What is the future of immigration?
My appearance on the Vice cofounder Shane Smith's new show.
I’m happy to share a recent appearance on the new podcast of Vice cofounder Shane Smith. The topic is “What is the future of immigration?” and you can scroll down for video and audio versions.
Immigration was one of the biggest issues in the 2024 elections, and one that broke decisively in favor of Donald Trump and border-hawk Republicans. It’s not a simple matter, as perhaps 40 percent of current Americans have an ancestor who came through Ellis Island and most of us take great delight in customs from our families’ countries of origin. Contrary to Great Replacement theorists like Tucker Carlson, immigrants don’t necessarily vote for Democrats. Indeed, Trump did historically well with Latino voters, matching the high levels (40 percent to 45 percent) that George W. Bush was able to pull, both as governor of Texas and in his 2004 race against John Kerry.
After years of footage of Latinos and other migrants rushing across the border between the United States and Mexico, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and the Democrats were widely seen as failing to control the flow of people—legal and illegal—into the country. There’s truth in that. Biden and Harris, his ‘border czar’ (by whatever name), failed to bring order or a sense of authority to all things related to immigration. Part of that is because immigration flows are largely beyond the control of destination countries. The U.S. economy is strong, especially compared to those sending the most people (in 2022, the third largest illegal population was from India). The only known way to avoid immigration is to utterly tank your economy (no one is moving to North Korea) or create a locked-down garrison state that nobody would feel safe in.
In the wake of his victory, President-elect Trump is promising the “largest deportation program in American history” and saying that he will use the military to carry out massive workplace raids. “It’s not a question of a price tag,” says Trump. “We have no choice. When people have killed and murdered, when drug lords have destroyed countries, and now they’re going to go back to those countries because they’re not staying here. There is no price tag.”
In fact, there is a price tag: a trillion dollars over the next decade. That’s a conservative estimate, coming from the American Immigration Council, which says the total will likely be far higher in strict monetary terms, plus whatever else comes with rounding up 11 million or 12 million people are forcing them out of the country.
This is bad, to say the least, and will be far more disruptive not only to America but to what we might call the soul of the country, which has long identified as a land of opportunity and one that is open to all who want to live and work peacefully. We’ve come a very long way since this 1980 Republican debate between Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush where each outlined what they would do to make illegal (!) immigrants more at home in America:
Trump is wrong in most of his assumptions about illegal immigrants. About 80 percent of them have been in the United States for over five years (60 percent have been here for more than 10 years) and, as a rule, they commit fewer crimes and consume fewer government services than native-born Americans (even as President Trump in his first term released actual criminals to imprison asylum seekers). Illegals also pay a lot in taxes. They’re not really undocumented in this sense—they just have fake documents, including Social Security numbers, and they pay into accounts they will never access. Immigrants—legal and illegal—are not all saints but they are assets to a country with declining fertility and labor-force participation rates. Violent criminals should be arrested and taken off the streets (or kicked out of the country), but that has very little to do with the vast, overwhelming majority of people getting into the country illegally.
For what it’s worth, Trump and those around him typically say they want to reduce legal immigration as well, especially programs that allow for temporary protected status. In his first term, as the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh has shown, he succeeded in reducing illegal immigration while having little effect on the number of illegals here. During this election season, he suggested automatically granting green cards to foreign-born college grads but has also talked about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of the country, suggesting he’s hardly going to liberalize legal immigration.
Yes, countries have borders and they have a right to control them. But the best way to do that is to create easy, legal ways for people to come here and live and work. Immigration has been an overwhelmingly positive force in the United States and we shut it down not just at the peril of all those who don’t get a chance to live and work here. We also will be shutting down our own future based on mistaken assumptions about who is coming here, how, and why.
Please watch or listen to What Is the Future of Immigration?, hosted by Shane Smith (I appear around the 40-minute mark). Here’s the YouTube version, following by Apple and Spotify ones. Below those, I added a few other related links as well.
Vice website for Shane Smith Has Questions.
Earlier this year, I participated in a
debate about immigration featuring , , and Cenk Uygur ( moderated). Here’s video of my opening statement, followed by the full video of that debate.Here’s a transcribed version of my opening remarks.
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