Is "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" Dead? Newsletter #1--Special Dems-Gone-Wild Edi

Is "Comprehensive Immigration Reform" Dead?

Newsletter #1--Special Dems-Gone-Wild Edition

Jun 29

Is Comprehensive Immigration Reform Dead? Sure looks like it.
The idea of “comprehensive” reform has dominated the immigration debate for decades. It always looked good on paper. There were two basic parts 1) Legalizing the 10 milion or more unauthorized immigrants who are already in the US (i.e. amnesty), while simultaneously 2) beefing up enforcement — at the border and inside the country — to prevent future unauthorized immigration.
A rough translation would be: “OK. People who’ve already snuck in get to stay and become citizens. But really — we mean it! — this is the last time. And we’re taking steps to make sure it is.” Even Rep. Luis Gutierrez, Democratic champion of amnesty, claimed to mean it. (He vowed last year to start building the wall himself.)
The bargain was bipartisan, compassionate, virtuous, poll-tested (“fix our broken immigration system” seems to have been the winning slogan). Editorial writers swooned. But in the real world, there was a problem of trust. In 1986, under Reagan, Congress had passed a similar reform. While the amnesty happened; the promised enforcement never materialized. Immigration-control types worried, with good reason, that the same thing would happen again unless somewhow the amnesty was delayed until enforcement measures were actually in place."Enforcement First" they called it. But the pro-immigration side worried that no level of enforcement would ever be deemed sufficient to trigger a delayed amnesty.
With no way to bridge this trust gap — and no real attempt, it must be said, from the overconfident pro-amnesty lobby, which saw history on its side —“comprehensivist” measures failed under both Presidents Bush and Obama, most recently in the form of the notorious 2013 “Gang of 8” bill. Then came Trump, and the arc of history veered off course. Yet editorialists could still hope Trump was just the one to finally put the Grand Bargain across, Nixon-China style. His base would trust him! Occasionally, Trump himself seemed to embrace these hopes.
I think you can now forget them. Three reasons:
1. The asylum surge: The current border crisis does not center on the 10-11 million illegal immigrants ‘living in the shadows’ in the U.S. It centers on the hundreds of thousands of putative “asylum” seekers (annually) from central American now overwhelming the system designed to assess their claims. The Gang of 8 bill really didn’t have much in it to address this problem—some more dollars for asylum judges, more border patrol agents. Against those incremental improvements you had to balance the significant lure of an amnesty (and the possibility of another one).
A package that might bring the new surge under control — involving a change in asylum standards and the treatment of juveniles — hasn’t been part of “comprehensive reform. The latter was designed as if the most urgent problem was illegals already here. It’s almost quaint to now hear Mayor Buttigieg talk about how “the real problem is we shouldn’t have 11 million undocumented people” Oh them, right. Yesterday’s cause. (Kind of like Obamacare!)
2. Dems no longer want the “enforcement” part of any deal. Nobody who watched the two Democratic debates could think that this party still supports the “enforcement” half of the “comprehensive” compromise — the idea that while the 10-plus million illegals get amnesty, there will be an attempt to prevent future illegal immigration of either the old clandestine kind or the new asylum-seeking kind There won’t be any attempt, if Democrats can help it.
It’s not just that none of the Dem presidential candidates (with the exception of half of Joe Biden) seem willing to deport any illegals who aren’t criminals (“absolutely not”—Senator Harris) — so that if you make it past the border, you’re home free. After all, Hillary Clinton had already gravitated to that position in 2016. It’s that the party also evinces no desire to block anyone at the border either. Senator Harris says any “mother who pays a coyote to transport her child through their country of origin, through the entire country of Mexico” to the U.S. deserves to stay, because “she has decided for that child to remain where they are is worse.” Sending her back is “not reflective of our America and our values and it has got to end.” This gets wild applause.
But wait, it’s not just asylum-on-demand. Julian Castro reminds us there are “millions of folks — a lot of folks that are coming are not seeking asylum. A lot of them are undocumented immigrants.” And he wants to “put undocumented immigrants, as long as they haven't committed a serious crime, on a pathway to citizenship.” More applause. Does anybody not get in?
The only way this party seems likely to support added enforcement is if it’s an even-more-obviously insubstantial cover for amnesty than the already vaporous provisions of the Gang of 8 bill.
3. Meanwhile, the GOP base has moved in the other direction: Trump may not have accomplished much on immigration — no legislative victories, a massive breakdown at the border. But he has given Republican voters permission to move decisively against the Establishment wing of their party, the Bush-backed wing that supported comprehensive reform. Polls confirm this shift—39% of Republicans now say immigration is “the most important problem facing the U.S. today.” (The runner-up is health care—with 13%.) You’re not going to find all that many GOP congressmen brave enough to support any kind of amnesty, even one wrapped in enforcement spending. Nobody wants to be primaried.
All this would seem to leave the “comprehensive” amnesty-for-10-million debate in a zero-sum posture. Like some other issues (e.g. ‘Does the Constitution protect abortion?’) there’s no more space for compromise. Either we’ll have a continued impasse or one side will win — transforming the country in one direction or the other.

https://kaus.substack.com/p/is-compr...gration-reform

Check out Mickey Kaus's new website

Well worth a visit.

July 8, 2019
By Monica Showalter

Writer Mickey Kaus, and his KausFiles column which has appeared on various news sites, is known for his sharp observations about politics, economics, and industry.
In some good news, he's got a new site. Even better, it's free for now, but understandably might move with the trend of pay-for-punditry - and it's still called KausFiles. The actual web address is https://kaus.substack.com

His writing is pithy, witty, and never insults your intelligence. He identifies as a Democrat, but, well, if that's a Democrat, then I'm also a Democrat. His bee ess meter is amazing. I just read about it on his Twitter and can see that he's been at it just a couple weeks. I read the whole thing and it's all good.
A sample from the top of his columns at the site:

Where Undernews Was, MSM Shall Be: If they’re really going after financier Jeffrey Epstein for sex trafficking of minors, maybe we’ll finally get answers to the two great mysteries of this case, a case that has been bubbling furiously in the Undernews for decades. 1) How does Epstein make his money? Supposedly he’s just an ace trader/hedge funder with billionaire clients. OK! But many Wall Street types are skeptical he is actually financing his unbelievable lifestyle this way. (“The trading desks don’t seem to know him.”) Alternative theories abound. 2) How much of America’s ruling class is involved? We know Bill Clinton has some splainin’ to do. But I don’t think his relationship with Epstein can account for all the heat that has been applied to various prosecutors along the way. As Ann Coulter said, in what remains the best short summary of the case, “This is not just a Clinton sex scandal; this is the elites getting cozy and covering up and protecting one another. It also involves the Bush administration ...." It’s a bad French movie come to life.

and it just keeps getting better and better.

Check it out, Kaus doesn't disapppoint.
Image credit: KausFiles screen shot

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https://www.americanthinker.com/blog...w_website.html

GUT the immigration program along with refugee, TPS, asylum programs!

We wanted it ended completely. We do not want to pay for this.

We already let up to 1,000,000 a year come here legally and that is way too many!

No more H-1B visas or other programs taking our jobs, foreigners taking over our neighborhoods, threatening our peace and our prosperity. Gut these visa programs!

Send them back to go contribute to their countries and prosper.

https://ecp.yusercontent.com/mail?ur...ImLI5Yav8g--~C

Leave the Snake People Alone!

#7 -- Plus: Shortcut to Social Equality

Aug 21
Public post

Revenge of the Snake People: Everybody's scared of millennials! Corporate CEOs are scared of millennials. Dean Baquet is scared of millennials. I know seasoned writers who don't go in to their prestigious magazine offices anymore for fear they'll be ambushed by the recent college grads employed there. If they say the wrong thing, they're in trouble. ...

And if you whine about millennials on the Web, as I've done on occasion, your computer shows you this terrifying image:

Manage American Greatness Again: China's facing an unprecedented internal rebellion in its most important financial center. According to the New York Times that shows the ...."Waning of American Power"? Huh? According to various relexively anti-Trump trained seals ... sorry, that’s not right, I mean foreign policy experts the NYT quotes, Trump is supposed to "manage” the situation. How? Did GHW Bush "manage" Tiananmen Square? Did Obama "manage" Arab Spring? (True, the elder Bush was successful at not impeding the collapse of the Soviet Union -- but he did it by basically staying on the sidelines, as Trump is doing with Hong Kong, no?) __________

“Trump Killed Epstein!” Not true, but that's the sort of headline we're going to need in the coming days. Ann Coulter's right when she argues that the only way the press is going to sustain interest in the Epstein case is if they think they can use it to get Trump. With no Trump angle, and Epstein dead, you can already feel interest in the case fading -- even with the mystery surrounding Epstein’s demise and the whereabouts of his alleged top procuress. He's starting to seem small time, even pathetic. True, there's some focus on shaming those who took his money when they should’ve known better -- but it's at about the same level as the shaming of Dem consultants who cooperate with Mark Halperin. "Focus on the victims," we’re told. Of course, the victims. The victims are real victims. They’re why Epstein was evil. They deserve attention, and justice. But I don't want to focus on the victims right now. Epstein was at the center of a sex ring, involving many rich and powerful people. I want to know how big the ring was, who was involved, how it worked and who semi-knowingly enabled it. Are we living in a conspiracy movie or not? When we know that, we can focus on the victims. …__________

Less immigration = fewer servants = more social equality? My argument in The End of Equality was that social equality, not income equality, should be the goal of liberal politics. Noah Smith and Richard V. Reeves have made similar points. [1] Of course, reducing income inequality is one way to pursue social equality, but it's not the only way and not necessarily the best way. We can also take direct routes — the World War II-era draft being the most conspicuous example of a direct, institutional social equalizer.

But there aren’t many of these direct routes. [2] Intriguingly, lowering immigration from poor nations might provide one of them. I’m not talking about the familiar wage argument — the idea that less unskilled immigration means higher earnings for workers at the bottom (a group that has seemed on the verge of dropping out of the common American culture). Instead, focus on the nature of the work -- especially the nature of "wealth work," and its subset, servant work.

There's a lot of fuss about this growing employment sector right now -- see Derek Thompson here and National Review here -- for good reason. Servant’s work seems inherently inegalitarian, no matter what the wage, because you have one individual bossing around another in the service of the former's personal needs (an arrangement that is never flipped around). It seems qualitatively different from ordinary "service" contracting -- e.g. hiring a plumber or even a dog groomer. You don’t tell a plumber to fetch your coffee. It’s also different from ordinary wage employment, where the boss bosses workers around in service of making a profit.

When historian Samuel Eliot Morison [3] looked at the heartening decline of servant work in the middle of the 20th century, he came up with a surprising explanation:

Middle- and upper-class Americans outside the South had always been dependent on recent immigrants for domestic service; now that source was largely cut off. The number of ‘private household workers’ — cooks, butlers, laundresses, housekeepers, and miscellaneous maids — declined between 1900 and 1950, although the total population of the period had increased 140 percent. … The main reasons for this decline have been the reduction of immmigration, and the increasing demand for women in war and other industries. The shortage of domestic ‘help’ has been a social revolution in itself. It has increased the number of restaurants, since men and women who dislike working in a household seem to prefer the far greater drudgery in a public eatery. [Emphasis added]

You can think of a variety of reasons why immigration would be a causal factor: one is obviously that immigrant workers might be more affordable to more people. Another could be that immigrants come from cultures more accustomed to servant work (more class-divided cultures, typically).

When I was researching End of Equality in the early 1990s, the long decline of servant employment, noted by Morison, was still one of the glories of America's middle class culture. We didn't have maids, we had fancier and fancier vacuum cleaners. But it was obvious the mid-century decline was by then already beginning to turn around, coinciding, perhaps not coincidentally, with a surge in immigration. Now, with the rich still getting richer, the “Servant Economy” is on the verge of exploding. If cutting the number of less skilled immigrants makes that explosion smaller, or less likely, that's a good thing in itself, even if it has no effect on overall wages._____

1. Smith argues that equality of respect (not of money) is “a big part of what makes people happy.”

2. I had high hopes for universal health insurance as a draft-like social equalizer — until Obamacare turned out to be a stratified mess, with poorer Americans shunted onto Medicaid like an inferior caste.

3. Indebted to Timothy Crimmins for pointing out the Morison passage.

__________

He's as sharp as he ever was! Joe Biden's defense against his embarrassing misstatements is not that they're isolated incidents (get serious) — and certainly not that he's getting old -- but that he's always been like that. This is true. The problem is Biden's also always been losing presidential races -- in 1998 and 2008, the two times he's run. In 1988. I was working at Newsweek when Eleanor Clift unearthed a video of a Biden telling (an admittedly annoying) voter at a New Hampshire coffee klatch "I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do." Biden then rattled off five academic boasts, most of which turned out to bogus (as Newsweek's reporters -- not the New York Times’ -- first disclosed). Biden dropped out of the race soon after that. This was 30 years ago!

You can be an effective president and a bad presidential campaigner. But unless he somehow makes his indiscipline lovable -- the way California Gov. Pat Brown made his bumbling lovable -- Biden may be doomed. (He seems doomed anyway, frankly, for Muskie-esque reasons. If you want a suitable metaphor, here's US women's cyclist Mara Abbott being overtaken by a pack of competitors — who had enjoyed an aerodynamic advantage — at the finish line in Rio. If you were rooting for Abbott, as I was, it was brutal. Root for Biden at your peril.)___________

Tom Wolfe's 1987 Bonfire of the Vanities popularized the term Master of the Universe for powerful, self-important Wall Street machers. Today we need a related term, Master of WeWork, for the self-important men (they are all men) who stride around the nation’s creative work spaces as if they owned them, issuing sweeping commands and grand strategic visions into their AirPods, making sure you pay attention to them -- they need freedom of movement to think freely!-- rather than your pathetic little tasks. ...