[tptacek]

At no point did mismanaged immigration during the Obama administration cause a crisis in my local municipality or force us to reallocate funds or scramble to find housing for over 100 people that were otherwise living in makeshift tents outside a police station. I think you'll find it pretty easy to pull up news stories; October 2023 was the peak of it in Chicagoland but you'll see stories running all the way into the middle of the next year.

(I liked Biden too and am directionally supportive of TPS; especially for Haitians, but broadly for everyone. My belief in the fundamental moral rightness of that program makes me less tolerant of the ineptitude with which the programs were managed, not more so: Biden's mishandling of this will probably set similar efforts back for the next 20 years.)

[jonway]

Thanks, I was editing the comment but I will stop to prevent any wiggle over here.

We have some number of immigrants where I am in a rather conservative small town in a large greater metro area. We have a local history of missionary and aid work, sponsoring people from terrible places like Sudan during the Save Darfur movement, and even farther back to bring Christian european people into the country. I sometimes see people in my daily life like (as you mentioned) a Haitian man who works in an industrial facility, people from Guatemala and Honduras live very close to me, some have bought into businesses and such.

From my perspective its the working rights that do the most to help people out, since amnesty applicants are prohibited from working for a waiting period and have to rely on whatever charities or aid is available, which varies.

[tptacek]

I think over the long and even the median term, we benefit from arbitrarily-skilled migration over the southern border. I'm to the left of the median Democrat on immigration. But in the short term of 2023 and 2024, we had chaos and direct costs. Black voters in the west side of Chicago noticed that services for their neighborhoods, and for Black homeless people in particular, we underfunded, while large allocations for housing and wraparound services for migrants were expedited on an emergency basis.

We could have taken in an integer multiple more migrants than we did in 2023. But we'd have to have the programs in place to do it. Instead, they built a clownfire clusterfuck of policy and procedure all while sending gravely mixed signals about the likelihood of success for economic migrants, which were (quite reasonably, and, in fact, correctly) interpreted by those people --- people smart and tenacious enough to cross the Darien Gap on foot! --- as a flashing green light.

It's not that the country doesn't have the capacity for those people. It does. But only if the mechanisms are in place to on-board them --- sufficient immigration judges, temporary housing, routing throughout the country, tracking. We had absolutely none of that, and the southern governors knew it and called the bluff.

I think people who care about Democratic party electoral success should be extremely wary of self-soothing explanations about how we did everything right and it was Republican misrepresentation and sabotage that got us here. I don't agree with conservatives on immigration and don't think the institutional Republican party is a good-faith actor on this issue, but that doesn't matter --- the only thing that matters is what the median voter thinks the next Democratic president will do on immigration. If they believe it's the same thing Biden did, that's going to cost us.

[keeda]

Oh as someone going through my own personal (legal) immigration-related crisis in the '21 - '24 timeframe, I totally don't think any party on any side of aisle was or is doing immigration right :-)

"Look at what you're going through doing it the legal way while illegals are getting put up in 5-star hotels on your tax dollars" was a line I heard a few times. I was very aware of the havoc due to immigrants being bussed across states. At the time I chalked it up to increased border crossings like everybody else.

But also for this reason I had looked into it and realized that the Biden admin's hands were tied by the laws as they existed. And when both parties finally managed to reach an agreement to fix some of the laws, it was torpedoed by a specific party to support a "campaign premise."

I realize I implied upthread that it was "only perceptions", which was incorrect. But if the immigration data does not support the events that transpired, something somewhere is screwy. And its not a stretch to imagine, given the torpedoing above, that it was deliberately managed.

[jonway]

Thank you for taking the time out of your day to address this with me, I do appreciate it and I think I've a clearer view on perspectives. The language and rhetoric is harmful to society all while we are achieving the worst outcomes. We are doing a bad job. I can see that there is something grievously wrong with our country. For what its worth, I'm writing here as I would to a close friend in case you feel a question about my sincerity.

I hear what you're saying, I also agree and think you're very correct that it matters what the median voter thinks. Infrastructure and process to manage people we are bringing here is a requirement. Personally, I very firmly want to afford people due process and dignity, both of which they deserve. I'm frustrated by the lack of real information and constant opportunistic black-and-white rhetoric. It can't be that either "You're racist" or pulling up the ladder or conversely "Illegals are rapists and bring crime" and so forth. This has become a convenient wedge issue and it is disheartening, since we are toying with people's lives.

A lot of perceptions of immigration are fueled by (political) media attention and the situation on the ground varies depending on where you are. I clearly recall media stories about a New York City's Roosevelt Hotel used for asylum housing, this is part of the mechanisms like temporary housing and it was then weaponized by disingenuous trolls and politics. I feel like even when the public or individuals do provide the needed parts, we still get bad results. Even if corporations use E-Verify, we still get identity theft and fraud. There was even a Police officer in Maine this year who was deported after DHS' E-Verify cleared him for work status. The only way around that I can see would be a national biometric ID and that might not even do the trick or without considerable downside.

In 2025, We have a militarized terror campaign when the same people controlling the government could have repealed the 1980 Asylum Act, deployed satellites over the southern border amd deployed drones with thermal vision to monitor and intercept crossings, border agents, better background checks for employees, or whatever else for the same cost and effort of what we're doing right now. Last year, Democrats negotiated to fund border security, immigration judges, ICE funding and increased staffing, Asylum reform, surveillance towers on the border (the wall I guess?) and more in a 2024 National Security Emergency Appropriations act in exchange for supporting Ukraine's war against invasion, but Donald Trump convinced the Republicans to kill it. It seemed like everything they had demanded and more.

Right now the USS Gerald Ford is sailing towards Venezuela and I'm no mind reader but it seems not unlikely that we're going to blow up another country, creating a different kind of chaos and destabilizing the region before washing our hands as soon as next week. I honestly don't think that anything less than Blackhawks in the sky across America would be deemed acceptable and I don't think it ends there. They're saying we're demanding gender mutilation and free healthcare for illegal immigrants on USDA.gov right now.

If you're interested, I would be grateful to know whatever ideas you have. You've worked with adversaries, sometimes you have to shut off and disconnect compromised systems. Are we really in the place that (it seems to me) we need to deport all non-citizens and halt all immigration or else they scare people into worse?

[tptacek]

I think it's also possible for the party to maintain marginally unpopular positions to support their principles --- that's what the GOP does on reproductive health care --- but when you do that you have to be cognizant that you're paying a price and you have to make that cost up somewhere else. And then, you have some control over how painful that cost is.

I don't think there's a set of policies that puts our shared principles on immigration "into the black" (so to speak) with the median US voter. Immigration is unpopular worldwide right now, and some of that unpopularity is just human nature, some of the same forces that drive NIMBYism. But you can minimize the costs by changing up how you communicate on these issues, and I think the best way to do that is to empathize (even as you disagree) with the beliefs of the people who disagree with you.

There are lots of places where conservatives disagree with me where I have zero empathy and zero fucks to give about how they feel. But when we're on the wrong side of an issue electorally, when the margins are as slim as they are, and when the issue is as salient as it is (it was the 2nd highest polled issue in weighted exits in 2024), it behooves us to be more careful.