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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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day =/= week
Wow I don't know how I managed to miswrite that one.
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Correction: "might require being mean to someone who isn't on the list of group identities that are allowed to be subject to being mean". They are just fine being mean to the deplorables.
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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 am pretty sure at least 2/3 of the population and probably even 2/3 of Republican voters would be fine with pretty wide immigration and even amnesty, if certain conditions are satisfied:
None of these sound crazy or extreme to me (obviously) but I don't see Dems agreeing (and honestly implementing) this kind of compromise, unfortunately. What they seemed to be offering was more of "we keep the current shitshow maybe with a tiny coat of paint and some money thrown in the general direction of Border Partol budget, and in exchange for that you get mass amnesty for pretty much every illegal that is not on death row for murder right now". Not sure how that'd be a working compromise.
It should quite obviously be fines. A surtax on income, or a set amount. Migrants come to the USA because they can earn more money, let the government and the citizenry wet its beak!
These two are tied together in my mind. Asking cities to tolerate an underclass that the feds refuse to deal with is absurd.
The two work in tandem. The first premise (or, in Dem's hands, anti-premise) is about when Dems are in power - they then would just ignore the immigration law completely and mass-import as many migrants as they can. The whole "illegal" thing loses its meaning because what's the point in the law is the government is refusing to follow it and the courts just shrug and stand aside? It's not a part of legal system anymore, for any practical purpose, just a mockery of what the law is supposed to be.
The second part comes in if Dems temporarily lose some amount of power on the national level. Then they fall back to the local level (there's such thing as "state rights" and contrary to popular - among Dems - opinion, it's not just a mindless Nazi slogan!) and ever if the law tried to reassert itself by temporary slowing down the intake and deporting some of the illegals, they would obstruct it on every level possible. The law is sacrosanct if it serves the Party's purposes, and completely ignorable - moreover, must be ignored - if it contradicts them. In other words, if they don't control the law and it's execution, it's not worth having. Of course, this must be accompanies with demanding the other side to follow every letter of the law (and some that they'd invent on the spot just to make it harder to follow) and exhaust every possible legal delay and perform every triple-checked verification before they take any action.
Taken together, these two parts form a ratchet, which make it very easy to move the policy and the action on the ground towards open borders, and next to impossible to move it to the opposite direction. Little wonder is the Republicans aren't exactly happy with this state of affairs.
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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.
I keep seeing the vapid mantra, “No one is illegal on stolen land!” in discussions about the LA riots. It’s retarded, but it’s suddenly everywhere.
A good slogan should go from the ears to the mouth smoothly, without stopping in the brain. That's what Orwell called "doubleplusgood duckspeak".
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Translation: "Only Blue Tribe has the right to determine who deserves what land."
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