Why indeed? Well, as Sharry explains, there were lots of reasons: Republican bad faith, especially back in 2013, plus lots of misjudgments and political malpractice on the liberal side.
But it’s got to get fixed.
Frank Sharry is an immigration activist and advocate. If you’re interested, check out his Wikipedia article. As a point of personal privilege, I was happy to learn that he’s a Princeton man. As we used to say back in the day: “Princeton in the Nation’s Service.”
Fourth, lots of people like me were reluctant to crack down on undocumented immigrants. After all, didn’t Rabbi Jesus teach us to welcome the stranger? And didn’t Exodus and Leviticus in the Hebrew Scriptures teach us the very same thing?
Conclusion?
It’s a win-win situation!
Opening the floodgates to undocumented immigrants is the right and moral thing to do!
And we economically comfortable folks get to benefit from cheap labor.
Like I said, a win-win.
And if unskilled working class people here in the United States see their wages depressed, well then, they had just better reread what Jesus said in Matthew 25, learn to share, and not be so picky about what wages they receive. If they have to choose between paying the rent and buying groceries, that’s just the burden they have to bear in order to do the right thing and welcome the stranger.
Oh Wait! That Sounds Like Hypocrisy!
It sounds like prosperous progressives are using purported morality as a cover for economic oppression of the working class.
Maybe we should all cover ourselves in sackcloth and ashes, rend our garments, and spend the next six months in profound contemplation of our own wickedness.
No! No! No! No! No!
Listen up, folks. Here’s the takeaway message.
We are in a political crisis. Trump and his enablers have leveraged concern over immigration to get the electorate to vote for a proto-fascist regime.
If your house is on fire, you put out the damn fire before you start to think deeply about what caused the fire.
Contemplating our own alleged hypocrisy at length is a luxury we can no longer afford.
Establishing a fine moral balance between the worth of a poor person in Guatemala versus a not quite so poor person here in the United States is, likewise, something that we cannot afford to do.
What we MUST do—well in advance of the 2026 election—is to work with the Latino community to develop a politically acceptable solution.
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.
Working people no longer vote their interests as “workers” but cast ballots for all kinds of different reasons. They shifted several points away from Democrats between 2020 and 2024 — but so did many different groups across the electorate, mostly because they were unhappy with the Biden administration’s performance on inflation.
The reductive analysis of working-class voters abandoning Democrats is particularly maddening because it misses what’s actually happening to those voters, which is a crisis much bigger than the temporary fortunes of a political party. This is less a Democratic problem than an American problem — but Democrats have a fresh chance to try to fix it.
For nearly half a century, and particularly over the past two decades, corporate America has plunged workers ever deeper into job and income insecurity. Employers, benefiting from weakened labor laws and lax enforcement of those that remain on the books, have been forcing workers into erratic schedules, hiring them as contractors or temporary or gig workers and stealing their wages. It’s no coincidence that all this happened while labor union membership, which peaked at one-third of the workforce, shriveled to the current 10 percent.
With the decline of unions and collective bargaining, pay has stagnated and pensions have disappeared. Wealth inequality has soared, earnings have become less dependable, and most workers report that they feel stressed, unappreciated, disconnected and distrustful of their employers. They are surveilled on the job, sanctioned for expressing themselves and subjected to dehumanizing workplaces. “Here most of us are, toiling under the authority of communist dictators, and we do not see the reality for what it is,” wrote University of Michigan philosophy professor Elizabeth Anderson. The financial collapse of 2008 and the coronavirus pandemic only deepened the insecurity and misery.
Voting patterns, not just this year’s but this century’s, reflect the discontent and instability. In nine of the past 10 federal elections, one party or the other has lost control of the White House, Senate or House. Voters, desperate for a fundamental change, punish the incumbent party and then, inevitably finding no relief, punish the other party two years later. Politics has become a depressing game of ping-pong, with no enduring wins.
“We’ve never had a period since at least the late 19th century where there have been so many knife’s-edge elections,” Podhorzer [the former political director of the AFL-CIO] told me. “So, coming out of every election, Democrats assume all we need is fine tuning, because we barely lost. We have to get past thinking we’re going to message our way out of this moment. It’s so much bigger than that. And it ignores the fact that, for all of the 21st century, we’ve been seeing that voters just want a different system, a more profound change.”
Even some on the right have begun to argue for a revival of labor unions and New Deal-style government intervention to undo the damage of the past half-century of neoliberalism, the era of the unfettered free market that began with President Ronald Reagan. The conservative writer Sohrab Ahmari argued in his 2023 book, “Tyranny, Inc.,” that the current “domination of working and middle-class people by the owners of capital, the asset-less by the asset-rich,” has “drained the vigor and substance out of democracy, facilitated massive upward transfers of wealth, and left ordinary people feeling isolated and powerless.”
In the short term, Democrats could change nothing and they’d still probably do well by default in the 2026 midterms as disenchanted voters once again punish the incumbent party. President-elect Donald Trump doesn’t have much of a popular mandate: The latest figures show he got below 50 percent of the popular vote, Harris lost by about 1.6 percentage points, and Democrats may have actually gained a seat or two in the House. And he’s already overreaching with outlandish nominations and announced plans to start a trade war with Canada, Mexico and China.
But in the long term, doing nothing would be a huge mistake — for the party and, more important, for the country. We are, in some ways, back to the extreme income inequality and unchecked corporate power over workers that gave rise to the modern labor movement in the 1930s and the New Deal’s government-regulated capitalism, which led America to three decades of broadly shared economic prosperity after World War II. What’s needed to relieve workers’ pain this time is no less ambitious.
Facing MAGA 