The Lie Progressives Tell Themselves About Immigration

Plus, CHIPS dips then flips, and the young men up for grabs this election…

Below, a look at the rapidly shifting politics of the CHIPS Act. And, both the Wall Street Journal and New York Times follow American Compass’s report on The Young Men Up for Grabs with their own features on the same. But first…

These days are fascinating ones for talking about immigration policy with progressives. Gone is the proud embrace of de facto open borders promoted by the Democratic Party in recent years, from decriminalizing illegal entry and protecting even violent offenders from deportation to extending all manner of public benefits. But rather than admit error, or at least admit political defeat, I’ve repeatedly encountered, to my genuine amazement, a different approach: In fact, they insist, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have been border hawks all along.

I was worried that, lacking on-the-record examples to highlight, I might have difficulty persuading you of something so bizarre. Fortunately, the New York Times has done us all the service of producing a 16-minute “Opinion Video” that lays it all out. In “If You Think Biden and Harris Were Weak on the Border, Think Again,” video producer Alexander Stockton explains, “this administration has conducted a campaign to secure the border since Day 1.”

The whole exercise is obscene. It’s obscene not because someone is publishing an odd opinion in the New York Times; obviously that happens most days, but rather because it is so forthrightly dishonest and pretextual, deployed for the purpose of exonerating progressives from accountability for their disastrously irresponsible policy and attempting to instead blame the rubes for not seeing how wise and effective the policy in fact was. If Trump beats Harris on Tuesday, fault won’t lie with the elites who ignored the popular will and are getting thrown out on their ears, you see, it will lie with the masses who just can’t appreciate how skillfully the elite are governing on their behalf. Convenient.

The conventional and reality-based narrative goes that Biden and Harris decried the Trump administration’s border policies and immediately began relaxing them upon taking office, all while delivering a loud and clear message that migrants crossing the U.S. border illegally would be admitted to the country. Subsequently, such entries skyrocketed. For several years, the administration not only failed to reverse course, but also sought to smooth the pathway to entry, with everything from a “CBP One” app for scheduling your entry online to unprecedented abuse of “parole” that granted legal status and even work permits.

Both 2022 and 2023 saw more than 2.5 million encounters at the Southern border (compared with less than 1 million in 2019, Trump’s final year prior to the pandemic). As the figure reached 300,000 in just one month in December 2023, heading into the election year, the Biden administration finally took action. It induced more enforcement from Mexico at the start of the year and then restricted the asylum process in June. Border crossings declined sharply.

So what can we do with this narrative? Perhaps complexify it? “Critics call this an election year flip-flop,” says Stockton, “but I found a steady drumbeat of policies that have gone largely unrecognized.” It’s all very complicated, so if you don’t understand, don’t be too hard on yourself:

Getting stuff done in government is often far less exciting. It involves fine tuning lots of little dials. It’s taken them some time and trial and error but through many minor modifications Biden and Harris have transformed the border. It used to indiscriminately allow millions in, but now it tightly controls who gets in.

When did we “indiscriminately allow millions in”? During the Biden administration. When did policy changes start to change that? In 2024. But please don’t call it an election year flip-flop.

Anyway, the real problem is asylum, and “only Congress has the power to fix the broken asylum system. It shouldn’t be called Biden’s open border, it should be called Congress’s.” Was it an open border before Biden? Well, no. And what happened in 2024? “Biden and Harris were forced to change priorities.” Odd use of the passive voice there. What forced them to change priorities? And why mid-2024? “They decided it was more important to secure the border than to protect the right to asylum.”

Which brings us to the best line of the video: “After Biden imposed the latest asylum restrictions, look at what happened to migration. It plunged. This is Biden and Harris’s second strategy for securing the border. Know the law.” There’s even a graphic.

It took about 80 seconds of exquisitely produced video to go from “only Congress has the power” to uncovering the innovative Biden-Harris strategy of “know the law,” which could in fact be used to tackle the border crisis. Did Biden and Harris not know the law for their first three-and-a-half years? Perhaps they were so busy “fine tuning lots of little dials” that they just didn’t get to the one that read “stop admitting millions of illegal border crossers”? Our role is not to reason why, I suppose.

And yet, even in the midst of the bravado performance, our progressive guide cannot quite bear to let the lie stand. “I’m gonna be honest,” he says, “a lot of this makes me pretty uncomfortable. I mean listen to Biden, he sounds like an anti-migration conservative.” All that effort at securing the border and enforcing the law? Doesn’t sound much like Biden, or like something any progressive in good standing would do. Indeed.

“In politics,” Stockton concludes, “the narrative that takes hold is often more important than what actually happened. Even though Biden and Harris acted tough behind the scenes, it took them much too long to sound tough in public, and too long for the results to show. Unfortunately, that might cost Harris the election.”

If Trump wins on Tuesday, expect to hear a lot more about how strong Biden and Harris were on immigration. As U/A was going to press this morning, the Times published another piece, this time a “News Analysis,” headlined “Biden Wanted to Fix Immigration, but Leaves Behind a System That Is Still Broken: President Biden’s legacy will largely be limited to his success in lowering border crossings…” There, readers can learn that “for four years, most of [Biden’s] goals were stymied by the need to confront a worldwide surge of displaced people fleeing their homes and a determined Republican opposition that seized on scenes of a chaotic border to block action and damage the president politically.” (This is another key point. There’s always some exogenous factor—COVID, climate change, political instability, even TikTok—causing the surge, leaving our technocratically savvy progressive border hawks helpless.)

“Seizing on those kinds of numbers [the ones showing the border crisis], Mr. Trump has made immigration a centerpiece of his campaign to retake the White House,” the Times reports (there’s that “seize” word again), “accusing Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris of leaving the borders wide open with a litany of false and misleading claims. … Immigration experts say those accusations are wildly exaggerated, but Mr. Trump’s campaign advisers believe the attacks will motivate his supporters, who are eager to blame someone for their economic and security anxieties.”

Step 1, claim that Biden secured the border and claims to the contrary are false. Step 2, attribute disagreement to irrational grievance. If Trump wins, the electorate’s rejection of the Biden-Harris immigration policy thus becomes evidence that our democracy is not working as it should—the people simply cannot be trusted to appreciate such sophisticated dial-turning. And it will quickly become a central talking point in the debates sure to follow about whatever actions on immigration the Trump administration takes.

This is the final point, which I’ve found fascinating in my own conversations, and which Stockton supplies mainly as subtext. The progressives opposed to securing the border and controlling immigration levels have an unshakeable belief that their own view must be accorded equal weight in the political process, no matter how unpopular it may be. You can see this in the lament that “Biden and Harris have fulfilled a Republican dream” and “have betrayed our economic, moral, and legal obligations in order to secure the border.” Who is the “our” here? Certainly not the citizens of the United States. Maybe New York Times readers?

As for the Republican dream fulfilled, suffice to say that rates of illegal immigration (including immigration made “legal” by executive fiat) that would have set records in any prior administration ain’t it. As Stockton ends his story of a migrant attempting to enter the country:

After being deported he quickly turned around and headed back toward the U.S. But when he got to the border, he didn’t cross. That’s what makes Biden and Harris’s policies like an invisible border wall. They didn’t have to physically build a wall, but they were still able to keep migrants out. After a year of waiting in Mexico, [he] was finally allowed into the U.S.

Progressives believe they have already made their compromises—indeed, conceded the case to Republicans entirely. This migrant entering the country illegally was deported. And then when he came right back, he didn’t cross immediately. He waited almost a year before we then let him in. It’s a pretty good summary of the “tough” new Biden-Harris policy, really. “They were still able to keep migrants out. After a year of waiting in Mexico, [he] was finally allowed in.” The idea that conservatives would “pocket” all this and demand more, rather than come back to the table for “comprehensive reform” and amnesty and so on, is apparently unfair, if not outright bad faith.

But of course, that’s not how politics works, nor should it. If Americans want the border secure, and will politically punish a party advancing a different vision, negotiations will proceed accordingly. An opposing party that refuses to accept less than capitulation is not “exploiting the issue,” it is more effectively representing voters. Republicans have put forward their own proposal, incidentally. It was called H.R. 2 and it passed the House last year. Odd that neither the Opinion Video nor the News Analysis mentioned it

Regardless of this week’s election outcome, immigration is going to remain a top issue as it has in every Western country that has failed to control it. Anyone hoping that “creative storytelling” (as the Opinion Video advertises itself) can overcome reality will be sorely disappointed. And anyone declining to get serious about solving the problem in keeping with the nation’s values and priorities, not merely their own, will have only themselves to blame for the consequences.

CHIPS ON THE BLOCK

These days are also fascinating ones to be talking about industrial policy, especially the CHIPS Act and its efforts to restart advanced semiconductor manufacturing the United States.

On Joe Rogan’s podcast, former President Donald Trump was critical of the CHIPS subsidies, saying he much preferred tariffs. This led to Politico reporting last Wednesday: “Harris starts campaigning on a $39B program that Trump wants to sink.” On Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported, “Some Fear Factory Boom Could Suffer Under Trump.” But the most important tidbit in that story was Speaker of the House Mike Johnson’s lightning-quick reversal on his own skepticism.

Campaigning with Rep. Brandon Williams, a vulnerable Republican in upstate New York, where Micron Technology has plans to invest $100 billion with CHIPS support, Johnson was asked whether a GOP Congress would attempt to repeal the law given Trump’s comments, and he responded, “I expect that we probably will, but we haven’t developed that part of the agenda yet.” But within hours, he was walking back the statement, saying CHIPS “is not on the agenda for repeal” and he would look only to “streamline” it.

Friends, how many policies can you name that Trump could say he wants to repeal, on which Speaker Johnson would put out a statement just to make clear he opposes repeal? And this one is industrial policy, that Johnson himself had voted against! The politics of industrial policy work in mysterious ways—or, rather, powerful and entirely commonsense ways that make continued efforts in this direction highly likely.

Meanwhile, the good folks at National Review are getting mighty nervous about early CHIPS successes, so much so that they put up a piece explaining that the extraordinary progress at TSMC’s new Arizona factory has nothing to do with the huge federal program intended to promote such investments, which previously had never occurred. No, “to the extent that politicians deserve any credit for TSMC’s results at this point, it is for embracing globalization, standing up to communism, and making Arizona a business-friendly state, not for passing corporate welfare. But the credit should really go to the people making the semiconductors.” (They ask kindly that you disregard their feature story from last year, “Why the CHIPS Act Will Fail: Don’t expect microprocessors to grow in the Arizona desert.”)

And look to your Left, where “Progressives and pro-labor Democrats are souring on President Joe Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act,” according to Politico. Much as the Obama administration learned once upon a time about “shovel-ready projects,” the Biden administration is discovering that the full monty of progressive impositions on major industrial investments are incompatible with those investments ever happening. Lengthy and largely pointless federal environmental reviews are a key one, which have now been waived under legislation co-sponsored by Sens. Mark Kelly and Ted Cruz and quickly signed by the president. Will Republicans continue warming to a law that is in fact delivering the private-sector investment, innovation, and job creation they prioritize, even as progressives sour on doing what it takes for heavy industry to succeed? Stay tuned.

YOUNG MAN, THERE’S A PLACE YOU CAN GO

On Thursday, American Compass published detailed survey data on the values and priorities of young non-white men, which tend to align more closely with the white working class of the Republican base than the affluent liberal women of the Democratic base.

On Friday, the New York Times published a long feature, “Trump Is Courting Apolitical Young Men. Will It Pay Off? Gen Z men are increasingly turning away from the Democratic Party, swayed by the former president’s bravado and irreverence…”

On Sunday, the Wall Street Journal published a long feature of its own, “Trump Pushes to Boost Turnout Among Young Men, Harris Focuses on Female Voters: Former president pursues key group with macho rhetoric and podcast appearances…”

Remarkably, neither article has a single polling result beyond the election horserace. Through interviews and “expert” analysis, they construct stories based almost entirely on “vibes” with no consideration given to the substance of young men’s priorities and policy preferences, and how those align with other constituencies. According to the Times, “it is Democrats, strategists said, who have offered more specific policy proposals that might benefit young men, like assistance for first-time home buyers. But they said Republicans were the ones speaking directly to this group.” The Journal reports that “in interviews with dozens of young men around the country in recent months, some said they don’t see a place for themselves in today’s Democratic Party.” It doesn’t explain why.

This mode of analysis is captured well by Richard Reeves, president of the American Institute for Boys and Men, who explains to the Times that the challenges facing young men “have metastasized into grievances, and these grievances come to be exploited.” Seized on, even. That’s definitely what’s going on.

Perhaps they need another lecture from Barack Obama accusing them of “putting women down” by not supporting Kamala Harris, and telling them “that’s not acceptable.” Or maybe Michelle Obama could tell them again that women “have every right to demand the men in our lives do better by us… Our lives are worth more than their anger and disappointment.” They’ll be back in the fold in no time.

And we’ll be back Wednesday with a special post-election edition of U/A.

Until then,

Oren