September 30, 2024 - 1:00pm

If states are the laboratories of American democracy, then the state of California is the preferred lab setting for progressives to test out their most extreme policy ideas. Everything from drug decriminalisation to radical educational curricula has been tried and tested in the Golden State. But the receptive political environment under the state’s one-party Democratic establishment and its sympathetic governor Gavin Newsom is wavering.

In recent weeks, Newsom has voted down a series of bills designed to benefit undocumented migrants in a move that is revealing the fault lines in progressive politics. Democrats are now on the defensive after nearly four years in which a worsening border crisis have swelled the ranks of the country’s undocumented population; and the issue has accordingly become a political millstone for Democrats everywhere, from their presidential candidate on down.

Newsom (who has harboured presidential ambitions of his own) has clearly turned on his state party’s most extreme immigration positions. In the last month, the Governor vetoed three major bills passed by Democrats in the state assembly attempting to regularise the status of undocumented immigrants; these changes would have made it easier for them to either engage in economic activity or use public services heretofore reserved for citizens and legal residents.

Earlier in September, Newsom vetoed a bill that would have granted some undocumented immigrants up to $150,000 in loans to buy a home under loan programmes managed by the California Housing Finance Agency. On Friday, he turned down another bill that would have given undocumented immigrants legal employment in California’s public universities: it was based on an untested legal theory propounded by progressive academics arguing that states have a right to ignore federal law disallowing the practice.

Over the weekend, Newsom axed a third bill, which aimed to give undocumented people access to unemployment benefits and could have been the most politically incendiary of all (he vetoed a similar proposal once before). The Governor’s refusal now to play along with such proposals indicates perhaps that the trend toward immigration maximalism has finally reached its practical limit in this most liberal of states.

Both Newsom and his fellow California Democrat Kamala Harris have attempted to execute Rightward pivots on immigration to fend off Donald Trump’s attacks. However, the broader support of many Democrat activists and the practical insistence of Left-leaning intellectuals on a borderless society has all but made it impossible for the party to change its course in both policy and political terms.

Democrats are missing a pro-restrictionist constituency to challenge the hegemony of the pro-maximalist professional elites who run the party. This role could theoretically be filled by working-class voices in organised labour (which has historically opposed open borders) and minority communities (who have already begun to turn against such policies in other Democratic strongholds like Chicago, or else defected to Republicans). But until this countermovement can be galvanised from within the ranks of the Democratic coalition, there can be no genuine party realignment on the issue.

This means that, coming up to the election, the Democrats are effectively suspended between the electoral imperative of disassociating themselves from unpopular positions and the moral imperative of staying true to ultra-progressive segments of their base. The question remains whether voters will be convinced by the Harris-Newsom pivot away from ultra-progressivism or whether it will be viewed as a hollow campaign ploy.


Michael Cuenco is a writer on policy and politics. He is Associate Editor at American Affairs.
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