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Shikha Dalmia: Hi, I’m here with Greg Sargent of the New Republic. Welcome to Zooming In.
Greg, you and I have known each other a long time, but we’ve actually never met face to face and we still haven’t met in the flesh. But here we are and talking about an issue that you have been writing about a lot—one that’s near and dear to my heart: immigration.
You’ve followed my work, I followed your work. And I’ve been a long-time advocate of open door policies, even in my more center-right phase. Part of this is, of course, personal: I’m an immigrant, I care about the issue. But there’s no contradiction if an immigrant, analytically thinking about the issue, concludes that immigration is actually bad for the host country. You and I both know plenty of thoughtful, serious immigrants who are pundits who have made exactly that case. And it’s not out of selfishness—a “pull up the drawbridge” instinct—but it comes from a genuine belief that absorbing too many newcomers can be bad for a country. I’m not one of them.
And I’ve two reasons for that. First, I just fundamentally believe in human beings, regardless of race, caste, creed, sexuality, nationality. I just think they are an asset. More of them are generally good for a country and not because I’m naive about some of the costs. There are some costs to everything. But immigrants are not only mouths that eat—they’re also hands and brains that grow the economic pie.
I owe this insight to Julian Simon, who’s one of the most underrated economists of the 20th century, if you ask me. While the intellectual establishment in the ’90s was talking about the cost of overpopulation and worrying about it, Simon was making the opposite case: that human beings are not a drain on resources but they are the creators of them. He called human beings the “ultimate resource.” I think he’s been vindicated. Nobody really talks about Malthusianism that much anymore.
And second, I think an open society is just richer—not just materially but in many other ways. The cross-pollination of ideas and cultures produces a more dynamic economy, a more vital culture, a genuine moral and intellectual progress. We grow by encountering each other.
Now, some version of that has been America’s self-understanding forever. And it is only recently that things have changed. To prove my point, I’m going to play for you clips of several presidents and how they talked about immigration till Trump came along.
So let’s listen to them and then we’ll talk about it.
What is personally painful for me is that I arrived in Reagan’s America, where this country’s self-understanding was that it was a shining city on the hill for people like me. And now I’m living in Trump’s America. And it hasn’t been that long. So how did America do this 180-degree in a few short decades?
Sargent: In a very important sense, the country hasn’t done this 180 on this national self-understanding you’re talking about. If you look at public opinion, and I really think this is critical to the whole debate, the last year and a half has taught us that the election of Trump 2024 did not actually represent a meaningful, durable cultural shift against immigration. Look at all the data we’ve got, plus the fact that the Joe Rogans of the world—and even some very red areas of the country—have reacted quite vehemently to mass deportations. It looks to me like the cultural consensus is still that as a general matter, immigrants and immigration broadly are seen as an important and valuable component of American life and that immigrants in some sense have a claim to coming here.
I think this debate has been distorted by misinterpretations of what happened in 2024. There’s a reading out there, and I think it’s easy to get seduced by this, that there was a deeper cultural shift against immigrants. And I don’t think that that’s what 2024 represented.
Our minoritarian system, plus the state of our information environment right now, makes it possible to win a national election by one point by saying what Trump said there. In fact, when he said that stuff in 2016, he didn’t even win the popular vote. But I do think that Trump’s victories have created a distorted sense of what happened inside the culture on this issue.
Dalmia: It’s interesting you should say that because we have been conducting these surveys of populist sentiment since a couple of years ago, and we are just about to go to the field on another one. And we asked people about their attitudes towards immigration. What was really startling was that on undocumented immigration, Trump supporters were clearly off the charts compared to any other cohort in their negative attitudes. But when it came to legal immigration, actually there was not that much disagreement between them and others. It was really like the undocumented issue that was getting them going, but they weren’t actually thinking that America should have a closed border. There’s absolutely something to that.
“If you look at public opinion, and I really think this is critical to the whole debate, the last year and a half has taught us that the election of Trump 2024 did not actually represent a meaningful, durable cultural shift against immigration. Look at all the data we’ve got, plus the fact that the Joe Rogans of the world—and even some very red areas of the country—have reacted quite vehemently to mass deportations. It looks to me like the cultural consensus is still that as a general matter, immigrants and immigration broadly are seen as an important and valuable component of American life and that immigrants in some sense have a claim to coming here.” — Greg Sargent
However, I would say a couple of things in response to you. One is that the Overton window on the anti-immigration rhetoric has really shifted to the right. Recall the piece I shared with you about how gay marriage attitudes and immigration attitudes aren’t the same; those on immigration are far more thermostatic [subject to volatile shifts], he said. And this person, a professor, was largely sympathetic to the argument for immigration.
But one of the things he says is: do not lead with statements about how good immigrants are for the country. Do not make general statements like the way Reagan began. This talking about immigration in the abstract … all of that has shifted. And in that montage we played, you can hear the defensiveness creeping in in Obama’s framing of the issue.
And so clearly there has been some shift in public opinion that the politicians are responding to.
Sargent: No, I think there has been a shift, but I want to stress the importance of the word “thermostatic,” which you used in there. This issue, unfortunately for people like you and me, is incredibly thermostatic. In other words, it really fluctuates based on who’s in power and based on what set of policies are in place. And I do think that Democrats probably should lead with enforcement in some respects.
The Democratic Party is a big tent, the center left is ideologically very diverse. For Democrats to compete nationally as a party, they have to win in some very tough areas. These are just facts of life. In order to do that, the approach taken has to be tailored to different areas of the country. And I think we’re even seeing that right now.
If you look at someone like James Talarico, who’s running a very hard race for Texas Senate, he leads with enforcement a lot of the time. In fact, he flatly states that Joe Biden failed us. But then he uses that as a way to open the door to a conversation about what comes next and what we do next. And he then talks about the need for generous and humane immigration policies quite expansively, and talks a lot about how immigration is good for the country. So I do think that Democrats in tough areas and red states, they’re probably going to have to lead with enforcement.
But not all Democrats have to talk that way. You’ve got J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, you’ve got California Governor Gavin Newsom, you’ve got Chris Van Hollen, who represents blue Maryland in the Senate. These are people who don’t necessarily have to talk in careful ways. But I think, as a general matter, we should essentially give Democrats lots of free reign.
Dalmia: Actually, that gets me to my next question. First, on Biden’s immigration policies, it’s been very interesting to watch how the thinking has evolved on that. I remember in 2023 there was this huge wellspring of discontent against Biden’s policies, not by the restrictionist right, but among progressives saying that his policies are just like Trump’s. In the first two years of Biden administration, he was still dealing with COVID. And he had kept in place Title 42, which was a catch and expel policy. We ran a piece by Linda Chavez to respond to the progressive left and say, “no, he was not like Trump.”
She said the number of people that Biden was deporting was twice the number of people that Trump deported under Title 42. But then he relaxed those policies after the pandemic emergency ended. There was so much pent-up demand that he had to deal with it somehow. And he actually dealt with it in a fairly responsible fashion. He created legal pathways for immigration. So the number of illegal border crossings in the latter two years of his term actually dropped 40%—from Central American countries who are coming from the southern border. To me, it’s a triumph of the right-wing narrative that Biden is seen as an open borders president.
Sargent: Well, I want to say a couple things about this. One is that perceptions of Biden as an open borders president really were only partly rooted in perceptions of reality. And that’s where the thermostatic nature of opinion on this issue comes in. When the public perceives that a pro-immigrant president is in charge, and when voters who are living under that see imagery on the television of border chaos, it triggers a different thing in their heads, I think, and starts to make them more open to the idea that control has been lost. And to be fair, Biden did lose control of the system, but there were reasons for that. There were world-historical reasons for that. The pent-up COVID demand is an extremely important part of that.
“Most Americans, I think, want a solution that looks like comprehensive immigration reform. Every bit of data on this shows that. It is only a small minority that opposes that. And I just doubt that the backlash to comprehensive immigration reform passing would have been very big. I think it would have been greeted with a lot of relief in the country.” — Greg Sargent
The borders were essentially closed because of COVID for a while, and then all of a sudden people could move and they took advantage of those opportunities. But also the Darién Gap opened, which is a very big event, and really was a big reason for the kinds of crushes that we see at the border. By the way, as an aside, you often hear a certain type of centrist pundit favorably compare Obama to Biden and say, “Well, why couldn’t Biden be like Obama?”
Well, Obama wasn’t dealing with those historical conditions. Toward the very tail end of his presidency you started to see asylum becoming a major issue, but that’s not something he mainly dealt with. Most of his presidency was consumed in debates over comprehensive immigration reform and whether House Republicans could be talked into agreeing to something. You and Jamelle Bouie covered that, I think, very well on the show.
Greg Abbott, governor of Texas, Ron DeSantis governor of Florida, both trying to assist Trump in the 2024 election, sent busloads of migrants to cities and created chaos in those cities. It created Camp of the Saints imagery that the right wanted—cities overrun, people camping out in tents and swarming the streets. The occasional crime would be hyped up.
But this is really important: they were artificially creating a situation by doing this. What they were doing was bombarding cities with immigrants under a set of laws that didn’t allow for their assimilation. In other words, Republicans in Congress were drawing a line and saying, “no, we won’t agree to do things like hire more judges. No, we won’t create pathways to work authorization for these people.” So Republicans created imagery of a system that was out of control by not allowing Democrats to do the things that they needed to do in order to fix the problem. And that’s an essential piece of this. It’s not like what we saw in these cities created by these governors was an actual natural thing. Like that’s not what immigration has to look like.
Dalmia: I think that’s exactly right. You mentioned Obama—in some ways, I think Obama did exactly what many people thought would get him to a point of comprehensive immigration reform. He was at that time called the “deporter-in-chief” because of the number of people he was deporting. And I wrote so many pieces about that at the time—he had innovated this idea of audit raids on employers. They would send Washington officials to employers who were employing undocumented immigrants, going through their books to look for discrepancies, to see if there was evidence of undocumented immigrants.
There was a pretty radical group of Republicans in the House who said, “no, this is still not enough. And we will still not allow you to create legal pathways to deal with the issue”—which to me is fundamentally the cure—“till we have operational control over the border.” I mean, that was the term of art that they were using—operational control. At which point he was forced to legalize Dreamers and the parents of Dreamers through executive order, which then became even more politically controversial. My point in recounting this history is that the enforcement-first approach has been tried, and it doesn’t work because it cannot work. Because ultimately, if there are 10 immigrants who come in through the border, it’s a political issue for the right.
Sargent: This is what allows the MAGA right to be mobilized by the leadership. They don’t want the issue solved. And this used to be a slam against Democrats, which I think was accurate at the time, that there was a certain cynicism that they don’t really want to give legal status to Dreamers because that means the issue goes away, and how do they mobilize the Hispanic vote? But I think there is a converse of that on the right, too.
To them the only solution that counts as a solution is expulsion.
But I do want to point out, though, that the Obama approach actually came a lot closer to succeeding than people think. For instance, comprehensive immigration reform got, I believe, 68 votes in the Senate …
Dalmia: It got through the Senate, but it didn’t get a floor vote—and not because it wouldn’t have passed, because it would have passed, but because a minority of Republicans in the Freedom Caucus essentially wouldn’t let it come to a floor vote …
Sargent: Because it would have passed.
Still though, it actually came pretty close, closer than people think. If you recall—and this is really geeky history that only you and I will know—John Boehner, who was then the speaker of the House, wanted it to pass. He genuinely wanted it to pass. He and Obama were discussing it on the phone and Boehner was essentially saying to him, “I just can’t do it right now. I’m getting close. I just can’t do it right now.” People forget this, but Paul Ryan—who was a darling of the right; it’s hard to convey to the young ones how important a figure Paul Ryan was to the right wing back in 2010—wanted comprehensive immigration reform.
Dalmia: They all did. I mean, Bush wanted comprehensive immigration reform and also came very close, and failed for the same reasons and in the same way that Obama did.
Sargent: The minority on the far right that essentially controls much of the Republican Party would not allow it. The problem becomes the makeup of the GOP, ultimately. And I think debating how to get around that, there’s really only one way to get there, which is Democrats need to win a trifecta, they have to end the filibuster, and they have to pass something.
In some funny way, the minoritarian features of the system are really the obstacle—the primary processes that dictate that a minority within the GOP has outsized control, even at a time when many major Republican constituencies wanted reform, like farm agriculture, the business community, and so forth. So they couldn’t pass it because the right wouldn’t allow it, and then Democrats can’t pass it because they won’t do away with the filibuster. Now that’s a separate debate, whether we should do away with the filibuster or not.
Dalmia: If Trump had done away with the filibuster, we would have been a lot worse off right now …
Sargent: I think that’s probably true. It’s a separate argument. But the bottom line is I think we can all agree that as long as there’s a filibuster there, and as long as the makeup of the Senate is what it is—favoring rural states, favoring red states, and so forth—you’re not going to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
Dalmia: You are saying Democrats need to make whatever arguments they need to make to get a trifecta and then you get around the obstructionists on the other side and pass a responsible immigration reform bill.
Sargent: Yes, and then I think you get a lot of Republicans voting for it.
Dalmia: I agree, you will get a lot of Republicans voting for it. And not to get too bogged down in this, but the amount of political traction that a pretty radical minority view has received, both in the Republican Party and the country, is not to be dismissed here. The reason we are in the place that we are right now is because that radical minority has very radically shifted the Overton window in the direction of restrictionism. At this stage, shoving immigration solution down its throat, will that radicalize it more or will it diffuse the issue?
Sargent: It’s a complex question. I think there’s a very strong argument to be made that if comprehensive reform had passed in 2013, 2014, legalizing the undocumented and creating a much more rational system, I don’t know that you get Donald Trump. I don’t know that he wins. Now, there’s a strong counter-argument that’s been mounted against that, which is that if you had passed comprehensive immigration reform, then you’re even more likely to get Trump because the backlash would be even more swift. I don’t believe that because I think that the nature of public opinion on this issue is that most Americans want the system to work. Period. They don’t understand why there’s so much chaos, why there’s so much suffering, why there’s so much disorder, and why this can’t be solved.
“Now that all these low information voters and the constituencies that went to Trump temporarily because of inflation have seen this alternative in action, have seen fascism, have seen Stephen Miller-style ethnic purges, they’ve snapped right back to a consensus that essentially favors a path to legalization for most undocumented immigrants here, lenient and fair treatment for those seeking humanitarian protections, packaged with border security—but not mass deportations. And that I think is the fundamental dispute.” — Greg Sargent
Most Americans, I think, want a solution that looks like comprehensive immigration reform. Every bit of data on this shows that. It is only a small minority that opposes that. And I just doubt that the backlash to comprehensive immigration reform passing would have been very big. I think it would have been greeted with a lot of relief in the country.
Dalmia: I completely agree with all of that, and I agree with you that Donald Trump would not have been elected if the immigration issue had been solved. But I would say this in response: if I were to sit down with a bunch of, let’s say, restrictionists in Congress who still want a solution to the problem, I think we could arrive at some point that we can all agree on. And I think that immigration bill would look something like: we need more legal pathways, create something like a guest worker program with Mexico and Central American countries where people can come and go based on requirements of the American economy, and you don’t have this settled population of undocumented immigrants because it’s become too risky for them to cross the border because of the strict enforcement and the lack of legal options. We would have more pathways for legalization for high-skilled immigrants.
And at the same time, we would increase border capacity to patrol the border, make sure there are not so many illegal crossings. I mean, we can see the contours of a bill like that. I think it really matters, however, whether the solution would stick or not, depending upon whether you have sold it in terms of harsh anti-immigration rhetoric, like controlling the border and defending this country from immigration, or you have sold it in pro-immigration, Reaganesque terms. Because if you do it in the former terms—that is, that we need to control the borders and keep our cultural makeup—we will set the stage of more and more anti-immigration policies in the future.
Sargent: If you package it in stringent terms like that, if you make a case for maintaining cultural homogeneity or keeping the transformation of the nation slow or manageable, some language like that, then maybe. But I think there’s probably some middle ground between language like that and then the other way of talking about it that you’re suggesting, which is essentially: “immigrants are good for the country.” There’s probably some middle ground in there that would be a sweet spot, that wouldn’t leave us vulnerable to demagogic exploitation later and would be persuasive to a lot of people.
I think James Talarico is doing something very interesting. And I don’t know if people are aware of this. He uses this metaphor all the time. He says immigration should be like a front porch. We should have a welcome mat and also a lock on our door. And it’s a little bit of a clumsy image but I think the underlying instinct that is driving what he’s doing there is a sound one. The instinct is essentially that people—as a general matter; the mainstream of the country—don’t pay very close attention to the specifics of this issue. They just want it managed. They think immigrants should be allowed into the country for both humanitarian and economic reasons. They think people should be able to migrate here strictly in search of a better life. They associate that with American identity, on a very deep level still. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. This is the broad mainstream.
But at the same time, they want to see less imagery of suffering and disorder at the border. And If you say to people, “look, immigration’s good for this country, we’re a nation of immigrants, your ancestors immigrated here” … that’s the Obama language that he used. And Biden uses that language, too. All mainstream Democrats use that language. Immigration’s good for the country. Your ancestors immigrated here. It’s a land of opportunity. We want this to be available to other people from around the world of goodwill who want to participate in the American experiment. The door’s open to that. We regulate it in terms of safety and so forth.
At the same time, we make sure that nobody’s abusing the system, nobody’s crossing illegally, or get as close as you can to that—nobody’s exploiting the asylum system in some sense. The metaphor that Talarico uses encapsulates that. If you can get to that argument, I don’t think it’s prone to the type of exploitation that you’re talking about.
And I think it actually is language that just about any Democrat running anywhere can use.
Dalmia: Let’s talk about Democrats and what’s happening on immigration on their side. I mean, the general perception is that there’s a big left-right division on immigration, that the populist right is in one place and then progressives want open borders. But there’s actually a pretty important split within the center-left space.
There is a big, big argument going on among Democrats about how to talk about immigration. Run us through that divide.
Sargent: I think the split, it’s not exactly between progressives on the Democratic Party and the Democratic mainstream. I think a number of mainstream Democrats are not in the cautious centrist camp, actually. I think, at the most fundamental level, the difference within the center left is rooted in differing interpretations of what the 2024 election meant.
There’s a certain type of pundit who holds that when Trump won the immigration argument in 2024, which he did, what happened was that a majority of voters in some sense agreed with Trump about immigration itself. In this interpretation, a majority decided that Trump was, in some sense, right about the negative social, economic, and cultural effects of immigration on U.S. society very broadly.
The alternate interpretation of what I think really happened in 2024 is that, as we said before, Biden did lose control of the system in important ways, and there was a thermostatic reaction against the party in power, with most low-information voters not really focused on the actual alternative that Trump and Stephen Miller were offering. And I think the centrist school over-read all of that as being a cultural shift against immigration in a more profound sense. But the last year and a half just disproves that interpretation. We’re just seeing the evidence all around us. Now that all these low information voters and the constituencies that went to Trump temporarily because of inflation have seen this alternative in action, have seen fascism, have seen Stephen Miller-style ethnic purges, they’ve snapped right back to a consensus that essentially favors a path to legalization for most undocumented immigrants here, lenient and fair treatment for those seeking humanitarian protections, packaged with border security—but not mass deportations. And that I think is the fundamental dispute.
“Because of the thermostatic nature of the issue, you’re seeing the public turn against Trump’s approach. The public is naturally saying, ‘Well, what do we do?’ The salience camp—I think someone called them the salience bros, which I thought is a good way to put it—what they say fundamentally is that opinion on this issue is fixed and static. That powerful developments in the present can’t really do much to shake that up or dislodge it. But I think that doesn’t allow for the possibility that the salience of immigration can be raised on terms that are positive or favorable to us.” — Greg Sargent
If you take the second of these conclusions—and I just don’t think there’s any way you can avoid that conclusion if you approach the debate honestly—you adopt a different understanding of how to do the politics right now. And that’s why the differing interpretations of 2024 are the root of the split. So the centrist camp—which adopts the view that there was a real, durable, meaningful cultural shift, that Trumpism is in some sense deeply held within the population—holds that Democrats can’t really talk about the issue because the culture is turned against them on it. Period.
I’m in the second camp that thinks that Trump’s overplaying of his hand has created this new opening to win the argument again. Because if you’ve got majorities snapping back to the consensus that you and I favor, there’s an opening to now talk to that majority. So this second camp aggressively associates itself with things like defending Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to the foreign gulag, and now seems to be winning his case.
This camp wants Democrats to associate themselves aggressively with defending things like holders of temporary protected status, with trying to find new ways to create orderly legal pathways for those seeking humanitarian protections. In other words, the second interpretation of 2024 leads you to a different way of doing the politics right now. And I think it’s the right way to do the politics. That’s the difference in a nutshell, I think.
Dalmia: Basically, there is one camp which says: “stay away from immigration, talk about kitchen table issues, because the minute you start talking about immigration, you raise the salience of immigration for voters, and voters are more interested in kitchen table economic issues, inflation and what have you. So just focus on that.” And it’s not that they are necessarily against pro-immigration reforms. They just think it shouldn’t be part of the political conversation. Whereas you are saying, “no, this is a political opening, and we can use it not just to defeat the other side, the Republican side, but also then set the stage for future immigration reform in the direction that we want.” Is that accurate?
Sargent: Right. And in part because of the thermostatic nature of the issue, you’re seeing the public turn against Trump’s approach. The public is naturally saying, “Well, what do we do?” The salience camp—I think someone called them the salience bros, which I thought is a good way to put it—what they say fundamentally is that opinion on this issue is fixed and static. That powerful developments in the present can’t really do much to shake that up or dislodge it.
But I think that doesn’t allow for the possibility that the salience of immigration can be raised on terms that are positive or favorable to us. I think the last year and a half has dramatically shown that it can be. For instance, the deportation of Abrego Garcia to the foreign gulag, the ensuing legal struggle over that, which was incredibly high profile, penetrated deeply into the culture, raised the salience of immigration, but in a way that created a favorable political environment for Democrats and people like you and me. The important point here is that the narratives around people like Abrego Garcia, and the narratives around deportations of longtime residents, like think of the five-year-old kids, something that just grabs the nation … it’s very powerful stuff. It gets people’s attention.
Now, I don’t understand for the life of me why Democrats wouldn’t want to associate themselves with the humane side of the argument at these precise moments when the public is jogged out of its algorithmic rut and is paying attention to these vivid and emotionally wrenching stories. It’s just beyond me. It makes no sense. And the data disproves the salience bro’s argument; Trump’s approval went down on the issue at precisely the moment when these things became big public questions—at precisely the moment that the salience of the issue was raised, only on terms favorable to us. The salience bro’s argument is just puzzling to me.
Dalmia: But let me ask you this question: Do you really think that this is just all a strategy question between these two camps on the Democratic side? Or do you think there is actually some sympathy for the cultural argument and even economic arguments against immigration on the center-left side? Because it’s not like they were always pro-immigration. There is a whole history of labor union, working-class nativism and xenophobia, and some elements of that are still sticking on the Democratic side.
Sargent: Absolutely. This is where it gets even more complicated because you’ve got a certain type of centrist pundit who I think fundamentally agrees with us about immigration. Someone like Matt Yglesias, I think, agrees with us. There might be some minor differences around the enforcement regime—but the fundamental agreement is there on immigration being good for the country, being manageable. There’s some differences on how to do the politics, but I think someone like him agrees with us. Whereas I think there’s another school of pundit who really does sneakily agree with the Trumpian argument, the cultural argument.
And, by the way, can I just say, since you brought up where the unions used to be on this issue? So what? Like, you’ve got these people, the pundits in this second camp who are sneakily sympathetic to Trumpism, they constantly say, “Well, Bernie Sanders used to be anti-immigrant, and well, unions used to be anti-immigrant,” as if that settles the argument. The unions and Bernie Sanders were wrong! And it’s actually a sign of progress that they’ve gotten to the point where they no longer understand immigration as a zero-sum issue. That’s good.
Dalmia: But I think the argument is how the Democratic Party is losing touch with its roots in working class people, and that it’s becoming overly progressive and elite and therefore doesn’t understand the cultural anxieties of ordinary Americans.
Sargent: And that argument is just highly risible, too! Because it just implies a very simplistic understanding of what the working class is right now. And here, again, we should probably point out that Trump’s gains in 2024 among some of those constituencies, like non-white working class people, young people, young African Americans, males, those types of [groups], has also distorted this part of the debate and made it hard to really cut through the clutter and get to what actually happened.
“Our minoritarian system, plus the state of our information environment right now, makes it possible to win a national election by one point by saying what Trump said. In fact, when he said that stuff in 2016, he didn’t even win the popular vote. But I do think that Trump’s victories have created a distorted sense of what happened inside the culture on this issue.” — Greg Sargent
This case has been made by people who are far more data focused than I am. But Trump won those voters because of the economy. We were in the middle of a post-COVID shock that took down incumbent parties around the world. I did some reporting up in Reading, Pennsylvania. Reading is this small city right in the middle of Eastern Pennsylvania. (People get very angry when you get the geography of Pennsylvania wrong, by the way! Like, really worked up about whether something is in central or eastern Pennsylvania, for some reason. I don’t know why!). It is 70% Latino. And it still went for Kamala Harris in 2024. But there was something like a 17-point shift among Latinos. She still won them by a sizable margin, but by not as much as Joe Biden did. And that mattered in a state like Pennsylvania, because there are a lot of Latinos in Pennsylvania, and you saw this across the board. There are a number of small cities with large Latino populations in Pennsylvania and these little shifts helped Trump win.
But here’s what I learned from my reporting up there: Democrats in Reading, Pennsylvania almost [to a person] told me that what they ran up against, again and again and again, was that Latinos were just thinking about costs. They had this picture of Trump—and there’s a whole bunch of reasons for this that are really irritating—that is 20 years out of date. It’s rooted in the penetration into the culture that Trump got in the ‘80s and ‘90s—the Apprentice guy, the guy who snaps his fingers and gets stuff done, the guy who fires people. He builds big things, he makes things happen. A lot of small business types—and Reading is filled with Latino small businesspeople, and a lot of Latinos in places like Pennsylvania are small businesspeople—[identified] with Trump’s entrepreneurial spirit. They found that inspiring in some sense.
Dalmia: Did they not remember his first term and what it meant? There was something like the Jan. 6 insurrection where he stood [near] Pennsylvania Avenue and called on his supporters to do the “right thing,” and he almost got his vice president killed.
And he was telling us to inject bleach in our veins, and he had like a zero-tolerance border policy where he was snatching suckling infants from the breasts of immigrant moms. I mean, how do you omit all of that, the intervening four years and the trauma the country endured at that time?
Sargent: It’s certainly a puzzle and it sets up a lot of dilemmas that really could be the topic of a whole bunch of podcasts. But I think the shortest possible answer for it is that we really are unable to appreciate how unfocused most people are on politics.
So, you and I obsess over Jan. 6, but to a lot of low information voters out there, that was just some very distant occurrence. When asked about it by pollsters, they’ll give the answer that you and I want to hear, which is good. But they just don’t think of it as you and I do. And by the way, I also reported this at the New Republic, but internal Kamala Harris polling found that they could not get low-information and swing voters to blame Trump for the COVID economy. Trump destroyed our economy. That’s what makes this whole thing even more perverse. But they just could not get voters to focus on that. The voters mostly thought it was COVID that did it. They associated Trump with the pre-COVID economy. Water under the bridge. That is, I think, the reason for it.
Dalmia: Did voters vote Trump in twice despite his harsh anti-immigration positions, [or] because of them? Is it that they have short memories? Or is it that they really do want the hard right’s immigration policies?
I am asking because David Frum, a neoconservative-turned-Never Trumper, who now writes for The Atlantic, wrote this famous essay, “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will,” in which he argued that there is an appetite in the American public to have secure borders; that this appetite is reasonable; and that if liberals don’t deliver on this wish, voters will elect worse people.
So, in other words, the choices for liberals are between Miller lite, so to speak, or Miller. I’m joking, but I think that is not an unfair description of his basic thesis. What do you think of that?
Sargent: Well, I think the central problem with Frum’s formulation is that it just erases a lot of the moral and policy complexity involved in the dilemmas that we really have to face up to. The Frum argument is: Biden failed to secure the border, that gave us Trump. Liberals failed to secure the border, that shows them to be the radicals, and then that creates an opening for right-wing majorities.
“Republicans in Congress were drawing a line and saying, ‘no, we won’t agree to do things like hire more judges. No, we won’t create pathways to work authorization for these people.’ So Republicans created imagery of a system that was out of control by not allowing Democrats to do the things that they needed to do in order to fix the problem.” — Greg Sargent
Now, purely as an empirical matter, as you pointed out earlier, that’s wildly oversimplified. But Biden focused mostly on deporting recent border crossers—deported a ton of those. He deprioritized the removals of people in the interior, and created these new legal pathways for people to come here in an orderly way. Frum is saying that you don’t just have to secure the border, you also have to have draconian interior enforcement so that the border doesn’t get out of control. He’s not just saying “secure the border,” he’s saying “[we need] draconian interior enforcement”; he’s saying “cut off humanitarian pathways.” That is what is necessary to prevent the fascists from winning, he’s saying.
And that’s wrong. We have to reject that head on. If by “secure” that means “adopt draconian deportation policies and do away with humanitarian protections so that fewer people try to come here,” we’ve got to say no to that. Admittedly, this puts us in a tough position. Because the hard question for you and me and Democrats is: How do you maintain a humane interior enforcement regime and assimilation regime and pathways for entry for humanitarian and economic purposes while also keeping unauthorized immigration low? That’s a hard problem, but the Frum formulation glosses over it and says: “you can’t solve the problem.” We have to say that we can have generous immigration policies while securing the border. That’s hard.
Dalmia: He says he’s not for draconian immigration policies, but he is also not for more legal pathways for immigration. And you can claim that our asylum system is abused, and I think it is, but the reason for that is there aren’t sufficient economic pathways for immigration. Ultimately, all immigration, in my view, is economic immigration. Asylum seekers wouldn’t come here if they didn’t think they could get jobs. So what you really need to do is create more legal economic pathways for immigrants. But he doesn’t want that either. So if he doesn’t want that, and he doesn’t want draconian interior enforcement immigration, then this problem doesn’t get solved.
There is a contradiction at the heart of Frum’s argument, which I don’t think he grapples with. He papers over that, even though the piece is actually admirable in how comprehensive it is and how seriously he takes the other side.
Sargent: The formulation is still fundamentally dishonest in the following way. Republicans want the debate to be fought out in the realm of the border. At least for a very long time they wanted it to be fought out there. You have them cosplaying by putting on combat gear and then riding around on a boat on some lake near the border and pretending to be patrolling or whatever. This is a staple of Republican politics, going back aways now—it’s pre-MAGA. But for Republicans, what they wanted was for the debate to be subsumed under the border. So: “Democrats are for porous borders, Republicans are for secure borders.”
When the debate gets into things like, “Should we deport longtime residents? Should we allow people in who have humanitarian claims? Should we broaden pathways for economic migrants (or whatever you want to call them)?” When the debate goes there, we win. And the thing is, the innovation on Stephen Miller’s part is he said, “No, we don’t have to keep it in the realm of the border. We’re going to win the argument even if we unleash fascism on the streets of American cities. We’re going to win with mass deportations. There’s a latent majority in the country which supports us, which wants ethnic purges, which wants ethnic homogeneity, which sees immigration as a threat to social cohesion” (that disgusting formulation that they always use). There’s a latent majority for that famous Department of Homeland Security X post which said, deport a hundred million people and you get paradise. The Frum formulation glosses over all of that and doesn’t allow for a world in which people like you and me can argue for humane immigration enforcement policies, more generous legal pathways, and border security. It’s a hard argument for us to make. It’s tough politically, but we can do it.
Dalmia: Immigration, for me, is not just about immigration. It’s a litmus test for the society we are becoming. And to me, the enforcement-first reality that we are living through is not just the threat to immigrants, it’s an invitation to a police state, as we are seeing. When ICE can detain legal residents without warrants and deport people under court order protection (and you mentioned Abrego Garcia and what was done to him), if you can shoot Americans without full accountability, those aren’t immigration problems. They are due process problems. They are free speech problems. They are problems for every citizen, regardless of where they were born.
So when I hear Democrats say, “don’t raise the salience of immigrants,” what I’m actually hearing them say is, “don’t raise the salience of authoritarianism.” And I think that’s a catastrophic mistake. You wrote a really good piece in February about how Democratic leaders can go on the offensive. Tell me, from your writing and reporting about the Democratic Party, who are the politicians—and you’ve mentioned Talarico already—who get the connection between immigration and authoritarianism and are willing to make the immigration issue salient because of its implication for our liberal polity?
Sargent: I think that’s a super important point. And to start, I want to 100% associate myself with your point that what people who are saying “don’t engage on immigration” are really saying is “don’t engage on authoritarianism.” That’s just very clearly true. We’re generalizing a bit, but that’s basically what they’re saying.
I think there are actually two camps among Democrats who get that the deeper argument is over how to respond to the authoritarian threat, both politically and substantively. In one camp, you’ve got people who represent very Democratic areas, like governors Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker and Sen. Chris Van Hollen. They take a very unabashedly pro-immigrant position. And they really understand the link you’re drawing. Take someone like Pritzker. Pritzker directly—and this was early on, before people really started focusing on what was happening in the cities—communicated to his constituents that they should record as much masked ICE thuggery as they could and put it on the internet. And the reason he said that is precisely because he calculated that when majorities understand and see the deeply authoritarian and fascistic nature of the Trump-Miller ethnonationalist purge, they’ll turn against that. And that’s what’s happened. They can then explicitly cast the stakes as being about whether the American electorate will passively accept authoritarianism in our streets and cities or not.
“I want to 100% associate myself with your point that what people who are saying ‘don’t engage on immigration’ are really saying is ‘don’t engage on authoritarianism.’ That’s just very clearly true.” — Greg Sargent
And then there’s a bit of a different camp—[which includes] people like Talarico in Texas, who I think gets this on a fundamental level, but talks about it differently. Like I said earlier, Talarico will say “Biden failed us on the border,” which he seems to see as essential to getting right-leaning voters to listen to a deeper moral case about immigrants. He has to win a lot of Republicans and he has to win a lot of Independents. He’s got to win some Trump voters. It’s just a fact of the math. Although it’s not that simple, he’s got to do other stuff, and moderation alone can’t win for him. The point being that Talarico, I think, sees the same link that you’re drawing, the one Pritzker and Newsom make quite explicit. But he talks about it a little differently, in terms that won’t alienate right-leaning voters, in terms that open the door to a conversation with them on a moral level about some of this stuff. And the way he talks about it, he makes this deeper case that’s linked to his religious convictions. So, a line of his is, “Christ is the immigrant deported without due process.”
So, he’s essentially saying his Christian convictions require welcoming immigrants and treating the immigrant humanely and fairly and generously. He talks expansively about how immigration is good for us in all kinds of ways. But on some level, he’s making the case you’re making, I think, because what he’s saying is that Trump and MAGA, their demonization of immigrants, is wrecking the common life of our society on a very profound level, on a spiritual and moral level. And he’s essentially saying: humane treatment of the immigrant is the way to have a non-authoritarian, humane society. He’s drawing the same link you are, but in language that I think right-leaning voters can accept.
Dalmia: Let me ask you: Do you see anybody on the Republican side who still gets it and would be able to revive the Reaganesque, shining city on the hill, unapologetic defense of immigration? Is there any hope in the Republican Party at this stage or is it completely gone?
Sargent: Well, they’re getting tossed out, aren’t they? Krysten Sinema, who was an independent from Arizona, did a compromise bill with Thom Tillis, Republican of North Carolina. Tillis is now so excommunicated from the Republican Party that he’s not running for reelection. There’s a race to succeed him. Their bill in 2022 had some combination of serious restrictions on asylum, which would seek to prevent people from crossing the border illegally, combined with legalization for two million Dreamers, plus a bunch of other things that would open legal pathways.
So there’s still a type of Republican who understands at some fundamental level that you’re not going to deport your way out of the problem. I think this is what you’re getting at—are there any Republicans left who don’t hold up “Mass Deportations Now” signs at the Republican convention? That’s the simple way to put your question. Are there any Republicans left who don’t want violent ethnic purges anymore?
Dalmia: Interior enforcement is a good thing for them. It’s a moral thing for them.
Sargent: Gov. Mike DeWine of Ohio, who stood up for the Haitians at a very difficult moment during the 2024 campaign when JD Vance and Donald Trump were accusing the Haitian immigrants of eating pets and so forth—it was real pogrom stuff, really nasty, vicious encouragement-of-violence type stuff—and DeWine rejected that. He said that these Haitian immigrants were contributing importantly to the economy and to communities. And, interestingly enough, in Springfield, Ohio, the very city where Trump and Vance were making their demagoguery central, you had a lot of Republicans who sided against them and sided with the Haitians.
Dalmia: We’ll end on this note, which goes to your point in the beginning that, fundamentally, if DeWine and Republicans in Springfield could rally behind the Haitian immigrants and the attacks that they were facing, it does suggest that this country hasn’t fundamentally changed on immigration, that there is a core pro-immigration, “we are a land of immigrants,” very high-minded, Reaganesque ethos that actually goes quite deep in our DNA and it hasn’t been just totally driven out by the populist anti-immigrant rage that we’ve seen in the last 10 years.
Sargent: I think that, fundamentally, there’s a majority that’s for sensible immigration reform, that sees immigrants as good for the country, that wants to facilitate immigration. There’s all kinds of data that shows that people support, in fairly large majorities, making it easier to come here on an orderly basis. That’s what people want. They want order. They just don’t want to see the suffering and disorder. I think that’s the essence of this.
You’re right that the Overton window has moved. But underneath it all, I’m highly skeptical that there’s been any durable cultural shift toward Trumpism. And I think we should internalize this idea as we figure out how to move forward.
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