Jonah Goldberg:

The most interesting, and possibly significant, political story right now is the revolt of blue city Democrats over immigration. I really should have led with this and I intended to get here sooner. But what’re you going to do?

I’ll zip through the normal punditry just to set the scene. A bunch of border state Republican governors and Biden’s own Department of Homeland Security, sometimes cooperatively and sometimes not, have sent scads of asylum seekers from the border to big cities. And it’s becoming a massive problem because it turns out that, not counting some rhetorical excess, the Republicans were right. The massive influx of poor migrants was a huge humanitarian crisis that was an unfair drain on the resources of states like Texas and Arizona. I didn’t like the use of these migrants as political props, but sending them north to cities like New York, Chicago, and Washington wasn’t simply a stunt. It was a reasonable response to a crisis being disproportionately borne by a handful of states asked to carry the burden of a national problem requiring a national response. Democrats love to talk about shared burdens, and their bluff was called.

Democrats, particularly Democrats in big urban centers, also loved to talk about how immigration is all upside and anyone who disagrees is a bigot, a nativist, a xenophobe, and just plain mean. That’s why they virtue-signaled their “sanctuary city” policies when such virtue signaling was cheap—both literally and figuratively.

Now, it’s a crisis that could destroy New York City, in the words of Mayor Eric Adams.

While I have compassion for the migrants and for the taxpayers alike, I have zero sympathy for the politicians who preened about their moral superiority to those concerned about uncontrolled immigration.

And that’s what I find interesting and valuable in this crisis. Again, like the Trekkers talking among themselves, a lot of blue-staters talked about immigration as if all decent and reasonable people agreed with them. Now that they see some of the costs of their own stated principles, they’re freaking out. And rightly so.

Part of the reason Democrats could demagogue the issue of immigration is that they saw only upside for themselves electorally. It’s not necessarily true that they all thought they were importing reliable Democratic voters, but the belief that they would end up being reliable Democratic voters made it much easier to demonize people who saw the downside of runaway immigration.

Just to be clear, it was never true that America was anti-immigrant (at least not in the last half-century). As Jim Geraghty notes, “Every year since the millennium, between 703,000 and 1.2 million immigrants have been granted legal permanent residence, also known as getting a green card. Green-card holders are permitted to live and work in the country indefinitely, to join the armed forces, and to apply for U.S. citizenship after five years — three if married to a U.S. citizen.” America has up to 50 million immigrants living here. Add first and second-generation Americans together and we’re talking about between a quarter and a third of the total population.

By the way, I love it when people accuse China hawks of being “xenophobes.” You know what share of (Han-Supremacist) China’s population is composed of immigrants? .1 percent.

As much as I hate the phrase “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste,” the value in this crisis is that it may teach Democrats that cost-free rhetoric isn’t actually cost-free if actually translated into policy. The best thing that could happen for immigration policy is for Democrats to recognize the downsides of immigration. The next best thing would be for Republicans to recognize the upsides of immigration. And while this is definitely a “both sides” point, it’s not symmetrical. Because the American status quo is wildly, unprecedentedly, and almost uniquely pro-immigrant already.

It’s a bit like all of the verbiage about free speech. Right and left seem to trade the baton on who is for or against free speech every couple years, or days, depending on the issue (“Book banners!” “Twitter censors!” etc.), but the crusaders on both sides almost always fail to recognize that whatever the censorial outrage du jour, it’s always against the backdrop of the fact that America is wildly pro-free speech as a matter of culture and law.

Anyway, if both parties could recognize—in the halls of Congress and on dumbass cable shows—that there are significant trade-offs inherent to immigration policy, that would be a huge step toward actually forging an immigration policy, and enforcing it. And making cosseted blue state Democrats recognize this fact where they live could be an important first step toward that.

… it’s slowly dawning on Democrats that their identity politics-infused assumptions of the electorate are starting to melt in the heat of reality. It’s official: Democrats have a nonwhite voter problem, as Ruy Teixera writes in his essay, “It’s Official: Democrats Have a Nonwhite Voter Problem.” For a long time Democrats have acted like nonwhite voters are axiomatically “the base.” That’s changing. And that’s good.

And that leads me to the thought experiment I wanted to get to but will instead just drop in your lap alongside sentient dolphins and mandatory voting. “What if nonwhite voters voted just like white voters?”

Even baby steps in this direction would shake the Democratic Party to its core. It’s really hard to accuse the opposing party of racism and xenophobia when the opposing party has roughly the same demographic makeup of your party. The more interesting question in some ways is, what would happen to the Republican Party? But I’ll leave that for you guys to discuss.