Trump's glue-eating necrophile house-elf says the Administration is "actively looking" the suspension of the writ of Habeus Corpus. Americans should "actively consider" overthrowing these tyrants.
Chapters 5 & 6 of John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul goes into the historical moment of Sir E Coke resisting the King. Barry’s writing style and thorough research makes it a worthwhile read regarding this important event . Thanks
Thank you for including that video of Kristi Noem doing her Irma Grese impression. There are so many awful outrages, they can slip by — but that is as disgusting an image as they come. Let’s not forget.
Claire now you’re onto it! As I am at pains to argue on my Substack Trump is a lot like the Charles II to Biden’s Cromwell. And I am of course the drunken skirt-chasing John Wilmot in Trump’s court. I’m reading this great book about John Wilmot and his times now called “A Profane Wit.” It’s an expensive book but giving me a lot of insight into what we’re living through. You need to see Trump from a literary philosophical perspective, and abandon the psychologizing and logicizing.
Maybe the best thing you have written so far, Claire. If anyone can read this and not understand what's at stake for Americas heart, mind and soul, they're denizens of some other state of being.
Thank you. It's astonishing that within three months we've already reached this point. I expected this to be bad, but I never thought it would happen this quickly. They obviously feel emboldened by the passive response.
I read and watch lots of Americans arguing with each other about politics, but I am not an American and I am not physically in America, so in some matters it's hard for me to form my own judgement. So I will simply ask Americans who are reading: how can you tolerate the presence of millions of foreigners, even well over ten million, illegally in your country? Why don't you *want* them out? Claire here is supposed to be concerned with national security - how could you possibly not have viewed the situation that existed under Biden as a security crisis?
It seems to me that Trump and Miller make a very simple point. Hundreds of thousands have been allowed to enter en masse, but they are only allowed to leave one at a time, and only after a judicial process that appears strongly prejudiced against deportation. I will not attempt to grasp the argument about the technicalities of American law, but it seems obvious to me that under such circumstances, you would consider every legal option for getting them out, including emergency powers.
But this situation would not even exist, without a powerful constituency in America that is radically against deportation in principle. That's what I don't understand. There are theories available to me - the Democrats want these people as new voters, the upper class wants them as servants and/or is insulated from the negative impacts, there are no significant negative impacts and the Right is getting people scared about a non-problem, retired boomers are all John Lennon fans and think borders shouldn't exist, and so on. Maybe some of that is even true. I just wish I knew where the "center of gravity" here is, the central reasons why this situation exists.
This is a very good question, and I can understand how confusing it would be to someone who hasn't spent time in the US. Where do you live?
The first thing--it's obvious, but people forget--is that America is *really* big--340.1 million people spread over a continent-spanning country. So a few million foreigners more or less isn't noticeable the way it would be in many countries. The second is that America has historically been a country of immigration, so people who seem foreign--who have accents, or look a bit fresh-off-the-boat--are a completely normal aspect of the texture of daily American life.
The next thing is that the border between the US and Mexico is really, really long, and difficult to police. So we're very used to people crossing it illegally. This is not a new issue--at all. In fact, immigrant labor (legal and illegal) has been vital to US agriculture since the end of slavery and probably before. Even when there was still a fairly large number of native-born farm workers, we still needed immigrant labor seasonally. The need for it grew when we implemented child labor laws, which kept young people from working in the fields.
As Americans became wealthier, fewer and fewer wanted to settle for the low wages and harsh conditions of farm work, so immigrants (legal and illegal) replaced us in those jobs, then they started replacing us in meat packing plants, restaurants, motels, domestic work, landscaping, construction, etc. The stronger our economy, the more Americans become unwilling to do those jobs--because there are easier ways to make a living.
Our whole discussion of illegal immigration is fundamentally dishonest because we refuse to acknowledge how dependent our economy is on an illegal labor force. Employers like the situation because they can exploit their workers--you're not going to complain or sue about the conditions you're working in if you're afraid of being deported, right? (And the conditions *are* terrible: Something like 20 percent of the Salvadorans who work in our fields were found to suffer from chronic kidney disease owing to dehydration.) There is, in this situation, an echo of slavery. We've never really figured out how to farm in a way that's not exploitative. On the other hand, we manage to feed a *very* large population cheaply. No one in the US starves. That's not something to be taken for granted.
Illegal migrants make up nearly half of the agriculture sector’s workforce. They do jobs that are so physically demanding and poorly compensated that you'd have to raise wages about twenty-fold to get Americans to do them. (That's a guess, I don't know that for sure). We simply don't know how to make that sector work with labor costs that high--making a profit in agriculture is already pretty difficult and delicately-poised. Increasingly, these jobs are being mechanized, which solves this problem, but we're not fully there yet.
So, whatever politicians say, they've thus far been reluctant to deport these immigrants en masse out of fear that the labor shortages would ripple across the whole agricultural supply chain and broader economy--reduced production would mean higher food prices and increased reliance on imports; farmers and food producers would be unable to meet contractual obligations; farms would go under, etc. And that's just what seems to be happening now: https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/15/news/economy/california-farmer-workers-immigration/index.html
By the way, the Trump administration claims that Biden let "ten million" or "twelve million" people cross the border during his time in power. That's nonsense. The number is more like 2 million. Here are some reasonable estimateser: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/ Obviously, it's hard to know exactly how many people are in the US illegally; I suspect it's probably quite a bit *higher* than 10-12 million, but most of them have been in the US for a very long time. Some people, obviously, very much want them gone. But others don't "want them gone" because they're integrated--they pay taxes, they work hard, and often, no one realizes they're illegals.
The reason the situation has persisted as long as it has is that Congress is incapable of legislating. The US is also incapable of deciding what it wants to do about this.
But all have this has gone unspoken, even though everyone knows it. Politically, politicians must insist they're against illegal immigration. No one is willing to say, "actually, we need them as much as they need us, so let's legalize them." So it's been impossible to forge a reasonable legislative compromise to regularize the status of our work force.
It places a massive strain on some communities, especially border communities, but it massively benefits others--these reserves of immigrant labor are one reason the US economy was so much stronger than others after the pandemic. (If you like, I can dig up the study that shows how much we owed to it.) And you're about to see what happens when immigrants (legal and illegal) are too frightened to leave home to pick crops.
There are so-called "push" and "pull" factors involved in migration. When the US economy is strong, it's a pull factor; when economies elsewhere are weak, or when they're violent and unstable, it's a push factor. In recent years the US economy has been very strong compared to its southern neighbors. (Trump may inadvertently succeed in reducing the problem by trashing the economy.) We've
The theory that Democrats want these people as new voters is ridiculous because illegal immigrants don't vote. The upper class does indeed want them as servants (I'll bet you everyone who serves drinks and cleans the pool on Trump's property is in the US illegally--he built many of his properties entirely with illegal labor.)
The right is, indeed, demagoguing the issue--it's not true at all, for example, that immigrants are more crime-prone than natives. (Given how crime-prone we are, that's no suprise.) But they're not wrong to say, "It is a massive problem that so many people in this country are here illegally," if only for the simple reason that it is *illegal.* It represents a breakdown of the rule of law.
Does that help? I fully understand why this would be confusing if you don't know the US well. I'm glad you asked.
Your comment here is disingenuous, Claire. It’s full of misinformation. You also conveniently forget to mention the downside of illegal immigration.
While some illegal immigrants are criminals, the vast majority are hardworking and industrious. What they all are is cheaters. What they’ve all done is jump the line at the expense of those who attempted to enter the United States the legal way.
To make matters worse, the cheaters have made a mockery of the asylum system. Virtually everyone who enters the United States makes an asylum claim based on fear of persecution. The vast majority of these claims are lies. I know that you recognize how important it is to offer asylum to those who truly deserve it. The cheaters have made the asylum system unworkable. It is simply impossible, no matter how many immigration judges are hired, to provide the due process required to determine whether millions of immigrants are making legitimate asylum claims or not. The cheaters have turned many Americans against the concept of asylum and that’s a tragedy.
It is simply inaccurate to say that illegal immigrants blend into American society seamlessly. While that is often true, there are frequent occasions when it is not. At the height of the Biden-inspired immigration crisis, immigration shelters were opened throughout New York City (where I live). Often the illegal immigrants were housed in smaller hotels. The hotel owners were thrilled to benefit from the government largess that provided them with fully occupied hotels for months on end. Of course, this made it impossible for New Yorkers searching for reasonably priced hotel accommodations for their visitors to find a place for them to stay. New York City spent billions of dollars providing shelter to the cheaters. What were the opportunity costs associated with that?
A fair number of these hotels and shelters were designed to house single young men often in their late teens or early 20s. These young men, with nothing to do, would stand around in front of their shelters socializing and smoking. Thanks to them there was liter everywhere and that liter exacerbated New York City’s rat infestation. I’m sure that the same thing happened in other metropolitan areas. Immigrants both legal and illegal often improve the quality of life but they also, in many circumstances, make the quality of life far worse. No one would know that by reading your Pollyannish-styled comment.
Then there’s the impact of illegal immigrants on working class wages. It may be true that the agricultural work done by illegal immigrants doesn’t drive down wages for Americans because Americans don’t want to do the type of labor that these cheaters do. But it is untrue that Americans won’t do other types of work that illegal immigrants perform, it’s just that they won’t do that work for the wages that illegal cheaters will work for.
Just one example is provided by the roofing profession. For most of the 20th century and the early part of this century, roofing work was done primarily by American workers. The work was hard, dirty and unpleasant but it paid reasonably well; maybe not quite a middle class wage but almost. A roofer actually made enough money to put his kids through college if they wanted to go. I know this personally because my roofer father-in-law who never graduated highschool paid for my wife’s college education and she never accrued any college debt.
Then the cheaters came. Illegal immigrants flooded the industry and were willing to work for near minimum wage or even less. Even roofing contractors who wanted to hire Americans couldn’t do it because their competitors, staffed by illegals, could bid out jobs for a fraction of the price that a company staffed by Americans had to pay. Now the roofing industry is staffed almost entirely by legal and illegal immigrants and the irony is that the illegal immigrants actually drive down the wages for the legal immigrants while native born Americans were driven out of the industry all together.
Its really rich to hear you repeat the lie that illegals merely take jobs in industries that Americans won’t work in when the reality is that the cheaters drive down wages so much that Americans can’t earn a decent living in those industries. To make matters worse, neoliberals like you were happy to see the industries where these displaced Americans might have worked, driven to Mexico and China. The reason the world looks to be coming apart at the seams to you, Claire, is that the system you support is untenable.
One thing is clear, a significant majority of Americans in both political parties want the cheaters gone. During the campaign, Trump was unambiguous about his plans to deport illegals. He won by achieving unprecedented levels of working class, Black and Latino support. Working class Americans of all races and backgrounds want the illegals deported.
It’s obvious Claire, that the single most salient reason populism is on the rise throughout the Western world is because in the United States and Europe, citizens are sick and tired of immigrants storming in at unprecedented levels. The victims who suffer worst of all are legitimate asylum claimants waiting patiently for those claims to be adjudicated.
In the United States, it’s unclear whether a substantial number of the cheaters will ever be deported. If it’s up to Trump, many will be. If it’s up to highly educated judges living in posh communities it may never happen. After all, who’s mowing the lawns and plugging holes in the rooves of these judges?
You didn’t suggest because the United States is a continent-wide country that illegal immigration was less impactful? You acknowledged that border communities were adversely affected. Do you think illegal immigrants are evenly disbursed throughout the United States? What about the impacts in places like New York City, Chicago and Denver? How many billions of dollars did these cities spend taking care of the cheaters?
You are right about one thing, Claire; some parts of the United States benefited immeasurably from illegal immigration. It was great for people in Scarsdale, New York, Brookline, Massachusetts and Marin County, California when the costs of lawn cutting and fixing rooves was held down by the poor wages paid to illegal immigrants. In short, illegal immigration is great for upper middle class people many of whom are beneficiaries of jobs made possible by government subsidies. It wasn’t so great for working class people who found their wages so suppressed that they had few options to pursue a middle class lifestyle.
Didn’t you say, Claire, that fewer Americans wanted to work in “restaurants, motels, domestic work, landscaping, construction, etc.?” You’re wrong about that. Americans, especially those without a college credential would be thrilled to work in those industries if they paid enough to support a middle class lifestyle. They don’t; and one reason (not the only reason) is that illegal immigrants drive down the wages. It’s great for employers. It’s great for patrons. It’s not so good for workers.
What about the legitimate asylum-seekers, Claire? Don’t you think that the cheaters have made a mockery of the asylum process and that the real victims here are the people who legitimately fear persecution at the hand of their Governments or criminal elements in their nations of origin?
"What about the legitimate asylum-seekers, Claire? Don’t you think that the cheaters have made a mockery of the asylum process and that the real victims here are the people who legitimately fear persecution at the hand of their Governments or criminal elements in their nations of origin?"
Since you are concerned about asylum seekers, you must know that Claire recently wrote on the subject of Afghan refugees (many of whom personally helped the veterans you have spoken about supporting) so you have an essay length answer if you wish to learn about a subset of the great number of real victims of Trump's second administration. You might also be interested in researching the legal status of the majority of deportees sent to CECOT. It's been extensively reported on, though it's been difficult, since this administration, weirdly, hasn't exactly made it easy to confirm which of the deportees are legal and which are illegal.
But since legality is clearly of significant importance to you, and (as you say) lawbreakers must be punished, do you have any thoughts on Stephen Miller's comments on habeas corpus, the main subject of the essay? As an energetic defender of this administration, I would be interested to see how concerns about legality and respect for legitimate asylum seekers fit into the equation. Because I don't see it?
I would be very opposed to actually suspending habeus corpus even if the suspension was limited to illegal immigrants. I support Miller’s comments about habeus corpus as an outstanding strategy to drive Trump’s opponents to distraction.
Hard to overstate how utterly feckless and pathetic the opposition to Trump 2.0 has been thus far. The harsh reality appears to be that the overwhelming majority of politically engaged Americans (including Democrats) are willing to make their peace with a dictatorship rather than confront the sorts of dangers and uncertainties that real resistance would require. The actual “resistance” seems more like a group therapy session designed to console people and make them feel like they’re doing something as Americans cower in fear and allow their rights to be trampled. We go through the motions of filing lawsuits, pretending that the law isn’t a dead letter where the regime is concerned, indulging the ridiculous fantasy that a lawless autocrat can somehow be constrained via legal proceduralism. There are some simple ground level truths here that I think are important to spell out: The coalition behind Trump has determined that they no longer wish to live in a society governed by the rule of law. Instead they wish to seize as much power as they can, by force if necessary. Their approach to legal and Constitutional constraints can be summed up as “Fuck you! Make me!” Their opposition apparently lacks the stomach for this challenge. So mostly they appear to be engaged in an elaborate toothless cosplay meant to disguise (perhaps from themselves) the unsettling truth that ultimately we’re just choosing to surrender to a tyrant.
So, the most incisive explanation of what is happening - or, at least is being attempted, here - comes from the Third Reich. A Jewish labor lawyer who worked in Germany from 1933-38, Ernest Fraenkl, published a book in 1941 examining the state of jurisprudence there called The Dual State. Its essential point was, borrowing from a recent Atlantic piece, “for most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.”
It described a capitalist economy operating as usual, a “normative state”, while at the same time establishing a “ prerogative state” featuring “arbitrariness unchecked by legal guarantees” - i.e., ordinary law didn’t apply.
If you wish to understand this moment, a must-read.
I disagree that it's a waste of time to file lawsuits. The courts have so far been the only obstacle to Trump's lawlessness. They wouldn't be working so hard to delegitimize the courts if they didn't find themselves stymied by them. Trump has so far been reluctant to simply announce that he doesn't plan to abide by these rulings, so he's trying to find workarounds--but this is slowing them down considerably. Many of his actions have been put on hold by the federal courts, at least temporarily. Trump is still trying to hold on to some semblance of legal-procedural legitimacy, so what the courts say is important. We'll see what happens when the courts keep telling him "no."
The problem isn't that people are filing lawsuits--that's very, very good, IMO. It's that *only* the courts are standing up to him, and that's not enough. The courts, by design, work slowly, and this administration is destroying things so quickly and thoroughly that it will be impossible to put them back together even if the courts order it done.
The opposition is behaving like most people who have no recent experience of authoritarianism do. The countries that have done best at pushing back on this kind of self-coup have had a recent experience of living under an authoritarian regime. That experience makes it possible for a critical mass of people to believe, "Yes, this is really happening--we have to act fast, and act together, to stop it." Americans have no idea what it's like to live in a country without basic rights, and they've held themselves to be exceptional in matters of liberal democracy for so long that they're finding it impossible to reconcile their self-image with reality.
Maybe you’re right that the lawsuits aren’t a waist of time, but rather that they’re merely insufficient in and of themselves. With regards to your last paragraph however, I think there’s something else going on here that I was trying to get at (perhaps not very effectively). One of the moments from Trump’s first term that stood out to me was a rally in which he said the following: “I’ve got the military. I’ve got the cops. I’ve got the bikers for Trump. I’ve got the tough people. But they don’t play it tough. Until it gets to a certain point. And then things could get really really bad!” This sort of over the top posturing and hinting at the prospect of violence is pretty much par for the course with him. But this particular episode stood out for me, perhaps because it succinctly captures an essential ingredient of Trumpism. It reminds me of a semi-famous anecdote about ancient Rome that recounts a discussion nobles were having about making all of the slaves wear uniforms so they could be identified as slaves. According to this story, the idea was ultimately nixed when one of the nobles pointed out that making them wear uniforms could cause the slaves to realize just how many other slaves there were. What a lot of Trump’s menacing buffoonery, along with the silly red hats and the exhortations to “FIGHT!” seems to come down to is building revolutionary conciousness. What Trump was essentially saying to his supporters was “Look around you. Our opponents are weak, feminized, and afraid of confrontation. The law is just words on a page. We can rip it up and if we stick together, what the hell can they do about it!?” This speaks to an essential truth that America’s Liberal elites have become dangerously alienated from: Rights don’t protect themselves. And ultimately, in the absence of a credible threat of force, they’re worthless. We’re used to thinking about deterrence in the context of international affairs. But as America separates into two warring tribes, I think the idea takes on more relevance domestically as well. In a democracy, what prevents the party in power from using their position to seize even more, to the point that they become autocrats who can never be dislodged? Some of it is morality and norms. But there’s also the implicit recognition that ripping up the rules would bring chaos and violence that ultimately would be to almost everyone’s detriment. And part of what I think has happened is that as the parties have sorted, largely along the lines of gender and educational attainment, we’ve crossed some critical threshold where this final bulwark against the abuse of power has collapsed (the asymmetry in gun ownership is an important factor here as well). The GOP and its allies have seemingly concluded that they can rip up the rules while incurring minimal costs in the form of violence and anarchy. The Democratic coalition (and especially those who run and staff elite Liberal institutions) have been socialized in a world where direct conflict (particularly of the physical variety) has become almost entirely foreign. Decades of peace and prosperity, overly supervised childhoods (in the case of the younger generation), and a culture of safetyism that seeks to suppress nearly all social friction via bureaucratic proceduralism has created a class of Liberal elites who appear constitutionally incapable of blowing up paradigms and taking BIG steps. And this isn’t just a matter of physicality either. Dem elites overwhelmingly come from academia and the non-profit world rather than business or other areas that require improvisation, risk taking, and operating in an uncertain environment where the rules are unclear or non-existent. This, in part, is what I was trying to speak to when dismissing lawsuits (perhaps foolishly) as a viable form of resistance. The reflexive tendency of mediocre bureaucrats to assume problems can always be addressed by painting inside the lines, running to HR, or following whatever other impersonal procedure has been legalistically spelled out for them. Democrats and their leaders simply appear uniquely ill-equipped to handle what we’re now facing, and thus find themselves, perhaps out of habit or inertia, reaching for toothless fixes that presume we still live in a world in which laws are binding and leaders follow the rules.
Hi Claire. Just wanted to give you a heads up. I finished a first draft tonight. Currently it’s hand written and I’d estimate around 6,000 words (my brain seems to work better writing rather than typing). So I’ll need to type it up and do some editing. Then I plan on showing it to one or two other people first just to confirm that I’m not making a complete fool of myself. And then I’ll send it to you. So I’m thinking maybe late in the week if that’s ok. Also, should I just send it to the email address that I receive the CG newsletter from?
I appreciate that Claire. I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. I’m not a writer by trade (as likely evidenced by my shitty mechanics). So you’d probably have to do some editing. Sometimes I have ideas for essays and I try to write them up. But I tend to get derailed in the middle and rarely end up finishing them. But maybe the encouragement, and the fact that I sort of have an outline to work with now could help. I could try working on it for the next couple of days, and if I come up with something decent I’ll send it to you for consideration.
With luck, persistence, and extraordinary effort, we may prevail. The option of not trying is unacceptable. The thought and depth of Claire's postings constitute priceless insights for the endeavor. At least, the speed and cruelty of Project 2025 via its prime mover permit no doubt about the threat and the stakes. It may not be Fort Sumpter, but it's pretty close.
Chapters 5 & 6 of John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul goes into the historical moment of Sir E Coke resisting the King. Barry’s writing style and thorough research makes it a worthwhile read regarding this important event . Thanks
Great piece. That human rights report is wild. Good lord.
Thank you for including that video of Kristi Noem doing her Irma Grese impression. There are so many awful outrages, they can slip by — but that is as disgusting an image as they come. Let’s not forget.
Claire now you’re onto it! As I am at pains to argue on my Substack Trump is a lot like the Charles II to Biden’s Cromwell. And I am of course the drunken skirt-chasing John Wilmot in Trump’s court. I’m reading this great book about John Wilmot and his times now called “A Profane Wit.” It’s an expensive book but giving me a lot of insight into what we’re living through. You need to see Trump from a literary philosophical perspective, and abandon the psychologizing and logicizing.
Maybe the best thing you have written so far, Claire. If anyone can read this and not understand what's at stake for Americas heart, mind and soul, they're denizens of some other state of being.
Thank you. It's astonishing that within three months we've already reached this point. I expected this to be bad, but I never thought it would happen this quickly. They obviously feel emboldened by the passive response.
I read and watch lots of Americans arguing with each other about politics, but I am not an American and I am not physically in America, so in some matters it's hard for me to form my own judgement. So I will simply ask Americans who are reading: how can you tolerate the presence of millions of foreigners, even well over ten million, illegally in your country? Why don't you *want* them out? Claire here is supposed to be concerned with national security - how could you possibly not have viewed the situation that existed under Biden as a security crisis?
It seems to me that Trump and Miller make a very simple point. Hundreds of thousands have been allowed to enter en masse, but they are only allowed to leave one at a time, and only after a judicial process that appears strongly prejudiced against deportation. I will not attempt to grasp the argument about the technicalities of American law, but it seems obvious to me that under such circumstances, you would consider every legal option for getting them out, including emergency powers.
But this situation would not even exist, without a powerful constituency in America that is radically against deportation in principle. That's what I don't understand. There are theories available to me - the Democrats want these people as new voters, the upper class wants them as servants and/or is insulated from the negative impacts, there are no significant negative impacts and the Right is getting people scared about a non-problem, retired boomers are all John Lennon fans and think borders shouldn't exist, and so on. Maybe some of that is even true. I just wish I knew where the "center of gravity" here is, the central reasons why this situation exists.
This is a very good question, and I can understand how confusing it would be to someone who hasn't spent time in the US. Where do you live?
The first thing--it's obvious, but people forget--is that America is *really* big--340.1 million people spread over a continent-spanning country. So a few million foreigners more or less isn't noticeable the way it would be in many countries. The second is that America has historically been a country of immigration, so people who seem foreign--who have accents, or look a bit fresh-off-the-boat--are a completely normal aspect of the texture of daily American life.
The next thing is that the border between the US and Mexico is really, really long, and difficult to police. So we're very used to people crossing it illegally. This is not a new issue--at all. In fact, immigrant labor (legal and illegal) has been vital to US agriculture since the end of slavery and probably before. Even when there was still a fairly large number of native-born farm workers, we still needed immigrant labor seasonally. The need for it grew when we implemented child labor laws, which kept young people from working in the fields.
As Americans became wealthier, fewer and fewer wanted to settle for the low wages and harsh conditions of farm work, so immigrants (legal and illegal) replaced us in those jobs, then they started replacing us in meat packing plants, restaurants, motels, domestic work, landscaping, construction, etc. The stronger our economy, the more Americans become unwilling to do those jobs--because there are easier ways to make a living.
Our whole discussion of illegal immigration is fundamentally dishonest because we refuse to acknowledge how dependent our economy is on an illegal labor force. Employers like the situation because they can exploit their workers--you're not going to complain or sue about the conditions you're working in if you're afraid of being deported, right? (And the conditions *are* terrible: Something like 20 percent of the Salvadorans who work in our fields were found to suffer from chronic kidney disease owing to dehydration.) There is, in this situation, an echo of slavery. We've never really figured out how to farm in a way that's not exploitative. On the other hand, we manage to feed a *very* large population cheaply. No one in the US starves. That's not something to be taken for granted.
Illegal migrants make up nearly half of the agriculture sector’s workforce. They do jobs that are so physically demanding and poorly compensated that you'd have to raise wages about twenty-fold to get Americans to do them. (That's a guess, I don't know that for sure). We simply don't know how to make that sector work with labor costs that high--making a profit in agriculture is already pretty difficult and delicately-poised. Increasingly, these jobs are being mechanized, which solves this problem, but we're not fully there yet.
So, whatever politicians say, they've thus far been reluctant to deport these immigrants en masse out of fear that the labor shortages would ripple across the whole agricultural supply chain and broader economy--reduced production would mean higher food prices and increased reliance on imports; farmers and food producers would be unable to meet contractual obligations; farms would go under, etc. And that's just what seems to be happening now: https://money.cnn.com/2018/06/15/news/economy/california-farmer-workers-immigration/index.html
By the way, the Trump administration claims that Biden let "ten million" or "twelve million" people cross the border during his time in power. That's nonsense. The number is more like 2 million. Here are some reasonable estimateser: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/07/22/what-we-know-about-unauthorized-immigrants-living-in-the-us/ Obviously, it's hard to know exactly how many people are in the US illegally; I suspect it's probably quite a bit *higher* than 10-12 million, but most of them have been in the US for a very long time. Some people, obviously, very much want them gone. But others don't "want them gone" because they're integrated--they pay taxes, they work hard, and often, no one realizes they're illegals.
The reason the situation has persisted as long as it has is that Congress is incapable of legislating. The US is also incapable of deciding what it wants to do about this.
But all have this has gone unspoken, even though everyone knows it. Politically, politicians must insist they're against illegal immigration. No one is willing to say, "actually, we need them as much as they need us, so let's legalize them." So it's been impossible to forge a reasonable legislative compromise to regularize the status of our work force.
It places a massive strain on some communities, especially border communities, but it massively benefits others--these reserves of immigrant labor are one reason the US economy was so much stronger than others after the pandemic. (If you like, I can dig up the study that shows how much we owed to it.) And you're about to see what happens when immigrants (legal and illegal) are too frightened to leave home to pick crops.
There are so-called "push" and "pull" factors involved in migration. When the US economy is strong, it's a pull factor; when economies elsewhere are weak, or when they're violent and unstable, it's a push factor. In recent years the US economy has been very strong compared to its southern neighbors. (Trump may inadvertently succeed in reducing the problem by trashing the economy.) We've
The theory that Democrats want these people as new voters is ridiculous because illegal immigrants don't vote. The upper class does indeed want them as servants (I'll bet you everyone who serves drinks and cleans the pool on Trump's property is in the US illegally--he built many of his properties entirely with illegal labor.)
The right is, indeed, demagoguing the issue--it's not true at all, for example, that immigrants are more crime-prone than natives. (Given how crime-prone we are, that's no suprise.) But they're not wrong to say, "It is a massive problem that so many people in this country are here illegally," if only for the simple reason that it is *illegal.* It represents a breakdown of the rule of law.
Does that help? I fully understand why this would be confusing if you don't know the US well. I'm glad you asked.
Your comment here is disingenuous, Claire. It’s full of misinformation. You also conveniently forget to mention the downside of illegal immigration.
While some illegal immigrants are criminals, the vast majority are hardworking and industrious. What they all are is cheaters. What they’ve all done is jump the line at the expense of those who attempted to enter the United States the legal way.
To make matters worse, the cheaters have made a mockery of the asylum system. Virtually everyone who enters the United States makes an asylum claim based on fear of persecution. The vast majority of these claims are lies. I know that you recognize how important it is to offer asylum to those who truly deserve it. The cheaters have made the asylum system unworkable. It is simply impossible, no matter how many immigration judges are hired, to provide the due process required to determine whether millions of immigrants are making legitimate asylum claims or not. The cheaters have turned many Americans against the concept of asylum and that’s a tragedy.
It is simply inaccurate to say that illegal immigrants blend into American society seamlessly. While that is often true, there are frequent occasions when it is not. At the height of the Biden-inspired immigration crisis, immigration shelters were opened throughout New York City (where I live). Often the illegal immigrants were housed in smaller hotels. The hotel owners were thrilled to benefit from the government largess that provided them with fully occupied hotels for months on end. Of course, this made it impossible for New Yorkers searching for reasonably priced hotel accommodations for their visitors to find a place for them to stay. New York City spent billions of dollars providing shelter to the cheaters. What were the opportunity costs associated with that?
A fair number of these hotels and shelters were designed to house single young men often in their late teens or early 20s. These young men, with nothing to do, would stand around in front of their shelters socializing and smoking. Thanks to them there was liter everywhere and that liter exacerbated New York City’s rat infestation. I’m sure that the same thing happened in other metropolitan areas. Immigrants both legal and illegal often improve the quality of life but they also, in many circumstances, make the quality of life far worse. No one would know that by reading your Pollyannish-styled comment.
Then there’s the impact of illegal immigrants on working class wages. It may be true that the agricultural work done by illegal immigrants doesn’t drive down wages for Americans because Americans don’t want to do the type of labor that these cheaters do. But it is untrue that Americans won’t do other types of work that illegal immigrants perform, it’s just that they won’t do that work for the wages that illegal cheaters will work for.
Just one example is provided by the roofing profession. For most of the 20th century and the early part of this century, roofing work was done primarily by American workers. The work was hard, dirty and unpleasant but it paid reasonably well; maybe not quite a middle class wage but almost. A roofer actually made enough money to put his kids through college if they wanted to go. I know this personally because my roofer father-in-law who never graduated highschool paid for my wife’s college education and she never accrued any college debt.
Then the cheaters came. Illegal immigrants flooded the industry and were willing to work for near minimum wage or even less. Even roofing contractors who wanted to hire Americans couldn’t do it because their competitors, staffed by illegals, could bid out jobs for a fraction of the price that a company staffed by Americans had to pay. Now the roofing industry is staffed almost entirely by legal and illegal immigrants and the irony is that the illegal immigrants actually drive down the wages for the legal immigrants while native born Americans were driven out of the industry all together.
Its really rich to hear you repeat the lie that illegals merely take jobs in industries that Americans won’t work in when the reality is that the cheaters drive down wages so much that Americans can’t earn a decent living in those industries. To make matters worse, neoliberals like you were happy to see the industries where these displaced Americans might have worked, driven to Mexico and China. The reason the world looks to be coming apart at the seams to you, Claire, is that the system you support is untenable.
One thing is clear, a significant majority of Americans in both political parties want the cheaters gone. During the campaign, Trump was unambiguous about his plans to deport illegals. He won by achieving unprecedented levels of working class, Black and Latino support. Working class Americans of all races and backgrounds want the illegals deported.
It’s obvious Claire, that the single most salient reason populism is on the rise throughout the Western world is because in the United States and Europe, citizens are sick and tired of immigrants storming in at unprecedented levels. The victims who suffer worst of all are legitimate asylum claimants waiting patiently for those claims to be adjudicated.
In the United States, it’s unclear whether a substantial number of the cheaters will ever be deported. If it’s up to Trump, many will be. If it’s up to highly educated judges living in posh communities it may never happen. After all, who’s mowing the lawns and plugging holes in the rooves of these judges?
You're arguing with positions I never took.
Really?
You didn’t suggest because the United States is a continent-wide country that illegal immigration was less impactful? You acknowledged that border communities were adversely affected. Do you think illegal immigrants are evenly disbursed throughout the United States? What about the impacts in places like New York City, Chicago and Denver? How many billions of dollars did these cities spend taking care of the cheaters?
You are right about one thing, Claire; some parts of the United States benefited immeasurably from illegal immigration. It was great for people in Scarsdale, New York, Brookline, Massachusetts and Marin County, California when the costs of lawn cutting and fixing rooves was held down by the poor wages paid to illegal immigrants. In short, illegal immigration is great for upper middle class people many of whom are beneficiaries of jobs made possible by government subsidies. It wasn’t so great for working class people who found their wages so suppressed that they had few options to pursue a middle class lifestyle.
Didn’t you say, Claire, that fewer Americans wanted to work in “restaurants, motels, domestic work, landscaping, construction, etc.?” You’re wrong about that. Americans, especially those without a college credential would be thrilled to work in those industries if they paid enough to support a middle class lifestyle. They don’t; and one reason (not the only reason) is that illegal immigrants drive down the wages. It’s great for employers. It’s great for patrons. It’s not so good for workers.
What about the legitimate asylum-seekers, Claire? Don’t you think that the cheaters have made a mockery of the asylum process and that the real victims here are the people who legitimately fear persecution at the hand of their Governments or criminal elements in their nations of origin?
"What about the legitimate asylum-seekers, Claire? Don’t you think that the cheaters have made a mockery of the asylum process and that the real victims here are the people who legitimately fear persecution at the hand of their Governments or criminal elements in their nations of origin?"
Since you are concerned about asylum seekers, you must know that Claire recently wrote on the subject of Afghan refugees (many of whom personally helped the veterans you have spoken about supporting) so you have an essay length answer if you wish to learn about a subset of the great number of real victims of Trump's second administration. You might also be interested in researching the legal status of the majority of deportees sent to CECOT. It's been extensively reported on, though it's been difficult, since this administration, weirdly, hasn't exactly made it easy to confirm which of the deportees are legal and which are illegal.
But since legality is clearly of significant importance to you, and (as you say) lawbreakers must be punished, do you have any thoughts on Stephen Miller's comments on habeas corpus, the main subject of the essay? As an energetic defender of this administration, I would be interested to see how concerns about legality and respect for legitimate asylum seekers fit into the equation. Because I don't see it?
I would be very opposed to actually suspending habeus corpus even if the suspension was limited to illegal immigrants. I support Miller’s comments about habeus corpus as an outstanding strategy to drive Trump’s opponents to distraction.
Hard to overstate how utterly feckless and pathetic the opposition to Trump 2.0 has been thus far. The harsh reality appears to be that the overwhelming majority of politically engaged Americans (including Democrats) are willing to make their peace with a dictatorship rather than confront the sorts of dangers and uncertainties that real resistance would require. The actual “resistance” seems more like a group therapy session designed to console people and make them feel like they’re doing something as Americans cower in fear and allow their rights to be trampled. We go through the motions of filing lawsuits, pretending that the law isn’t a dead letter where the regime is concerned, indulging the ridiculous fantasy that a lawless autocrat can somehow be constrained via legal proceduralism. There are some simple ground level truths here that I think are important to spell out: The coalition behind Trump has determined that they no longer wish to live in a society governed by the rule of law. Instead they wish to seize as much power as they can, by force if necessary. Their approach to legal and Constitutional constraints can be summed up as “Fuck you! Make me!” Their opposition apparently lacks the stomach for this challenge. So mostly they appear to be engaged in an elaborate toothless cosplay meant to disguise (perhaps from themselves) the unsettling truth that ultimately we’re just choosing to surrender to a tyrant.
So, the most incisive explanation of what is happening - or, at least is being attempted, here - comes from the Third Reich. A Jewish labor lawyer who worked in Germany from 1933-38, Ernest Fraenkl, published a book in 1941 examining the state of jurisprudence there called The Dual State. Its essential point was, borrowing from a recent Atlantic piece, “for most people, the courts will continue to operate as usual—until they don’t.”
It described a capitalist economy operating as usual, a “normative state”, while at the same time establishing a “ prerogative state” featuring “arbitrariness unchecked by legal guarantees” - i.e., ordinary law didn’t apply.
If you wish to understand this moment, a must-read.
I disagree that it's a waste of time to file lawsuits. The courts have so far been the only obstacle to Trump's lawlessness. They wouldn't be working so hard to delegitimize the courts if they didn't find themselves stymied by them. Trump has so far been reluctant to simply announce that he doesn't plan to abide by these rulings, so he's trying to find workarounds--but this is slowing them down considerably. Many of his actions have been put on hold by the federal courts, at least temporarily. Trump is still trying to hold on to some semblance of legal-procedural legitimacy, so what the courts say is important. We'll see what happens when the courts keep telling him "no."
The problem isn't that people are filing lawsuits--that's very, very good, IMO. It's that *only* the courts are standing up to him, and that's not enough. The courts, by design, work slowly, and this administration is destroying things so quickly and thoroughly that it will be impossible to put them back together even if the courts order it done.
The opposition is behaving like most people who have no recent experience of authoritarianism do. The countries that have done best at pushing back on this kind of self-coup have had a recent experience of living under an authoritarian regime. That experience makes it possible for a critical mass of people to believe, "Yes, this is really happening--we have to act fast, and act together, to stop it." Americans have no idea what it's like to live in a country without basic rights, and they've held themselves to be exceptional in matters of liberal democracy for so long that they're finding it impossible to reconcile their self-image with reality.
Maybe you’re right that the lawsuits aren’t a waist of time, but rather that they’re merely insufficient in and of themselves. With regards to your last paragraph however, I think there’s something else going on here that I was trying to get at (perhaps not very effectively). One of the moments from Trump’s first term that stood out to me was a rally in which he said the following: “I’ve got the military. I’ve got the cops. I’ve got the bikers for Trump. I’ve got the tough people. But they don’t play it tough. Until it gets to a certain point. And then things could get really really bad!” This sort of over the top posturing and hinting at the prospect of violence is pretty much par for the course with him. But this particular episode stood out for me, perhaps because it succinctly captures an essential ingredient of Trumpism. It reminds me of a semi-famous anecdote about ancient Rome that recounts a discussion nobles were having about making all of the slaves wear uniforms so they could be identified as slaves. According to this story, the idea was ultimately nixed when one of the nobles pointed out that making them wear uniforms could cause the slaves to realize just how many other slaves there were. What a lot of Trump’s menacing buffoonery, along with the silly red hats and the exhortations to “FIGHT!” seems to come down to is building revolutionary conciousness. What Trump was essentially saying to his supporters was “Look around you. Our opponents are weak, feminized, and afraid of confrontation. The law is just words on a page. We can rip it up and if we stick together, what the hell can they do about it!?” This speaks to an essential truth that America’s Liberal elites have become dangerously alienated from: Rights don’t protect themselves. And ultimately, in the absence of a credible threat of force, they’re worthless. We’re used to thinking about deterrence in the context of international affairs. But as America separates into two warring tribes, I think the idea takes on more relevance domestically as well. In a democracy, what prevents the party in power from using their position to seize even more, to the point that they become autocrats who can never be dislodged? Some of it is morality and norms. But there’s also the implicit recognition that ripping up the rules would bring chaos and violence that ultimately would be to almost everyone’s detriment. And part of what I think has happened is that as the parties have sorted, largely along the lines of gender and educational attainment, we’ve crossed some critical threshold where this final bulwark against the abuse of power has collapsed (the asymmetry in gun ownership is an important factor here as well). The GOP and its allies have seemingly concluded that they can rip up the rules while incurring minimal costs in the form of violence and anarchy. The Democratic coalition (and especially those who run and staff elite Liberal institutions) have been socialized in a world where direct conflict (particularly of the physical variety) has become almost entirely foreign. Decades of peace and prosperity, overly supervised childhoods (in the case of the younger generation), and a culture of safetyism that seeks to suppress nearly all social friction via bureaucratic proceduralism has created a class of Liberal elites who appear constitutionally incapable of blowing up paradigms and taking BIG steps. And this isn’t just a matter of physicality either. Dem elites overwhelmingly come from academia and the non-profit world rather than business or other areas that require improvisation, risk taking, and operating in an uncertain environment where the rules are unclear or non-existent. This, in part, is what I was trying to speak to when dismissing lawsuits (perhaps foolishly) as a viable form of resistance. The reflexive tendency of mediocre bureaucrats to assume problems can always be addressed by painting inside the lines, running to HR, or following whatever other impersonal procedure has been legalistically spelled out for them. Democrats and their leaders simply appear uniquely ill-equipped to handle what we’re now facing, and thus find themselves, perhaps out of habit or inertia, reaching for toothless fixes that presume we still live in a world in which laws are binding and leaders follow the rules.
These are very good points. It might even be worth turning this into an essay. Want to try? I'll publish it if it turns out well.
Hi Claire. Just wanted to give you a heads up. I finished a first draft tonight. Currently it’s hand written and I’d estimate around 6,000 words (my brain seems to work better writing rather than typing). So I’ll need to type it up and do some editing. Then I plan on showing it to one or two other people first just to confirm that I’m not making a complete fool of myself. And then I’ll send it to you. So I’m thinking maybe late in the week if that’s ok. Also, should I just send it to the email address that I receive the CG newsletter from?
I appreciate that Claire. I’m certainly willing to give it a shot. I’m not a writer by trade (as likely evidenced by my shitty mechanics). So you’d probably have to do some editing. Sometimes I have ideas for essays and I try to write them up. But I tend to get derailed in the middle and rarely end up finishing them. But maybe the encouragement, and the fact that I sort of have an outline to work with now could help. I could try working on it for the next couple of days, and if I come up with something decent I’ll send it to you for consideration.
With luck, persistence, and extraordinary effort, we may prevail. The option of not trying is unacceptable. The thought and depth of Claire's postings constitute priceless insights for the endeavor. At least, the speed and cruelty of Project 2025 via its prime mover permit no doubt about the threat and the stakes. It may not be Fort Sumpter, but it's pretty close.