Links - Immigration
Reflections and all the arguments
With the beginning of Trump’s second term, there is a new round in the fight about immigration. Before you run off thinking you know what there is to know, you might want to follow these two links I share.
In the first case we have David Bier with a retrospective of the data and evidence all in support of a counter-conventional take: That Biden was NOT the cause of the crisis at the border.
What then did cause it? Quite simply, a very strong labor market—both relative to foreign alternatives and in absolute terms—along with new-found ways for migrants to share and learn immigration techniques plus bad policies (including a continuation of Trump’s very own).
This is truly fascinating, and a bit surprising even to me. It challenges the widespread conventional wisdom about immigration over the past decade. Almost everything most people believe is wrong.
One key chart from the piece:
Biden increased enforcement and had asylum policies more restrictive than Trump. But his administration was up against a few obstacles:
There was a growing surge of immigrants that obviously tested U.S. border control processes to the limit.
The government proved itself quite incapable of solving this complex problem—I offer this as both an excuse as well as criticism, and Biden’s administration deserves direct blame. The excuse portion is government is simply not good at doing stuff (neither effectively nor efficiently—good luck, DOGE). And Congress including Republicans were not helpful in giving resources. But Biden didn’t pursue a winnable policy—one might argue he didn’t have one.
By trying to find some strange middle ground between Trump’s policies, which were so bad that Biden . . . largely kept them, and an increase in legal immigration, which he only tried late into his term and found tangible success in tippytoeing into it, he was backed into the corner of a growing problem.
Still with all of that said, Biden didn’t cause the crisis. He was simply at the helm when it arrived. Similarly, Trump didn’t cause COVID or the COVID response debacles. He was a party to it and shares responsibility for not doing better, but just as with Biden and the border crisis the failure was in not responding to it better.
I can hear the Trumpistas now, “What am I supposed to believe? You’re extensive data, thorough analysis, and logical reasoning or my own lying eyes?!? Besides, the most trusted news sources told me what I wanted to believe.”
Motivated reasoning and happenstance gave us perhaps both Trump terms. In the first one, immigration played a leading role along with a divisive candidate who was as unlikable as she was a worrisome version of technocratic elite. It was happenstance that the Trump persona was aligned with the zeitgeist. In the second, immigration was an even bigger star in the cast along with factors like inflation and an arrogant incompetent candidate who was replaced by a condescending incompetent candidate. Still, without the immigration angle, Democrat incompetence might have defeated bullying incompetence, which is what we actually got. It was happenstance that immigration volumes would balloon after Trump left office. There is more to it than the popular monocausal story.
From the conclusion,
The best solution to address illegal immigration is through legal immigration pathways that provide individuals with the opportunity to live and work permanently. Biden has made a few important reforms but has not ended illegal immigration. The problem persists because he failed to act more boldly to create other legal pathways and because Congress has refused to reform the legal immigration system, keeping an archaic system crafted 100 years ago. America can do better. We can achieve both legality and order at the border. The Biden administration showed proof of concept. Now’s the time to finish the job.
Zooming out, it is important to separate the fundamental issue of immigration from the more sensational topic of the dysfunctional border. The latter gets all the clicks, but it isn’t so much about policy as it is procedure. The former is where the action is.
As an analogy, police enforcing the law and making arrests are procedural concerns. They are operational—similar to border enforcement and migrant processing. The legislature passing bills declaring what is to be illegal and what punishments should come from it along with judicial proceedings are more philosophical—similar to immigration policy. Chaos at the border cannot break our country. Mistakes in immigration policy can.
That brings me to the second link. If you want to hear all the serious arguments for and against immigration, and you have the need/desire to get that information via rap music, the wait is over.1
This, Battle of the Borders, is an excellent addition to the esteemed collection put together from John Papola.
His podcast is excellent too.
For those who prefer to read than listen, there is always Caplan’s Open Borders.