Must-Read: Dylan Matthews: What’s the point of an anti-immigrant left?

Must-Read: I must say: many—most?— of those who made their careers at the Old New Republic—advancing in the world by catering to the prejudices and bigotries of Marty Peretz—acquired some very bad habits of rhetoric and argument thereby, which still poison what they say and think.

Indeed, in many cases I think that they can no longer think honestly and accurately.

Give me a ticket-punching card-carrying member of the Juicebox Mafia any day.

Dylan Matthews on Peter Beinart

Dylan Matthews: What’s the point of an anti-immigrant left?: “Beinart’s policy argument is… mistaken… https://www.vox.com/2017/7/2/15847840/beinart-atlantic-left-immigration

…Beinart gives readers a totally false sense of the state of research… the overwhelming academic consensus that the other 92.4 percent are held harmless or benefit from immigration, and that Americans gain overall. Nor does he note that immigration appears to increase high school graduation rates among natives…. Beinart portrays a National Academy of Sciences study on immigration as showing major costs to native workers, when the study actually concluded, “the impact of immigration on the wages of native-born workers overall is very small”….

Beinart’s political argument is disconnected from this narrative of immigration battering the working classes. He… argue[s] that Democrats… “must take seriously Americans’ yearning for social cohesion” and “dust off a concept many on the left currently hate: assimilation.” The idea that the US has gotten worse at assimilating new immigrants, though, is unfounded…. “They’re integrating as well as, or even faster, than immigrants who came from Europe in the last century”…. Beinart’s concern about public opinion more generally is also odd, given that Americans have become more pro-immigration, not less, in recent decades….

This is the point where you have to ask yourself what Beinart actually thinks the Democratic party is for. Personally, I think any center-left party worth its salt has to be deeply committed to egalitarianism… fighting for LGBT rights against bathroom bills, fighting mass incarceration and police violence victimizing black Americans… working for more domestic redistribution to address poverty and hardship, including through universal health care… treating people born outside the US as equals… generously funding foreign aid for health programs that have saved hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives. And it means a strong presumption in favor of open immigration. Not only does migration help native workers overall, it enables a massive increase in the welfare of people abroad, typically people much poorer than even poor Americans, who come here…