I agree with the premise of this article. I wish only that the author had mentioned that opposition to immigration was also central to the Democratic Party for decades and that Biden has continued Trump's immigration policies. We as citizens will have to appreciate how much immigrants contribute to our country before politicians will stop using fear of the other as a fund-raising issue.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. The article does point out that "agitation among Progressive elites" has historically been part of the nativist backlash. You are quite right that the Democratic Party has been no consistent friend of immigrants. In fact, one of the worst immigration legislations in recent times was enacted by Bill Clinton. But it is important to bear in mind that the nativist right has a huge role in establishing the parameters of immigration policy at any given time and all politicians, left and right, operate within those. Also, I don't think it is fair to say that Biden has simply continued Trump's immigration policies. He has continued the MPP program to be sure. But he has reinstated the refugee program, asylum, ended deportation of non-violent undocumented, H-1Bs are back on track as are visas for their spouses, reallocated some unused green cards to folks waiting for decades....I could go on. It is important to keep sight of the fact that the Trump administration was in its own league on this issue. No previous administration in living memory, Dem or Rep, can be compared to it.
Also, something that's truly abominable under the Trump administration that transpired was what ended up as an active effort in punishing lawyers and advocates working with and representing immigrants in immigration court. Immigration courts not only kept running until weeks after the pandemic had started, they largely did not shut down until enough judges were ill that proceedings couldn't continue. That, coupled by the nonsensical policy for ICE to fly detainees around the country to "gather" them in a sense before sending them to their court hearings, almost certainly helped to spread the virus from where the hearings are held - frequently larger metro areas - to where the detainees were - largely rural or small towns with facilities staffed by locals. It also meant that attorneys were obligated to show up to court where AILA members, as counsel for the detainees, posted photos of men in hazmat suits walking about the facilities, while judges, lawyers for both sides, and detainees were not offered anything close to that sort of protection. It dosn't take a genius to put two and two together and would take a real leap of logic to attribute the after effects to coincidence.
As I worked in NYC primarily while an active practitioner, my timeline and DMs had a lot of very angry, and then very sick, attorneys, translators, paralegals, interns, and others involved in representing these clients. Then a few weeks later, the first death notices began to show up, and because the more senior attorneys in their 60s and 70s weren't on social media and the those in their 30s and 40s began to need hospitalization in larger numbers, it took quite some time to to figure out what ended up ghastly, that a large number of attorneys and staff were infected very early on and more passed away in a few months than, well, basically the total number of deceased attorneys I worked with in the aggregate over the course of nearly a decade, and some who had more severe reactions found themselves unable to go to work afterwards because of the brain-fog effect from Long-COVID.
All this, mind you, happened in addition to the deliberate sabotaging of the legal channels (V/U Visa processing, asylum/refugee admission, intentional backlogging of adjustment of status, etc). Immigration is the only field of administrative law that operates outside of most of the Constitutional protections and takes full advantage of that loophole in a militarized way to start with, and while I once thought ICE agents using ruses and deception to circumvent the 4th Amendment in conducting raids was egregious, keeping the courts open and deliberate creating an environment where COVID can spread is so utterly cruel and sadistic that my grandfather, who was a high ranking Chinese Communist Party official that served as the rubber stamp judge for what were obviously politically motivated convictions that were conducted with 0 due process (and did everything he could to be re-assigned out of the job, since he had 0 legal training and having lived through the war had no desire to contribute to more deaths), thought the practice to be beyond what would be acceptable even in a judicial system that's 100% consisted of show trials. "At least we never thought about letting the lawyers, whose whole job was to show up, also get punished for doing their job, since this was after the Cultural Revolution had passed". When someone who literally was assigned to be the rubber stamp of a kangaroo court in an authoritarian country thinks that your practices are cruel, I think that says it all.
I'd like to note that the quota system based on nation of origin never actually went away, the law merely changed the process of adjustment of status so that instead of arriving in the US with the right to stay being the norm for those holding immigrant visas, permanent residency was pushed back and the immigrant/non-immigrant/dual intent visa system, centered around consular processing and consular nonreviewability, was put in the same spot. This is kind of a sleight-of-hand though, because the quota system, one purely based on nation-of-origin, is still the law and still the system that determines the distribution of family-based immigrant visas as well as adjustment of status to permanent residency for a large number of those already legally here. We had a rather sarcastic celebration during law school in the immigration law course on the day the priority date for all immigrant visas finally all hit the 1990s. I took the class in 2013.
A stirling example of poseur conservative analysis that has thrived in the post-Reagan, post John O’Sullivan National Review years to produce the sad little racket that passes today for “movement conservatism”. Here’s a hint about whether the replacement theory is real or not: do leftists consistently brag about and celebrate it? Yes, they do! But neocons are the left’s useful idiots.
Thank you for your unsparing analysis. I would also add, that in addition to immigrants comprising a vital component of our workforce, 1) immigrants have been awarded 38% of Nobel Prizes since 2000, 2) immigrants contribute to our social safety net, 3) immigrants have provided a richness of cuisines, music, art, language that cannot be quantified, and 4) contrary to current GOP talking points, there is a wide diversity in voting behaviors amongst immigrant communities. The benefits of sensible and humane immigration so far outstrip any counter arguments that one has to bend reality to believe otherwise. Of course, that's exactly what today's Republican party has done.
I agree with the premise of this article. I wish only that the author had mentioned that opposition to immigration was also central to the Democratic Party for decades and that Biden has continued Trump's immigration policies. We as citizens will have to appreciate how much immigrants contribute to our country before politicians will stop using fear of the other as a fund-raising issue.
Thanks for your thoughtful comment. The article does point out that "agitation among Progressive elites" has historically been part of the nativist backlash. You are quite right that the Democratic Party has been no consistent friend of immigrants. In fact, one of the worst immigration legislations in recent times was enacted by Bill Clinton. But it is important to bear in mind that the nativist right has a huge role in establishing the parameters of immigration policy at any given time and all politicians, left and right, operate within those. Also, I don't think it is fair to say that Biden has simply continued Trump's immigration policies. He has continued the MPP program to be sure. But he has reinstated the refugee program, asylum, ended deportation of non-violent undocumented, H-1Bs are back on track as are visas for their spouses, reallocated some unused green cards to folks waiting for decades....I could go on. It is important to keep sight of the fact that the Trump administration was in its own league on this issue. No previous administration in living memory, Dem or Rep, can be compared to it.
Also, something that's truly abominable under the Trump administration that transpired was what ended up as an active effort in punishing lawyers and advocates working with and representing immigrants in immigration court. Immigration courts not only kept running until weeks after the pandemic had started, they largely did not shut down until enough judges were ill that proceedings couldn't continue. That, coupled by the nonsensical policy for ICE to fly detainees around the country to "gather" them in a sense before sending them to their court hearings, almost certainly helped to spread the virus from where the hearings are held - frequently larger metro areas - to where the detainees were - largely rural or small towns with facilities staffed by locals. It also meant that attorneys were obligated to show up to court where AILA members, as counsel for the detainees, posted photos of men in hazmat suits walking about the facilities, while judges, lawyers for both sides, and detainees were not offered anything close to that sort of protection. It dosn't take a genius to put two and two together and would take a real leap of logic to attribute the after effects to coincidence.
As I worked in NYC primarily while an active practitioner, my timeline and DMs had a lot of very angry, and then very sick, attorneys, translators, paralegals, interns, and others involved in representing these clients. Then a few weeks later, the first death notices began to show up, and because the more senior attorneys in their 60s and 70s weren't on social media and the those in their 30s and 40s began to need hospitalization in larger numbers, it took quite some time to to figure out what ended up ghastly, that a large number of attorneys and staff were infected very early on and more passed away in a few months than, well, basically the total number of deceased attorneys I worked with in the aggregate over the course of nearly a decade, and some who had more severe reactions found themselves unable to go to work afterwards because of the brain-fog effect from Long-COVID.
All this, mind you, happened in addition to the deliberate sabotaging of the legal channels (V/U Visa processing, asylum/refugee admission, intentional backlogging of adjustment of status, etc). Immigration is the only field of administrative law that operates outside of most of the Constitutional protections and takes full advantage of that loophole in a militarized way to start with, and while I once thought ICE agents using ruses and deception to circumvent the 4th Amendment in conducting raids was egregious, keeping the courts open and deliberate creating an environment where COVID can spread is so utterly cruel and sadistic that my grandfather, who was a high ranking Chinese Communist Party official that served as the rubber stamp judge for what were obviously politically motivated convictions that were conducted with 0 due process (and did everything he could to be re-assigned out of the job, since he had 0 legal training and having lived through the war had no desire to contribute to more deaths), thought the practice to be beyond what would be acceptable even in a judicial system that's 100% consisted of show trials. "At least we never thought about letting the lawyers, whose whole job was to show up, also get punished for doing their job, since this was after the Cultural Revolution had passed". When someone who literally was assigned to be the rubber stamp of a kangaroo court in an authoritarian country thinks that your practices are cruel, I think that says it all.
I'd like to note that the quota system based on nation of origin never actually went away, the law merely changed the process of adjustment of status so that instead of arriving in the US with the right to stay being the norm for those holding immigrant visas, permanent residency was pushed back and the immigrant/non-immigrant/dual intent visa system, centered around consular processing and consular nonreviewability, was put in the same spot. This is kind of a sleight-of-hand though, because the quota system, one purely based on nation-of-origin, is still the law and still the system that determines the distribution of family-based immigrant visas as well as adjustment of status to permanent residency for a large number of those already legally here. We had a rather sarcastic celebration during law school in the immigration law course on the day the priority date for all immigrant visas finally all hit the 1990s. I took the class in 2013.
A stirling example of poseur conservative analysis that has thrived in the post-Reagan, post John O’Sullivan National Review years to produce the sad little racket that passes today for “movement conservatism”. Here’s a hint about whether the replacement theory is real or not: do leftists consistently brag about and celebrate it? Yes, they do! But neocons are the left’s useful idiots.
Thank you for your unsparing analysis. I would also add, that in addition to immigrants comprising a vital component of our workforce, 1) immigrants have been awarded 38% of Nobel Prizes since 2000, 2) immigrants contribute to our social safety net, 3) immigrants have provided a richness of cuisines, music, art, language that cannot be quantified, and 4) contrary to current GOP talking points, there is a wide diversity in voting behaviors amongst immigrant communities. The benefits of sensible and humane immigration so far outstrip any counter arguments that one has to bend reality to believe otherwise. Of course, that's exactly what today's Republican party has done.