Streets of Gold (part 2)

October 22, 2025

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Here I will describe what Abramitzky and Boustan have to say about the economic impact of immigration, public attitudes toward immigration, and immigration policy in general.

Economic impact

We can easily imagine a situation in which an immigrant takes a job that otherwise would have gone to a US-born worker. We may be tempted to generalize that as the number of immigrants goes up, the employment prospects of US-born workers go down. The trouble with that generalization is that it treats the economy as a zero-sum game, where any gain is someone else’s loss. A capitalist economy is better understood as a growth game, where economic growth creates jobs, boosts output, and raises incomes in general. That has been our history, although the process has been interrupted by recessions and marred by racial and ethnic discrimination.

If there were a fixed number of jobs, then more immigrants would necessarily mean fewer jobs for the US born. But the number of jobs is not fixed, and by contributing to innovation and starting new businesses, immigrants often create new employment opportunities for others. Think: everything from big tech giants like Google and eBay to small local businesses like dry cleaners and restaurants. And immigrants need new housing and consumer products themselves, all of which helps put Americans to work.

Economists are generally receptive to moderate population growth, because they view it as a normal part of economic growth. A growing population will have more people looking for jobs, true; but it will also have more consumers demanding products, entrepreneurs to start businesses, and savers and investors to finance them. That means more jobs looking for people.

The country’s current rate of population growth is one percent per year, not particularly high by historical standards. Almost all of that is due to net migration, since our rate of natural increase is near zero. But suppose the situation were reversed, with near-zero net migration and one-percent natural increase. That would please nativists, who want more US-born babies and fewer immigrants. But would it make it easier for job-seekers to get good jobs? They would still be competing with new entrants to the labor force, just ones born here instead of somewhere else. Would competing with more English-speaking Americans fresh out of school be easier than competing with immigrants? If we are always competing with someone—except in the zero-growth society America has never been—why blame the competition on immigrants?

Now, as the authors acknowledge, “Some workers who do the same jobs as immigrants…stand to lose from immigration.” But they go on to say:

But immigrants tend to concentrate in tasks that don’t require English language skills (like landscaping or construction), while the US born are more likely to hold jobs that require interacting with customers or the public. What’s more, immigrants often fill positions that many US-born workers would not take at wages that consumers are willing to pay, such as picking crops or taking care of the elderly. In this way, immigrants create markets for certain products that otherwise might not exist.

Just as letting immigrants in does not hurt US workers as much as people think, keeping them out does not help US workers very much either. Employers usually find ways to avoid hiring very many more US workers or increasing wages very much to attract them. They outsource work to foreign countries or replace workers with machines.

Blaming our economic problems on immigrants may be distracting attention from the larger issue of how to create good jobs in a global, high-tech economy. This book does not develop that line of thought, but meeting that challenge would have to include training workers for the jobs of the future and clarifying what humans can do better than machines.

Public opinion

With all the hostile rhetoric being directed at immigrants these days, readers may be surprised to see the authors asserting that “attitudes toward immigration are more positive now than at any time in US history.” They also say that “two out of three Americans think that ‘immigrants strengthen the country because of their hard work and talents,’ as opposed to burdening ‘the country because they take jobs, housing and health care.'”

I checked to see if that claim is consistent with the latest Gallup polling. It is, with one qualification. Gallup reported some decline in support for immigration between 2021 and 2024. Not surprisingly, the decline was greatest among Republicans, as the Biden administration reversed many of Trump’s hardline policies, such as requiring asylum seekers to remain in Mexico while they applied and separating families at the border so that parents could be prosecuted for entering illegally. Even then, the percentage of respondents agreeing that immigration was mostly a good thing only declined to 64 percent.

Then, Gallup’s 2025 survey found that support for immigration rebounded to 79 percent, the highest on record. Under the headline, “Record High Say Immigration Benefits Nation,” Gallup reported:

The recent jump in perceptions of immigration being a good thing is largely owed to a sharp increase among Republicans and, to a lesser extent, independents. These groups’ views have essentially rebounded to 2020 levels after souring in the intervening years.

This helps explain why the politics of immigration are so volatile. Attitudes toward immigration are turning surprisingly positive just as the most anti-immigration administration since the 1920s is trying to implement its mass deportation policy.

Public policy

Streets of Gold includes a very useful timeline of US immigration policy from 1790 to 2020. Abramitsky and Boustan do not make any specific proposals for changing immigration law. They are more interested in letting their findings inform the general spirit of the laws.

Given the recent trend in public opinion, the authors say, “A positive and optimistic message about immigration is broadly popular and might even be a political winner if politicians embrace it proudly, rather than cringing from it out of fear of backlash.” They state their own main message this way: “[A]s a society, we need to design our immigration policy at the level of generations: the immigrants of today are the Americans of tomorrow.”

The record shows that immigrants and their children usually move toward becoming contributing members of society before long. If we have the imagination to envision their future, we can become more tolerant of the short-term costs, like paying taxes to educate their children or allowing them to participate in health insurance programs. Depriving them of education or health care is neither in their interest or ours.

The most extreme opponents of immigration do not want to imagine children of the undocumented as future Americans even if they were born here. (Until recently, everyone assumed that the Constitution had settled that question, but now President Trump’s executive order to the contrary is forcing the Supreme Court to rule on it.) Others we might readily imagine as citizens are “Dreamers” who were brought here as small children and adults who have lived and worked in the country for many years.

Those who boast of their love of America, and who accuse the administration’s critics of hating America, might ask themselves whether their love of country extends to the millions of immigrants and their descendants who have—to coin a phrase—made America great. And they can do it again if given the opportunity.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Streets of Gold

October 16, 2025

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Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan. Streets of Gold: America’s Untold Story of Immigrant Success. New York: Public Affairs, 2023.

As we witness the efforts of the Trump administration to carry out their mass deportation policy, this is a good time to review some of the basic facts about immigration. I found this book by economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan very helpful.

They wrote the book to expose some of the most common myths about immigration. They especially wanted to question the unflattering comparison of today’s immigrants to those of an earlier era. Many people seem to think that immigration was once a “rags-to-riches” story, but that more of today’s immigrants get stuck in poverty and put a strain on public resources. They fear that immigrants are failing to learn English and integrate into American culture, reducing job opportunities and wages for other workers, or even becoming a criminal underclass raising rates of violent crime. While some of that may be true in individual cases, most of the evidence does not support these generalizations.

The great strength of this book is that the authors have solid data on which to base their conclusions. They say that “we were able to compile what is the first set of truly big data about immigration.” They did this by getting permission to tap into Ancestry.com’s digitized database of census records. Linking family records from decade to decade and generation to generation enabled them to study both intragenerational and intergenerational economic mobility. (At least they could compare fathers and sons; women were harder to track because they so often changed their last names.)

The researchers supplemented this database with other sources of information, including Social Security and IRS records, interviews from the Ellis Island Oral History Project, and their own interviews and surveys of today’s immigrant families.

Two waves of immigrants

One of the biggest questions the researchers wanted to answer was whether the immigrant experience has changed very much over the past century. To find out, they compared the two biggest waves of immigration in US history—1880 to 1920 and 1980 to today.

Some differences between the two waves were apparent. The earlier wave featured large numbers of immigrants from Southern and Eastern European countries, such as Italy, Poland and Russia. That was before the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s both reduced the number of legal immigrants and imposed quotas that favored Northern and Western Europe, the places from which earlier generations of Americans had come. After those restrictions were lifted in 1965, immigrant origins shifted to regions with large and growing populations, especially Latin America and Asia.

During the first of the two waves, legal entry was much easier, especially for unskilled laborers. Once the steamship made the ocean crossing faster and cheaper, poor immigrants arrived in large numbers. Although some returned to their native country voluntarily, less than two percent were barred from entry or deported. During the recent wave, legal entry has been more selective, with preference given to immigrants with skills or links to relatives already here. A special provision for refugees fleeing oppression was added in 1980, although it was slow to be implemented. With the demand for legal entry above the supply of legal slots, stopping illegal immigration has been difficult, especially because of the 1000-mile southern border we share with a relatively poor part of the world.

Another difference is that the initial earnings gap between immigrants and the US-born is larger now than it was in the earlier wave. That’s because the United States is now a very wealthy country and most immigrants come from distinctly poorer ones. As we’ll see though, that gap does not prove to be insurmountable once they get here.

The similarities between the waves are as important as the differences. In both cases, the impact of immigration on the percentage of foreign-born in the population has been about the same. It rose to about 14 percent in both eras. Add in the children of the foreign born, and then their children, and we have truly been a nation of immigrant families.

Also in both eras, the rapid increase in the foreign born provoked an anti-immigrant reaction. My impression is that the hostility was worse during the nativist movement of the 1920s, which inspired the most restrictive immigration laws in our history.

Despite the challenges, the immigrant story in both eras is largely one of success and assimilation. The progress was gradual rather than instantaneous, but “the American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for Immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago.”

Dispelling the myths

With regard to economic success, the immigrant story is neither one of rags to riches nor persistent poverty. On the average, the income gap between immigrant and non-immigrant families gets cut in half after twenty years.

Even more noteworthy is the success of the second generation. The children of immigrants have the advantage of being exposed to the domestic economy and culture from an earlier age.

[W]e find that the children of immigrants surpass their parents and move up the economic ladder both in the past and today. If this is the American Dream, then immigrants achieve it—big time.

The researchers focused on second-generation children who grew up with family incomes at the 25th percentile, the point that demarcates the lowest quarter of the distribution. These children were more likely to move up to the 50th percentile (the median income) than US-born children who started out at the same low level. The authors suggest a couple of reasons why immigrant children might surpass US-born children in upward mobility. First, when their families immigrated, they chose to move to cities with job opportunities, while equally poor non-immigrant families were often “rooted in place” in locations with depressed economies. Second, the immigrant children’s initial low incomes might be misleading, since their parents experienced language barriers and other adjustment difficulties that kept their abilities from being fully rewarded. Less disadvantaged by those problems, the children moved briskly ahead.

When children of immigrants are themselves undocumented, their job and income prospects are much more limited. But that applies to only 5% of the children of immigrants, since the vast majority are either citizens born in the US or members of families that entered legally (or received amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act).

Fears that the more recent wave of immigrants are failing to learn English and integrate into US culture have proven to be mostly unfounded. The authors find that ethnic distinctiveness declines rapidly over time, as measured by such indicators as English fluency, residential desegregation, marriage across ethnic boundaries, and the kinds of names parents give their children. “In one generation’s time, we find that it becomes hard to tell apart the children of immigrants from the children of the US born. Both groups are simply American.”

Finally, the connection between immigration and crime has been greatly exaggerated, especially to scare voters into supporting a policy of mass deportation. In general, the researchers find that “immigrants are less likely to be arrested or incarcerated today relative to the US born.” The opposite impression is created by selectively publicizing incidents of immigrant violence, especially gang violence, although the US-born population has its criminal gangs too.

The most thorough study of immigrant crimes rates was based on Texas data. It found that:

…undocumented immigrants were half as likely as the US born to be arrested for violent crimes. For property crimes and drug violations, the gaps between undocumented immigrants and the US born were even larger. (The rates of criminal behavior for legal immigrants were substantially closer to, but still below, the rates for the US born.) Similar patterns have been documented for the country as a whole, albeit with less complete data.

One reason why immigrant crime rates tend to be low is that immigrants in general—and the undocumented in particular—take pains to avoid getting in trouble because of their great fear of deportation.

In my next post, I will tackle the contentious issue of how immigrants impact the US economy and affect the economic prospects of other Americans.

Continued

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Why Trump Would Like to Be King

June 13, 2025

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Organizers of the “No Kings” protests are planning hundreds of rallies this weekend to remind the country that the President is not a monarch. Why does Donald Trump give so many people the impression that he is trying to be one? Why would he want to be one?

The short answer is that Trump wants to accomplish through undemocratic means what he cannot accomplish through democratic means. One of his favorite gambits is to declare a national emergency about something, and then claim dubious emergency powers to impose his policies. In the first six months of his second term, he has already done this several times.

The power to tariff

Consider his trade policy. Although the United States has been running a trade deficit with the rest of the world for the past fifty years, President Trump has now declared this a national emergency. He claims that his emergency economic powers allow him to impose tariffs on foreign goods unilaterally, although the Constitution clearly assigns that power to Congress.

He has tried to sell his tariffs to the public by claiming that foreigners will pay them. As more people come to realize that American importers and consumers will pay them, support for tariffs has declined sharply. Some supporters remain, such as domestic steel companies hoping to benefit by higher prices on foreign steel, but they are outnumbered by the companies and consumers relying on foreign goods. If a democratic vote were held today, Trump’s sweeping tariff proposal would lose.

The power to defund

Another part of Trump’s undemocratic agenda is his war on the administrative state, the federal government agencies that carry out mandates given them by Congress. Here he has used the “emergency” of the longstanding budget deficit as an excuse for drastic cuts to the federal workforce, especially in agencies he dislikes, like the Agency for International Development, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to spend, and the Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act bars the executive from refusing to spend what Congress has allocated without its permission. Russell Vought, Trump’s budget director and major contributor to the Project 2025 blueprint for radically conservative government, has encouraged Trump to violate this law in the hope that the Supreme Court would then declare it unconstitutional.

Americans are always interested in reducing “waste, fraud, and abuse,” but they are not very keen on closing Social Security offices, reducing veterans’ services, defunding cancer research, firing weather forecasters, or weakening consumer protections. Ironically, now that Trump must work with Congress to pass a budget, he supports the “One Big Beautiful Bill” that the Congressional Budget Office and most economists expect to increase the deficit. That raises suspicion that the assault on the federal bureaucracy was never about deficit reduction in the first place, even if Elon Musk wanted it to be.

The power to deport

President Trump’s favorite “emergency” justifying extraordinary powers is immigration. Here he has had more popular support, especially for preventing illegal border crossings and deporting immigrants who have committed other crimes.

He could have pursued these goals legally, in cooperation with Congress. Instead, he told lawmakers during the campaign to kill the bipartisan bill that would have tightened border security and provided some path to citizenship for migrants who have been here many years. Meanwhile he riled up his base with a disinformation campaign associating immigrants in general with violent crime, a correlation that the evidence does not support. Having promised to prioritize criminal deportations, his administration then proceeded to order Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to deport large numbers of immigrants with no criminal records as quickly as possible. Finding and prosecuting criminals just doesn’t meet the quotas, and giving people their day in court takes too long to please Trump.

Many Americans who support normal criminal law enforcement are distressed to see armed and masked ICE agents rounding up people they consider harmless, like restaurant workers, strawberry pickers, students on the way to school, or job seekers in Home Depot parking lots, let alone mothers dropping off their children at day care centers. Most Americans do not support forcing the immigrant parents of U.S.-born children to choose between leaving their children behind or depriving their children of their rights as citizens. Trump’s solution was to try to end birthright citizenship by executive order, in blatant defiance of the Constitution.

The power to intimidate

When people protested these policies, Trump declared the protests themselves an emergency justifying the militarization of law enforcement. He deployed the National Guard and other military forces without the consent of local authorities, telling a federal court that he was putting down a rebellion against the United States. (Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem suggested a more sinister motive—“liberating” the people of California from their “Marxist” leadership, as if the administration had a right to overturn California elections too.) Trump promised that further protests would be met by overwhelming force, a stunningly hypocritical position for a president who failed to mobilize the military to defend the Capitol on January 6, and then pardoned the rioters convicted of assaulting and injuring police officers.

If Trump is going to mobilize the military for every small and mostly peaceful demonstration—misleading portrayals by right-wing media to the contrary notwithstanding—his kingdom will soon look a lot like a police state. We don’t need too much imagination to see him responding to the social unrest he helps create by declaring martial law and arresting opposition leaders, Putin style. He has already said that arresting Governor Gavin Newsom is “a great idea.”

Federal courts have ruled that many of Trump’s actions—imposing tariffs unilaterally, impounding federal funds, deporting migrants without hearings, and deploying the National Guard to put down an imaginary rebellion—exceed his authority. That covers a lot of his agenda, making Richard Nixon’s domestic lawlessness pale by comparison. Many of these rulings are on hold as the administration pursues its appeals. Nevertheless, the protestors—by which I mean the peaceful majority—are often the ones with the law on their side, while the administration is the larger threat to law and order. President Trump said the other day that he is certainly not a king, since he is having so much trouble getting what he wants. Let’s hope we keep it that way.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Working-Class Conservatism

June 5, 2017

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Like so many others who have been closely following current events, I can easily be caught up in the outrage over President Trump’s latest tweet or poorly thought-out policy proposal. Nevertheless, I do try to stay focused on issues that transcend any one personality, no matter how–um–large. Even if Donald Trump were to be impeached, the wave of popular anger that helped elect him would not entirely subside. The fact that so many of his supporters keep sticking by him, almost without regard to what he does, indicates that he has tapped into a strong current of public opinion that will continue to shape our politics. The country will have to come to grips with what Trump represents to people, even if his own presidency is a colossal failure.

In some of my earlier posts, such as “A Leap into the Dark” just after the election, I acknowledged Trump’s general appeal to conservative voters (using that term rather broadly), but questioned his authenticity as a champion of the working class. He did, in the end, get the support of most Republicans across the socioeconomic spectrum, and much of what he is trying to do has the support of the Republican establishment. Now however, having recently read Michael Lind’s article on “The New Class War,” I want to ask if there is a distinctly working-class brand of conservatism, even if Donald Trump represents it rather inconsistently. I want to explore how the interests of working-class Trump supporters and establishment Republicans may diverge on certain issues, even as they converge on others. An angrier and more outspoken working-class conservatism could be helping the G.O.P. win elections, but it could also prove to be a divisive force that could weaken the party and create opportunities for Democrats.

Convergent interests

Climate change is a good example of an issue where the interests of many blue-collar workers seem to converge with those of the Republican establishment. Even as the scientific consensus on climate change  grows stronger, and more and more Democrats support action to control carbon emissions, most Republican leaders support President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accord and his renunciation of President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. In this respect, the Republican establishment most represents the interests of fossil-fuel industry executives and shareholders. Led by Americans for Prosperity, a group financed by the Koch brothers, the industry has poured millions of dollars into the effort to influence–perhaps I should say mislead–public opinion, support its political allies, and defeat its political opponents.

Almost by definition, the main concern of working-class conservatives is saving jobs in those established industries. For Republican leaders like Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, constituent pressures combine with fundraising incentives to motivate conservative environmental policy. Of course, those leaders almost always frame the issue as opposing “job-killing” regulation, not preserving corporate profits.

Continuing to do what one has always done, whether or not it makes sense to do it, is a simple conservative impulse that cuts across class lines. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat, who has voiced skepticism about climate change, now admits that “in actual right wing politics no serious assessment of the science and the risks is taking place….Instead there’s just a mix of business-class and blue-collar self-interest and a trollish, ‘If liberals are for it, we’re against it’ anti-intellectualism.”

Without sacrificing their environmental concerns, Democrats who wish to appeal to working-class voters need to emphasize the ways that government can promote job creation in clean-energy industries, as well as facilitate the retraining of displaced workers for new jobs. Just talking about the potential dire consequences of future climate change may not impress someone trying to make ends meet right now.

Divergent interests

Global trade and immigration are issues where working-class interests diverge in many ways from the traditional positions of the Republican establishment. In the recent past, Republicans have been the biggest advocates for free trade, consistent with the belief that unrestricted markets can best create wealth for all. They have been less united on immigration, but advocates of global free markets often welcome the flow of labor across borders to supply the labor needs of expanding industries. Cultural conservatives may worry about the threat to American culture from “alien” ideas or practices, worries enhanced by the threat of terrorism. Donald Trump’s proposals to build a wall between the U.S. and Mexico and ban travel from Muslim countries appeal especially to cultural conservatives.

If there is a distinctly working-class position on globalism, it is based again on concerns about jobs and incomes. The free flow of capital and labor across borders has enabled corporations to profit by seeking out cheaper labor, but a lot of that has come at the expense of  workers born in the United States. That is one reason why labor’s share of national income growth has been falling. (Another is replacement of human labor through automation.) This strengthens the anti-trade, anti-immigrant sentiment within the Republican Party. It is a kind of conservatism, but not the pro-capital kind that has dominated the party in the Reagan-Bush era.

The G.O.P. is unlikely to renounce its support for globalism anytime soon. Although the United States is now a debtor nation with an embarrassingly large trade deficit, trade is still a two-way street. American companies want foreign buyers and American consumers like inexpensive foreign goods. Powerful retailers like Walmart oppose new taxes on imports.

Some new policies might benefit American workers, but Democrats are at least as likely to propose them as Republicans. International trade agreements could include stronger protections for workers. Displaced workers could have more opportunities for education or retraining. American industries could compete globally on the basis of quality–more like the Germans do–rather than on cost-cutting.

Another area in which working-class interests diverge from Republican establishment interests is taxation and spending. Wealthy Republicans have the most to gain from tax cuts and the least to lose from cuts in social spending. Working-class people have less to gain from tax cuts, since they are taxed at a lower rate already, and more to lose from cuts in social programs on which they increasingly rely.

The current debate over repealing and replacing Obamacare has dramatized this difference. Establishment Republicans have long advocated repeal, while giving little thought to replacement. Their main aim was to eliminate the new taxes on the wealthy that financed the new insurance subsidies. Trump supporters apparently believed him when he promised better health insurance coverage at lower cost. Then he double-crossed them by endorsing a House Republican bill that accomplished no such thing.  Similarly, the President’s tax “reform” bill turns out to be mainly a huge tax cut for the rich. His budget proposal includes not only that tax cut, but extreme cuts in programs that benefit many of his own supporters.

Working-class attitudes toward social spending are a little complicated, however. The American Dream is having a good enough job so that you don’t have to rely on any government programs. You want to get good health benefits at work, so you don’t need to obtain insurance from a government exchange or an expansion of Medicaid. Working-class conservatism often takes the form of anger that so many Americans do rely on Medicaid, or food stamps, or housing subsidies. In many ways, a vote for the Republican Party is a vote for a mythical America in which everybody is successful and nobody needs such things. Just as a vote against a clean energy policy is a vote for a mythical planet where human activity has little impact on the weather.

That gives the Democratic Party the opportunity and the challenge of presenting itself as the party of the real America. That’s the America where rapid economic change creates the need for a stronger safety net, since working-class incomes have become less reliable. It’s the America where enhanced threats from foreign competition and automation force us to create new and better jobs by investing more in the talents of our own people.

In short, the Democratic Party does not have to become the party of some “liberal elite” consisting of upper-middle-class professionals. It does not have to cede working-class voters to the more conservative party, where their interests are often overshadowed by those of the wealthy. Donald Trump may have gotten a lot of their votes this time, but they are very much up for grabs if he and his party let them down.

The complexities of race and class

In many of the discussions about how the Democratic Party is losing the middle class, it’s the white working class that is the focus. That raises the question of whether the attitudes of working-class voters have a racial–or even racist–component that attracts those voters to the more conservative party. That’s true to a degree, but any such conclusion has to be carefully qualified.

Much has been written about how the Republican Party–the party of Lincoln and in many respects the liberal party of the nineteenth century–became the more conservative party on racial issues. To make a long story short, the Democratic Party outraged much of its base in the “Solid South” by aligning itself with the Civil Rights Movement from the 1940s on. Then the conservative movement that captured the Republican Party in the 1960s and 70s built its majority largely by relying on a “Southern strategy.”

As with the immigration issue, establishment Republicans often take a free-market position on race. That view treats racial discrimination as an anachronism that free-market competition and equal opportunity should eliminate. Rational employers have an interest in hiring the best person for the job, and workers can succeed if they do the right things, like work hard, stay in school, and avoid having children before getting married (without the help of Planned Parenthood, of course!). The G.O.P. is also home to some cultural conservatives who believe, deep in their hearts, in a predominantly white, Christian society. But most Republicans just tend to minimize the problem of racial discrimination and prefer to solve it more by individual changes of attitudes than by government mandates.

White working-class attitudes about race tend to be conservative for at least two reasons. First, less educated people tend to be less enlightened about race. They are less aware of how systematic and enduring racial discrimination has been in American history. They are more likely to attribute the present condition of Black Americans to defects of character like lack of will power. But in addition, they do not have the greater economic security that comes with solid job credentials. Whites who cannot claim high status on the basis of educational attainment or income may take pride in being white, just as lower-achieving men may take pride in being real men, whatever they think that is. Putting down non-whites or women is one way of bolstering one’s own status. People who feel that way, whether they consciously articulate it or not, are more likely to be drawn to the political party that is less associated with movements for racial or gender equality, and less supportive of government assistance to the “undeserving” poor.

That, however, is not an unmixed blessing for the Republican Party. Racial and gender attitudes have changed so much in this country that no major party wants to be known as the party of white or male supremacy. The party establishment has to walk a fine line, tolerating some unenlightened attitudes without fully embracing them. The Democrats, on the other hand, will remain–and should remain–the party identified with the struggle for equality. Their best hope for winning over working-class voters is to try to alleviate the causes of working-class status anxiety. Again, promote investments in education and job creation, so that working people of all races and ethnicities can get ahead without having to be afraid of one another.

Although I thought that Donald Trump was going to lose the election because of his own failings, I did not agree with Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy of attacking him and his followers instead of focusing primarily on economic issues. I thought it was a big mistake to describe his followers as “deplorable” racists and other kinds of bigots. Racial attitudes are now too complex and subtle for such a large segment of the population to be characterized that way. Economic insecurity and class tensions are no doubt complicated by the country’s unfortunate racial history. But I think that the best course for the more liberal party is to address the economic concerns that working families of all races have in common. Reject outright bigotry where it does exist, for sure, but do your best to convince people that a flourishing society has no need for it.

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Posted by Ed Steffes

Immigration Ban Poorly Thought Out

January 30, 2017

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In my last post, I questioned the wisdom of cutting off funding for international family planning agencies in an effort to reduce abortions. Since organizations like Planned Parenthood help women avoid the unwanted pregnancies that often lead to abortions, impeding their work is more likely to increase abortions than reduce them. In public policy, good intentions are not enough. Political leaders also need the expertise to assess the real-world consequences of ideas that sound good in speeches or fit neatly into some political ideology.

Experts on terrorism are raising analogous questions about President Trump’s executive order, “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States.” No one questions the goal of protecting Americans against terrorism. Whether a ban on immigration from seven Muslim countries is an effective way to do that is questionable.

The administration issued its executive order hastily, apparently without much consultation with our own government agencies and experts. Although one of the objectives was to allow time to develop better vetting techniques, the administration did not conduct any review of existing vetting procedures before concluding that they are failing. The order was so broad and vague that it appeared to apply to green card holders who were already living in the country legally, but happened to be traveling abroad when the order was issued. The legal basis for the order is murky, since one federal law gives the President the authority to suspend the entry of some classes of aliens in the national interest, but a later federal law bans discrimination among immigrants on the basis of national origin.

The order singled out the Muslim countries of Syria, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen for a 90-day ban on visas. In addition, it halted refugee vetting and admission for 120 days for all countries, but indefinitely for Syria, where the refugee crisis is particularly acute. Critics noted that the list of countries did not include any from which the 9/11 terrorists had come, such as Saudi Arabia or Egypt. According to Scott Shane’s analysis in the New York Times, “Since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, no one has been killed in the United States in a terrorist attack by anyone who emigrated from or whose parents emigrated from…the seven countries targeted….” As Shane and many others have noted, the list also did not include any Muslim countries in which Donald Trump has business interests. The order may be something of an overreaction, because only 123 out of 230,000 US killings since 9/11 have been attributed to Muslim terrorists. Better vetting of Americans buying guns would probably do a lot more to save lives than keeping foreigners out, but the Trump administration is ideologically opposed to that.

Supporters of the ban defend it as a preventive measure. Even if immigrants from these troubled countries have not killed any Americans yet, they might in the future. Although we cannot rule out that possibility, we can reasonably ask whether the proposed solution alleviates or aggravates the problem it intends to address. Middle Eastern terrorists are political extremists who often try to justify their actions with an extreme interpretation of Islam. The United States cannot fight terrorism in Iraq or Syria–or at home for that matter–without the cooperation of the more moderate majority of Muslims. That’s why both George W. Bush and Barack Obama took pains to say that we are not at war with the Muslim religion itself. The new administration denies that this order is a ban on Muslims as such, since many Muslim countries are not included. But that distinction is likely to be lost on many in the Muslim world, since Trump is on record calling for a Muslim ban, and the executive order does make a religious distinction by exempting religious minorities (no doubt intending Christians) within the Muslim countries. Trump has expressed far more sympathy for the Christian victims of ISIS than for the larger number of Muslim victims. He has even claimed that Muslim refugees have been getting into this country easily while Christians have been kept out, but the actual numbers admitted are nearly the same for both religions. The order lumps all the Muslims together in these war-torn countries–the radicals and the moderates, our enemies and our allies, the terrorists and their victims, the adults and the children–and sends a message loud and clear that none of them are welcome here. Extremists can then use that message to advance their anti-Western agenda.

Alienating our friends and reinforcing our enemies’ talking points sounds like a formula for further radicalization, conflict and insecurity.

 

 

 

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Posted by Ed Steffes

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