Two explanations are popular among Democrats for why Donald Trump won: voters are racist and voters (wrongly) blame their economic insecurity on mass immigration.
In a post-election autopsy at The New York Times, correspondent Miriam Jordan admitted that Americans’ immigration attitudes have shifted “to the right,” but argued that this is borne not of intelligent analysis but of a spell cast by a demagogue. Jordan quoted Rodrigo Garcia, a “Mexican American” who was taken in by “Trump’s forceful rhetoric.” “I feel like there should be a certain limit of the people that come into America, instead of just letting everyone come in,” Garcia said.
Garcia’s view is not radical. It’s a sensible one, no matter what nation is being considered. Trump’s “forceful rhetoric” is not what makes people think immigration needs some limits.
But instead of attempting to understand Garcia’s position, Jordan does everything she can to obfuscate the good sense of immigration skeptics. And she is not alone at the New York Times. Her view was echoed and reinforced in another article, “In Trump’s Win, G.O.P. Sees Signs of a Game-Changing New Coalition.” In that piece, four authors panicked over Trump’s “invitation” to “Latino and Black voters to join his us-versus-them campaign, rallying them against elites, out-of-touch liberals, and the undocumented immigrants he claimed were taking ‘Black jobs’ and ‘totally destroying our Hispanic population.’”
These articles are representative of a general problem for the Democratic Party. While their pet explanations might console the media, academics, and Democratic leaders in Congress, there is a more complete and more charitable explanation available: since Americans want to preserve the dignity of their citizenship, they elected Donald Trump to stop mass immigration and the open borders policies that facilitate it. Democrats will never be able to offer serious solutions if they are unable to recognize the legitimacy of this problem.
Voters do not want platitudes about racism nor do they think they were misled on the economy. How is it possible to deny that adding thousands of ESL students to local public school systems strains the system and burdens taxpayers? Voters do not believe Democratic politicians and condescending policy wonks who promise them that, contrary to their intuition and experience, unchecked immigration is actually a boon to the economy, culture, and education. Voters will trust the party that acknowledges the myriad problems in U.S. immigration policy and can speak sensibly about limiting immigration. They want candidates they believe are likely to do something about an obvious evil.
Mass Immigration Takes the Civility Out of Politics
How does mass immigration undermine American citizenship? Most significantly, it makes politics and elections about force rather than persuasion. Citizens believe that elections can be won by persuasion. And they rightly understand that the Democratic Party has decided to try to win elections by importing votes and shaming anyone who notices.
Vice President-elect J.D. Vance made an argument similar to this on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying,
I think Kamala Harris and the Democrats, they want to give these million upon millions of illegal aliens the right to vote…it will have degraded the voting power of the people who have the legal right to be here. Because of what Ronald Reagan did at the 1986 amnesty, California is now effectively a permanently blue state.
That is, Californians were not “persuaded” to become a permanently blue state. Aggressive and exploitative leftist politicians forced the state into decline by importing votes so that they could overwhelm the citizens’ voting power and rule the state without having to appeal to conservative, working-class Californians.
Citizenship requires a stable electorate, with patterns of growth and decline suited to the natural life of a community, rather than massive artificial growth coming from the outside, and made up of people who are going to be used to overwhelm the conservative element in the community. This is true of citizenship as citizenship, regardless of race or nation. Trump’s appeal to citizenship, to its most basic requirements, allowed him to speak to the whole American electorate and dramatically expand the GOP’s voter base.
Millions of new immigrants being brought into the country represent, electorally, a victory for left-wing politics. It’s why Vance said,
If Kamala Harris gives 10 million of those people legal status and allows them to vote in American elections, then, you know, say 70-30, they go Democrat. Republicans will never win a national election in this country in my lifetime.
The reason for this political alignment among immigrants used to be acknowledged by Democrats and Republicans alike, namely, a free people is an educated people. Republican institutions and self-government cannot be imported. Today, though, the Democratic Party is forced to deny these obvious facts because they conflict with its anti-racist identity.
The American Left’s Dilemma
If the Democrats were to adopt the view that those opposed to mass immigration are not evil and are actuated instead by a sensible concern for the value of their citizenship, they could avoid embarrassing dilemmas and return to their more sensible post-war roots.
The Reverend Al Sharpton provided a good example of the obstacle Democrats face. In an appearance on “Morning Joe” after the election, Sharpton and Joe Scarborough tried to dissect and explain Trump’s success with blacks and Hispanics. At one point, Sharpton, for want of a better explanation, claimed that conservative Hispanics are racist against other Hispanics. It’s embarrassing that he was reduced to such an explanation, but what else could he have said? He could not have admitted that Hispanics are interested in preserving the value of their American citizenship. For Sharpton to take conservative Hispanics seriously, he would have to admit that putting citizens first, being America First, is a common sense, rather than racist, political position.
The entirety of the American Left’s enterprise—from the most vulgar political propaganda to the more refined illiberal political theories of academia—rests on the premise that Westerners and Americans (by which they mean white people) must always prioritize non-Westerners and non-Americans. Promoting open borders is not an isolated policy position—it is essential to the American Left’s worldview.
Going forward, I predict that the Democratic Party will continue to demonize and mischaracterize all legitimate attempts to restore sanity to the border. I doubt a week will pass without them ginning up a story of cruelty and inhumanity. A false dichotomy will be pressed on the American people: are you for open borders or are you for children in cages?
As for all their other tired tricks and lies these days, I believe this one will prove ineffectual because the American Left no longer owns the news. Left-wing journalists can make their news stories, but they lack the monopoly of former times.
In a recent op-ed in The Harvard Crimson, a student argued that “our crumbling media landscape…is most to blame” for Trump’s victory. The writer hopes journalists will recommit themselves to high standards of journalistic integrity. If they do, he hopes that they can “be taken seriously in communicating Trump’s threat to democracy, inflationary tariff policies, and so on.” The student has recognized a real problem for the American Left, but I doubt those outlets he calls “the traditional media” will be able to recapture the power they once had to shape the narrative. The days of Obama’s vaunted “echo chamber” are gone.
Hope For Citizenship
Mass immigration harms everything: culture, schools, health care, jobs, and elections. Citizens who voted to preserve a stable electorate should be applauded rather than demonized. It took a long time for American voters to come to this common-sense conclusion, but come to it they did. Citizenship (of any nation) cannot remain strong without some border, physical and legal, between the citizens and the rest of mankind. Many pleasing illusions invite Americans to ignore this reality, but for the moment, there is some genuine resolve among voters.
With a stable electorate, liberals and conservatives would be able to put aside the dire contest over immigration and return to gentlemen’s disagreements.
Cole Simmons teaches high school literature and history at Redeemer Classical School, in McGaheysville, Virgnia. He earned his doctorate from the Institute of Philosophic Studies at the University of Dallas.
https://americanmind.org/salvo/the-democrats-immigration-mess/
