Trump’s bizarre and abrasive style, to be sure, couldn’t be more different than that of the Bush dynasty. And his idiosyncratic tariff policy is a genuine break with what went before. But in most areas, Trumpism is simply Bushism gilded by a tacky coat of paint. In political terms, Donald Trump is the brother-by-a-different-mother of Dubya and Jeb!  

Pop quiz: which of the three last Republican presidents has launched a major war of choice against a populous Persian Gulf country — George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, or Donald Trump? If you answered all three, you are right. Republican presidents began all three Gulf Wars: the First Gulf War of 1991, the Second Gulf War of 2003-2011, and the Third Gulf War of 2026-?.

Second question: which of the last three Republican presidents had, as his major legislative accomplishment, a tax cut that disproportionately benefited the rich and corporations? If you answered all three — the two Bushes and Trump — you are, again, correct.  

Third question: which of the last three Republican presidents successfully promoted the expansion of legal guest-worker programs for cheap-labor industries like agriculture and hospitality? Once again, the answer is both Bushes and Trump.  

Fourth and final question: which of the last three Republican presidents signed laws or authorized regulations to boost the number of rich foreigners who could buy green cards, as a ticket to American citizenship? You guessed it, both Bushes and Trump. In politics as well as policies, the Trump administration increasingly looks like a continuation of the post-2000 Republican norm: pro-war, pro-business.

To see why, it helps to examine the electorate. Over the past decade, much has been made of a supposed “realignment” between the two parties and Trump’s success in attracting a formerly Democratic-leaning working class into the Republican column. Yet this was always overstated. In reality, Trump didn’t create a party realignment, and he hasn’t significantly reshaped one.  He has inherited the Bush Republican Party — a new American political party that coalesced in the Nineties and 2000s.

In 2024, the only two religious groups that viewed Trump favorably were white evangelical Protestants (67%) and white Catholics (51%). Trump won four-fifths of the white evangelical vote in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But his margin was only a slight improvement over Mitt Romney in 2012 (who won 78% of the same group), John McCain in 2008 (74%), and George W. Bush in 2004 (78%). History, then, shows a gradually expanding share of white-evangelical votes for any and all Republican presidential nominees, not a sudden surge under Trump in 2016. 

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With the white working class as a whole, Trump — who won 62% in 2016, 59% in 2020, and 66% in 2024 — did only marginally better than GOP nominees since 1980, from highs under Ronald Reagan (56% in 1984) and Romney (56%) to a low of 45% with McCain. That this reflects the evolution of the GOP, rather than the unique charisma of Trump, is evident from the fact that in the 2022 midterms, Republican congressional hopefuls won 66% of the working class, the same rate as Trump in 2024.  

The Republican share of the white working class is boosted by ultra-Republican white evangelicals. As the University of Pennsylvania’s John J. Diulio points out, “in 2016 and 2020, Trump won a majority of white evangelical working-class voters, but he lost a majority of white non-evangelical working-class voters. He lost them again in 2024.” White, working-class Americans who were not evangelical Protestants preferred Harris to Trump by a margin of 52 to 45.

Add regional dynamics, and it becomes even clearer that the Trump party is simply the Bush party, only with vulgar rhetoric. The Bush GOP is based in the former territory of New Deal and Jacksonian Democrats — the Confederacy and Appalachia. Its constituents, like small-business owners and working-class evangelicals, are those who formed the base of the Democratic Party for most of its history.

Eight out of 10 white Southerners were Democrats in 1950s, and as recently as 1992, Republicans had only a two-point advantage in the white South. By 2020, two-in-three white Southerners identified with the Republican Party.

Opposition to the civil-rights movement was a factor, but if racism were the only one then white Southerners should have completely abandoned the Democrats by 1968 or 1972. Instead, cultural conservatism with respect to religion, sex, and censorship, along with a distinctively martial version of Southern patriotism, combined with the increasing progressivism of national Democrats, gradually drove many white Southern Democrats into the Republican Party between the Seventies and the 2000s.

Today Republicans from the South hold more than 50% of the seats of the Republican House majority. In the Senate, the Republican majority leader and the Republican majority whip are from South Dakota and Wyoming, respectively, while the Republican conference chair is from Arkansas, the Republican policy boss is from West Virginia, and the Republican senatorial committee chair is from South Carolina.  

In hindsight, John McCain’s 2008 candidacy was a link in the soft transition of the party of Bush into the party of Trump. Having co-sponsored a bill providing amnesty for illegal immigrants with Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy in 2005, in 2008 McCain opposed any amnesty. And to bolster his pseudo-populist bona fides, McCain chose Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate.  

In foreign policy, McCain — a Vietnam veteran and former POW and the descendant of military officers whose extended family owned a Mississippi plantation until after World War II — was one of the most consistently bellicose members of the hawkish wing of the GOP. During his presidential campaign, to the tune of the Beach Boys song “Barbara Ann”, McCain sang “Bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Had McCain been elected president, America might have waged all-out war against Iran a decade and a half ago.

Constituent interests, not the theories of Curtis Yarvin or Patrick Deneen, explain the policies of the post-Nineties GOP, under Trump and the Bushes alike. In terms of counties rather than states, the American red-county economy is predominantly exurban and rural and dominated by three kinds of industries: extractive resource industries like oil and gas and coal; the federally funded defense industries and the local businesses and jobs that military spending supports; and low-wage industries, most notably agriculture and services. Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of employers and investors in red counties across America.

In 2019, 55% of all primary energy — chiefly oil, natural gas, and coal — was produced in the United States came from six mostly red states: Texas, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Oklahoma, West Virginia, and North Dakota, with the Lone Star State accounting for 41% of all US crude production. Naturally, the Republican Party supports the mantra “drill, baby, drill” (and “mine, baby, mine”) and opposes the Green New Deal, with its goal of phasing out all fossil-fuel use in the United States and the world in favor of renewables.

By far the most important social base of the Bush-to-Trump Republican Party, and the greatest influence on Republican economic policy, is made up of small-business owners who, according to the Stanford Business Review, “represent a distinct, Republican-leaning constituency.”

Business owners are a minority of Republican voters; the majority of voters in both parties are mostly wage earners. But they are overrepresented among GOP primary voters, lobbyists, staffers, and politicians. Apart from professional and technical services, small businesses are concentrated in construction, natural resources and mining, trade, transportation and utilities, manufacturing, and leisure and hospitality. Republican-leaning billionaires and mega-corporations draw the ire of progressives and some conservative populists, but the party’s center of gravity is found among provincial Republican millionaires. Small and regional capital, not big business, forms the social power base of the Trump party and that of the Bushes before him.

You don’t have to be a Marxist to understand that mainstream Republican economic policy reflects the economic interests of this sector of capital. Compliance with federal, state, and local regulations is a bigger challenge for small-business owners than for large, managerial corporations, so it isn’t surprising that Trump 2.0 would hire Elon Musk and Russell Vought to theatrically cut regulations, fire federal bureaucrats, and dismantle government agencies. 

For most small businesses, wages plus benefits and payroll taxes are the greatest cost. Mainstream Republican policies toward American workers under Trump and the two Bushes form a consistent policy designed to minimize the bargaining power of workers in wage negotiations and to make workers so economically desperate they will be compelled to take jobs with poor pay and bad working conditions.  

Some of these policies — such as unremitting hostility to organized labor — have obvious benefits for cheap-labor small businesses. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump pretended to show respect for unionized workers by inviting Teamsters President Sean O’Brien to speak at the Republican National Convention. Less than a month later, in a social media conversation with Elon Musk, Trump told Musk: “You’re the greatest cutter. I look at what you do. You walk in and say, ‘You want to quit?’ I won’t mention the name of the company but they go on strike and you say, ‘That’s OK. You’re all gone.’ ”

Trump was evidently unaware that federal law prohibits the firing of striking workers. The United Auto Workers union immediately filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board, a New Deal-created agency that Musk is suing on the specious claim that it has been unconstitutional from the beginning. In January 2025, having returned to the White House, Trump crippled the NLRB by illegally firing a board member, removing the board’s quorum.

Crushing unions and dismantling the NLRB are only two of the strategies used by mainstream Republicans, including Trump, to shift the balance of power in wage negotiations from workers to employers. Tight labor markets that result from low immigration and low workforce participation by mothers of young children can create a seller’s market in labor that strengthens the power of workers, male and female, to demand higher wages. To this end, employer lobbies dominated by Republican-leaning small-business owners for decades have supported mass low-wage immigration and promoted the employment of mothers of young children.  

The US Chamber of Commerce, the National Small Business Association, and the National Federation of Independent Business all support expanding guest worker programs, whose workers, unlike green card holders (legal permanent residents), don’t qualify for a path to citizenship and voting. According to an NFIB spokesperson, “our members support an enforceable guest worker program and expanding H-2B visas for economic need.” 

The US Chamber of Commerce advocates doubling the number of immigrants. According to the NSBA, meanwhile, more than a third of small businesses employ workers who belong to one of three categories: green-card holders, temporary foreign workers, or visa holders. The NSBA advocates lifting country caps on employment-related visas, allowing unlimited numbers of non-citizen foreigners to work in the homeland. 

This is one of the surprising and little-noticed threads that tie the Bushes to Trump. As United Farm Workers comms director Antonio de Loera-Brust has noted in these pages, the Trump II administration has moved to increase the number of agricultural guest workers. This, notwithstanding its showy enforcement actions in blue cities. Far from being a radical break with Bush-era Republican immigration policy, Trump’s actual immigration policy has been a continuation of employer-first policies in substance, though not in rhetoric. 

In a cabinet meeting on 11 April, 2025, Trump said that “we have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to NEED people.” The second Trump administration has used a variety of methods, including extreme vetting of applications and travel bans, to reduce legal immigration to the United States by an estimated 35% and 50%, if the present rate continues over four years.  

While blockading legal immigration overall, the Trump administration has exempted the low-wage H-2 visa categories from obstructionist delays. And the administration has doubled the number of H-2 visas for low-wage workers for 2026. 

All of this shows that Trumpism is merely the higher stage of Bushism. It was George Herbert Walker Bush who signed the Immigration Act of 1990, which in hindsight was the foundation for the mass immigration of the last half century. The 1990 Act simultaneously created the EB-5 visa selling green cards to the foreign bourgeoisie, created the H1-B guest-worker visa, expanded existing guest-worker programs, and created new guest-worker categories. It also created the Temporary Protected Status program, under which President Joe Biden granted legal status to nearly a million otherwise ineligible foreign nationals.

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Republican foreign policy, like tax and labor policy, can be explained in terms of Republican voters and donors. Republican policy towards the Middle East is influenced but not wholly determined by support for Israel’s annexationist hard Right among evangelical Christian Zionists and Right-wing Jews, who, however, are a minority of America’s mostly Democratic Jewish voters. In 2020, after moving the US embassy, Trump declared, “and we moved the capital of Israel to Jerusalem. That’s for the evangelicals.”

And Republican policy towards Latin America is influenced by anti-communist Cuban-Americans, a crucial Florida voting bloc, who nurtured Marco Rubio. In Trump’s second term, the former senator from the Sunshine State, long associated with the hawkish wing of the GOP, has magnified his influence by holding multiple foreign policy jobs simultaneously at times — Secretary of State, National Security Advisor, and acting administrator of USAID.

The underlying divide in GOP foreign policy is among three schools of thought: global hegemonists who favor American military hegemony in every major region; balance-of-power realists or “prioritizers” who want to focus America’s limited military resources on the Chinese challenge in Asia; and neo-isolationist “restrainers.” The global-hegemony strategy’s major supporters since the end of the Cold War have disproportionately been Southern conservative hawks like South Carolina’s Sen. Lindsay Graham and Arkansas’s Senator Tom Cotton. The armed-services committees in the Senate and House are led by two Republican Southern hawks — Mississippi’s Senator Roger Wicker and Alabama’s Representative Mike D. Rogers. 

Their militarism is unusual by national standards but typical of the martial tradition of the American South. Nearly half of new military recruits are from the South, even though it contains only about a third of young adult Americans. 

The hawks whom Southern voters send to Congress ensure that the region profits from defense spending. The list of states that derive more than 3.5% of their GDP from defense contracts is dominated by states in the South and Southwest: Texas, Virginia, Arizona, Maryland, Kentucky, Alabama, Mississippi, and Missouri (Connecticut and Maine make the list because of their Navy bases and shipyards). Meanwhile, the importance of defense spending to California’s economy has declined, as military investment in Florida has increased.

Under the two Bushes and Trump, congressional Republicans in Washington, among other things, have been subsidizing the folks back home by increasing defense spending while further ballooning deficits enlarged by their tax cuts for the rich and business. 

Under Trump as under the Bushes, the Republican Party, based in the former Confederate states, is the party of unnecessary wars, tax cuts for the rich, and anti-worker, low-wage labor-market policy. Anti-interventionist realists and restrainers and economic populists on the Right who dreamed that Trump would favor their causes may not want to hear the truth. And the truth will be resisted as well by Democrats and Never Trump Republicans who idealized the two Bushes while demonizing Trump. But the fact is that, apart from his colorful personality, Trump has been a relatively conventional post-Cold War Republican president. 

The Third Gulf War is the latest reminder that there is no Trump party and never has been, only the Bush party under new management.

Today, just this scenario is unfolding under President Trump. After sustained lobbying by business interests, the Trump administration is doubling the number of H2B seasonal guest-worker visas it is granting in 2026. This will allow major industries — including hospitality, landscaping, and construction — to import an additional 65,000 foreign workers this year, on top of the 66,000 visas already granted by statute. 

The decision comes on the heels of the Trump administration arbitrarily lowering the wages for workers in the H2A agricultural guest-worker program, which allows employers to import seasonal farm workers primarily from Mexico, Jamaica, and Central America, and does not even have a statutory visa cap. Even before Trump’s wage cuts, the H2A program has septupled in size since 2005, and is now bringing in nearly 400,000 seasonal guest workers a year. (The union I work for, the United Farm Workers, is suing to reverse the new wage cut in federal court.) 

The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown has generated significant controversy. For the Left, the ICE raids and the agency’s notorious “performative cruelty” — often afflicting long-time residents with close US citizen relatives and without criminal records — have provoked grief, anger, even rebellion. For much of the Right, the images of migrants being detained stoke vindication and triumphalism.

Yet far from headlines and social-media feeds, the Trump administration is quietly replacing one group of cheap foreign workers with another. By its own estimates, the population of the H2A agricultural guest-worker program will grow by as many as 120,000 additional workers a year following the H2A wage cuts — far exceeding the number of farm workers who have been deported. Similarly, by doubling the H2B program, the number of foreign workers in construction, landscaping, and hospitality will ultimately increase, not decrease. After deindustrialization, such jobs are often the only ones available to US workers without college degrees. And now, by Trump policy design, they have to compete with a foreign reserve army willing to work for even less. This, despite the “Americanism” slop the US Department of Labor’s social-media interns like to post, is not putting American workers first.

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Indeed, what’s coming into being now is worse than simply maintaining the status quo. While migrant workers excluded from citizenship weaken US workers’ bargaining power, the expansion of guest-worker programs is that problem on steroids. Whereas undocumented workers can at least change jobs and often join unions, guest-worker visas tie employees to the specific employer who is sponsoring their visa. With seasonal visas like H2B and H2A, employers also decide whether or not to bring guest workers back each year. This makes the prospect of organizing a union or negotiating a higher wage significantly harder.

Taken as a whole, the Trump administration’s immigration policy amounts to a system that can best be described as American Kafala. “Kafala” is the infamous migrant-labor system of the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms. Foreign workers live and work in countries like Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates but remain completely excluded from citizenship and bound to their employers.

Such a lopsided power dynamic between employers and workers has led to horrendous cases of abuse and exploitation. Much was made of Kafala’s abuses in the lead-up to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. Yet equally abhorrent abuses have already occurred in the similar US guest-worker programs like H2A and H2B, including rape, human trafficking, and forced labor. Expanding guest-worker programs now will lead to more such cases. 

Trump, like many rich and powerful people, admires the societies of the Gulf. While corruption may well have played its part in Trump’s close relations with various Gulf rulers — a decked-out Qatari Air Force One is a nice toy, indeed — much of the US president’s admiration for these Kafala-fueled societies seems genuine. Trump notably visited Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE for the first major foreign trip of his second term as president. During that trip, Stephen Miller, the architect of Trump’s deportation policies, praised an Emirati palace as costing less than what Democrats spent housing migrants. Yet like everything else in the Gulf, the palace was likely built by hyper-exploited, near-slave-like migrant workers.

More recently, Miller laid out some of his most explicit thinking yet on the relationship between labor, migration, and citizenship. It is worth quoting in full. “Plenty of countries in history have experimented with importing a foreign labor class,” Miller tweeted. “The West is the first and only civilization to import a foreign labor class that is granted full political rights, including welfare [and] the right to vote. All visas are a bridge to citizenship.” This is, of course, not true: the West has long denied rights to its imported labor classes. Even excluding the trans-Atlantic slave trade, various gästarbeiter (“guest worker,” from the German) programs have been a feature of the Western world since World War II. And the H2A and H2B in the United States, as well as similar visa programs in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom, all function to bring cheap foreign labor into the country without extending the workers an opportunity to become citizens.

Yet for all its historical illiteracy, it was a revealing comment by Miller. He takes no issue with the existence of a foreign workforce per se. One might point out that this is effectively what our huge migrant underclass already amounts to. Yet Trump and Miller are now going even further, expanding guest-worker programs to create not just a foreign labor class excluded from citizenship, but one legally tied to specific employers. If not quite slavery — due only to the fact that foreign workers willingly pursue these visas, even bribing corrupt labor recruiters to obtain them — guest-worker programs are at least a form of indentured servitude, but with no promise of citizenship at the end of decades of hard labor.

There is real bigotry inherent in this position. Miller views foreign workers as less worthy of protections than citizen workers. But the logic is not an ethno-nationalist one, bent on creating the white utopia of liberal nightmares and Groyper dreams. It is an exploitive logic bent on creating a permanent underclass beholden to a global elite of the kind you’d find in Dubai as well as Mar-a-Lago. Miller’s goals, in other words, align perfectly with those of international corporate capital. Indeed, Trump’s moves on guest-worker programs are a reminder of the one constant of the Republican coalition: the interests of Big Business will always prevail. Certainly, there is no reason to expect Trump, whose own businesses have long relied on both H2A and H2B guest-worker programs, to behave any differently.

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Immigration restrictionists have been made useful idiots for the Kafala agenda of Big Business. Deportation raids harm a small minority of undocumented workers, while intimidating the far larger group that remains — and will remain, by design. The raids serve two simultaneous purposes for business interests. First, they render the remaining foreign workers more docile than ever. Second, the raids have been cynically used to justify expanding guest-worker programs by citing fear of a deportation-induced labor shortage. This, even as Team Trump has made clear that it will never permit a shortage of cheap foreign labor to hinder the arbitrage game.

To their credit, some restrictionists are clear-eyed about what is happening. Yet they have been either unwilling or unable to get the administration to change course on expanding exploitative guest-worker programs. President Trump’s 2024 election was in no small part a mandate to reduce the number of foreigners arriving in the United States and competing for jobs, housing, and other resources. Certainly among Latino voters, a feeling of competition with recent border crossers was a major factor behind their shift to Trump. Affluent liberals, for whom open borders mean only a cheaper supply of landscapers, delivery drivers, nannies, and handymen, failed to understand the economic stress that many working-class people, especially other immigrants, felt as their bargaining power was undercut by newer arrivals.

Yet the Trump administration is doing the opposite of addressing those concerns. Indeed, Latino voters who may have once supported Trump have clearly begun to turn against him. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is creating an even worse version of open borders: legalizing big business’s ability to bring in workers on demand — without rights. This American Kafala strategy amounts to legally codifying the exploitative relationship between big business and immigrant labor, ensuring that borders remain open to service capital’s cheap-labor needs.

It would be far better for American workers to simply legalize the undocumented foreign workforce we already have, allowing them to compete on a level playing field and organize for higher wages and better working conditions, rather than deporting and replacing it with another foreign workforce permanently trapped in legalized exploitation.

For example, Nick Fuentes, the perma-smirking king of the racial Right, describes Usha Vance as a “foreigner” and a “jeet,” mocks her name (“what the fuck is that?”), and blames her husband for “race-mixing.” Fuentes, who boasts a million followers on X, is having a something of a moment, with Kevin Roberts, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation, going to bat for him (before apologizing some half a dozen times). But many lesser e-pundits share Fuentes’s views; even a Department of Government Efficiency staffer has called for normalizing “Indian hate.” 

At the intersection of these crosswinds stands Nikki Haley’s son, Nalin. The scion of one of America’s most prominent Indian families, he has shot to online fame in recent months, after he went public with his religious conversion (to Catholicism) and let loose his political opinions — ones that often clash with his family’s.

For one thing, Haley isn’t shy about venting his weariness of immigration of all kinds, not least from India. When Vivek Ramaswamy called for an “end [to] identity politics” this week, Haley replied, “End H1-B visas,” the program used by firms, especially in tech, to import latter-day indentured servants, more than 70% of whom are Indian.

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“We don’t just stop illegal immigration,” Haley tells me by Zoom on Tuesday. “I think we need to stop legal immigration.” With green eyes, impossibly white teeth, and six-pack abs, he cuts a striking figure. He is well-versed in meme warfare and knows just how to “ratio” accounts much bigger than his own — that is, garner more “likes” for his replies than the original poster. Like that of the British-born progressive pundit Mehdi Hasan, with whom he’s repeatedly tussled. 

When I mention his demand that Hasan be “denaturalized,” he interrupts: “and deported.” Tongue in cheek, surely? “No, I quite literally mean that. I’m often sarcastic, but not in this case. I mean, he hates America. If you hate America, you shouldn’t be in America. … Everyone wants to make it so complicated. That’s the thing with the past generation. They always talk about the rules, regulations, process. No, it’s simple. If you don’t like America, get out.”

That’s not how American naturalization works legally, and the e-Right’s calls to denaturalize and deport any immigrant who says the “wrong” thing clashes sharply with both constitutional writ and the spirit of the American tradition. And if that sort of thing were all that Nalin Haley stood for, he could easily be dismissed as just another online loudmouth (albeit, one who puts his name and face to his fulminations). 

Yet behind his bravado is a serious-minded 24-year-old recent graduate emerging from the political shadow cast by his mother. Nikki Haley served as a lawmaker in South Carolina, became the state’s governor, and was tapped as UN ambassador by Donald Trump in his first term before unsuccessfully challenging him for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination. Her son’s rage — and that of his Gen-Z-male cohort — is a predictable consequence of policies promoted by that older generation of conservatives, who prized cheap labor and free-market dogma far above America’s internal stability and cohesion. 

Nikki Haley supported legal, merit-based immigration as part of a pro-business platform. Her son wants to close the border entirely. Nikki Haley believes “it is not that Israel needs America — America needs Israel.” Her son thinks “Israel is just another country, and if they want to have a better relationship with the United States, they need to stop interfering in our politics.” Nikki Haley believes in an expansive foreign policy. Her son wants to end all foreign aid “as long as we have unemployment, people below the poverty line, medical debt, and bad schools.”

These domestic ills aren’t abstractions to him. “My friend group from high school, all graduated, great degrees from great schools,” he says. “It’s been a year and a half, and not one of them has a job — not one. So I’m angry at that, because I’m having to try and help my friends get jobs when their parents got jobs immediately — not just after graduating college, but out of high school.”

Statistics bear this out: in September, the share of the long-term unemployed, those who’ve been out of the job market for more than six months, hit 26%, according to The New York Times, much of it driven by recent graduates. The jobs that are available for recent grads are often precarious or temporary. “So when you see a bunch of foreigners coming over here to take jobs that [my friends] wanted,” Haley says, “they have every right to be pissed, and I’m pissed for them.”

It isn’t about jobs alone. “I look at the housing market,” he says, “and I don’t see how I’m ever going to own a house. And I do very well for someone my age” — he works in finance on the South Carolina side of Charlotte — “and I still don’t see it.” Again, the generational discontent: “My parents bought their first house for $90,000. I mean, that house probably now is worth $400,000. How can we compete?”

Then there’s the rising crime and disorder. “I live in what is known as a very safe area,” he explains. “Yet someone got shot and killed outside my apartment complex a couple months ago. . .  Outside my apartment in that same couple months, someone got jumped for a bad drug deal. And I’m tired of having to go to CVS to push a button for an employee to come unlock the toothpaste for me. Like, that’s ridiculous.”

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Overall, the effect is akin to “living in some fake world, some fake TV show,” he says. “We are the United States of America, we don’t do this. Things should be safe. Things should work. People should have jobs. Houses should be affordable.” If the son of Nikki Haley feels this way, it’s not hard to imagine the depths of anger and despair among less privileged Zoomers, a reality that probably explains, at least in part, the cohort’s often-brutal political rhetoric.

Nalin Haley was four years old when his mother was elected to the state House of Representatives. But things really changed when she was first elected governor, in 2010. Nalin and his sister, Rena, he recalls, “didn’t know that we had to live in this big house that’s also a museum” — the governor’s mansion.

When they arrived, the main housekeeper asked the two children what they wanted to eat. “And you know, we were very simple. We were like, ‘Well, what do you have?’ And she said, ‘Everything.’ We, having grown up very simple, we just asked for grilled cheese.” By his own account, Nalin’s parents — the governor and her husband, the businessman and military officer Michael Haley — kept him humble. All through childhood, including the years spent in the governor’s mansion, he had to do chores and was expected to work summer jobs.

On matters religious, however, Nalin Haley had to carve his own path. Beginning when he was in fourth grade, his maternal grandparents, Indian-born Sikhs, lived with the family and served almost as surrogate parents amid the political storms of those years. “I had my parents being [Protestant] Christian, and my grandparents being Sikh. As a result, I was very confused.” Which of these faith teachings was true?

To answer that question for himself, Haley absorbed books on world religions when other kids were reading about cars and dinosaurs. Eventually, thanks in part to a spiritual experience he’s reluctant to divulge, he concluded that Christianity is the true faith. He would go on to attend Villanova University, a Catholic institution in Philadelphia. Yet it wasn’t until after graduation that he was received into full communion with the Roman church.

“I needed to research my own faith better in terms of the history, the early beliefs, the Church Fathers,” he says. “When I did that, I felt as though anyone who does that kind of research will walk away a Catholic.” In his choice of denomination, too, Haley is representative of his generational cohort of Gen-Z men, an influential subset of whom is turning to Christianity — and specifically, to liturgically traditional communions like Catholicism and Orthodoxy.

In parallel to his spiritual conversion, he also began to develop his own distinct political ideas — not always the case in other political families like, say, the Cheneys. “I was not just going to have the same political views as my parents,” he says. Yes, he supported his mother in the 2024 Republican primary, but he did this, he insists, mostly to be a “good son.” All along, “I didn’t and was never going to be an advocate for a view that I did not have.” He repeats this point several times, almost like a mantra — a loyal son, but not a political disciple.

Yet when it comes to his views on immigration, critics from both the Left and the Right insist on seeing him as something other than his own man. He’s received his share of racist abuse from the toxic sewers of the online Right, notwithstanding his Christian faith and hard-line restrictionist views on immigration. “I just don’t let it bother me,” he says. “The internet’s not a real place necessarily. It is in some sense, but it’s also not. … I know who I am.”

As for one of the main sources of the racist sludge, Fuentes, Haley insists he’s barely watched the former’s show and doesn’t know his views. “I have no idea what to say about him or what to think about him,” Haley says. “And none of my friends really know about him, either.” I find that hard to believe, given Fuentes’s enormous influence among Zoomers. Still, it’s a relief to hear Haley add that racial animosity is out of the question for him: “As a Christian, I can’t have that. As a Christian, Jesus told me to love everybody, including groups of people who I don’t agree with.”

He goes on: “I get it from both sides. Someone who is biracial, only someone who is biracial can understand the feeling that … You can never feel one way or the other, because one way or the other, those two groups will never fully see you as them.” Christianity, it seems to me, serves as the bridge between these social realms for him — and could do so in an increasingly fractured American polity, if we’re lucky. 

The Left, meanwhile, reproaches him for backing an immigration policy that, if it had been in effect when his grandparents immigrated from India, would have barred them from entry — thus, in a sense, foreclosing his own existence. That line, too, leaves him unfazed. “It’s not 1969,” he shrugs. “It’s just not. We have a different country. We have a different set of circumstances.” It’s reasonable, then, to “adapt” and to “have different policies.”

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In 2025, “we have lawlessness, we have crime, we have unemployment. We have all these issues. So my first thought isn’t, ‘Well, what happened in the past, and how could we have changed the past?’ Because we’re not living in the past. We’re living right now. And so my thought is, ‘What can we do to stop the lawlessness, the unemployment, the housing crisis?’ ”

The 21st-century economy, he worries, won’t produce enough of the kind of high-wage jobs that defined middle-class prosperity in his parents’ and grandparents’ time. If the future is scarce service-sector jobs, why import more unskilled labor to undercut already low wages for such work among native-born workers? “A lot of people are just going to lose their jobs. They’re just going to be sitting around without jobs. And the next thing you know, you’re going to have people saying, ‘We need UBI,’” or universal basic income.

The economic pressure on his generation, he fears, will compound existing trends toward loneliness and alienation, especially between Gen-Z men and women.

“The future of division in America,” he speculates, “is not going to be about race. It’s probably not going to be about income, although that is a big disparity. It’s going to be about gender. It’s going to be men on one side, women on the other. If you look at someone’s” — algorithmically curated — “‘For You’ page on TikTok or on Instagram, for a young man it’s going to be completely different from a young woman’s.”

Gen-Z women are veering sharply to the Left: an overwhelming majority just voted for Zohran Mamdani in New York City. Meanwhile, Gen-Z men like Haley are shifting to the Right, and even the very hard Right that sometimes plays out as crass misogyny online, thus deepening the mutual alienation of the sexes. Yet, Haley wonders, it might not be as hopeless as all that, because both parties are responding to the same set of frustrations: “They’re tired of modernity. They’re tired of technology. All of this modernity is not natural to them.”

What both sexes desperately need, he says, is time together — in person. “They’re being more anti-social,” he observes of his cohort. “Their attention spans are getting shorter. So they only see what’s on the phone. That means that in terms of race, if all you see about a certain race is what you see on your phone, you’re going to have that view of them. If all you see about a certain gender is on your phone, you’re going to think that about them.”

He adds: “But make no mistake, the future of Gen Z, regardless of its men or women, is nationalist.” When I ask him whom he prefers among the suspected contenders for the 2028 Republican nomination, he suggests that JD Vance comes closest but says the vice president needs to “somehow work on his charisma, aura, and likability.” And if the immediate slate of political contenders on the Right aren’t up to the task, Nalin Haley is prepared to enter the arena himself.

“I want someone to fight for me,” he says. “And if no one’s fighting for me, then I’m going to fight for myself and those around me who are suffering.” His anger is often palpable. At times, it’s discomfiting. It’s also, I must admit, at least partly justified. Mere hectoring moralism, without more, will do little to assuage it. Reforming the material substrate beneath that generational rage should be the foremost task of both parties. 

Freedom of movement, multiculturalism, global economic openness, and affirmation of the historically marginalized: these are the core principles that have become synonymous with the Brahmin Left’s vision of progressive capitalism, and which California’s particular fusion of elite and activist driven politics has done so much to shape.

The problem for Democrats pining for a Golden State hero to slay Trumpism is that the strength of these convictions is indelibly tied up with a record of aloof misrule and beguiling hypocrisy.  While some state Democrats have been in an uproar this week over Newsom’s proposed budget cuts, the state’s deep-seated economic challenges extend far beyond decisions over any single social program. Since Arnold Schwarzenegger left the Governor’s office in 2011, Democrats have overwhelmingly dominated California’s state politics, enjoying a “supermajority” in the state legislature free of Republican influence for over twelve years. With 43 of California’s 52 congressional districts in their hands, they have also shifted the poles of Democratic politics from the Northeast and Midwest to the West Coast.

Some progressives might assume this performance is a tribute to uncompromising values and smart party-building. Yet in this period, California’s image as a beacon for those seeking reinvention and the American Dream has been gradually but unmistakably sullied, a challenge Newsom’s second term in office is unlikely to reverse despite his sudden interest in slashing red tape around development.

For the world’s fourth largest economy, the state’s major indicators of development don’t inspire much confidence. Nearly a third of Californians live in or near the threshold of poverty, and nearly a quarter of the U.S. homeless population lives in California. The future isn’t bright for the state’s youth, either. One 2023 report on educational attainment placed California in the bottom half, far below most other states dominated by Democrats.

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Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassallo

And the “California Exodus,” first identified in the early 1990s, shows few signs of abating. The UnHerd contributor Joel Kotkin, a former Bill Clinton supporter, has blamed California’s woes on a green, liberal “gentry” motivated by a suspicion of development and expensive energy policies. Thronged, purportedly, by self-serving public sector unions, NIMBY lobbies, and zealous climate activists, California’s Democratic Party has succumbed to its worst instincts around managing its existing coalition. With a monopoly on state power, it has rewarded inertia while amplifying a caricature-prone conception of social justice divorced from the very real material hardships of the working-class.

Kotkin’s unsparing portrait is undoubtedly meant to provoke progressives who sincerely believe California is a policy leader and agenda-setter for the Democratic party. Many would proudly contend that, with an assist from the party’s delegation in the Pacific Northwest, California Democrats have the set bar for regulating carbon emissions and extending protections to minorities, and that they are focused on improving wages in California’s all important hospitality sector. If the state’s affordable housing crisis is less than excusable, they would add, at least Newsom and his allies are waking up to the issue.

This apologia fails to appreciate that when national voters think of the merits of one-party rule under Democrats, they now turn to California’s underwhelming performance. And the disenchantment cuts across the ideological spectrum. Cultural moderates and blue-collar conservatives believe the party’s priorities are elitist and dogmatic, while Left-wing populists see the state as ground zero for government capture by Big Tech.

The air of elitism cannot be overstated. Too often, support for California’s progressivism, both within the state and from afar, betrays the exact dynamic Kotkin and like-minded critics take issue with: the entitled sense of “stewardship” that drives the modern Democratic Party’s approach to governance. Rather than focus on broadening the pathways to middle-class prosperity and setting bold targets for poverty reduction, California Democrats appear to be in the business of merely managing economic insecurity through means-tested programs like food assistance. Judging by the numbers, they haven’t succeeded, despite plenty of legislation attesting to their support for active government.

It wasn’t always this way. Between the original Progressive Era and the early postwar boom, California had a competitive two party-system inflected by agrarian populism, anti-monopoly politics, and a growing trade union movement. The Second World War and federal New Deal policies rapidly industrialized the state, consolidating California’s status as a cultural, economic, and political counterweight to the East Coast and a place with expanding potential. Despite some hotbeds of hardline conservatism, California overall seemed to testify to the efficacy and popularity of strong government and public investment. Indeed, its extraordinary growth and the population’s sense of upward mobility seemed largely driven by the New Deal order.

But the former governor Jerry Brown transformed West Coast progressivism. Big developmentalist projects and courtship of the working-class gave way to a watered-down version of “New Left” autonomy, wellness culture, and (often superficial) ecological consciousness. While the Golden State’s notorious smog eventually improved as a result of stronger environmental standards, prospects for the working-class were less encouraging.

Since then, California’s stark economic inequality has, for all intents and purposes, become a Democratic problem. Economic progressives point with good reason to anti-government, budget-slashing Republicans in Congress as a major reason for America’s pockmarked welfare state and wealth inequality. But the fact is that in deep-blue California there is no obstructionist opposition party to blame for its limited horizons. Indeed, although Trump noticeably improved his margins there in the 2024 election, the state GOP is essentially a rump party (ostracized for its aggressive stance on restricting immigrants, yes, but also a victim of its own chosen irrelevance).

This inconvenient fact of one-party rule is beginning to bear down on other California Democrats hoping to lead their party out of the wilderness. While Newsom still enjoys the highest name recognition at the national level, the evolving situation might be best described as the Ro Khanna dilemma, in which aspiring party insurgents are tethered to the very upscale, Brahmin Left constituencies they must distance themselves from. Since winning his first House term in 2016, Khanna has built a profile as both an “economic patriot” who advocates for industrial policy and a sometime-adversary of monopoly power, particularly in regard to the tech industry. He co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign, and has become a prominent interlocutor between the party establishment and progressive activists. His near ubiquitous media presence during Trump’s first six months back in office suggests he is either planning to run for president or play progressive kingmaker in the hopes of catapulting himself to the VP slot.

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LA's dreams went up in flames

By Joel Kotkin

Yet Khanna also represents the richest congressional district in the United States — a symbol of just how comfortable the once-Republican dominated upper-class are with Democrats, and how much the once-populist Democratic Party has ingratiated itself among America’s 21st century oligarchs and cultural elites.

That image of following the preferences of society’s richest will be hard to shake. Many progressive Democrats still like to think of themselves as New Deal-style social democrats focused on workers’ interests. Yet as Trump’s “triple-trending counties” prove, many parts of the country don’t see them that way. Fair or not, overcoming that perception is the main task for the Democrats. The question is whether the party’s would-be leaders have the stamina and authenticity to do so.

As Khanna illustrates, however, it will take Trumpian levels of chutzpah for elite progressives to convincingly run against their ossified establishment. Whatever his true convictions, Khanna seems unlikely to transform into a veritable tribune of the left behind, whether they reside in California or Western Pennsylvania. Needless to say, the odds of the same happening to Newsom are even more remote.

That’s not to say a healthy intraparty rebellion couldn’t ignite further in California. But given the state’s reputation for dysfunction and drift, Democrats desperate for new blood and new ideas might reconsider the faith they once put in their California delegation. Jejune fantasies of a “Left coast” paradise can no longer distract from the hard truth: In the age of Trump, Progressive California has been a drag on building real working-class power.

It just goes to show that the Biden-era policies dogging the country now were shaped by a sort of temporary insanity, where even moderate Democrats abandoned long-held beliefs to avoid charges of bigotry or associations with Trumpism.

But there’s a serious danger in attributing Joe Biden’s border chaos more to ideology than cowardice. The Biden administration leaned into immigration as a cultural signifier to rack up virtue signal points and stave off charges of bigotry. The result was a precarious new shadow society of migrants, and few good options to address it.

We know that Biden wasn’t a hardened open-borders ideologue. Nor was his vice president, Kamala Harris, at one point charged with addressing the root causes of the migrant surge (a mission that came to naught). Mainstream Democrats wanted higher levels of immigration, to be sure, but Biden and his more lucid colleagues mostly didn’t expect the border to be flooded like it was after Biden rolled back Trump-era policies like “Remain in Mexico,” under which would-be asylum seekers were required to file their cases in Mexico, rather than make the trek to the US frontier. The Bidenites believed the costs of their anti-Trump virtue signaling would be worth the benefits.

To put the numbers in perspective, net migration during Biden’s tenure exceeded 8 million people. It was the largest surge in American history, and the most rapid since 1850. That means Biden added the entire population of New York City to the United States in just four years; or two Delawares to the country every single year of his presidency. There are fewer residents in my home state of Wisconsin — which has a population of 6 million — than migrants who moved to America under Biden.

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For Democrats who counted on winning re-election in 2024, this was not the plan. The party’s genuine ideologues were surely pleased, but the Biden administration drastically reduced migration as it became clear that a continued surge would harm the party in 2024. The truth is that many key decision makers in the Biden administration legitimately didn’t understand that loosening restrictions on migration would be such a powerful magnet for people to come to America.

That, of course, reflects gross incompetence. During a 2021 reporting trip to northern Mexico, I asked a group of Haitian migrants who’d mostly come from stable lives in places like Argentina and Chile why they left those countries to sleep on the cartel-infested streets of Matamoros, waiting for a chance to cross. They said they wanted the American Dream.

I relayed that story to a prominent Left-wing politician at the time, who seemed dumbfounded. “Do they know what it’s like to be poor in the United States?” the person wondered.

Those migrants knew exactly what it would be like. WhatsApp messages from friends and relatives who came first had convinced them to fork over hefty fees to cartel smugglers, risk life and limb crossing through passages like the Darien Gap, and then live in the shadows of US society on a hope and a prayer that dubious asylum cases would turn out alright in several years. If not, they could always melt into the background of a sanctuary city.

So what does any of this have to do with cancel culture?

Peak Woke was a strange time. Presidential hopefuls swapped out “Latino” for “Latinx,” Aziz Ansari’s mild sexual exploits became national news, and feminists organized a boycott of Tampax over a joke. The consequences were, of course, more serious. From malicious government censorship to grave media blunders, a chill ultimately settled over politics and culture.

This is why, in 2019, Kamala Harris pledged to publicly fund gender transitions for prisoners and detained illegal immigrants. It’s why “Scranton Joe” Biden himself supported previously radical trans policies. In Peak Woke, Democrats believed it would be politically worse for them not to back these ideas because interest groups, journalists, and activists were itching to call them bigots.

On immigration, the cynical political calculus of every Democrat running in 2020 was to be positioned as Trump’s antithesis. “Biden Pledges to Dismantle Trump’s Sweeping Immigration Changes,” read an NPR headline. “Biden Will Stop the Border Wall and Loosen Immigration Again,” blared Politico. “Immigrants have always made us stronger as a nation — our diversity has always been our greatest strength. Donald Trump doesn’t get that,” tweeted Biden in October 2019.

As the centrist candidate in the Democratic primary, Biden actively sprinted away from his prior positions on illegal immigration. He had to deal with headlines like this one from CNN: “Joe Biden Once Said a Fence Was Needed to Stop ‘Tons’ of Drugs from Mexico” and this one from Politico: “Biden Under Fire for Mass Deportations Under Obama.”

In December of 2019, Vox noted, “Biden has struggled to answer questions in several recent debates about Obama’s more controversial policies on immigration enforcement, which included record-high levels of deportations and were often criticized by activists.”

At the time, in the fevered days of the #AbolishICE movement, now making a comeback on the Left, virtually no immigration enforcement mechanism was considered humane by activists and outside groups. “There will not be another foot of wall constructed on my administration,” Joe Biden pledged in 2020, commenting on perhaps the most basic piece of infrastructure imaginable. This became a massive pull factor for newcomers. As a Red Cross worker in Mexico explained to me in 2020, migrants heard Biden was not as “drastic” as Trump, and they were taking their chances accordingly.

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Trump’s deportation bust

By Juan David Rojas

David Leonhardt explained what happened after Biden took office in a groundbreaking retrospective for The New York Times last year. “Several factors caused the surge, starting with President Biden’s welcoming immigration policy during his first three years in office,” he wrote. “Offended by Donald J. Trump’s harsh policies — including the separation of families at the border — Mr. Biden and other Democrats promised a different approach.”

“After taking office, his administration loosened the rules on asylum and other immigration policies, making it easier for people to enter the United States,” reported Leonhardt. “Some have received temporary legal status while their cases [went] through backlogged immigration courts. Others have remained without legal permission.” According to numbers tracked by Syracuse University, the asylum backlog at the end of the Biden administration was nearly 4 million active cases, with the average wait time stretching well more than a year long.

Love Trump or hate him, a surge of 8 million migrants in four years is no easy situation to address. And as the Biden-Harris campaign ultimately discovered, voters demanded that the next president address it, Democratic or Republican. So here we are, with a massive new population of aspiring Americans, who are living in precarious conditions legally and socially, and an economy of employers and consumers ever-more tied to their cheap labor.

It should be obvious that Biden and “career prosecutor” Harris weren’t on an ideological crusade to replace the native population of the United States. But elite Democrats also wanted to win elections above all else. This is why when the vibes were anti-Trump, they did everything they could to counter him, both to avoid the minefield of Peak Woke cancel culture and to rack up virtue points. It’s also why Biden’s policies and rhetoric changed as soon as election year rolled around and the polling looked bad.

Democrats painted themselves into a corner on immigration. They feared the fringe to the detriment of the American majority—and ultimately, to their own party’s detriment. The immigration chaos Americans endure now is a direct consequence of cancel culture or Peak Woke, and the way “responsible” Democrats caved into these forces, afraid to look like they cared too much about overseeing an orderly immigration system.

In the end, the officials graced me with clemency, thanks in part to advocacy by the boat’s captain. “Not long ago, they would have ignored you, but things have changed”, the captain later explained, referring to Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.

The experience showed me first-hand how Latin-American countries enforce their borders when confronted with mass migration — and taught me a valuable lesson about cross-border travel. Had I been deported, however, the penalty would only have been a speedy return to the United States — as opposed to life inside a “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador: the fate of hairdressers and landscapers — in addition to hardened criminals — under President Trump.

Many in MAGA World seem to believe that no corrective is too severe, no countermeasure too cruel, in response to the border chaos inherited from Joe Biden. Yet more than 100 days into his second term, Trump’s deportation effort is a failure on its own terms — notwithstanding the shock-and-awe impression.

Make no mistake: the border was in a catastrophic state under the previous administration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of illegal immigrants swelled by approximately 10 million during Biden’s term. The parameters under which irregular visitors could claim asylum were stretched to such a point that the term “refugee” lost all meaning, leading to a backlog of 3.2 million claimants. Industrial-scale smuggling boomed, and vital public services across the United States groaned under the weight of mass migration.

Ordinary Americans, including many Latinos, warned that economic migrants were abusing an overly generous asylum regime — a reality I observed firsthand in 2022 and 2023 as an immigration case worker. Finally, in June 2024, Biden stanched the flow somewhat with an executive, prompting a decline in the numbers. Yet under Team Biden, removals from within the homeland dropped to about half of what they had been in Trump’s first term, about 50,000 a year.

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The progressive case for Trump’s deportations

By Juan David Rojas

Confronted with this reality, an overwhelming majority of voters expressed support for cutting illegal immigration and ramping up deportations. On the former (cutting the flow), Trump has unquestionably delivered. By March, border crossings fell to just 7,000, a quarter-century low. This has been, by far, the most unambiguous success of an otherwise confused presidency.

Mass deportations, however, are a different story.

Thus far, the pace of total deportations is lower than it was under Biden in 2024. True, this is in part a function of fewer crossings. But there is no question that many of those who entered in recent years are still here. While credible data on interior removals under Trump II have yet to be released, it’s plausible that the deportation figure hovers around 50,000. It’s far more than under Biden, to be sure, but still a far cry from the 120,000 deported at the same point in 2009 by Barack Obama (earning Obama the moniker “Deporter in Chief” from progressives).

Having failed at delivering big numbers, Trump officials have apparently resorted to spectacular stunts and sadism as substitutes.

In March, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans to Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s so-called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a latter-day gulag. Like many others, I gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, assuming that a Department of Justice renowned for prosecuting gang members couldn’t possibly send civilians with no criminal sentences to a prison built for MS13 and Barrio 18’s most hardened members.

Except, the White House continues to withhold the names and purportedly heinous crimes of those deported to Bukele’s CECOT, treating them as state secrets. Most of the inmates were designated as “alien terrorists” and stripped of the ability to contest that designation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — the White House’s ridiculous theory of the case being that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is conducting an “invasion” of the US homeland at the behest of the Caracas regime. Under the terms of the agreement with El Salvador, outsourced detainees are imprisoned indefinitely in the CECOT. No trial, not even proper sentencing.

On 20 March, CBS published the names of the imprisoned Venezuelans from a leaked government document. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times ran all 238 names through public databases in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, finding serious accusations or convictions for just 32 of the deportees. Another two dozen were accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses, such as trespassing and speeding. The remainder had no criminal records in either the United States or abroad; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official also admitted in a sworn declaration that “many” of those deported had no criminal records. Deported, to be clear, to a gang confinement center. For life.

In deciding if someone is a member of Tren de Aragua, Trump officials placed inordinate emphasis on tattoos. A separate government document obtained by the Times, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide”, uses an eight-point system to identify gang members, with tattoos yielding four points. One such case with no criminal record was that of Arturo Suarez Trejo, a landscaper and urban musician with numerous tattoos who was detained while filming a music video.

Two others with no criminal records — Francisco García Casique, a barber, and Neri Alvarado, a bakery-shop worker — had tattoos of family members’ names, one of which included a ribbon for autism awareness. As Ronna Rísquez, the author of a 2003 book on Tren de Aragua, has noted, the group doesn’t use tattoos as markers of affiliation — in marked contrast to the likes of MS13 and Barrio 18.

Given that ICE arrested 976 gang members in February, it’s fair to describe the vetting process behind the Salvadoran deportations as incompetent, and that’s being generous. A charter flight even arrived with eight women — a surprise that proved too extreme for even Bukele, who harangued his American counterparts for violating the terms of their agreement. The women were ultimately returned to the United States, with many claiming that officials asked passengers to sign affidavits confessing membership in Tren de Aragua.

Beyond Trumpian chaos, the GOP’s characteristic incoherence appears to have contributed to the Salvadoran debacle. Days into Trump’s presidency, Venezuela’s Maduro regime acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in the country. Furious, Miami hawks in Congress threatened to withhold their votes from the slim GOP majority. The White House immediately caved, leading to an abrupt end to Venezuelan repatriations and the subsequent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The plight of CECOT deportees has since been a propaganda boon for Maduro, as thousands have poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador.

The Trump administration also wrongfully deported the Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, though his case is a complicated one. Kilmar’s family business was allegedly extorted by Barrio 18 in his home country. Had he solicited asylum when he first traveled to the United States, he could have claimed a credible fear of persecution. Instead, ICE nearly deported him in 2019. By that point, Kilmar wasn’t eligible for asylum, but a judge granted him “withholding of removal” on the grounds that his life was still at risk in El Salvador.

Kilmar’s alleged ties to MS13 remain unproved, and he complied with yearly check-ins at ICE. Yet the reality is that the case is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate. It’s reasonable to question Abrego García’s current immigration status; by 2019, his family business was defunct and the threat of Barrio 18 diminished. At the same time, he should have been eligible for residency through his marriage to a US citizen. Ironically, recipients of withheld removal like him are ineligible for permanent residence but can receive work permits.

None of this excuses the Trump administration’s denial of due process to Kilmar Abrego, let alone hundreds of apparently nonviolent offenders condemned to life in a foreign gulag. Surprising as it may be to MAGA, the Fifth Amendment entitles noncitizens to due process. Considering that the president is floating sending US citizens to the CECOT, and is attempting to deport legal residents over anti-Israel op-eds — it’s fair to wonder if Trump is bent on importing Maduro’s and Bukele’s governance model, even as he deports their citizens.

Instead of governing by decree like Maduro or Bukele, the White House could pursue long-term, durable reform in the legislature. A reasonable compromise with Democrats could be to close the loophole in the Immigration and Nationality Act which allowed virtually any border-crosser to apply for asylum under Biden. In exchange, Republicans could acquiesce to the regularization of spouses of US citizens, a move which would help accelerate deportations by annulling the ongoing issue of custody for the children of illegal spouses.

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The future belongs to Right-wing progressives

By Mary Harrington

Unfortunately, much of the GOP is currently committed to ending asylum outright. It’s similarly telling that Christian conservatives justify imprisoning the fathers of US citizens in CECOT. The fact that immigration enforcement was more or less abrogated during most of Biden’s term doesn’t justify violating constitutional amendments. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s once-vaunted approval on immigration is in free fall, particularly among Latinos, a key segment of the Republicans’ new base.

Contrary to much of the party’s narrative about serving a “multiracial working class”, the GOP appears bent on alienating previously die-hard supporters, such as Venezuelan-Americans. Unlike MAGA partisans, the broader working class has little interest in terrorizing migrants for the sake of likes on the X app.

For their part, Democrats would do well to acknowledge that popular support for restrictionism is an inevitable consequence of mass illegal immigration. The fact that migrants’ own countries of origin have experienced the same trend — as I learned on my trip to Peru — suggests that more is at play than Left-of-center parties “accepting conservative frames on immigration”, as progressives worry. Even in Left-wing Mexico, 55 percent oppose allowing entry to foreign migrants.

For Left and Right, the Obama administration’s common-sense mix of pathways to citizenship and overwhelming enforcement was a key source of its appeal with Latino and working-class voters. It should, moreover, give Democrats pause that Biden’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — abandoning of Obama’s winning formula subsequently enabled both of Trump’s ballot-box victories. In their Fox News-distorted reality, Republicans also fail to recognize that the “Kenyan-born” Obama respected due process, even as he deported almost 3 million in his first term.

The mistake of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats alike is that they each fail to understand that their priorities are comparably unpalatable to most Americans. So long as both factions remain beholden to the preferences of nativist incels and cosmopolitan elitists, respectively, they will continue to sow maximal cruelty, exploitation, and sectarian hatred among the very people they claim to represent.

No, in fact, it’s complicated. In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right like Carlson make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists who use “culture” as a synonym for “race.” But race, however defined, is a biological concept, while nationality is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA, but nobody is born speaking Japanese or Slovenian and preprogrammed with a particular nation’s culture and customs and tastes in cuisine.

As more countries become melting pots, thanks to the combination of immigration with assimilation, more nations like the United States will be made up of people who share a common culture, but not common ancestors or a common resemblance.

“Nation” and “state” are sometimes used interchangeably. But they must be different things, otherwise the term “nation-state” would be redundant, like nation-nation or state-state. “State” refers to an organized, independent territorial political community. “Nation” refers to a social community, defined by nonpolitical markers of some kind.

In nation-states, the national community and the political citizenry overlap, though not completely. But in addition to nation-states, there are multinational states with two or more nationalities — Anglophones and Francophones in Canada, Flemings and Walloons in Belgium. And there are stateless nations, like the Kurds and the Palestinians.

Whether you belong to a particular state’s citizenry or a particular national community is an objective question. It is sometimes said that to be an American is to believe in liberal democracy. No “American-ness” (extra-political cultural identity) exists, we are told, only “Americanism” (devotion to a particular political creed). But this gets both the American state and the American nation wrong.

There are three ways to become a citizen of the American state: to be born to one or more parents who are citizens; to become a naturalized citizen after a lengthy process of legal immigration; or to be born on US territory (according to a contested Supreme Court decision). A foreign national who tells a US custom agent, “I believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence” isn’t immediately granted citizenship.

Nor is there any ideological or credal test in the oath that immigrants must swear to become US citizens; it is a loyalty oath to the government, the state half of the nation-state compound, not a confession of a secular creed: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

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Can Trump make McKinley great again?

By Michael Lind

Is there an American “nationality”, a cultural majority, distinct from the US citizenry? For all of the talk about “American exceptionalism”, the relationship between state and nation in the United States isn’t different in kind from that in other modern countries.

Contemporary countries are shaped by what might be called the Three D’s: decolonization, disestablishment, and desegregation. Most of the countries represented in the United Nations today, including the United States, were created from the partition of a few multinational empires — overseas colonial empires, like the British and French empires, and overland dynastic empires, like those ruled by the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanovs, whose domains were held together under new communist management until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

The newly independent fragments usually have been more ethnically homogeneous than the multinational empire from which they were carved. In most post-imperial states, the numerically largest community — European settlers in the Americas and Australia and New Zealand, the largest tribe in the former dynastic empire — has lent its language to the successor state, and sometimes its name. Poland is the land of the ethnic Poles.

All contemporary nation-states have ethnic minorities as well as ethnic majorities. Not all citizens of Poland are ethnic Poles. The disestablishment and privatization of religion and the abolition of formal racial or ethnic segregation guarantee national minorities civil and political rights equal to those of members of the national cultural majority — in theory, if not always in practice.

The result in modern nation-states is the replacement of a “thick” conception of national identity — uniting language, culture, religion, and biological race — with a thinner but genuine national identity defined chiefly by a shared language and a few customs and cultural references that are shared by most citizens, notwithstanding their religious beliefs and ancestry.

This emphasis on language and customs in defining national identity is a return to the historic norm. For most of human history, settled populations were similar in appearance and ancestry to their nearest neighbors, who were sometimes their greatest enemies. You couldn’t tell which tribe people belonged to merely by looking at them. But whether they spoke your language, and whether they spoke it with an accent or not, could tell you whether they belonged to your community or were outsiders.

In the biblical Book of Judges, the Gileadites identified their enemies, the Ephraimites, by forcing suspects to pronounce the word “shibboleth” (an ear of wheat or rye), which the Ephraimites mispronounced as “siboleth”. Hence, the term “shibboleth” for a marker of group identity.

Membership in the cultural nation is defined not only by the language you speak, but also by the language in which you think, the Muttersprache (mother tongue), acquired in most cases in childhood.  Most citizens in a nation-state are members of the linguistic and cultural majority, but belonging to it isn’t and shouldn’t be a condition of citizenship. It is no insult to say that the immigrants Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, and Albert Einstein became great US citizens while remaining cultural Germans.

Of course, outsiders who look no different from insiders can learn to talk like insiders as well. For this reason, in the past, ethnic boundaries among tribes of similar appearance were sometimes reinforced by physical alterations like circumcision, in the case of Jewish men and boys, or by distinctive clothing, ornaments, or hairstyles.

In many premodern Muslim and Christian societies, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars or other badges, turbans or conical hats, or other distinguishing apparel. The Manchu conquerors of Qing China forced men who belonged to the subjugated Han Chinese majority to identify themselves by wearing “queues” or pigtails, on penalty of being beheaded if they refused. Among other things, the end of invidious religious and ethnic discrimination in modern nation-states means that all citizens are free to dress alike and wear the same hairstyles, if they choose.

The lands of European settlement, from the time of Columbus onward, have been exceptions to the historic rule that the cultural nations in a particular region tend to be similar in appearance and ancestry. The Americas from the beginning have been radically diverse, with European colonists living alongside Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, and, in some places, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other non-European contract laborers.

The independence of former European colonies in the Western Hemisphere — beginning with the secession of the United States from the British empire in 1776, and followed by the independence of Latin-American countries from Spain and Portugal — initially produced Herrenvolk (master-race) regimes, majoritarian or authoritarian. The descendants of European settlers lorded it over Native Americans, people of African and Asian descent, and mixed-race populations.

In the New World, racial classifications have reflected ruling-class strategies, not anthropological realities. For example, where European settler populations were outnumbered, as in some Caribbean islands, settler elites sometimes pursued a divide-and-rule strategy in which non-European populations were split up into multiple categories, like “mulatto,” “octaroon,” and “quadroon,” which distinguished varying degrees of mixed European and African ancestry.

In the Old South, however, all states, save for South Carolina and Mississippi, had white majorities. For strategic reasons, the Southern planter class adopted a strict binary black-white binary based on the “one-drop” rule: anyone with any African ancestry, no matter how minor, was defined as “negro” or “black.”

This definition benefited the planter elite in two ways. First, the one-drop rule maximized the number of unfree workers defined as slaves and, later, as blacks under segregation, by including many people who wouldn’t otherwise have been considered black, and might even have been considered white, in other Western Hemisphere countries like Brazil. At the same time, the fear on the part of poor Southern whites of being defined as black, losing their status and even their freedom, gave them a vested interest in the maintenance of white supremacy, which the Southern ruling class invoked to avert populist uprisings and democratic agitation by non-elite whites.

To be consistent, the US government should have stopped classifying Americans using the arbitrary categories of 19th-century racists at the same time in the 1960s that racial discrimination was outlawed. Tragically, most though not all black American leaders since the 1960s have rejected the idea of colorblind law in favor of a system of “affirmative action” or racial preferences, which can’t work unless all Americans were assigned to one of a few arbitrary “races”: black, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic or Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American (the precise list has varied with each census since the 1970s).

Since the 1970s, the proponents of “race-conscious remedies” to the legacies of historic American racism have found allies among American corporations, which can use racial tokenism to divert attention from their mistreatment of all workers, and American universities, which similarly have used racial quotas to divert attention from favoritism in admission for “legacies” (children of alumni, particularly big donors).

The premise of the existing system of racial classifications in the United States is that the races, or pseudo-races, are permanent. But in reality, the white-only “melting pot” that blended Anglo-American Protestant settlers with later waves of European “white ethnics” into a single generic white population has become a transracial melting pot, creating a mixed-race American majority with a common language and culture.

Today, 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958, and attitudes are now the same in the South as in the rest of the nation. Interracial marriage rose to 11% in 2020, from 3% five decades earlier, when the US Supreme Court struck down laws against it; among cohabiting (as opposed to married) couples, the figure is 1 in 5.

Among younger Americans, the ratio is greater. Nearly 1 in 3 “Asian” and “Hispanic” newlyweds, and 1 in 5 “black” newlyweds, has married someone of another “race.” The number is lowest among so-called non-Hispanic whites, around 15%, simply because this group remains the largest. One in 10 children born in the United States has parents of different officially defined “races.” Old-fashioned “race” thinkers like Ibram Kendi may insist that the “colorblind” ideal is itself a form of white supremacy. But for growing numbers of Americans, both native and immigrant, love is colorblind.

Progress, right? The problem is that the United States, like all other contemporary democratic nation-states, has below-replacement fertility, meaning its population will shrink without immigration. The combination of large-scale immigration with low native fertility means that in the United States, as in Europe, the share of the population made up of recent immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants balloons rapidly.

This wouldn’t necessarily seem to threaten the cultural majority, if immigrants assimilated quickly and painlessly to the language and culture of their new country. But it is a problem if large numbers of immigrants choose not to assimilate, or if they are discouraged from doing so. Assimilation does take time. And as the 1990s US Commission on Immigration Reform led by civil-rights pioneer Barbara Jordan noted, America’s engine of assimilation begins to break down when newcomers are piled on too rapidly.

At the same time, too many on the American Right underestimate the power of assimilation. From the 18^th century to the 21^st, anxieties that immigrant groups would never assimilate to the mainstream in America have been overblown. Irish-Catholic immigrants didn’t overthrow American democracy on behalf of the Bishop of Rome and his Jesuits. Today’s Mexican-American immigrants are assimilating to the mainstream at the same rate over several generations as did the European immigrants of the past, making a mockery of fears that they will turn the American Southwest into a Spanish-speaking Quebec.

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The only ethnic diasporas that have maintained their identities over time in the United States have been self-segregating sectarian communities, like the Amish and the Hasidim. Their numbers are so small that their self-segregation hasn’t caused significant problems, of the kind that would arise if a large share of the US citizenry formed a separatist religious enclave.

Then there are legal obstacles to assimilation. For most of American history, immigrants were assigned a race on coming to the United States. Scandinavian immigrants were assigned to white America; Haitian immigrants were assigned to black America. The combination of racial classifications with state laws against interracial marriage meant that “white” Italian Americans could marry “white” Polish Americans, but not black Americans.

The pan-racial categories of the US Census continue to be used to classify immigrants as well as natives. The results are frequently absurd. On arrival in the United States, immigrants from Denmark and Greece are assigned to the “non-Hispanic white” category, while immigrants from India, China, and the Philippines find themselves assigned to a fictitious “Asian and Pacific Islander” pseudo-race. Arab-Americans are treated as “non-Hispanic whites”, but some support the creation of a new, equally nonsensical category: Middle Eastern and North African, a fake official nationality that would include Arabs, Persians, and (to be consistent) Jews.

Proponents of affirmative action or “equity” or “DEI” want it to be legal to discriminate in college admissions and hiring against non-Hispanic whites, no matter how poor, in favor of “blacks” and “Hispanics”, no matter how rich. The beneficiaries of racial quotas, in addition to elite black and Hispanic Americans, include wealthy and well-educated immigrants — affluent professionals from West Africa, for example, or upper-class South Americans.

Unfortunately, the toxic interaction of America’s legacy racial categories with mass immigration promotes the idea that the important divide is not between Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races), but between so-called whites, blacks, so-called Hispanics, and so-called Asians. Like pan-Aryanism and pan-Africanism, these spurious racial categories never corresponded to any actual communities in the United States or anywhere else. Now that the American melting pot is creating a post-racial, post-ethnic cultural majority in the United States, it is time to abolish official racial classifications altogether.

The equation of race and nation by Right-wing racists and Left-wing multiculturalists is increasingly at odds with social reality. National identity in the future for the most part will be like national identity in the past — but with a post-racial twist. In the past, the members of a tribe usually sounded the same and looked alike. In today’s melting-pot nations, modified by waves of immigration, the members of the majority tribe will sound the same, even if they look different.

But there is a strong constitutional and moral case for limiting birthright citizenship. It’s the argument that led the Trump administration to issue an executive order that defines a new status quo: going forward, children of illegal aliens won’t receive recognition of their citizenship by the US Department of State or any other executive agency.

Start with the Constitution. The question of birthright citizenship goes back to the 14th Amendment, one of the three ratified in the immediate wake of the Civil War. The relevant portion reads: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” The phrase at issue is “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” (known as the jurisdiction clause). Proponents of birthright maintain that the phrase merely means subject to the laws and courts of the United States.

Yet the debates over the 1866 Civil Rights Act, the legislation that led to the 14th Amendment, as well as the principles of the American founding, suggest a different interpretation.

The 1866 act was meant to secure the full benefits of citizenship for recently freed slaves and their descendants — and all black citizens, for that matter. The law’s proponents were determined to convert it from legislation to constitutional text, thus insulating its protections from change by a future Congress. Hence, the 14th Amendment. This means that the legislative history of the 1866 act can help illuminate what the 14th Amendment was supposed to be all about.

The 1866 legislation’s citizenship clause read: “All persons born in the United States and not subject to any foreign power, excluding Indians not taxed, are hereby declared to be citizens of the United States.” A few months later, when the 14th Amendment was debated, the floor manager, Sen. Jacob Howard, described it as “simply declaratory of what I regard as the law of the land already”, namely, that “every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers.”

By the “law of the land already”, Howard meant the recently passed 1866 Civil Rights Act. The then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Lyman Trumbull, addressing an objection over the absence of the Civil Rights Act’s phrase “Indians not taxed” from the 14th Amendment, stated that it was obvious that Indians were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States “in the sense of owing allegiance solely to the United States”.

In such language from some of the 14th Amendment’s chief proponents, we can discern the outlines of an argument that the jurisdiction clause meant more than merely being subject to the law and courts on US soil. It had to do with a fundamental tenet of citizenship: loyalty or allegiance.

So how did we end up with the children of even illegal aliens receiving automatic citizenship? The US Supreme Court first addressed the meaning of the citizenship clause of the 14th Amendment in an 1898 case. It concerned the fate of Wong Kim Ark, a child of Chinese nationals who were permanent US residents. In a 6-2 decision drafted by Justice Horace Gray, the high court held that the common law was the proper interpretive guide to the US Constitution’s text. Since the common law mandated birthright citizenship — jus soli as opposed jus sanguine, “right of soil” instead of “right of blood” — the child was a citizen under the 14th Amendment.

To this day, the case remains the controlling precedent for the maximalist position on birthright citizenship, cited by sympathetic judges and law professors on both sides of the aisle. Yet the dissenting opinion, written by Chief Justice Melville Fuller, offers an interpretation of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause that is more consonant with American principles of just government than Justice Gray’s opinion.

Fuller argued that the common law couldn’t be the controlling authority, because in separating from the British Crown in 1776, the American colonists had elevated the principles of the Declaration of Independence over the common law. The common law of England contemplated subjects owing perpetual allegiance, rather than citizens of a government based on consent.

Fuller was right. The common law didn’t come up at all during the debate over the 14th Amendment. There were no references to Sir Edward Coke or to Blackstone, the eminent English authorities on common law, and the lawmakers were much more comfortable speaking of the interaction between the principles of America and her institutions than they were citing English precedents on jus soli.

They believed that the principles of the Declaration would control — and, where necessary, overrule — the common law of England. If human equality is a fact of nature, then nobody may rule another without their consent. All ought to enjoy their liberties and the pursuit of happiness alike. The existence of slavery, the ensuing crisis brought on by the conflicts between these principles and American practice, and the subsequent Civil War are the historical context for the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. American citizenship, defined constitutionally for the first time in the 1860s, was never based in blood. But crucially, it was never based in soil, either.

American citizenship was based on consent. Wong Kim Ark, then, should be overturned, and we should have a robust national debate about citizenship, immigration, and national allegiance. Congress is well within its enforcement powers under section 5 of the 14th Amendment to restrict birthright citizenship much more than it does currently.

Let’s start with two issues on which we might reach a broad national consensus: illegal immigration and birth tourism. It seems to go against common sense to allow a million or two immigrants to cross our southern border illegally and then to confer citizenship upon the children they may have here.

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Children of foreign soldiers born on US soil have always been excluded from birthright citizenship, in the same way as the children of ambassadors and diplomats. It’s controversial to call the flood of economic migrants of recent years a slow-moving invasion — but what of the subset of that group that constitute criminals, foreign spies, and terrorists? Does it redound to American national interest or civic health to confer citizenship on any children they may produce on US soil?

Is it prudent, let alone just, to allow wealthy foreigners from China or Russia to purchase birth-tourism packages costing as much as $100,000 and including a final-trimester hospital stay in Florida or California as well as a fresh US passport for the new babies? Should we be in the business of exporting tens of thousands of newly minted Americans every year, with all the attendant privileges and benefits, to the homelands of our foreign adversaries?

To be sure, the meaning of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause is contested. The prospects for overturning Wong Kim Ark any time soon are remote. But even under the Wong Kim Ark precedent, controlling emphasis was placed on the importance of Ark’s parents being “permanently domiciled” in the United States. Let’s update and apply that precedent to a world transformed by transportation technology in the ensuing 127 years. If you are not a lawful permanent resident, any children you may have in the United States are permanent residents with you, not automatic citizens.

The next step after Trump’s executive order will be to get the American people more involved, which means Congress should debate, openly and with great fanfare, the meaning of the 14th Amendment on the relationship between birth, citizenship, and government by consent. None of these issues is as settled or obvious as defenders of birthright citizenship insist.

Like other braceros, my grandfather was sprayed with DDT, a toxic pesticide, upon entering the United States — a ritual humiliation born of American paranoia about Mexican “disease”. Wages were low and often stolen, while housing and transportation conditions were inadequate or downright dangerous. The program also helped depress wages for local workers, and to undermine their organizing efforts. Among the braceros themselves, organizing was extremely difficult; it was easy to deport any ringleaders back to Mexico.

The experience of men like my grandfather impelled the old Left, Mexican-American civil-rights groups, and the labor movement to oppose guest-worker programs. That opposition should extend to modern-day equivalents, such as the H1B visa, which allows tech firms to import what amount to white-collar braceros — and which has become the subject of an ongoing civil war on the American Right.

It’s no surprise, then, that Right-wing opponents of the H1 scheme found an unlikely ally in Sen. Bernie Sanders. Back in 2007, Sanders’s skepticism of guest-worker visas led the Vermont socialist to vote against a Bush-era immigration-reform bill that would have expanded such programs. Neoliberal Democrats would weaponize that record against Sanders in his subsequent runs for the party’s presidential nomination.

Today, as the Democratic Party reckons with its dramatic failure in the November election, Left populists have the chance to take the lead in forging a pro-labor approach to immigration — and, perhaps, a grand bargain with the populist Right that imposes order at the border and ends exploitative visas, while extending citizenship to the immigrant workers who have toiled and lived in the United States for years and sometimes decades.

The history of US agricultural labor underscores the need for a more worker-focused approach than the one progressives in recent years have adopted. Agriculture is the largest economic sector that remains excluded from basic New Deal-era labor protections. While workers in most other sectors have a federally protected right to form unions to defend their mutual interests, agricultural laborers do not.

Crucially, Mexicans were exempted from the 1924 Immigration Act that ended the Ellis Island era of mass immigration — often cited by a number of immigration skeptics as their ideal law — precisely because agricultural employers in western states wanted to continue exploiting Mexican workers. The easy deportability of these migrants was a significant selling factor for agricultural employers, continuing a long tradition of employers preferring labor that is easier to exploit and get rid of.

This is the same pattern — do what the boss says or get deported — promoted by modern guest-worker programs. That pattern goes back to their bracero origins, which proved so popular among employers that it continued to grow long after the war had ended, and even as demobilized vets — such as a young Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers union, where I work — came home and went looking for work in the fields. It was only after a horrific accident involving an overcrowded employer-owned vehicle that killed more than 40 bracero farm workers in 1963 that the program came to an end.

Notably, within a year of its termination, the first successful effort to unionize US agricultural workers began with the UFW’s historic 1965 grape strike in Delano, California. The confidence that striking workers could no longer be easily replaced by braceros was indispensable.

This history echoes today in the H2A agricultural guest-worker program, which is also rife with abuse. Federal investigations have repeatedly uncovered everything from forced labor to employers stealing worker wages to make political contributions. Unlike the H1B visa, which nominally gives recipients a chance at becoming Americans, the non-immigrant H2A visa explicitly excludes agricultural guest workers from future citizenship.

Even worse, workers’ visas are entirely dependent on their employers, effectively allowing bosses to deport a worker at will, or to simply not renew the visa for the next harvesting season — the most convenient way to ensure any potential troublemaker asking about wages or workplace safety will never again set foot in America. Needless to say, the H2A scheme has exploded in size over the past decade, severely undercutting the wages and jobs of the US-citizen workers who still make up a significant share of our agricultural labor force.

Could populist conservatives end such abuse on their own? The short answer is no.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for the incoming Trump II administration, explicitly called for a “cap and phase-down” of H2A guest-worker visas with the aim of “increasing employment for Americans in the agricultural sector”. Yet Big Agriculture, a much more powerful Republican constituency, wants to see H2A expanded and made cheaper by lowering wages.

As it is, the H2A visa program is already uncapped, meaning there is no legal limit to how many workers it can bring in. The only limits are the costs it imposes on employers required to provide housing, food, and transportation, with growers frequently cutting corners to keep costs down and ignoring the requirement to first offer jobs to local workers.

Still, employers are bent on expanding the H2A program to year-round industries, and worst of all, they want to reduce the federally mandated wages they must pay these workers. In a bitter irony, the prospect of mass deportations is now being used by some industry lobbyists as just the latest excuse to expand the H2A program, saying, in effect: If you get rid of one cheap foreign workforce, we’ll need another one to replace it.

Shockingly, the agricultural lobby, with help from several Republican attorneys general, has even opposed a Biden administration rule requiring seat belts on company vehicles transporting H2A workers. This includes the attorneys general of Idaho and Washington state, where deadly bus crashes involving seatbelt-less company vehicles have left dozens of H2A workers dead.

Unbelievable as it may seem to many conservatives, it was the Biden administration that sought to protect jobs of American workers against displacement by H2A workers. In sharp contrast, it was the first Trump administration that accommodated Big Ag’s priorities on H2A, cutting their wages and thus making it cheaper to displace American workers. Donald Trump even granted H2A workers a special exemption to his Title 42 executive order closing down the border, making sure H2A workers could continue to enter the country during the pandemic.

Put another way: the populist Right, on its own, doesn’t have the influence within the Republican coalition to restrict programs like H1B and H2A in the face of powerful corporate constituencies like Big Tech and Big Ag. The populist Right’s arguments against mass migration may have helped the GOP make historic gains among working-class voters, including with many Latinos who compete in the same economic sectors with new arrivals. But that doesn’t change the fact that Right-wing populists lack the muscle to take on Silicon Valley’s preferences on H1B or Big Ag’s preferences on H2A. The nonstop pilgrimages of tech barons such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago will see to that.

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Thus, any serious effort to reform the legal immigration system will need to attract progressives like Sanders who understand the negative impact of guest-worker programs on American workers of all races. Trade unions would be critical in forging such a bipartisan coalition. However, labor has one major demand from any immigration reform effort: an amnesty for existing undocumented workers.

This demand is born out of the most basic duty of any union: loyalty to members. Every union has a legal duty to represent every member of a bargaining unit, regardless of immigration status. The threat of deportation isn’t theoretical to labor. Organizers know from bitter experience that workers who are afraid of getting deported are harder to organize. Many have seen first-hand how the immigration status of outspoken worker leaders is used to silence or even deport them.

Expanding union density in the 21st century, then, requires taking into account the interests of undocumented workers. While employers may be happy to exploit these workers indefinitely without ever extending citizenship rights, the labor movement is locked in as a powerful constituency in favor of a pathway to citizenship. This disposition unavoidably complicates the populist Right’s efforts to consolidate into a coherent pro-worker project.

Despite this, there remains the outline of a deal here for those paying attention: legislation that restricts exploitative guest-worker programs such as H1B, H2B, and H2A, while extending a pathway to citizenship to the undocumented workers who are already here. Such a compromise could be combined with E-Verify provisions to effectively ensure a closed labor market going forward and assuage concerns on the Right about spurring further migration.

This would be an immigration platform designed to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street, and one which the emerging populist center of American politics can rally behind. Call it the American Workers First Act, with four major provisions: restrictions on guest-worker programs; amnesty for undocumented workers without criminal records; mandatory E-verify going forward; and substantial investments in US workforce development.

This is admittedly a long shot in the current political climate. Any deal would need to include a sizable enough amnesty for Democrats to turn on powerful constituencies that would oppose any restriction to guest-worker programs, such as Silicon Valley. In turn, any deal that includes the dreaded A-word, would have to overcome significant skepticism on the Right, and likely necessitate other significant concessions to restrictionist priorities.

But despite the obvious challenges, it’s easy to see what both the populist Right and the labor Left have to gain from such a bargain. For the Right, America would keep the predominantly Latino (and mostly socially conservative) longtime residents already living here, while compelling them to learn English and pay taxes. In exchange, restrictionists would get to slash the number of migrants coming legally for the first time since 1924.

For the labor Left, such a deal is first and foremost a pathway to citizenship for very deserving and hard-working people. Extending full citizenship and labor rights to the undocumented workers who make up a large share of the workforce in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality, caregiving, and construction also creates new organizing opportunities. Many Democrats would no doubt still strongly oppose a compromise that went against the interests of major corporations. But the political pressure to seize the long-awaited opportunity for a pathway to citizenship would be unavoidable.

Could any Democratic senator really tell her constituents that she voted to keep the Mexican grandmothers undocumented in order for Elon Musk to continue bringing in tech workers on demand from India?

This is the conversation we should be having. The days of relying on business interests to deliver Republican votes for immigration reform are clearly gone, and have been since at least 2013. For a labor Left looking to protect and empower our undocumented members, it is the populist Right we should be negotiating with.

An immigration policy truly concerned with the interests of American workers would recognize a highly exploitable permanent immigrant underclass as a threat to American jobs and wages — one best eliminated by extending the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, not by the cruel and unworkable fantasy of removal. American workers would be the biggest winners of a compromise which would leave them able to compete on a fair and level playing field.

Google, Amazon and Microsoft all rely on a funnel of such workers; Meta is classified as “H-1B dependent” over its unusually high foreign visa workforce. And as layoffs hit Silicon Valley last year, the tech industry ramped up applications to bring in even more foreign personnel.

But in a moment of political realignment and worker uprising, a reckoning may be coming.

In October, a jury found that Cognizant engaged in systemic discrimination against American workers, in favour of thousands of South Asian workers on H-1B visas. The trial unearthed damaging facts about the system — namely, that Cognizant gamed the visa lottery process with fake applications and sought to depress wages with visa-dependent foreign talent.

“The entire business model is built on the back of cheap Indian labor,” said one former director at the firm. The people who are on visas are the people Cognizant wants.”

And now the H-1B visa has caused the first major rift in the Trump coalition as MAGA squares up to Silicon Valley.

The touchpaper was lit by Sriram Krishnan, Trump’s adviser on artificial intelligence policy, with his announcement that he wants to lift the annual cap on the permits, which currently sits at 65,000, plus an additional 20,000 for those with degrees from American graduate schools.

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The online Right exploded: “We won’t allow Big Tech to create their fantasy monarchy in America and make MAGA their indentured servant slaves,” wrote the online activist Laura Loomer. Other conservatives weighed in, urging Trump to remain true to his America First-values, reminding him that in 2016, he called the H-1B programme “very, very bad for workers” and declared, “we should end it”.

Then Vivek Ramaswamy, fanned the flames, writing a lengthy post about the inadequacies of American culture, seeming to suggest the need for H-1B style immigration was just as much about changing the American way of life as meeting economic demand. “More math tutoring, fewer sleepovers,” he scorned, “More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons.” A more study-focused method of raising children reinvigorated by attracting foreign-born engineers, he argued, would produce a “culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy”.The subsequent storm of racist vitriolic rage in response — featuring the invasion of Indian migrants and deficiencies of Indian culture — drew Elon Musk into battle. A long-time supporter of the visa arrangement, he began removing the verified status of some accounts and suspending others over allegations of harassment.

“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” wrote Musk, promising “war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”

Like much of the past few years of conservative populist rage, the issue is clouded by inflammatory rhetoric around identity and culture. But at the centre remains an economic issue that has festered for decades. Elites have gained tremendously from the H-1B programme. The record for everyone else is quite mixed.

Originally designed in 1990 to plug a gap in scientific and technological knowledge, and to bring over foreigners of “distinguished merit and ability”, there are safeguards which are supposed to prevent corporations from exploiting the H1B visa to harm American workers. But inevitably, these loophole-ridden rules are easily manipulated by employers who favour foreign workers, and are using them to undercut American wages.

The Department of Justice investigated Meta, for example, and found that the company created an entirely separate job programme to comply with the rules. Positions the firm sought to fill with H-1B holders were effectively disguised from the public — advertised in print media and applicants could only respond through physical mail-in forms — despite other routine jobs posted by the company accessible electronically.

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The government found that Meta discriminated against American workers, refusing to recruit, consider, or hire qualified Americans for more than 2,600 jobs. The Department of Justice, however, ended the issue with a slap on the wrist penalty of $14.25 million, or a mere 0.016% of company revenue.

While government enforcement actions are rare and generally impotent, research strongly shows that major employers, especially those in Silicon Valley, are using the H-1B and similar visa programmes to depress wages. Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Meta use the scheme “in order to legally pay many of their H-1B workers below the local median wage for the jobs they fill,” noted the Economic Policy Institute, a Left-leaning think tank, in a research report.

It’s more indentured labour than free market: should a foreign worker complain about wages or working conditions, an employer can rescind the visa and send them back to their home country. Meanwhile, economists from the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego found that tech worker wages would have been as much as 5.1% higher in the absence of H-1B visa workers in the same field.

Proponents of the visa counter that the programme leads to greater dynamism and economic expansion, a trickle-down effect that helps workers. But recent experience has called such claims into question. Last year, the top 30 H-1B visa employers laid off 84,556 people at the same time as they sought 34,414 new H1-B foreign workers. This includes firms such as Musk’s Tesla.

Such lax supervision of the H-1B programme has led to other indignities. In 2016, Disney and Southern California Edison were caught forcing laid-off American workers to train their H-1B foreign replacements. Similar stories have been reported around the country, especially in California, where such in-shoring dynamics are common.
To add insult to injury, as tech firms laid off thousands of Americans last year, they lobbied the Biden administration and Congress to lift the cap. But, of course, it is in the economic interest of any corporation to hold down labour costs, by any means.

Such obvious realities are confirmed in the litigation documents revealed by the Cognizant trial. The courtroom drama forced the disclosure of an internal presentation that warned about reforms that might limit the number of H-1B visas, which might force Cognizant to hire more native-born Americans. That option, the company warned, “may reduce [profit] margin”.

One might assume the Democrats, not the Republican Party, would mobilise more effectively to crack down on H-1B abuses. But the party has changed dramatically in recent generations. Silicon Valley and immigration lobby influence have moved the Democrats into a position far from its historic labour movement roots.

In 2010, for example, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi organised a retreat for the leading tech titans, featuring some of the same Silicon Valley leaders now in the orbit of Trump. The demand from donors was clear. “They want H-1B visas for immigration, and we’re saying ‘help us have a comprehensive immigration reform and we can help you with that,’” Pelosi told reporters.

Similarly, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, another group with sway over Democrats, has lashed out at any attempt to raise H-1B wages. In reaction to a previous proposal, the AILA howled that hiking wages threatens the “solvency of countless American businesses” and represents efforts to “scapegoat immigrants”.

Not much has changed. President Joe Biden had promised strong reforms to the H-1B programme, such as raising the $60,000 income threshold, but ended up settling for more minor tweaks to the system. Notably, Biden signaled his seriousness on the issue with his appointment of Ur Jaddou, a former aide to former Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-Calif, to lead USCIS, the agency overseeing the visa scheme. Lofgren long served as the representative for the district encompassing Silicon Valley and was one of the biggest boosters of H-1B.

On Saturday, Trump finally weighed in, siding with Musk and his other tech-centric advisers. “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas. That’s why we have them,” Trump told the New York Post. “I have many H-1B visas on my properties. I’ve been a believer in H-1B. I have used it many times. It’s a great program.”

But for all his enthusiasm, and for every Silicon Valley executive posting on X about the need for foreign talent and STEM expertise, hundreds of other users have flooded social media with online H-1B applications which show businesses using the programme for low-skilled jobs, such as “golf development director” and “cook”.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. The president-elect has, after all, surrounded himself with diverse viewpoints and many who hold diametrically opposing positions. JD Vance and incoming White House advisor Stephen Miller are avowed critics of H-1B visas, so it is far from certain that Musk will have the final word.

It all highlights the uncomfortable dynamic at play in Trump’s coalition. On the one side are libertarian business leaders who seek economic growth at all costs, often at the expense of American wages and consumer protections. Ramaswamy, for instance, is tasked with the DOGE commission, which will suggest vast swaths of government spending to cut — a position that will spark new debates about austerity, the welfare state and whether Americans are simply too lazy to compete. On the other side, we have the average Trump supporter who seeks a halt to immigration and a focus on rebuilding the middle class. Given the strongly held beliefs on both sides, the H-1B fight is only the first of many that will divide the administration over class lines. How long will Trump be able to hold it together?

Critics from the centre-left may be right to fault Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for “creating stories”, but they are yet to articulate how they would improve the flailing status quo. Kamala Harris may assert that Trump “doesn’t have a plan”, but it is the Democrats who have fallen short in this respect, despite their best efforts to pivot to the Right on the issue. It begs the question: what can Harris do, beyond her usual rhetorical acrobatics, to reclaim the border issue from Republicans once and for all?

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The solution has to go beyond the realm of policy to win over voters. Rather than simply coming up with yet another wonkish 10-point plan, Democrats must figure out a way to convince both the American public and themselves that the border must be defended, that ordinary citizens are right to be concerned, and that order and predictability in the immigration system are positive goods.

First, it is important to establish an honest account of what’s gone wrong over the last eight years. For there can be no resolution to the border crisis without acknowledging that Trump and Biden together share the blame. But where to begin? There can be no hiding from the fact that the Biden era witnessed the worst upticks in irregular migration in recent history, with more than 10 million encounters at the southern border according to the US Customs and Border Protection (CBP). This amounts to a 1,240% increase since 2021 and a backlog of more than 591,000 individuals in the shambolic CBP app’s mass parole programme. All the while, a misguided strategy of documenting those crossing the border — or “managing the flow” — as opposed to trying to halt the flow of irregular arrivals has resulted in a virtual open invitation to economic migrants from Central America and elsewhere to crowd the US asylum system.

Harris should start by admitting the failures of her own party. In 2021, she was made Biden’s spokesperson on the border. But she was hardly the “border czar” the GOP make her out to be. The role gave her little to no actual responsibility over policymaking, which remained in the hands of DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. So rather than pretending her stint in the job was a success, she could admit that the present course is wrong and unsustainable. This would go a long way toward distancing herself from the Biden record — something she has already begun to do in other policy areas. 

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Indeed, given the Republican’s consistent failings on immigration, Harris does not have to stay on the defensive. The most remarkable aspect of tracing the volume and trajectory of irregular migration flows to the US is not the cleavages but rather the continuities between the Biden and Trump administrations. Contrary to the former president’s claims of presiding over the “lowest illegal immigration in recorded history”, Trump’s four years in office saw an effective decrease in deportations from the Obama era according to data collected by Pew Research. As the Houston Chronicle reported in 2020, near the end of the Trump era: “Barack Obama’s ICE arrested and deported more than twice as many people during his first term in office.”

What’s more, both Trump and Biden failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation despite their respective party’s control of Congress for their first two years in office. To the extent that both presidents did see dips in border activity, it was as a result of acting belatedly near the close of their time in office: in Trump’s case during the pandemic, with Title 42 restrictions, while in Biden’s case, the ongoing decline in border encounters resulted in “the lowest border numbers of [this] presidency”. Both were instances of improvised responses coming in “too little, too late”.

The most damning piece of dishonesty was presented by Trump himself during the Butler, Pennsylvania rally in which he nearly died. The big chart which he turned to look at as a bullet whizzed past his ear may have saved his life, but it was still chock full of lies. Most notably, an arrow on the X-axis of the graph indicates January 2020 as the point at which Trump left office, which precedes an uptick of irregular crossings — yet Trump left office in January 2021. It slipped beneath the news of an otherwise important day, but according to the same chart, the latest increase in illegal migration actually began under Trump and simply continued unabated under Biden.

Looking at Trump’s deeply mediocre record on immigration control, we get the impression of a president who does not really care about fixing the problem so much as drumming up support from it, ergo the enthusiasm for horror stories about Haitian migrants. The Trump era, after all, produced a parade of failed immigration bills, which illustrated the gap between GOP rhetoric and results. These included the 2017 Raise Act that would have deemphasised family reunification and established a Canadian-style points system; and then the two 2018 Goodlatte bills, which between them would have funded the wall and brought in mandatory E-Verify. Yet these proposals were defeated not by Democrats but by the then-Republican majority. Alongside these legislative duds was Trump’s own reluctance to support mandatory E-Verify in the White House budget, just as reports of illegal immigrants being hired at Trump Organization properties came to the fore in 2019.

A clever Harris counterattack on immigration would highlight these myriad Republican failures and hypocrisies before throwing the gauntlet back at Trump. Just as the former president mocked his opponent at the end of the recent debate, asking of the Vice President’s pledges “Why hasn’t she done it? She’s been there for three and half years…” so too could Harris retort “Why hasn’t he done it? Where is that ‘big, beautiful’ wall that Mexico was going to pay for?” But an even more important objective for any progressive realignment on the issue would be for Harris to catalyse a genuine transformation of attitudes from within the Democratic Party.

For this to happen, the issue has to be reframed away from the emotive narratives that have so far dominated the discourse; instead, the discussion could be centred around the material realities and economic costs of runaway migration. It’s a debate that’s already happening in places such as the UK, Western Europe, and Canada where the centre-left is trending toward a pragmatic restrictionism.

However, this is harder to pull off in the US, where entrenched donor elites in both major parties are committed to the open borders status quo. Realignment-minded Democrats must therefore find a countervailing set of interests to combat the influence of the professional elites who run their party, who generally combine material reliance on the undocumented serf class with moralistic views around immigration maximalism. This intra-party bloc could be assembled from unions and working-class minorities, who would be among the first to benefit from any tightening of the labour market that would come with a crackdown on illegal migration, through higher wages, more jobs and greater bargaining power.

A novel wing of “Border Democrats” could then emerge to take up the pro-immigration control arguments of heterodox Democratic leaders such as Bernie Sanders, Vicente Gonzalez, and late civil rights icon Barbara Jordan. After this, the policy momentum will be sure to follow: a progressive agenda could include the aforementioned mandatory E-Verify (far more effective than a wall), and a new “Alliance for Progress” that combines strong border security with generous developmental assistance. If Harris intends not just to defeat Trump but to diffuse many of the factors that gave rise to his movement, she would be wise to follow such a course. It would empower Democrats, humble Republicans, and restore the broad patriotic appeal of progressivism in an era of economic populism.