I disagree with the entire premise that illegal immigrants who have evaded capture for long enough should be ignored. From where I sit, they should be the first targets, very publicly banished from the US, forbidden on pain of death from ever setting foot on US soil again. Anything less that that will encourage illegal immigration. Now, if they have been well behaved while here, I am open to the idea of them being free to choose a destination which will accept them if their initial homeland is problematic (and remaining in ICE custody for a time while attempting to establish a destination), but they can't stay here.
I knew that would be a controversial point, but with which particular part of my argument do you disagree?
Do you think I am wrong to say that America has become their homeland, that I am wrong to say that banishing someone from their homeland is a sin without just cause, or that I am wrong to say that illegal entry is not a sufficient cause for such a severe penalty?
The last of those options. Premise: No criminal should be allowed to benefit from their crime *after being convicted of having committed said crime*. The benefit of illegal entry into the United States is living in the United States. Therefore, a punishment whereafter they stay in the United States is not a functional deterrent.
Wouldn't you say that the punishment for a crime ought to be reasonably proportioned to the harm caused by that crime? For example, even if it were necessary to achieve deterrence, it would be unjust to have someone executed for, say, falling into a patch of your neighbor's flowers while playing ball (a la Wesley Crusher), right?
It seems to me that the harm done to us by a single act of illegal immigration, while serious and punishable, does not approach the life-ruining harm inflicted by permanently taking a man away from his family, friends, parish, job, etc.. We should punish illegal immigrants (hence my suggestion of garnishing wages and serving time), and I think making that making punishment severe enough balances the scales of justice and serves as adequate deterrent, even though the criminal does also get to enjoy the fruits of his crime. (If it's not enough deterrence, I suppose then garnish the wages more!)
That is an approach we take with quite a few crimes. If a dude beats up another dude for committing adultery with his wife, we can't take away the wounds he inflicted and we can't take away the satisfaction he derives from revenge, so he will enjoy the fruits of his crime, but we CAN make up for those fruits by inflicting other, proportionate penalties on him (like several years of jail).
Just because we do not know the identity of the man who was robbed of the opportunities that the illegal immigrant has taken advantage of, does not mean that the benefits the illegal immigrant has earned were not at the cost of some citizen who would otherwise have legally earned them.
It might not be that we disagree on the principle of proportionality, but rather that we disagree on the severity of the crime.
What is your point of reference for illegal entry to the US and masquerading as a US Citizen for 20 years? Mine is identity and wage theft for the duration.
Because that is the way the world works. Countries are clubs, the core feature of a club is the ability to control membership. If you don't do that you don't have a club.
Literally no one actually wants to live in a borderless world. So stop pretending you do.
I think I also need to deny the first claim. Not because my position needs it, but for the same reason that I cannot admit that two men are married, whatever the civil law of the land may say. The lie at the foundation of their claims "this is my homeland" or "this is my spouse" will corrupt like an unconfessed mortal sin.
Why do you think it's wrong? I think I sketched out some decent reasons in the article for thinking it's right. You are correct, of course, that getting that first step wrong would poison the rest of the argument, so it's reasonable to object there.
I don't think the lying itself makes it no longer a lie. However, other factors may intervene to make it no longer a lie.
For example, suppose I tell you every day for a decade that I am a millionaire. This would be a lie. However, on day 3,653, I win the Powerball. The next day, I tell you I am a millionaire. It's true!
Or, likewise, suppose I am 15 (and tall) when I start using a fake ID and telling people I'm old enough to drink, so that they sell me drinks. This is all lies. After 6 years, I actually am old enough to drink, so it's no longer a lie.
I think that, if you've settled in a place for two decades, people should recognize it as your homeland, regardless of whether or not you spent the preceding two decades lying about it.
Except that there is a legal mechanism for changing one's homeland, and this individual, by definition, has never gone through the steps to do so. I do not grant that your common law analogy holds water, nor that your story of your dad moving from PA to MN is apples to apples with illegal immigration.
1) for anyone in the third world moving to America (even illegally) is worth millions of dollars in value. Probably more.
2) given this incentive, the immigrant must believe that the % likelihood of getting caught and the punishment for getting caught are combined worse then the multi-million dollar payout.
3) that’s going to require pretty high clearance rate on detection and capture as well as a pretty “cruel” punishment.
I don’t see any way around this logic. Perhaps in the far past the cost of global travel and the lack of a welfare state presented enough non-legal barriers to keep large third world migration out without much enforcement, but not today.
The only countries I see keeping immigrants out combine high clearance rates with significant punishments. There are a few lucky examples for whom geography grants some natural exclusivity, but this doesn’t apply to America.
4) birthright citizenship (there is zero possibility of the constitutional amendment) combined with family reunification (which you say should be preserved) means that immigration enforcement is basically impossible if they get across the border. All you gotta do is get over and have a baby, and now you’re untouchable. Everyone knows this which is why they do it. China even has essentially a mass birth tourism operation to exploit this hack.
This is also why your math is a bit off. I think most people would consider someone born to an illegal “foreign born” but that doesn’t show up in the statistics because of our birthright citizenship (that btw is unique to the Americas, Europe doesn’t have it).
I think we need to raise doubt that this “hack” is full proof and the only way to do so is some high profile examples.
Nobody chooses or earns their situation of birth and our legal processes have long been broken and arbitrary, so the ethical justification for deportation of long assimilated migrants, regardless of whether they overstayed a visa and committed a regulatory infraction… or not, is extraordinarily cruel and also highly unlikely to do anything but confirm to all portions of the polity that our shared humanity is minimal but our capacity for arbitrary cruelty is enormous.
"Nobody can earn for anyone else" -- This is false. Parents have been earning for their children since Adam and Eve. A person's birthright, whatever it may entail, is their parents' second gift to them (after the gift of life). The value of that birthright is the fruit of the labors of the parents. To say that that is not earned at all because it is not earned by the child is disingenuous.
How is it disingenuous!? How could the child earn what the parents earned?? How could inheritance be anything but an entirely unearned nepotism bonus??
Do hospitals randomize which children are returned to which parents? (Obviously not) I therefore conclude that the inheritance of the child is earned by the parents, and it is not wrong for the child to experience any benefits that his/her parents may have earned (unless those benefits were criminally gained, I suppose). Just because the child hasn't earned the benefits, it does not imply that the benefits have not been earned by anyone else on behalf of the child. Once you have earned benefits, it is entirely within your discretion to give them to whomever you choose. Even if the person(s) you give them to never do(es) anything to earn those benefits, the work you did still earned those benefits.
If we are to treat immigration crimes like that, we should probably treat other crimes like that as well. Drive faster than the posted speed limit even once? Lose your license, lose your car. Run a red light? Lose your license, lose your car. Don't pay all your taxes? Prison.
If you draw a Venn Diagram of the people who want all illegals deported because they "broke the law," and the people who were horrified that Biden hired more IRS agents to catch tax cheats you will get a circle. Conservatives are also much more likely to oppose red light cameras to ticket the filth who run red lights, even though traffic accidents kill far more people than illegals. That's how you know that all the people who say that illegals need to be deported without mercy because "they broke the law" are liars. They don't support merciless, relentless enforcement of the law any time the law is something they might feel like breaking someday.
If some kind of natural disaster devastated the US so lots of Americans wanted to flee to other countries, I am sure that people like you would quickly come up with explanations for why it is totally okay for you to illegally emigrate to countries that the disaster didn't hit.
While I admit that I have not read Two Hundred Years Together, I have now thoroughly searched two different copies of the book for this quotation (Incorrect Library translation). It does not appear, nor does anything that closely resembles it. I believe the quote is fabricated.
On the other hand, there is this quote in the final pages of Chapter 9:
> To these subjects of discontent was added the humiliating defeat against Japan, and the ruling circles of Saint Petersburg yielded to the temptation of a simplistic explanation: Russia is fundamentally sound, and the whole revolution, from beginning to end, is a dark plot hatched by the Jews, an episode of the Judeo‐Masonic plot. Explain everything by one and the same cause: the Jews! Russia would long have been at the zenith of glory and universal power if there were no Jews!
> And, clinging to this short but convenient explanation, the high spheres only brought the hour of their fall even closer.
> The superstitious belief in the historical force of conspiracies (even if they exist, individual or collective) leaves completely aside the main cause of failures suffered by individuals as well as by states: human weaknesses.
> ...No, it can not be said in any case that it was the Jews who “organised” the revolutions of 1905 or 1917, just as one cannot say that it was this nation as a whole that fomented them. In the same way, it was not the Russians or the Ukrainians, taken together as nations, who organised the pogroms.
The Jews sure do get a raw deal, though: communism always presented them as greedy capitalist monsters (because the US had greater influence in Israel, which threatened the USSR's monopoly in the Middle East), but capitalist anti-Semites always talk about them as craven communists! They can't win!
I confess that I am never quite sure how to respond to an anti-Semite. With a regular honest racist, you can talk about black-on-white crime statistics and HBD and dig into root causes and the uglier side of American history, conceding on some points but scoring on others, until the racist has some substantial doubts about his views.
But anti-Semites always cloak what they have to say in at least two layers of cryptic misdirection, because they're afraid they're going to get banned (a reasonable worry, to be sure), and then what they actually believe always seems (to me) to be built on a foundation of water. It turns out to be *all* redirects, every justification giving way to another, all the way down to an irrational core belief (but where does it come from?) that The Jew is not entirely human (but then what else could he be?). Honest racists are not uncommon, but I've not yet met an honest anti-Semite.
I worry for people in your position. I really do. Not as much as I worry for your would-be victims, but I do worry. But I don't know how to address you in a way that you are able to hear.
terrible idea. the state's job isn't to make the wicked suffer, the more they suffer the better, it's to maintain order. However unfair you think it is for your mexican neighbor to come here and build a life and raise a family without the government's permission, killing these people as official state policy would provoke a backlash so bad it would legitimately be catastrophic
My understanding is that the three most severe punishments a state can give, in increasing order of severity, are "Life imprisonment", "Banishment", and "Death". If a convict has been banished once and returns, what punishment can be given but death?
I establish elsewhere in these comments how and why I think that banishment is the proper penalty for illegal entry into the US. What else could you do in the case of a repeat offender illegal entrant into the US?
My goal is neither: My goal is crime deterrence, particularly deterrence of repeat crimes.
I don't care if it is cheaper to imprison than to execute (in this context) because life imprisonment is a lighter sentence than banishment, so it can't be the penalty for a second instance of a crime whose first time penalty is banishment, disregarding what the crime might be.
Sorry, just to be clear, we're talking about like, some pedro herrera who lived in the us for 19 years and like, installs roofs and never committed any violent crimes, right? If he hops the border again because he wants to see his daughter we execute him?
Does the federal government actually have the power to mandate E-Verify? I imagine it does under current interpretations of the interstate commerce clause, but from an originalist standpoint it seems like a stretch.
This is an interesting question, and I have not considered the answer. It's always taken as read that Congress can do this, and I never stopped to think under what power.
Were I to defend mandatory E-Verify, though, I think I would defend it on the basis of the *foreign* commerce clause rather than the interstate commerce clause. Hiring illegal immigrants is a form of commerce with foreign nations, and Congress cannot regulate what it cannot detect, so the necessary & proper clause enables it to do what it needs to do to detect it (within reason).
This is a very interesting theory, but something feels off about it to me. My basic intuition is that if you look at Trump's base of support, it's largely in areas with *low* foreign-born populations, which seems like it would be surprising on your view: the idea is that your community is being changed by incompatible or unfamiliar cultures that come with the foreign-born population, so it would be kind of odd if the areas with the smallest foreign-born populations are also the most supportive of the right-populist anti-immigration candidate.
Of course, I wanted to check this intuition, so I ran a quick correlation between state foreign-born population percentage and Trump vote percentage in 2024.
My results match my initial intuition: the r of foreign-born % to Trump vote % is -0.56 (p < 0.00003). Spearman's rho matches: -0.64, in case you were worried about Pearson's r with this dataset.
You could probably run the same thought on county-level data instead of state-level data, but this is a bigger project than I was ready to undertake this morning. My intuition is that the effect would be even stronger there, since immigrants tend to live in urban areas [citation needed] and one of the biggest splits right now is urban-rural [citation needed]. I don't know whether the Know Nothings had a similar distribution or not, another thing worth checking I suppose, if reliable data is available.
Does your theory have an explanation for this? Maybe national news/media means that people all over the country feel the effect, so it goes beyond one's own community? Or some kind of sorting effect where people get angry about immigrants and leave to low-immigrant areas (I'm skeptical this happens in large numbers, but maybe)? Or maybe when foreign-born populations get high, they start to filter into those non-urban areas and the local max is very low, so it triggers this even if the local max in urban areas has not been reached?
My theory of the case is that, in reality, American communities have wildly different assimilation capacities.
Cities (by my theory) have *always* had way more assimilation capacity than small towns. For example, New York City's foreign-born share of population has been above 20% basically without interruption since the 1840s, often above 30%, and sometimes above 40%. ( https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/historical-population/1790-2000_nyc_total_foreign_birth.pdf ) NYC has always had its problems and immigration-related strains, but I wouldn't say it's proved unequal to the challenge. And the city has immense resources, a strong cultural identity specifically around assimilation, and tons of social infrastructure for dealing with this sort of thing that Glenwood, MN does not.
In my thinking, then, national immigration capacity is a function of individual community capacities, and any national figure is just a very blunt averaging of very different situations in thousands of very different communities. My expectation going into this clean, then, would have been that any national figure would be mostly noise, with very little signal. I'd've thought you'd need to do a lot of fancy math to figure out what the actual capacities are in various communities, compare them to actual loads, then weight them appropriately. You'd need like 70 pages of tables and argument to get me to buy into a particular answer about immigration capacity, and, even then, there'd be no single national number, just a lot of community-specific numbers and a distribution issue.
But then I looked at national figures and found reasonably consistent patterns at thresholds that seemed plausible, which made me think that community-specific deviations from the norm mostly cancel out across the nation. On the model I just described, there shouldn't really be *any* correlation between national foreign-born population share and nativist attitudes, because that model says that all national statistics are overwhelmingly noise instead of signal. But the signal-to-noise ratio on national statistics actually seems to be fairly good!
This could happen if, for example, the distribution of immigrants to communities tends to be proportionate to that community's capacity to receive them. If NYC's capacity is 40% and Glenwood's is 4%, and 90% of immigrants go to NYC (or places with similar high capacity) while only 10% go to Glenwood (or places with similar low capacity), they would all hit their capacities at about the same time.
So that is my (tentative, untested) explanation for what you describe, and indeed for why national-level figures provide any signal at all.
It’s because people who live outside of cities and high immigrant populations have been convinced by media bubbles (and a version of the Chinese Robber Fallacy) of the encroaching horrors of the immigrant socialist hell holes, despite all crime data running in the opposite direction for 35 years.
The idea that it’s about actually exceeding immigration capacity seems wildly incompatible with any macro data or the regional data. It is about how rural conservatives believe in a cartoon propaganda version of left leaning high immigration cities.
I was born in the New York metro area and now I live in Florida. I think it would be fair to say that the changes brought about to my home city by immigration are part of why I moved away. If you don’t like immigration you’re going to move away from immigrants. I’ve seen several studies showing this effect is true on mass across the globe. Natives are essentially being driven from their cities and are willing to pay a premium to live in low immigration communities (usually out in the burbs). A lot of movement from blue states to the sunbelt is driven by people fleeing the effects of immigration.
Electorally is has an impact even were you don’t live. New York used to be more of a swing state. California used to be republican. Nobody can imagine these things anymore. Mitt Romney got 59% of the white vote and lost (he got 51% of the California white vote).
This doesn't make a ton of sense at a state-level. For example, your move from New York to Florida is basically a lateral move - NY's foreign-born population is 23.3%, FL's is 23.1% (obviously some areas are higher than others - I'm sure NYC is higher than Pensacola). The sunbelt is a bit of a fuzzy term, but let's say it includes: CA, NV, AZ, NM, TX, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, FL. The median foreign-born population in those states is 11.9%, the median for all states is 8.3%. It especially doesn't make sense to head to the southwest, TX, or FL if you are trying to escape immigration - those states are all above average in terms of foreign-born population, and most are in the top third.
Maybe at an urban -> suburban/rural level you might see this effect, but it doesn't really make sense on a state level.
As for which states are in play vs. which aren't, I think there's a lot more factors than this. FL used to be a toss-up (famously), now is solidly red. AZ used to be solid red, now is a toss-up. MI and IA used to be a toss-ups, now solid red. NM used to be a toss-up, now solid blue. If someone can't imagine a state changing its electoral alignment, they probably just don't know much electoral history. Nothing is set in stone.
1) Florida's whites vote 2/3rds GOP. Whites outside of the south are more split closer to 50/50, so adding a few immigrants to the blacks is enough to make things a one party state.
2) Florida's largest Hispanics population is Cubans. Cubans are "white hispanics". A super majority of them identify as white on the US census. Genetic tests confirm this. In most of the third world communism was a proxy battle between light skinned and dark skinned people. Refugees from communism in Cuba has large European admixture and pass as white. You can clearly see this walking around downtown Tampa. They also have personal experience with leftisms failures.
By contrast NY has Puerto Ricans. Most of these don't identify as white (and genetic tests confirm this) and the percentage identifying as white is actually falling (negative assimilation).
3) I agree that GOP dominance in Florida can be a fragile thing. Of all the states its the most in flux and has the least history (basically unpopulated before air conditioning). But there are structural advantages that I think are entrenched. No income tax obviously. Pro-growth mindset. And most personally to me universal school vouchers. I lived this covid and woke in my kids northern schools and said enough.
Hi, first time commenter and first time lurker. Got this recommended by the algorithm, well written piece. I was looking for this comment chain/response after reading since it was my primary objection. Idaho, with a 5% total immigrant population, continues to have immigration be a major issue despite the fact that the vast majority of Idahoans have never met an immigrant of any kind.
> American communities have wildly different assimilation capacities.
But...why? This is fine to state, but it begs the question. I strongly suspect that if you dug under this question you would find intense xenophobia and racism (which Japan also has, I might add). You may argue that certain communities don't have the right institutions, but I'd counter that if you tried to build those institutions they would be shunned because it's not really about the institutions at all. As evidence, note the intense hatred Fox News seems to have for any city with a population greater than 500k.
I'm not sure why we should aim to limit immigration despite its obvious benefits. Why not try and make more places like NYC? Why should we take as given that American communities just have different immigration capabilities by fiat? This seems malleable, so why shouldn't we try and change that?
The short answer is: We should! I think it is admirable for a nation to have a large capacity for immigration.
However, we run into the old problem of reliable thing-we-are-pretty-sure-works (reduce strain by reducing immigration) vs. unreliable or experimental policy that might work a lot, or only a little, or not at all (reduce strain by increasing capacity).
Unfortunately I came to the same conclusion in the run up to the 2024 election. Going by history, we start to see negative impacts on the social order when immigration reaches somewhere around 10% foreign born. 7-10% is our sweetspot as a nation. I say unfortunately because all the remedies are awful.
A factor I think is also important is the 2nd generation citizen population. My mom is a 2nd generation citizen. Her mom came from Ireland as a young adult, and married a man who was a 2nd generation citizen whose parent's were from Ireland as well. My mom who was born and raised in the US has had a strong affinity for Ireland her whole life and a corresponding lack of attraction to the US. She was raised in a Irish ghetto, considers herself Irish enough to seek out and obtain citizenship, and has a large in-group bias towards the Irish and other people of Irish decent. She tries to convince me to get Irish citizenship every few months and doesn't understand my resistance to the very idea. *I* am American.
I think there is probably a limit to 2nd generation citizens as well, though that data will be harder to suss out. That might be what we see with Canada as well - I suspect Canada has fewer second generation citizens but more first generation citizens. The rule might be something like "Less than 1/3 of the population must be a first or second generation immigrant."
Though I don't think the picture is quite so rosy in Canada. They seemed poised to elect a "far right" candidate up until Trump started talking about annexing Alberta and then support tanked for anything associated with the right.
Another aspect is that 10% across the country could still be close to 30-50% in a specific small town. If there is more of an effort to funnel immigration evenly that might work as well as reducing the immigrant population This means intentionally breaking up refugee groups when resettling, among other things which might be unsavory to people but it is the kind of thing that would also possibly increase the rate of integration and increase the overall amount of immigrants we could take in.
Regarding E-verify, from my understanding, employers are legally required to accept any "reasonably genuine" documents that appear to relate to the employee, even if they are not ultimately confirmed by e-verify. Employers cannot terminate an employee simply because they believe they are an illegal immigrant. Doing so may result in anti-discrimination lawsuits against the employer and then the immigrant receives protection from deportation for up to 6 years.
"“Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement” (DALE) is a temporary immigration status meant to encourage workers to report employers’ unlawful practices without fear of retaliation, including threats of deportation. DALE, if granted, is a commitment from DHS to protect its recipient from deportation for four years, with a possibility to renew that protection for an additional two years. During this time, a DALE recipient is considered to be lawfully present in the United States and is able to apply for work authorization. It is important to understand, however, that DALE is only a temporary protection that does not offer any pathways to a permanent legal status in the U.S. Also, applying for DALE does notify DHS that you are in the United States, with the possibility that DHS could try to deport you after your legal status expires. We strongly recommend consulting with an immigration attorney before requesting DALE."
Maybe I received bad information regarding this but it sounds like the problem might not be entirely on the corporations but at least some of the blame lies on our litigious society.
I disagree that just because someone evaded the law for long enough they should automatically receive amnesty. Statue of limitations are due to evidentiary difficulties, not because there's some moral right to avoid punishment for wrongdoing if you're good enough at it. If the idea is that immigration crimes are simply unimportant, mere clerical errors, I think the existence of this post is sufficient to demonstrate that this is not the case. Illegal immigration can bring a nation to her knees.
Though I guess we do have precedent for a statue of limitations and for that alone we have room to argue that people who have been here for a decade+ should have standing to remain. Unless they have warrants out on them or were otherwise told to get out in a reasonable time frame from their entry.
Another solution is to increase birth rates of later-generation Americans, though no one really knows how to do this.
I am going to make a few notes on this insofar as they relate to my own country.
First, data from Statistics Canada indicates that the percentage of newborns in Canada with foreign-born mothers has increased substantially over the last quarter-century: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91f0015m/91f0015m2025004-eng.htm So your hypothesis about second-generation outcomes, unless I am misunderstanding it, would seem not to hold up. (If you read my initial comments here, we do have immigration tensions; we've just taken steps to address them.)
Second, it wasn't the threat to annex Alberta that led to Poilievre's loss. (The meetings between Alberta separatists and US officials came later. One took place in a SCIF.) Poilievre lost because he is an attack dog who got all of his targets taken away (mainly carbon pricing and Justin Trudeau). If you want an example of a conservative political party getting torched in an election post-Donald, likely because the voters took one look at the US and said "oh hell no", look at Albanese's Labor's landslide over Dutton's Coalition in Australia.
The anti-US turn that Canadians have taken is because of gratuitous threats of wholesale annexation (former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull noted that "[i]t would be a joke if it wasn't so serious"), imposition of tariffs in violation of CUSMA (yes, the US is currently largely abiding by the letter of CUSMA, outside certain sectors, but for a few days the tariffs were fully in effect), claims that the US doesn't need anything from Canada (we ship you below-market oil, Hydro-Québec powers New England, and BC Hydro makes sure Washington-Oregon border towns on the Columbia River don't flood, also how're your tourism and alcohol sectors doing, businesses on the ground and border-state politicians are begging us to come back and Ambassador Pete has been claiming that it's insulting that most of our provinces won't stock your booze all the while purporting not to know why we're so fucking pissed off and telling us that even though the alcohol bans were in retaliation for the tariffs, putting the booze back on the shelves won't get the tariffs lifted, so why the hell should we) and flagrant disrespect like "Governor Trudeau" (and more recently "Governor Carney").
It is a source of no small amount of irritation here that it seems most USAians (as exemplified by Pete Hoekstra) don't get why we're so pissed off. (As South Park put it years ago, "A third of the world hates you because you don't understand why a third of the world hates you." These days that quote might be more accurate if it read "ninety-five percent".)
But to the actual point of the article, I don't think your first- and second-generation benchmark is correct, per the data from Statistics Canada I noted, and I suspect rather that it has more to do urbanization (with large urban areas being able to absorb more foreign-born residents) and diversity (with, in contrast to James' hypothetical, no particular immigrant group being able to dominate local politics).
We're people who'll drive forty-five minutes in a blizzard to avoid shopping at a store we don't like. (I know someone who boycotts Shell to this day because she can't forgive them for operating in apartheid South Africa.)
It's not like we haven't had diplomatic rows before; Bush was pissed off that Chrétien chose not to send Canadian forces to Iraq in 2003. (Canadians still served in Iraq because some were on military exchange in deployed US units, and until the Russo-Ukrainian War the longest confirmed sniper kill in history--3.5 kilometres--was made by a Canadian JTF-2 operative during operations against the Islamic State in 2017.) But we're also people who do things like Operation Yellow Ribbon when the US closed its airspace following the September 11, 2001 attacks, or the Canadian Caper to evacuate US embassy personnel in Tehran after the 1979 Revolution against the US-backed dictatorial regime, going so far as to forge diplomatic papers (risking a major diplomatic incident) to get them out.
We even followed the US lead on things like tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles at the behest of the Biden administration, and saw two of our citizens kidnapped by China for the better part of three years after, following Donald I's invocation of our bilateral extradition treaty, we detained Huawei executive Meng Wangzhou in Vancouver while extradition hearings were ongoing.
We've even put up with USAians making fun of our accents and our paper money. (At least you can tell ours apart at a glance, unlike US notes which have far more muted colours, and only got those in the last twenty years or so.) Or trying to bring guns across the border in violation of our laws. (Reportedly at some crossings the CBSA staff have a daily betting pool on how many people trying to enter Canada will attempt to do so with their firearms, and when denied entry, cite their "Second Amendment" right to carry the gun, even though no such right exists here, and certainly no such right exists concerning importation. The US, of course, has similar rules for non-immigrant travellers attempting to bring firearms across the border.)
I really have to wonder how much these various aspects of the bilateral relationship are actually known among the general USAian population. But we've been putting up with USAian ignorance for decades. (To be honest, my opinion of USAians is so low, they'd have to work very hard indeed to disappoint me.)
"51st state" and "Governor Trudeau" pushed us over the edge. "Badly misread" is putting it lightly.
Since the majority of Americans are opposed to this status quo, they have been split into two extreme camps and taught to hate each other by corporate media. As you described, one camp is extremely supportive of illegal immigrants on humanitarian grounds, and the other is extremely unsupportive of illegal immigrants on rule of law grounds. This dichotomy maintains the status quo - immigrants are allowed in and are able to get jobs, but in effect do not have the same rights as those with legal status.
China actually maintains a similar population of internally-displaced, ethnically-Chinese migrant workers without full residency rights in the area where they live and work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_in_China
As in the US, this results in widespread family separation as Chinese migrant workers' children are often not able to follow their parents when they migrate to another region for work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-behind_children_in_China
Rich societies in the 21st century are built on the backs of disenfranchised migrant workers - slavery by another name - just like every other great empire in human history, dating all the way back to the pharaohs.
I'm usually skeptical of your "it's Big Business" omnicause (particularly insofar as it requires large numbers of business leaders to coordinate decades-long campaigns without leaving behind much evidence), but immigration is one of the places where the theory seems unusually plausible. It's easy enough to see how Big Business, by simply making it too costly for politicians to notice certain things, could drive this polarization without consciously planning or coordinating it.
Or because doing so is too painful for them / their voters.
Or perhaps even because the solution that seems obvious to one is genuinely not obvious to another.
(Or, another classic: multiple obvious solutions, each of which is unacceptable to a blocking minority, so we have majorities supporting various solutions but none becoming law.)
For example: I don't think Congress is being *paid* to let Social Security go into crisis in 4 years, and the solution *was* obvious (adopt GW Bush's plan in 2005). Yet here we are! Now everyone's presenting different "obvious" solutions: raise the retirement age! lift the payroll tax cap! means-test payments! allow the cuts! This all seems to be happening with very little influence from the Captains of Industry, or so it seems to me.
You didn't mention what I think is the most obvious solution of all, which is to start adding the portion of Social Security not covered by payroll taxes to the national debt.
The Big Business angle to this approach is that it turns Social Security into welfare rather than an earned benefit, and thereby opens it up to future spending cuts.
At the current time, given current debt financing costs, I think that solution would alarm Big Business. Interest rates would go up, maybe quite substantially, and would keep going up for a long time, and they hate that. They'd get inflation and higher financing costs, which they hate as much as the rest of us.
Also, wasn't your thesis that the obvious solution that Congress was being paid not to do was that it was something Big Business *didn't* want?
And what's the coordinating mechanism for this particular conspiracy?
So I have a lot of problems with the thesis in this area. (It fits immigration much better, though.)
As usual, very thorough and very good. My initial reaction is ironically the opposite of Chuck C. I do, in fact, think it's perfectly fine to “Come to America illegally! As long as you can get away with your crime for long enough, you’ll get to stay!” The effort required for the resource-dry work of living fully under the table tends to breed, in my experience, the most innovative and "American" people.
My bigger thought, however, is to ask if it is really wrong, other than the "why me" of any living population, for an immigrant group to merge with a native population such that a new culture is created? In the long arch of history, this has happened to pretty much every culture at one time. Most of the nations that ruled during the time of Christ no longer exist, with a few exceptions.The Romans dissolved into various tribes. Everyone was French for a few years during Napoleon. The notion of the nation-state didn't fully come to exist in Europe until around the 1700s. Germany, in its current form, is younger than I am. In other words, I think the argument about immigration in the US and Europe today is microscopic and deeply unpragmatic.
Even though I understand your frustration at the theme park, part of me is not exactly worried about the future of American culture, because no culture is ever calcified or survives more than a few hundred years. We, as a nation, will have a different face in 50 years and probably a different name in 500. And that's okay with me. Maybe all the radicals' fears will come true and the US will become majority Muslim and Africa will become the cradle of Christianity, which will spread through India (as the trend looks now), and the values we hold dear will be kept alive in places we will never visit. That doesn't scare me.
I feel like we (American Catholics) spend a lot of time worry about how to protect American culture, forgetting that Jesus had never heard of it.
On the one hand, you are, of course, correct that culture *will* change, whether you like it or not, whether you protect it or not. That's just what culture does, always. Even in the context of assimilation, assimilation is *always* a two-way street, leaving both majority and minority changed by the encounter (usually each acquiring what is best about the other). The French have that silly Academy or whatever whose sole purpose is to preserve the French language inviolate for all time and, like, sorry friends, doomed project!
However, yes, culture is going to change, but a lot hinges on how quickly it does so. Smash two cultures together too quickly and you're going to get a lot of problems: crime, violence, economic dislocation. This alone is going to make a lot of people very unhappy, and cause them to (rationally) call for slowing or stopping immigration.
Worse, if you go too fast, you're also going to lose stuff that is very good, stuff you didn't have to lose. For example, I think America, for all her faults, has some very good values. Representative government. Religious pluralism. Freedom of speech and inquiry. Self-reliance. Equal justice under law, not just for the clan, but for everyone without limitation. Self-government (and long practice with it). Living with them all our lives, I don't think we always recognize how counterintuitive these are, and how unnatural. They are not the human default. We are trained in them almost from the day we are born, and we have to transmit them through careful education to our children. One of the great things about America (and, nowadays, other countries of the West) is our ability to teach these counterintuitive things to strangers, too, making them part of our great extended clan. But we can only teach so many at a time. If we bring in too many, you're right, we will get a fusion culture... but the resulting culture may be missing some *or all* of these things. Historically, the Catholic Church was very skeptical of lots of these things, but I'm American enough to believe that losing these values would be a great loss to the world. Indeed, it would be a great loss to immigrants, since, once those values are lost, the door would slam shut on them completely and forever!
Whereas, if we pace ourselves, bringing in lots New Americans but never so many that they erode our core commitments, we can ensure that these values (and many other good things at our culture) will be preserved, even as our culture continues to change and grow over decades and centuries to come.
I think of it like a lake: lakes constantly need new infusions of nitrogen and phosphorous to stay vital, and they are constantly changing. But put in too much nitrogen *too fast* and BOOM, algae bloom, oxygen levels collapse, fish die off.
I think cultures for sure evolve, but historically most assimilating cultures didn't have the current progressives in the west suicidal infatuation with undermining their own culture and elevating the "other's".
I think the "appetite for immigration" and level of acceptable immigration would be much higher if California wasn't running government programs in 30 different languages (I worked on a project where we did this and believe me it was a nightmare). Where immigrants were expected to change.
Yes there would still be an overall averaging. But the left's attitude right now (as I related in another post) is basically "fuck white people and their culture and America too". It makes people defensive and worried and less willing to tolerate immgiraiton.
I do remember that almost every dark-skinned woman in the park that night was wearing a hijab, and I remember wondering whether that night was East African Heritage Night or something because the crowd had such an unusual racial composition.
(Of course, I didn't put together "hijab" + East African until my wife mentioned that the haunted house girls were East African and I asked how she knew.)
Prefacing note before all of this: there are (broadly) two kinds of birthright citizenship, jus soli and jus sanguinis. The former is "right of soil", whereby anyone born in a country receives citizenship there. The latter is "right of blood", whereby anyone descended from a citizen of a country receives citizenship there. (If you recall, there were questions around Ted Cruz's eligibility to be President back in 2016, because while he has at least one US-citizen parent, he was, in contrast to the earlier questions around John McCain being born in the then-US-controlled Panama Canal Zone, without question born in Canada, so the question was whether, in light of the Fourteenth Amendment, Mr. Cruz's jus sanguinis citizenship satisfied the "natural-born citizen" requirement, since jus soli citizenship is Constitutionally mandated while jus sanguinis citizenship exists by statute. As you noted in an earlier article, the answer was, of course, "duh", but there were still questions.) It is probably useful to distinguish these categories when discussing immigration and citizenship.
So, Canada and immigration.
Yes, we've got a lot of foreign-born residents. Depending on where you are, this doesn't produce the sort of social tension you described, but Canadian culture is very low-tension already. (Canada is also very racist; arguably it is more so than the US because the US is more cognizant of its racism. See, for instance, Romanian stand-up comic Victor Patrascan eviscerating a couple from Edmonton here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQqdenMLSDY )
That doesn't mean we don't have issues with immigration (apart from the aforementioned racism).
Those very humanitarian instincts which lead the part of the US population to support higher immigration levels? That's reversed in large parts of Canada! One crisis we faced over the last decade was Latin American immigrants fleeing their home countries (because of, some would argue, political instability produced by US and Canadian policies; this is of course one humanitarian reason sometimes cited for permitting high immigration and even turning a blind eye to undocumented migrants, because they're often fleeing problems created by the two northern American polities), entering the US--and then continuing north until they got to Canada, because they were afraid of US xenophobia but Canada was reportedly welcoming. What happened? They got to southern Manitoba in the middle of winter, with clothing suited to at best the Rio Grande, and froze to death. (The climate there is, of course, little different from the climate in northern Minnesota.) So just on that basis those humanitarian instincts flowed in the direction of "how do we stop these people from dying, we might need to do more to stop them coming here".
We've also had a simmering housing crisis for decades, which can be traced in part--certainly not in full--to policy decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s to curtail or end federal support for affordable housing programs, and which at least as a side effect has resulted in a lot of people having much of their net worth tied up in their housing. (Reverse-mortgage ads are all over TV these days.) Since increasing housing stock would drive down home values, this produces political pressure not to do so--but without that housing stock, we can't absorb immigrants because they will be homeless and freeze on the streets. (Or just be on the streets, if you're in southwestern BC. We had a much, much milder winter than the rest of the country.)
We've also had a stagnant GDP per capita for a decade (whether you blame Justin Trudeau or the legacy of Stephen Harper for this is correlated to your political views, and the extent to which you look at provincial governments as being at fault says a lot about how much you actually understand Canadian federalism) where GDP growth was largely matched by population growth, much of it driven by immigration. When we (maybe) entered a technical recession (the usual "two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth" definition), what wasn't as widely reported is that this was matched by a reduction in population because Mark Carney (who is, by the historical standards of Canadian politics, a centrist, maybe mildly centre-right, politician, and not centre-left, and the Liberal Party currently occupies that same position) adopted the position (one of many on which the Conservatives were about to win a landslide majority, until Carney replaced Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre was exposed as an attack dog rather than an actual leader; Tom Mulcair had the same problem back in 2015) of decreasing immigration targets, so GDP per capita remained stagnant or even grew slightly. (This is how we avoided this immigration crisis--by kicking out the main political faction, the Trudeau wing of the Liberals, that was pushing for substantially higher immigration! But in the intervening decade we went from having a solidly pro-immigration social consensus to a firming anti-immigration social consensus, and what that means for Canadian society and culture still remains to be seen. The main legacy of Justin Trudeau's time as Prime Minister is that in public policy, it is decidedly not the case that something that is worth doing is worth overdoing. See also carbon pricing.)
(I will desist from detailing what I think we should do to Pete Hoekstra for reposting the White House warmonger's "51st state" taunt over the technical recession, but suffice it to say that I think he has stepped far beyond the bounds of proper ambassadorial conduct. Also, to another commenter here, it wasn't Donald's threat to annex Alberta--though his government's consorting with separatists there and promising to backstop a new currency certainly didn't help--that has driven anti-US sentiment here; it was the threat to annex us entirely and the imposition of all sorts of tariffs, never mind the increased border controls to the point where the Haskell Free Library had to install a second entrance when the whole point of the place was the binational nature of it. At this point I'm fully in agreement with Wab Kinew that we shouldn't let up on the economic retaliation until all the tariffs--including the ones reflective of older tensions, like on lumber--are gone for good and the entirety of the Epstein Files have been released. I haven't knowingly purchased a US foodstuff for myself in over a year.)
If there is a simmering immigration controversy here, it's because of legislation recently enacted to comply with a court ruling that jus sanguinis citizenship can't be restricted by generation. (This was a real issue; among other things, children born outside of Canada to parents who couldn't pass on their Canadian citizenship due to said restrictions, in a jurisdiction without jus soli citizenship, ended up stateless.) The concern now is that this has resulted in a lot of people worldwide--probably the majority of them USAians--being eligible not just for immigration but outright citizenship, and we still don't have the housing infrastructure necessary for that, never mind that especially with tensions being as they are we are becoming more conscious of our own national identity again and what sets us apart from, especially, the US, and since they'd be citizens we couldn't simply set quotas and turn them away. The one thing that's probably keeping this from boiling over is that anyone wishing to claim citizenship this way has to prove their Canadian ancestry, entirely at their own expense, which means hiring an immigration lawyer and a genealogist who are suddenly slammed with work over this very issue. (I personally also think that anyone claiming citizenship this way should have to at least take the citizenship oath, which as explained by the Ontario Court of Appeal in McAteer v. Canada (AG) is an oath to the institutions of government but phrased, archaically, as an oath to the monarch who in a constitutional monarchy embodies said institutions--but a lot of would-be citizens interpret, and object to, it as a personal oath of loyalty. See https://disavowal.ca/ for the arguments in this direction. I disagree with them, because the oath has a clear legal meaning and I'm a monarchist besides, and I further think in this moment it would help further tamp down on this potential crisis since USAians are generally anti-hereditary monarchy, for understandable historical reasons, and so a lot of would-be citizens would refuse to take the oath, and thus could not become citizens, on those grounds.)
The other major immigration crisis here is the Temporary Foreign Worker program (I think the US equivalent would be the H-1B and/or H-2B visas, but I'm not familiar with US work visa programs and mostly know those from tangential observation of US political controversies), which again draws a lot of humanitarian objections but also objections that it warps the labour market. The humanitarian objections have a lot to do with how people in Canada on the TFW program end up almost as slaves (in an uncomfortably literal sense) to their employers, because their status in Canada is tied to remaining employed by that particular employer, which gives said employers a lot of power over said foreign workers, because being fired means being kicked out of Canada entirely. The labour-market objections come from how employers will insert nonsense requirements into job descriptions (such as fluency in some language that isn't English or French) just in order to claim that they can't fill the position with domestic labour. Recent reforms to it have helped tamp this down but I haven't paid as much attention.
So we have immigration crises! They're not boiling over because as a society we changed course on the question.
(This is all to say nothing of Jesse Ventura's laughable suggestion that Minnesota should try to be annexed by Canada, or the even more laughable suggestion I've seen elsewhere that we should absorb not just Minnesota but also all of New England and Cascadia.)
(Also, while I'm not at all a sociologist, it wouldn't surprise me if some of our greater capacity for immigration was just sheer bloody-minded stubbornness to be different from the US. If the US can't absorb more than about 10% foreign-born, damn it to hell we can do more than that.)
On another note: I would remind you that there was a major event in the late 1840s which led to a substantial uptick in the foreign-born population of the United States, that being the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which (as I recall) ended in the sale by Mexico to the United States of the northern half of Mexico (now the southwestern United States). (In Mexico, this was the invasion and theft of half of their land by the US; yes, it was technically a sale, but compare the purchase prices and land areas of the Mexican Cession to those of the Gadsden Purchase to see why Mexico still views it as outright theft to this day. It's like your neighbour held a gun to your head and made you sign a contract selling your house to him for $1. Sure, there was a contract and all that, and you signed it, and received the purchase price... but you were still robbed.) Mexican citizens living in the ceded area were, again as I recall, given a choice between moving south to what remained of Mexico and keeping Mexican citizenship or staying in the United States and receiving US citizenship. So suddenly the US had a lot of new land with a lot of new citizens who weren't born in the US, suddenly enjoying the right to move anywhere in the country. (I don't know anything about internal migration in the immediate wake of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however.)
(The war also helped define Canada-US relations for the better part of two centuries until the sleep-deprived spray-tan fucked it up; President Polk was facing tensions with the UK over the Oregon Territory, but not wanting to fight a war with the UK while already embroiled in one with Mexico, he agreed to partition the area by extending the border along the 49th parallel to the mainland coast, with Vancouver Island remaining British entirely, providing a peaceful resolution to the border dispute.)
(Side note: "Trust is a more important currency in politics than most of today’s politicians seem to realize. Once spent, your ability to make deals falls off a cliff." I cannot avoid noting here that however bad you may think the JCPOA was--and at this point the US would be insanely fortunate to be able to get it again, or even get it with the proviso that Iran can charge "service fees" for use of the Strait of Hormuz--Donald's ripping it up in his first term utterly destroyed the trust other countries, especially Iran, had in the United States, and is a large part of why the current war is proving intractable. Iran simply does not trust that the United States will keep its word when it comes to any potential peace deal, and the ability of the United States to make deals fell off a cliff.)
"Tourists’ babies probably aren’t, but the 14th Amendment was pretty sweeping on this point." As I recall, even tourists' babies become citizens under the expansive definitions of jus soli applicable in US and Canadian citizenship law. The only two exceptions of which I'm aware are people to whom domestic law does not or cannot fully apply: children born to members of an invading military force (because the country cannot, definitionally, enforce its laws on armed invaders) and children born to diplomatic personnel from other countries (because they enjoy certain legal immunities; go look up how much DC says it's owed in parking tickets from all the ambassadors there). If you're in the country legally on a tourist visa, you've assented to be subject to its laws, and the country is entirely capable of enforcing those laws on you. (You are, to quote the Constitutional language, "subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States]", which invading armies and ambassadors are not.) "Anchor babies" are a source of controversy in immigration! (I think this was brought up in relation to whether Barack Obama was a native-born citizen, because of his parents' status in Hawai'i, but the court case you want to look at is 1898's United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which everyone thought had settled the question until 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue's squatter purported to claim otherwise.)
(Another side note: the question of sweeping jus soli citizenship is one of those ones that has become impossible to solve because of partisan polarization in the United States. It was not always so; Harry Reid supported curtailing it. https://cis.org/Feere/Flashback-Sen-Reid-Birthright-Citizenship )
(Fun fact: during World War II when European heads of state fled to the UK in the face of the Nazi onslaught, some of them, at least their families, went across the Atlantic to Canada. Perhaps the most notable result, when it comes to citizenship law, of this was that Princess Margriet of the Netherlands was born in 1943 in a maternity ward in an Ottawa hospital. She is not a Canadian citizen, and was not a British subject, because the ward in question was declared to be extraterritorial at the moment of her birth; she received Dutch citizenship at birth because Dutch citizenship law follows jus sanguinis.)
EDIT: Another factor that comes to mind when it comes to how Canada has been able to absorb a higher foreign-born population than the United States has to do with the relative levels of urbanization and urban concentration. A quick look indicates to me that our ten largest metropolitan areas (as of the 2021 census) contain about 55% of our population, while the US's ten largest (as of 2020) contain less than 25%, so if populous urban areas can absorb more immigration than less populous areas, then this might explain our greater capacity, but this probably needs a great deal of refinement because the US has a lot more large urban areas than Canada does! (For instance, that top-ten list in the US misses Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, all of which are major points of entry to my knowledge.)
Neither am I, but at least all the data from 1850 is publicly available, so someone could try to tease it out from that. Wikipedia's summary indicates that the census that year collected data on country of birth and attempted to collect data on every resident, not just heads of household. From what I can tell the assessed populations in the areas added by the Mexican Cession and the annexation of Texas didn't amount to more than about 2% of the total population of the country but it's the internal migration that could prove more significant.
These observations do make me morbidly amused about how MAGA is so eager to annex Canada (I've even heard of Harris voters who support it on economic grounds), even though that would immediately push the foreign-born population of the US to somewhere around 25%! It's like MAGA already doesn't see Canada as a separate country, or Canadians as "foreign-born"*. (We already have issues with USAians getting in the domestic arrivals line at airports to the point where foreign/international arrivals signage has a US flag next to a world map at Pearson and YVR. Personally I think we should take said flags down and automatically reject any USAian who gets in the domestic line on the grounds of misrepresenting their nationality. But I also thought we shouldn't have let the convicted criminal cosplaying as a head of state into the country for the G7 summit last year on the basis of said criminal convictions, which would've caused a diplomatic row to dwarf anything that's rocked bilateral relations in recent decades, including all the actual current unpleasantness, so I'm probably not the person to take advice from on those matters.)
*If you don't count them as such, it pushes the share down to 15% or so, which would still be nowhere near enough to tamp down the nativist sentiments by your argument--and even if it were you'd just be trading a nativist problem for a separatist one!
I admit, when I first saw Canada's foreign-born share, I said to myself, "Pshaw, that number's way too high, it must be like half Americans and we don't count we're practically Canadian already."
Then I factored out Americans from the Canadian foreign-born stock (footnote 12) and HOO BOY was I surprised by the results. (Spoilers for those reading along: Americans make up only like 20% of Canada's foreign-born share.)
Re: JCPOA: it was always dumb for the U.S. executive to make agreements without getting them ratified by the Senate. It was also dumb for foreign governments to accept them, but our executive asked them to trust us, then couldn't keep that word. Trust torched. A James Heaney presidency will see the U.S. enter very few international agreements, but the ones we join will enjoy broad, durable, national support (as ratified by the Senate).
There's enough stories out there about USAians not understanding Canadian social conventions that you can be sure that we count them as foreign-born (and, again, as I noted, there's simmering concerns about allowing an influx of USAians into the country due to expanded jus sanguinis citizenship).
(At least the ones who choose to settle down here don't do stupid shit like the tourists who try to demand US currency in change from stores. Whether they flagjack before actually becoming citizens is another matter.)
Depending on how one defines "white" my own metro area is probably at about 40% not white. The main impact of this, from my perspective, is that there's a lot of great food available, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if smaller communities even along the coast would get more restive trying to handle our demographic mix. (But keep in mind that in contrast to your example of an influx of a single ethnic group, the mix here is very diverse so no one group can dominate. And even then there's plenty of linguistic and other divisions among those groups; consider all the various spoken forms of Chinese that still persist, despite the CCP's efforts to impose Mandarin on everyone.)
(Briefly on the JCPOA since this isn't the article for it: the two other major problems are, one, the US's demonstrated inability to get Israel to stop its own attacks, and Iran is at the least demanding an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and may decide to push further to demand withdrawals from the West Bank and Gaza, and might even go for the Golan Heights; two, the Iranian negotiators have read "The Art of the Deal" in which the bad combover said that the way to make a good deal is to promise a lot of stuff in future and then never deliver, so the Iranians are only willing to accept anything that they can get right away and don't trust future commitments one bit.)
The numbers here are pulled from the "nativities of the population" tables.
Population of New Mexico: 61,547 (60,000 of whom were born under Mexico or abroad)
Population of Utah: 11,354 (75% are Mormons)
California: 92,000 people; however, most of them were brought out by the Gold Rush. Based on the number of people residing there who'd been born in the state in 1850, it's likely that there might have been about 8,000 people living there who weren't born American when we annexed it.
Population of the US in 1850: 23,191,876, 1% of which is 231,919.
Our annexation of the American SW added three-tenths of a percentage point to the number of foreign-born residents of America.
But as I noted, in the immediate wake of the theft of northern Mexico, Mexican citizens there were given the opportunity to instead be US citizens, which would have given them freedom of movement to the rest of the US. I wonder what the data looks like for other parts of the country. (Also, there was Texas, which was another 1% of the population.)
I'm perfectly willing to accept that the Mexican Cession had a comparatively small impact on the foreign-born demographic and that a much bigger root cause of the late-1840s nativism was immigration from European Catholic countries like Ireland, Italy and Spain (and, of course, said immigrants' Catholicism was another factor! It may be wholly invented after the fact but one reason I've seen given for the "Know Nothing" name was that it was a reference to "I know nothing but this book", contrasting the Protestant reliance solely on the Bible with the Catholic use of other sources in addition to it. As I've noted before in these comment sections, one of the root causes of the 1775 treason was the granting of civil rights to Catholics in Québec) but I'd still be interested to see country-of-origin breakdowns for other areas in the United States at the time.
Side note: James, how did you handle Puerto Ricans, living in the mainland US or otherwise? Given the reaction to Bad Bunny performing at Super Bowl LX, I have to wonder if those USAian citizens' presence on the mainland (by some estimates there's nearly twice as many people of Puerto Rican descent living in the mainland US than there are living in Puerto Rico itself) has contributed to the nativist problems. (Which is not to say that Puerto Ricans should be kicked out of the US, of course.)
There was virtually no out-migration from New Mexico or California to the rest of the country. The distances were prohibitive, and the locals had no reason to do so.
As to Texas: In 1850, 93,000 of the free inhabitants were born outside of the state but in America, 43,000 were born in the state, and 18,000 were foreign-born.
So it was much more to do with immigration on the Atlantic coast than anything resulting from the Mexican-American War. That doesn't surprise me; what did surprise me was that James didn't bring up the conflict at all given that it occurred immediately prior to the rise of the nativist Know Nothings and resulted in the absorption of some number of foreign-born people into the US.
The truth: I didn't think about Puerto Ricans. Never crossed my mind. They are no doubt excluded from the foreign-born share of population (rightly so), but you are right that Puerto Rico is an odd part of our empire with a (somewhat) different culture from the mainland. Dunno how that might factor into a more nuanced analysis.
I suspect it has some impact. You are right that the black population in the US has a markedly different culture than the rest of the country, but it is also one to which the rest of the country is regularly exposed, at least in some ways. The same is not true of Puerto Rican culture, at least to my knowledge, though occasionally you get something breaking through like Luis Fonsi's "Despacito". But what was notable with the reaction to the announcement of Bad Bunny as the headliner for the Super Bowl LX halftime show is that it appeared that a lot of MAGA types online had no idea that Puerto Ricans are US citizens or that Puerto Rico is part of the US; the fact that he performed in Spanish (I believe that was announced beforehand) likely also had a great deal to do with it. (Never mind that estimates place the share of the US population speaking Spanish at home at about 14%, and the US has more hispanophones than any other country except Mexico.)
I recall seeing some administration official or nominee testify before a US Senate committee and complain about how US culture needs to be protected, citing said halftime show in particular, but I can't find the clips right now. (Completely ignoring that Puerto Rican culture is necessarily part of US culture!)
(Other notable non-USAians to perform at the halftime show: Rihanna, a Barbadian; the Weeknd, a Canadian; Shakira, a Colombian; Coldplay, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, all British groups; Paul McCartney, also from the UK; Shania Twain, a Canadian; U2, an Irish group; Enrique Iglesias, a Spaniard. But they all sang in English, I believe.)
Also there's something in here about how Donald wants to pretend to be William McKinley (brought it up in his inaugural address and reverted the federal name of Denali back to Mt. McKinley, for instance) while clearly not liking Puerto Ricans, but it was under McKinley following the Spanish-American War that Puerto Rico was first brought under US jurisdiction. (And then came the Insular Cases, and so on.)
this argument is gonna stick in my brain for a while. im gonna be thinking my way around it for a while. thank you for that. it makes me uncomfortable.
Another factor in the "how many is too many" question is how the government handles issues of law enforcement. Does the government appear to favor the newcomers over the natives? If so, where once a community might have tolerated 10%, now it becomes 7.5% or 5%. Or perhaps 0%.
James, you take a very humanistic approach to this issue, and I truly admire you for it. But it is completely impractical. We will never devote the resources necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I disagree with many of your assertions.
FIRST. The exclusion of Chinese had nothing to do with the nation’s desire to limit the number of immigrants and everything to do with racism.
SECOND. Your statistics don’t match the unlimited immigration of Germans, Italians, Russians, Irish,
Jews at the beginning of the 20th Century, and it is what made our nation the richest and most powerful and technologically advanced in the world.
THIRD. Everything and worse you ascribe to Afghanis was said about the above immigrants. Within a generation, they were as American as apple pie and bagels were as American as hot dogs.
FOURTH. Your analysis is backward looking. It doesn’t account for the population implosion facing the Northern Hemisphere. Who is going to pay for social security and our military in 2050. Just look at Japan. Even China is expected to lose a half billion people. Russia will be devastated. Germany and France created their own problems with guest workers who were imported to do jobs no one else wanted to do.
FINALLY. Just about everything you say is refuted by Miami’s experience with Cuban and Haitian immigrants. They made South Florida great. But don’t ask for help at Macy’s in Dadeland Mall in English if you expect to be understood.
Jon! Always grateful for your thoughtful comments and perspective. I'll give my brief thoughts in response in the order in which they were received.
FIRST. I don't think you can so easily separate the nation's desire to limit immigrants from racism. Friction with immigrants is a *cause* of racism. Friction with Asians was unsurprisingly higher than friction with Germans because the median Asian was more different from the median American than the median German. Difference creates friction, and sufficient friction causes both racism *and* a desire to limit immigration (a desire which can create a feedback loop creating more racism). If it were just freestanding racism, existing independent from immigration pressure, America would have banned Asian immigration *before* they started immigrating... but, in reality, it was the immigration itself that caused the friction (and, to a great extent, the racism as well).
SECOND. I'm not sure which particular statistics you're talking about when you say they "don't match." Towards the end of the 19th Century, America *did* begin to impose limits on German/Italian/Russian/Irish/Jewish immigration. The Immigration Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1891, the Immigration Act of 1917... all these targeted (and slowed) European migration. Whenever European migration got fast enough to push America beyond 14% foreign-born, Congress came up with a new way to slow them down. You're right that, in the 1910s, it began to speed up again... and, in response, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which finally (and permanently) ended unlimited immigration from Europe.
You are correct, of course, that those immigrants contributed a great deal to making our country great. (I should hope so! My people came over in that wave!) Someday, too, the descendants of Somalis will contribute to making our country great, too. I am confident in this. The question is not whether they are inferior people (they aren't!) but whether they are coming too fast right now. I think that's the same question we faced in the early 20th century. The American people decided, "Yes, the Europeans are coming too fast now," and they massively slowed down immigration in order to deal with that. I don't think they were wrong to do so.
THIRD. "Within a generation"? Every one of those nationalities developed multi-generational ethnic enclaves in multiple American cities that didn't fade until the mid-twentieth century, AFTER immigration had been limited. THAT is when those populations assimilated. Looking around my city, *even just among the Catholics*, we have Polish parishes and German parishes in very close proximity to one another, but each community needed their own parish, because they weren't assimilated and didn't mix with one another (nor with the mainstream).
Assimilation comes eventually. Sometimes, it even comes fast and easy. But the lesson we should take from the European migration of the early 20th century is the opposite: assimilation is slow and hard and is easily overwhelmed by new immigration if the federal government doesn't put on the brakes.
FOURTH. Our coming population hole is indeed a tremendous problem. However, filling the hole with immigrants *will not remove the problems caused by immigration and assimilation*. Those problems will exist *even though* the country has a legitimate, urgent need for large-scale immigration. Either the nation has to find some way to make its assimilation capacity much, much higher... or the nation has to accept (as I did some years ago) that both Social Security and the military are going to face major cuts in coming years.
FINALLY. I can't speak to South Florida, never having lived there. I don't know the rate at which foreign-born residents came to live there, nor how they came to do so. I can see that Florida's foreign-born share of population is almost 25%, which is pretty impressive, but I don't know whether that's come with any costs, nor how recently it has spiked. However, I think is a bad thing if there are areas in the United States where (as you say) English-speakers can't be helped. I would vote against whatever set of policies brought that about.
1) like most of the ex confederacy its whites vote pretty hard to the right
2) there are a lot of different kinds of Cubans, but compare to a lot of other Hispanic immigrant groups they are more “white hispanic”. That is if you have them take an ancestry.com test they would have a lot of European ancestry in there and a lot of them pass as white if you look at them.
There is also the fact that many of them were originally communist refugees.
The net effect of this is that Cubans are one of the most right wing and assimilated immigrant groups in America.
By contrast most of the Hispanic immigration to my old home of New York was Puerto Rican, with a smattering from the other “islands”. These groups are generally darker skinned, vote strongly for the left, and have worse social statistics than other Hispanic groups. Note to that since Puerto Ricans already have us citizenship their immigration often doesn’t show up as immigration.
There's a couple of reasons for Canada's ability to take in lots of immigrants (which has been under strain recently). Canada has never been a unicultural country. From the very beginning, the country was a union of the protestant English and the catholic French (to say nothing of the indigenous peoples). For the later half of the 20th century (leading up to COVID), there was a very strong pro-immigration consensus based on a manageable number of immigrants coming in selected via a points system that prioritized skill and language aptitude.
This started to break down about a decade ago when the new Trudeau government rapidly jacked up immigration numbers (including taking and naturalizing large numbers of Syrian refugees), essentially doubling the inflow of immigration. We also started getting more asylum seekers generally. Canadian attitudes started to shift against new immigration (there were some polls where, for the first time, more Canadians were against new immigration than for it).
However, after Trudeau was deposed last year in a palace coup, his more centrist replacement, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, started cutting immigration numbers (mostly from the temporary foreign worker program, that ultimately turned out not to be so temporary). Immigration as a political issue is not as salient as it was in the Trudeau era, but is not where it was pre-Trudeau.
Nice article, I too live in MN and have noticed much the same things. I am a centrist, but who is pretty radical on immigration (and think it has been *the issue* since at least 2013. I seems like one of those things where if the Dems had caved to the right's concerns a bit back then, Trump doesn't get elected either time) in part because I was so sick of NPR/MPR totally soft-pedaling the issue. really one of the things that "red-pilled" me.
Both my wife and I (she is much more a progressive than me) have been talking about this sort of thing since our college days 20+ years ago, and how the danger zone in the US is around 14%. And here we are...
One of the biggest places all this friction plays out is schools. Radicalizes a lot of parents. At my kids (pretty good) inner city public schools, where there were very few problems of any sort, one of the Somali 4th graders was bringing a knife to school and shaking down the other 4th graders for money and another 5th grader was stealing things from students and the school in an almost organized crime manner. Breaking into locked areas with tools and such for months, and stealing in bulk.
Just a little local anecdote that underlines the kind of friction this creates. I am a bit involved in Dem politics and very involved in youth sports. I was at a Dem event where the elected official's staff member doesn't know that, and tells me about how they hate sport parents and can't wait to gut the youth sports budget because that is "white people shit" (note almost everyone in this conversation except the elected official is white because this is a fundraiser). They say they will support some sports the PoC kids like (namely soccer), but basically white people don't need anything from government and their culture doesn't matter.
I gently point out that actually my family is very involved in this sort of thing, and a lot of people value it a lot. And exactly this type of behavior is what turns the existing population against immigrants, and they just sheepishly changed the subject.
Nice to hear what they really think. Didn't donate any more money to that dude.
It's a fun writeup, and it's always very satisfying when a complicated thing can be distilled down into a single number, so I'm inclined to like it. Unfortunately I think it's probably more wrong than right, for a couple reasons.
One is that, as you mention in a couple comments, the foreign born population percentage is WAY higher in some places, apparently without causing problems. NYC's is much higher than 10%; SF's is in the 30s. San Francisco has lots of problems (citation needed), but no one seems to think that's because of its immigrant population, in fact it's often quite the opposite.
But that makes me skeptical of the connection to the know-nothing party-- we might say that today the national average is actually pretty impactful, because of mass communication, social media, etc. But that would not have been true in the 1840s, where the local population is all that would have really mattered. In fact, are we really that similar to the Americans of the 1840s at all, by comparison? Are people in rural Tennessee 2026 more similar to New York City citizens of 2026, or rural Tennesseans of 1840?
My engineer brain started to think about an "assimilation ratio" to reflect that some immigrant populations are much more similar to Americans than others, so Canadians would have a .15, while rural Afghans might have .98. Unfortunately, such a project is probably complicated enough to only be done by someone who is very excited about official sub-sarahan IQ statistics.
On the other hand, such a model probably have a big impact on your proposed solutions: America's ability to assimilate highly educated populations than rural ones with limited exposure to global American culture. Or maybe not! Maybe it really is more simple -- that would be very strange to me but it's not impossible
I suspect you are correct that this could be a huge refinement to my simple model, but, as you say, it would be very hard, and would require tremendous resilience against accusations of racism.
It's worth exploring, though. One of the other commenters suggested that Canada's apparent high assimilation capacity is related to its long-standing visa "points" system, which prioritizes highly-educated, highly-skilled workers, who are, in turn (the theory goes) more readily assimilable. That seems plausible! And a blunt tool like foreign-born share of population is too coarse to even begin to investigate that.
I haven't looked into how our immigration system works after the overhauls of the last decade, but what I can say is that it's a lot easier to get people to accept immigration if it's targeted at skilled professionals in fields where the country has a clear shortage. We've taken an anti-immigrant turn generally but very much want medical doctors! (And a fair few USAian doctors want to come here. See also the Patrascan video I linked.)
George Bowering, a Canadian poet, was very young when WWII broke out. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and Canada's declaration of war on Japan (depending on the exact legal niceties you observe, Canada declared war before the US did), we, like the US, interned people of Japanese descent. Bowering, who was six years old at the time, wrote in his book "Stone Country" that he was confused by this; his dentist was Japanese and also had the same name as the King, so he seemed alright in young George's book:
"Here was Canada, threatened by two huge and successful enemies, both capable of crossing oceans. There could be spies and double agents and traitors everywhere. So we locked up a lot of people who did not have English last names. We locked up Italians and Germans and Jews with German names, and Ukrainians and Romanians, and so on. On the West Coast we joined our fear of the exotic with BC's traditional anti-Asian activity, and took all the Japanese Canadians away from the coast so that they could not signal to submarines where the choice targets were.
"The RCMP infiltrated the Japanese-Canadian community, and eventually made a report that indicated higher levels of patriotism there than in the populace as a whole, including buying bonds, trying to enlist and giving blood to the Red Cross. But there were energetic racists working at all levels of government, and when Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong happened the Japanese Canadians could see the graffiti on the wall. As soon as Canada declared war on Japan, forty Japanese citizens were slapped into jail, all the Japanese Canadian-owned fishing boots were tied up and Japanese language schools and newspapers disappeared.
"The JC community tried everything they could to demonstrate their loyalty. Japanese-Canadian soldiers would leave their blood on the ground in Italy. But there were white fishermen and farmers in BC who dreamed of an economic future free of Japanese-Canadian competition. Mackenzie King was slow to give in to the mob, even when it was led by his own MPs. It was not that he didn't keep up his end as a racist. He did not like the fact that Jews were buying property next to his in Quebec. He would be thankful that the atomic bomb was dropped on Asians rather than Europeans. He was not comfortable with the fact that India made it into the Commonwealth. But he dragged his feet when it came to hauling away the Japanese Canadians, because he did not want retaliation against the Canadian POWs at Hong Kong.
"At the end of February 1942, twenty thousand people were herded into the Pacific National Exhibition grounds in east Vancouver and then herded to internment camps or deserted mining towns in eastern BC, the Prairies or as far east as Ontario. They were allowed to take a suitcase and a blanket each. In all the confusion of wartime their boats and houses and stores and farms somehow fell into the hands of white folks.
"I was living in Greenwood, BC, at the time. Being six years old, I found it confusing when I saw the caricatures of evil Jap fighter plane pilots with their huge teeth and thick glasses, and then went to get my teeth fixed by a thin Japanese-Canadian dentist who shared my first name. Well, so did the king, and he knew what was what."
A weighty analysis and I agree with much of it. I'm not so sure how practical it is to reduce the non-native-born population of the US to just 10%. But the immigration system badly needs overhauling. And I agree that assimilation is vital. lack of assimilation is causing real problems in the UK and other European countries.
As to immigrant assimilation, the area of most concern would be Muslim immigrants which might resist assimilation. (Having said that, Columbus has the second largest Somali immigrant population, without the issues you describe in the Twin Cities).
As to granting legal status to longtime illegally present immigrants, we will need to do that, if oly because of the logistical nightmare of trying to deport millions of "illegals". I have long believed that anyone who came to the US as an adult, needs to pay a substantial penalty, one that would discourage future illegal immigration. I don't think that should be in money as not all would be able to pay (I am open to a prison sentence, perhaps suspended). But the most fitting penalty would be losing the right to ever be an American citizen. (Exceptions should be made for those brought as minor children -- the DREAMers or DACAs).
A trio of conservative Muslim Texans attended a state Republican convention with the theme of "Unity drives victory".
They were told they should convert or leave the US. (Not, to be sure, unanimously; some other delegates defended them, and they were not themselves removed as delegates on procedural grounds.) The outgoing party chair suggested they should join the Democratic Party instead.
I disagree with the entire premise that illegal immigrants who have evaded capture for long enough should be ignored. From where I sit, they should be the first targets, very publicly banished from the US, forbidden on pain of death from ever setting foot on US soil again. Anything less that that will encourage illegal immigration. Now, if they have been well behaved while here, I am open to the idea of them being free to choose a destination which will accept them if their initial homeland is problematic (and remaining in ICE custody for a time while attempting to establish a destination), but they can't stay here.
I knew that would be a controversial point, but with which particular part of my argument do you disagree?
Do you think I am wrong to say that America has become their homeland, that I am wrong to say that banishing someone from their homeland is a sin without just cause, or that I am wrong to say that illegal entry is not a sufficient cause for such a severe penalty?
The last of those options. Premise: No criminal should be allowed to benefit from their crime *after being convicted of having committed said crime*. The benefit of illegal entry into the United States is living in the United States. Therefore, a punishment whereafter they stay in the United States is not a functional deterrent.
Wouldn't you say that the punishment for a crime ought to be reasonably proportioned to the harm caused by that crime? For example, even if it were necessary to achieve deterrence, it would be unjust to have someone executed for, say, falling into a patch of your neighbor's flowers while playing ball (a la Wesley Crusher), right?
It seems to me that the harm done to us by a single act of illegal immigration, while serious and punishable, does not approach the life-ruining harm inflicted by permanently taking a man away from his family, friends, parish, job, etc.. We should punish illegal immigrants (hence my suggestion of garnishing wages and serving time), and I think making that making punishment severe enough balances the scales of justice and serves as adequate deterrent, even though the criminal does also get to enjoy the fruits of his crime. (If it's not enough deterrence, I suppose then garnish the wages more!)
That is an approach we take with quite a few crimes. If a dude beats up another dude for committing adultery with his wife, we can't take away the wounds he inflicted and we can't take away the satisfaction he derives from revenge, so he will enjoy the fruits of his crime, but we CAN make up for those fruits by inflicting other, proportionate penalties on him (like several years of jail).
Just because we do not know the identity of the man who was robbed of the opportunities that the illegal immigrant has taken advantage of, does not mean that the benefits the illegal immigrant has earned were not at the cost of some citizen who would otherwise have legally earned them.
Although that's true, I don't see the relevance to the question of proportionality.
It might not be that we disagree on the principle of proportionality, but rather that we disagree on the severity of the crime.
What is your point of reference for illegal entry to the US and masquerading as a US Citizen for 20 years? Mine is identity and wage theft for the duration.
Why would the entirely random chance of birth make one more entitled to the common inheritance of all?
Because that is the way the world works. Countries are clubs, the core feature of a club is the ability to control membership. If you don't do that you don't have a club.
Literally no one actually wants to live in a borderless world. So stop pretending you do.
From where do you pull that birth is random chance?
I think I also need to deny the first claim. Not because my position needs it, but for the same reason that I cannot admit that two men are married, whatever the civil law of the land may say. The lie at the foundation of their claims "this is my homeland" or "this is my spouse" will corrupt like an unconfessed mortal sin.
Why do you think it's wrong? I think I sketched out some decent reasons in the article for thinking it's right. You are correct, of course, that getting that first step wrong would poison the rest of the argument, so it's reasonable to object there.
because I am unable to wrap my head around the idea that telling a lie for long enough makes it no longer a lie.
I don't think the lying itself makes it no longer a lie. However, other factors may intervene to make it no longer a lie.
For example, suppose I tell you every day for a decade that I am a millionaire. This would be a lie. However, on day 3,653, I win the Powerball. The next day, I tell you I am a millionaire. It's true!
Or, likewise, suppose I am 15 (and tall) when I start using a fake ID and telling people I'm old enough to drink, so that they sell me drinks. This is all lies. After 6 years, I actually am old enough to drink, so it's no longer a lie.
I think that, if you've settled in a place for two decades, people should recognize it as your homeland, regardless of whether or not you spent the preceding two decades lying about it.
Except that there is a legal mechanism for changing one's homeland, and this individual, by definition, has never gone through the steps to do so. I do not grant that your common law analogy holds water, nor that your story of your dad moving from PA to MN is apples to apples with illegal immigration.
Let us posit the following:
1) for anyone in the third world moving to America (even illegally) is worth millions of dollars in value. Probably more.
2) given this incentive, the immigrant must believe that the % likelihood of getting caught and the punishment for getting caught are combined worse then the multi-million dollar payout.
3) that’s going to require pretty high clearance rate on detection and capture as well as a pretty “cruel” punishment.
I don’t see any way around this logic. Perhaps in the far past the cost of global travel and the lack of a welfare state presented enough non-legal barriers to keep large third world migration out without much enforcement, but not today.
The only countries I see keeping immigrants out combine high clearance rates with significant punishments. There are a few lucky examples for whom geography grants some natural exclusivity, but this doesn’t apply to America.
4) birthright citizenship (there is zero possibility of the constitutional amendment) combined with family reunification (which you say should be preserved) means that immigration enforcement is basically impossible if they get across the border. All you gotta do is get over and have a baby, and now you’re untouchable. Everyone knows this which is why they do it. China even has essentially a mass birth tourism operation to exploit this hack.
This is also why your math is a bit off. I think most people would consider someone born to an illegal “foreign born” but that doesn’t show up in the statistics because of our birthright citizenship (that btw is unique to the Americas, Europe doesn’t have it).
I think we need to raise doubt that this “hack” is full proof and the only way to do so is some high profile examples.
Nobody chooses or earns their situation of birth and our legal processes have long been broken and arbitrary, so the ethical justification for deportation of long assimilated migrants, regardless of whether they overstayed a visa and committed a regulatory infraction… or not, is extraordinarily cruel and also highly unlikely to do anything but confirm to all portions of the polity that our shared humanity is minimal but our capacity for arbitrary cruelty is enormous.
It is not and ethical justification it is a legal one...
>Nobody chooses or earns their situation of birth>
What has that got to do with anything?
>legal processes have long been broken and arbitrary
In large part because of the people who want more immigration.
"Nobody chooses or earns their situation of birth" -- true, but their parents do earn the situation of their children's birth.
Nobody can earn for anyone else nor can parents have earned their own parents. How could you earn what someone else chose??
"Nobody can earn for anyone else" -- This is false. Parents have been earning for their children since Adam and Eve. A person's birthright, whatever it may entail, is their parents' second gift to them (after the gift of life). The value of that birthright is the fruit of the labors of the parents. To say that that is not earned at all because it is not earned by the child is disingenuous.
How is it disingenuous!? How could the child earn what the parents earned?? How could inheritance be anything but an entirely unearned nepotism bonus??
Do hospitals randomize which children are returned to which parents? (Obviously not) I therefore conclude that the inheritance of the child is earned by the parents, and it is not wrong for the child to experience any benefits that his/her parents may have earned (unless those benefits were criminally gained, I suppose). Just because the child hasn't earned the benefits, it does not imply that the benefits have not been earned by anyone else on behalf of the child. Once you have earned benefits, it is entirely within your discretion to give them to whomever you choose. Even if the person(s) you give them to never do(es) anything to earn those benefits, the work you did still earned those benefits.
If we are to treat immigration crimes like that, we should probably treat other crimes like that as well. Drive faster than the posted speed limit even once? Lose your license, lose your car. Run a red light? Lose your license, lose your car. Don't pay all your taxes? Prison.
If you draw a Venn Diagram of the people who want all illegals deported because they "broke the law," and the people who were horrified that Biden hired more IRS agents to catch tax cheats you will get a circle. Conservatives are also much more likely to oppose red light cameras to ticket the filth who run red lights, even though traffic accidents kill far more people than illegals. That's how you know that all the people who say that illegals need to be deported without mercy because "they broke the law" are liars. They don't support merciless, relentless enforcement of the law any time the law is something they might feel like breaking someday.
If some kind of natural disaster devastated the US so lots of Americans wanted to flee to other countries, I am sure that people like you would quickly come up with explanations for why it is totally okay for you to illegally emigrate to countries that the disaster didn't hit.
We have to expel those responsible to begin with
https://files.catbox.moe/pti3tl.jpg
While I admit that I have not read Two Hundred Years Together, I have now thoroughly searched two different copies of the book for this quotation (Incorrect Library translation). It does not appear, nor does anything that closely resembles it. I believe the quote is fabricated.
On the other hand, there is this quote in the final pages of Chapter 9:
> To these subjects of discontent was added the humiliating defeat against Japan, and the ruling circles of Saint Petersburg yielded to the temptation of a simplistic explanation: Russia is fundamentally sound, and the whole revolution, from beginning to end, is a dark plot hatched by the Jews, an episode of the Judeo‐Masonic plot. Explain everything by one and the same cause: the Jews! Russia would long have been at the zenith of glory and universal power if there were no Jews!
> And, clinging to this short but convenient explanation, the high spheres only brought the hour of their fall even closer.
> The superstitious belief in the historical force of conspiracies (even if they exist, individual or collective) leaves completely aside the main cause of failures suffered by individuals as well as by states: human weaknesses.
> ...No, it can not be said in any case that it was the Jews who “organised” the revolutions of 1905 or 1917, just as one cannot say that it was this nation as a whole that fomented them. In the same way, it was not the Russians or the Ukrainians, taken together as nations, who organised the pogroms.
The Jews sure do get a raw deal, though: communism always presented them as greedy capitalist monsters (because the US had greater influence in Israel, which threatened the USSR's monopoly in the Middle East), but capitalist anti-Semites always talk about them as craven communists! They can't win!
I confess that I am never quite sure how to respond to an anti-Semite. With a regular honest racist, you can talk about black-on-white crime statistics and HBD and dig into root causes and the uglier side of American history, conceding on some points but scoring on others, until the racist has some substantial doubts about his views.
But anti-Semites always cloak what they have to say in at least two layers of cryptic misdirection, because they're afraid they're going to get banned (a reasonable worry, to be sure), and then what they actually believe always seems (to me) to be built on a foundation of water. It turns out to be *all* redirects, every justification giving way to another, all the way down to an irrational core belief (but where does it come from?) that The Jew is not entirely human (but then what else could he be?). Honest racists are not uncommon, but I've not yet met an honest anti-Semite.
I worry for people in your position. I really do. Not as much as I worry for your would-be victims, but I do worry. But I don't know how to address you in a way that you are able to hear.
terrible idea. the state's job isn't to make the wicked suffer, the more they suffer the better, it's to maintain order. However unfair you think it is for your mexican neighbor to come here and build a life and raise a family without the government's permission, killing these people as official state policy would provoke a backlash so bad it would legitimately be catastrophic
My understanding is that the three most severe punishments a state can give, in increasing order of severity, are "Life imprisonment", "Banishment", and "Death". If a convict has been banished once and returns, what punishment can be given but death?
I establish elsewhere in these comments how and why I think that banishment is the proper penalty for illegal entry into the US. What else could you do in the case of a repeat offender illegal entrant into the US?
executing a criminal is more expensive than life inprisonment, which you'd know if your goal was practical governance and not punishing the wicked
My goal is neither: My goal is crime deterrence, particularly deterrence of repeat crimes.
I don't care if it is cheaper to imprison than to execute (in this context) because life imprisonment is a lighter sentence than banishment, so it can't be the penalty for a second instance of a crime whose first time penalty is banishment, disregarding what the crime might be.
Sorry, just to be clear, we're talking about like, some pedro herrera who lived in the us for 19 years and like, installs roofs and never committed any violent crimes, right? If he hops the border again because he wants to see his daughter we execute him?
Yes. Publicly.
Does the federal government actually have the power to mandate E-Verify? I imagine it does under current interpretations of the interstate commerce clause, but from an originalist standpoint it seems like a stretch.
This is an interesting question, and I have not considered the answer. It's always taken as read that Congress can do this, and I never stopped to think under what power.
Were I to defend mandatory E-Verify, though, I think I would defend it on the basis of the *foreign* commerce clause rather than the interstate commerce clause. Hiring illegal immigrants is a form of commerce with foreign nations, and Congress cannot regulate what it cannot detect, so the necessary & proper clause enables it to do what it needs to do to detect it (within reason).
That's my knee-jerk response, anyway.
It has the power to do whatever the voters want it to do if there are enough of them.
This is a very interesting theory, but something feels off about it to me. My basic intuition is that if you look at Trump's base of support, it's largely in areas with *low* foreign-born populations, which seems like it would be surprising on your view: the idea is that your community is being changed by incompatible or unfamiliar cultures that come with the foreign-born population, so it would be kind of odd if the areas with the smallest foreign-born populations are also the most supportive of the right-populist anti-immigration candidate.
Of course, I wanted to check this intuition, so I ran a quick correlation between state foreign-born population percentage and Trump vote percentage in 2024.
My results match my initial intuition: the r of foreign-born % to Trump vote % is -0.56 (p < 0.00003). Spearman's rho matches: -0.64, in case you were worried about Pearson's r with this dataset.
You could probably run the same thought on county-level data instead of state-level data, but this is a bigger project than I was ready to undertake this morning. My intuition is that the effect would be even stronger there, since immigrants tend to live in urban areas [citation needed] and one of the biggest splits right now is urban-rural [citation needed]. I don't know whether the Know Nothings had a similar distribution or not, another thing worth checking I suppose, if reliable data is available.
Does your theory have an explanation for this? Maybe national news/media means that people all over the country feel the effect, so it goes beyond one's own community? Or some kind of sorting effect where people get angry about immigrants and leave to low-immigrant areas (I'm skeptical this happens in large numbers, but maybe)? Or maybe when foreign-born populations get high, they start to filter into those non-urban areas and the local max is very low, so it triggers this even if the local max in urban areas has not been reached?
My theory of the case is that, in reality, American communities have wildly different assimilation capacities.
Cities (by my theory) have *always* had way more assimilation capacity than small towns. For example, New York City's foreign-born share of population has been above 20% basically without interruption since the 1840s, often above 30%, and sometimes above 40%. ( https://www.nyc.gov/assets/planning/download/pdf/data-maps/nyc-population/historical-population/1790-2000_nyc_total_foreign_birth.pdf ) NYC has always had its problems and immigration-related strains, but I wouldn't say it's proved unequal to the challenge. And the city has immense resources, a strong cultural identity specifically around assimilation, and tons of social infrastructure for dealing with this sort of thing that Glenwood, MN does not.
In my thinking, then, national immigration capacity is a function of individual community capacities, and any national figure is just a very blunt averaging of very different situations in thousands of very different communities. My expectation going into this clean, then, would have been that any national figure would be mostly noise, with very little signal. I'd've thought you'd need to do a lot of fancy math to figure out what the actual capacities are in various communities, compare them to actual loads, then weight them appropriately. You'd need like 70 pages of tables and argument to get me to buy into a particular answer about immigration capacity, and, even then, there'd be no single national number, just a lot of community-specific numbers and a distribution issue.
But then I looked at national figures and found reasonably consistent patterns at thresholds that seemed plausible, which made me think that community-specific deviations from the norm mostly cancel out across the nation. On the model I just described, there shouldn't really be *any* correlation between national foreign-born population share and nativist attitudes, because that model says that all national statistics are overwhelmingly noise instead of signal. But the signal-to-noise ratio on national statistics actually seems to be fairly good!
This could happen if, for example, the distribution of immigrants to communities tends to be proportionate to that community's capacity to receive them. If NYC's capacity is 40% and Glenwood's is 4%, and 90% of immigrants go to NYC (or places with similar high capacity) while only 10% go to Glenwood (or places with similar low capacity), they would all hit their capacities at about the same time.
So that is my (tentative, untested) explanation for what you describe, and indeed for why national-level figures provide any signal at all.
It’s because people who live outside of cities and high immigrant populations have been convinced by media bubbles (and a version of the Chinese Robber Fallacy) of the encroaching horrors of the immigrant socialist hell holes, despite all crime data running in the opposite direction for 35 years.
The idea that it’s about actually exceeding immigration capacity seems wildly incompatible with any macro data or the regional data. It is about how rural conservatives believe in a cartoon propaganda version of left leaning high immigration cities.
I was born in the New York metro area and now I live in Florida. I think it would be fair to say that the changes brought about to my home city by immigration are part of why I moved away. If you don’t like immigration you’re going to move away from immigrants. I’ve seen several studies showing this effect is true on mass across the globe. Natives are essentially being driven from their cities and are willing to pay a premium to live in low immigration communities (usually out in the burbs). A lot of movement from blue states to the sunbelt is driven by people fleeing the effects of immigration.
Electorally is has an impact even were you don’t live. New York used to be more of a swing state. California used to be republican. Nobody can imagine these things anymore. Mitt Romney got 59% of the white vote and lost (he got 51% of the California white vote).
This doesn't make a ton of sense at a state-level. For example, your move from New York to Florida is basically a lateral move - NY's foreign-born population is 23.3%, FL's is 23.1% (obviously some areas are higher than others - I'm sure NYC is higher than Pensacola). The sunbelt is a bit of a fuzzy term, but let's say it includes: CA, NV, AZ, NM, TX, LA, MS, AL, GA, SC, FL. The median foreign-born population in those states is 11.9%, the median for all states is 8.3%. It especially doesn't make sense to head to the southwest, TX, or FL if you are trying to escape immigration - those states are all above average in terms of foreign-born population, and most are in the top third.
Maybe at an urban -> suburban/rural level you might see this effect, but it doesn't really make sense on a state level.
As for which states are in play vs. which aren't, I think there's a lot more factors than this. FL used to be a toss-up (famously), now is solidly red. AZ used to be solid red, now is a toss-up. MI and IA used to be a toss-ups, now solid red. NM used to be a toss-up, now solid blue. If someone can't imagine a state changing its electoral alignment, they probably just don't know much electoral history. Nothing is set in stone.
1) Florida's whites vote 2/3rds GOP. Whites outside of the south are more split closer to 50/50, so adding a few immigrants to the blacks is enough to make things a one party state.
2) Florida's largest Hispanics population is Cubans. Cubans are "white hispanics". A super majority of them identify as white on the US census. Genetic tests confirm this. In most of the third world communism was a proxy battle between light skinned and dark skinned people. Refugees from communism in Cuba has large European admixture and pass as white. You can clearly see this walking around downtown Tampa. They also have personal experience with leftisms failures.
By contrast NY has Puerto Ricans. Most of these don't identify as white (and genetic tests confirm this) and the percentage identifying as white is actually falling (negative assimilation).
3) I agree that GOP dominance in Florida can be a fragile thing. Of all the states its the most in flux and has the least history (basically unpopulated before air conditioning). But there are structural advantages that I think are entrenched. No income tax obviously. Pro-growth mindset. And most personally to me universal school vouchers. I lived this covid and woke in my kids northern schools and said enough.
Hi, first time commenter and first time lurker. Got this recommended by the algorithm, well written piece. I was looking for this comment chain/response after reading since it was my primary objection. Idaho, with a 5% total immigrant population, continues to have immigration be a major issue despite the fact that the vast majority of Idahoans have never met an immigrant of any kind.
> American communities have wildly different assimilation capacities.
But...why? This is fine to state, but it begs the question. I strongly suspect that if you dug under this question you would find intense xenophobia and racism (which Japan also has, I might add). You may argue that certain communities don't have the right institutions, but I'd counter that if you tried to build those institutions they would be shunned because it's not really about the institutions at all. As evidence, note the intense hatred Fox News seems to have for any city with a population greater than 500k.
I'm not sure why we should aim to limit immigration despite its obvious benefits. Why not try and make more places like NYC? Why should we take as given that American communities just have different immigration capabilities by fiat? This seems malleable, so why shouldn't we try and change that?
> why shouldn't we try and change that?
The short answer is: We should! I think it is admirable for a nation to have a large capacity for immigration.
However, we run into the old problem of reliable thing-we-are-pretty-sure-works (reduce strain by reducing immigration) vs. unreliable or experimental policy that might work a lot, or only a little, or not at all (reduce strain by increasing capacity).
I wrote a little bit more about why I approve of, but am skeptical about, efforts to increase capacity here: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/how-many-immigrants-is-too-many/comment/289079799 (although more, perhaps, could be said on the matter)
But surely we have a lot of evidence of things that work, given the very rich history of us cities?
I don't think that we do, but I could be wrong.
Unfortunately I came to the same conclusion in the run up to the 2024 election. Going by history, we start to see negative impacts on the social order when immigration reaches somewhere around 10% foreign born. 7-10% is our sweetspot as a nation. I say unfortunately because all the remedies are awful.
A factor I think is also important is the 2nd generation citizen population. My mom is a 2nd generation citizen. Her mom came from Ireland as a young adult, and married a man who was a 2nd generation citizen whose parent's were from Ireland as well. My mom who was born and raised in the US has had a strong affinity for Ireland her whole life and a corresponding lack of attraction to the US. She was raised in a Irish ghetto, considers herself Irish enough to seek out and obtain citizenship, and has a large in-group bias towards the Irish and other people of Irish decent. She tries to convince me to get Irish citizenship every few months and doesn't understand my resistance to the very idea. *I* am American.
I think there is probably a limit to 2nd generation citizens as well, though that data will be harder to suss out. That might be what we see with Canada as well - I suspect Canada has fewer second generation citizens but more first generation citizens. The rule might be something like "Less than 1/3 of the population must be a first or second generation immigrant."
Though I don't think the picture is quite so rosy in Canada. They seemed poised to elect a "far right" candidate up until Trump started talking about annexing Alberta and then support tanked for anything associated with the right.
Another aspect is that 10% across the country could still be close to 30-50% in a specific small town. If there is more of an effort to funnel immigration evenly that might work as well as reducing the immigrant population This means intentionally breaking up refugee groups when resettling, among other things which might be unsavory to people but it is the kind of thing that would also possibly increase the rate of integration and increase the overall amount of immigrants we could take in.
Regarding E-verify, from my understanding, employers are legally required to accept any "reasonably genuine" documents that appear to relate to the employee, even if they are not ultimately confirmed by e-verify. Employers cannot terminate an employee simply because they believe they are an illegal immigrant. Doing so may result in anti-discrimination lawsuits against the employer and then the immigrant receives protection from deportation for up to 6 years.
From https://legalaidatwork.org/factsheet/employment-rights-of-undocumented-workers/ :
"“Deferred Action for Labor Enforcement” (DALE) is a temporary immigration status meant to encourage workers to report employers’ unlawful practices without fear of retaliation, including threats of deportation. DALE, if granted, is a commitment from DHS to protect its recipient from deportation for four years, with a possibility to renew that protection for an additional two years. During this time, a DALE recipient is considered to be lawfully present in the United States and is able to apply for work authorization. It is important to understand, however, that DALE is only a temporary protection that does not offer any pathways to a permanent legal status in the U.S. Also, applying for DALE does notify DHS that you are in the United States, with the possibility that DHS could try to deport you after your legal status expires. We strongly recommend consulting with an immigration attorney before requesting DALE."
Maybe I received bad information regarding this but it sounds like the problem might not be entirely on the corporations but at least some of the blame lies on our litigious society.
I disagree that just because someone evaded the law for long enough they should automatically receive amnesty. Statue of limitations are due to evidentiary difficulties, not because there's some moral right to avoid punishment for wrongdoing if you're good enough at it. If the idea is that immigration crimes are simply unimportant, mere clerical errors, I think the existence of this post is sufficient to demonstrate that this is not the case. Illegal immigration can bring a nation to her knees.
Though I guess we do have precedent for a statue of limitations and for that alone we have room to argue that people who have been here for a decade+ should have standing to remain. Unless they have warrants out on them or were otherwise told to get out in a reasonable time frame from their entry.
Another solution is to increase birth rates of later-generation Americans, though no one really knows how to do this.
I am going to make a few notes on this insofar as they relate to my own country.
First, data from Statistics Canada indicates that the percentage of newborns in Canada with foreign-born mothers has increased substantially over the last quarter-century: https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/91f0015m/91f0015m2025004-eng.htm So your hypothesis about second-generation outcomes, unless I am misunderstanding it, would seem not to hold up. (If you read my initial comments here, we do have immigration tensions; we've just taken steps to address them.)
Second, it wasn't the threat to annex Alberta that led to Poilievre's loss. (The meetings between Alberta separatists and US officials came later. One took place in a SCIF.) Poilievre lost because he is an attack dog who got all of his targets taken away (mainly carbon pricing and Justin Trudeau). If you want an example of a conservative political party getting torched in an election post-Donald, likely because the voters took one look at the US and said "oh hell no", look at Albanese's Labor's landslide over Dutton's Coalition in Australia.
The anti-US turn that Canadians have taken is because of gratuitous threats of wholesale annexation (former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull noted that "[i]t would be a joke if it wasn't so serious"), imposition of tariffs in violation of CUSMA (yes, the US is currently largely abiding by the letter of CUSMA, outside certain sectors, but for a few days the tariffs were fully in effect), claims that the US doesn't need anything from Canada (we ship you below-market oil, Hydro-Québec powers New England, and BC Hydro makes sure Washington-Oregon border towns on the Columbia River don't flood, also how're your tourism and alcohol sectors doing, businesses on the ground and border-state politicians are begging us to come back and Ambassador Pete has been claiming that it's insulting that most of our provinces won't stock your booze all the while purporting not to know why we're so fucking pissed off and telling us that even though the alcohol bans were in retaliation for the tariffs, putting the booze back on the shelves won't get the tariffs lifted, so why the hell should we) and flagrant disrespect like "Governor Trudeau" (and more recently "Governor Carney").
My apologies if I undersold the disaster that has been US Foreign and Economic policy as it relates to Canada, that wasn't my intent.
I know that wasn't your intent. I was addressing generally the question of "why are Canadians so anti-US now" and noting that it is not as connected to Poilievre's loss as you might think. (There isn't no connection; the two major issues in 2025 were the economy, as always, and sovereignty, and the Conservatives were trusted more on the former while the Liberals were trusted more on the latter, and Poilievre was unable to keep the focus squarely on the economy. If any single thing Donald did had a major impact on our election, it was DOGE, because a report came out only days before the election that the Conservatives were planning their own version https://www.desmog.com/2025/04/23/revealed-the-conservative-playbook-for-bringing-doge-to-canada-elon-musk-pierre-poilievre/ ) It definitely wasn't "Donald threatened Alberta specifically", at least not as of the time of the election, because any serious threats to pick off Alberta didn't come until later. (For instance, compare Jesse Watters' rhetoric from January 2025 https://thehill.com/homenews/media/5073900-jesse-watters-canada-donald-trump/ to his rhetoric in August 2025 https://www.latintimes.com/fox-news-host-says-trump-could-annex-canadian-states-if-democrats-push-back-against-texas-588160 Direct meetings between Alberta separatists and US administration officials started in April 2025 or thereabouts and serious reporting on it only came months later https://nationalpost.com/news/alberta-separatists-boast-cabinet-level-meeting-with-trump-administration )
It is a source of no small amount of irritation here that it seems most USAians (as exemplified by Pete Hoekstra) don't get why we're so pissed off. (As South Park put it years ago, "A third of the world hates you because you don't understand why a third of the world hates you." These days that quote might be more accurate if it read "ninety-five percent".)
But to the actual point of the article, I don't think your first- and second-generation benchmark is correct, per the data from Statistics Canada I noted, and I suspect rather that it has more to do urbanization (with large urban areas being able to absorb more foreign-born residents) and diversity (with, in contrast to James' hypothetical, no particular immigrant group being able to dominate local politics).
Poilievre wasn't a "far right" candidate; in the U.S. his politics would be that of a Blue Dog Democrat.
Yeah I agree he badly misread Canada. It was right where the US was until Trump started antagonizing them.
We're people who'll drive forty-five minutes in a blizzard to avoid shopping at a store we don't like. (I know someone who boycotts Shell to this day because she can't forgive them for operating in apartheid South Africa.)
It's not like we haven't had diplomatic rows before; Bush was pissed off that Chrétien chose not to send Canadian forces to Iraq in 2003. (Canadians still served in Iraq because some were on military exchange in deployed US units, and until the Russo-Ukrainian War the longest confirmed sniper kill in history--3.5 kilometres--was made by a Canadian JTF-2 operative during operations against the Islamic State in 2017.) But we're also people who do things like Operation Yellow Ribbon when the US closed its airspace following the September 11, 2001 attacks, or the Canadian Caper to evacuate US embassy personnel in Tehran after the 1979 Revolution against the US-backed dictatorial regime, going so far as to forge diplomatic papers (risking a major diplomatic incident) to get them out.
We even followed the US lead on things like tariffs on Chinese-made electric vehicles at the behest of the Biden administration, and saw two of our citizens kidnapped by China for the better part of three years after, following Donald I's invocation of our bilateral extradition treaty, we detained Huawei executive Meng Wangzhou in Vancouver while extradition hearings were ongoing.
We've even put up with USAians making fun of our accents and our paper money. (At least you can tell ours apart at a glance, unlike US notes which have far more muted colours, and only got those in the last twenty years or so.) Or trying to bring guns across the border in violation of our laws. (Reportedly at some crossings the CBSA staff have a daily betting pool on how many people trying to enter Canada will attempt to do so with their firearms, and when denied entry, cite their "Second Amendment" right to carry the gun, even though no such right exists here, and certainly no such right exists concerning importation. The US, of course, has similar rules for non-immigrant travellers attempting to bring firearms across the border.)
I really have to wonder how much these various aspects of the bilateral relationship are actually known among the general USAian population. But we've been putting up with USAian ignorance for decades. (To be honest, my opinion of USAians is so low, they'd have to work very hard indeed to disappoint me.)
"51st state" and "Governor Trudeau" pushed us over the edge. "Badly misread" is putting it lightly.
https://www.joeydevilla.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/there-is-no-enemy-like-a-friend-betrayed-2.jpg
US employers benefit tremendously from having a large underclass of illegal immigrants in the US. They don't have to be paid minimum wage and they can't report illegal or otherwise unsafe working conditions. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/01/magazine/economy-illegal-immigration.html
Since the majority of Americans are opposed to this status quo, they have been split into two extreme camps and taught to hate each other by corporate media. As you described, one camp is extremely supportive of illegal immigrants on humanitarian grounds, and the other is extremely unsupportive of illegal immigrants on rule of law grounds. This dichotomy maintains the status quo - immigrants are allowed in and are able to get jobs, but in effect do not have the same rights as those with legal status.
China actually maintains a similar population of internally-displaced, ethnically-Chinese migrant workers without full residency rights in the area where they live and work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_in_China
As in the US, this results in widespread family separation as Chinese migrant workers' children are often not able to follow their parents when they migrate to another region for work: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left-behind_children_in_China
Rich societies in the 21st century are built on the backs of disenfranchised migrant workers - slavery by another name - just like every other great empire in human history, dating all the way back to the pharaohs.
I'm usually skeptical of your "it's Big Business" omnicause (particularly insofar as it requires large numbers of business leaders to coordinate decades-long campaigns without leaving behind much evidence), but immigration is one of the places where the theory seems unusually plausible. It's easy enough to see how Big Business, by simply making it too costly for politicians to notice certain things, could drive this polarization without consciously planning or coordinating it.
If Congress can't solve a problem with an obvious solution for decades, it's because they're being paid not to.
Or because doing so is too painful for them / their voters.
Or perhaps even because the solution that seems obvious to one is genuinely not obvious to another.
(Or, another classic: multiple obvious solutions, each of which is unacceptable to a blocking minority, so we have majorities supporting various solutions but none becoming law.)
For example: I don't think Congress is being *paid* to let Social Security go into crisis in 4 years, and the solution *was* obvious (adopt GW Bush's plan in 2005). Yet here we are! Now everyone's presenting different "obvious" solutions: raise the retirement age! lift the payroll tax cap! means-test payments! allow the cuts! This all seems to be happening with very little influence from the Captains of Industry, or so it seems to me.
You didn't mention what I think is the most obvious solution of all, which is to start adding the portion of Social Security not covered by payroll taxes to the national debt.
The Big Business angle to this approach is that it turns Social Security into welfare rather than an earned benefit, and thereby opens it up to future spending cuts.
At the current time, given current debt financing costs, I think that solution would alarm Big Business. Interest rates would go up, maybe quite substantially, and would keep going up for a long time, and they hate that. They'd get inflation and higher financing costs, which they hate as much as the rest of us.
Also, wasn't your thesis that the obvious solution that Congress was being paid not to do was that it was something Big Business *didn't* want?
And what's the coordinating mechanism for this particular conspiracy?
So I have a lot of problems with the thesis in this area. (It fits immigration much better, though.)
As usual, very thorough and very good. My initial reaction is ironically the opposite of Chuck C. I do, in fact, think it's perfectly fine to “Come to America illegally! As long as you can get away with your crime for long enough, you’ll get to stay!” The effort required for the resource-dry work of living fully under the table tends to breed, in my experience, the most innovative and "American" people.
My bigger thought, however, is to ask if it is really wrong, other than the "why me" of any living population, for an immigrant group to merge with a native population such that a new culture is created? In the long arch of history, this has happened to pretty much every culture at one time. Most of the nations that ruled during the time of Christ no longer exist, with a few exceptions.The Romans dissolved into various tribes. Everyone was French for a few years during Napoleon. The notion of the nation-state didn't fully come to exist in Europe until around the 1700s. Germany, in its current form, is younger than I am. In other words, I think the argument about immigration in the US and Europe today is microscopic and deeply unpragmatic.
Even though I understand your frustration at the theme park, part of me is not exactly worried about the future of American culture, because no culture is ever calcified or survives more than a few hundred years. We, as a nation, will have a different face in 50 years and probably a different name in 500. And that's okay with me. Maybe all the radicals' fears will come true and the US will become majority Muslim and Africa will become the cradle of Christianity, which will spread through India (as the trend looks now), and the values we hold dear will be kept alive in places we will never visit. That doesn't scare me.
I feel like we (American Catholics) spend a lot of time worry about how to protect American culture, forgetting that Jesus had never heard of it.
On the one hand, you are, of course, correct that culture *will* change, whether you like it or not, whether you protect it or not. That's just what culture does, always. Even in the context of assimilation, assimilation is *always* a two-way street, leaving both majority and minority changed by the encounter (usually each acquiring what is best about the other). The French have that silly Academy or whatever whose sole purpose is to preserve the French language inviolate for all time and, like, sorry friends, doomed project!
However, yes, culture is going to change, but a lot hinges on how quickly it does so. Smash two cultures together too quickly and you're going to get a lot of problems: crime, violence, economic dislocation. This alone is going to make a lot of people very unhappy, and cause them to (rationally) call for slowing or stopping immigration.
Worse, if you go too fast, you're also going to lose stuff that is very good, stuff you didn't have to lose. For example, I think America, for all her faults, has some very good values. Representative government. Religious pluralism. Freedom of speech and inquiry. Self-reliance. Equal justice under law, not just for the clan, but for everyone without limitation. Self-government (and long practice with it). Living with them all our lives, I don't think we always recognize how counterintuitive these are, and how unnatural. They are not the human default. We are trained in them almost from the day we are born, and we have to transmit them through careful education to our children. One of the great things about America (and, nowadays, other countries of the West) is our ability to teach these counterintuitive things to strangers, too, making them part of our great extended clan. But we can only teach so many at a time. If we bring in too many, you're right, we will get a fusion culture... but the resulting culture may be missing some *or all* of these things. Historically, the Catholic Church was very skeptical of lots of these things, but I'm American enough to believe that losing these values would be a great loss to the world. Indeed, it would be a great loss to immigrants, since, once those values are lost, the door would slam shut on them completely and forever!
Whereas, if we pace ourselves, bringing in lots New Americans but never so many that they erode our core commitments, we can ensure that these values (and many other good things at our culture) will be preserved, even as our culture continues to change and grow over decades and centuries to come.
I think of it like a lake: lakes constantly need new infusions of nitrogen and phosphorous to stay vital, and they are constantly changing. But put in too much nitrogen *too fast* and BOOM, algae bloom, oxygen levels collapse, fish die off.
I think cultures for sure evolve, but historically most assimilating cultures didn't have the current progressives in the west suicidal infatuation with undermining their own culture and elevating the "other's".
I think the "appetite for immigration" and level of acceptable immigration would be much higher if California wasn't running government programs in 30 different languages (I worked on a project where we did this and believe me it was a nightmare). Where immigrants were expected to change.
Yes there would still be an overall averaging. But the left's attitude right now (as I related in another post) is basically "fuck white people and their culture and America too". It makes people defensive and worried and less willing to tolerate immgiraiton.
In the incident that you witnessed at Valleyfair, what led you to believe that the aggressive young men were Somali?
It's been months, so I don't remember.
I do remember that almost every dark-skinned woman in the park that night was wearing a hijab, and I remember wondering whether that night was East African Heritage Night or something because the crowd had such an unusual racial composition.
(Of course, I didn't put together "hijab" + East African until my wife mentioned that the haunted house girls were East African and I asked how she knew.)
Prefacing note before all of this: there are (broadly) two kinds of birthright citizenship, jus soli and jus sanguinis. The former is "right of soil", whereby anyone born in a country receives citizenship there. The latter is "right of blood", whereby anyone descended from a citizen of a country receives citizenship there. (If you recall, there were questions around Ted Cruz's eligibility to be President back in 2016, because while he has at least one US-citizen parent, he was, in contrast to the earlier questions around John McCain being born in the then-US-controlled Panama Canal Zone, without question born in Canada, so the question was whether, in light of the Fourteenth Amendment, Mr. Cruz's jus sanguinis citizenship satisfied the "natural-born citizen" requirement, since jus soli citizenship is Constitutionally mandated while jus sanguinis citizenship exists by statute. As you noted in an earlier article, the answer was, of course, "duh", but there were still questions.) It is probably useful to distinguish these categories when discussing immigration and citizenship.
So, Canada and immigration.
Yes, we've got a lot of foreign-born residents. Depending on where you are, this doesn't produce the sort of social tension you described, but Canadian culture is very low-tension already. (Canada is also very racist; arguably it is more so than the US because the US is more cognizant of its racism. See, for instance, Romanian stand-up comic Victor Patrascan eviscerating a couple from Edmonton here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQqdenMLSDY )
That doesn't mean we don't have issues with immigration (apart from the aforementioned racism).
Those very humanitarian instincts which lead the part of the US population to support higher immigration levels? That's reversed in large parts of Canada! One crisis we faced over the last decade was Latin American immigrants fleeing their home countries (because of, some would argue, political instability produced by US and Canadian policies; this is of course one humanitarian reason sometimes cited for permitting high immigration and even turning a blind eye to undocumented migrants, because they're often fleeing problems created by the two northern American polities), entering the US--and then continuing north until they got to Canada, because they were afraid of US xenophobia but Canada was reportedly welcoming. What happened? They got to southern Manitoba in the middle of winter, with clothing suited to at best the Rio Grande, and froze to death. (The climate there is, of course, little different from the climate in northern Minnesota.) So just on that basis those humanitarian instincts flowed in the direction of "how do we stop these people from dying, we might need to do more to stop them coming here".
We've also had a simmering housing crisis for decades, which can be traced in part--certainly not in full--to policy decisions made in the 1980s and 1990s to curtail or end federal support for affordable housing programs, and which at least as a side effect has resulted in a lot of people having much of their net worth tied up in their housing. (Reverse-mortgage ads are all over TV these days.) Since increasing housing stock would drive down home values, this produces political pressure not to do so--but without that housing stock, we can't absorb immigrants because they will be homeless and freeze on the streets. (Or just be on the streets, if you're in southwestern BC. We had a much, much milder winter than the rest of the country.)
We've also had a stagnant GDP per capita for a decade (whether you blame Justin Trudeau or the legacy of Stephen Harper for this is correlated to your political views, and the extent to which you look at provincial governments as being at fault says a lot about how much you actually understand Canadian federalism) where GDP growth was largely matched by population growth, much of it driven by immigration. When we (maybe) entered a technical recession (the usual "two consecutive quarters of negative GDP growth" definition), what wasn't as widely reported is that this was matched by a reduction in population because Mark Carney (who is, by the historical standards of Canadian politics, a centrist, maybe mildly centre-right, politician, and not centre-left, and the Liberal Party currently occupies that same position) adopted the position (one of many on which the Conservatives were about to win a landslide majority, until Carney replaced Trudeau and Pierre Poilievre was exposed as an attack dog rather than an actual leader; Tom Mulcair had the same problem back in 2015) of decreasing immigration targets, so GDP per capita remained stagnant or even grew slightly. (This is how we avoided this immigration crisis--by kicking out the main political faction, the Trudeau wing of the Liberals, that was pushing for substantially higher immigration! But in the intervening decade we went from having a solidly pro-immigration social consensus to a firming anti-immigration social consensus, and what that means for Canadian society and culture still remains to be seen. The main legacy of Justin Trudeau's time as Prime Minister is that in public policy, it is decidedly not the case that something that is worth doing is worth overdoing. See also carbon pricing.)
(I will desist from detailing what I think we should do to Pete Hoekstra for reposting the White House warmonger's "51st state" taunt over the technical recession, but suffice it to say that I think he has stepped far beyond the bounds of proper ambassadorial conduct. Also, to another commenter here, it wasn't Donald's threat to annex Alberta--though his government's consorting with separatists there and promising to backstop a new currency certainly didn't help--that has driven anti-US sentiment here; it was the threat to annex us entirely and the imposition of all sorts of tariffs, never mind the increased border controls to the point where the Haskell Free Library had to install a second entrance when the whole point of the place was the binational nature of it. At this point I'm fully in agreement with Wab Kinew that we shouldn't let up on the economic retaliation until all the tariffs--including the ones reflective of older tensions, like on lumber--are gone for good and the entirety of the Epstein Files have been released. I haven't knowingly purchased a US foodstuff for myself in over a year.)
If there is a simmering immigration controversy here, it's because of legislation recently enacted to comply with a court ruling that jus sanguinis citizenship can't be restricted by generation. (This was a real issue; among other things, children born outside of Canada to parents who couldn't pass on their Canadian citizenship due to said restrictions, in a jurisdiction without jus soli citizenship, ended up stateless.) The concern now is that this has resulted in a lot of people worldwide--probably the majority of them USAians--being eligible not just for immigration but outright citizenship, and we still don't have the housing infrastructure necessary for that, never mind that especially with tensions being as they are we are becoming more conscious of our own national identity again and what sets us apart from, especially, the US, and since they'd be citizens we couldn't simply set quotas and turn them away. The one thing that's probably keeping this from boiling over is that anyone wishing to claim citizenship this way has to prove their Canadian ancestry, entirely at their own expense, which means hiring an immigration lawyer and a genealogist who are suddenly slammed with work over this very issue. (I personally also think that anyone claiming citizenship this way should have to at least take the citizenship oath, which as explained by the Ontario Court of Appeal in McAteer v. Canada (AG) is an oath to the institutions of government but phrased, archaically, as an oath to the monarch who in a constitutional monarchy embodies said institutions--but a lot of would-be citizens interpret, and object to, it as a personal oath of loyalty. See https://disavowal.ca/ for the arguments in this direction. I disagree with them, because the oath has a clear legal meaning and I'm a monarchist besides, and I further think in this moment it would help further tamp down on this potential crisis since USAians are generally anti-hereditary monarchy, for understandable historical reasons, and so a lot of would-be citizens would refuse to take the oath, and thus could not become citizens, on those grounds.)
The other major immigration crisis here is the Temporary Foreign Worker program (I think the US equivalent would be the H-1B and/or H-2B visas, but I'm not familiar with US work visa programs and mostly know those from tangential observation of US political controversies), which again draws a lot of humanitarian objections but also objections that it warps the labour market. The humanitarian objections have a lot to do with how people in Canada on the TFW program end up almost as slaves (in an uncomfortably literal sense) to their employers, because their status in Canada is tied to remaining employed by that particular employer, which gives said employers a lot of power over said foreign workers, because being fired means being kicked out of Canada entirely. The labour-market objections come from how employers will insert nonsense requirements into job descriptions (such as fluency in some language that isn't English or French) just in order to claim that they can't fill the position with domestic labour. Recent reforms to it have helped tamp this down but I haven't paid as much attention.
So we have immigration crises! They're not boiling over because as a society we changed course on the question.
(This is all to say nothing of Jesse Ventura's laughable suggestion that Minnesota should try to be annexed by Canada, or the even more laughable suggestion I've seen elsewhere that we should absorb not just Minnesota but also all of New England and Cascadia.)
(Also, while I'm not at all a sociologist, it wouldn't surprise me if some of our greater capacity for immigration was just sheer bloody-minded stubbornness to be different from the US. If the US can't absorb more than about 10% foreign-born, damn it to hell we can do more than that.)
On another note: I would remind you that there was a major event in the late 1840s which led to a substantial uptick in the foreign-born population of the United States, that being the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which (as I recall) ended in the sale by Mexico to the United States of the northern half of Mexico (now the southwestern United States). (In Mexico, this was the invasion and theft of half of their land by the US; yes, it was technically a sale, but compare the purchase prices and land areas of the Mexican Cession to those of the Gadsden Purchase to see why Mexico still views it as outright theft to this day. It's like your neighbour held a gun to your head and made you sign a contract selling your house to him for $1. Sure, there was a contract and all that, and you signed it, and received the purchase price... but you were still robbed.) Mexican citizens living in the ceded area were, again as I recall, given a choice between moving south to what remained of Mexico and keeping Mexican citizenship or staying in the United States and receiving US citizenship. So suddenly the US had a lot of new land with a lot of new citizens who weren't born in the US, suddenly enjoying the right to move anywhere in the country. (I don't know anything about internal migration in the immediate wake of Guadalupe Hidalgo, however.)
(The war also helped define Canada-US relations for the better part of two centuries until the sleep-deprived spray-tan fucked it up; President Polk was facing tensions with the UK over the Oregon Territory, but not wanting to fight a war with the UK while already embroiled in one with Mexico, he agreed to partition the area by extending the border along the 49th parallel to the mainland coast, with Vancouver Island remaining British entirely, providing a peaceful resolution to the border dispute.)
(Side note: "Trust is a more important currency in politics than most of today’s politicians seem to realize. Once spent, your ability to make deals falls off a cliff." I cannot avoid noting here that however bad you may think the JCPOA was--and at this point the US would be insanely fortunate to be able to get it again, or even get it with the proviso that Iran can charge "service fees" for use of the Strait of Hormuz--Donald's ripping it up in his first term utterly destroyed the trust other countries, especially Iran, had in the United States, and is a large part of why the current war is proving intractable. Iran simply does not trust that the United States will keep its word when it comes to any potential peace deal, and the ability of the United States to make deals fell off a cliff.)
"Tourists’ babies probably aren’t, but the 14th Amendment was pretty sweeping on this point." As I recall, even tourists' babies become citizens under the expansive definitions of jus soli applicable in US and Canadian citizenship law. The only two exceptions of which I'm aware are people to whom domestic law does not or cannot fully apply: children born to members of an invading military force (because the country cannot, definitionally, enforce its laws on armed invaders) and children born to diplomatic personnel from other countries (because they enjoy certain legal immunities; go look up how much DC says it's owed in parking tickets from all the ambassadors there). If you're in the country legally on a tourist visa, you've assented to be subject to its laws, and the country is entirely capable of enforcing those laws on you. (You are, to quote the Constitutional language, "subject to the jurisdiction [of the United States]", which invading armies and ambassadors are not.) "Anchor babies" are a source of controversy in immigration! (I think this was brought up in relation to whether Barack Obama was a native-born citizen, because of his parents' status in Hawai'i, but the court case you want to look at is 1898's United States v. Wong Kim Ark, which everyone thought had settled the question until 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue's squatter purported to claim otherwise.)
(Another side note: the question of sweeping jus soli citizenship is one of those ones that has become impossible to solve because of partisan polarization in the United States. It was not always so; Harry Reid supported curtailing it. https://cis.org/Feere/Flashback-Sen-Reid-Birthright-Citizenship )
(Fun fact: during World War II when European heads of state fled to the UK in the face of the Nazi onslaught, some of them, at least their families, went across the Atlantic to Canada. Perhaps the most notable result, when it comes to citizenship law, of this was that Princess Margriet of the Netherlands was born in 1943 in a maternity ward in an Ottawa hospital. She is not a Canadian citizen, and was not a British subject, because the ward in question was declared to be extraterritorial at the moment of her birth; she received Dutch citizenship at birth because Dutch citizenship law follows jus sanguinis.)
EDIT: Another factor that comes to mind when it comes to how Canada has been able to absorb a higher foreign-born population than the United States has to do with the relative levels of urbanization and urban concentration. A quick look indicates to me that our ten largest metropolitan areas (as of the 2021 census) contain about 55% of our population, while the US's ten largest (as of 2020) contain less than 25%, so if populous urban areas can absorb more immigration than less populous areas, then this might explain our greater capacity, but this probably needs a great deal of refinement because the US has a lot more large urban areas than Canada does! (For instance, that top-ten list in the US misses Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle, all of which are major points of entry to my knowledge.)
I am genuinely uncertain how Mexicans in the purchased/conquered territories were counted in the 1850 census!
Neither am I, but at least all the data from 1850 is publicly available, so someone could try to tease it out from that. Wikipedia's summary indicates that the census that year collected data on country of birth and attempted to collect data on every resident, not just heads of household. From what I can tell the assessed populations in the areas added by the Mexican Cession and the annexation of Texas didn't amount to more than about 2% of the total population of the country but it's the internal migration that could prove more significant.
These observations do make me morbidly amused about how MAGA is so eager to annex Canada (I've even heard of Harris voters who support it on economic grounds), even though that would immediately push the foreign-born population of the US to somewhere around 25%! It's like MAGA already doesn't see Canada as a separate country, or Canadians as "foreign-born"*. (We already have issues with USAians getting in the domestic arrivals line at airports to the point where foreign/international arrivals signage has a US flag next to a world map at Pearson and YVR. Personally I think we should take said flags down and automatically reject any USAian who gets in the domestic line on the grounds of misrepresenting their nationality. But I also thought we shouldn't have let the convicted criminal cosplaying as a head of state into the country for the G7 summit last year on the basis of said criminal convictions, which would've caused a diplomatic row to dwarf anything that's rocked bilateral relations in recent decades, including all the actual current unpleasantness, so I'm probably not the person to take advice from on those matters.)
*If you don't count them as such, it pushes the share down to 15% or so, which would still be nowhere near enough to tamp down the nativist sentiments by your argument--and even if it were you'd just be trading a nativist problem for a separatist one!
I admit, when I first saw Canada's foreign-born share, I said to myself, "Pshaw, that number's way too high, it must be like half Americans and we don't count we're practically Canadian already."
Then I factored out Americans from the Canadian foreign-born stock (footnote 12) and HOO BOY was I surprised by the results. (Spoilers for those reading along: Americans make up only like 20% of Canada's foreign-born share.)
Re: JCPOA: it was always dumb for the U.S. executive to make agreements without getting them ratified by the Senate. It was also dumb for foreign governments to accept them, but our executive asked them to trust us, then couldn't keep that word. Trust torched. A James Heaney presidency will see the U.S. enter very few international agreements, but the ones we join will enjoy broad, durable, national support (as ratified by the Senate).
Re: urban areas: I like this theory.
There's enough stories out there about USAians not understanding Canadian social conventions that you can be sure that we count them as foreign-born (and, again, as I noted, there's simmering concerns about allowing an influx of USAians into the country due to expanded jus sanguinis citizenship).
(At least the ones who choose to settle down here don't do stupid shit like the tourists who try to demand US currency in change from stores. Whether they flagjack before actually becoming citizens is another matter.)
Depending on how one defines "white" my own metro area is probably at about 40% not white. The main impact of this, from my perspective, is that there's a lot of great food available, but it wouldn't at all surprise me if smaller communities even along the coast would get more restive trying to handle our demographic mix. (But keep in mind that in contrast to your example of an influx of a single ethnic group, the mix here is very diverse so no one group can dominate. And even then there's plenty of linguistic and other divisions among those groups; consider all the various spoken forms of Chinese that still persist, despite the CCP's efforts to impose Mandarin on everyone.)
(Briefly on the JCPOA since this isn't the article for it: the two other major problems are, one, the US's demonstrated inability to get Israel to stop its own attacks, and Iran is at the least demanding an Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon and may decide to push further to demand withdrawals from the West Bank and Gaza, and might even go for the Golan Heights; two, the Iranian negotiators have read "The Art of the Deal" in which the bad combover said that the way to make a good deal is to promise a lot of stuff in future and then never deliver, so the Iranians are only willing to accept anything that they can get right away and don't trust future commitments one bit.)
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1850/1850a/1850-census-report-territories.pdf
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1850/1850a/1850-census-report-california.pdf
The numbers here are pulled from the "nativities of the population" tables.
Population of New Mexico: 61,547 (60,000 of whom were born under Mexico or abroad)
Population of Utah: 11,354 (75% are Mormons)
California: 92,000 people; however, most of them were brought out by the Gold Rush. Based on the number of people residing there who'd been born in the state in 1850, it's likely that there might have been about 8,000 people living there who weren't born American when we annexed it.
Population of the US in 1850: 23,191,876, 1% of which is 231,919.
Our annexation of the American SW added three-tenths of a percentage point to the number of foreign-born residents of America.
But as I noted, in the immediate wake of the theft of northern Mexico, Mexican citizens there were given the opportunity to instead be US citizens, which would have given them freedom of movement to the rest of the US. I wonder what the data looks like for other parts of the country. (Also, there was Texas, which was another 1% of the population.)
I'm perfectly willing to accept that the Mexican Cession had a comparatively small impact on the foreign-born demographic and that a much bigger root cause of the late-1840s nativism was immigration from European Catholic countries like Ireland, Italy and Spain (and, of course, said immigrants' Catholicism was another factor! It may be wholly invented after the fact but one reason I've seen given for the "Know Nothing" name was that it was a reference to "I know nothing but this book", contrasting the Protestant reliance solely on the Bible with the Catholic use of other sources in addition to it. As I've noted before in these comment sections, one of the root causes of the 1775 treason was the granting of civil rights to Catholics in Québec) but I'd still be interested to see country-of-origin breakdowns for other areas in the United States at the time.
Side note: James, how did you handle Puerto Ricans, living in the mainland US or otherwise? Given the reaction to Bad Bunny performing at Super Bowl LX, I have to wonder if those USAian citizens' presence on the mainland (by some estimates there's nearly twice as many people of Puerto Rican descent living in the mainland US than there are living in Puerto Rico itself) has contributed to the nativist problems. (Which is not to say that Puerto Ricans should be kicked out of the US, of course.)
There was virtually no out-migration from New Mexico or California to the rest of the country. The distances were prohibitive, and the locals had no reason to do so.
As to Texas: In 1850, 93,000 of the free inhabitants were born outside of the state but in America, 43,000 were born in the state, and 18,000 were foreign-born.
https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1850/1850a/1850-census-report-texas.pdf
So, at most, annexing Texas meant adding two-tenths of a percentage point to the foreign-born population of the US.
So it was much more to do with immigration on the Atlantic coast than anything resulting from the Mexican-American War. That doesn't surprise me; what did surprise me was that James didn't bring up the conflict at all given that it occurred immediately prior to the rise of the nativist Know Nothings and resulted in the absorption of some number of foreign-born people into the US.
Thank you for checking.
The truth: I didn't think about Puerto Ricans. Never crossed my mind. They are no doubt excluded from the foreign-born share of population (rightly so), but you are right that Puerto Rico is an odd part of our empire with a (somewhat) different culture from the mainland. Dunno how that might factor into a more nuanced analysis.
I suspect it has some impact. You are right that the black population in the US has a markedly different culture than the rest of the country, but it is also one to which the rest of the country is regularly exposed, at least in some ways. The same is not true of Puerto Rican culture, at least to my knowledge, though occasionally you get something breaking through like Luis Fonsi's "Despacito". But what was notable with the reaction to the announcement of Bad Bunny as the headliner for the Super Bowl LX halftime show is that it appeared that a lot of MAGA types online had no idea that Puerto Ricans are US citizens or that Puerto Rico is part of the US; the fact that he performed in Spanish (I believe that was announced beforehand) likely also had a great deal to do with it. (Never mind that estimates place the share of the US population speaking Spanish at home at about 14%, and the US has more hispanophones than any other country except Mexico.)
I recall seeing some administration official or nominee testify before a US Senate committee and complain about how US culture needs to be protected, citing said halftime show in particular, but I can't find the clips right now. (Completely ignoring that Puerto Rican culture is necessarily part of US culture!)
(Other notable non-USAians to perform at the halftime show: Rihanna, a Barbadian; the Weeknd, a Canadian; Shakira, a Colombian; Coldplay, The Who, and The Rolling Stones, all British groups; Paul McCartney, also from the UK; Shania Twain, a Canadian; U2, an Irish group; Enrique Iglesias, a Spaniard. But they all sang in English, I believe.)
Also there's something in here about how Donald wants to pretend to be William McKinley (brought it up in his inaugural address and reverted the federal name of Denali back to Mt. McKinley, for instance) while clearly not liking Puerto Ricans, but it was under McKinley following the Spanish-American War that Puerto Rico was first brought under US jurisdiction. (And then came the Insular Cases, and so on.)
this argument is gonna stick in my brain for a while. im gonna be thinking my way around it for a while. thank you for that. it makes me uncomfortable.
Another factor in the "how many is too many" question is how the government handles issues of law enforcement. Does the government appear to favor the newcomers over the natives? If so, where once a community might have tolerated 10%, now it becomes 7.5% or 5%. Or perhaps 0%.
James, you take a very humanistic approach to this issue, and I truly admire you for it. But it is completely impractical. We will never devote the resources necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff. And I disagree with many of your assertions.
FIRST. The exclusion of Chinese had nothing to do with the nation’s desire to limit the number of immigrants and everything to do with racism.
SECOND. Your statistics don’t match the unlimited immigration of Germans, Italians, Russians, Irish,
Jews at the beginning of the 20th Century, and it is what made our nation the richest and most powerful and technologically advanced in the world.
THIRD. Everything and worse you ascribe to Afghanis was said about the above immigrants. Within a generation, they were as American as apple pie and bagels were as American as hot dogs.
FOURTH. Your analysis is backward looking. It doesn’t account for the population implosion facing the Northern Hemisphere. Who is going to pay for social security and our military in 2050. Just look at Japan. Even China is expected to lose a half billion people. Russia will be devastated. Germany and France created their own problems with guest workers who were imported to do jobs no one else wanted to do.
FINALLY. Just about everything you say is refuted by Miami’s experience with Cuban and Haitian immigrants. They made South Florida great. But don’t ask for help at Macy’s in Dadeland Mall in English if you expect to be understood.
Jon! Always grateful for your thoughtful comments and perspective. I'll give my brief thoughts in response in the order in which they were received.
FIRST. I don't think you can so easily separate the nation's desire to limit immigrants from racism. Friction with immigrants is a *cause* of racism. Friction with Asians was unsurprisingly higher than friction with Germans because the median Asian was more different from the median American than the median German. Difference creates friction, and sufficient friction causes both racism *and* a desire to limit immigration (a desire which can create a feedback loop creating more racism). If it were just freestanding racism, existing independent from immigration pressure, America would have banned Asian immigration *before* they started immigrating... but, in reality, it was the immigration itself that caused the friction (and, to a great extent, the racism as well).
SECOND. I'm not sure which particular statistics you're talking about when you say they "don't match." Towards the end of the 19th Century, America *did* begin to impose limits on German/Italian/Russian/Irish/Jewish immigration. The Immigration Act of 1882, the Immigration Act of 1891, the Immigration Act of 1917... all these targeted (and slowed) European migration. Whenever European migration got fast enough to push America beyond 14% foreign-born, Congress came up with a new way to slow them down. You're right that, in the 1910s, it began to speed up again... and, in response, Congress passed the Emergency Quota Act, which finally (and permanently) ended unlimited immigration from Europe.
You are correct, of course, that those immigrants contributed a great deal to making our country great. (I should hope so! My people came over in that wave!) Someday, too, the descendants of Somalis will contribute to making our country great, too. I am confident in this. The question is not whether they are inferior people (they aren't!) but whether they are coming too fast right now. I think that's the same question we faced in the early 20th century. The American people decided, "Yes, the Europeans are coming too fast now," and they massively slowed down immigration in order to deal with that. I don't think they were wrong to do so.
THIRD. "Within a generation"? Every one of those nationalities developed multi-generational ethnic enclaves in multiple American cities that didn't fade until the mid-twentieth century, AFTER immigration had been limited. THAT is when those populations assimilated. Looking around my city, *even just among the Catholics*, we have Polish parishes and German parishes in very close proximity to one another, but each community needed their own parish, because they weren't assimilated and didn't mix with one another (nor with the mainstream).
Assimilation comes eventually. Sometimes, it even comes fast and easy. But the lesson we should take from the European migration of the early 20th century is the opposite: assimilation is slow and hard and is easily overwhelmed by new immigration if the federal government doesn't put on the brakes.
FOURTH. Our coming population hole is indeed a tremendous problem. However, filling the hole with immigrants *will not remove the problems caused by immigration and assimilation*. Those problems will exist *even though* the country has a legitimate, urgent need for large-scale immigration. Either the nation has to find some way to make its assimilation capacity much, much higher... or the nation has to accept (as I did some years ago) that both Social Security and the military are going to face major cuts in coming years.
FINALLY. I can't speak to South Florida, never having lived there. I don't know the rate at which foreign-born residents came to live there, nor how they came to do so. I can see that Florida's foreign-born share of population is almost 25%, which is pretty impressive, but I don't know whether that's come with any costs, nor how recently it has spiked. However, I think is a bad thing if there are areas in the United States where (as you say) English-speakers can't be helped. I would vote against whatever set of policies brought that about.
Florida has benefited from two things:
1) like most of the ex confederacy its whites vote pretty hard to the right
2) there are a lot of different kinds of Cubans, but compare to a lot of other Hispanic immigrant groups they are more “white hispanic”. That is if you have them take an ancestry.com test they would have a lot of European ancestry in there and a lot of them pass as white if you look at them.
There is also the fact that many of them were originally communist refugees.
The net effect of this is that Cubans are one of the most right wing and assimilated immigrant groups in America.
By contrast most of the Hispanic immigration to my old home of New York was Puerto Rican, with a smattering from the other “islands”. These groups are generally darker skinned, vote strongly for the left, and have worse social statistics than other Hispanic groups. Note to that since Puerto Ricans already have us citizenship their immigration often doesn’t show up as immigration.
James and I briefly discussed the question of how to count Puerto Ricans living in the mainland US in this analysis: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/how-many-immigrants-is-too-many/comment/275290619
There's a couple of reasons for Canada's ability to take in lots of immigrants (which has been under strain recently). Canada has never been a unicultural country. From the very beginning, the country was a union of the protestant English and the catholic French (to say nothing of the indigenous peoples). For the later half of the 20th century (leading up to COVID), there was a very strong pro-immigration consensus based on a manageable number of immigrants coming in selected via a points system that prioritized skill and language aptitude.
This started to break down about a decade ago when the new Trudeau government rapidly jacked up immigration numbers (including taking and naturalizing large numbers of Syrian refugees), essentially doubling the inflow of immigration. We also started getting more asylum seekers generally. Canadian attitudes started to shift against new immigration (there were some polls where, for the first time, more Canadians were against new immigration than for it).
However, after Trudeau was deposed last year in a palace coup, his more centrist replacement, former Bank of England governor Mark Carney, started cutting immigration numbers (mostly from the temporary foreign worker program, that ultimately turned out not to be so temporary). Immigration as a political issue is not as salient as it was in the Trudeau era, but is not where it was pre-Trudeau.
Nice article, I too live in MN and have noticed much the same things. I am a centrist, but who is pretty radical on immigration (and think it has been *the issue* since at least 2013. I seems like one of those things where if the Dems had caved to the right's concerns a bit back then, Trump doesn't get elected either time) in part because I was so sick of NPR/MPR totally soft-pedaling the issue. really one of the things that "red-pilled" me.
Both my wife and I (she is much more a progressive than me) have been talking about this sort of thing since our college days 20+ years ago, and how the danger zone in the US is around 14%. And here we are...
One of the biggest places all this friction plays out is schools. Radicalizes a lot of parents. At my kids (pretty good) inner city public schools, where there were very few problems of any sort, one of the Somali 4th graders was bringing a knife to school and shaking down the other 4th graders for money and another 5th grader was stealing things from students and the school in an almost organized crime manner. Breaking into locked areas with tools and such for months, and stealing in bulk.
Just a little local anecdote that underlines the kind of friction this creates. I am a bit involved in Dem politics and very involved in youth sports. I was at a Dem event where the elected official's staff member doesn't know that, and tells me about how they hate sport parents and can't wait to gut the youth sports budget because that is "white people shit" (note almost everyone in this conversation except the elected official is white because this is a fundraiser). They say they will support some sports the PoC kids like (namely soccer), but basically white people don't need anything from government and their culture doesn't matter.
I gently point out that actually my family is very involved in this sort of thing, and a lot of people value it a lot. And exactly this type of behavior is what turns the existing population against immigrants, and they just sheepishly changed the subject.
Nice to hear what they really think. Didn't donate any more money to that dude.
Fellow Minnesotan! I declare a Minnesota Karma Train! https://imgur.com/gallery/minnesota-karma-train-Ew58jB7
It's a fun writeup, and it's always very satisfying when a complicated thing can be distilled down into a single number, so I'm inclined to like it. Unfortunately I think it's probably more wrong than right, for a couple reasons.
One is that, as you mention in a couple comments, the foreign born population percentage is WAY higher in some places, apparently without causing problems. NYC's is much higher than 10%; SF's is in the 30s. San Francisco has lots of problems (citation needed), but no one seems to think that's because of its immigrant population, in fact it's often quite the opposite.
But that makes me skeptical of the connection to the know-nothing party-- we might say that today the national average is actually pretty impactful, because of mass communication, social media, etc. But that would not have been true in the 1840s, where the local population is all that would have really mattered. In fact, are we really that similar to the Americans of the 1840s at all, by comparison? Are people in rural Tennessee 2026 more similar to New York City citizens of 2026, or rural Tennesseans of 1840?
This is a reasonable objection, well-stated. My reply to a similar objection is given here: https://decivitate.jamesjheaney.com/p/how-many-immigrants-is-too-many/comment/274625684 . But it's very speculative.
Granting that my number may be quite wrong, I do still think it's important to figure out *a* number, even if it's a number using a different measure.
My engineer brain started to think about an "assimilation ratio" to reflect that some immigrant populations are much more similar to Americans than others, so Canadians would have a .15, while rural Afghans might have .98. Unfortunately, such a project is probably complicated enough to only be done by someone who is very excited about official sub-sarahan IQ statistics.
On the other hand, such a model probably have a big impact on your proposed solutions: America's ability to assimilate highly educated populations than rural ones with limited exposure to global American culture. Or maybe not! Maybe it really is more simple -- that would be very strange to me but it's not impossible
I suspect you are correct that this could be a huge refinement to my simple model, but, as you say, it would be very hard, and would require tremendous resilience against accusations of racism.
It's worth exploring, though. One of the other commenters suggested that Canada's apparent high assimilation capacity is related to its long-standing visa "points" system, which prioritizes highly-educated, highly-skilled workers, who are, in turn (the theory goes) more readily assimilable. That seems plausible! And a blunt tool like foreign-born share of population is too coarse to even begin to investigate that.
I haven't looked into how our immigration system works after the overhauls of the last decade, but what I can say is that it's a lot easier to get people to accept immigration if it's targeted at skilled professionals in fields where the country has a clear shortage. We've taken an anti-immigrant turn generally but very much want medical doctors! (And a fair few USAian doctors want to come here. See also the Patrascan video I linked.)
George Bowering, a Canadian poet, was very young when WWII broke out. After the attack on Pearl Harbor and Canada's declaration of war on Japan (depending on the exact legal niceties you observe, Canada declared war before the US did), we, like the US, interned people of Japanese descent. Bowering, who was six years old at the time, wrote in his book "Stone Country" that he was confused by this; his dentist was Japanese and also had the same name as the King, so he seemed alright in young George's book:
"Here was Canada, threatened by two huge and successful enemies, both capable of crossing oceans. There could be spies and double agents and traitors everywhere. So we locked up a lot of people who did not have English last names. We locked up Italians and Germans and Jews with German names, and Ukrainians and Romanians, and so on. On the West Coast we joined our fear of the exotic with BC's traditional anti-Asian activity, and took all the Japanese Canadians away from the coast so that they could not signal to submarines where the choice targets were.
"The RCMP infiltrated the Japanese-Canadian community, and eventually made a report that indicated higher levels of patriotism there than in the populace as a whole, including buying bonds, trying to enlist and giving blood to the Red Cross. But there were energetic racists working at all levels of government, and when Pearl Harbor and Hong Kong happened the Japanese Canadians could see the graffiti on the wall. As soon as Canada declared war on Japan, forty Japanese citizens were slapped into jail, all the Japanese Canadian-owned fishing boots were tied up and Japanese language schools and newspapers disappeared.
"The JC community tried everything they could to demonstrate their loyalty. Japanese-Canadian soldiers would leave their blood on the ground in Italy. But there were white fishermen and farmers in BC who dreamed of an economic future free of Japanese-Canadian competition. Mackenzie King was slow to give in to the mob, even when it was led by his own MPs. It was not that he didn't keep up his end as a racist. He did not like the fact that Jews were buying property next to his in Quebec. He would be thankful that the atomic bomb was dropped on Asians rather than Europeans. He was not comfortable with the fact that India made it into the Commonwealth. But he dragged his feet when it came to hauling away the Japanese Canadians, because he did not want retaliation against the Canadian POWs at Hong Kong.
"At the end of February 1942, twenty thousand people were herded into the Pacific National Exhibition grounds in east Vancouver and then herded to internment camps or deserted mining towns in eastern BC, the Prairies or as far east as Ontario. They were allowed to take a suitcase and a blanket each. In all the confusion of wartime their boats and houses and stores and farms somehow fell into the hands of white folks.
"I was living in Greenwood, BC, at the time. Being six years old, I found it confusing when I saw the caricatures of evil Jap fighter plane pilots with their huge teeth and thick glasses, and then went to get my teeth fixed by a thin Japanese-Canadian dentist who shared my first name. Well, so did the king, and he knew what was what."
A weighty analysis and I agree with much of it. I'm not so sure how practical it is to reduce the non-native-born population of the US to just 10%. But the immigration system badly needs overhauling. And I agree that assimilation is vital. lack of assimilation is causing real problems in the UK and other European countries.
As to immigrant assimilation, the area of most concern would be Muslim immigrants which might resist assimilation. (Having said that, Columbus has the second largest Somali immigrant population, without the issues you describe in the Twin Cities).
As to granting legal status to longtime illegally present immigrants, we will need to do that, if oly because of the logistical nightmare of trying to deport millions of "illegals". I have long believed that anyone who came to the US as an adult, needs to pay a substantial penalty, one that would discourage future illegal immigration. I don't think that should be in money as not all would be able to pay (I am open to a prison sentence, perhaps suspended). But the most fitting penalty would be losing the right to ever be an American citizen. (Exceptions should be made for those brought as minor children -- the DREAMers or DACAs).
A trio of conservative Muslim Texans attended a state Republican convention with the theme of "Unity drives victory".
They were told they should convert or leave the US. (Not, to be sure, unanimously; some other delegates defended them, and they were not themselves removed as delegates on procedural grounds.) The outgoing party chair suggested they should join the Democratic Party instead.
https://www.texastribune.org/2026/06/15/texas-republican-party-convention-muslims-sharia-law/
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/texas-gop-convention-muslim-republicans/
https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/religion/2026/06/16/554663/texas-republican-party-convention-muslims-sharia-law/
(You can find images of the three in tears after facing the blatant Islamophobia from other delegates at the convention.)