Coyote Blog

It is almost impossible to have a discussion on immigration with either Republicans or Democrats because the conversation quickly devolves into a pointless blame game, eg "how can you defend x when other defenders of x have done so many things wrong" where x = something like "the virtues of immigration" or "consistent enforcement of current immigration laws."   Well, I can give you the definitive answer to this blame game -- it is both their faults.

Before getting into it, a bit of history. 

In my lifetime, IMO the country has never allowed enough legal immigration.  The reasons are complicated but I used to say simplistically that Republicans wanted immigrants to work but not vote (appreciating their economic contribution but fearful of their political impact) while Democrats wanted immigrants to vote but not work (assuming the immigrants would support Democrats but bowing to pressure from unions fearful of employment and wage competition from immigrants).  Bernie Sanders, who is as Left as they come, was opposed immigration for years for exactly these wage competition concerns.

The problem was that the legal immigration level was really too low to support our economic growth, and thus there were always opportunities and relative prosperity for immigrants even when they did not enter legally.   From time to time Congress would be forced to act, generally giving amnesties every so often to immigrants already here and fairly well integrated into the economy.  Immigrants from certain countries were restricted (sometimes for bad reasons, but sometimes for good reasons (eg immigrants from low-trust societies that had dominant clan or tribal relationships -- think Sicily in the early 1900s).  And a good number of immigrants were rejected or deported, often for criminal ties and it is useful to note that until 10 years ago there was pretty solid bipartisan support for doing so.

Beyond the ideological and policy changes over the last 10 years I will describe below, a couple of other changes have been happening that make the immigration problem worse.  First, Presidents have largely given up on the hard work of taking policy choices to Congress and now manage issues like immigration through Presidential decree.  In this environment no engagement with the other side is necessary, which is entirely against the original design of our country.  People get frustrated that Congress does not move fast enough on contentious issues, but in fact that was never the intention.  If the country is divided 51-49 on some issue and the Congress is divided 51-49 and the President was elected 51-49, it should not be possible to stampede an extreme solution to the issue through executive action, but that is the growing approach we have seen over 20 years (at least).

The second changing factor is one of polarization.  The country has any number of times been severely polarized around certain issues, but seldom has it been polarized around ALL issues.  This is largely a result, in my observation, of the knee-jerk partisan behavior we see today.  For example, I wrote the other day that I don't think there is any way to reasonably explain the Left's embrace of Islam, which in its current manifestation tends to be hostile to many of the Left's other values such as secularity, empowerment of women, and sexual tolerance, except as a tit for tat opposition to Conservative post-9/11 criticisms of Islam.  So when one side says that we need less immigration, the other side says we want to take immigration to infinity, and the other side then says we want it negative.

A pox on Republicans, and in particular Trump.

If I had to teach American history thematically, rather than chronologically, one of the top five themes that made the US the nation it is today has to be immigration.  It is impossible to understate the net positive impact of immigration in our history, both in aggregate as well as the many great individuals.  And for our growth and greatness to continue, we need more immigration.  Every economist I have seen present over the last several years (including to such crazy left-wing groups like the board of the California Chamber of Commerce) has said that the economic growth rates we have experienced in the past and wish to see in the future are impossible without substantial increased immigration (I know there is some argument that reduced immigration will lead to re-entry of US citizens into the workforce, which will certainly happen in some small way but not enough to sustain growth and besides, the exit of citizens from the workforce likely has more to do with entitlements than immigration).  Remember that fertility levels in the US have fallen well below replacement levels, which means our native population will begin to shrink with the passing of us baby boomers.

And this is not even to consider the desire we should have to continue to import the best and most talented people into our country.  For decades, other countries have lamented their "brain drain" to the United States as being such an obvious advantage to the US.  Their best and brightest would take a job in the US and never come back.  Their brightest kids would go to US colleges and come to love the country so much they wanted to stay.  It is hard to come up with any parallel case in modern history -- we have lots of examples of talented people running away from certain countries, but I can think of only one where so many talented people ran towards a country.  And insanely, Trump wants to end that because some small percentage are vocal and irritating.   His plan to fight China is to keep their students out of the country.  My plan to fight China would be to take 100,000 of their top kids into our universities every year and offer automatic green cards to the top half of these on graduation.  Skim a million of their best youth off over a generation.

Perhaps driven by years of his private zero-sum deal-making (e.g either the lenders retain more out of bankruptcy or Trump does), Trump brings a really harmful zero-sum thinking to both trade policy and immigration law.  He sees each new immigrant as taking a job from a US citizen, just as he sees each import as reducing US output by the same amount.  This is incredibly narrow thinking that is not born out in theory or in 200 years of practice.  New people and sources of supply allow the US to shift people and capital to more productive pursuits, while accessing the whole world of talent via immigration and trade spurs new ideas and technologies.  This zero-sum thinking is ironic to see in a Republican, because traditionally most Progressive-Left-Marxist economics are founded on zero-sum thinking.  Specifically, trade protectionism and immigration restrictions as a means to protect US jobs has always been the Left's policy position, yet another reason I find Trump to be more Left than Right in much of his economic policy.

Whatever the background, Trump and his MAGA followers cheered the news in 2025 that the US had achieved negative net immigration, a policy I consider entirely equivalent to net-zero climate policy and just as destructive to economic growth.  Traditional Conservatives may try to argue that, well, he is only fixing the worst features of Biden-era immigration policy. But in fact he goes much further than this, blaming immigration of all sorts as a net harm and infecting his followers with an unhealthy mythology about the evils of immigration.  Worse, the over-wrought language about immigration, even calling it an invasion, is being used to justify extreme enforcement tactics up to and including the use of the military for regular policing, something that has always been an anathema in this country.  The tactics have become provocative and dangerous --perhaps even purposefully so -- and Trump really hit a new low by cutting a deal to send the deportees he liked the least to the horrible prisons of El Salvador, which I once called Trump's Constitution-free zone.  Precedents last forever, and frankly I don't care how bad a criminal immigrant is, nothing justifies escalating enforcement to such terrible levels.

A pox on Democrats, and particularly Progressives.

Had the Left set out in 2020 to do everything they could to turn the central third of the political spectrum against immigration, they could not have done a better job.  They actively encouraged people to pour through the deserts of Mexico creating a series of humanitarian crises while at the same time overwhelming the country's ability to humanely receive and integrate them.  They tossed out historic vetting of immigrants with problematic backgrounds.  In the midst of a housing crisis in many cities, they took over whole hotels and housing projects and filled them with these recently arrived immigrants, handing them taxpayer money to live on (necessary because while blue cities tolerated or encouraged their presence, they did not allow them to work).  If you wanted to try to piss off the middle band of Americans who are not hard-core Left or Right, one couldn't do much better than the picture of unvetted immigrants who are effectively exempted from current immigration law living in government funded housing (that many Americans were struggling to afford) and receiving generous government assistance.

And then there is the issue of criminality.  Contrary to mythology on the Right, neither immigrants in general nor illegal immigrants in particular have historically (at least prior to 2020 and maybe still) had higher crime rates than native born Americans.  In fact, much of the data I have seen tends to show them committing fewer crimes.  This does not, by the way, come as a surprise to me from living in Arizona.  These folks were coming here to work and seek prosperity, and nothing would get them tossed out of the American dream faster than encountering the law.  Years ago, I once only slightly tongue in cheek observed that the best way to spot an illegal immigrant in Phoenix was to find the only car actually driving the speed limit.

There was a pretty bipartisan left-right consensus that -- even if we all disagree on the correct level of immigration -- immigrants without permanent residency that commit crimes get sent back via a fairly speedy process.   This is the deal with Joe Sixpack, who is skeptical of immigration but largely accepts it as long as the criminals are stopped at the gates or sent home.  But this consensus got interrupted by the sanctuary city movement.

I will admit that at first, the sanctuary city idea sounded OK to me.  For years I used to rail at our former Sheriff Joe Arpaio (lol just search this site for his name) who used to do crazy stuff like descend on a local business, zip-tie everyone with brown skin, and release them only when some panicked family member brought proof of their legal residency.  Having seen my city actively harassing peaceful, productive people who were in violation of immigration laws (only), I thought at first that sanctuary city meant that the city would allow their illegal immigrants to live in peace.

But it turns out this was not exactly what sanctuary city means in practice.  Phoenix was something of an outlier on this and most cities never had their police actively searching out immigration violations among peaceful, law-abiding residents.  The only time city police really got involved with immigration was when they arrested someone for a crime (eg robbery or assault) and it turned out the person was not a legal immigrant.  Thus the main actual impact of sanctuary city status is that the city does not turn over criminals for deportation, breaking the old deal with Joe Sixpack.  And it has had the additional effect that every high profile, make-the-national-news story about the Left fighting a deportation in the streets or in the courts usually involves a criminal for whom few in the middle are going to have sympathy.  My hard-working and friendly yard guy was deported 9 months ago without a peep of support, but the Left is seen on the news rallying for Venezuelan gang leaders.  The optics are terrible.

Some suggestions (none of which is likely to happen)

• In the short term, back off in Minneapolis.  It is dangerous there and both sides are to blame for being purposely provocative, though I must admit that Waltz and the rest of the Minnesota government has done what I thought was impossible -- they are being even more outrageous than Trump, purposefully painting targets on law enforcement officers and encouraging their citizens to get into dangerous confrontations.  The Feds are going to have to make the first move to de-escalate -- F*ck saving face, and its only like 1% of the country anyway.  Even Patton had to back off and try again later a few times.
• In the short term, I would love to see the Feds and sanctuary cities negotiating local agreements to avoid the Minnesota chaos.  The Feds could agree that if the city cooperates on immigrants who have committed crimes on an agreed list, they will not take enforcement actions against others in the city.  In other words, the Feds agree that if the city will hand over their violent and repeat offenders, the Feds will leave the day laborers at the Home Depot alone.  Then if the city still objects, the Feds can publicly proclaim that they only wanted to deport criminals and the city wanted to keep them.  The PR battle they are losing now could go the other way.
• Longer-term, Congress has to act.  Yes, given that the Senate will remain close to 50-50 for years to come, some sort of compromise will have to happen but this is what is supposed to happen on issues where the citizenry is equally divided.   My guess is that in such a compromise Republicans will have to accept some sort of amnesty and higher immigration limits while Democrats would have to accept greater enforcement activity, more vetting, limits on certain government assistance to immigrants and perhaps more voter ID requirements.  I know this is possible because similar deals have happened in the past.  I am not optimistic as the moderates in the Senate like Krysten Sinema and Jeff Flake have all been driven out and such a compromise can only come with Presidential leadership and its not going to happen here.  More than wanting their stuff, partisans will demand the other guys don't get their stuff.  I would see the Right screaming against anything with amnesty regardless of what they get in return and the Left screaming about voter ID.

Update:  about an hour after I hit publish, the Trump Administration began signaling that looks very close to the first two suggestions above.  We shall see, though this Administration tends to stick to a policy position about as long as a 5-year-old who has mainlined 3 Hershey Bars stays on task.

I don't know who this is, but this X post by Cynical Publius has been quoted by a number of Conservative sites.  This represents a VERY common attitude among Conservatives and deserves to be quoted in depth.  In regards to the prosecution of Letitia James he writes:

You see, for many years now Democrats have believed that they could do basically whatever they wanted to Republicans, whilst Republicans were still bound by the Old Rules of comity and respect.

Those were the New Rules. (Hat tip, Kurt Schlichter.). They thought we would never adopt the New Rules.

We did.

The James indictment says to Democrats: “You no longer can assume that we will let you do whatever you want to us. We will do to you what you did to us. And we will be merciless until you prove you will never do it again.”

The particular beauty of the James indictment is that she brought the most scurrilous and ridiculous of charges against Trump, while the record shows that James clearly committed the basic federal crimes she has been charged with.

Here’s the other thing. Federal laws are so complex and capacious that pretty much every one of us breaks a federal law every few months without knowing that we did. There has long been a tacit understanding in this regard that politicians would not take advantage of this with regard to mere “footfaults” on nonsense laws. But Democrats decide to abandon that too. New Rules. That we now follow. Suck on it, Democrats. You get what you paid for.

(But to repeat; James charged Trump with nonsense; Trump charged James with a verifiable crime.)

That last part is likely true, though it is not clear that very many people are prosecuted for it.  It is certainly NOT true for the Comey prosecution, which as currently charged is a total crock [update:  this is not to say that Comey is guilty of abuse of power charges -- it is simply to say that the current charges are cr*p].

Whatever the case, Mr. Publius appears to be working from the assumption that getting tough on the Left with actions like this is the only way to de-escalate all the lawfare -- I suppose the logic being that bullies back down when challenged and forced to face accountability.  This is clearer in some of the comments to the post:

This is the FAFO (f*ck around, find out) stance being taken by many Republicans, reflecting the decision-making rules of playground and bar fights. But for all that we overuse fight analogies when referring to politics, the correct behaviors in a Constitutional Republic which emphasizes the rule of law are different than in a bar fight.  Precedents really do matter, and even more so precedents that are repeated and reinforced by the political opposition get set in stone.  Mr. Publius is correct in saying that any person is likely guilty of something given the web of detailed, illogical, and self-contradictory Federal and state laws and regulations.  That is all the more reason to avoid degenerating into tit for tat lawfare as this legal environment makes lawfare all too easy -- against most anyone.  Our out of control regulatory state creates an environment like a dry overgrown southern California ravine on a hot day during a drought.  The Biden administration started some fires but ultimately they were contained -- Republicans should remember that despite everything (maybe because of all the lawfare end the sympathy and anger it engendered) their guy was elected.  The response now should be to exercise great care until the fire danger is reduced.  Instead, Republicans want to whip out the flamethrower.

I get called a simp or a cuck or worse for wishing turn back the clock on lawfare.  But historically we revere people who did just that.  The best examples of this occurring are from the early history of the US, such as in the election of 1800 when Jefferson just edged out Aaron Burr in a contentious election.  I am sure the Federalists were mighty pissed at Mr. Jefferson -- hell, their anger still resonates today in an extremely popular modern Broadway musical -- but they honorably turned over power to their hated rival. Looking farther back into history, Mr. Publius has adopted a nom de plume presumably from on interest in Roman civilization, or at least in how our founders admired the Roman republic.  But he needs to go back and re-study how the Roman republic died, a victim of 150 years of steadily escalating precedents that eroded the norms of the old republic.  I suggested in the online comments he might want to change his online name to "Graccus" to acknowledge the similar path he is pointing towards in this country.

Or perhaps even better historical examples are the famous blood feuds like between the Hatfields and the McCoys.  At what point in this feud do you think that retaliation and escalation by one party "taught the other a lesson" or caused the other to back down and de-escalate?   Never, which is why such feuds ended only when everyone was dead.

But an even better way to refute this Mr. Publius's position is to, for a moment, accept the author's premises about the Democrats.   There is an old political joke that goes like this:

This is sort of funny, but there is actually a better meta joke associated with this I will come back to in the postscript.  But I think we can confidently ascribe this position to the author Publius and to many other Republicans.  They are convinced that the Democrats are evil and that Republicans are well-intended but stupid because they always let Democrats get away with everything and are always to civilized to really fight back.  Just read the comment thread above.

But let's assume this is true for the moment.  If the Democrats are really always historically evil and law-breaking, what the hell makes one think that being more bare-knuckled is going to change them?  If they are evil, are you really expecting them to say "hey, you got me, we went too far, let's dial it back" or are they just going to respond by going to 11 the next time?  The author's strategy fails based on his own assumptions.  Unless his strategy is to turn the US into a banana republic.

Postscript:  The meta joke embedded in the joke quoted above is that believing this statement is one of the few bipartisan political beliefs that exist.  Republicans and Democrats BOTH will agree to this statement with a smile ... with the one small difference that Democrats will assume it was written by one of their own and thus that Republicans are the evil party and Democrats are the stupid party that play the game too genteelly.  And both the Republican and the Democrat presented with this passage would be shocked and outraged that their opposition would believe its the other way around.

Which brings us back to the case in question.  Let's generalize the last line in the Publius post above as "the charges against our guy were a politically-motivated crock, while our charges against their guy are just and fair."  Both R's and D's believe this absolutely from their perspective right now.  Their lawfare is righteous, the other guy's is evil.  So how is escalation of the lawfare going to achieve anything except a degeneration into banana republic politics?

Postscript #2:  I am not a Republican so I am probably not an appropriate source of advice to them.  But the Republican opportunity in my mind is to drive a wedge between mainstream traditional Democrats and the increasingly crazy, sometimes violent far-Left progressives.  This is something Trump seems pretty good at, when he can avoid chasing some new squirrel.  But I can tell you that one thing mainstream traditional Diane-Rehm-listening Democrats are NOT going to like is anything that feels like undermining the rule of law.  Republican bare-knuckle lawfare is not going to sit well, and is going to drive them into the arms of the crazies, no matter whether the Republicans think Democrats "started it" or not.  Republicans are actually winning the PR battle on the shutdown (first time in my whole life that has happened) and Trump has been pretty good at painting Democrats into defending extreme positions on 80-20 issues.  Taking immigration as an example -- where I am a strong supporter of increasing immigration limits so this is frustrating to me -- Progressives have made the whole immigration cause about protecting a few named, obvious felons from deportation.  And thus losing the PR battle.

Against this backdrop of Progressive own-goals, arresting violent rioters and serial felons will likely get grudging approval even among some Democrats; putting Comey in jail for contempt of Congress is only going to feel good to Republicans and can do nothing but hurt their popularity in the middle.

Dear Republicans,

I am sorry I have not had time to write sooner, and I only have time for a short missive.  But I want you to know that you are NOT going to like living with the precedents that Trump is setting right now for Presidential power.

I know you have convinced yourselves that you will be in power forever.  Believe me, I know -- the Democrats thought the same thing after 2020 and even more so after the 2022 election.  And I know some of the court challenges at the margin have been nutty -- the injunction against Congress legislatively cutting funding to certain organizations was completely baseless, for example.  These crazy court challenges at the bleeding edge have allowed you to convince yourselves -- wrongly -- that all of Trump's actions are perfectly normal and legal and all the legal actions are unjustified.   You will not like future administrations firing Republican commissioners from typically bipartisan organizations.  You will not like Presidents setting tariff rates (or by extension other tax rates) at will.  You will not like a Federal Reserve that is a lapdog to the current administration (perhaps the only thing that can make the Fed worse than it is already).  You will not like Presidential powers that trump state and local governments on even the smallest details.

You all need to relearn Coyote's Law -- never give the government (or particularly the President) powers you do not want your worst enemy to wield, because sure as hell your worst enemy will be in charge some day.  Yes, I know previous administrations pushed the envelope on Presidential power.  Unfortunately, when faced with an opposition party in the prior administration that took a bad precedent from level 4 to an 8, both parties will likely NOT respond by de-escalating but by pushing the 8 up to 11.

I am on vacation and had not really intended to post but I wanted to quickly comment on one of the arguments used to push back on the DOGE effort. The Democrats, who historically have been real masters of managing the media, have had a pretty flat-footed response to DOGE and have floundered for any sort of messaging that offsets the near endless revelations of stupid spending that DOGE is finding. Most of their protests just look like hysterical defenses of the indefensible.

But the argument I have heard recently that is more likely to resonate with the Democrat's traditional (read: sane) base is something like "we are all for explorations of government efficiency but think it needs to be done in a much more measured and careful way." Unfortunately, for anyone with any experience in organizational cost cutting, a "measured pace" is another way of saying "let's move slow enough so the antibodies in the system have time to kill us." As a result, if anything, I think DOGE is moving too slow.

Way back when I was a newly minted MBA with a less cynical view of how organizations work, I was employed by consultant McKinsey & Co to do cost cutting studies. McKinsey had a pitch to clients where they said that simple-mindedly mandating across-the-board cuts was stupid and destructive. Instead they advocated for a process, I think it was called EVA but it was 30 damn years ago and I cannot remember, to carefully look at every process in the company, to redesign the process, and then cut headcount based on implementing the better process. They would say that the only way to cut staff was to first cut the work that employees had to do first.

As a over-educated and under-experienced consultant, this sounded great to me. It made logical sense as the most thoughtful way to go about cost and headcount reduction, and really it still does make sense in an academic vacuum. It just feels better doing a detailed analysis that leads to 10% less needed staff rather than simply at the outset demanding a 10% across-the-board staff reduction (it also demands orders of magnitude more consulting hours, but that only occurs to the current more cynical version of myself).

But in the real world, one often does not have this luxury. First, going into such an analysis can take many months, all through which the organization knows cuts are coming and productivity plummets. It is effectively pulling off the Band-Aid really slowly. Second, the only way to do this analysis is to have the cooperation of the staff that is about to be cut, a tall order in many real world situations where the staff is ready to fight you (and especially when the staff is organized into unions to fight you). Third, you really don't necessarily get much innovation through this process. By the way, all these problems are squared and cubed in a public vs private context with powerful unions and constant media spotlight.

When I was fresh our of mba-school, I thought just whacking 20% of the staff without analysis was the dumbest thing in the world. But having tried to change and manage organizations, I have changed my mind. Necessity is the mother of invention, and sometimes just getting rid of 20% of the staff and having to make do is the ultimate in necessity. In a reverse of the McKinsey formulation, you cut the work that has to be done by cutting the staff. This approach is fast, and there is no way for the anti-bodies to organize to fight the change when the change comes fast enough. Rip off the Band-Aid, get the required savings, fix problems where you went to far later.

The DOGE efforts are doomed at some level no matter what because so much of Federal spending is programmed by law. It is going to take legislative changes and a better budgeting approach out of Congress to make big changes. But I do think there is staffing efficiency to be had but DOGE is not going to get there alone either**. At some point Trump is going to have to just pick a number and say that in 30 days, every department has to cut their staff by that number. Nothing else is going to work. Nothing else usually works in the private world and it certainly is not going to work in the government where the antibody strength is the highest.

Which is not to say that what DOGE is doing is not valuable, because it is. The constant string of factoids and revelations are going to be the PR air cover that larger cuts via legislation and/or mass layoffs are going to need.

** Postscript: it is useful to keep a few numbers in mind to see the difficulties with the DOGE process getting their promised savings. Yes they can keep finding million dollar examples of stupid spending to be cut. But to get a trillion dollars in savings -- an almost unfathomably large number -- requires a million individual cuts of a million dollars each. The other thing to remember is just how large the federal workforce is. As I pointed out the other day, the 75,000 that took Trump's early retirement package seems like a lot, but it is well under just the normal annual 6% turnover in the federal workforce.