The Border is America’s Wellness Check

If you’re in the DC area, please consider coming to AI Bloomers 5. Register if you haven’t.

“I kind of worship at the altar of intention and obstacle. Somebody wants something. Something's standing in their way of getting it. They want the money, they want the girl, they want to get to Philadelphia — doesn't matter. And if they can need it, that's even better.”

~ Aaron Sorkin

Many on both sides argue about immigration from the viewpoint of economic self-interest. I think for voters, the border represents something very different: it’s about intention, control, and story. Voters are the doctor who hits a hammer on a patient’s knee, hoping for a reaction.

Here’s my immigration voter theory of mind:

It might be too hard to fix the problems with the economy, with religion, or whether my country’s elites share my values. I don’t know how much politicians can actually change things. But if there’s one thing the government of the United States should be able to control, it's the border. If our votes matter at all, if we matter to the government at all, they should be able to stop illegal immigration. 

The schoolhouse rock story of Democracy tells us that the public and private sector are separate and that the people we vote for represent us by best accomplishing the goals we set for them. The modern system of entanglement between elected officials, appointed regulators, and the private sector muddles this story. 

Should inflation be solved by the legislature’s fiscal policy, or the federal reserve’s monetary policy? Are university admissions a matter of administrative control, judicial ruling, or expert independence? I don’t have simple answers. 

The animating stories in elections are the ones about man versus man. Complex solutions are too boring. Turn on the TV: Will Trump end Democracy? Will Biden die before November? Whether voters trust someone’s complex solutions is downstream of these storylines. 

Culture eats policy, but narrative eats culture. 

Don’t believe me? Read Micah Meadowcroft in American Compass:

Somewhat overshadowed in 2020 by COVID-19, immigration policy has returned to its 2016 pride-of-place. No issue defines this election year more, both here and in Europe, especially the problem of illegal mass migration. Border sovereignty—more than concerns about the costs of free movement for goods and capital—remains the definitive issue dividing the few from the many in what is an increasingly global struggle between populist revisionists and a status-quo elite.

Immigration sits in the sweet spot. It’s the rare issue with both dueling intent and relevance. 

According to Democratic strategists Ruy Rexeira and John B. Judis, immigrants were the heart of an Emerging Democratic Majority! As Vivek Ramaswamy provocatively articulates, “the great replacement theory is not some grand right-wing conspiracy theory, but a basic statement of the Democratic Party's platform.” 

In their follow-up book Where Have All The Democrats Gone?, the same Democratic strategists found that in the nearly 20 years since The Emerging Democratic Majority, past immigrant groups trended Republican as they grew in size while white rust belt voters rapidly shifted Republican. So regardless of how much the Democratic Party adopted Texeira and Judis’ strategy, it hasn’t worked very well so far.

I am increasingly skeptical that this matters at all. It just doesn’t matter whether Texeira’s strategy worked or in some sense whether immigrants vote Democrat at all. All that matters is that the intent was there. Voters watched the debates and the cable commentary. They say what Democrats said about Trump and what they said about people who think like them. That’s more important than how the strategy turned out. 

Tyler Cowen is skeptical immigration fails a cost-benefit analysis. Nonetheless, he also recognizes political reality.

I am writing this post on Election Day in France, and preliminary results suggest a very real risk that France ends up ungovernable.  Immigrants are clearly a major factor in this outcome, even under super-benign views that do not “blame” the immigrants themselves at all.

…

I think it is better for countries in such positions to be much tougher on immigration, rather than to suffer these kinds of political consequences.

I also wondered where the Bismarckian compromise on immigration is. 

The answer lies in the increasingly bipartisan realization that the Democratic Party completely failed to deal with Biden’s deterioration. These same systematic failures appear across the Democratic party. In a sense, this culture of failure completely debunks the conspiracy theories that assume the worst intentions. The Democratic Party can’t even conspire to win an election, which is their job! If they can’t even do that, there’s no organized conspiracy to replace the electorate.

In another sense, it justifies voter’s suspicions that their votes don’t matter. Over time, my most prominent takeaway about the administrative state was how much failure was due to incompetence, and how non-ideological that failure was. When I interviewed Alex Nowrasteh, arguably the most prominent critic of restrictionist policy, he raised the point that administration failure went in opposite directions when it comes to legal and illegal immigration. Obviously, failure on illegal immigration means that some people enter who aren’t allowed under current US law. But failure on legal immigration, during both the late Trump and early Biden administrations while lockdowns were in place, meant that legally allocated visas weren’t being given out and quotas were arbitrarily reduced, for reasons like US embassies not being physically open to conduct interviews. 

The challenge of our age is to be intolerant of incompetence. 

On dozens of other issues, complex systems allow both parties to deflect from their shared hand in causing this problem. Not on the border. This raises two problems. First, there’s not much incentive for Republicans to solve illegal immigration permanently, since it's one of their best campaign issues. Second, even if there is a solution which applies to the border specifically, the similar culture of incompetence which infects every other policy issue will not be solved, nor will voters feel the clear right to demand it be solved in the way they demand the border be solved. 

When it comes to the border, voters treat incompetence as malice. Perhaps they are logically mistaken to do so; incompetence may not literally be malicious. But on a consequentialist level, it might be better for us to start thinking of more issues that way.