How The Left Got Rolled On Immigration
Like Crime And COVID, They Didn't See The Backlash Coming Because They Can't
About a year ago, I quarreled with a young progressive activist in my neighborhood over the status of progressives in outer-borough immigrant-dominated communities.
We both live in a community populated by South Asian, Indo-Caribbean, and Hispanic immigrants. He said to me that those populations would “naturally fit” into progressive politics because of how “racist and xenophobic” the right and centrists are and would reject anti-immigrant and anti-migrant messaging. He then shut me down by reminding me I was white and he was part of one of those communities.
“You’re ridiculous,” he told me. “This is an immigrant community and my family are immigrants, I know them better than you do. This community will be welcoming of migrants.”
I couldn’t argue with that and dropped the conversation, but having been a journalist who covered this community for almost a decade, I did not agree.
Last month, a story made national news that invoked memories of that conversation. At a junior high school about half a mile away from me, migrant children who recently arrived in New York have fallen victim to bullying and harassment. The school where the incidents took place has a student body that is 98 percent non-white and largely first-generation immigrants.
JHS 226 serves a community that is staunchly Democratic. These are communities that progressive activist groups like Democratic Socialists of America had hoped to be able to spread their influence to. These are first or second-generation children of immigrants – if not immigrants themselves – bullying and abusing migrants. This isn’t racist white people in the Midwest. These children are not acting out naturally, they are learning these behaviors; from home, from their friends, and on social media.
I’m about to take a radical position here.
I don’t think of the migrant crisis as an actual crisis, no more than the wave of European immigration in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was a “crisis.” We are seeing another great wave of immigration to our country like the one that brought most of our ancestors here. Those waves of immigration were not much different than what is happening at the border today; the difference is we didn’t have the rules and regulations we do now. Before the 1920s, unless you were Chinese, if you found yourself pulling up onto a dock in the United States from another country, you were let in provided you passed a health exam. There was no “legal” or “illegal” immigration, no asylum process, no lotteries. You paid your fare from the old country, landed on Ellis Island or one of the other immigration stations in the country, got health clearance, and then were let loose into America to find your way.
And once you were here, there were the same problems we decry having with migrants today. Worried about migrants committing crimes? Early immigrants were involved in organized crime syndicates that often turned cities into battle zones, from the Mulberry Street Boys to La Costa Nostra to Murder Inc. Worried about migrants being exploited? My favorite novel, The Alienist by Caleb Carr, offers an insight into how immigrants more than a century ago were forced to live. Set in 1896 New York, the novel is about the search for a serial killer who is murdering young immigrant boys, largely Irish and Italian, forced to prostitute themselves to make enough money for their immigrant families to eat. One trip to the Tenement Museum in New York City would shock you. Immigrants on the Lower East Side and in Hell’s Kitchen lived in squalor, packed into homes with no running water forced to defecate and urinate in buckets in hallways.
Even my own family lived in cramped conditions; my four aunts, and for a time their cousin, shared one bedroom in their childhood home.
There is no easy way to handle hundreds of thousands of migrants coming to your country in a short period. There just isn’t enough housing, even if we could go back to the pre-1920s immigration system where there were no regulations and complicated asylum processes. It’s easier to say you can be a “sanctuary city” than to be one in practice. Progressives were always more aspirational than realistic. Republicans like Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who shuttled migrants to cities like New York and Chicago, knew that., and he isn’t the only one. Progressives have proven, as they have with issues like crime, homelessness, and COVID mitigation, that making promises is easier than keeping them, even if you fully intend on keeping them. There are always operational roadblocks standing in your way, the least of which is public opinion.
On balance, immigration has always been a good thing. The immigrants of the 19th and 20th centuries built the greatest economy in the world and a superpower that rivals the greatest empires of the past, but it also fundamentally changed our country and many communities.
Over the generations, our ancestors’ immigration stories were altered, to be solely about desperate Europeans escaping centuries of war and poverty to make a better life in America, which, many will say, is not shared by the people coming across the Mexican border today. Critics of modern immigration will say that, unlike our ancestors, they don’t want to work or assimilate, they want America to bend to them. Well, so did we. Some of our country’s most popular cultural aspects, notably our food, all stem from our ancestors not completely assimilating. They took traditions and values from the Old World and “Americanized” them. Do you think we all learned English? Look at any picture of Little Italy in the 1950s, or go to Brighton Beach, Brooklyn today. The Prussian community on Manhattan’s East Side wasn’t called “Little Germany,” it was called “Kleindeutschland.”
These arguments are ones I have made for years now, and they’ve rarely broken through. For whatever reason, people seem to be married to the idea that it was “different” for our ancestors. Our parents and grandparents greatly sanitized the stories of our ancestors to make them seem far more righteous than they were, especially in comparison to immigrants nowadays. A big reason for this is what I call the “Hazleton Factor,” named for the Pennsylvania city where the modern xenophobic movement that birthed Trumpism began. Hazleton is a longtime working-class city of European immigrants that has become a destination for immigrants from the Dominican Republic. As a result, a culture clash has occurred. Dominicans have built their own communities and the city looks unrecognizable to its longtime white residents.
Progressives have to believe they stand for “the people” and if what “the people” want clashes with what they want, it creates a dynamic idealist leftists are not capable of comprehending.
There are so many who just plain do not want the immigrants to come. They are culturally different than us. They are black or brown, they speak a different language, and many belong to different religions. There is a great fear of hoards of new immigrants coming into towns and cities and changing them, as happened in Hazleton. Right-wingers call this the “replacement theory.” This causes those who were born and raised in these communities and who worked for years to build them, to feel culturally isolated.
It does not matter what is “fair” or “unfair.” Talking about the intricacies of immigration policies doesn’t move the needle. The reason Republicans think they can get away with demanding tough immigration reform, and then killing what they wanted, is they understand one fundamental truth about immigration politics that progressives don’t or refuse to: Letting any migrant in is a compromise, and that desire isn’t limited only to white people in rural areas and suburbs. It is shared all across the political and demographic spectrum, including in multicultural South Ozone Park, Queens. It isn’t only America either; anti-immigrant political parties have won national elections in Italy, the Netherlands, and Sweden because of waves of migrants entering Europe. The UK left the European Union and destroyed its economy over it. Japan’s rigid immigration rules, aimed at protecting the country’s homogenous culture, have stagnated its economy for decades.
I don’t have an immediate answer as to what to do about that, but just like with other issues progressives keep losing on, we must first acknowledge the real source of the problem before we can consider how to solve it. The Left refuses to do that though, because it would be admitting defeat. Progressives have to believe they stand for “the people” and if what “the people” want clashes with what they want, it creates a dynamic idealist leftists are not capable of comprehending. When the public supported putting the brakes on criminal justice reform measures in favor of tougher policing after a post-pandemic crime spike, leftists were unable to cope with being at odds with the populist sentiment. They just ignored it and created an alternate reality where “the people” wanted what they wanted. This made them look out of touch and tone-deaf and contributed to significant progressive defeats this decade at the hands of both Republicans and moderate Democrats. Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, a Republican, won his election in 2021 largely due to backlash to COVID school closures, something that blindsided Democrats and progressives.
Leftists are doing it again with immigration. This time though, Democrats came prepared. Rather than play along with the disastrous leftist messaging on immigration, they sought to outflank Republicans on the issue, showing them to be the unserious charlatans they are. Largely due to this, Democrats were able to win the New York Congressional seat they lost in 2022 this week. Progressives are unhappy about it, but if they are going to try to be a populist movement, they’re going to have to learn to accept when the “people” oppose their ideas and figure out a way forward despite it.