What Is The Right Approach On Immigration?

I grew up in a small meatpacking town in the Upper Midwest in the 1980s and 1990s.  As was the case in every Midwestern meatpacking town in this era, the union was crushed, the local workers were used up and thrown in the trash, and the industry titans held wages down with a revolving door of immigrant labor that continued to be piped in for generations.  If ever there was a blueprint for turning a young person into an immigration skeptic, my adolescent experience was it.  

Indeed, I spent most of my formative years pushing back against the growing consensus in my party that more immigration served anybody well except greedy employers, and also warning the electoral ramifications would at some point become devastating.  And as more communities experienced the kind of transformation that mine did, skepticism about immigration became more universal, more strident, and more visceral.  That's why when Donald Trump came down the escalator in 2015 and made immigration skepticism the centerpiece of his campaign, he instantly and permanently realigned almost every square inch of the United States that isn't formally designated a metropolitan area.

Is the skepticism more about culture or economics?  For most people, it's a mixture of both, even though most stick with paying lip service to the economics part.....or at least they did until Trump made overt bigotry acceptable.  Either way, the verdict was rendered by the public and it fell on entirely deaf ears on the previous administration who tried to gaslight the country into accepting that bottomless "asylum" claims guaranteed to everyone who entered the country without permission were somehow different than mere illegal border crossings.  Over 10 million people crossed the border during Biden's administration, and the country predictably revolted.

Trump promised to not only seal the borders but to deport those who were here illegally.  A decisive majority of Americans indicated to pollsters that they were onboard.  Critics on the left argued it would be ugly and the public wouldn't have the stomach for it.  I had assumed the administration was bluffing and merely intended to do a few months of high-profile deportations before declaring victory and moving on to the business of tax cuts for the rich and ten-figure self-enrichment plunders.

But on this, the left turned out to be closer to right than I was, and the administration wasn't bluffing.  It turns out that heavy-handed deportation campaigns not only served the administration's ferocious anti-immigrant agenda, but it also allowed them to test-drive the country's willingness to endure paramilitary occupations in their neighborhoods where administration critics are executed with prejudice on the streets.  

The public appears to have reached its limit, at least according to polling.  Trump's version of "deporting the illegals" exceeded what they had in mind, both in scope and in practice.   They believed Trump would limit his deportations to MS-13 thugs with face tattoos and not the dishwasher at their favorite Mexican restaurant, and they have some measure of buyer's remorse.  Indeed, the polling consensus now shows that most people want to limit deportations to those with criminal records while leaving undocumented workers alone.

This shifting center of gravity nationally perfectly contextualizes how complicated the immigration issue is and reinforces that the sweet spot will be very hard to find.  To most people, it passes the general smell test to not waste resources on deporting hard-working immigrants living here illegally as long as they keep their noses clean.  But the Trump administration's instinct is not entirely wrong in regards to the incentive structure for entering the country illegally being intractably connected to activity on the border.  If we choose to allow undocumented workers to stay as long as they don't break additional laws when here, the incentive remains for them to continue coming here and we'll never get the border situation under control.  If we return to limiting deportations to habitual lawbreakers, our border descends into unmanageable chaos again.  

On the other hand, we need workers to do the work that illegal immigrants do.  For a generation, I bristled at this argument because the pipeline of foreign labor suppressed wages for American workers.  That's still true to a degree, but it's not the 1990s anymore.  The labor force is shrinking as the Baby Boomers retire and their grandkids are no longer making babies to replace them.  The cake is baked in regards to precipitous population decline, with the decline being most aggressive with working-age Americans. A generation ago, factory floors full of food processing workers were relieved of their duties and replaced by immigrants for 50% lower wages.  That scenario is hard to replicate today because few factories would be able to part with the existing workers on their floor and expect to find replacements.  

And I just don't see a scenario where economies are sustainable with a population in sustained retreat.  Visit any small farm town on any back road anywhere in America and you'll find what population loss does to a business sector.  Single-street downtowns vibrant with a dozen businesses 30 years ago typically have nothing left but the bar when revisited today.  Consider this the canary in the coal mine of what the national economy will look like if population decline becomes the national standard and new people don't enter the labor force to replace those who leave it.   

So is the solution a surge in the number of legal immigrant visas?  A pretty strong case can be made for this, but between the intense vetting requirements of those seeking work visas and the extremely dynamic labor market needs of an economy constantly in transition, accepting new legal immigrants comes with its own serious challenges and a molasses-slow processing timeline.  The AI revolution will make employment need identification only more challenging moving forward.  By the time a would-be immigrant has his visa granted and processed, the field of work he's pursuing might be rendered obsolete by AI or automation.  And then what?

Furthermore, it's not as if a surge in supply of legal work visas is gonna diminish demand among those from impoverished countries who want to migrate here.  If anything, the opposite will happen.  The number of people who want to flee a hostile homeland will always exceed the number of legal visas we have to offer.  There will definitely still be illegal immigration if we signal a willingness to grant more legal immigration.  The likelihood is that there will be even more of it. 

Then there's the matter of Donald Trump, undoubtedly speaking for millions who pretend they're for immigration "as long as it's legal", asking out loud why we can't have more immigrants from "nice countries" like Norway or Denmark.  Yeah, we're not gonna get any immigrants from "nice countries".  They have no interest in giving up the standard of living they enjoy where they are for the vastly worse standard of living afforded to them as a worker in the United States.  Between the medieval social values, the embarrassing political paralysis, the images of school hallways splattered with the blood of children slaughtered by guns, and having to pay $30,000 a year for a health insurance plan, America has nothing to offer people from "nice countries".

This means that virtually none of our new immigrants are gonna be white.   Given the degree to which people choose to divide themselves by identity groups, and the degree to which elected officials tend to exploit that division, one doesn't have to be overtly bigoted to be concerned about the implications of accelerated demographic changes on national unity.  Of course, this has been a concern going back to the nation's origins and tends to work itself out a generation later, but let's not pretend that the people saying "they're fine with legal immigration" won't continue to foment a ferocious backlash if the country called their bluff and boosted the number of people eligible for immigrant visas.

And ultimately, this is the biggest reason why nothing will get done on immigration despite the undisputed brokenness of our current policy.  Whatever kind of reform that polls well in concept will be deeply unpopular in practice.  Negative externalities will unfold from whatever policy is adopted and they will happen quickly and uncontrollably.  Nobody wants to be holding the hot potato when it happens because they know a voter backlash will be right around the corner.  

The inevitability of that voter backlash assures that immigration will continue to be a catastrophic loser for the Democratic Party, potentially even for 2026 when the country now says they disapprove of Trump's immigration policy.  Just because voters are uncomfortable with Trump's deportation tactics doesn't mean the issue will have any salience at all among voters whose lives aren't directly impacted by immigration policy.  Just as it's proven impossible to get voters to care about other people's kids being killed by gun violence, they will be equally unmoved by the call to cast their ballot on behalf of those sent to detention camps by ICE.  Voters decide elections based on self-interest and community interest, and even in the most favorable possible political environment, most people are not gonna perceive immigration liberalization serves that interest.  In other words, if the Democrats allow their 2026 messaging to lean too heavily on avenging ICE's excesses, they're unlikely to swing votes even amongst those who casually agree.

And that's in the rare instance where the Democrats are not playing defense on immigration.  In most cases, they will be playing defense.  They will have to answer for surges of humanity on the border.  They will have to answer for the perceptions of eroding national demographic unity.  They will have to answer for the latest crime committed by an illegal immigrant that's made the national headlines.   And they'll pay the price for it politically even with a policy approach less insane than the Biden-era "asylum for all comers".  They'll have to pay for it politically even in the hypothetical aftermath of a seemingly moderate immigration reform legislation that will lead to an inevitable repetition of the vicious cycle of unmanageable borders invaded by people who want to get in on the next round of amnesty.

This probably means a close variation of Trumpism will be our default immigration policy for the foreseeable future.  His supporters are likely incapable of grasping that this will come with medium-term and long-term implications on economic sustainability as our labor force drops through the floor, but it will likely happen in a slow-motion pattern that they will deem more acceptable than the alternative of poorly regulated borders, abrupt demographic change, and a loss of national familiarity.  Given the absence of any better options, I'd like to see us at least try coupling a surge in legal immigrant visas with tight border control and hope I'm proven wrong that it's a logistical impossibility to sustain, but I struggle to see how such a dynamic won't come apart amidst the unyielding gravity of incentive structures that starts the ugly cycle all over again.