Policy Can't Solve a Propaganda Problem

Last week in The Argument (which is apparently my new foil), Jerusalem Demsas published a piece titled “Liberals don’t have to lose on immigration.” It deserves a full response, because it displays some of the worst tendencies in liberal punditry.

Demsas (an immigrant herself) says that although Trump rode a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment to power, the reality of his immigration crackdowns has left Americans skeptical: polling shows precipitous declines in Trump’s approval ratings on immigration.

For most liberals, this shift would appear to be a good thing. But Demsas disagrees. She says “I worry that many liberals could take this to mean we don’t need to address the very real democratic backlash to immigration.” She continues:

She points out that immigrants are a crucial source of labor and innovation, especially important in the face of a housing shortage. “But,” she says, “it doesn’t really matter if I can share with you 1,000 studies showing that I'm right on the policy merits if the voters simply disagree. And that’s where liberals are very much in trouble.”

This is all a little baffling. Demsas’s entire premise is built on the idea that voters are distinctly anti-immigration, and that liberals need to adapt to that position. But she doesn’t cite any data to back that up. Nor could she, because the data is clear: in the early 2020s, anti-immigration sentiment spiked to 20 year-highs. In the past year, however, it has plummeted: Gallup polling shows that the percentage of Americans who want less immigration has gone from 55 to 30. A June Quinnipiac poll found that independent voters prefer giving undocumented immigrants a pathway to citizenship over deportation by a 47-point margin – up from 24 points just this past December. The “very real democratic backlash to immigration,” in other words, is over.

Demsas says that “voters simply disagree” about immigrants being a vital source of labor and innovation. Do they? A 2021 Cato Institute survey found that 69% of Americans think that immigration benefits the economy, and 61% say immigration enriches American culture. A recent Pew survey found that a plurality of Americans thought that Trump’s immigration crackdowns would weaken the economy.

And so it seems that Demsas’s argument is designed to address a problem that does not exist. That would generally be a good reason to ignore the rest of the argument, but Demsas makes a mistake so egregious that I think it’s worth addressing.

The commonly accepted narrative about the politics of immigration over the last few years is as follows: under Biden, border crossings spiked significantly. This triggered an anti-immigration backlash, which Donald Trump seized on to help win him the election.

Demsas correctly identifies a problem with this narrative: “[t]he backlash to immigration,” she points out, “was not tied to specific numbers.” Tens of thousands of Ukrainian refugees were accepted into American cities without political fallout, but similar numbers of South American migrants resulted in a purported “migrant crisis.” 

Demsas chalks this up to government preparedness. “Unexpected” immigration, she says, fosters chaos and “drain[s] the local political system’s time, attention, and money.” The argument here is that the government was unprepared for the recent influx of migrants, and that unpreparedness made the issue more visible. 

There’s likely some truth to that, but I have a much simpler explanation: the media did this. 2024 saw a massive spike in mainstream media coverage of immigration that featured words like “crime,” “murder,” and “invasion.” A quarter of a billion dollars was spent on political ads fearmongering about immigration in just the first half of 2024. Fox News’ coverage of migrant crime increased 880% in early 2024, and the outlet ran an average of seven “migrant crime” segments per weekday through July of that year. 

We’ve seen similar trends in the recent past: in 2018, media coverage of the “migrant caravan” surged before the midterm elections and plummeted immediately after.

There is strong evidence that in general, anti-immigration sentiment isn’t driven by the material realities of immigration. Research and polling has consistently shown that Americans are more likely to harbor anti-immigrant sentiment the farther they live from the border. Not unrelated, the bulk of anti-immigrant ad spending concentrates far from the border as well.

Demsas herself provides an illustrative example of how detached from reality anti-immigration sentiment tends to be:

Think about this one for just a second. 37,000 migrants caused a “massive” backlash in the U.K., whereas nearly one hundred times as many migrants barely caused a stir in Spain (a smaller country by population). Does this sound like it’s about government preparedness? Of course not. The reason a relatively small number of migrants spurred a backlash in the U.K. is that anti-immigration political forces drew attention to them and the media dutifully followed suit.

All of this is worth keeping in mind when you look at Demsas’s actual policy proposals. She suggests: (1) more federal money for jurisdictions that take in immigrants; (2) potentially taxing immigrants at a higher rate; (3) investing in state capacity to manage immigration; and (4) investing in English language classes and “playing up” English language requirements.

These proposals range, in my view, from admirable to stupid to bizarrely vague (what does it mean to “play up” English language requirements, exactly?). But regardless they will not work, because they are, as my If Books Could Kill co-host Michael Hobbes put it, policy solutions to a propaganda problem.

Demsas is, in her own words, looking for “a solution to the politics of immigration.” (The belief that the politics of immigration can be “solved” betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics are, but I digress). But the idea that minor policy changes can meaningfully shift public opinion on immigration is tenuous. 

Last year Democrats proposed a draconian border security bill in an effort to outflank Republicans on the issue. Not wanting Democrats to solve a problem he was campaigning off of, Donald Trump whipped the Republican caucus into voting against the bill. Did any of this bolster the Democrats’ standing among immigration hardliners? No – voters most concerned with immigration heavily favored Trump.

If a huge, thoroughly publicized piece of legislation couldn’t move the needle for Democrats, why would some technocratic tinkering around English language classes?

Demsas, like so many centrists, thinks that politics is a puzzle to be pieced together: if you figure out what the public wants, you can meet them there and win the day. But the public is fickle. Their sentiment on any given issue can fluctuate at the whims of media. How can you find policy solutions that will satisfy a public that is capable of shifting by 25 point margins in the span of a year?

The problem that Democrats actually need to solve is how to effectively message in an information environment that is designed from the ground up to benefit reactionary narratives. If they don’t figure that out, they’ll end up like Demsas, dreaming up middling solutions to non-existent problems.