

Are you conflating encounters and admissions?

Regardless, I don’t think the average illegal alien is voting. They don’t appear to have done so in the last election, at least.

I don't have data on the "average illegal alien," but it does seem like some will make the attempt.

https://x.com/libsoftiktok/status/1839371055728918923

Biden-Harris TPS program is flying migrants directly into small communities with government subsidies. They released a special app for immigrants to apply to while waiting in other countries. Pew estimates just under a million immigrants:

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/03/29/how-temporary-protected-status-has-expanded-under-the-biden-administration/

(The figure cited shows a few countries with TPS approval older than the current administration, subtract those for an estimate. Notably Trump rescinded TPS for a few countries during his administration and it was treated as a big deal.)

Hundreds of thousands of illegals are coming in across the border. Here's a pew post about how Biden stopped Title 42 expulsions, leading to Title 8 Apprehensions (they get a court date and then leave lmao):

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/02/15/migrant-encounters-at-the-us-mexico-border-hit-a-record-high-at-the-end-of-2023/

This article tries to put a positive spin on it by claiming Republicans are overestimating. The result is, still, alas, of course, millions of illegals coming in through the border:

https://www.factcheck.org/2024/02/breaking-down-the-immigration-figures/

Of those 6.5 million encounters by CBP, 2.5 million people have been released into the U.S. with notices to appear in immigration court or report to Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the future, or other classifications, such as parole.

Here's another great AP fact check which concludes that Biden and Harris aren't flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country, because they're actually just flying hundreds of thousands of immigrants into the country on purpose:

Trump said during his speech, “Today it was announced that 325,000 people were flown in from parts unknown - migrants were flown in airplane, not going through borders ... It was unbelievable. I said that must be a mistake. They flew 325,000 migrants. Flew them in over the borders and into our country.”

But migrants are not being flown into the U.S. randomly. Under a Biden policy in effect since January 2023, up to 30,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela can enter the country monthly if they apply online with a financial sponsor and arrive at a specified airport, paying their own way.

[...]

Biden has exercised parole authority far more than any of his predecessors, which Trump calls “an outrageous abuse” that he will end if returned to the White House. Biden has granted entry — by land or air — to at least 1 million people using parole, not just the 327,000 who flew from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua or Venezuela though December.

The article then alleges that paroled immigrants can't become citizens, but that's not really true: eventually they simple stop being paroled immigrants because their status increases to some other status. There are law firms scattered all over the country dedicated to figuring out how to give legal citizenship to these kinds of immigrants. The government pays them!

I don’t think the average illegal alien is voting.

They acquire citizenship and then overwhelmingly vote for Democrats. Which is Musk's claim: if Harris wins election, these immigrants will stay in the US and form a voting block that will vote Democrat in 2028, by which time there will be even more and more immigrants on the path to citizenship.

Anyone who is going to be voting in 2028 already has a green card, unless they are married to a US Citizen (meaning a 3-year rather than a 5-year qualifying period) and their naturalisation happens unusually quickly.

All those anchor babies grow up with citizenship. Give it time

Unless you have some wildly compelling evidence otherwise, most of what I've seen indicates that those born in the US, raised in the US, even to immigrant parents tend to vote at least in broad strokes similar to their peers, and don't follow their parent's preferences to any abnormal degree. Certainly it's hard to imagine an 18-year-old voting Democrat for the sole reason they are eternally and perpetually grateful for their parents being allowed into the country by Democrats 18+ years earlier... that's just not how people vote.

Who are their peers?

The grandchildren of the people given amnesty are already out there voting.

The majority of children and 100% of the grandchildren were always going to be citizens.

Why? We could end birth right citizenship. It’s a very strange and weird policy when you zoom out and look at most countries

No we can't, it's in the constitution.

Depends. Birthright citizenship is not as straightforward as it appears.

That is why they are part of anyone intelligent's conversation about letting in the first gen.

Is this one of those things where the statistic is wrong as bait to get people complaining about real numbers? Cause I do not want to go through that again. Goalpost movement is not admirable.

Anyway. I generally agree that no single policy works as a vote purchase. That includes helicopter money. People don’t generally want a handout; they want a system which subsidizes whatever they were already doing, but makes it socially acceptable. Unfortunately, everything that resembles such a system is laundered through the lawmaking process and then tossed in the tumble dryer that is our economy. If the cycle lines up and we get a Good Economy, the program was a success and will never be removed. If it runs into a Bad Economy, it was obviously the only cause; anyone involved ought to be run out of town on a rail.

On the other hand, there are lots of ways to buy your opponent votes. Class warfare. Scandals and/or witch hunts. Doing anything that can be remotely tied to a Bad Economy.

These are powerful incentives for incrementalism. Any bold plan is a point of failure. I suspect this is why none of the Presidential candidates since Obama have pitched a signature policy. The closest we got was Trump’s wall, which appears to have been overcome by events. As with the ACA, the popular underlying concept has given way to a series of last-minute compromises tolerated by both parties.

When minorities vote Democrat at rates of 60% (Hispanic and Asian) or 90+% (black), you don't need to buy anything, you just need to have them there, and registered. They will take care of the rest with or without your handouts.

Why do you think this is the case, then?

Probably because those minorities and foreigners are exhibiting the failure mode of all democracies, especially when they are multi-racial. They know voting is a racial head-count, and if they want to be counted, they need to vote D.

The Democrats are the party of minorities and foreigners. They've chosen to be so rather than moderate their policies to appeal to the native American population. This is a reversion to form, as Democrats have been shot through with international communists and Soviet sympathizers since FDR was first elected.

This is why you see internal migration going from blue states to red states. Democrats have shit policies which drive people out. This should cause Democrats to slowly lose relevance, or force them to pivot to more reasonable policies. Instead, they import foreigners, make them citizens, and rely on those votes (and the census representation that goes with the warm bodies) to maintain relevance.

The problem with this is that it means Democrats are trying to replace their opponents, breed them out, and kill them through neglect and indifference, in order to turn the country into a one-party government. When California becomes a one-party state, people leave for Texas and Idaho. When all of the US becomes Soviet, there's nowhere left to move.

I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using? Because sure, I can think of a fair few countries where democracy went poorly, but I'm not sure I'd jump to "democracy always fails in this manner" or similar argument "all democratic failures happen in this manner" or even "all countries that get too multiethnic and are democracies fail this way" and the similar prediction that "all democracies are doomed to eventual failure". Not quite sure which angle exactly you're describing.

If anything, I think that the two-party system, for all its incredible and well-documented failings, actually serves as a pretty good insulation from what I think you're talking about. Since both parties have an incentive to change their policies (often incrementally, but the base pressures are there) in order to win, or regain an edge, this means that a multi-ethnic state cannot rely on simple alliances between ethnic groups, but must in some sense compete for them, and trade groups once in a while too. Don't think we'd get very far broaching replacement theory per se in this context, but more wondering about the proposed mechanism and evidence side of things. Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute), for the sake of argument here, you can't do so indefinitely. I just don't think it usually makes sense numerically, without being washed out by backlash. For example, we can plainly see that even Kamala has had to harden her border policies. That's in direct response to discontent. Might she be lying? Sure. But the discontent is real and might even cost her an election, which I count as evidence for my above contention.

I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using?

Greece and Rome, mostly, as well as the American Founders reflecting on Greece and Rome. This is ancient, and has been known for millennia. This is nothing new, and it is nothing I came up with on my own.

Read Aristotle and Socrates and Plato. Read Thucydides. Read history.

If you're looking for a peer-reviewed study in Nature or Science, you've come to the wrong place.

Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute)

You are incorrect, it's obviously happening, and it's happening at an unprecedented pace during this administration.

Another, longer article arguing the same.

Even in a high-immigration scenario, US population will peak around 2080 and red tribe white TFR is the highest stable one. Just make it that far and the country gets reconquêred.

Here is the Cato institute proofing with many studies that Hispanics turned to the Dems because the local GOP was more and more anti-immigration. That pushed minorities away:

https://www.cato.org/blog/proposition-187-turned-california-blue

Hispanic voters were alienated from the GOP and welcomed by the Democratic Party during the fights over Proposition 187, Wilson’s reelection, and during a series of other propositions proposed in the mid-1990s. One way this shift occurred was by galvanizing Hispanic naturalization in response to the perceived GOP threat.

Here is Mother Jones saying that demography is destiny and the whites deserved it:

https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2019/11/it-was-redistricting-not-prop-187-that-turned-california-blue/

It’s that simple. Prop 187 probably cemented Hispanic support for Democrats, but that was about it. It was demographics and redistricting that really made the difference.

If you believe in the demographic theory of presidential elections, the same thing will happen nationally when the non-white vote reaches about 50 percent. Unfortunately, that’s still a decade or two away.

Prop 187 passed, and should have been law.

The fact that it was overturned and within one generation California was no longer majority white should tell you all you need to know about Democracy. Apparently you can't just vote on things you want done, and when you do, you deserve to be wiped out.

Most critiques about the Cato study is that it is intentionally ignorant about different groups of hispanics. There was a group of, essentially, founding Californians (same with Texas and most border states) that are legitimately what you would call 'hispanic whites' that were culturally indistinguishable from an Okie or 49er that came from Iowa or Nebraska in the 1850s. They were then "supplemented" with non natives from, primarily, Mexico who were completely different and leaned heavily Democrat. Because they were poor and unassimilated.

I suspect the demographics are destiny strategy is going to backfire anyway. Immigrants will initially vote for whichever party is promising not to deport their extended family, but once they are all citizens that leverage goes away. Once their physical safety from deportation is secured, those voters actually start wanting things. Things that the Democratic Party seems unable or unwilling to provide. Just look at how the party seems to be simultaneously hemorrhaging both Jewish and Muslim voters. Or the increasing tension between African Americans and newly arrived immigrant groups. Or the way that the LGBTQ bloc conflicts with the social opinions of most of the newly arriving ethnicities. The Democrats have taken on too many different identity groups and the contradictions are starting to burst them asunder.

Don't know why the downvotes, we've seen this quite a lot. People are people at the end of the day. The wants and needs are usually pretty similar. And vote-buying in a macro sense is only mildly effective, to the extent that in many cases (not all but many) it doesn't even make sense for the ruling politician or party to pursue it. Plus, in my opinion many ethnic voting blocks are fundamentally temporary, not structural. Okay, fine, sure, worldview does play a part in politics, even a major one. But like, if we're talking about Mexican-Americans for example, there's no actual fundamental reason they'd be Democratic voters instead of Republican ones. And at risk of being over-broad, polling data seems to support my view.

I mean it depends on the propaganda. If they can continue to paint the GOP as Nazi authoritarians who hate minorities and women, I think you could keep most immigrants on the D side. Most are coming from regimes that are authoritarian in some form or another and aren’t keen to have that happen here.

There's at least some loose relationship between voting patterns and the truth, though. The GOP is only able to be painted as Nazi authoritarians because some actual authoritarians do hang out with them, just like the Dems are only able to be painted as out-of-touch, gender-obsessed ideological warriors because they exist and Dems also commonly hang out with them.

Most of the Hispanics I've talked to however tend to be disillusioned with communism and general leftism and actually like the GOP rhetoric (this was Miami though, the Southwestern trends I'm a little less familiar with) and the financial policies too (lots of Trump fans for economy alone I've seen). GOP sticking points tend to be other issues. Like someone brought up Prop 187, which was raising specters of racial profiling and practical, daily QoL hits on actual Hispanic citizens. That, arguably, wasn't really propaganda. And of course Hispanics in general are much more traditional-family focused and religious, both traditional GOP wheelhouses.

Hispanics are already moving towards Trump.

Just look at how the party seems to be simultaneously hemorrhaging both Jewish and Muslim voters.

Is it? Or is it just losing turnout support

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