by Michael Liss
Shall oppressed humanity find no asylum on this globe? —Thomas Jefferson, 1801
Last month, after 3 Quarks Daily published my “A Requiem For Post Mortems,” I got a direct email from a reader politely critiquing it. We exchanged emails afterwards, and I asked him if I could raise some of his points in a subsequent post. I’ve chosen one, not intending to diminish his other ideas, but because this one, where he said I’d “misse[d] first on the importance of the migration issue, i.e., that … Trump was right and Dems wrong on the need to control migration [and] that Trump controlled migration much better than Biden, who didn’t even try until the 3d trimester” has the most salience right now.
So, since Elon and Vivek and Laura Loomer and pretty much all of MAGA-land are talking about immigration, let’s go there. Let’s do something we have never ever been good at and talk about immigration.
We can start by acknowledging my correspondent’s point, although I would phrase it differently. Certainly, from an electoral perspective, Trump was right on the need to control illegal immigration. Biden didn’t do it until very late in his term, too late to help Harris in the election. It is not clear to me why Biden didn’t move more aggressively earlier, but, during his four years in office, aggregate immigration, legal and illegal, rose to a level not seen since 1850. I can ascribe to Biden a good-hearted intention—a genuine desire to ease the suffering of others—but it cannot be ignored that part of a President’s job is to be practical and even a little cold-hearted when the situation requires it, and Biden, for whatever reasons, wasn’t. We don’t have hard polling data that indicates that swing voters, and even some Biden 2020 voters, went Trump in 2024 solely because of the immigration issue, but it could not have helped Harris.
Would voters have been less critical of Biden’s approach if he had been able to curtail illegal immigration while otherwise maintaining a generous posture? Hard to say, not just because of the potency of the issue and the effectiveness of Republican messaging, but also because of the layering of how policy is determined and applied. Read more »
