Learning the right lessons from Maximum Canada
Stricter border control, more immigration
Republicans aren’t going to approve more immigration. No shit we would like more immigration or to fix our current system. But thats simply not going to happen.
Fair. I was more interested in his assessment of how immigration plays with voters, and the notion voters in many countries may be more relaxed about high legal immigration levels than we sometimes assume but this gets obscured by discussion of illegal arrivals.
Obviously in a specific US legislative context you would have other challenges actually enacting immigration reforms.
In other words, there are basically two ways of thinking about this:
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There’s an “immigration” issue that plays very differently in the United States than in Australia and Canada.
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There’s an “asylum” issue that plays very similarly in Australia, Canada, and the United States.
To me, the story here is more (2) than (1). Or, rather, to the extent that (1) is true, it’s because (2) looms larger in the United States — Democrats have not been as willing as Australian Labor or Canadian Liberals to agree with the political right that it’s undesirable for people to make asylum claims.
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This is just to say that I think the situations in the U.S. and Canada are actually not that different. Orderly migration attracts some controversy but irregular flows of people generate significant backlash.
I found this an interesting take on the politics of immigration. I’ve always treated conservative shrieking about illegal migration and asylum arrivals as a proxy for arguing against migration more generally. But Yglesias is effectively arguing that voters in many countries may actually simultaneously be relaxed about high levels of legal migration and hawkish on illegal migration, but the extent or otherwise of the latter tends to determine whether the former or latter takes precedence in the political debate.
This does sound increasingly like the picture we’ve got in the UK too: for example, we reported an all-time high net migration figure in the last year, yet polling simultaneously show that voters have never been more comfortable with immigration levels than they are at the moment, but the Conservatives are still making ‘stop the boats’ the centrepiece of their political programme with an election no more than 18 months away (presumably because they have polling telling them this resonates with voters somewhere, though who knows what drives this government…)
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