Immigration

It’s a big day for stats in British politics. Following the news that inflation has dropped to 2.3 per cent, the Home Office has this morning published its latest figures for visa applications. They reveal a 25 per cent fall across all visa routes in the first four months of 2024, following the package of changes that the Home Secretary announced in December 2023. The most significant drop was in student dependant numbers, which fell by 79 per cent.  This big fall is one of the reasons why Home Secretary James Cleverly is reluctant to clamp down even further on the graduate visa route. Last week’s report by the Migration Advisory Committee disappointed some Tory MPs, who have significant concerns about the number of visas being handed out.

Washington makes a fundamental error when it sees the present border crisis as an immigration problem, rather than the national security problem it has become under President Biden. For border states such as Texas, which bear the brunt of the situation, it’s also becoming a constitutional problem. In January, the US Supreme Court vacated an injunction prohibiting the feds from cutting razor wire that Texas had placed across a 2.5-mile stretch of border near the town of Eagle Pass. Governor Greg Abbott responded by asserting his state’s fundamental right to self-defense in the face of federal inaction, citing constitutional authority.

The most effective ad ever made for a presidential election featured a violent, career-criminal, Willie Horton, walking out of a Massachusetts prison on a weekend pass. On one of those passes, he went on another vicious crime spree. George H. W. Bush used those crimes — and the lax policies that let Horton roam the country — to destroy his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts governor Mike Dukakis. The past is prologue. Once again, voters are worried about their safety and angry about the open-border policies that have degraded it. Donald Trump knows that, so he will be using ads like the one Bush used against Dukakis. They will have the same devastating impact. A little background is helpful.

Welcome to Thunderdome. We all know what the best version of Joe Biden sounds like — a throwback to images of old Irish bipartisan politicking, itself an act of role-play for a senator who has more often than not been an angry partisan and constant fabulist both away from the cameras and in front of them. But at least there’s something respectable about that caricature, when given the Jon Meacham veneer of gestures toward the other side of the partisan aisle, framed by misquotes of Saint Augustine, half-remembered fables and snatches from the worst entries in the Catholic hymn book. There was no such respectability to be found in Joe Biden’s State of the Union speech last night.

Senate Republicans who are negotiating an immigration reform bill with Democrats are defending their efforts after conservatives reacted angrily to leaked details for the deal. The lead negotiator, Senator James Lankford, said on Fox News Sunday that his detractors are relying on “internet rumors” to fuel their opposition to the bill.“This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day,” Lankford said. “There’s no amnesty, it increases the number of border patrol agents, it increases asylum officers, it increases detention beds so we can quickly detain and then deport individuals.

Given just how unpopular illegal immigration is, it is stunning to see both the likely nominees for president fumbling the issue. That’s political malpractice.  For Biden, the malpractice consists not only in keeping the border open, which is already killing him in the polls, but in resisting the strongest Republican proposals to close it. Every time Republican congressional leaders visit the White House to negotiate, they come away empty handed.   In stiff-arming the Republican proposals, the White House has put itself in the awkward position of saying it will grudgingly accept their efforts but only if Republicans make concessions on other issues.

For decades the American left has attempted to build a winning political coalition by convincing as many factions as possible that they have somehow been victimized by a white power structure — more particularly, by an American and European white male power structure. The goal has been to provide the Democratic Party with a large base of aggrieved voters while simultaneously giving its traditional allies in the media, academia and government a persuasive social justice (or more recently “anti-colonial”) narrative. But ever since Joe Biden’s inauguration as America’s forty-sixth president, when his promise to be the country’s conciliator quickly disappeared behind a sharp left turn, progressivism’s self-defeating internal contradictions have become increasingly apparent.

Many commentators (including yours truly) have pointed out that America is divided more now than it has been since the late 1850s and the run up to the Civil War. But as usual, I may have understated the case.  That, anyway, is what Vivek Ramaswamy would say. In a remarkable, just-published interview with Tom Klingenstein, Ramaswamy several time insists that we are not in a pre-war situation. It’s worse than that. “We are,” he insists, “absolutely in a war with the fate of the country at stake.” Hyperbolic? I don’t think so. The war, he acknowledges, could and likely will get worse. But we can already see the troops deployed and the battle lines drawn.