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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   11109 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 17, 2026

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Nearly two years ago, I wrote:

Being pro-immigrant does not mean pro-immigration

After listening to a recent interview of Carlos Odio, a pollster focused on Latino voters, I truly do believe that the stance above represents the message the broadest number of Americans can agree to and/or might tolerate. American politicians, leaders, and statesmen ignore this and they will make mistakes in one of the ever salient topic of US electoral politics. What was really clarifying for me though is the terminology, which unlocks my thinking of what it means to "support immigrants" and "not support immigration", bolded mine:

But I think the best way to simplify to take all these dimensions and narrow it down. It's a framework that comes from a pair of academics is stock versus flow. [Stock] is how people think about immigrants who are in this country, established in this country, already arrived. Versus flow, those who want to come or are coming.

And attitudes across lots of national contexts towards stock versus flow are very different. People tend to be much more sympathetic to people who are already in the country versus allowing large numbers to come in into the future. Those attitudes are very different. Latinos are not unique in that regard. Latino attitudes, [regarding] the border, are, can, or can be, very different from the ones that they have about something like a pathway to citizenship.

So what you have is big big immigration fights in a uh 2008 and uhh 2012, to some extent in 2016 because the conversation Hillary Clinton wanted to have, were really about stock: "What do we do about immigrants who are already here?" you know. In the second Bush term, the focus had been on workplace raids, deporting people who had been working here for a very long time. The fights of this whole period of time tended to be about stock. And on stock, Latinos are very very much on the pro-immigrant side of things. It is a place on which they tend to be more distinctive from the rest of the electorate.

In fact, even amidst everything else we're going to talk about, Latinos have remained very pro pathway to citizenship. Even Trump voters have remained very pathway to citizenship favorable, toward pathway citizenship. That has not changed. They have stayed pro-immigrant when it comes to the stock conversation.

The pair of academics mentioned, based on my research, are Yotam Margalit and Omer Solodoch who wrote on Against the Flow: Differentiating Between Public Opposition to the Immigration Stock and Flow. They are among the first to really separate people's attitudes towards stock vs flow. What Odio mentions about Latino Trump voters supporting pathway to citizenship I think is referring to this poll.

What is especially important, I think, is by looking through the lens of stock vs flow, we can very quickly figure out the problems and mistakes that both the left and right makes on immigration.

Biden's and the left's failure with immigration is because they confused supporting immigration as also supporting immigrants. There was a perception after 2012 and 2016 and 2018 that Latinos was on the side of the Democrats and are a loyal and committed base. And by handwaving the national debate on immigration as a Latino issue, Democrats, especially under Biden, made moves that they think Latino voters would like. But we can see those moves are actually pro-flow instead of pro-stock and that's not what the people wants, bolded mine:

And in fact, a lot of the resentment in the in the Biden era, as people were crossing the border, was saying here are people who are coming today, who are in the perception of these voters receiving permits, work permits, might be getting other additional benefits beyond that. In New York, you get housing benefits. Some other people were getting some sort of cash benefit if you were an asylum seeker. And [voters] saying, "Well, hold on. Not only is my family struggling, but even my undocumented family, right, my undocumented aunt who's been here for decades, hasn't gotten anything and she's been waiting her turn in line". Which by the way, there's actually no line if you've been undocumented for 20 years. There's no way to regularize it at this point. And so there's a resentment towards that actually is not just about like, oh, I'm just anti-immigrant, but is about a feeling of unfairness that's not about where you stand overall in immigration, but rather what's the sequence in which of events in which these [things] should happen. The fight that we then have in 2024 was about the large numbers who were coming into the country.

If the above sounds familiar to you then it's because it echoes the chump effect that has been linked before on this forum.

On the other hand, Trump's and the right's failure with the ongoing deportation campaign is because they're confusing attacking immigrants with attacking immigration. Trump best issue is with regards to immigration and securing the border. Trump even went on Univision and talk about immigration in 2024 and laid out his case about criminals and illegals. Latinos shifted for Trump in 2024. Yet once in office, one can see how the mistake Trump makes is the reverse of Biden, where anti-stock moves are being confused as anti-flow, which is also not what people want, bolded mine:

There was a way that the Trump administration could have done immigration that would have retained incredibly high support. If they if they had very narrowly focused in on criminals and they had been trotting out criminals that they were deporting, support would have stayed very high for those policies. It has remained high for the border, right? I mean, it's remained high for the border generally viewed by [people], even despite literally every single area of Trump's presidency policy area falling off a cliff. You ask people: "what about the border?", he still gets either neutral or approval. And when you ask Trump versus Democrats, it's like not even close. If you want to see the stock versus flow in effect, you could see that among Latinos, Trump's best issue area is the border. And one of his worst is when you just ask about immigration that people when they're asked about immigration today are thinking in terms of stock of people in the country now, but when they're thinking about the border, they're thinking about it in a very different plane. Just the border is not very salient.

I think Odio was referring to this poll back in April 2026, where Latinos (and All Voters) highest approval is on Trump's handling of "Border Security" (versus "Crime and Public Safety", "Immigration", "ICE in American Cities", "The Economy"). But anyway, what Trump is running afoul of what's called "Ethics of Proximity" or "Moral Distance" (couldn't find a good link for this). These concepts overlap, and one could imagine there is a spectrum in which one can put individuals closer to stock or close to flow, with higher in stock means closer in moral distance, and therefore rules that might seemed harsh but fair from a distance becomes cruel and unjust up close.

In summary: if the thesis of the Biden era is "pro-flow is pro-stock, we are pro-stock, therefore we must be pro-flow", and the anti-thesis of the Trump era is "anti-stock is anti-flow, we are anti-flow, therefore we must be anti-stock", then hopefully the future (successful) synthesis on the immigration debate is one who is able to say and do "stock is not flow, we are pro-stock but anti-flow, therefore we will do just that".

You'd need to reach extremes of harshness of enforcement of the anti-flow position to counteract the powerful flow incentives of being pro-stock. I'm talking about shooting illegal border crossers, or at least long prison sentences, because if the message is that "once you get there you are almost guaranteed to have a pathway to citizenship", why wouldn't all of latin america try? After all, all they have to lose is the right to visit the US legally as tourists, which most of them probably never would do anyway.

I have a longer reply here that I think would be of interest to you but I think the gist is that pro-stock moves can be counterintuitively "pro-outflow" moves. We want to be pro-stock, but we want to keep the stock small by being anti-inflow and pro-outflow, with inflow here meaning people who want to come and stay. People who want to come then want to leave, we should encourage and make it easy for people to do so. All the anti-inflow measures are fine (even though we don't do all of them, for example punish the employers), it's just it should also be coupled with "pro-outflow" moves as well.

I think the "pro-outflow" effect of a pathway to citizenship is likely a drop in a bucket compared to the "pro-inflow" incentive ("All I have to do it to move there, have a kid, avoid ICE for 15 years and then I've secured a statistically better life for all my decendants for generations?"). It's not like the countries illegal immigrants come from overtook the west when it comes to economic prospects in those 15 years. They might outflow on vacation to go visit their family members who didn't immigrate illegally, but they will come back.

I agree that it's important to understand this distinction as it exists in people's minds, but think that once you factor in incentives, most of the distinction is mental/bias/illusion and trying to be pro-stock but anti-flow is largely pointless and hypocritical. That is, I agree with your assessment that most normal people are pro-stock anti-flow while most politicians are either pro-both or anti-both, but I consider the normal position to be the fallacious one.

People respond to incentives. Millions of illegals flock to our shores because they expect a better life here. They expect a better life here because they we have implemented policies which will enable them to have a better life here even if they cross illegally. Every dollar of welfare, every dollar earned under the table at a job, every anchor baby, every forgiven crime, is another reason to come. If people who spent months making their way to the border, taking risks and spending their last money to sneak across it, were met with immediate detection and expulsion, they would not come. If people who managed to avoid detection had to spend their entire lives living in fear because the instant anyone found out about them they and their entire families, including children would be immediately deported back to their home country even decades later when they had no property or connections there anymore, they would not come. I admit that doing this to actual families would carry with it a high cost, so does dropping nukes on someone. But once you do that and people see you do that, they wise up and do whatever it takes for that not to happen to them. It's status quo bias to look at all the illegal immigrants and imagine us being ruthless to everyone like this forever, but the long term outcome of anti-illegal immigration policies is that we will almost never have to do it because people will stop crossing illegally in the first place. We don't have to punish anyone for crimes they don't commit, but it requires punishment when they do, and more importantly it requires consistency. We can't have half the presidents being harsh on illegals and half being lenient, they have to all actually enforce the law.

It is not economically feasible for us to perfect police the border with no leaking. We have to stem the tide at its source: the incentives. You cannot meaningfully be anti-flow while dangling the carrot of American Citizenship to anyone who thwarts you, even if it feels bad to take the carrot away after they've stolen it. Suck it up and do the right thing, and stop letting superficial proximity biases distort good policy.

People respond to incentives

I think we can start from here and expand on what it means to have a regime of "pro-stock and anti-flow", and also examining the 2nd and 3rd order effects of certain policies. As I delve into this topic and reading other discussion here, I'm also seeing that we need to differentiate inflow and outflow because with "anti-flow" what I think most really mean is "anti-inflow and pro-outflow". I'm also seeing a need to differentiate "pro-stock" is not to mean growing the stock, but rather as in develop and pathway to legalization so that they don't remain "stock".

Take this paper published in 2016 which tackles the effect of border enforcement:

Prior to 1986, Mexico-U.S. migration was characterized by great circularity, but since then circularity has declined markedly for undocumented migrants but increased dramatically for documented migrants. Whereas return migration by undocumented migrants dropped in response to the massive increase in border enforcement, that of documented migrants did not. At present, the Mexico-U.S. migration system has reached a new equilibrium in which undocumented migrants are caged in as long term settlers in the United States while documented migrants increasingly range freely and circulate back and forth across the border within rising frequency.

...

Although deportations from Mexico rose from 15,000 in 1990 to 307,000 in 2012 these removals have apparently not had a significant effect on undocumented population size. According to official estimates, the number of undocumented Mexicans dropped by just 200,000 between 2008 and 2012, despite more than 1.9 million deportations over the period

...

U.S. immigration and border policies have implicitly rested on a neoclassical foundation, seeking to drive up the costs and risks of undocumented border crossing while lowering the odds of unauthorized employment and depressing earnings to reduce the incentives for migration. If Mexican migrants are indeed operating according to the precepts of NE (Neoclassical Economics), then the main issue is whether expected U.S. earnings can be reduced enough to deter migrants from heading northward. If, however, migrants are operating according to the precepts of NELM (New Economics of Labor Migration), then driving up the costs and risks of border crossing could well backfire by curtailing circular migration. Having experienced higher costs and risks at the border, migrants might hunker down and stay north of the border rather than returning home to face those costs and risks again. Border enforcement, therefore, can be expected to play an outsized role in the decision making of undocumented as opposed to documented migrants.

Prior work indicates that until 1986 movement between Mexico and the United States was heavily circular, in keeping with expectations from NELM, suggesting a significant risk of backfire from a policy of intense border enforcement. Massey and Singer (1995) estimated that from 1965 to 1985 around 85% of undocumented entries were offset by departures; and Jasso and Rosenzweig (1982) estimated that 56% of legal immigrants from Mexico who arrived in 1970 had returned by 1979. Although we cannot know for sure how many documented and undocumented migrants moved with motivations assumed by NE versus NELM, it is clear that clear that circulation was common in both groups.

Here is an interview, bolded mine:

“The greatest need now is a path to legal status for the 11 million undocumented residents who are already here, who mostly have been here now for 15 years or more and increasingly have U.S. citizen children,” he said. “If we were to grant these people permanent legal status, many would actually return home, secure in the knowledge they could re-enter whenever they want.”

Reading that, what I get are:

  1. Migration programs like temporary visitor programs is "pro-outflow"
  2. Increasing the "cost of border crossing" would definitely be "anti-inflow", but is actually having an "anti-outflow" effect. So any "anti-inflow" effect doesn't matter because any inflow at all is trapped and over time becomes stock.
  3. path to legalization (pro-stock) is counterintuitively "pro-outflow".
  4. As @MadMonzer mentions, and the quotes above reinforces, being documented is a "pro-outflow" move.

Other things that I thought about:

  1. US entities that keep supporting illegal undocumented stock is therefore "pro-inflow" and "anti-outflow". Yet ICE raids surge, but few employers face charges so clearly an avenue of being "anti-inflow" and "pro-outflow" is not being exercised
  2. "On "anchor baby," in 2024, approximately 250k got their green card as a parent. That's a huge number, but at the point when a 21 year old American sponsor you, would another average American consider them stock or flow? I bet most would say closer to stock than flow.
  3. Birthright citizenship is undoubtedly "pro-inflow" and "anti-outflow" and increasing the "stock".
  4. Foreign development that leads to lower fertility rate and makes people less likely to want to leave their country is undoubtedly "anti-inflow" and "pro-outflow" (because those who already came will be attracted to come back).

I think this is a good exercise to think about regarding any immigration policy.

I think you're right about the median illegal immigrant, and maybe about the 90th percentile, but:

I admit that doing this to actual families would carry with it a high cost, so does dropping nukes on someone. But once you do that and people see you do that, they wise up and do whatever it takes for that not to happen to them.

The trouble with this is that people tend to be stupid and stubborn, so "surely people won't be stupid and stubborn enough to bring massive consequences down on themselves for no benefit" just isn't going to be universally true, and prospective illegal immigrants probably are not sufficiently better than average in measures of genius and intellectual humility, so we'll still have to metaphorically nuke the most stupid and/or stubborn exceptions.

Look at your analogy non-metaphorically, even: you'd think that literally dropping nukes on someone would have indeed led to immediate surrender, which would have been uniformly preferable (even game-theoretically in this case, though that's an additional complication) to waiting for more nukes and then surrendering, but when we actually tested that theory it took a second nuke and we were all lucky it didn't take a third.

Indeed, to go with the carrot/stick analogy, pro-stock anti-flow is being pro carrot and pro stick... for the same behavior. At best, you're being confusing, at worst needlessly cruel.

Is anti-stock, pro-flow a coherent position? It seems like many countries (Singapore, UAE) manage a stable equilibrium with something that could maybe be described as that. The anti-stock makes the pro-flow more manageable.

Is anti-stock, pro-flow a coherent position?

It's the old Berchtold Brecht "dissolve the people and elect another" position.

So after reading the various discussion. I realize that if we go further in the definition of flow as "those who want to come or are coming and stay", we can further separate policies as "pro/anti-inflow" and "pro/anti-outflow".

The example of Singapore, UAE can therefore be classified as "anti-inflow, pro-outflow".

That doesn’t fit Anglo culture. Anglo cultures openness to work with others, view towards freedom, and sense of fairness would never allow an anti-stock pro flow policy. They would end up wanting to let “good ones in the flow” get citizenship etc. Saudis never think about giving their Indian slaves a share of their princes oil inheritance.

The anti-tribalness of Anglo culture is a huge problem when travel became cheap and fast.

You will notice that these countries are non-democracies.

I suspect that this is the sort of technocratically correct policy which democracies cannot implement due to the words of a soft spoken MemriTv guest- democracy is government of the people, by the people, and for the people. But the people, are retarded.

It seems coherent enough on its face, at least as coherent as the inverse. Anti-stock, pro-flow would look something like: accommodate transient immigrants to contribute to the economy, but do nothing to assimilate them to the local culture and disregard most requests for permanent residency. I think that would work well for smaller economies (especially those defined by a primate city where the immigrants could be siloed), though I don't know if a country as large as the US could write sensible policy with this in mind.

I agree with both @lollol and @MathWizard - the median voter in the Anglosphere wants a secure border and minimal in-country enforcement (apart from the expeditious deportation of foreign criminals), and this doesn't work very well in practice. As well as the incentives point, illegal immigrants can arrive by overstaying tourist visas, not just by jumping the border - and before the current wave of "refugee" arrivals most did.

But I don't think this means you should be "pro-stock and pro-flow" or "anti-stock and anti-flow". Once we understand that you can't make sane immigration policy by pandering to the median voter, I think you should try to make policy in the national interest, and that means distinguishing between wanted and unwanted immigrants. The Canadian and Australian experience is that if you are visibly trying to do this (by which I mean actually trying, not pretending to try) the public will tolerate a reasonable number of mistakes. Trump, of course, is not doing this - almost nobody thinks that deporting military spouses over paperwork issues is a good idea, but the administration (and its noisiest very online supporters) want to do it as a show of commitment to "deport them all". What is going on here - if we assume the administration is at least marginally competent, the answer is obvious - Trump's mass deportation policy is about putting on a show for his base, not about appealing to the median voter.

As a separate issue, effective in-country immigration enforcement requires a citizen register including biometric data. (And once you have that, you effectively have ID cards even if you don't require people to routinely carry the card). The US basically has this, but it is split between various databases (particularly the SSA and State DMVs) in a way which makes using it for immigration enforcement ineffective. The UK doesn't, which is why we had the Windrush scandal when we tried to do serious in-country enforcement. I think the MAGA base would now support ID cards, but a noisy minority of Republicans profoundly wouldn't. But in any case, ID cards are less unpopular than either open borders or mass deportations of well-behaved settled illegals.

I feel like you could atleast make the argument for why “being mean and doing cruel things” is an optimal policy.

When the gap between the right and left is gigantic on immigration then being cruel to the stock of foreigners the last administration let into the country is a viable threat for when you are out of power.

When Dems will offer Asylum plus American money when in power then many will come. Being cruel and doing things like throwing a German military wife into gitmo for a year accomplishes a viable counterweight to Dems open borders and free stuff in a way that “maybe we will catch you when in power and put you on a Delta flight to your home country does not”.

Also don’t think we’ve put a German wife in Gitmo but we’ve done some cruel things and works fine as a proposal and we probably should do that.

This is all magnified by the fact that America is ran by executive orders and laws don’t mean anything so our government effectively hinges on the electoral college. It’s an all or nothing election.

I think Trump is definitely attempting to put on a show for the base rather than doing things that might be effective.

This seems like the worst option of all policy worlds, because it's basically creating a selection effect for the worst types of immigrants.

It will scare off risk averse immigrants, and any immigrants that want a stable/predictable legal situation.

The easiest to find immigrants are ones that are trying to work within our legal system. They leave a paper trail. That paper trail might be from jobs, taxes, school enrollment, etc.

The hardest to find immigrants operate entirely in the black market.

How are we defining "effective" in this context?

One of MAGA's stated goals is to reduce illegal immigration. If "putting on a show for the base" results in illegal border crossings hitting a 50 year low, they may reasonably conclude that doing so is an effective means of achieving said goal. Refer also to my prior posts on "picking up Tuna Cans".

As for your concern about "selection effects", the argument pattern matches to a common form of rhetorical bait-and-switch where legal immigration is conflated with illegal immigration. I imagine that risk averse immigrants who sincerely want a stable/predictable legal situation would apply for legal status without having to be prompted or threatened.

effective in-country immigration enforcement requires a citizen register including biometric data.

From a technical perspective, you could do an "ID lite" without biometric data. Give out "federal payroll tax numbers" (call it what you want) that come on a credit card sized NFC enabled card with private and public keys. Expand E-Verify and make it mandatory for every single form of income, and force employers to tap the NFC card to a phone when they sign up an employee. Force them to tap in freelancers. Have the system report nothing back but success or failure to enroll. Then soft-roll-out over a period of time (you'll have a few percent of citizens having trouble proofing their status, but you'll always have that) and slowly take SSN out back and shoot it. Make the cards easily revocable and replaceable when stolen or lost.

Then nail everybody not complying for tax evasion.

I have to ask if you are in gun rights spaces at all, because this is very reminiscent of a more moderate (but still pro-gun) suggestion on private sales: Give NICS access (i.e. the federal background check system for firearms purchases) to everyone, with it returning nothing but "yes" or "no", and then require it for all sales, including private. No official record needed (serial numbers, etc.), but at least allow law abiding citizens to sell guns at any time with peace of mind that they're not selling to a felon. And if they do, and they didn't use NICS, proponents argue legal action against the seller is a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way of curbing illegal sales.

Much in the same way, this is a way to verify workers in a minimally intrusive and maximally effective way. And just like NICS access (and voter ID), I doubt anyone with political weight is going to advocate for it.

Canada essentially did this by mistake with their licensing/registration scheme -- online private sales exploded, because you suddenly had a fairly transparent way of checking that somebody in (say) Newfoundland was who he said he was -- and some sort of recourse if he failed to ship your gun to the Yukon or whatever.

To this day this is an area in which Canada is a lot freer than the US for gun-buyers -- the lack of the whole FFL/interstate commerce thing helps of course, but even if that were repealed I'd think that Americans would find transacting with BamaBoy666 on reddit a bit fraught...

almost nobody thinks that deporting military spouses over paperwork issues is a good idea

Caveat: if you've been in the US illegally for several years, get married, and then immediately try to move onto a military base without adjusting your immigration status first... well, I can see how some people might describe that as a "paperwork issue", but I don't think it's an unfair result. And if it isn't a "paperwork issue" in your estimation, sadly, it'll be conflated with those cases that are by people trying to gin up negative publicity, and so I have to eye every story with suspicion that there's more going on behind the scenes than a sob story.

Yeah, I think this is FAFO dumbassery biting them in the rear. Being married to a US citizen, with the aid of a competent immigration lawyer(which military personnel have access to) is pretty much a shoe in for residency.

Yeah, I was thinking of one case in particular:

the woman’s work visa expired around 2017, and she was marked for removal from the United States a few years later. She and the Coast Guardsman were married early this year [...] when the woman and her Coast Guard husband were preparing to move into their on-base housing on Wednesday, they went to the visitor control center to get a pass so she could access the Key West installation. During the routine security screening required for base access, the woman’s name was flagged as a problem.

I saw a lot of people referring to it as a paperwork issue or ICE targeting servicemember spouses, but this case seemed... well, what did anyone expect? The timing of the husband's ship was such that the marriage must have taken place only a few weeks prior to this event, at most. All I can think of is that either the husband didn't know her status (and maybe she didn't, either, somehow, despite having lived and presumably worked in the US illegally for nearly a decade?), or that they assumed (erroneously) that marriage would automatically resolve any status issues. In which case... well, I can forgive her for not knowing the law, but a USCG man should presumably at least think to speak to base counsel or his CO prior to marrying any foreign national, let alone one who has immigration status issues?

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