While I like your ideas, they don’t address the elephant in the room: illegal immigration. When I talk to normies who don’t follow politics closely, even those who vote for Democrats, I find many of them are bothered by the high levels of illegal immigrants in the country, by sanctuary cities, and by Democrats’ perceived (or actual) lack of interest in immigration enforcement. To them, it feels inherently disorderly and unfair.
So I do think a return to Obama’s first term policies and PR on the issue makes sense politically, and is probably necessary.
I'll write more on this but building up the state capacity for an orderly immigration system is definitely a necessary prequisite for solving this problem. That means reforming the asylum system, staffing up the immigration courts so people get an answer to their asylum claim quickly, building up regional processing centers away from the southwest border so people can apply to enter the US without trying to physically cross it, and more.
I see this argument all the time, and as someone who is very pro-immigration, it sounds great. But those people needed to efficiently process asylum claims never get hired, and it ends up sounding like a dodge.
There are easier solutions, like “Remain in Mexico.” Or raising the bar on what constitutes credible fear for an asylum claim so they can be turned back immediately. People are generally suspicious of immigration, but they absolutely hate it when it comes south of the border. We need to stop people from entering illegally as much as possible, and it wouldn’t hurt for our next Democratic nominee to pressure sanctuary cities.
Again, I am pro-immigration. I thought it was really low for Abbott to send bus loads of migrants to New York. But as gross as it was, it proved his point. It’s easy to be a sanctuary city when you don’t bear the brunt of the problem. This would be a dramatic signal that we’re taking a new tack. Even just slap fights with mayors and governors would help.
You left out a CRITICAL distinction: illegal immigration vs legal. My sense is that the majority of the public is against illegal immigration but much more nuanced about legal immigration. The problem is, the Biden administration screwed up royally by allowing what was perceived to be unfettered illegal immigration and the backlash has affected all immigrants. Then Biden claimed there was nothing that he could do about the border absent Congressional action. Well, Trump proved that was not true. I think that if a candidate wants to win in 2028, she or he will have to continue Trump's border policies.
I'm in strong agreement. I think the issue here is that we need to moderate on process (ironic for the Abundance movement), not volume. We can be pro-mass-immigration but anti-illegal-immigration. Can we be processing asylum claims at embassies and consulates, then giving people the right to buy a plane ticket to the US rather than physically crossing the Southern Border? Can we just--generally--make it easier to get a work visa, then come to the US with one and start a W2 job immediately? What, precisely, would we have to do to get illegal crossings of the Southern border down to 0, while issuing 2M+ visas per year? Is this politically tenable?
More generally--and I posted this on Slow Boring yesterday--if the culturally blue collar won't tolerate high levels of legal immigration, can we actually go all-in on the so-called Sunbelt Strategy that seems to have fallen out of favor vis-a-vis winning back the Blue Wall? If maintaining high levels of (ideally legal) immigration is an economic imperative--and I think it is--what else can you compromise on to get to 50% of the electorate. How do you make local Chambers of Commerce the bedrock of the Democratic base? How do you win the white, male, over 50, college educated vote that is presumably fine with immigration in suburban Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, Miami, Tampa, and Atlanta by DC/SF margins?
Can we build an economically moderate, pro-immigration, pro-free trade party with a path to victory through some combo of AZ/UT/TX/NC/GA/FL? What would we have to change about our economic policy to make that a winning coalition? What would it take to win Miami-Dade by 40, Frisco, TX by 30, and flip Forsyth County, GA blue? Could this free us from dependance on MI/WI/PA?
I don’t think this approach to asylum would work. You just can’t offer everyone in a war zone the right to fly to the US - there are millions of refugees in the Congo, millions of Gazans.
The whole principle of asylum, honestly, doesn’t make sense nowadays in a world with cheap travel. It’s designed to handle refugees fleeing a war across a border, not people freely traveling around the world.
I think you are vastly overestimating how expensive travel was in the past (which, fair enough this is something everyone from layman to social scientist to archeologists do). Having to accept millions of refugees was something that countries absolutely had to deal with in the past. Like world war 2! One of the most shameful moments in American history was turning away of jews from the United States after a similar moral panic over immigration in the 1930's.
The revolutions of the early 19th century caused huge waves of immigration to America (relative to Americas population in particular), many of those immigrants would go on to help the Union win the civil war! Those immigrants, like the ones that would follow them in the 20th century crossed an entire ocean to get here, and they contributed immensely to our countries history/growth.
Something that's always stuck with me is how when the syrian civil war got going is how many of the refugees had college degrees, masters, etc. These weren't farmers fleeing conflict, these were engineers, doctors, nurses, scientists and yet the conversation across America and Europe treated them like they were all dirt farmers with nothing to contribute.
There's always been those making excuses for why, now, in particular we cannot help these people. There were in 1930, there were in 1850, and there are now. If we chose the wrong path then we forfeit the right to whine when those refugees go on to make another country stronger.
In this hypothetical scenario are we dumping a million congolese people on a random state and city? Because that is not how refugee resettlement works. There is nothing stopping democrats from making the refugee system more well designed to better integrate refugees into communities.
I brought up the syrian example for a reason. The united states accepted basically 0 syrians relative to Europe (which had far less resources to work with than us). This set off a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment across europe giving rise to far right anti-US parties. oops!
This isn’t going to work, and I am going to take a minute to explain why. I agree that there is a significant backlash to Trump’s immigration tactics, and you have some attractive ideas, but I don’t think you are quite getting the underlying attitudes and history that got us here in the first place. For context, I live in a pretty red area - we moved here after we married so I could have horses - so I hear a lot of these discussions from non-pundits. This area includes a lot of the working class voters that Democrats have lost and need to get back.
As far as building new housing, and I have heard this discussed in front of me in these terms, the question I hear most is why, if the population was not growing, you would need much in the way of additional housing. We are currently still seeing natural population increase, more births than deaths, just to be clear, but that is not how US population change is being reported. At all. The belief is, fewer immigrants, more abundant housing.
Support for net zero among these blue collar voters is limited, to put it mildly. Solar farms are not popular. If you tell them this might delay electrification, most are not going to care, and quite a few will consider it a plus.
Further, we have daily predictions of an “AI jobs apocalypse”, actual quote from an NYT headline, in the news, and predictions of 50% or more of jobs disappearing. People are currently afraid to leave their jobs and managers are reluctant to hire. This does not feel like full employment to people. I expect that the idea of jobs opening up in skilled manufacturing, health care, etc. is likely to get at least some interest from people who think they might need those jobs in the very near future and do not feel that those types of jobs are beneath them. I do know blue collar workers are interested in and training for those types of jobs now at community colleges in my state.
As far as innovation goes, blue collar sentiment seems to be split between, “just let in the smartest”, and some version of “slowing this shit down might be a good thing.” Antipathy to social media and AI as a proxy for innovation blurs the implications for health research, national defense, etc.
Overall, I think the stumbling block is going to be that the blue collar voters that Democrats have lost have different issues they care about and different concerns they want addressed.
It's definitely true that many people would like the population of 1990, the technology of 1990, the social attitudes of 1990, and the geopolitics of 1990 to come back. However nothing we can do is going to make that happen and we need to instead solve the problems of 2025.
The places that people WANT to live do NOT have enough housing.
But yeah, this is, sadly, pretty similar to what the even-somewhat-anti-immigration people I know have expressed. And changing their minds will be HARD – they don't trust really anyone about a lot of these kinds of issues.
Much of that migration has been white collar workers into previously heavily blue collar exurbs like the one I live in. We are in central Virginia and got a fairly big influx from DC and even some from NYC.
Encouraging remote work might help by letting people who actually don’t want to live in cities make space for those who do. It also reduces regional polarization and it helps the economies of those more rural areas.
Service workers can and do work in the locations where remote workers live. As those communities bounce back, job opportunities increase. I have seen this firsthand.
One of the challenges with remote work is it is contextual on your employer in most cases. i'm in silicon valley and RTO has led to a lot of upheaval for folks who moved far away in 2020-2021 and now have to figure out how to get back to the office. I have a colleague who bought a house ~90 miles away from their office when they were told they were permanently remote. Not to mention those tech workers blowing up the real estate of the rural locations they live in. I suspect the blue collar folks in those towns making less than $100k a year don't appreciate a bunch of newbies moving in who make 2 -3 times that jacking up house prices.
My partner had a fully remote job, was laid off, and now has to commute five days a week for her new employer. If we had been in the middle of nowhere her career prospects would have been dire. The competition for remote work is so much greater, and the pay tended to be much less.
Those are good points. FWIW, ordinary IT jobs outside of SV typically pay reasonably well when cost of living is factored in. Depending on the employer, which still matters even for IT, they can be pretty stable. Universities, state and local government, and established employers who don’t live and die by stock price tend to be particularly stable. IT jobs are often not as technically interesting, though, and raw pay is typically lower than SV.
Some companies out your way emphasize fully remote, such as Airbnb, Dropbox, etc, but I am not sufficiently familiar with them to give you suggestions beyond what you could and probably have searched for yourself.
Most people don’t literally move to the middle of nowhere - they tend to move close enough that they can drive in if they have to. So DC area remote workers might move to Hanover County or Orange County in Virginia, or Harpers Ferry in WV, but not usually to Maine or Colorado. Still more of a haul than people want to do daily.
Remote workers moving into this region (exurban central VA) increased property values, with a lot of new higher end homes going up, and reduced availability of raw land. People already living here are dealing with higher taxes but also more services, more economic opportunity, and more recreational activities. It’s all tradeoffs. More things to do, more job opportunities, but also an increase in cost of living.
Remote is augmented by new fully remote companies, self employment and gig work performed remote, and small businesses being set up as home businesses outside of cities. The last two are generally not counted in job figures for remote work.
Someone going in to the office once or twice a week to DC is much more likely to live somewhere like Hanover County or Orange County than someone who has to make that commute 5 days a week.
Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic here, but I'm not sure this takes into account 2 key problems:
1. A significant portion of Americans just plain don't like immigrants. There's a large and growing "blood and soil" type faction, and even before the Biden era immigration issues, Trump's first victory was large also carried on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment.
2: Disinformation. I'm pretty pro most of these reforms and ideas, but I struggle to see how they'll break through to an audience that can be easily convinced of nonsense like "20 million illegal criminals came into the country in a year", or that "there are new migrant caravans that magically appear before every election", or that "immigrants get to own free houses and cars as soon as they cross the border."
The immigration debate I think so often confuses different classes of immigration, even though most voters view them completely differently.
Illegal immigrants - those that cross the border illegally. There is wide consensus this should be stopped, although wide disagreement on how exactly to do that. Draconian efforts like Trump has conducted with raids seems to be quite unpopular. But everyone agrees there should be more enforcement. What to do with those that are already here illegally has less consensus, I suspect the "path to citizenship" approach is not as popular as it was when Obama almost got a deal.
Asylum seekers - these commonly get conflated with illegals (J.D. Vance attacking the Springfield Haitian immigrants). I think most people are fine with asylum seekers in theory, but don't like the gamification of the system where you show up and claim asylum, they prefer asking for asylum from a foreign location. I think the perception is the Biden administration incentivized this avenue as a work-around for illegal immigration, and is why some voters allege Democrats are bringing in illegals to win votes.
Legal immigrants - there a growing, but still very much minority that xenophobically does not want more legal immigration, but I think the wide consensus is still that legal immigration is good. I don't know if there is appetite for MORE legal immigration now, likely due to mismanagement of the first two classes.
I think if you take care of #1 - border enforcement, orderly and humane deportations, penalties for employers that hire illegals, and #2 - disincentivize gamification of the system, that will give you a lot more latitude on #3.
I think these arguments work really well in conjunction with the piece from earlier this week about designing systems which don't reward lying. Even if "illegal immigration" is part of a system that people have been engaging with for dacades which was never truly enforced, it clearly undermines democratic support and rewards people who break the letter of the law. The problem, though, is that our system doesn't really allow you to follow the letter of the law!
Part of a sane immigration system will mean having the tools to control immigrant flows through democratic means. The old "comprehensive immigration reform" paradigm seems to be pretty out of fashion, but the core idea seems true to me. If you want to argue for higher numbers of immigrants (which I do), you need to be able to credibly promise that you'll honor the democratically agreed-upon result.
This piece seems like it's more written to persuade center-left political strategy types than immigration advocates. Which is fine, but let's be clear on the distinction.
What I think many immigration advocates may find gives them (us) pause on this is the soft pedaling of the moral dimension: namely immigrants' presumptive (to us) right to freedom of movement without regard to citizenship. To an anti-nationalist cosmopolitan, it seems pretty monstrous that that right can be denied based purely on whether a person (or their parents) was born on the "wrong" side of an arbitrary line on the map. It seems, indeed, no less monstrous than denying people freedom based on the color of their skin.
It may well be a necessity for Democratic and liberal politicians to run away from this view because it's so unpopular. But calling it "democratically responsive" is kind of a turn-off for those of us to whom the majority view is obviously odious. There is a strong harm reduction argument here-- let's try and convince people that they can have their precious "border security" with as little as possible of the horrific cruelties we've lately seen from Trump. But it also carries a whiff of moral surrender, like trying to convince Nazis that they don't need to bother with the Holocaust because they can get what they say they want just by imposing a special tax on Jews and making them wear yellow stars.
I like the general direction but I think this focuses too much on the economics. Immigration is good according to Econ 101, yes. But the democratic pushback is around cultural issues. So we need to compromise on those areas. Things like:
Stop allowing asylum
Stop allowing non-English speakers
Extra tough crackdown on immigrant crime
Extra tough crackdown on illegal immigration
I think we could achieve a democratic consensus that still raises the net amount of immigration and generally improves on the status quo, if we are willing to “take a loss” on the most culturally sensitive parts of the issue.
I also think we need to revise the asylum system. What is driving the massive groups at the border that become staples on Fox News are people seeking asylum. The current asylum laws are broad, and immigration advocates have worked hard to use them as a loophole to gain status, so that if someone can make a claim that they are unsafe in their home country they can gain asylum status (not that it is easy, but there is a broad range of things that qualify).
I would also love for immigration advocates to acknowledge that some folks should be deported. Locally some advocates were involved in fighting to keep illegal immigrants selling fentanyl from being deported, arguing that they were essentially indentured servants. Or fighting the deportation of a man with multiple DUIs.
For footnote 5, I think it is good to check gut feelings against aggregate data bc I do think Biden experience proved a higher level of immigration is beneficial and we didn't delve into some nonlinear range haters would eat up.
Haven’t liberals tried comprehensive immigration reform, multiple times in the past 20 years? The last bill they authored would have been a conservative wet dream during the Obama years. Republicans do not actually care about immigration, they think Democrats are trying to import minorities to replace white Americans.
Conservatives, anti immigration people do not live in reality. why the fuck should I care about the democratic will of morons who voted for a charlatan who can’t string a coherent sentence together to save his life. I don’t believe in democratic principles because they are “fair and ethical” but because they tend to produce the results that best maximize human flourishing. When that doesn’t happen I don’t give a damn what the popular will is, I want maximum freedom and economic prosperity for the collective of
Populism is a disease destroying the liberal world that needs to be exterminated not reasoned with.
I think this is a fairly reductive view of populism, yes theres been eras of history where populism was anti-immigration, but also times where it was in favor of it. A lot of the times the reason why anti-immigration became a force in opposition to "elites" was because those pro-immigration elites had other policies that were very unpopular.
For example: WW1, to say the least, was fairly controversial in the United States. In particular because the justifications for our involvement were incredibly flimsy and the government crackdown in the United States against the anti-war movement was very intense. This meant the isolationist movement had a lot of strange bedfellows in it.
If you want a more recent example: The vietnam war basically destroyed LBJ's presidency and caused a near implosion of the democratic party over it. Organized labor siding distinctly AGAINST the anti-war movement was a disaster for the labor movement and essentially turned a generation of young people against it that would probably otherwise be sympathetic to them.
That is all to say, if you don't want anti-immigration sentiment to rise, it helps for the pro-immigration side to not be broadly unpopular because of its positions on other issues.
In what way is it reductive, are there any examples of pure populism being good for the fundamental societal goal of maximizing human flourishing? Populists do not have comprehensive world views, and are inherently reactionaries. These people do not inhabit reality and their so called "democratic preferences" are destroying the country so. World War one was controversial because America is and has always been full of isolationist buffoons, just look at the current Admin.
If somebody is naive or stupid enough to vote for Donald Trump because they thought he would be better on Immigration policy than Kamala Harris they should probably be institutionalized and be kept as far away from the ballot box as possible. We are witnessing the "democratic will" destroy the constitution, so at this point some illiberal methods are justified to sustain the republic.
I believe right wing populists politicians and the media pundits that spread their message are evil humans. Until Americans learn elections have consequences I'm gonna enjoy all the reaping the sewn.
"But we could also go much further. One idea might be to tax immigrants themselves at higher rates and restrict federal benefits until immigrants have met some threshold of tax payments or achieved permanent residency.6 This is not a prospect that brings me joy. But I do think that these are necessary preconditions to warming the public to the idea that the economic math of immigration works out in our favor."
The flaw in this proposal is that immigrants are already subject to huge fees to fund citizenship and immigration services. Are you proposing to end these user fees and subject them to higher rates in the income tax code? Or both?
This is not going to be a winning position for democrats. The winning position will be what you described continuing to crack down on illegal immigration, but "not in a mean way." That would look like mandatory e-verify, voluntary deportation schedules that give the longest transition time to those who have been here longest, faster asylum processing but keep asylum-seekers on site until claims can be processed, due process during deportation, etc. Winning on immigration will look like honoring the policy insight that was politically popular in 2024, while correcting for the implementation failures that have made it less so in 2025.
I'm not terribly moved by your economic arguments here — and I'm also an abundance liberal (of the American Compass variety). The goals of reducing the illegal labor force should be to (i) boost wages for those who work legally, (ii) create incentives to invest in productivity advances so we can do more with fewer people, (iii) entice prime-age Americans who have left the labor force or who are under-employed into more productive work. It is absolutely possible to grow with fewer people if the people do more productive work.
I sometimes hear democrats say, "well we'd have to pay Americans more to do the work illegal immigrants do today" as if it were an objection. It's always wild to me that they'll say this out loud, because the claim just gives up the whole game. To a working class person that sounds like the Democratic party is putting the interests of businesses and consumers above the interests of workers. Not a winning proposition economically.
My views on how to be an egalitarian liberal and still defend closed borders have been most strongly influenced by Joseph Heath's essay "A Unified Theory of Border Control and Reasonable Accommodation." It's a good argument. I'd be curious whether you'd modify your proposal after reconsidering some of the economic and philosophical objections to your view.
I think the Federal government profits off even undocumented immigration, because some of the “undocumented “ pay sales and income taxes and even payroll taxes and don’t draw on middle class “welfare” programs. Local governments, with their crowded emergency rooms and free government schools flooded with people of little English.
While I like your ideas, they don’t address the elephant in the room: illegal immigration. When I talk to normies who don’t follow politics closely, even those who vote for Democrats, I find many of them are bothered by the high levels of illegal immigrants in the country, by sanctuary cities, and by Democrats’ perceived (or actual) lack of interest in immigration enforcement. To them, it feels inherently disorderly and unfair.
So I do think a return to Obama’s first term policies and PR on the issue makes sense politically, and is probably necessary.
I'll write more on this but building up the state capacity for an orderly immigration system is definitely a necessary prequisite for solving this problem. That means reforming the asylum system, staffing up the immigration courts so people get an answer to their asylum claim quickly, building up regional processing centers away from the southwest border so people can apply to enter the US without trying to physically cross it, and more.
I see this argument all the time, and as someone who is very pro-immigration, it sounds great. But those people needed to efficiently process asylum claims never get hired, and it ends up sounding like a dodge.
There are easier solutions, like “Remain in Mexico.” Or raising the bar on what constitutes credible fear for an asylum claim so they can be turned back immediately. People are generally suspicious of immigration, but they absolutely hate it when it comes south of the border. We need to stop people from entering illegally as much as possible, and it wouldn’t hurt for our next Democratic nominee to pressure sanctuary cities.
Again, I am pro-immigration. I thought it was really low for Abbott to send bus loads of migrants to New York. But as gross as it was, it proved his point. It’s easy to be a sanctuary city when you don’t bear the brunt of the problem. This would be a dramatic signal that we’re taking a new tack. Even just slap fights with mayors and governors would help.
I agree, stopping border chaos has gotta be the #1 goal of any reasonable immigration policy.
You left out a CRITICAL distinction: illegal immigration vs legal. My sense is that the majority of the public is against illegal immigration but much more nuanced about legal immigration. The problem is, the Biden administration screwed up royally by allowing what was perceived to be unfettered illegal immigration and the backlash has affected all immigrants. Then Biden claimed there was nothing that he could do about the border absent Congressional action. Well, Trump proved that was not true. I think that if a candidate wants to win in 2028, she or he will have to continue Trump's border policies.
I'm in strong agreement. I think the issue here is that we need to moderate on process (ironic for the Abundance movement), not volume. We can be pro-mass-immigration but anti-illegal-immigration. Can we be processing asylum claims at embassies and consulates, then giving people the right to buy a plane ticket to the US rather than physically crossing the Southern Border? Can we just--generally--make it easier to get a work visa, then come to the US with one and start a W2 job immediately? What, precisely, would we have to do to get illegal crossings of the Southern border down to 0, while issuing 2M+ visas per year? Is this politically tenable?
More generally--and I posted this on Slow Boring yesterday--if the culturally blue collar won't tolerate high levels of legal immigration, can we actually go all-in on the so-called Sunbelt Strategy that seems to have fallen out of favor vis-a-vis winning back the Blue Wall? If maintaining high levels of (ideally legal) immigration is an economic imperative--and I think it is--what else can you compromise on to get to 50% of the electorate. How do you make local Chambers of Commerce the bedrock of the Democratic base? How do you win the white, male, over 50, college educated vote that is presumably fine with immigration in suburban Houston, Dallas, Phoenix, Charlotte, Salt Lake City, Miami, Tampa, and Atlanta by DC/SF margins?
Can we build an economically moderate, pro-immigration, pro-free trade party with a path to victory through some combo of AZ/UT/TX/NC/GA/FL? What would we have to change about our economic policy to make that a winning coalition? What would it take to win Miami-Dade by 40, Frisco, TX by 30, and flip Forsyth County, GA blue? Could this free us from dependance on MI/WI/PA?
I don’t think this approach to asylum would work. You just can’t offer everyone in a war zone the right to fly to the US - there are millions of refugees in the Congo, millions of Gazans.
The whole principle of asylum, honestly, doesn’t make sense nowadays in a world with cheap travel. It’s designed to handle refugees fleeing a war across a border, not people freely traveling around the world.
I think you are vastly overestimating how expensive travel was in the past (which, fair enough this is something everyone from layman to social scientist to archeologists do). Having to accept millions of refugees was something that countries absolutely had to deal with in the past. Like world war 2! One of the most shameful moments in American history was turning away of jews from the United States after a similar moral panic over immigration in the 1930's.
The revolutions of the early 19th century caused huge waves of immigration to America (relative to Americas population in particular), many of those immigrants would go on to help the Union win the civil war! Those immigrants, like the ones that would follow them in the 20th century crossed an entire ocean to get here, and they contributed immensely to our countries history/growth.
Something that's always stuck with me is how when the syrian civil war got going is how many of the refugees had college degrees, masters, etc. These weren't farmers fleeing conflict, these were engineers, doctors, nurses, scientists and yet the conversation across America and Europe treated them like they were all dirt farmers with nothing to contribute.
There's always been those making excuses for why, now, in particular we cannot help these people. There were in 1930, there were in 1850, and there are now. If we chose the wrong path then we forfeit the right to whine when those refugees go on to make another country stronger.
If the Democrats adopt a policy of "We should accept a million Congolese refugees", then they are definitely going to lose on immigration.
In this hypothetical scenario are we dumping a million congolese people on a random state and city? Because that is not how refugee resettlement works. There is nothing stopping democrats from making the refugee system more well designed to better integrate refugees into communities.
I brought up the syrian example for a reason. The united states accepted basically 0 syrians relative to Europe (which had far less resources to work with than us). This set off a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment across europe giving rise to far right anti-US parties. oops!
Hell yeah – this is pretty great as a pragmatic compromise; just gotta convince a WHOLE BUNCH of people! 🙂
This isn’t going to work, and I am going to take a minute to explain why. I agree that there is a significant backlash to Trump’s immigration tactics, and you have some attractive ideas, but I don’t think you are quite getting the underlying attitudes and history that got us here in the first place. For context, I live in a pretty red area - we moved here after we married so I could have horses - so I hear a lot of these discussions from non-pundits. This area includes a lot of the working class voters that Democrats have lost and need to get back.
For blue collar workers, the idea of deliberately keeping trade wages low via immigration is not particularly popular, and that framing is exactly how they hear it. Per public policy, we have deliberately funneled US students away from trades for 25 years, since the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Now, with economic uncertainty around AI, there has been a large upswing of interest in the trades. See for example https://www.thecentersquare.com/national/article_8fe307f2-99fd-11ef-94d5-67ff0702e20a.html discussing Gen Z interest and https://www.highereddive.com/news/skilled-trades-shortage-gen-z-training-hvac-electrical-plumbing-contractors-thumbtack/729998/
As far as building new housing, and I have heard this discussed in front of me in these terms, the question I hear most is why, if the population was not growing, you would need much in the way of additional housing. We are currently still seeing natural population increase, more births than deaths, just to be clear, but that is not how US population change is being reported. At all. The belief is, fewer immigrants, more abundant housing.
Support for net zero among these blue collar voters is limited, to put it mildly. Solar farms are not popular. If you tell them this might delay electrification, most are not going to care, and quite a few will consider it a plus.
Further, we have daily predictions of an “AI jobs apocalypse”, actual quote from an NYT headline, in the news, and predictions of 50% or more of jobs disappearing. People are currently afraid to leave their jobs and managers are reluctant to hire. This does not feel like full employment to people. I expect that the idea of jobs opening up in skilled manufacturing, health care, etc. is likely to get at least some interest from people who think they might need those jobs in the very near future and do not feel that those types of jobs are beneath them. I do know blue collar workers are interested in and training for those types of jobs now at community colleges in my state.
As far as innovation goes, blue collar sentiment seems to be split between, “just let in the smartest”, and some version of “slowing this shit down might be a good thing.” Antipathy to social media and AI as a proxy for innovation blurs the implications for health research, national defense, etc.
Overall, I think the stumbling block is going to be that the blue collar voters that Democrats have lost have different issues they care about and different concerns they want addressed.
It's definitely true that many people would like the population of 1990, the technology of 1990, the social attitudes of 1990, and the geopolitics of 1990 to come back. However nothing we can do is going to make that happen and we need to instead solve the problems of 2025.
The places that people WANT to live do NOT have enough housing.
But yeah, this is, sadly, pretty similar to what the even-somewhat-anti-immigration people I know have expressed. And changing their minds will be HARD – they don't trust really anyone about a lot of these kinds of issues.
In fairness, with remote work, there has been a pretty large migration out of big cities into exurbs and rural areas. See census data discussion from UVAs Cooper Center at https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
Much of that migration has been white collar workers into previously heavily blue collar exurbs like the one I live in. We are in central Virginia and got a fairly big influx from DC and even some from NYC.
Encouraging remote work might help by letting people who actually don’t want to live in cities make space for those who do. It also reduces regional polarization and it helps the economies of those more rural areas.
I think we are pretty clearly past the peak of remote work, and that's probably good for 1) cities and 2) "social cohesion"
Respectfully, as a remote worker, I would have to disagree with this on all counts.
We are not past the peak of remote work.
Remote work is good for social cohesion, for families, and for reducing political polarization.
I do not believe cities benefit from trapping people there who would rather live elsewhere.
Remote work is nice if you can get it, but service workers - who have the biggest affordability problem- don’t have that option.
Service workers can and do work in the locations where remote workers live. As those communities bounce back, job opportunities increase. I have seen this firsthand.
One of the challenges with remote work is it is contextual on your employer in most cases. i'm in silicon valley and RTO has led to a lot of upheaval for folks who moved far away in 2020-2021 and now have to figure out how to get back to the office. I have a colleague who bought a house ~90 miles away from their office when they were told they were permanently remote. Not to mention those tech workers blowing up the real estate of the rural locations they live in. I suspect the blue collar folks in those towns making less than $100k a year don't appreciate a bunch of newbies moving in who make 2 -3 times that jacking up house prices.
My partner had a fully remote job, was laid off, and now has to commute five days a week for her new employer. If we had been in the middle of nowhere her career prospects would have been dire. The competition for remote work is so much greater, and the pay tended to be much less.
Those are good points. FWIW, ordinary IT jobs outside of SV typically pay reasonably well when cost of living is factored in. Depending on the employer, which still matters even for IT, they can be pretty stable. Universities, state and local government, and established employers who don’t live and die by stock price tend to be particularly stable. IT jobs are often not as technically interesting, though, and raw pay is typically lower than SV.
Some companies out your way emphasize fully remote, such as Airbnb, Dropbox, etc, but I am not sufficiently familiar with them to give you suggestions beyond what you could and probably have searched for yourself.
Most people don’t literally move to the middle of nowhere - they tend to move close enough that they can drive in if they have to. So DC area remote workers might move to Hanover County or Orange County in Virginia, or Harpers Ferry in WV, but not usually to Maine or Colorado. Still more of a haul than people want to do daily.
Remote workers moving into this region (exurban central VA) increased property values, with a lot of new higher end homes going up, and reduced availability of raw land. People already living here are dealing with higher taxes but also more services, more economic opportunity, and more recreational activities. It’s all tradeoffs. More things to do, more job opportunities, but also an increase in cost of living.
Return to office is literally happening. There is data on this. Do you think the trend is going to reverse? If so, when and why?
Return to office is happening for some, hybrid for others. It is happening MUCH less than management originally wanted. See nice discussion, with numbers, at https://theconversation.com/us-workers-with-remote-friendly-jobs-are-still-working-from-home-nearly-half-the-time-5-years-after-the-pandemic-began-251758
Remote is augmented by new fully remote companies, self employment and gig work performed remote, and small businesses being set up as home businesses outside of cities. The last two are generally not counted in job figures for remote work.
Someone going in to the office once or twice a week to DC is much more likely to live somewhere like Hanover County or Orange County than someone who has to make that commute 5 days a week.
Perhaps I'm being overly pessimistic here, but I'm not sure this takes into account 2 key problems:
1. A significant portion of Americans just plain don't like immigrants. There's a large and growing "blood and soil" type faction, and even before the Biden era immigration issues, Trump's first victory was large also carried on the back of anti-immigrant sentiment.
2: Disinformation. I'm pretty pro most of these reforms and ideas, but I struggle to see how they'll break through to an audience that can be easily convinced of nonsense like "20 million illegal criminals came into the country in a year", or that "there are new migrant caravans that magically appear before every election", or that "immigrants get to own free houses and cars as soon as they cross the border."
The immigration debate I think so often confuses different classes of immigration, even though most voters view them completely differently.
Illegal immigrants - those that cross the border illegally. There is wide consensus this should be stopped, although wide disagreement on how exactly to do that. Draconian efforts like Trump has conducted with raids seems to be quite unpopular. But everyone agrees there should be more enforcement. What to do with those that are already here illegally has less consensus, I suspect the "path to citizenship" approach is not as popular as it was when Obama almost got a deal.
Asylum seekers - these commonly get conflated with illegals (J.D. Vance attacking the Springfield Haitian immigrants). I think most people are fine with asylum seekers in theory, but don't like the gamification of the system where you show up and claim asylum, they prefer asking for asylum from a foreign location. I think the perception is the Biden administration incentivized this avenue as a work-around for illegal immigration, and is why some voters allege Democrats are bringing in illegals to win votes.
Legal immigrants - there a growing, but still very much minority that xenophobically does not want more legal immigration, but I think the wide consensus is still that legal immigration is good. I don't know if there is appetite for MORE legal immigration now, likely due to mismanagement of the first two classes.
I think if you take care of #1 - border enforcement, orderly and humane deportations, penalties for employers that hire illegals, and #2 - disincentivize gamification of the system, that will give you a lot more latitude on #3.
I think these arguments work really well in conjunction with the piece from earlier this week about designing systems which don't reward lying. Even if "illegal immigration" is part of a system that people have been engaging with for dacades which was never truly enforced, it clearly undermines democratic support and rewards people who break the letter of the law. The problem, though, is that our system doesn't really allow you to follow the letter of the law!
Part of a sane immigration system will mean having the tools to control immigrant flows through democratic means. The old "comprehensive immigration reform" paradigm seems to be pretty out of fashion, but the core idea seems true to me. If you want to argue for higher numbers of immigrants (which I do), you need to be able to credibly promise that you'll honor the democratically agreed-upon result.
This piece seems like it's more written to persuade center-left political strategy types than immigration advocates. Which is fine, but let's be clear on the distinction.
What I think many immigration advocates may find gives them (us) pause on this is the soft pedaling of the moral dimension: namely immigrants' presumptive (to us) right to freedom of movement without regard to citizenship. To an anti-nationalist cosmopolitan, it seems pretty monstrous that that right can be denied based purely on whether a person (or their parents) was born on the "wrong" side of an arbitrary line on the map. It seems, indeed, no less monstrous than denying people freedom based on the color of their skin.
It may well be a necessity for Democratic and liberal politicians to run away from this view because it's so unpopular. But calling it "democratically responsive" is kind of a turn-off for those of us to whom the majority view is obviously odious. There is a strong harm reduction argument here-- let's try and convince people that they can have their precious "border security" with as little as possible of the horrific cruelties we've lately seen from Trump. But it also carries a whiff of moral surrender, like trying to convince Nazis that they don't need to bother with the Holocaust because they can get what they say they want just by imposing a special tax on Jews and making them wear yellow stars.
I like the general direction but I think this focuses too much on the economics. Immigration is good according to Econ 101, yes. But the democratic pushback is around cultural issues. So we need to compromise on those areas. Things like:
Stop allowing asylum
Stop allowing non-English speakers
Extra tough crackdown on immigrant crime
Extra tough crackdown on illegal immigration
I think we could achieve a democratic consensus that still raises the net amount of immigration and generally improves on the status quo, if we are willing to “take a loss” on the most culturally sensitive parts of the issue.
I also think we need to revise the asylum system. What is driving the massive groups at the border that become staples on Fox News are people seeking asylum. The current asylum laws are broad, and immigration advocates have worked hard to use them as a loophole to gain status, so that if someone can make a claim that they are unsafe in their home country they can gain asylum status (not that it is easy, but there is a broad range of things that qualify).
I would also love for immigration advocates to acknowledge that some folks should be deported. Locally some advocates were involved in fighting to keep illegal immigrants selling fentanyl from being deported, arguing that they were essentially indentured servants. Or fighting the deportation of a man with multiple DUIs.
For footnote 5, I think it is good to check gut feelings against aggregate data bc I do think Biden experience proved a higher level of immigration is beneficial and we didn't delve into some nonlinear range haters would eat up.
Haven’t liberals tried comprehensive immigration reform, multiple times in the past 20 years? The last bill they authored would have been a conservative wet dream during the Obama years. Republicans do not actually care about immigration, they think Democrats are trying to import minorities to replace white Americans.
Conservatives, anti immigration people do not live in reality. why the fuck should I care about the democratic will of morons who voted for a charlatan who can’t string a coherent sentence together to save his life. I don’t believe in democratic principles because they are “fair and ethical” but because they tend to produce the results that best maximize human flourishing. When that doesn’t happen I don’t give a damn what the popular will is, I want maximum freedom and economic prosperity for the collective of
Populism is a disease destroying the liberal world that needs to be exterminated not reasoned with.
I think this is a fairly reductive view of populism, yes theres been eras of history where populism was anti-immigration, but also times where it was in favor of it. A lot of the times the reason why anti-immigration became a force in opposition to "elites" was because those pro-immigration elites had other policies that were very unpopular.
For example: WW1, to say the least, was fairly controversial in the United States. In particular because the justifications for our involvement were incredibly flimsy and the government crackdown in the United States against the anti-war movement was very intense. This meant the isolationist movement had a lot of strange bedfellows in it.
If you want a more recent example: The vietnam war basically destroyed LBJ's presidency and caused a near implosion of the democratic party over it. Organized labor siding distinctly AGAINST the anti-war movement was a disaster for the labor movement and essentially turned a generation of young people against it that would probably otherwise be sympathetic to them.
That is all to say, if you don't want anti-immigration sentiment to rise, it helps for the pro-immigration side to not be broadly unpopular because of its positions on other issues.
In what way is it reductive, are there any examples of pure populism being good for the fundamental societal goal of maximizing human flourishing? Populists do not have comprehensive world views, and are inherently reactionaries. These people do not inhabit reality and their so called "democratic preferences" are destroying the country so. World War one was controversial because America is and has always been full of isolationist buffoons, just look at the current Admin.
If somebody is naive or stupid enough to vote for Donald Trump because they thought he would be better on Immigration policy than Kamala Harris they should probably be institutionalized and be kept as far away from the ballot box as possible. We are witnessing the "democratic will" destroy the constitution, so at this point some illiberal methods are justified to sustain the republic.
I believe right wing populists politicians and the media pundits that spread their message are evil humans. Until Americans learn elections have consequences I'm gonna enjoy all the reaping the sewn.
"But we could also go much further. One idea might be to tax immigrants themselves at higher rates and restrict federal benefits until immigrants have met some threshold of tax payments or achieved permanent residency.6 This is not a prospect that brings me joy. But I do think that these are necessary preconditions to warming the public to the idea that the economic math of immigration works out in our favor."
The flaw in this proposal is that immigrants are already subject to huge fees to fund citizenship and immigration services. Are you proposing to end these user fees and subject them to higher rates in the income tax code? Or both?
This is not going to be a winning position for democrats. The winning position will be what you described continuing to crack down on illegal immigration, but "not in a mean way." That would look like mandatory e-verify, voluntary deportation schedules that give the longest transition time to those who have been here longest, faster asylum processing but keep asylum-seekers on site until claims can be processed, due process during deportation, etc. Winning on immigration will look like honoring the policy insight that was politically popular in 2024, while correcting for the implementation failures that have made it less so in 2025.
I'm not terribly moved by your economic arguments here — and I'm also an abundance liberal (of the American Compass variety). The goals of reducing the illegal labor force should be to (i) boost wages for those who work legally, (ii) create incentives to invest in productivity advances so we can do more with fewer people, (iii) entice prime-age Americans who have left the labor force or who are under-employed into more productive work. It is absolutely possible to grow with fewer people if the people do more productive work.
I sometimes hear democrats say, "well we'd have to pay Americans more to do the work illegal immigrants do today" as if it were an objection. It's always wild to me that they'll say this out loud, because the claim just gives up the whole game. To a working class person that sounds like the Democratic party is putting the interests of businesses and consumers above the interests of workers. Not a winning proposition economically.
My views on how to be an egalitarian liberal and still defend closed borders have been most strongly influenced by Joseph Heath's essay "A Unified Theory of Border Control and Reasonable Accommodation." It's a good argument. I'd be curious whether you'd modify your proposal after reconsidering some of the economic and philosophical objections to your view.
I think the Federal government profits off even undocumented immigration, because some of the “undocumented “ pay sales and income taxes and even payroll taxes and don’t draw on middle class “welfare” programs. Local governments, with their crowded emergency rooms and free government schools flooded with people of little English.
Sorry. Local governments lose money. And some people think the undocumented are getting “free stuff” and they aren’t.