What Are You Really Mad About?

Or are you just hungry?

Consider the following (pro/re?)gressive thought chain:

• I am against immigration.

• I am against disorderly immigration.

• I am against disorderly immigration because it threatens our way of life.

• I am against disorderly immigration when it harms us economically and culturally.

At each level the hypothetical immigration objector is more critically defining his position. He is making assumptions in those various thoughts. He moves from making blunt statements (accurate as they may be) to eluding to arguments that substantiate statements.

None of the four positions is necessarily wrong to hold. But I would begin to challenge that as more refinement is offered it reveals a hidden motive (again, not necessarily a bad one) that is the real object of concern.

Rather than it being immigration per se that angers and worries people, I think it is actually a concern about disorderliness and the improper use of government resources. It is really chaos at the border and the welfare state itself including threats to it.

Imagine hypothetically a city (say, Tulsa) starts to offer very generous services (welfare or otherwise) relative to other cities in that region. All else equal, people from nearby communities would tend to migrate to that generous city to take advantage of the new opportunities.

If these are rivalrous in nature meaning you cannot have it fully if I have it, this would indeed be an unintended drain on Tulsa's resources. If these newcomers do not bring contributions to offset their new resource use, it will be an economic negative for the community. And if the new services were attractive enough to bring in very high volumes of migrants, it might look quite chaotic in the town known as the Oil Capital of the World.

This would be frustrating to current Tulsa citizens. Yet, to be angry at the intrastate and interstate (but still all U.S. citizen) migration would be to blame a symptom rather than the cause.

The sharp, recent reversal in support for more immigration relative to current levels needs some context. Most people know that immigration levels have grown substantially in recent years. So, it isn’t as significant that public opinion in support of increased levels of immigration would decline—it could be the case that people are finally happy with a higher level and wish it to be capped there.

The more meaningful change is in the lower support for “keep the level the same” and higher support for “decrease the level”. This clearly shows a change disfavoring immigration on its face. Yet this doesn’t address the confounders that make interpretation not so straightforward.

For years now there has been highly-publicized if not sensationalized reporting on a chaotic border and concerns about illegal immigrants use of public resources. Note that worry about immigrants draining government resources came not only from Republicans but also from Democratic mayors, et al.

Consider these facts:

• Public support for welfare programs is moderately strong and rising including and importantly for Social Security and Medicare.

• Public concern about the future of Social Security and Medicare is rising.

• The public increasingly views healthcare provision as a government responsibility.

Add to those a few observations:

• The conventional wisdom seems to be that public schools and other social services lack needed resources (i.e., they are stretched thin).

• Housing affordability is certainly low, and people tend to think about first-order effects (e.g., more immigrants means less housing) and ignore second-order effects (e.g., more immigrants means more labor supply to help build more housing).

• Americans are increasingly worried that we may lose our freedoms if we are not careful, and regardless of it all being untrue, the panic over Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio had salience with many.

• Despite the fact that immigrants do not consume more means-tested welfare than do natives, public sentiment is very much of the opposite belief.

• Neither party seems to deny the need or desire for a welfare state. And both campaign on preserving them even if under different guises. To a Republican the idea of an illegal immigrant collecting Social Security, being in government housing, or their kids being in a public school is abhorrent. To a Democrat, it is not too different other than when there isn’t enough of those things to go around. Democrats would seemingly be fine as long as we just grew the programs enough to include all legal if not illegal migrants.

Put it all together, and it doesn’t seem so obvious that it is immigration that is out of favor.

To the credit of most people I encounter who support Trump because of his immigration policies, they tend to start with border chaos and then work into concerns regarding culture (disruption to social life and political changes) and economics (jobs/wages and welfare use) when pressed to justify their position. Hence, that is what I conclude about what really angers them.

I see an interesting parallel in the widely and long-held beliefs about American foreign aid and the current attempts to change it. Foreign aid is at best a mess and at worst a source of wrongdoing (sometimes from the perspective of what is in America's best interest and often times from the perspective of what is best for the intended recipients). So concerns about it are well founded as far as that goes.

We can set aside the mythical idea that it is a large expense. It absolutely is not, and it won't be but a rounding error in the attempts at reigning in spending. So concerns about it being a drain on U.S. resources are simply sad innumeracy.

DOGE is politically capitalizing on the mess part evoking thoughts of Bismarck’s comparison between lawmaking and a sausage making. Foreign aid is much worse than a sausage factory, but you don't clean up the mess of a sausage factory by bombing the factory. The sausage factory is necessary to produce sausage. And it doesn't surprise me that the government is not good at running the sausage factory.

To be sure DOGE and the administration don’t shy away from giving hope to people who cannot distinguish millions from billions from trillions—differences in many orders of magnitude. So here too we find DOGE capitalizing politically without necessarily delivering anything of substance.

There is a role to be played by the US government in promoting the interest of America abroad. But the entanglement of doing that under the auspices of charity is where the mess begins. I don't hear anything coming out of DOGE much less in the political zeitgeist that supports the idea that charity is needed and we need that charity to be done outside of the US government. I just see it being captured as a political issue and used as a culture war pawn.

And the really interesting part is how DOGE itself is proudly using chaos as the means to achieve it's ends. It would appear it is chaos versus chaos. The same sentiment that put Trump in office to bring order to the border might cost his party dearly as Democrats seek to bring order to the federal workforce.

The desire for a non-chaotic border is natural. There is nothing objectionable about that as a goal. We should just understand that it does not necessarily imply no immigration.

Similarly the desire for foreign aid policies and programs to be congruent with U.S. national interests is a fundamentally worthy goal. We should just understand that it does not imply the charitable aims are wrong. It is just that they should not be pursued through the same means. That duel pursuit is impossible because government isn't going to be good at doing so, they will be easily corrupted in the process, and not everyone will agree what aims should be sought after.

This last piece is where the messiness really sets in as we don't have a unified set of priorities or even desires when it comes to charity. One advocate's charity is another taxpayer's forced funding of something they find repulsive—all done by a bureaucrat who has ulterior motives.

Readers know I think the right border-crossing limitations are extremely minimal. But regardless of your views on that, we would all agree on the desirability of orderliness. The lack of orderliness is the heart of the problem and the anger—along with the concerns about immigration interacting with welfare.

Similarly, the right amount of foreign aid might be zero. But regardless of one's views there, the right amount of charity is somewhat large—just don't think it can be accomplished through government. That fraught cause is the heart of the problem there.