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How did illegal immigration become so polarizing? The last two Democratic presidents prior to Biden, Clinton and Obama, both talked about maintaining strong borders and deported millions of illegal aliens. Suddenly in the last few years, Democrats act like it's always been our cultural policy to allow whoever wants in, to live here. Is this really just a crass strategy to build a larger blue voting base, or is it something more?
There's three major stories I'm aware of:
The Red Tribe story starts in 1986, where President Reagan promoted and passed a major immigration bill with two central components. On one hand, almost all existing immigrants, regardless of their status, would be given an amnesty and treated as if they had legally immigrated for purposes such as deportation and naturalization. In turn, we were supposed to get a massive enforcement apparatus discouraging further illegal immigration. But like all Wimpyisms, we found that the stuff that took place today happened reliably, and the prong that was supposed to happen in the future faded away; the various rules to cut off the employment of illegal immigrants were left unenforced, and various court cases would make deportation harder even in the rare case anyone was caught.
((Note that there is no honest Blue Tribe analysis of the impact of these policies: compare the wikipedia's "allowing for the legalization of nearly 60,000 undocumented immigrants from 1986 to 1989 alone" with the actual source).
This was, on its own, frustrating. But it did not escalate immediately. What really brought the tension to the forefront was the 2013 Gang of Eight bill. While a lot of broad stroke discussions of the proposal (championed by Rubio) heavily promoted an increased enforcement mandate, the combination of interactions with the then-controversial ACA and widespread loss of trust in claims made about the ACA made it far more critical. And then the language actual came out, and one of the biggest enforcement mechanisms was a entry/exit database that had been required by statute for over a decade-and-a-half already. This time they'd really do it because the amnesty would only be provisional until (some of) these enforcement actions happened... because ten years of provisional status would be a lot more politically costly to act against. And that goal leaked.
So a lot of conservatives absolutely lost their shit, Rubio was a joke for months. A lot of mainstream conservatives swore, at length, that they would not even consider any bill that did not prioritize enforcement first. Meanwhile, the mainstream democratic party saw any bill without a broad amnesty component as actively useless.
... which was itself, in turn, an escalation. After seeing the conservative response, President Obama, and pushed DACA and DAPA, along with a number of other various non-prosecution policies. While not all of these would manage to go into action (albeit some were only blocked officially), the blue tribe calling conservatives the Party of No weren't exactly wrong! And the next ten years would primarily focused around lawfare; because neither side could pass legislation the other would even consider, various executive actions were the only real option, and because this required no negotiation except for what had to pass SCOTUS scrutiny, these policies could be much wider or single-sided than any plausible statute. Conservatives pointed to increasingly fraught possibilities of downstream political consequences (JarJarJedi has listed most of the mainstream examples, but for a particularly fun one most people who can think about don't say outloud: under the INA, people who have immigrated legally are eligible for naturalization after five years. guess how 'immigrated legally' is defined, or the legal consequences of a grant of citizenship that can't be stripped). Eventually this culminated in US v. Texas under Biden, where it turned out to be impossible to compel any enforcement policy at all from a President that didn't want to follow it.
The Blue Tribe story starts a few years later, as the IRCA1986's entry date amnesty thing passed, and it turned out that there were millions (sometimes estimated as ten million!) people who either entered the US too late for its use, did not register in time, or who were not eligible for other reasons. Run all the above with the opposite valiance, and you've got ten or tens of millions of people, a large portion who immigrated as children, are forced into a gray-at-best legal environment over what the Blue Tribe sees as a glorified paperwork offense, and Republicans who demand that we make a lot of additional paperwork offenses and hefty punishments for them before even considering confronting The Real Problem.
((In both the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe tellings, there's also various selection pressures: pro-immigration Republicans and restrictionist-Democrats were either compelled to change their minds or pushed out of the party/national politics.))
The Gray Tribe story starts much later, and thinks the legal and legislative connections are a little besides the point. They explain why things aren't happening, but they don't explain why the rioting is happening. For that, we instead look to a large and increasing group of who have long framed immigration enforcement of any type as fundamentally illegitimate, and any attempts to do so as fundamentally driven by animus and a sign of unadulterated evil. That put the normal paeans to informed compromise off the table.
The exact start date is fuzzy and depends heavily on who you ask and when. The growth of Punch A Nazi discourse in 2016 is an easy example, but you can also see people pointing to G20 protests or the tactics formalized in the gay marriage wars (I use 'animus' specifically). Everyone's least favorite web forum also 'must' have been the source.
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IMO it's the confluence of several things:
For one, the pre-2010s Democratic Party were far more beholden to private sector organized labor and high school educated voters in general, and that group tends to be skeptical of immigration be it for cultural or economic reasons. For all his Millennial fans, Obama won in '08 because high school educated white Midwesterners (He won Indiana!) liked him. Since then, thanks to Millennials being the most educated generation in history, the college educated (who tend to be pro-immigration) are far more powerful in intra-Democratic party politics than was the case in the 90s and 2000s. The pro-immigration lobby has also arguably changed from mostly being a pro-business project (hence Bernie's quip about open borders being a Koch brothers policy, which is literally true if one reads the 1980 Libertarian Party platform) to being a project spearheaded by educated immigrants and second-generation children of immigrants themselves.
Relatedly, the fusionists (a bunch of highly educated/cosmopolitan northeasterners along with the pro-business lobby) lost control of the GOP to the populists (Trump has personality, yes, but his platform is largely cribbed from Pat Buchanan minus the hoe scaring social conservatism, nominating ACB aside.) representing the high school educated. The GOP aren't so much the party of big business at this point (Nationally, anyway; this is less the case at the state level.) as small/medium business owners, whose interests concerning immigration are more mixed (Some use illegal labor, yes, but others are irritated with having to compete with illegal labor. See also: free trade.).
IMO an underrated cause for polarization on both sides is internet media making the issue more visible and mobilization easier. It's true, yes, that post-2000 immigration has spread far beyond the traditional locales of border states and major coastal cities, but there's also the media factor. On one hand, we're seeing things from the right like truckers using social media to lobby for English proficiency requirements and crackdowns on non-domiciled CDLs on the back of several high profile fatal accidents involving immigrant truck drivers (I have no idea if anyone's actually quantified whether or not foreign drivers who can't speak/read English crash more.). On the other, enforcement of immigration laws has never been overly pleasant, but it's never been easier to capture the anguish of the unfortunate migrant being deported, akin to viral incidents of police brutality in general.
Finally, there's the obvious answer that immigration has become more contentious for the simple reason that the foreign born population is at or near historic highs. The last time we were where we are now in that regard we got the first red scare and the height of the second Klan.
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The best way to model the immigration policies of each party is thus:
Republicans are unwilling to accept any policy that will lead to a lawbreaker being rewarded.
Democrats are unwilling to accept any policy that might require being mean to someone.
As a result we haven't had a coherent immigration policy in decades. Democrats won't accept any policy that will deport millions of people living peacefully (who exist, regardless of the quantity or density of rapists and whatnot in the population). Republicans will not accept any policy by which illegals en masse become legal. In reality since at least 1992, through Republicans and Democrats:
has been the de facto national policy. As a result you have these huge communities of millions of people across the country who were let in, the only way to get them out is through quantities of cruelty unimaginable in the Lower 48 in living memory. The only way to legalize them is to abrogate the idea of rule of law and justice.
The modern Trump policies are, to this point, de facto the same as those in the past, just with some random cruelty thrown in to make sure that the illegals don't get too comfortable. Stephen Miller's reach goal is 3,000/day, which, if we're generous and assume that government workers get in a whole 52 weeks a year, would be 156,000/yr, and leaving aside a lost half a year, let's say about 600,000 across the Trump administration. Low end estimates place the number of illegal immigrants in the country at around 12,000,000. As I've repeatedly been told that no one will self-deport, Trump is not going to significantly lower the number of illegals in the country. We're not going to feel any difference in the number of brown people around.
What is going to be achieved is preventing illegals from having contact with the legitimate world by arresting them at churches, courthouses, etc. Which probably reduces welfare spending enough to be worth something!
But at the end of the Trump administration, even if you pretend he's going to get entries to zero, we're going to have a giant lump of illegal immigrants in the country, and we're still going to have a weak response to it.
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'White skin bad, brown skin good' took over the democrats+TDS.
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In my perception it’s not so much that the Democrats have gone crazy it’s more that Republicans won the messaging war and also, tactically, tricked many Democrats into knee jerk reactions. Dems have always been praising the virtues of model minority immigrants and at times Reps too, that’s important background. Dems had a long history of wanting more “charitable” treatment for the poor or oppressed (whether you think this is a weakness or a strength is partly a values disagreement). We can’t act like this isn’t a recurrent historical position - see for example the Statue of Liberty poem about bringing America the poor and hungry and persecuted. (Immigration sentiment also historically has come in waves for and against)
So when Trump says some overtly racist things or does a Muslim bad etc., plus the college educated lens of viewing Trump pronouncements as facially and literally accurate rather than the directional pronouncements most voters actually hear, I think there was an overreaction. Dems operate partly on guilt and border security plays on that guilt. But again, although some politicians got tricked into saying and supporting poorly considered things in Trump backlash (hate to admit he could be right about anything) extending even to the Biden years still in the shadow of Trump, I’d view this as mostly organic rather than some actual pro-immigrant plot.
To be sure, there IS a subset of Democrats who legitimately feel greater allegiance to the globe and humanity as a whole than they do to the US, they are loud but this is often a minority and they don’t always get into authority positions.
I should also add that at least 3 times in the last 15 years we got extremely close to compromise with immigration bills, but they all failed to pass so in a very real way the problem got worse than normal. In that way, of course the rhetoric gets most extreme, because the problem is more extreme
I do wish people would not truncate the stanza:
(Emphasis mine) Sometimes people even truncate the poem mid line "Your huddled masses." There's not even a comma breaking the sentence there! Critically she doesn't say send me all. Her command for who to send does not require nobility, but does require carrying an essential notion of liberty with you. It is inscribed on the Statue of Liberty after all, not the Statue of Unlimited Open Boarders.
There's not an entirely negligible portion of the population that is fine with even fairly generous immigration policy. They might prefer, though, if the plan is to vote for the same shit policies that you are fleeing from that you do not come to the US.
That’s a great point and I was just trying to be brief with my allusion. I actually think that you could get bipartisan support for limiting the type of immigration that leads to large amount of remittances vs those who genuinely want to raise families and establish themselves. Thus my point about how the current split is partially a result of the stalled bipartisan efforts (like really we were only a vote or two shy several times)
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It's not only the voting base. The census counts illegals too (Trump tried to change it and lost), and with thin margins of current Congress majorities/minorities, two more/less seats for California or Texas may decide who controls the House. It is also budgets - leftist NGOs were getting literally billions of dollars from the budget for "immigrant services". You need to have a crisis to get billions for "helping to solve" it. Plus, of course, there are a lot of businesses who wouldn't mind cheap labor force not covered by the myriad of regulations Democrats introduce - which is fine with Democrats, since they get less pushback from businesses for introducing those, as businesses know: in a pinch, they can always hire illegals. And, of course, this population now needs welfare/social services coverage, which means expanding welfare state programs (and attached NGO networks, again) - a dream for every Democrat. In addition to that, on the ideological level, the colonial powers need to pay for their past sins, and accepting unlimited migration is the prescribed way to do that. The West stole everything from oppressed people, now the oppressed people finally get to enjoy it. There are many factors why unlimited migration aligns well with the governance model Democrats are embodying.
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