Progressive author Matthew Yglesias, who wants to triple the United States population up to 1 billion people with massive migrant inflows, is asking his readers for ideas to sneak the unpopular flood past voters.
“Even the best immigration arguments probably aren’t big winners,” Yglesias wrote in his March 25 blog entry. “It makes a lot more sense [for Democrats] to duck the [immigration] issue… all factions of Democrats seem largely aligned on this,” he said.
“This is why, when it comes to immigration, many of the Trump administration’s most egregious excesses are going to be fought primarily through litigation rather than vocal politics,” he said before asking his readers for ideas to sneak millions of migrants past the voters.
“We need to start with the [belief that] good immigration policy can contribute to economic growth if approached with an empirical spirit rather than cultural panic, and come up with ideas that facilitate that,” Yglesias wrote under the headline, “Democrats can’t hide from immigration forever.”
President Joe Biden’s deputies stuffed the economy with roughly 12 million migrants in just four years. That brutal policy forced Americans to suppress their sympathy for migrants and to demand the enforcement of immigration laws.
But the underlying problem, Yglesias claims, is that Americans are genetically opposed to migration: “I think that the average person badly underrates the long-term economic benefits of migration because of Malthusian intuitions that are deeply embedded for evolutionary reasons.”
The “Malthusian” term refers to Thomas Malthus, a pre-industrial British economist who argued in 1798 that humanity is doomed to a sequence of harvests that grow the population and famines that shrink the population.
That quip also dismisses the ability of Americans to recognize the growing evidence that mass migration wrecks wages, housing, and economies in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, and also in many of the migrants’ home countries.
“What he’s basically saying is, ‘People aren’t up to my standards,'” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “But that’s too bad because policy has to be based on what works in human societies, and human societies are not run just by accounting calculations.”
In contrast, Yglesias, the intellectual writer, admits that he emotionally supports migration partly because it helped his ancestors:
People who immigrate to the United States of America obtain large benefits by doing so, and I am deeply sympathetic to the vast majority of the many, many people who would like to do this. All of my great-grandparents moved to this country at a time before the imposition of numerical quotas on the places they were coming from, and I feel incredibly fortunate for that.
His faith in migration, however, is also built on the simplistic claim that migrants make economies bigger: “I wrote One Billion Americans [in 2020] because I believe, very strongly, in the productive power of immigration.”
Yglesias is so committed to migration that he suggested the federal government raise the inflow of white-collar migrants who compete for the jobs and homes sought by his own university peers: “I think Democrats today could also start talking about making it easier for companies to get visas to bring highly paid workers over.”
The visceral welcome for outsiders is a core feature of progressives, who downplay emotional and civic obligations to local citizens in favor of self-created obligations to far-distant people. For example, Boston’s Mayor Michelle Wu declared her emotional support for migrants over her city’s residents. “We stand with immigrants: You belong here,” she declared on March 19.
But resistance to mass migration is normal and reasonable, said Krikorian:
What he refers to as “cultural panic” is a natural and inevitable human response [to migration], and so policymakers have to work with the grain of human nature, not against it…
What he wants to do is cut against the grain [of human nature], but as though he is slicing a London broil… He’s basically viewing society as the chef with the knife in his hand views the London Broil. And that’s no different from the way a Bolshevik or a Chinese communist viewed human nature, and again, I’m not saying the man’s a communist and is going to kill people, but it’s the same perspective on human nature, and it cannot work.
“It’s hubris and hubris leads to nemesis, and how about we not do that?” Krikorian added.
Breitbart has extensively covered the damage done by the various white-collar visa programs — such as the mixed-skill H-1B program — to Yglesias’ university peers, to the nation’s productivity, and to business innovation.
Instead of recognizing this damage, Yglesias blames the 2024 defeat on the Democrats’ efforts to trick the Republicans into endorsing the “Gang of Eight” bill in 2013:
But the ultimate legacy [of the deception] was to mislead Democrats about the actual politics [of migration], which isn’t that voters hate all immigrants or want to see immigration ended, but is that people worry a lot about the downsides of being too lax. And unfortunately for Democrats, the advocacy groups they outsourced their immigration policy thinking to are very anchored in the community of immigration lawyers and in broad progressive skepticism of law enforcement. It’s not just that those voices can push fairly extreme positions, it’s that they don’t really have a coherent account of why immigration is good that is persuasive to most American voters [emphasis added].
Business-funded advocacy groups, however, were powerful enough to drag the Democrats to defeat in 2024. So they’re still powerful enough to blame Democrats for the 2024 disaster and to demand even more imported workers.
Meanwhile, leading Republicans and business leaders are making the popular case that the nation and its 330 million citizens will prosper by ending businesses’ addiction to cheap, disposable migrant labor.
