Andrew Sullivan believes the Democrats are in the process of throwing away the 2020 election because of how they are handling the immigration issue:
This is, to be blunt, political suicide. The Democrats’ current position seems to be that the Dreamer parents who broke the law are near heroes, indistinguishable from the children they brought with them; and their rhetoric is very hard to distinguish, certainly for most swing voters, from a belief in open borders. In fact, the Democrats increasingly seem to suggest that any kind of distinction between citizens and noncitizens is somehow racist. You could see this at the last convention, when an entire evening was dedicated to Latinos, illegal and legal, as if the rule of law were largely irrelevant. Hence the euphemism “undocumented” rather than “illegal.” So the stage was built, lit, and set for Trump.
He still tragically owns that stage. …. The most powerful thing Trump said in the campaign, I’d argue, was: “If you don’t have borders, you don’t have a country.” And the Democrats had no answer, something that millions of Americans immediately saw. They still formally favor enforcement of immigration laws, but rhetorically, they keep signaling the opposite. Here is Dylan Matthews, also in Vox, expressing the emerging liberal consensus: “Personally, I think any center-left party worth its salt has to be deeply committed to egalitarianism, not just for people born in the U.S. but for everyone … It means treating people born outside the U.S. as equals … And it means a strong presumption in favor of open immigration.” Here’s Zack Beauchamp, a liberal friend of mine: “What if I told you that immigration restrictionism is and always has been racist?” Borders themselves are racist? Seriously?
And if the left has, in fact, taken up this position, I’d argue it’s intellectually wrong, and I’d suspect it’s a matter of group-think, although the latter is only a suspicion based on the use of the word racism. No one on the left, and few on the right, want to be tarred and feathered with that word. Ever. So you pick a position, associate the opposition with racism, and begin the campaign with your strategy already set out for you.
And the right, and much of the independents, won’t buy it. Indeed, it may repulse the right-inclined independents, who fiercely believe in a United States, but can’t stomach the craven failure of the GOP. That’s the political evaluation of this strategy.
It’s intellectually fucking lazy. If nothing else, nations serve as experiments in how to run societies, and immigrants to tend to mar the experimental parameters.
BUT SET that aside. Let’s analyze this from a more systematic point of view. Let’s try some analysis that doesn’t have us crossing our eyes to stare painfully at the speck on the tip of our nose. I think Andrew missed a bet. The left missed that same bet. The far right’s too incoherent to accuse of missing a bet, it would be unfair. (The moderate right – or true conservatives – I lump with the independents for the nonce.)
The real question to ask is Why is there an immigration issue? What is going on to force people to leave their homelands and come to a foreign land where they have to start all over again, illegally?
Political repression? Asylum is a legal option, so we can toss out those immigrants, who numbered about 25000 in 2014.
How about the rest? Mostly, it’s about economic distress. So what’s causing that?
Could it possibly be … the United States?
This isn’t an attack on the United States, but rather another rendition of the law of unintended consequences.. I recall reading, maybe 25 years ago, about several analyses of the impact of American agricultural exports on the agricultural sectors of the countries receiving these exports. It was apparently quite devastating, especially when those exports received financial support in order to give them a better chance at enduring success.
I’ve done some poking around, but haven’t found much to indicate this research continued. There is this report from The New York Times in 2003:
The more than $10 billion that American taxpayers give corn farmers every year in agricultural subsidies has helped destroy the livelihoods of millions of small Mexican farmers, according to a report to be released on Wednesday.
Prepared in advance of critical trade talks next month, the report by Oxfam International argues that the subsidies given American corn farmers allow them to sell their grain at prices far below what it costs to produce. That has led to cheap American corn flooding the Mexican market and pushing the poorest Mexican farmers out of business, the report said.
”There is a direct link between government agricultural policies in the U.S. and rural misery in Mexico,” according to the report entitled, ”Dumping Without Borders: How U.S. agricultural policies are destroying the livelihoods of Mexican corn farmers.”
I found it hard to find current corn crop subsidies for the current year, which surprised me. And then the export subsidies also must be part of the equation.
So our exports devastate the economies of our neighbors by destroying their agricultural sectors. Should it be a surprise that the result is a tide of economically distressed workers searching for a way to restore their economic fortunes?
Of course, this is all handwaving on my part. My information is old, possibly out of date – and the causal chain may still be up for debate. But stipulate it, and then what do you do? As an engineer, you look at stopping farm subsidies, but the political screams would send our politicians scrambling from rocks to hide under. Ban ag exports?
I think I’d be assassinated.
But I’d rather fix a problem at its source, rather than twist myself into a fatal knot, as the left may be doing.
