On Bill Clinton, policy stubbornness, and what makes a migrant crisis

Hello from Austin! I am currently at the YIMBYtown conference, so if you’re around say hi. Eager to hear from folks working or thinking about under-the-radar issues.

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I published an article last week about the so called “migrant crisis” that I’m really proud of. It tackles the question of why there has been so much chaos in New York and Chicago when other cities that have also received a lot of asylum seekers (Miami, Houston, LA) have managed the situation without as much of a fiscal or political fallout. Here’s a gift link and an excerpt:

What ensured the quiet assimilation of displaced Ukrainians? Why has the arrival of asylum seekers from Latin America been so different? And why have some cities managed to weather the so-called crisis without any outcry or political backlash? In interviews with mayors, other municipal officials, nonprofit leaders, and immigration lawyers in several states, I pieced together an answer stemming from two major differences in federal policy. First, the Biden administration admitted the Ukrainians under terms that allowed them to work right away. Second, the feds had a plan for where to place these newcomers. It included coordination with local governments, individual sponsors, and civil-society groups. The Biden administration did not leave Ukrainian newcomers vulnerable to the whims of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who since April 2022 has transported 37,800 migrants to New York City, 31,400 to Chicago, and thousands more to other blue cities—in a successful bid to push the immigration debate rightward and advance the idea that immigrants are a burden on native-born people.

One part of the article that I don’t think got a lot of attention was this little nugget where former President Bill Clinton remarks on a recent radio interview that the six-month (180 day) mandatory waiting period to receive a work permit “doesn’t make any sense”. He makes no mention of the fact that he actually signed that requirement into law when he was president. You can listen for yourself, but in a circuitous way it reminded me of this paper about “stubbornly persistent” policy choices. The paper looks at 800 state policies that were the products of close referendums and found that “passing a referendum increases the chance a policy is operative 20, 40, or even 100 years later by over 40 percentage points.”

The author suggests that one of the reasons for this persistence is that once a policy is passed it simply becomes less salient, or the population becomes used to the way things are such that changing things is harder than accepting the way the world is. He also looks at federal and state legislation (smaller samples) and finds similar persistence.

I suppose the lesson here is that if you expect to clean up legislation later, you should be careful. Large bills that radically affect an important issue area are not to be taken lightly. For various reasons it may not be possible to revisit an issue and you’ll find yourself on a local radio show, twenty years after the fact, criticizing your own policy as it wreaks havoc on your own political party. 

The other thing I wanted to expand on briefly is the argument I make in the kicker of the piece. After their defeat in the 2016 presidential election, many Democrats became convinced that immigration was inherently a public opinion killer. Trump’s victory and similar anti-immigration tidings from western democracies brought bad tidings of great sorrow. And yet, the public opinion research on immigration is significantly more complicated than that, I urge people who are interested to read this helpful overview.

To complicate the narrative a bit here: Gallup polling shows that the number of Americans saying immigration was a good thing in June 2016 was 72 percent. By May 2020, that number had risen 5 points, the greatest support recorded since the poll began in 2001. Three years into Trump’s presidency, 59 percent of Americans said that immigrants “make our country stronger” vs just 34 percent that said immigrants are a “burden on our country.”

There’s a lot of desire to cleanly tie public opinion to asylum flows, but lets just think a bit critically about what it would mean for that to be true. It beggars belief that the correct model of the world is that people have well-calibrated barometers of how many migrants are flowing across their borders or are regularly checking government data sources to learn this information. In reality, there’s good evidence that asylum flows are not even correlated with restrictive immigration periods, see the below graph from this paper.

None of this is to say that Biden doesn’t have a real problem with migration. But to address a problem, you have to actually identify it. The problem, as my article argues is not the number of asylum seekers or immigrants, but rather the sense that the government isn’t controlling its own borders. People don’t know how many immigrants have moved to New York City, but they do see people lining up asleep on the sidewalk in midtown Manhattan. Voters aren’t tracking southwest border encounters, but they do see headlines about how local government funds are being diverted towards migrants and worry that resources are being taken away from native-born Americans.

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A couple of things I’ve been reading:

• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain by George Saunders

• Favorite Atlantic article of the past week.

• Favorite non-Atlantic article of the past week.

Thanks for reading!