Could be. I don’t claim to know for a fact. But even if it’s your suggested explanation, we can dig further into that.
In a country of recent immigrants, where first generation migrants are relied on for a lot of low paid labor, commit crime at a lower rate than American born people, and contribute to government coffers while getting little to nothing back…why would so many people base their vote on the desire to kick such people out? Is it because they’ve bought into “open borders” or other false rhetoric?
Why would they not care about dreamers being booted out, regardless of being peaceful people contributing to society, if they don’t believe in migrant crime waves?
But people only have a small field of view and rely on their chosen news source for the big picture.
For example, on the economy, when people were surveyed on how they were doing personally, the majority said their financial situation was as good or better under Biden than pre-covid. But, when asked how America was doing, the majority thought worse, including 50% of people believing the stock market had gone down and unemployment was up.
Because Faux et al told them that all day every day.
You can’t win a fair election against a propaganda machine until you have a more effective propaganda machine than they do. The very nature of the ideas of the left, whether center-left or radical left, are utterly incompatible with the no-nothing rah rah team t-shirt approach to propaganda that works so well.
You basically have the right idea, but I’ll state it a little differently: find a way to win back socially moderate and even perhaps somewhat socially conservative (but not fanatically so) working class in small town USA and the exurbs. Losing people in Zanesville, Youngstown, Erie, Johnstown…that’s how the Democrats lost states that were once either reliably blue or at least competitive from one election to the next.
I’m a little sceptical about the lower crime rate and economic contributions given the scarcity of data and the fact we now know the opposite is true in Europe. But even if they are correct, a lot of people simply dislike change, especially when it’s outside their and even their government’s control, as with illegal immigration. And having lots of asylum seekers really is a burden; there’s evidence areas on the border that received a lot of migrants swung more heavily to Trump.
Everyone knows if you give citizenship to illegal immigrants it will encourage more to come, and successive US governments have done a crap job of preventing it. What’s the other option?
AFAIK polling shows a majority of Americans support letting Dreamers stay. But they don’t get to pick from a buffet of policies; I imagine they saw it as choosing between another 4 years of mass illegal immigration under Kamala, or deportations and an immigration clampdown under Trump.
True.
Mmm. There’s a better argument people were misinformed on the economy, given inflation already had come down. Still, inflation was bound to be a headwind even if much of it was a result of external factors. As has been said, incumbents have been booted out over inflation in many countries.
Yeah, this might be it. And this:
Biden was Obama’s vice-president, and as I recall seemed to represent the older, equality-rather-than-equity version of the party. So swing voters (who are substantially low-information voters) may genuinely have expected him to be like Obama or Clinton.
But one of his first actions on becoming president was an executive order on advancing racial equity. And there were other similar ones. His administration was sued over COVID relief loans that discriminated on race and gender. He definitely leaned in to DEI-type stuff, and swing voters likely weren’t expecting it.
I don’t think they can, because the most influential people in the Democratic party, and in the various campaign groups that lobby them, are entirely unwilling to compromise on these issues.
FTR I would dispute that “we know the opposite is true in Europe”, but I’ll put that aside as it will take us too far afield.
There’s no scarcity of data. When people are incarcerated in the US, their immigration status is recorded, and we see that migrants are disproportionately underrepresented. The only thing requiring an estimate is the number of migrants living in the US, but note that an under-estimate here would mean that migrants are even less likely to commit crimes than American-born citizens.
I haven’t even heard any MAGA explicitly reject these numbers. Much of MAGA media just focuses on just showing crimes committed by migrants, and minorities, and letting emotion guide the audience into the conviction that crime is a migrant / minority thing (helped by chyrons about “migrant crime wave”).
Again, economically and in terms of things like food production, construction etc, that simply isn’t the case. It’s true that there can be a burden on some services, but often that’s due to services being allocated on the basis of the documented population only, which for my mind is a good argument for a path to citizenship.
A sober, fact-based analysis of the situation and potential issues. Much of the developed world is ageing, and the US’ is faring better than most thanks to its under-the-table immigration. But, instead of playing pretend, why not decide how many people are needed for farm work etc and documenting them formally?
I wouldn’t be against some kind of staged citizenship, but there should be something instead of just exploiting them and then lying about them all being MS-13 or whatever
Yet most people have also been in favor of the draconian deportations without due process; that’s because they’ve been fed a load of bollocks. e.g. the white house continues to insist Garcia is an MS-13 member, despite providing no evidence.
This is very true, but it’s still the case that Biden being responsible for egg prices was misleading. It’s just, in this case, happened to match similar rhetoric elsewhere.
I am skeptical about your scepticism, but I really want to caution you against projecting the European immigration situation onto America; yours is honestly much more difficult.
The largest group of illegal immigrants coming to America are Latinos. We have lots of Latinos already. We like Latinos. We’re used to sending our kids to school with theirs, many of us attend church alongside them. Their language is the most frequently taught foreign language in our schools. There are many wealthy and successful Latinos. Hell, the head of the Proud Boys is Latino!
Logistically, the difficulties in integrating a bunch of new Latinos into mainstream American society simply don’t compare with those of integrating African and Asian Muslims into European society. Also, many European countries (looking at you, France) have done a much crappier job than we have of providing new immigrants with realistic opportunities for upward social mobility. We don’t have a permanent underclass of unacculturated immigrants.
And fundamentally, America isn’t a country like Britain, France or Germany. We’re better.
Your symbols of national unity are the Crown and the Church. Ours are the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. We don’t define ourselves as a nation based on a shared cultural or ethnic heritage, but on our acceptance of the principles of democracy and individual liberty. Obviously, I’m being extremely idealistic here, but I do think we have a significant advantage insofar as our national founding myths are a much easier fit for the reality of an increasingly diverse and interconnected world than yours are.
You didn’t think you could throw something like that out without pushback, right?
America talks a good game, but was busy enslaving people at the same time as talking about individual liberty. And in terms of freedom of speech, separation of church and state etc, the US is looking much worse right now, in practice, than most European nations.
If your point is just that believing in this ideal is a positive…I guess so, though I think even here there’s room for nuance. Because arguably this rhetoric has often taken the place of reality, where people take away rights at the same time as wrapping themselves in the flag and citing the constitution.
On a related note, I don’t think it’s useful to talk about “minority working class voters” as though they were a monolith. America’s integration of Latinos has largely been a success, while over 150 years after the end of slavery, we still haven’t figured out how to get the descendants of the enslaved people their fair share of the national wealth. When we talk about “minorities” leaving the Democratic party, we should recognize that we’re mostly talking about Latinos and Asians; Blacks are for the most part staying put. Averaging the opinions of these groups together isn’t necessarily going to accurately reflect the views of either of them.
Well, that’s kind of my point. Historically, America has treated Blacks and Natives far worse than it’s treated immigrants (including non-white immigrants, though they’ve certainly faced barriers that Europeans didn’t). Our history with regard to those groups has been shameful, but that doesn’t invalidate the stories of other minority groups who have done very well here and successfully integrated into mainstream culture. Europe by and large doesn’t have those kind of success stories.
And yes, no question that America currently seems closer to completely abandoning its national ideals than ever before, but that’s all the more reason to loudly remind people what those ideals are supposed to be.
And this could be a whole other thread, but I think Americans across the political spectrum are getting spooked by the rapid development of AI technology, and particularly by such development being carried out by unregulated, profit-driven actors. I think this is a potent issue that no Democrat is particularly talking about AFAICT.
Well there have certainly been issues here in Europe. When commonwealth citizens were invited to the UK post war, to help us rebuild, it was a good opportunity to create a new kind of diverse Britain.
Instead, most immigrants were given menial jobs regardless of qualifications and faced a great deal of discrimination culminating in the “rivers of blood” speech in parliament.
That said, while racism remains a serious issue, this is a very diverse country, and we can say we have had a prime minister and mayor of London of Indian descent, and certainly we have no issue here with prominent people being gay, atheist etc.
Really? The little guy gets screwed over by corporations in so many ways, and yet people continue to believe we must deregulate and protect the “job creators”. Suddenly now they are spooked by this? Interesting
It probably helps that there was already a bunch of narratives about AI being super dangerous before AI even existed. Someone says, “I just invented social media!” and nobody knows what it is, so nobody gets concerned about how it might be dangerous on a societal level. Someone says, “I just invented AI!” and everyone thinks, “You mean like Skynet?” and starts edging backwards nervously.
Can you link me to the data please? I recall trying to look this up in the past, and only finding sites saying it was difficult to determine.
Assuming it’s true that in the long term asylum seekers benefit the economy, they don’t arrive with job offer in hand and a rental agreement sorted. Someone has to feed and house them while they get settled, and AFAIK that burden has for a long time fallen on border areas, and they are sick of it. Since those states started shipping migrants to sanctuary cities in blue states, we’ve been seeing stories about how they have been struggling with the influx, too. (I can’t find anyone analysing whether this affected voting in those cities - they do seem to have swung towards Trump, but so did everywhere - but it would be interesting to look at.
I don’t understand why they haven’t been providing visas for farm and other necessary workers all along. Surely that would be better for everyone than just ignoring illegal immigration? It’s kind of a bizarre situation to campaign against immigration enforcement rather than for increasing legal immigration.
And re the OP, this would be a mix of messaging and policy - I’m not sure they are really separable.
I think most people are a lot less concerned about due process than we might hope. It’s not the kind of obvious issue whose relevance is easy to grasp: AFAIK it’s fairly probable that Garcia is an MS-13 member. If he is shown to be one, a lot of people are going to be just fine with what happened, because they don’t think about the counterfactual and the fact laws are supposed to be followed to protect the innocent.
People do blame governments for things, even if the cause was mostly external. Maybe if Biden had been younger and more able to speak to the public and defend his actions, like Obama was, it might have made a difference. And this is where having a primary would have helped, because a fresh candidate could have distanced themselves from unpopular aspects of the Biden presidency. Kamala didn’t really get that chance.
Yes, that’s fair. I do think the US situation is a lot less problematic than in Europe, both due to the immigrants themselves, and the existing US culture that stresses shared values and a shared immigration experience.
(I just wish European politicians would recognise this fact too, and stop burying their heads in the sand about the need to be more selective and to take active steps to aid integration.)
In some ways. The US lacks a social safety net, employment protections; many people can’t afford healthcare, it has a very high crime (and thus incarceration) rate. It has unusually high inequality, and it’s the epicentre of the culture wars. The fact European countries do better on these things is most likely a result of their comparative homogeneity.
Don’t go telling the French that! They’re quite proud of being a republic, and of their “Laïcité”. And yet I’d say they are doing a worse job than Britain at integration.
Also true. The old paradigm of white vs minority is no longer useful, and both sides need to realise that.
Yes. Though Sadiq Khan is of Pakistani descent; some people get offended if you mix them up.
P.S. No study like this is perfect! One can hypothesize that undocumented immigrant criminals disproportionately steal from other undocumented people, who are afraid to report crimes to police. So, as with any crime rate analysis, I would focus on homicide. That’s the one crime which is almost always reported, and where the police do the best (albeit still highly imperfect) job of catching the perpetrator.. The Texas homicide data shows the rate for native born being similar to that of legal immigrants, with the undocumented homicide rate much lower.
It seems surprising that illegal immigrants would have a lower crime rate than legal ones, considering they are likely to be poor, unable to access benefits, and unable to work legally.
AFAIK a lot of crime is recidivism. If someone in the country illegally is convicted of a crime, how likely are they to be deported? In Texas in particular.
This article summarizes the data that shows immigrants are disproportionately under-represented among the prison population.
It’s a good article, but of course posting articles can sometimes feel like a cop-out, so I can simply cite the first paper that that article references: THE INCARCERATION GAP BETWEEN IMMIGRANTS AND THE US-BORN, 1870–2020
So why should the solution not be to process asylum claims? Or allow people still having their asylum claim processed to work (from some googling, in the US asylum seekers can indeed work after 150 days of having their claim processed, which is at least better than the UK).
Why have a shadow economy?
I am suggesting the former and not the latter.
If he probably is then they should have no trouble presenting actual evidence, in court. Instead they have disobeyed the courts, repeatedly, right up to the supreme court and a likely constitutional crisis.
In terms of your point about other cases being even more egregious, possibly, but so what? We can take any case that’s an affront to the law and human rights and protest what’s happening and challenge the government, and its supporters, to defend the indefensible. We don’t have to play top trumps and find the absolute worst case.
We better hope someone can come up with an idea that will work for the left because the right is in the process of going after young women in the same way they went after the young men in 2024.
This is a fascinating and frightening article about how young woman are being led down the rabbit hole by right-wing influencers. Like how the men used comedy and sports to initially pull people in and then gradually moved into politics, the woman are talking about health, beauty and celebrities. But it has the dark undercurrent of right-wing misogyny all through it.
I don’t know how we can combat this. The problem is that all of the influencers on the right are punching down, they deal with conspiracies and they just have to grift. The left doesn’t work like that, nor should we want to. But that kind of content is massively popular. Negative sells. How can we get positive to sell?
ISTM that, in general, Democrats aren’t even trying to reach these people. That’s what I’m saying - they should just try. Try to speak where disaffected young people (and others) are listening. That means going on Rogan and similar venues. The actual message doesn’t matter if the only ones hearing it are already voting Democratic. We need to go places that others are listening.
In some ways. The US lacks a social safety net, employment protections; many people can’t afford healthcare, it has a very high crime (and thus incarceration) rate. It has unusually high inequality, and it’s the epicentre of the culture wars. The fact European countries do better on these things is most likely a result of their comparative homogeneity.