The Hard Lesson We Learned About Immigration

Inflation is good.

The Federal Reserve, when setting its interest rates, does not try to lower or freeze prices. It attempts to generate a rate of inflation of around two percent. When consumers expect prices to drop, they hold off on making purchases. Why buy now when things will be cheaper later? As consumer demand declines, so does business activity, which leads to fewer jobs, lower wages, and possibly recessions. Inflation does the opposite, promoting consumer spending and economic production.

Of course, just because a little inflation is good doesn’t mean unlimited inflation is good. (See Germany, Weimar). This is why the Fed has put so much effort into containment and was designed to be independent of political pressures to deliver tough monetary medicine when required.

Immigration, as it turns out, has a lot of parallels to inflation.

Overall, immigration is good. You wouldn’t want to live in a country where nobody wanted to get in. Without a steady flow of incoming workers, businesses—particularly in specific sectors such as agriculture, meatpacking, and construction—would strain to find workers. Some companies would shutter, and others would provide clunkier service while increasing costs. Small-to-mid-size cities would lose population and revenue, forcing cuts in schools, police, and so on.

However, too much immigration in a short period causes acute disruptions. States and cities struggle to find sufficient lodging. Schools can’t handle sudden increases in students who need to learn English. As with just-right inflation, Goldilocks immigration policy engineers an amount that’s just right—relatively slow, steady, reliable, and predictable.

I don’t believe immigration tipped the election to Donald Trump. Only 11 percent of voters named immigration their most important issue, versus 32 percent who prioritized the economy and vastly preferred Trump. (The plurality winner was democracy, a bloc accounting for 34 percent of voters that swung for Kamala Harris.)

Moreover, 75 percent of voters said inflation had caused them “moderate” or “severe hardship” in the past year (despite its rapid cooling), with most of these citizens siding with Trump. But when asked if they wanted undocumented immigrants to be “deported,” only 40 percent agreed, with 56 percent saying they should be given a “chance at legal status.” Trump won nearly a quarter of the voters against deportation, presumably because they thought he would be better for the economy or might not follow through with his bluster about mass deportations.

But immigration frustration probably helps explain the surprising rightward lurches—more extensive than the national swing towards Trump—in Democratic strongholds such as Manhattan, Chicago, Bergen County, New Jersey, and Worcester, Massachusetts. These are some of the places Texas Governor Greg Abbott spent approximately $150 million to bus migrants.

In the aftermath of the 2012 election, when Mitt Romney lost after touting the benefits of “self-deportation,” both parties’ leadership briefly agreed that a compassionate immigration policy was necessary to win Latino votes. The famous autopsy of 2012 commissioned by the Republican National Committee concluded, “If Hispanic Americans hear that the GOP doesn’t want them in the United States, they won’t pay attention to our next sentence,” and “among the steps Republicans take in the Hispanic community and beyond we must embrace and champion comprehensive immigration reform. If we do not, our Party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.” Democrats had already made the same political calculation, and past nods towards hardline border policies became much less frequent.

A faction of Senate Republicans agreed with the autopsy and passed bipartisan reform legislation in 2013. But the Republican Speaker of the House, John Boehner, bowed to outrage among grassroots conservatives and shelved the bill. Trump became the 2016 Republican presidential nominee after portraying Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists. Not only did he win, the star of The Apprentice performed slightly better than Romney with Latinos, and he improved his performance in each subsequent election. The 46 percent share of the Latino vote won this year by Trump is the highest recorded by a Republican presidential candidate in exit poll data going back to at least 1972.

Suffice it to say the RNC autopsy was wrong.

That doesn’t mean the public wants cruel nativism. Again, the exit poll shows voters prefer pathways to legal status over deportation of the undocumented. While some oversimplified news headlines this year suggested majorities want mass deportation, more nuanced examinations of the available data show otherwise.

But the election shows that a progressive-to-moderate position immigration does not remotely guarantee support from Latino voters.

That means that Democrats should approach the immigration issue not from a crass electoral perspective but from a governing perspective.

I would not charge the Biden-Harris administration with treating immigration in a crassly political fashion. Harris was not pandering to Latino voters in June 2021 when she traveled to Guatemala and said to potential migrants, “Do not come.” For the last four years, she and the president have implemented policies to restrict a record influx of southern border crossings without shutting the gates on those who deserve asylum. In doing so, they angered the nativists who want immigration ended and immigration advocates who rarely want the federal government to deny admittance to anyone.

With many fleeing pandemic-ravaged autocracies in favor of the best economy in the world, the Biden-Harris administration faced a Herculean policy challenge, perhaps impossible to resolve. But in retrospect, the administration should have viewed immigration as the Fed sees inflation: At the first sign of rapid acceleration, move aggressively to restrict and contain. As I wrote last week, in 2021, Biden was a bit slow to respond to rising inflation. Similarly, it took until June of this year, after several other promising reforms failed to bring order to the border, for the administration to impose severe restrictions on asylum-seekers by executive order. Did the White House hesitate because it was worried about upsetting progressive activists? Was it fearful the judiciary would strike down a broad assertion of executive power? I don’t know, but hindsight suggests these were risks worth taking.

“I reject the false choice that we must decide between securing our border and creating a system of immigration that is safe, orderly, and humane,” Harris said on the campaign trail.

This difficult-to-execute principle is good policy, and it tracks public sentiment. It was hard for Harris to convey, following years of border chaos cynically stoked by the likes of Abbott. But that doesn’t mean Democrats should scrap it.

Trump is now poised to inject his own brand of chaos into the immigration issue. In 2018, he paid a political price for a policy of migrant family separations. Yet he just tapped one of the biggest advocates of family separation and mass deportation, Tom Homan, to be his “border czar.” Chaos is sure to follow, and chaos is bad governing. Democrats will be well-positioned to make that argument.

The post The Hard Lesson We Learned About Immigration appeared first on Washington Monthly.