A 2024 win by Donald Trump “may well have catastrophic consequences” for the United States and the world, say two top Democratic strategists.
Yet the two Democrats refuse to recognize their party is doubling down on the extremist immigration policies that sent Trump to the White House in 2016.
“The [Democratic] party’s first duty is to protect democracy by winning the next presidential election, and every other consideration, however worthy, must yield to this overriding necessity,” said the two authors, William Galston and Elaine Kamarck, both of whom work at the Brookings Institution.
They hide the wealth-shifting impact of migration by portraying Trump’s 2016 win as a “cultural appeal based on anti-immigrant sentiments and nationalism,” they wrote.
They also hide President Joe Biden’s policy of inviting a record wave of wealth-shifting illegal migrants, visa workers, and legal immigrants, and instead focus on a sympathetic subset of resident illegals: “Most Americans favor both humane treatment for immigrants, including a path to citizenship for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients or DREAMers and other longtime residents.
“That’s hilarious,” responded Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re saying that everything has to be sacrificed to the goal of stopping Trump [in 2024] — except adopting any of the [immigration] policy positions that attracted voters!”
Krikorian continued:
For [Democrats] like this, there can’t be any legitimate [public] concern about immigration, so they pathologize it by saying it is “The usual kind of bitter clingers to their guns and Bibles and immigration and xenophobia.”
The fact is that our leadership classes, both right and left, just are unwilling to give an inch on immigration. If they had just got rid of the visa lottery 10 years ago, we might not be in this pickle because it would have demonstrated a certain amount of solidarity with disaffected members of the public.
It would have signaled that the [the leaders] were listening and yet they’re doubling and tripling down. When [Joe] Biden got elected, they introduced the most radical immigration bill … So yeah, I don’t think they’ve learned anything. Maybe it’ll take an electoral annihilation in November for them to learn.
But the Republican mass-migration crowd may actually be emboldened by victories across the board in November [2022] into thinking they can now get away their [more] guestworker plans.
Immigration is not merely a “cultural” issue, as the two authors insist.
It is a Washington, DC economic policy that extracts consumers and low-skill workers from poor countries to offset the economic loss caused by Wall Street’s transfer of high-productivity manufacturing and technology jobs to China. The policy also imports millions of compliant foreigners for the technology and healthcare jobs that might otherwise have been held by the alienated sons and daughters of the discarded industrial workforce.
That economic strategy of extraction migration has no stopping point, and it is harmful to ordinary Americans because it cuts their career opportunities and their wages while it also raises their housing costs. Extraction migration also curbs Americans’ productivity, shrinks their political clout, and widens the regional wealth gaps between the Democrats’ coastal states and the Republicans’ heartland states.
Unsurprisingly, a wide variety of polls do show deep and broad opposition to labor migration and the inflow of temporary contract workers into jobs sought by young U.S. graduates. The opposition is growing, anti-establishment, multiracial, cross-sex, non-racist, class-based, bipartisan, rational, persistent, and built on the solidarity that Americans owe to one another.
The two authors do admit that Democrat elites do not want to recognize the easy-migration/cheap-labor policies that are powering Trump’s return to power in 2025:
We fear that the Democratic Party is not positioning itself to fulfill this duty [of defeating Trump in 2024] … it has barely begun to develop an agenda on cultural issues that a majority of Americans can support. This triple failure is what we call the new politics of evasion.
The party’s progressive leadership is living their own cultural bubble that blinds them to the public’s concerns, the authors say:
In recent years, a substantial portion of the Democratic Party has convinced itself that Americans are ready for a political revolution that transforms every aspect of their lives. This assumption has crashed into a stubborn reality: Most Americans want evolutionary, not revolutionary, change. They want more government in some areas but not all, and within limits. And they want government that respects their commonsense beliefs — for example, that defunding the police is not the path to public safety, abolishing immigration enforcement is not the cure for our southern border, and that it is wrong to exclude parents from decisions about the education of their children.
But Biden’s administration is entwined with the investor class who profit from the export of manufacturing jobs and the import of workers and consumers.
Other writers doubt that the white-collar woke Democrats can change their pro-migration policies amid growing public opposition. Ronald Brownstein, a long-time advocate for mass migration at The Atlantic, wrote in December:
Even if Democrats follow the critics’ advice and either downplay or explicitly renounce cutting-edge liberal ideas on policing and “cancel culture,” the party is still irrevocably committed to gun control, LGBTQ rights (including same-sex marriage), legalization for millions of undocumented immigrants, greater accountability for police, and legal abortion. With so many obstacles separating Democrats from blue-collar white voters, there’s “not a lot of room” for Democrats to improve their standing with those voters, says Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist who has extensively studied blue-collar attitudes.
“I don’t know where [Biden’s] heart is on this stuff, but I think he’s a creature of the party and what he thinks is the party consensus,” Democrat consultant Ruy Teixeira told The Atlantic. “He doesn’t want to pick a fight.”
Yet Galston and Kamarck insist that “there is no greater cause … [Democrats should be] subordinating everything else to this goal.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s deputies are trying to invite more economic migrants through the border, amid much evidence that migration allows employers to shove Americans out of jobs.
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