About That Immigration Framework...

So the White House released a broad outline of a "framework" for a DACA deal today.  The one-pager on the framework is here.  The four big components:

• $25 billion for a wall trust fund along with other enforcement efforts.
• Legal status and path to citizenship for up to 1.8 million people (so more than DACA).
• An eventual end to chain migration: going forward, citizens and legal permanent residents could sponsor only spouses and minor children. Existing backlogs for other immigration categories would be cleared over time, but no new people could be added for those categories.
• The redistribution of the diversity lottery to other visa categories.

More details will be coming next week.  And I think those details will be important--especially for the changes in chain migration.  Some GOPers--like Tom Cotton and Mitch McConnell--have praised the framework, but some House Republicans are reportedly unhappy with the deal, which they believe gives too much to immigration maximalists.  Some Democrats have denounced it, but others--especially key figures like Claire McCaskill--have been quiet.  So we'll have to see how viable this framework is from both policy and political standpoints.

I'm not necessarily endorsing or attacking this framework, but a few thoughts about it below.

Because of a variety of reasons, much of the media is going to fixate on the "path to citizenship" element of this framework.  While this is a major concession by the White House (especially expanding it beyond DACA), there's a certain political logic to it.  It's almost certain that any individuals given permanent legal status in an amnesty will eventually be put on some path to citizenship.  I doubt there's enough of a constituency for permanent status without citizenship for that to be permanently sustainable.  So, if citizenship is going to be given, it might as well be given up front in exchange for other, tangible policies.  There's also a case to be made for ensuring that the U.S. does not have a permanent, legally recognized class of second-class residents.  I've long suggested that citizenship/non-citizenship might not be the most important red line in amnesty negotiations--what really matters are the structural reforms gained in exchange for that amnesty.

Which brings me to other elements in the plan.  Allowing the backlogs of current chain-migration petitioners (siblings, etc.) to be cleared might minimize the risks of legal challenges were this framework to become law.  One could imagine people with pending applications to immigrate filing a lawsuit saying that those petitions should be honored.  One could also imagine U.S. citizens with family members with pending applications suing.  Allowing those in the backlog to enter eventually voids that legal risk.  It will take a while to clear the backlogs, so the historically high rate of legal immigration would continue for years.  Now, there's a chance that this reform to chain-migration could be undone by later Congresses, so there's a possibility that this reform might never actually take effect.  (Of course, all reforms to the legal-immigration system could be reversed.)  It doesn't deliver any specifics about any changes to skills-based migration, either.

The one-pager doesn't list anything about E-Verify, so that might wait for another day (pending new details being released).  And, obviously, all enforcement efforts could be blocked by the "Resistance" in the judiciary.

In this deal, the White House is offering an amnesty about half the size of the 1986 amnesty up front in exchange for improved enforcement mechanisms and eventual significant structural changes to the legal-immigration system.  Putting nearly 2 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship, the White House proposal is much more generous than DACA ever was.  It gives a lot to Democrats and DREAM Act activists--much more than many House Republicans might be comfortable with.  Does it give enough to make a deal?  The Left will have to decide how much of a priority it assigns to granting legal status to DACA-eligible people.  Meanwhile, the Right (and the pro-worker Left) will have to decide whether increased enforcement provisions and eventual structural reforms to the legal-immigration system are enough to agree to an upfront amnesty.  (And, of course, there's also the debate about the precise details of any structural reform.)

Partisan Corrosion

The great temptation of partisanship is, if you will forgive the geek-y analogy, the temptation Boromir faced about the One Ring: the reliance on using evil tools in the name of good.  Rather than seeking to restrain our destructive impulses and use good faith, partisans who succumb to temptation hope to marshal destructive impulses on their own behalf and embrace targeted bad faith (as long as that bad faith is on their side).  So, in a time of vulgarity and hysteria, the partisan might double down on those tactics in order to advance his or her own cause.

We live in an era of righteousness porn--of fantasies of inflicting pain on others because you find them deplorable.  Righteousness porn prioritizes retribution over forgiveness, and slaughter over reconciliation.  As such, it cultivates intellectual sterility and moral narcissism.  Why bother to learn from others or to recognize them in their own particularity--when you can merely harm them and feel good about it?

Righteousness porn is a common friend of identity-politics tribalism.  The premise of identity politics--whatever group it favors--is that it is right and just to disparage and harm others because of some characteristic, such as skin color or sex.  Instead of seeking to minimize harm, identity politics instead chooses to direct it.

As Michael Sandel has written, a politics denuded of a concept of the good is one that will degenerate into a tabloid soap opera. To escape the soap opera is to refuse to play by its vacuous rules--to insist instead on intellectual and moral seriousness.

The cure for identity politics is not to reserve it for some favored caste.  Instead, the cure is to toss it into the steaming pit atop Mount Doom.  The cure for vice is striving after virtue.  To combat evil, we must come to understand the good.  The moment of great civic peril is precisely when we most need principle, prudence, and sympathy.

Deplorables--Now and Forever!

I don't necessarily endorse all the claims Nancy Fraser makes in this thoughtful essay in American Affairs, but she does offer a very interesting narrative of our current political turmoil. Arguing that distribution (of goods) and recognition (of social practices, values, etc.) are core defining traits of any political hegemonic bloc, she finds that Donald Trump's election challenged the reigning paradigm of progressive neoliberalism:

That may sound like an oxymoron, but it was a real and powerful alliance of two unlikely bedfellows: on the one hand, mainstream liberal currents of the new social movements (feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, environmentalism, and LGBTQ rights); on the other hand, the most dynamic, high-end “symbolic” and financial sectors of the U.S. economy (Wall Street, Silicon Valley, and Hollywood). What held this odd couple together was a distinctive combination of views about distribution and recognition.
The progressive-neoliberal bloc combined an expropriative, plutocratic economic program with a liberal-meritocratic politics of recognition. The distributive component of this amalgam was neoliberal. Determined to unshackle market forces from the heavy hand of the state and from the millstone of “tax and spend,” the classes that led this bloc aimed to liberalize and globalize the capitalist economy. What that meant, in reality, was financialization: the dismantling of barriers to, and protections from, the free movement of capital; the deregulation of banking and the ballooning of predatory debt; deindustrialization, the weakening of unions, and the spread of precarious, badly paid work. Popularly associated with Ronald Reagan, but substantially implemented and consolidated by Bill Clinton, these policies hollowed out working-class and middle-class living standards, while transferring wealth and value upward—chiefly to the one percent, of course, but also to the upper reaches of the professional-managerial classes.

Fraser argues that reactionary neoliberalism had been the main political rival to progressive neoliberalism, but Trump instead championed reactionary populism, which was premised on the diffusion of economic goods and more "reactionary" cultural values.  She claims that, in governing, the president has largely failed to deliver on his populist distributive promises and instead has offered a kind of hyper-reactionary neoliberalism, in which the president stokes "reactionary" cultural feuds while continuing to support the economic policies of neoliberalism (with things like TPP excepted).  Fraser suggests that some kind of progressive populism could be a corrective to the Trump presidency.

I have some real doubts about breaking cultural narratives down to the "reactionary" and the "progressive," and probably have a slightly different view of the merits of a capitalist economy than Fraser does.

Nevertheless, many of her comments about the architecture of neoliberalism (finance, labor, etc.) are revealing.  And her points about hyper-reactionary neoliberalism are not entirely dissimilar from my piece for NRO earlier this week, in which I warned of the political and policy dangers of President Trump immersing himself in cultural feuds while supporting unreformed GOP policy nostalgia.  (I also suggested some areas for a populist-conservative reset--read the rest here!)

One of the revealing things about the neoliberal consensus has been the fact that, for all its celebration of disruption, the neoliberal order has in fact grown fairly sclerotic.  At least in the United States, a certain elite consensus on immigration, trade, and so forth has hardened.  It's proven surprisingly resistant to reform, even as the current paradigm of globalization has reached a point of diminishing returns and grows increasingly unstable.  The post-2000 United States has witnessed a number of depressing trends--from GDP slowdown to climbs in mortality rates in certain areas.  But the overall architecture of the current iteration of globalization could not be challenged, either from the left or the right.

One of the signs of the sclerosis of the neoliberal order is the fact that many proponents of that order cling to shame politics--the effort to shut down debate by calumny and to distract from problems by heaping opprobrium on someone else--even as it too has reached a point of diminishing returns.  The "deplorables" strategy ("calling out" both Donald Trump and his supporters as rabid animals) is quintessential shame politics.  It was the core of Hillary Clinton's campaign in 2016, and it failed miserably.  Yet many of Trump's opponents have doubled down on this effort.*  Denunciations of the president and his "deplorable" supporters fill our airwaves and social-media feeds, but how to correct some of the ills of the neoliberal paradigm has gotten much less attention.

As I've written before, reform could be a way extending some of the real benefits of the post-WWII and post-Cold War global order.  The rise of populist disruption is a sign that the current iteration of globalization needs updating.  History shows that rigidity often weakens a political paradigm, so the defense of globalization by saying that it cannot be changed in any way might end up not being much of a defense at all.

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*Note: That's many--not all.  Some Trump critics have advocated for reforms (calling for the Left to dial back its culture war, for instance, or the Right to advance more worker-friendly policies).  Critiques of Trump that emphasize the need for changes probably have more political viability than those that merely denounce Trump while defending the status quo.  Of course, forceful criticism of a president is a necessary and healthy component of political life.  Fierce denunciations of a president's supporters--including calls to excommunicate them from political life--can be more troubling, however.