The Economist surely ranks as the world’s most influential newsweekly, and the cover story of its latest issue must have greatly surprised many longtime readers of that staunchly neoliberal publication. The headline was “Scrap the Asylum System” and the inside pages fleshed out this emphatic statement in a leader backed by a long article.
For decades, the Economist has been known for its strong support of immigration and immigrants, asylum-seeking refugees certainly included, and an apparent ideological reversal of such magnitude naturally caught my eye.
Although many different elements may have gone into this surprising shift, I suspect that the strident anti-immigration policies and rhetoric of President Donald Trump were probably the decisive factor.
Over the last couple of months, Trump’s immigration-control measures have been unprecedented in their harshness, sending masked federal officers to snatch suspected illegal immigrants off the streets of our major cities, then deploying thousands of national guardsmen and marines to Los Angeles to intimidate and suppress the resulting public protests. Judges, mayors and other elected officials from around the country have sometimes been arrested and dragged away for allegedly interfering with such immigration operations.
California is America’s largest state with a population of some 40 million, perhaps half of them from an immigrant background, and our senior U.S. Senator is Alex Padilla, a respected moderate Democrat from the Los Angeles area. Last month Sen. Padilla attempted to ask Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem a probing question about immigration policies at her LA press conference, only to be manhandled, handcuffed, and thrown to the ground by members of her security detail, an incident that absolutely astonished me. I’d never previously heard of any similar physical attack upon so high-ranking an elected official in modern American history. This seemed more like the sort of behavior we’d expect to see in a despotic Third World dictatorship.
Most recently, the Trump Administration publicly touted the creation of a new prison-camp in Florida swampland to hold those arrested for immigration violations, proclaiming it the “Alligator Alcatraz.” Trump had already made arrangements to send other such civil offenders off to brutal foreign prisons in El Salvador or Africa’s Sudan, sometimes even doing so in direct violation of orders issued by federal judges. Trump officials have apparently convinced themselves that the harshest possible measures taken against immigrants and their advocates are the recipe for political success.
During the 1990s, immigration and related topics had been the main subjects of my writing and political activities, but that completely changed in 2001 after the 9/11 Attacks, with foreign policy matters becoming my leading concern. I’ve still occasionally published major articles on immigrants and immigration in the quarter-century since then, but only every year or two rather than on a weekly or monthly basis.
So although I’d followed the controversial zigzags of the Trump-Biden-Trump immigration policies of the last decade, I’d only occasionally covered them in my own writings. Instead, our hugely provocative and dangerous Ukrainian proxy war against nuclear-armed Russia on Russia’s own border has been a frequent topic, along with the new Middle Eastern conflict suddenly ignited in October 2023 by the successful Hamas raid on Israel.
But immigration issues have been very much in the news over the last several years, likely playing a major factor in Trump’s 2024 victory at the polls. His dramatic current policies have major implications for the future of American society, and with the Economist apparently now partially bending to those gale-force political winds, I’ve decided to recapitulate our recent history of immigration policies, also providing my own views of Trump’s dramatic current actions.
Although sometimes obfuscated or overshadowed by other ideological issues, the largest single factor shaping immigration policy has usually been simple economics, namely the basic law of supply and demand. A large increase in the supply of willing workers will naturally favor their employers, so business interests have traditionally supported heavy immigration, while workers and their advocates have taken the opposite side of the debate.
In recent years, this fundamental point has sometimes been lost in the angry American battle over immigration, but I’ve always considered it obvious, and I emphasized this point in a long 2011 article, noting the decades of recent economic stagnation for ordinary Americans in a section entitled “The Politics of Rich and Poor”:
It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that this 40 year period of economic stagnation for most Americans coincides exactly with 40 years of rapidly rising immigration levels. After all, the concept that a huge influx of eager workers would tend to benefit Capital at the expense of Labor is hardly astonishing, nor does it require years of academic research into the intricacies of economic theory.
Consider, for example, the case of self-educated union activist Cesar Chavez, a liberal icon of the 1960s who today ranks as the top Latino figure in America’s progressive pantheon. During nearly his entire career, Chavez stood as a vigorous opponent of immigration, especially of the undocumented variety, repeatedly denouncing the failure of the government to enforce its immigration laws due to the pervasive influence of the business lobby and even occasionally organizing vigilante patrols at the Mexican border. Indeed, the Minutemen border activists of a few years back were merely following in Chavez’s footsteps and would have had every historical right to have named their organization the “Cesar Chavez Brigade.” I think a good case can be made that during his own era Chavez ranked as America’s foremost anti-immigration activist.
But today’s union leaders have grown almost completely silent on the obvious impact that large increases in the supply of labor have on the economic well-being of ordinary workers. A crucial explanation is that for reasons of citizenship and language, the overwhelming majority of immigrants are employed in the private sector, particularly the small-scale non-unionized private sector. Meanwhile, population growth tends to increase the need for teachers, police officers, firefighters, and other government employees, thereby benefiting the powerful public-sector unions that today completely dominate the labor movement.
In that same article I went on to note that the sort of neoliberal economic ideology enormously beneficial to the business interests on one side of the immigration debate had successfully captured the political leadership of both the Democratic and Republican parties, causing them to mindlessly endorse the sort of “Open Borders” approach that would have stunned previous generations of American elected officials:
The political reality is that both major parties are enormously dependent upon the business interests that greatly benefit from the current system and are also dominated by disparate ideologies—libertarian open-borders and multicultural open-borders—whose positions tend to coincide on this issue.
As an extreme example of the bizarre ideological views of our current political elites, consider a less-publicized element of the immigration reform plan that President George W. Bush trumpeted during his 2004 reelection campaign. This provision would have allowed any foreigner anywhere in the world to legally immigrate to America if he accepted a minimum-wage job that no American were willing to fill, an utterly insane proposal which would have effectively transformed America’s minimum wage into its maximum wage. Naturally his opponent, Sen. John Kerry, saw absolutely nothing wrong with this idea, though he did criticize various other aspects of Bush’s immigration plan as being somewhat mean-spirited.
This bizarre, unthinking elite consensus in support of Open Borders was further brought home to me a couple of years later when I was invited to New York City to participate in a televised public debate on immigration issues before a live studio audience, with the show carried on NPR and also rebroadcast on various television outlets across the country. As I explained in 2013:
Given my two decades of past writing on immigration issues, I found it quite ironic and amusing that I had been selected for the “anti-immigration” side of the debate, together with Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the eminently pro-immigrant Migration Policy Center. This indicates how yesterday’s fringe ideas have now become the accepted mainstream perspective of American elites. The resolution under consideration was certainly as extreme and radical a formulation of the views of economic libertarians as might be imagined: “Let Anyone Take A Job Anywhere.”
Under the literal interpretation of such a proposal, one can easily imagine twenty or thirty million of the world’s desperate poor coming to America within the first few years of enactment, drawn from a global pool numbering in the billions. The resulting social and economic changes would be on a scale unprecedented in human history let alone America’s past, and the potential for an utterly destructive outcome leading to the collapse of our society seems completely obvious.
Nonetheless, at the pre-debate vote the supporters of this proposal outnumbered opponents by a landslide margin of some twenty-five points, 46% to 21%, while one-third of the audience remained undecided. Indeed, during the televised pre-debate discussion between the moderator and the Intelligence Squared chairman, some doubts were expressed that any intelligent person could oppose such a sensible free market policy in labor mobility.
Once the debate began, I focused on the obvious point that the law of supply and demand ensured that a huge increase in the number of willing workers would greatly reduce their economic bargaining power against their employers. Wages for ordinary Americans have been stagnant for forty years and it is probably more than pure coincidence that the last forty years have witnessed one of America’s greatest waves of foreign immigration. Adopt a proposal that immediately increases such immigration levels by a factor of five or ten, and America’s minimum wage would be transformed into its maximum wage, with the natural outcome being economic devastation for most working Americans.
Certainly America’s affluent and highly-educated urban elite—the sort of New Yorkers attending the debate—would benefit in the short run from enacting a policy that drastically cut the share of the national income going to shopkeepers, nannies, construction workers, and probably 90% of all other Americans. But the eventual social consequences of the total impoverishment of the American middle and working classes might lead to the sort of extreme political reaction we sometimes read about in the history books.
Such points might seem totally obvious to me, but many of the audience members had seemingly never encountered them before, and the results were striking. After ninety minutes of hearing both sides of the issue, there was a swing of thirty-two points toward our opposed position, and we won handily. As a point of comparison, at the reception prior to the show we had been told that the largest previous swing at any Intelligence Squared debate had been the shift of eighteen points that occurred during a 2006 debate on the nature of Hamas in the Mid East conflict.
I have little doubt that those many hundreds of earnest New Yorkers who decided to spend their time and money to attend an evening policy debate rather than see a Broadway show or watch Gravity in 3-D, consider themselves well-informed people, who regularly read The New York Times and many of the leading liberal opinion magazines. But such purportedly “liberal” outlets studiously avoid mentioning that a massive influx of foreign workers would be an economic catastrophe for the bulk of the American population. Hence the apparent surprise of so much of the audience at the notion that a huge increase in the supply of workers might produce a sharp decline in the market value of their labor and the income they receive.
The political elites of both major parties continued to completely ignore these widespread popular sentiments. Therefore they were totally shocked a couple of years later when Donald Trump suddenly made immigration his signature issue and used it to easily crush all his Republican establishment opponents in the primary and seize the GOP nomination for himself. Decades of very heavy immigration had dramatically changed the racial demographics of our country, thereby greatly unsettling large portions of the white majority, while the reigning Democratic Party establishment ferociously vilified anyone who dared question the economic logic of their lunatic Open Borders dogma. This opened the door to Trump’s populist, racially-charged insurgent candidacy.
A few weeks before Trump’s upset November 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, I’d published an article emphasizing all of these important points:
In the year 1915 America was over 85% white, and a half-century later in 1965, that same 85% ratio still nearly applied. But partly due to the passage of the Immigration Reform Act of that year, America’s demographics changed very rapidly over the following five decades. By 2015 there had been a 700% increase in the total number of Hispanics and Asians and the black population was nearly 100% larger, while the number of (non-Hispanic) whites had grown less than 25%, with much of even that small increase due to the huge influx of Middle Easterners, North Africans, and other non-European Caucasians officially classified by our U.S. Census as “white.” As a consequence of these sharply divergent demographic trends, American whites have fallen to little more than 60% of the total, and are now projected to become a minority within just another generation or two, already reduced to representing barely half of all children under the age of 10.
Demographic changes so enormous and rapid on a continental scale are probably unprecedented in all human history, and our political establishment was remarkably blind for having failed to anticipate the possible popular reaction. Over the last twelve months, Donald Trump, a socially liberal New Yorker, has utilized the immigration issue to seize the GOP presidential nomination against the vehement opposition of nearly the entire Republican establishment, conservative and moderate alike, and at times his campaign has enjoyed a lead in the national polls, placing him within possible reach of the White House. Instead of wondering how a candidate came to take advantage of that particular issue, perhaps we should instead ask ourselves why it hadn’t happened sooner.
The answer is that for various pragmatic and ideological reasons the ruling elites of both our major parties have largely either ignored or publicly welcomed the demographic changes transforming the nation they jointly control. Continuous heavy immigration has long been seen as an unabashed positive both by open borders libertarians of the economically-focused Right and also by open borders multiculturalists of the socially-focused Left, and these ideological positions permeate the community of policy experts, staffers, donors, and media pundits who constitute our political ecosphere.
Earlier this year, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders, an elderly individual with unabashed socialistic views, was interviewed by Vox‘s Ezra Klein, and explained that “of course” heavy foreign immigration—let alone “open borders”—represented the economic dream of extreme free market libertarians such as the Koch brothers, since that policy would obviously drive down the wages of workers and greatly advantage Capital at the expense of Labor. These notions scandalized his neoliberal interlocutor, and the following day another Vox colleague joined in the attack, harshly denouncing the candidate’s views as “ugly” and “wrongheaded,” while instead pointing to the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal as the proper font of progressive economic doctrine. Faced with such sharp attacks by young and influential Democratic pundits less than half his age, Sanders soon retreated from his simple statement of fact, and henceforth avoided raising the immigration issue during the remainder of his campaign.
Only a brash, self-funded billionaire contemptuous of establishment wisdom would challenge this bipartisan immigration consensus among our political elites, and only a prominent celebrity could launch his campaign with sufficient visibility to achieve a media breakthrough. This seemed an unlikely combination of traits to find in one individual, but the unlikely occurred, and our national politics has been upended.
There had already been strong previous indications of this smoldering political volcano among voters, though these signs were repeatedly ignored or discounted by the DC Republican apparatchiks who spent their time attending each others’ receptions and fundraisers. During the 2014 election cycle, immigration was a key issue behind the stunning defeat of Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, who lost to an unknown primary challenger whom he outspent 40-to-1, constituting one of the greatest upsets in Congressional history. Prior to that, anti-immigration Tea Party insurgents had ended the long careers of incumbent Republican senators Bob Bennett of Utah in 2010 and Richard Lugar of Indiana in 2012.
The symbolic centerpiece of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential campaign had been his promise to build a wall to block the influx of illegal immigrants. Once in office, he did no such thing, and just a couple of months after the 2018 midterm elections, I published a January 2019 article pointing out that even the underlying premise of his proposal made absolutely no sense, probably reflecting Trump’s own ignorance of the issue along with the equal ignorance of his agitated right-wing supporters.
