This follows up on my Dec. 10 post on immigration. On Dec. 11, the New York Times published the analysis I have just cited. It’s long and it’s meaty. If you want to know what’s actually going on, I highly recommend it.
Two things stood out for me.
Thing One: The Immense Scope of the Immigration Surge Under Biden
The Times writes,
Total net migration during the Biden administration is likely to exceed eight million people. That’s a faster pace of arrivals than during any other period on record, including the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, when millions of Europeans came to the United States. Even after taking into account today’s larger U.S. population, the recent surge is the most rapid since at least 1850.
And, by the way,
About 60 percent of immigrants who have entered the country since 2021 have done so without legal authorization, according to a Goldman Sachs report based on government data.
The combined increases of legal and illegal immigration have caused the share of the U.S. population born in another country to reach a new high, 15.2 percent in 2023, up from 13.6 percent in 2020. The previous high was 14.8 percent, in 1890.
Thing Two: The Effect on Working Class Wages
According to the article,
The Congressional Budget Office has concluded that wage growth for Americans who did not attend college will be lower than it otherwise would have been for the next few years because of the recent surge. On the flip side, higher immigration can reduce the cost of services and help Americans, many with higher incomes, who do not compete for jobs with immigrants.
Bernard Yaros Jr., a lead U.S. economist at Oxford Economics, a research firm, described the recent increases as “something that we really haven’t seen in recent memory.” Mr. Yaros said that they had “helped cool wage growth.”
By “political realignment” I’m referring specifically to the need for economically comfortable, college educated people to wake up and smell the coffee, to inform ourselves about the realities of working class life in America, and align with persuadable working class voters to oppose the continued dominance of the super rich.
If you can, you really need to read and digest both of the articles I cite. The Times piece provides a lot of helpful information on the attitudes of young working class men. The other article, from The Atlantic online, works off an interesting but problematic premise: that Republicans and Democrats are in competition to form a “lasting political coalition” with working class voters. Read it and see what you think.
As for me, here’s what I think. I think the incoming Trump administration is going to be dominated by billionaires with a tax cutting, regulation slashing agenda.
I think that if this tax cutting, regulation slashing agenda were to produce big economic gains for working class people, then lots of those working class people would decide that fascism works for them—and our country would well and truly be in deep doodoo.
I also think that if my grandmother had wheels, she could ride on the railroad tracks.
Plus, if my aunt had balls, then she would be my uncle.
I want to make two distinct points about facing MAGA on immigration. I believe that each of my two points is terribly important. (You might not share that opinion, and if you don’t share it, then bless your heart. It’s a free country—at least for the moment.)
Point One: Really Bad Situational Awareness and Strategy
That aptly named Mr. Karma, who is a staff writer for The Atlantic, offers up a lengthy, thorough, and brutal exposition of the Democratic political malpractice that led to the loss of Latino support in 2024 and to the catastrophic Trump victory.
Although I am no expert on the topic, I find Karma’s analysis persuasive. If you are interested in Democratic victories going forward, then I urge you to read it.
Point Two: A Vital Missing Piece of the Analysis—What’s the Right Thing to do About Immigration?
The immigration question is really two issues: 1) What legal standards ought to govern who can, and who cannot, immigrate to the United States, and how are these legal standards best enforced? 2) What should be done about the 11 million plus undocumented people who already live here? Should all of them be deported? Some of them? If only some of them, how to decide who gets to stay and who has to leave?
These are hard questions. Very hard questions. In large measure, because many considerations need to be taken into account in answering them. And because those considerations point in all sorts of different directions.
One of these considerations, among many others, is what is politically feasible. What proposed answers can someone of good will, acting in good faith, present to the American people and obtain their consent?
Because no matter how fair and wise your preferred approach might be, trying to push that approach without public buy-in will only make matters worse.
And conversely: shouldn’t you at least try to identify a sound, moral policy and then see whether you can sell that policy? Shouldn’t you try that approach first, before leaping into a discussion about which bumper sticker slogan is most likely to sell?
And, by the way, I don’t fault Mr. Karma for writing an article on political inside baseball rather than an article on what is good and sound public policy. He and his editors get to choose the topic on which they want to write.
I’m just saying: realize that any analysis of political inside baseball, no matter how fine the analysis, needs to be married to good, defensible public policy.
So is there a way out of the grim place we’re in? What I believe is that while resentment can put bad people in power, in the long run it can’t keep them there. At some point the public will realize that most politicians railing against elites actually are elites in every sense that matters and start to hold them accountable for their failure to deliver on their promises. And at that point the public may be willing to listen to people who don’t try to argue from authority, don’t make false promises, but do try to tell the truth as best they can.
We may never recover the kind of faith in our leaders — belief that people in power generally tell the truth and know what they’re doing — that we used to have. Nor should we. But if we stand up to the kakistocracy — rule by the worst — that’s emerging as we speak, we may eventually find our way back to a better world.
If you were a president-elect, and if your fondest ambition were to be like Orban or Putin, a high priority would be control of the power agencies: the Justice Department, the FBI, and the military. You would select three plausible appointees as Attorney General, FBI chief, and Secretary of Defense—people whose backgrounds would make it hard for a Republican senator to oppose. These choices would be evil, but highly intelligent. You would conspire with these three picks, getting them to commit to your authoritarian goals, but promising to conceal their goals until it’s too late to stop them. These people would not be Matt Gaetz or Kash Patel or Pete Hegseth.
Now, I have long since concluded that trying to read the mind of the Orange God King is a fool’s errand. And, by the way, I am no fool, and neither are you.
But, reflecting on Mango Jesus’s deeds (not his thoughts), I can say this. He has acted as if his fondest desire was to spit on our country’s main institutions of law and order, to order the 53 Republican senators to eat a meal of shit sandwiches, and to force them all to say—to make every mother’s son and daughter of them say—”Thank you, SIR. May we please have some more, SIR?”
And how did Lizard Brain try to bring this about? Well, you will remember that he first demanded—DEMANDED—that the Republican senators agree not to exercise their constitutional duty and right to advise and consent to presidential appointments.
Whoops! That didn’t work.
Then he tried to force Matt Gaetz down their throats as the new Attorney General.
Whoops! That didn’t work, either, so he picked someone else. (A few posts from now, we’ll get to Pam Bondi. I promise you.)
Then he served up an inexperienced, dishonest, drunken lout, Pete Hegseth, as his choice for Defense Secretary.
Then, when that selection ran into Republican opposition, he talked about replacing Hegseth with a more palatable choice.
Then someone realized that, with repeated Shock & Awe stunts going pear shaped, Trump was in imminent danger of getting a reputation as an incompetent old fool.
Then the folks around Trump began leaking that, while Hegseth’s nomination might be in deep doodoo, it was all a very clever ploy to use the nominee as a “heatshield,” to take attention away from the ghastliness of other nominees like Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel and RFK Jr. (See, e.g., Mark Caputo, Hegseth Brings His Nomination Back from the Brink.)
Friends and neighbors, if you think Trump and his henchpersons are playing three-dimensional chess, then please let me know, because I have a fine, fine bridge in Brooklyn that I can let you have at a cheap price.
And What Will the 53 Republican Senators Do About the Shock & Awe Bullshit Nominees?
Three points. First: I don’t know what they’re going to do, and I won’t try to predict what they are going to do. Second: One can always hope, but I have zero expectation that their decisions will be based on patriotism, principle, and reason. Third point: All that said, the most reliable means of predicting human behavior is careful analysis of motivation and incentive. Accordingly, I strongly recommend
Martin names ten of them: McConnell, Collins, Cassidy, Tillis, Ernst, Murkowski, Grrassley, Young, Moran, and the yet-to-be-named (by Governor Mike DeWine) person from Ohio to replace J.D. Vance, and he takes a careful look at each of them—their individual situations, their likely motivations, and their incentives. See also
There will be 53 Republican senators in the next Congress. To Trump’s absurd nominees, one may expect at least 43 of them to say, “SIR, thank you for the shit sandwich, SIR. SIR, may I please have another one, SIR.”
But, for Trump, 43 will not be enough. He needs 50 (so that Vice President Vance can break the tie).
The article goes into some statistical detail to refute a theory that you might not have heard about; I know I haven’t. The refuted theory is that shifts toward Republicans in big cities were a reaction to perceived local Democratic Party mismanagement of urban problems.
No, say the authors. Majority-white areas shifted relatively little. Majority-nonwhite areas shifted toward the Republicans—a lot.
And, in areas that had received a lot of migrants since 2021, there was a really, really big shift to the right. Or, at least, so says the article.
It’s a longish piece. My shorthand summary doesn’t do it justice. You probably want to read it for yourself.
My takeaways? (1) Identity politics is a hound dog that no longer hunts. (2) We badly need to come to a reasonable consensus on immigration—and try to take that issue off the table.
Mr. Schale, a self-described “political hack,” has a lot of things to get off his chest. Worth a full read. Some things that particularly caught my eye:
We must be smarter about how we use data. Right now, we use data as a crutch. We were addicted to ad-testing, to the point that it drove decision-making more this cycle than the desire or need to tell a story. We overuse analytics to find the most “efficient” ways to communicate with voters, meaning in many cases, we just don’t talk to huge swaths of both our base, or to Republicans. Data also allow campaigns to avoid accountability for decisions—just blame the outcome on following the analytics. Data are vital, but should work for the campaign—not the other way around.
We must deal with the right’s tremendous advantage in delivering content.After 2020, I had a billionaire ask me what I thought would be useful going forward. My advice was to spend a billion dollars building out an ecosystem like the right to deliver information to not only our base but persuadable voters. There was an acknowledgement of the problem, but that was all. I worry that coastal Democrats don’t fully grasp just how much of a disadvantage we face on the news consumption front—especially podcasts and social media—and that to solve it, we need a donor or two willing to invest significant capital. …
The truth is we got here because our brand sucks. We tend to put voters in different buckets—black, Hispanic, young, gay, etc.—and treat these groups like they are more progressive than they really are, and somehow unique from each other. At the same time, we’ve made decisions to stop talking to large chunks of the electorate. …
Truth be told, thanks to “smart” election technology—in this case, campaign analytics and modeling—we increasingly don’t talk to voters in large swaths of states.
Facing MAGA 