Tag Archives: Immigration

American Opinion on the Deportations in Summer 2025.

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The country is deeply divided over the Trump administration’s treatment of illegal immigrants.  There doesn’t seem to be much resistance this time to closing down the Southern border.  The gap opens over what to do about the illegal immigrants who entered the country before the border got shut down.  Do all or most of them get to stay?  Do they all get deported without regard to how long they’ve been here or what role they now play in the economy? 

In June 2025, 52 percent of Americans supported deporting illegal immigrants.  The partisan divide was stark, but also revealing on minority positions within each party.  Those approving deportations included 90 percent of Republicans, but also 20 percent of Democrats.[1]  

Almost as many Americans (49 percent) said that President Trump had crossed some boundary of reasonableness in his sweeps and arrests. Thus, 50 percent of Americans disapproved of President Trump dispatching National Guard and even Marine units to Los Angeles to cow disorderly demonstrators protesting Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers conducting sweeps for illegal immigrants.  Only a third (35 percent) of Americans approved of the deployment of military forces to deal with a civil policing matter.[2]    

If you desire the end, then you must desire also the means.  Either essentially half of Americans desire the end, but don’t want the reality of it shoved in their faces OR their desire for the end is purely rhetorical.  Hard to tell which is true.  Some of each?  Apparently, President Trump desires the end and accepts—even relishes–the means. 

The Republican opponents of deportation may largely represent businesses that depend upon illegal immigrants because many Americans have never known what hard work for low pay is really like.  The Democratic supporters of deportations provide a warning shot—if any more were needed after the election—of the fragility of the party’s coalition.

The 80 percent of Democrats who oppose deporting illegal immigrants doubtless have a variety of motives.  The illegals toil in vital sectors of the economy where the Native-born don’t want to work.  The illegals are in flight from Hell-hole countries (of which there are a great many).  They are just trying to make better lives.  Immigration is what made America great!  Ideally, there shouldn’t be any immigration restrictions at all, except for identifiable terrorists and criminals.  Broadly, on many issues, Democrats are cosmopolitans (citizens of the world and concerned for their fellow citizens) and Republicans are parochial (American citizens and concerned for their fellow citizens).  It will be difficult to reconcile those two positions. 

            In September 2025, the Supreme Court lifted a stay by a federal judge in California that had stopped Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from using ethnicity and language as partial grounds for stopping and detaining suspected illegal immigrants.  Some ethnicity and language communities in California “braced” for impact.  One apologist for the government argued that “[M]ost undocumented migrants in Los Angeles are Latino…”[3]  Fine, but most Latinos in Los Angeles are not “undocumented migrants.”  They still are subject to stops and detentions and “show us your papers.” 

[1] Reuters/Ipsos poll reported in “Poll Watch,” The Week, 27 June 2025, p. 17.

[2] Reuters/Ipsos poll reported in “Poll Watch,” The Week, 27 June 2025, p. 17. 

[3] The Week’s summary of Andrew McCarthy’s statement in National Review, in “Trump sends ICE into Chicago and Boston,” The Week, 19 September 2025, p. 4. 

American attitudes toward immigration.

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            We are all immigrants or the descendants of immigrants.[1]  Yet “Americans” have often been ambivalent about—or hostile to—new arrivals.  In the 17th Century Native Americans made repeated attempts to wipe out English settlers.  The early European settlements, especially those of the English, were starved for settlers.  They generally welcomed newcomers with open arms. 

            After independence from Britain had been won, the new United States had to define its own policy on immigration.  Generally, the new nation desired immigrants.  Immigrants could bring valuable skills, and the labor to transform the continent’s abundant resources into national wealth.  All residents enjoyed the same civil and legal rights.  The initial residency requirement for citizenship was two years, later set at five years.  No one coerced them to abandon their own culture, or even language. 

            In the 1830s began a great wave of immigrants, predominantly Germans and Irish.  Trouble arose from the reality that “new” Americans were not immediately and might never be “real” Americans in the eyes of the “old” Americans.  Increasingly, the “voluntary” Americans were drawn from countries where absolute monarchy prevailed.  This included all those who belonged to the “absolute monarchy” of the Papal Catholicism.[2]  Other American feared the United States would be swarmed by left-wing radicals in flight from more repressive regimes. 

“Nativism” arose as a political force, culminating in the American or “Know Nothing” Party in the 1850s.  They expressed Thomas Jefferson’s earlier fears that people raised under ana absolute monarchy could not learn how to participate in a democratic republic.[3] “Nativism” made impressive progress until swamped by the larger crisis of the Civil War. 

After the Civil War, as any textbook will tell you, the country bounded forward in both industrialization and the exploitation of the Trans-Mississippi West.  Vast amounts of natural resources (minerals, timber, grains and livestock) just needed manpower to put them to work.  British, German, Irish (and French-Canadian in New England) immigrants poured in.  Anti-Catholicism, anti-Semitism revived, and a new anti-Socialism joined them as inspirations to immigrants.  Then, in the 1880s, there began a tidal wave of “new immigration” from Southern and Eastern Europe.  Poles, Russian Jews, Italians, Hungarians, Greeks, and others arrived in huge numbers.  Only the First World War (1914) paused most European emigration. 

This latter immigration stirred bubbling cauldron of late-19th and early-20th Century social, economic, cultural, and political strife.  Both “advanced” thinkers and organized labor championed the limits; but equivalent figures argued for inclusion over exclusion.  The contest produced the first laws restricting European immigration (1923-1924).   The laws have been revised on several occasions, but the United States has been a country of regulated and restricted immigration for a century.  Recently, mass defiance of the law has combined with important political and economic forces turning a blind eye to the issue has made it an explosive problem. 

So, we go back and forth in a debate that is ever-changing and ever-the-same. 

See: Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted; Roger Daniels, Guarding the Golden Door. 

[1] Including those whose ancestors crossed the Bering land bridge when it was still above sea level.  

[2] The “Syllabus of Errors” (1877) summed up more than a century of Papal anti-modern, anti-republican, and anti-liberal thought.  “He was agin it,” as Will Rogers said of a fundamentalist Protestant preacher’s views on sin. 

[3] Jefferson came down on both sides of many issues.  This is one such. 

Diary of the Second Addams Administration 3.

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            Among President Donald Trump’s Executive Orders (EOs) bearing in some way in illegal immigration were ones: declaring an emergency on the southern border; ordering 1,600 troops to the border to support Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); stopping the claiming of asylum at the border; revoking President Joe Biden’s EO granting special immigrant status to about 600,000 refugees from Venezuela’s Marxist dictatorship; increasing those eligible for “fast-track deportations”; declared drug cartels (which also engage in people smuggling) as “terrorists”; taking the Border Patrol asylum app off-line; and revoking an earlier ban on ICE raids on sanctuaries like churches, schools, and hospitals.[1]  In a blow at “sanctuary cities,” the Department of Justice threatened to prosecute state and local officials who refused to comply with deportation orders. 

The search for illegal immigrants got underway immediately.[2]  ICE corralled 5,000 illegal immigrants in the first weeks.  So did the expulsions.  Military planes began ferrying deportees back to their home countries.  Brazil, Mexico, and Columbia got the first returnees.  When Columbia tried to refuse, Trump threatened to slap a 25 percent tariff on imports from Columbia.  The president of Columbia caved-in. 

Democrats’ criticism of President Trump’s actions took three lines.  First, Trump’s EO modifying the eligibility for “birthright citizenship” met a barrage of denunciations from Democrats.  “The 14th Amendment says what it means, and it means what it says” asserted Connecticut’s Attorney General.[3]  Twenty-two states sued to block the order. 

Second, some critics saw a much greater import to the “birthright” EO.  Closing the border on the grounds that the massive illegal immigration “constitute[s] and invasion” creates the possibility that President Trump could invoke the Alien Enemies Act,[4] and then deploy “extraordinary new powers.”  So, we’re closer to fascism in this view.  On the other hand, the half of the country that elected Trump supports the mass deportations of illegal immigrants, while the half that failed to elect Kamala Harris oppose mass deportations.[5]  So, we’re living with the results of a free and fair—if tight–election in this view. 

Third, it won’t work.  A human tide of people from troubled areas of the world want to get to places of greater safety and opportunity.  They will keep coming regardless of the measures taken to stop them.  “Migrants don’t simply disappear by wishing them away.”[6]  A Trump supporter could offer two counter-arguments.  On the one hand, look at the European model.  They pay foreign countries to block passage.  On the other hand, Trump isn’t wishing them away.  He’s launching a massive effort to actually stop migration.  Time will tell. 

[1] “Asylum halted as immigration crackdown begins,” The Week, 31 January 2025, p. 5. 

[2] “Thousands arrested in immigration crackdown,” The Week, 7 February 2025, p. 5. 

[3] Which sounds a lot like “Originalism.”  Originalism – Wikipedia  That’s OK: John Marshall Harlan’s lonely dissent on Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) adopted the same perspective.  However, it is a hard swerve away from the well-established liberal position that the Constitution is a “living document” which jurist must interpret in light of changing times. 

[4] One of the Alien Sedition Acts passed in 1798; unlike the others, this Act won support from many Jeffersonians and was never repealed.  See: Alien and Sedition Acts – Wikipedia 

[5] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 7 February 2025, p. 17.  The Boston Globe put the share of supporters at 55 percent. 

[6] Juliette Kayyem in the Atlantic, quoted in “Thousands arrested in immigration crackdown,” The Week, 7 February 2025, p. 5. 

Diary of the Second Addams Administration 2.

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            Between 20 January and 1 February 2025, President Donald Trump issues 45 Executive Orders (Eos) that imposed sweeping changes in government policies.[1]  President Joe Biden had issued only 26 EOs ordering sweeping changes in the same period following his inauguration and didn’t hit the 45 mark until 14 May 2021.[2] 

            Some of these EOs struck a nerve with Democrats.  Among many other things, Trump withdrew–more accurately re-withdrew–the United States from the Paris Climate executive agreement[3]; ordered the immediate dismantling of any and all government programs promoting diversity, inclusion, and equity; ordered any federal workers employed on such programs to be placed on paid leave; reversed a Biden EO permitting transgender troops to serve in the military; changed the name of the tallest mountain in the United States from “Denali” back to “McKinley”[4]; ordered that the “Gulf of Mexico” be renamed the “Gulf of America”; and reversed an EO originally issued by Lyndon B. Johnson in 1965 which allowed government to lean on private contractors to take “affirmative action” in hiring.[5]  In short, a bunch of sacred cows went to Bovine University. 

            More substantively, Trump withdrew the United States from the World Health Organization, (W.H.O.); said that the United States would “take back” the Panama Canal; reduced restrictions on oil and gas production that had been imposed by the Biden administration; created a “Department of Government Efficiency” (D.O.G.E.) to be led by Elon Musk; and ordered an end to “birthright citizenship.”[6] 

            More orders followed hard on the heels of the first few days.  He issued, then quickly rescinded, an order temporarily halting the payment of federal grants, loans, and other forms of assistance to a wide range of groups outside the federal government.  “The order sparked chaos at universities, charities, local government, and other bodies reliant on federal funding,…”[7]  Not satisfied with shaking hearts and minds with such dramatic action, the administration also issued a warning to federal employees that there were going to be big job cuts.  The e-mail message offered many of them the choice between retiring immediately and being paid for eight months or risking being laid off when Musk got around to them.  “Which will you have?”[8] 

            To top off the disruption, Trump fulfilled his pledge to pardon the 1,600 convicted rioters from 6 January 2021.  Or, in the words of the WSJ, “Cop Beaters.”  He’s good for his word, alas. 

[1] List of executive orders in the second presidency of Donald Trump – Wikipedia 

[2] List of executive actions by Joe Biden – Wikipedia  Biden issued his final EO, his 162nd, on 19 January 2025. 

[3] Like the Iran agreement, President Barack Obama had known that he couldn’t get a treaty through the Senate because the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote of approval for any treaty.  So, in both cases, he settled for executive agreements whose durability depended upon retaining control of the White House.

[4] Still, if you go to a GMC dealer, you won’t be offered a test drive in the “exciting new McKinley.” 

[5] Commonly believed to mean quotas. 

[6] He did not exactly end “birthright citizenship.”  He restricted it to exclude children born of parents who were illegal immigrants, and to exclude children born to a foreign national mother in the United States on any kind of short-term or temporary visa and whose father was also not a citizen.  Furthermore, the change was not retroactive and applies to children born after 19 February 2025.  The 14th Amendment had been adopted long before there had been any idea of illegal immigration. 

[7] “Trump orders cause whiplash in Washington,” The Week, 7 February 2025, p. 4.  See also: “Trump returns with a barrage of orders, pardons,” The Week, 31 January 2025, p. 4. 

[8] True Grit (2010) “Fill Your Hands!” 

Tragedy and Policy.

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            Venezuelan despots Hugo Chavez, then Nicholas Maduro sparked a gigantic flood of refugees from their country.[1]  By October 2022, an estimated 7 million people had fled the country, more than 20 percent of the population.  The emigration began with the country’s elites, then ate down into other layers of society as political oppression led to economic catastrophe.[2]  The Biden administration gestured at expelling some of the illegal immigrants under Covid-era “Title 42” provisions.  For the rest, it adopted a “remain in Texas” policy which infuriated both the people of border areas and Texas governor Greg Abbott.  In April 2022, the Biden administration ended “Title 42” expulsions.  Governor Abbott began bussing illegal immigrants from Texas to various self-proclaimed “sanctuary cities” in loudly Progressive areas.  New York City became the chief destination of both “Operation Lone Star” busees and the greater number who made their own way.[3]  Soon, New York City and many other places had migrant crises of their own.[4]  New York City began taking control of disused or under-used hotels to house the migrants.  For example, the city took over the Roosevelt Hotel as one of these facilities.[5]

            In September 2022 a Venezuelan named Jose Antonio Ibarra illegally entered the United States near El Paso, Texas.  Probably, he hoped to connect with a brother who had entered the United States illegally at an earlier date.[6]  ICE officers detained him soon afterward and then released him.  Like many other Venezuelan migrants, Ibarra traveled to New York City. where he stayed in the Roosevelt Hotel migrant shelter.  In September 2023, he was arrested for “acting in a manner to injure a child less than 17.”  Released on bond before ICE could issue a detainer order,[7] he blew town for Athens, Georgia, where his brother lived.  No sooner did the two get together than they went to stealing.  In October 2023, the brothers were arrested in possession of goods stolen from a local Walmart.  They were released.  Then Jose Antonio Ibarra was arrested for shoplifting.  He was released, but failed to appear for a court hearing in December 2023.  The judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.   Athens, Georgia, police failed to locate Ibarra over the next two months.  On 22 February 2024, Ibarra murdered a 22 year-old nursing student named Laken Riley.  Arrested and tried, he was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment. 

            The case received a lot of media attention.  In March 2024, just after Ibarra’s arrest, the House of Representatives passed the “Laken Riley Act.”  The law required the Department of Homeland Security to detain illegal immigrants who “[are] charged with, [are] arrested for, [are] convicted of, [admit to] having committed, or [admit to] committing” theft-related crimes.  The vote was 251–170, with 37 Democrats and all Republicans voting in favor.  It went to the Senate, where it just sat.  Progressives argued that the law would allow the “indefinite detention, without bail, of any undocumented immigrant—including minors, asylum seekers, or “Dreamers” brought here as children—who is merely arrested for, not convicted of, nonviolent crimes like theft.”[8]  Democrats had control of the Senate at that point, so cooler heads (or colder hearts) prevailed. 

Put simply, the Laken Riley case asked the question: how many American citizens have to die in the pursuit of “a blinkered delusion with purchase on only the progressive fringes of American politics”?[9]  In November 2024, Democrats lost the Senate as well as the White House.  Anger over illegal immigration provided one big driver in the election.  In January 2025, the new Senate immediately passed the bill while adding “assaulting a police officer, or a crime that results in death or serious bodily injury like drunk driving” to the list of offenses.  In addition, the law allows states to sue the Department of Homeland Security if they believe that the law is not being enforced.[10]  This time, many Democrats scrambled to support the bill: 48 in the House and 32 in the Senate voted in favor.  The House approved the revised bill and President Donald Trump signed it into law. 

            A long and winding road from the rise of a Venezuelan Marxist dictator to the death of an American nursing student to a backlash bill over a neglected problem. 

[1] Probably not the sort of thing that gets your image on the currency a hundred years later. 

[2] A basic introduction is Venezuelan refugee crisis – Wikipedia  There is a good deal of journalism on the story, but—so far—no really good book to recommend. 

[3] GEORGE BENSON On Broadway Album Version 

[4] See: New York City migrant housing crisis – Wikipedia  See also: Nelson – ha ha 

[5] The Roosevelt Hotel had been built during a happier and more optimistic time in America.  See: Roosevelt Hotel (Manhattan) – Wikipedia and Terminal City (Manhattan) – Wikipedia  More evidence, if any is needed, that we are not the country we once were.  Could we be once more? 

[6] The brother is believed to be a member of the Tren de Aragua crime organization.  See: Tren de Aragua – Wikipedia  Both the violence and pervasiveness of the gang in the United States seems over-stated, notably by President Trump.

[7] “[T]he defining characteristic of a sanctuary city in the US” is prohibiting “the use of city funds and resources to assist federal immigration enforcement.” 

[8] “Immigration: the Laken Riley bill advances,” The Week, 24 January 2025, p. 17. 

[9] Senator John Fetterman  (D-Pennsylvania) quoted in ibid.   

[10] Laken Riley Act – Wikipedia 

Prologue to a Diary of the Second Addams Administration 10.

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The Agenda: deporting the illegals and others. 

Broadly, immigrants vulnerable to President-Elect Donald Trump’s promised “mass deportations” fall into three categories.[1]  First, there are the illegal immigrants, whom Democrats long preferred to call “undocumented immigrants,” as if there had been some kind of bureaucratic snafu.  Second, there are those seeking asylum in the United States on the grounds that they face grave danger in their own home county.[2]  Third, there are those in the United States who have been granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS).[3] 

There are an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States.  One careful estimate for the period February 2021 through October 2023 suggested that 4.2 million people had found entry into the United States.  Of these, about 2.5-2.6 million had been released into the country, while 1.6 million were estimated to have evaded all contact with the Border Patrol.  A further 2.8 million were expelled immediately back to Mexico.[4] 

Who goes first?  Thomas Homan, Trump’s nominated ICE commissioner, says that illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in the United States in addition to having entered the country illegally, will head the list.  Homan also has said that Texas provides a good model for national policy.  Texas governor Greg Abbott’s “Operation Lone Star” has called out the National Guard and put physical barriers along and in the Rio Grande.  Texas has also sent about 120,000 illegal immigrants to Democrat-led cities in the North. 

For a good while now, some Democrat-led cities have declared themselves “sanctuary” cities where local authorities will not co-operate with ICE.  These same cities often receive federal funding for various programs.  The Trump administration could try to compel co-operation by holding back these funds. 

One question is “Can this policy succeed?”  A second question is “What will it cost?”   The latter question has two sides to it.  On the one hand, there is a monetary expense to the government.  One estimate is that deporting a million people a year would cost $88 billion a year.  On the other hand, the illegals work in great numbers in construction, farming, restaurants, and hospitality.  Who will take those jobs if the illegals are deported?  American teenagers and college kids?  The homeless?  Folks for whom coding “boot camp” didn’t work out?  Another cost will come in fewer houses built, less fruits and vegetables in the grocery stores, slower service in restaurants, and longer turn-around times for hotel rooms.  All of it at a higher price. 

So why do it?  One answer is “Democracy, that’s why.”  According to an Ipsos poll,[5] fifty percent of Americans favor shutting down the U.S.-Mexican border.  Citizens live under the laws of their country.  To see the laws openly flaunted may be infuriating.  To see the spike in demand on various kinds of humanitarian support services in places where the illegal immigrants first arrive may be infuriating.  The pay-off through their eventual contributions to the country may be hard to discern in the current moment.  It’s a tough parlay to make. 

[1] “Immigration: Preparing for the crackdown,” The Week, 13 December 2024, p. 17. 

[2] In 2023, about 750,000 people applied for asylum.  Outmatched: The U.S. Asylum System Faces Record Demands p. 3.  Many of the illegals released from custody are asylum-seekers. 

[3] There were 1.2 million people with TPS in March 2024.  How TPS has expanded under the Biden administration | Pew Research Center 

[4] Lori Robertson, Breaking Down the Immigration Figures – FactCheck.org  27 February 2024.  Old-timers may wonder if the “gotaway” estimates resemble the Vietnam War “body counts” of our youth. 

[5] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 6 December 2024, p. 17. 

Migration.

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The United States began limiting immigration in 1924.  The United States currently has an estimated 11-12 million illegal immigrants living in the country.  The United States admits 950,000-1 million legal immigrants each year.  Both of those realities have become the centers of political contention.  Pro-foreign-life people argue that immigration is vital for America’s society and economy, that the illegals should be granted some kind of legal status (often phrased as a “path to citizenship”), and that the United States has some kind of humanitarian duty to welcome everyone who has been the victim of one of life’s hard knocks.  Pro-it’s-our-choice people argue either that the immigrants are a bunch of undesirables from failed societies who will wreak havoc, or that immigration is good, but we need to pick and choose while recognizing that massive immigration will disrupt American society.  Various combinations of the two views either make the most sense or are a recipe for disaster.[1]

There are about 7.7 billion people in the world.  They live in 195 countries.  Gallup polled people in 152 of those countries.  They report that 15 percent of adults in those countries, an estimated 750 million people, would migrate to another country if they could.  Of that estimated 750 million people, about 158 million people want to move to the United States.[2]  Obviously, the real numbers could be much higher.  For one thing, many adults have children.  For another thing, there are the 43 countries where Gallup did not poll.  One can imagine virtually every single person in North Korea or Syria wanting to bolt.

One distortion in the contemporary debate arises from geography.  The Atlantic and Pacific Oceans bar most foreigners from getting to the United States except by sea (rare) or air travel.  You can’t get on an international flight from most places in the world headed for the United States unless you already have a visa.  That’s not the case for Central America.  People willing to run the risks of traveling the Lawless Roads can end up at the southern border of the United States.  Where political stunts by all sides provide something for cameramen to do.

The 2017 population of the United States has been estimated at 325 million people.  Can we take in 158 million people from foreign cultures—many of them very different in values from that of the United States—without any impact on American society?  If so, at what pace?  A million a year?  Five million a year?  Ten million a year?  All of them at once?  No?  Then the pro-foreign life people accept the idea of immigration restriction.  They just want to set the threshold at some undefined higher level.  And they don’t want to talk about the social, political, and financial costs.

As for the pro-it’s-our-choice people, there are 158 million people who want to come here, but you think there aren’t any among them who would make a vital contribution to America?  Red China wants to take over Taiwan, just like it did Hong Kong.  So, many people from a leading Far East industrial nation are going to want to migrate.  Russia and Iran are going to add Lebanon to the bag, just like Syria.  Lots of Lebanese Christians will want an out.

It’s an important debate.  It would be nice if we had it.

[1] I don’t have a ‘source” for this statement.  It’s just my sense of all the stuff I’ve been reading for years.  While there may NOT have been “good people on both side” in Charlottesville, there are idiots on both side of this debate.  Just hoping that I’m not one of them.  No need to tell me if you think I’m an idiot.  That’s what my sons are for.

[2] “Poll Watch,” The Week, 21/28 December 2018, p. 17.

Migrants 1.

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Social scientists posit that people experiencing disturbing social change can seize on particularist identities like ethnicity or nationality.  Demographic change and economic change and shifting social values all can trigger such a response.  On the other hand, cultural and economic elites in Western countries celebrate the free flow of goods and labor.  They also have developed more cosmopolitan views than have many fellow citizens.[1]

Illegal immigration provides a good example of the particularist-cosmopolitan tension.  In recent times, illegal migration has become easier than ever before in history.  In both Europe and America bitter quarrels over immigration rack politics.[2]  These controversies arise not from heavy current immigration, but from heavy prior immigration.  More importantly, the general backlash against elites–who led us to war in Iraq and then into the financial crisis—has ensnared migrants.

Illegal migration to the United States dropped sharply during the Great Recession.  It hasn’t picked up immensely in the past year.  However, that still leaves 10-12 million illegal immigrants in the United States.  Human symbols of elite failure.  Liberals insisting on calling them “undocumented immigrants”—as if there is just some bureaucratic foul-up in Washington—adds fuel to the fire.  President Obama’s skirting of the law angered many people.  Illegal immigration in the European Union is more recent.  There the flood of migrants from various failed states mixes with refugees from war-torn Muslim states.

People leave their “shithole” countries for good reasons and not just on a whim.  Until conditions in those countries improve, there is not likely to be a significant drop in attempts at illegal immigration.  To complicate matters further, while many of the migrants are economic migrants, the law allows them to request asylum as victims of persecution.  This clogs the immigration system and delays repatriation.

In light of this reality, attention has turned to deterring them from reaching American or European soil in the first place.  Europeans have negotiated with pathway countries—Libya, Sudan, and Turkey—to stem the departures for Europe.  The implementation of those agreements involves a good deal of brutality that is much worse than anything suffered by Central American migrants to the United States.  Mexico is unwilling to play that sort of role for the United States.  The “zero tolerance” policy attempted by a Trump administration grown tired of waiting for Congressional approval of a border wall offers another form of deterrence.

Cosmopolitans sometimes phrase the choice in a misleading way: “What sort of society do they wish to be?  Do they wish to be immigrant nations with continual demographic and cultural change?”  First, both the European Union and the United States have long had substantial legal immigration.  Second, it is legitimate to debate what kinds of immigrants best serve the interests of the community.

[1] Benjamin Barber, Jihad and McWorld: How Globalism and Tribalism Are Shaping World Society (1996).  Barber’s analysis remains engaging, but it wasn’t new.  Late-Nineteenth Century sociologists had identified the problem of anomie.  For that matter, historians long ago diagnosed the rise of “mystery” religions as a response to the cosmopolitanism of the Hellenistic kingdoms.

[2] Amanda Taub and Max Fisher, “In U.S. and Europe, Conflict Over Migration Points to Political Problems,” NYT, 30 June 2018.

Memoirs of the Addams Administration 14.

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The historian Fernand Braudel distinguished between long term trends and the “mere history of events.”  It’s a useful concept to bear in mind when analyzing political developments.  However, Braudel would be the first to admit that events can illustrate trends.

As early as the 1950s, Democrats turned to seeking changes in the law through the courts when they could not obtain them through the legislature.  Two can play at this game.  Both parties have spent a great deal of effort getting “their” judges on the bench while blocking the other guys’ judges from getting on the bench.  Polarization has only made the problem more obvious.  In 2013, when last in the majority, Senate Democrats chose to get rid of the filibuster for all judicial appointments below the level of the Supreme Court.  When Justice Antonin Scalia died, President Obama nominated a highly qualified Democratic replacement; Senate Republicans refused to even hold hearings on the nominee.  Now in the minority, Senate Democrats chose to filibuster the nomination of Neil Gorsuch to replace the late Antonin Scalia on the Supreme Court and Republicans chose to do away with the filibuster.[1]  This unhappy event is merely the most recent phase in the politicization of the judiciary.  The mind reels at possible future developments.

Human-caused climate change is a reality.  So, too, is the halting effort by industrial countries to limit the further emission of pollutants that cause that climate change.  So, too, are the social and economic costs of fighting climate change in industrial societies.  When interest groups resist the threats to their immediate well-being, governments can either bend before the resistance, or seek to off-set those costs, or seek to circumvent the resistance by other means.  Thus, President Barack Obama insisted that the Paris climate agreement to which his administration adhered not be a treaty.[2]  He knew he could never get such a treaty through the Senate, as required by the Constitution.  Nor could he get the policies needed to implement the Paris agreement through Congress.  So, he resorted to a “Clean Power Plan” issued by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).  The Trump administration ordered a re-write of the Plan and “requested” that the EPA lighten up on other regulations.[3]  Most observers found this to be ridiculous pandering to his core voters.[4]  In this view, coal is a dying industry, climate change has to be resisted with energy,[5] and renewable energy is a key technology of the future economy.

American social values and the deficiencies of the American education system have challenged the growth of the high-tech industries for many years.[6]  In brief compass, America doesn’t produce enough techies to meet the needs of growing industries.  The solution appeared in the hiring of many (85,000 new people a year) from foreign countries.  The granting of H-1B visas plays a key role in this process.  Now the Trump administration has issued orders intended to hinder the issuing of such visas.[7]  The empty spots aren’t likely to be filled by displaced coal miners.

[1] “Senate showdown over Gorsuch nomination,” The Week, 14 April 2017, p. 5.

[2] “Climate change: Can Trump revive coal?” The Week, 14 April 2017, p. 17.

[3] Relax the rules on emissions by power plants to be constructed in the future; allow new coal mining on public lands; and ease restrictions on the emission of methane in the course of “fracking.”

[4] As an employer, the whole of the coal industry ranks behind some fast-food chains.  Coal mine employment has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1990, long before the Clean Power Plan was even a twinkle in Barack Obama’s eye.  “The bottom line,” The Week, 14 April 2017, p. 35.

[5] HA!  Is joke.

[6] See Bruce Cannon Gibney, A Generation of Sociopaths: How the Baby Boomers Betrayed America (2017).

[7] “Tech: More scrutiny for skilled-worker visas,” The Week, 14 April 2017, p. 35.

Rivers of Blood I.

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Muslim immigration to Western Europe began by stages after the Second World War as labor-short economies and the end of empires combined to draw non-Europeans toward the “mother country.” A great deal of thoughtlessness went into these migrations. All host countries were ill-prepared to deal with the immigrants.

In January 2015 there are an estimated 20 million Muslims in Europe. About 5 million are in France, where they make up 8 percent of the population. (See: “The other land of liberty and opportunity.”) In Britain and Germany they make up 5 percent of the population. One of the things that eats at European countries is the feeling that immigrants have come to their countries to prey on the generous social welfare provision of enlightened countries. In the 1970s, two-thirds of the immigrants in Germany were in the labor force, while one-third were not. Thirty years later scarcely more than a quarter of immigrants were in the labor force.[1] Another problem, revealed by a poll in L’Express in January 2013 is that 74 percent of those polled said that Islam “is not compatible with French society.” Yet this feeling finds no expression in the “mainstream” or “respectable” French political parties. Why not?

Christopher Caldwell argues that the European left has made discussion of the problems raised by immigration almost impossible.[2] On the one hand, they have evoked European historical crimes—the Holocaust above all—to justify repressing unwelcome speech. He implies that they have undermined the foundations of democracy in the process. In France, he sees the “SOS Racisme” group created in the 1980s as a puppet of the Socialist Party intended to shout-down conservative voices and the 1990 Gayssot Law against Holocaust-denial as an entering wedge for people who want to stifle discussion of other historical events—many of them highly unpleasant and non-Western. Most recently, the anti-immigrant Front National Party got left out of the post-Charlie Hebdo parade on the grounds that it was not “republican” enough.

On the other hand, people on the left have failed to understand that, whatever was done to European Jews, it wasn’t done by Muslims. Just as Palestinians have felt free to reject the State of Israel as European expiation of European crimes at the expense of Arabs, so too have Euro-Muslims felt free to reject European progressive thought as an alien set of values intended to curb their own beliefs. If one adds these forces to the failure to integrate the immigrants and their French-born descendants into French society, one can begin to understand some of the impulses that set the Kouachi brothers and Amedy Coulibaly on the path to terrorism. They are not alone in their alienation, hostility, and religious fervor.

Caldwell understands that Europe’s aging and declining non-Muslim population makes immigration essential. He is less quick to say that the anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments expressed by parties like the Front National can have no practical expression in public policy. Yes, the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492. Is that what the Front National or other parties expect to repeat with Muslims? Some of the Front National voters undoubtedly do want that, but the program of the party calls for a halt to further immigration and a defense of “secular values.” France already has more police per capita than any other European country. Even so, security lapses allowed the Kouatchis and Coulibaly to escape detection of their plans to kill.

There is going to have to be a third way between “political correctness” and stupidity.

[1] Two million out of three million in the early 1970s versus two million out of seven-and-a-half million in th early 2000s.

[2] Christopher Caldwell, “Europe’s Crisis of Faith,” WSJ, 17-18 January 2015.