Can the Center Hold? It Must Solve Immigration First By Alexander Stern
https://www.realclearpolicy.com/articles/2018/07/23/can_the_center_hold_it_must_solve_immigration_first_110723.html
The country seems perpetually stuck in 2016. Pundits and authors continue rehashing what “really” happened in the election. Our president — as he demonstrated once again in Helsinki last week — remains preoccupied with electoral math. The Justice Department continues to grind away on the campaign, emerging every few weeks to send the media into a frenzy. And Republicans are still deciding whether, how, and how much to separate themselves from Trump.
The Democrats seem to be stuck even further back — in 2016 primary season — with their establishment wing trying to beat back a populist surge to its left. Bernie’s latest bounce back took the form of a surprising win by fellow New Yorker and self-described socialist, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, over one-time Speaker hopeful Joe Crowley. Meanwhile, long-time senator Diane Feinstein lost the support of California’s Democratic Party to Kevin de Léon, the challenger to her left, despite crushing him in the primary. Even presidential hopefuls looking ahead to the 2020 primary season have darted left, likely in fear of being outflanked.
In other words, moderate Democrats face in 2018 much the same challenge Hillary Clinton faced in 2016, with populist storms surging on both sides. The difference is that today’s Democrats can learn from Clinton’s mistakes.
New Democracy, an initiative led by the Progressive Policy Institute’s Will Marshall, seeks to do just that. For New Democracy’s recent debut at the Washington Court Hotel, center-left politicians and policy experts exchanged ideas on a new Democratic platform. Speakers included Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE), former New Orleans mayor Mitch Landrieu, and William Galston, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who was domestic policy adviser to Bill Clinton. Galston’s talk focused on what he argued is a sine qua non for the center-left’s agenda: sensible immigration policy.
After the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton pushed back against a widespread narrative that pinned her loss on a neglect of white working-class economic anxiety, especially in the Midwest. Her campaign did take inequality seriously, Clinton insisted, and rolled out a detailed economic agenda. She even made concessions to the populist Left on issues like trade. But her message seemed to go unheard.
In his talk, Galston helped to explain why. “Populism,” he said, “is not principally an economic issue.” In particular, fear of losing jobs or lower wages goes only so far in explaining the appeal of Trump’s anti-immigration message. And immigration is, according to Galston, the “principle source” of the “conservative, populist wave sweeping over not only the United States but most of the democratic West.”
What drives populism and anti-immigration sentiment, then, if not only economics? The immigration issue is a “trifecta,” according to Galston, drawing together economic, security, and cultural concerns. To be effective, center-left politics must address all three of these dimensions.
First, he argues, we need a more merit-based legal immigration system, bringing it line with those of most other Western countries. Specifically, we should recalibrate the current distribution of green cards, two-thirds of which go to those with family ties with only a fifth based on immigrants’ prospective economic contributions. As for security, Galston thinks we should hold employers accountable for their workers’ immigration status of by putting in place stricter authorization measures, and track immigrants who overstay their visas more closely. We should also build a “smart” wall, using the latest available technology, rather than Trump’s physical one.
Finally, Galston emphasized, Democrats must not shy away from the cultural underpinnings of anti-immigration sentiment. This means acknowledging the importance of national identity more than some on the Left are comfortable doing. “I’m not against identity politics,” Galston said. “We need a new American identity politics.” This would involve making it easier for new immigrants to learn English and offering them a civic education as soon as they arrive in the country.
Galston cited a wealth of polling data showing that these kinds of fixes, including a measure that would allow DACA recipients to stay in the country legally, are precisely what most Americans want — even most members of Congress. But, Galston argued, our toxic political discourse and antiquated rules in Congress have left us on the eve of another election without any progress on this long-festering issue.
Galston held out hope, however, that a Democratic candidate for president would emerge in 2020 “with the courage to propose a mainstream solution to this stalemate.” If, instead, Democrats continue to “overplay their hand” with talk of sanctuary cities and abolishing ICE, they risk alienating potential voters — 60 percent of whom, according to a recent poll, now think Democrats are more interested in exploiting the immigration issue for political gain than in solving it. Ignore this “warning light,” Galston suggested, and Democrats may relive 2016 all over again.
Comments are closed.
