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All I care about is immigration. Am I happy that boorish, poorly dressed morons who don’t know the first thing about chesterton’s fence are now in power unraveling a century of American hegemony for no real reason? No, of course not. But this is only happening because the people who opened the gates and didn’t close them went against the will and welfare of the public for decades too long.
The immigration situation could have been resolved firmly in the mid to late 90s, when even California voted resoundingly for highly punitive measures against illegal migrants and at the height of Pat Buchanan’s popularity and the height of American prosperity and global power. Nobody listened. Now, the idiots are in power, and likely won’t even do anything substantive about the immigration issue, but the lesson for politicians is this - until the immigration situation is fixed, populists who promise to tear down institutions will keep getting elected, endlessly.
I won’t defend this administration, though I voted for Trump (not that my vote matters). But I will hold my nose and vote for the most-electorally-viable anti immigration candidate in every single race, in every single jurisdiction in which I can vote, forever until something is done, come what may.
I know nothing short of mass deportations counts as "substantive" for you, but I'm pretty sure they already did do something. There was some chart going around recently about how Trump cut bordering crossings by something like 80-90% pretty much the moment he walked into office. It was on Twitter, and it was an image, so I'm having a tough time finding it, but maybe someone here knows what I'm talking about.
That can be turned back.
What may be decisive is that he may have demoralized the Democrats or at least their donor base on this issue. There've been a few post-mortems on just why immigration has to be one of the sacred values of the Democratic party and whether it's what even Latinos want. If it ceases to be a sacred value then someone might just decide to do "common sense immigration reform".
Then again, Republicans had some soul-searching on immigration after Romney too and then did the mother of all reversions. It's only been a couple of months. It's not particularly far-fetched that Trump wears out his welcome with the electorate and the next Democratic administration acts in a more sensible but pro-immigration manner because the President isn't a doddering old man who can't keep the administration on the right side of political tradeoffs.
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Arent you a wealthy Jew from Morocco currently living in the UK? Do I have you confused with a different "rafa" from the LessWrong days? Or have you since emigrated and gotten your US citizenship?
Well I’m certainly not from Morocco. I was born in the US and lived in New York until I was in my early twenties. My ancestors have been there since the 1840s.
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I mean, he's not going to deport the 15 million people that Biden let in, but Trump has already mostly fixed the southern border. Transits are down over 90% (not sure on exact numbers but something like that).
And if the Trump administration arrests and deports a few hundred thousand criminals, that's an unalloyed good as well.
Finally we have the self-deportations that will occur, and probably already have occurred, due to the DOGE kneecapping the US spending that was funding illegal immigrations.
Net migration will almost certainly be negative during Trump's term. This is a dream if that's your #1 issue.
The Southern Border is hugely relevant. During the Biden wave there was an entire Cincinatti or St. Louis worth of people coming in every month.
No idea where you're getting that 85% stat, probably outdated data.
You said the southern border doesn't matter. But Biden let in something like 10-15 million illegals. If Harris had been elected she'd had let in a similar amount. Trump fixed this virtually overnight.
You're saying this doesn't matter because of legal immigration from an earlier era. I obviously disagree.
But, yeah, I do agree that legal immigration is also a big deal and will fundamentally reshape our country even ignoring the Southern Border. That will be harder to fix, but he's at least trying with birthright citizenship.
I'm not interested in betting because the numbers will almost certainly reflect people who gained permanent residence status, which is irrelevant. As far as I know, the government doesn't collect stats on people who repatriate that are not in the US legally, nor provide data on visa overstays, etc.. Who knows, maybe after Trump they will start.
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For all the talk of mass deportations and ICE kicking down doors to round up millions of illegals, I haven't seen much action on that front amidst all this other chaos except a few flights to Guantanamo and an executive order blocked by the courts. There's a lot of performative signaling about how little this administration cares about foreigners, but a symbolic victory with no practical results would be worse than nothing, as it invites an extreme reaction from the other side without having moved the baseline.
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Of legal immigrants, yes, but 1) recently, we have had more of illegals immigrants than legal, and 2) legal family migration is to a large degree downstream of illegal immigration. Illegals come here, and get married to legal residents, which enables them, and their families to start chain migration. They give birth to children who have been treated as US citizens, which again allows them to bring their illegal parents and older siblings through family process, and also to get married to illegals who then are legalized.
As it happens, Trump actually tries to do something about that, with his EO stopping birthright citizenship to illegals. We will see what SCOTUS says about this, but the implications of it could be enormous. For example, it will discourage illegals from starting families in here, because their children will be in bad legal situation. It will make it easier to deport parents of small children if they are no longer US citizen children.
Took a look. Damn, family based immigration is a straight exploit.
Immigrate illegally -> have a child -> wait 20 years -> get a greencard for both parents -> sponsor all the siblings and children.
It is a long con, but securely brings the whole extended family over 1-2 generations. A part of me feels thats anyone who spends 30-ish years of their life working around the system deserves a green card just for the effort . But, im not the median motte commenter.
I would have expected limits to chain immigration. Like, someone who came as a family based immigrant cant sponsor family based immigrants. Or that you can only sponsor minor siblings. But it's quite liberal. The long waitimes seem to be the only throttling tool on hand.
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Yes, that’s why I said “get married to legal residents”.
Anything involving legal immigration system is “very difficult” if you talk to pro immigration advocates, but as it happens, I personally know multiple people who went exactly this route, and it worked out for them.
Who do you think are the millions of people coming on family based visa? Are you suggesting that 200k of former employment based green card recipients are bringing 5 family members from abroad each?
You sneak through the border with a husband and a kid. You give birth to an another child. Your child is a citizen. Once he becomes old enough, he sponsors your and his brother’s family based green card.
OK, and how exactly do you think US citizens come about to have foreign family? Again, think it through. These US citizens are almost universally downstream of some relatively recent immigration event. They either became naturalized citizens, or were born to immigrants. People who were born to two American-born parents are highly unlikely to have any foreign family that they could even consider getting in here.
So, basically all family based immigration is downstream of recent immigration. If you ignore the family based legal immigration, then legal immigration has been absolutely overwhelmed by illegal immigration for many years now.
What I am arguing here is that large chunk, if not a majority of legal family based immigration is downstream of some illegal immigration event that happened in recent history. For example, US citizen born to illegal parents, or formerly illegal aliens who legalized their presence in some way (and there are ways to do it for quite a lot of people).
Therefore, when you say that
You are missing the forest for trees: yes, family based chain migration have brought more people here than fake asylum claimants, but the point is that fake asylum claimants will cause more family based migration in future, so reducing the former also reduces the latter.
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In 2016, I was skeptical of Trump because I thought that there would be this big anti-immigration moment, nothing would be done because Trump is ultra incompetent, and then the moment would pass and people would be pro-immigration again.
To my immense surprise, only the first part was true. Of course Trump did little, despite Miller’s best efforts, but rather than end the movement wholesale it only caused it to grow, particularly among prominent and influential people who had previously had no strong views on immigration. It would seem that talking about things (and this is Trump’s strength), even if you do nothing, kind of aids the cause.
Also, so many of the problems the West faces are downstream of mass immigration that - even though I care about them - you have to stop it first, or it’ll all be worthless.
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I wouldn't even say that the measures were "punitive" to illegals, they just weren't deliberately imposing costs on Americans. The landmark California legislation was the simple and straightforward Prop 187:
That this was what considered so punitive that Democrats fought tooth and nail and got the Supreme Court to strike it down really speaks volumes to me about priorities. Yes, they say, Americans should be forced to provide free schools and medical treatments for people that snuck into the country.
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