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'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 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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
Hell yeah – this is pretty great as a pragmatic compromise; just gotta convince a WHOLE BUNCH of people! 🙂
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.