Test Case

As Ryan Avent notes, yesterday's football games were full of advertisements from Virginia legislature candidates, almost all Republicans, almost all heavily emphasizing the immigration issue. I assume these races, where other factors would seem to presage the continued blueing of Virginia, are going to play as a test case for the emerging notion that immigrant-bashing is the Great Republican Hope for 2008.

One irony here is that in my view one of the big problems with Washington DC is, indeed, that Northern Virginia has too many immigrants and I wish more of them would move to the city. There's tons of great, affordable ethnic restaurants of the sort that usually provide the spice of urban life but instead of being in the city, they're overwhelmingly located in Virginia strip malls like the legendary Eden Center in Falls Church. This is great for Tyler Cowen, Northern Virginia's premiere foodie, but it's not so great for me. So on some level, I kind of hope Virginia politicians do come up with some scheme to drive immigrants out of their precious suburbs thus paving the way for a Brave New World of delicious DC cuisine (but do try Thai X-ing in the District which is great, albeit a logistical nightmare).

Comments

It is not, of course, the "immigration" issue. It's the illegal immigration issue.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 5, 2007 7:21 PM

It's funny how many thai restaurants there are here even though there are almost no thai-americans.

Posted by Bang my Kok | November 5, 2007 7:43 PM

And, in fairness, some of us have no interest in "immigrant-bashing."

I'm hoping for a workable solution to illegal immigration that respects the rule of law and doesn't compound the problem.

Posted by southpaw | November 5, 2007 7:49 PM

Matt, you write that such "great, affordable ethnic restaurants of the sort... usually provide the spice of urban life." But that's really not true, at least not any more. The best places for ethnic food in almost every city in the country these days, including NYC, are away from the city centers, where real estate and overhead costs are cheaper. So, you go to Queens, Monterey Park, CA, Doraville, GA, to get the good stuff. There's still good food to be had in close-in neighborhoods in LA, but as center cities get "nicer" they also get more expensive...and the chains move in...and the good tacos move out.

That said, I live in the District too and I wish I could get better Mexican and Vietnamese close by...but you have to go to Virginia.

Posted by Doug | November 5, 2007 7:56 PM

HA! Thai X-ing is right down the street from my brother's house in Shaw. That place has the most amazing thai food, but it takes as long as if you cooked it yourself, including the time it takes to shop for groceries. Don;t bother calling ahead, he won't start cooking your order until after you show up, maybe later.

Posted by coda | November 5, 2007 8:24 PM

From a layman's perspective, Basil Thai on Wisconsin in Georgetown is pretty decent.

Posted by southpaw | November 5, 2007 8:34 PM

If the GOP wants to embark on a national self-bleaching project just as demographic trends are going the opposite way, that is their option. But I don't think the Dobbs mob is going to uniformly pull the lever for the GOP given that Dobbs' populist rants are often geared against Republicans in power.

And, as always, I have to point out that, while it's true that a lot of people are unhappy about immigration right now, their numbers and influence are carefully magnified through a disciplined message machine and a lazy press. It's a constructed narrative and one Democrats would do well not to accept uncritically.

Posted by yave begnet | November 5, 2007 8:44 PM

I've been predicting immigration (really it's mainly immigration, but often with the word "illegal" prepended) will be a big issue in the next year and a possible electoral unguent for the Republicans.

Dems better be dealing with the issue of immigration, illegal and otherwise, or they may face some hurtin' at the polls.

I say start by deporting every Irish citizen in the US illegally. I don't hate the Irish, but there are tons of them in the US illegally, and they seem to have great difficulty adapting to the great cultural heritage of the United States, since they are unfamiliar with corned beef and cabbage as a dinner dish, and sometimes do not appreciate tacos.

But, seriously, Republicans are gonna run like hell on immigration.

Posted by blatherskite | November 5, 2007 8:45 PM

To echo what Doug said:
'Ethnic' restaurants in the city center or other trendy areas are going to cater to tourists, and so are going to tend to be 'Disneyfied' versions of that cuisine. Your authentic mom and pop places are going to be in first ring suburbs and/or non-trendy (i.e. actually ethnically segregated) neighborhoods.

Posted by Kenny | November 5, 2007 8:47 PM

Politics is like Hollywood: the people who practice it tend to be smarter than the stuff they make.

Immigration is the issue du jour and like most issues du jour there is little room for nuance or complexity.

Immigrants: many hard working, not-overly-bad people (not a good day: not going to say anything nicer about people in general), delicious and unusual foods, interesting tile art.

Also: some of the pathologies from the places they came.

Does anyone care (by which I mean anyone who isn't a situational [and probably congenital] racist interested mostly in the election year benefits of immigrant bashing) that the greater LA area is now home to an entrenched multinational gang problem more rather than less likely to get worse over time.

Why does this matter?

Apart from the fact that lots of people live there and don't especially want (and may not even deserve) to have their neighborhoods (I'm not just talking about south and east LA: this is a Valley problem now) terrorized by people who literally saw off the legs of their competition but because where there is crime there is - eventually - less freedom for the less-bad, and there is already less freedom for the less-bad.

You wonder why they're any worse than the Crips or Bloods.

They're worse because the Crips and the Bloods were at war with each other. They hustled and murdered on the streets of their own neighborhoods.

That's bad enough but at least they stayed in one place.

The new gangs - multinational, Latino - take their thugging anywhere they can; they plant seeds.

America is an imperial country now; there will fewer rather than more social services. It isn't going to be the answer.

It probably never was.

More and more these gangs will take care of the sick mothers and pay for education.

But that help comes with a price.

Posted by Linus | November 5, 2007 9:17 PM

It is not, of course, the "immigration" issue. It's the illegal immigration issue.

If that was truly the case, then President Bush's proposal to grant a limited form of amnesty to illegal immigrants would have been welcomed as a step towards resolving the issue, but of course it was rejected like so much cold, limp broccoli. I think Bush and Rove seriously miscalculated on the potential for the issue of immigration to divide the GOP into warring factions, and it will be very interesting to see how it plays out in the 2008 Republican primaries.

Posted by David W. | November 5, 2007 9:55 PM

Of course, lets not forget that Republicans, once using immigrant bashing to get elected, will immediately turn to their corporate pay-masters and ask what they want.

The same cultural conservatives who vote because they actually believe that Republican politicians care about banning gays from America will fall for the Republican anti-illegal rhetoric.

Now – mind you, I am 100% on the same page with Mickey Kaus in terms of what our illegal and essentially unmonitored immigration policies have brought to the lower classes of the United States. I am an American-first progressive. In other words, we take care of our own first, then worry about foreigners. But I am also not naïve enough to believe that Republicans will ever be anything more than shills for corporations.

Posted by Brad | November 5, 2007 10:11 PM

Shorter Matt Yglesias:

Let's push more African-Americans out of DC!

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 5, 2007 10:51 PM

Thai X-ing has nothing on Thai Square, but I disagree that per capita NoVa has better restuarants than DC.

Posted by Justin | November 5, 2007 11:01 PM

I say start by deporting every Irish citizen in the US illegally.

Why is it still acceptable to make ethnic slurs against the Irish? I mean, you can't call a football team the Fighting Sioux but nobody complains about the Fighting Irish.

One irony here is that in my view one of the big problems with Washington DC is, indeed, that Northern Virginia has too many immigrants and I wish more of them would move to the city.

You would think that without driver's licenses they would want to take advantage of DC's mass transit system.

Posted by Just Karl | November 5, 2007 11:37 PM

"If that was truly the case, then President Bush's proposal to grant a limited form of amnesty to illegal immigrants would have been welcomed as a step towards resolving the issue,"

Yup, kind of like handing out free ATM cards is a solution to bank robbery: You can always solve a crime problem by retroactively making the conduct legal.

Even if amnesty were a rational response to the presence of so many illegal immigrants, without tough border enforcement first, an amnesty just pulls in more illegals looking forward to the NEXT amnesty.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 5, 2007 11:48 PM

I think the Kaine/Warner response "One party is the party of hope and optimism, and the other is the party of 'who can we be afraid of today'", if it works, should be examined. Now, in Virginia, Kaine/Warner has a record to run on in a way that won't be true in a Presidential election. But it seems like a good start.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | November 5, 2007 11:50 PM

Um Karl, that's pretty dumb. They're called the Fighting Irish because they chose the name...whereas the University of Illinois did not precisely ask the Illini to use their's.

Nor did the Redskins, etc.

Posted by Greg | November 6, 2007 12:13 AM

It is not, of course, the "immigration" issue. It's the illegal immigration issue.

Not necessarily. A lot of anti-immigration advocates think both legal & illegal immigration are bad.

Posted by Peter H | November 6, 2007 12:45 AM

This is a good example of how on the hugely important topic of immigration pundits do most of what little thinking they ever do with their stomachs.

Posted by Steve Sailer | November 6, 2007 1:52 AM

Yup, kind of like handing out free ATM cards is a solution to bank robbery: You can always solve a crime problem by retroactively making the conduct legal.

If an illegal immigrant wants to open a bank account and get a free ATM card in the bargain, where's the criminality in that? Illegal or not, an immigrant who does honest work for pay isn't doing something criminal per se by having a bank account. So what exactly is the crime here?

Even if amnesty were a rational response to the presence of so many illegal immigrants, without tough border enforcement first, an amnesty just pulls in more illegals looking forward to the NEXT amnesty.

Amnesty won't change whether or not someone wants to immigrate to the U.S. in the future, but only change the status of those who are already here. The dire poverty in much of Mexico and Central America is such a huge driving force that it makes the prospect of future amnesty pale in comparison.

FWIW, over thirty years ago in the meat packing industry I saw plenty of legal immigrants from Mexico replace "native Americans" during a strike in the plant I once worked in, so the standard line that "they're stealing our jobs" falls pretty flat with me given the giant collective yawn about the lives of said striking meat packing workers. If Republicans were genuinely concerned with the issue of how immigration drives down the wages of unskilled labor, they'd have done far more with regard to making such work more valued by raising the minimum wage and reforming union organizing rules. I see the immigration issue as a cynical way for the GOP to get votes via an anti-immigrant message among those in the working class who are who are in fact being squeezed harder and harder financially. The news media generally loves playing along in order to gain viewers also, and grab more advertising dollars selling the eyeballs of said viewers. Nice work for them if they can get it I suppose, but it won't honestly deal with the real issue, which is the ongoing decline of wages in the U.S. and elsewhere as globalization pits ever more workers against one another in a race to the bottom when it comes to unskilled and low-skilled labor.

Posted by David W. | November 6, 2007 2:01 AM

Reading much of the literature from the people who crusade the hardest and are especially focused on this issue, it becomes immediately clear that these people have nothing against "immigration" in general. Nor are they especially worried or anxious that we are recieving a number of immigrants who are from a different culture and speak a different language than us. These people don't worry about the frenchification of the U.S. and portmanteaus like "Francifornia" aren't even heard of. Reactionary demands that certain territories pass measures instituting English as the official language, aren't a particularly useful example of the type of policies and concerns people interested in this issue support or worry over. And no matter what, in no way is this process ever likened or referred to as an 'invasion' as if the immigrants composed a unified hostile army of sorts. Reading and listening to them at length, it's very clear that the primary
concern of the people very interested in this issue, most of them white conservative men, is a sincere pragmatic concern for the integrity of the law and absolutely nothing else. Which is exactly why the Republican party, an organization with a historic devotion to civic integrity and promoting the public good and one which has historically bypassed using or exploiting racial, sexual, xenophobic and other reactionary fears to attract supporters is now campaigning on this very issue. Because as mentioned, these two groups have a lot in common.

Posted by DRR | November 6, 2007 5:26 AM

The only ad I've seen a lot of in NoVa recently is for Karen Schultz, a Democrat, bashing Jill Vogel, a Republican, for being soft on immigration enforcement and supporting amnesty.

Posted by aaron | November 6, 2007 7:09 AM

"Which is exactly why the Republican party, an organization with a historic devotion to civic integrity and promoting the public good and one which has historically bypassed using or exploiting racial, sexual, xenophobic and other reactionary fears to attract supporters is now campaigning on this very issue. Because as mentioned, these two groups have a lot in common."

Except, of course, the GOP isn't, to any significant extent. Here we've got an issue where the public is, according to polls, 70-80% against the Democratic position. The GOP ought to be all over it. And yet they barely touch it.

Because the leadership of both parties agree on this one. It's the party bases that disagree. Bad news for the Republicans, because they're going to piss off their base a LOT more than Democrats will piss off their's, by not delivering secure borders.

Posted by Brett Bellmore | November 6, 2007 7:13 AM

Yay, all diversity means to you is food. I'm sure you think you're being tongue-in-cheek by reducing the immigrant experience to something you can buy and shove in your stomach. However, by evading a serious debate on the issue you reveal your disdain for the idea that society should emphasize one set of assumptions about the best ways to interact with nature and other people (this is called "culture") even if it doesn't ban other forms of interaction. This emphasis gives society harmony, life standardization and predicatability, connectedness.

But no, what do you care about the emptiness, the internal death, of living in an aggressively multicultural society that encourages not tolerance but integration into globalized mush? You're too busy worrying about a chainsmoking excon with three kids by three women who could not possibly afford health insurance. No, the welfare state is great, but there may very well be more to the world than money.

And of course, anti-immigrant policies also have economic and security bases in addition to this cultural preservation bleeding heart stuff.

Posted by Moral Panicker | November 6, 2007 7:34 AM

But Yglesias is to blame for not presenting a serious argument only if this is an issue which either represents a serious problem or is being engaged in seriously. I don't see any reason to think that is the case with immigration. Instead anger about immigration tends to track with nervousness about other things rather than anything having to do with immigration.

I saw a good example of this in the '90s when I was living in Chicago (a city that has done a great job keeping its immigrants and so has wonderful cheap food of just about every type one could imagine). The Tribune started running some nutty right wing woman whose name I forget. She apparently got a lot of negative comments from the Tribune readership because she followed with a column about how people in Illinois and Indiana only know about immigration from newspapers, making clear that she had not bothered to check on where immigrants were actually moving in the country.

But it did highlight the fact that immigrant bashing was working well in California, but was basically not present at all in Chicago (there was a bit in the far suburbs which had no immigrants yet). The reason for this seemed pretty clear. California had a heavily military based economy, and so the economy hit hard times when defense budgets were slashed. Illinois had largely civilian manufacturing, so when the base closings came Illinois actually eagerly reclaimed the land that the bases were sitting on (other than a naval training center that they kept).

So the economy in California tanked, while the economy in Illinois grew because of the end of the Cold War. So naturally immigrants were dangerous to the US in California and not in Illinois.

So if what will lessen anxiety about immigration is not anything about immigration, but rather better economic prospects, and a government that does not use fear to stay in power, it is not clear why arguments about immigration should be any more serious than the distribution of restaurants they bring.

Posted by Lon | November 6, 2007 9:08 AM

But no, what do you care about the emptiness, the internal death, of living in an aggressively multicultural society that encourages not tolerance but integration into globalized mush?

I love it. Instead of going out an interacting with people, creating a community, you will lament, in almost poetic terms, that community is no longer handed to you on a silver platter. You must now go out and learn and meet people...oh no!

Posted by Rambuncle | November 6, 2007 10:29 AM

Here we've got an issue where the public is, according to polls, 70-80% against the Democratic position. The GOP ought to be all over it. And yet they barely touch it.

Brett: What the hell you talking about? The GOP presidential aspirants are falling all over themselves in an effort to demonstrate sufficiently robust immigrant bashery. This is true for even the ones (nearly all of them, that is) who know better and who have demonstrated common sense in the recent past on the issue.

It's the party bases that disagree. Bad news for the Republicans, because they're going to piss off their base a LOT more than Democrats will piss off their's, by not delivering secure borders.

You mean "by not delivering a less rapidly browning America." We could have substantially more secure borders tomorrow if we adopted a policy raising immigration limits and allowing Latin Americans a regulated, legal labor outlet in the US. Most would-be illegal immigrants will naturally prefer the significant advantages of immigrating legally -- even if they may have to wait a year or two for their numbers to come up. This should both lessen substantially the incentive to immigrate illegally and lessen the incentive to hire illegals (because there will now be a legal way to hire a Mexican or Honduran). Lower -- probably much lower -- numbers of people trying to sneak into the country allows those guarding our borders to focus on terrorists instead of economic migrants. We all win.

Posted by Jasper | November 6, 2007 11:34 AM

Jasper,

You make excellent points about how the key to securing our borders is to make legal immigration easier for people who want to work. Remove the economic incentives for illegal immigration, and the overwhelming majority of people who currently come here illegally will immigrate instead through legal channels.

We need to do more than raise immigration limits. We need to remove numerical limits altogether, on immigrants from all parts of the world, not just Latin America. Instead, we need to create guest worker programs that will match immigrants with a job in the United States, and let the invisible hand of the marketplace determine how many people enter each year for economic reasons. If an immigrant has a legitimate job waiting for him/her in the US, they should be allowed in. If he/she doesn't have a legitimate job waiting for him/her, then they should be turned away, if they don't turn themselves away in the 1st place.

After all, a successful guest worker program would fill all jobs that are available to immigrants, and if there are no jobs left for immigrants in the US, then there is no reason for most immigrants to come here, either legally or illegally. Conversely, so long as there are jobs in the US to be had by immigrants, they will continue coming here, either legally or illegally. That's why Prohibition-model measures have failed to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

Posted by eltoro | November 6, 2007 12:57 PM

Why is it when I read MattY's imm. posts I always get the feeling I'm reading something from 100 years ago and from Inja?

David W braindeadedly says: If an illegal immigrant wants to open a bank account and get a free ATM card in the bargain, where's the criminality in that? Illegal or not, an immigrant who does honest work for pay isn't doing something criminal per se by having a bank account. So what exactly is the crime here?

First, the Bush admin pressured Congress to change the rules allowing banks to accept MexicanIDCards. What that did, for those like MattY unable to figure these things out, is it gave large banks a means to profit from illegal activity.

And, in fact, large banks donate money to far-left, racial power groups that promote that illegal activity.

Further, the FederalReserve is profiting from the money that IllegalAliens send home by taking a cut of that flow. They're explicitly attempting to profit from indirect illegal activity.

Bottom line: our entire system is being corrupted by IllegalImmigration. And, people like MattY are enabling and supporting that GovernmentCorruption.

Bonus: a MiamiHerald columnist threatens a "LatinoIntifada" without "reform". And, JohnMcCain said something similar recently. What name do we give to those who help lead a country to this situation?

Posted by TLB | November 6, 2007 4:15 PM