The EconomistJanuary 20th 2018 United States 35O
NE moonlit night 13 years ago Jennifer crossed into Texas,
squeezed into a car footwell. Her mother had made the clan-
destine journey from theirnative Guatemala, looking for work to
help pay for Jennifer’s leukaemia treatment, five years earlier.
Having established herself in Maryland, cleaning houses and car-
ing for children, she wanted her son and two daughters—includ-
ing Jennifer, by then six and cancer-free—with her. “All I remem-
ber is staring at the moon,” Jennifer recalls. “So long as I could see
it, I thought we’d be OK.”
Now in her last year of high school in Maryland, Jennifer is the
commander of her school’s air cadets and has been offered a
place by six colleges. Whether she will be able to join the air force,
as she would like, or study for a degree, or even remain in Ameri-
ca is unclear, however. She is one of the 700,000 beneficiaries of
an Obama-era programme, known by its acronym DACA, that
shields illegal immigrants brought to America as children from
deportation; but which President Donald Trump has ended. The
programme is due to lapse on March 5th, leaving its beneficiaries,
known as “Dreamers”, liable for expulsion. This would be so ob-
viously counter-productive that only a seriously dysfunctional
government could countenance it. In other words, Jennifer is
right to be worried.
Mr Trump says he is legally compelled to axe DACA, which
most Republicans regarded as an act of executive overreach, and
wants Congress to pass a law to protect the Dreamers. Yet he also
sees that as an opportunity to extract support for his restrictionist
agenda from the Democrats, who are dedicated to saving the
Dreamers and whose votes are needed to do so. So Mr Trump is
demanding billions of dollars for his promised border wall, as
well as changes to legal immigration, which he and other Repub-
lican hawks want to cut by half. The Democrats say: no way. And
with a rare moment of leverage looming for the minority party, in
the form of a spending bill required to keep the federal govern-
ment running beyond January 19th, they are demanding that the
fate of Dreamers should be secured first. That seems ambitious.
Though the Dreamers will probably be saved eventually—be-
cause around 85% of Americans want them to be—the stand-off
has degenerated into an ugly row over Mr Trump’s reference to
Haiti and African countries, at a bipartisan meeting on immigra-tion, as “shitholes”. Moreover, in any event, the farrago will have
sucked up vast amounts of congressional time, caused needless
anxiety to those affected (including, Jennifer estimates, a third of
her school’s 200 air cadets) and perhaps a governmentshutdown
costing billions in lost economic activity.
That America is in a fix over immigration is perhaps unsur-
prising. Through its history, periods of high immigration have al-
ways provoked a backlash—thus, the restrictive measures passed
in the early 1920s after an influx from southern and eastern Eu-
rope, and again in the early 1960s, to expel thousands of low-
skilled Mexicans. It is a cycle as American as the opportunity the
country otherwise affords immigrants. After another great in-
wash of Hispanics, peaking duringthe late 1990s at around
750,000 arrivals a year, a repulse was inevitable. Only this time it
is different. Anti-immigration movements have in the past been
as much within the parties as between them, the backlash having
traditionally been led by left-wing unions and right-wing nativ-
ists. Yet this row is partisan, making it symbolically important to
the parties, liable to getpersonal, and correspondingly intracta-
ble. For the same reasons, the political discussion of immigration
has become increasingly removed from reality. Employment in
low-skilled jobs will grow faster over the next decade than the
number of native workers. By leaving millions of long-stay immi-
grants in the shadows, America is inflicting a vastopportunity
cost on itself. Moreover, perhaps in part as a response to Mr
Trump, immigration is becoming much less unpopular.
In both parties, fundamental forces have shaped this political
change. Only a decade ago, Republican leaders such as George W.
Bush enthused about immigration. Yet they were out of touch
with the nativism of many Republican voters. That sentiment,
which Mr Trump divined and has exacerbated, has now infected
the party to such a degree that hostility to immigration is the sur-
est indicator of Republican support. The arrival of many Hispan-
ics in Republican states which had previously seen little recent
immigration, such asAlabama and Arkansas, is one reason for
this. Another is the electoral migration of working-class whites
from the Democrats—bringing with them the left’s traditional
fear for the effect of immigration on native workers’ wages. In ad-
dition, Republicans’ fears are driven, opinion polling and Mr
Trump’s rhetoricsuggests, by ethnocultural anxiety which, in a
country turning rapidly browner, cannot easily be assuaged.In with the out crowd
Meanwhile, the Democrats, who until a decade or so ago were
similarly divided on immigration, are now all for it. In 2006, 40%
of Democrats were in favour of a border wall; now less than 10%
are. This is in part because the party has to some degree replaced
its lost whites with Hispanic voters. It also represents a more pro-
found cultural shift, driven by a cosmopolitan relish for diversity
and zeitgeisty aversion to chauvinism, such that even white
Democrats now feel markedly less chary towards immigration
than they did. To be pro-immigrant is becoming even more inher-
ently Democraticthan to be agin immigration isRepublican.
This is unhelpful for anyone who wants to improve America’s
immigration policies. And that includes the public at large, which
is to the centre of both parties on the issue. Surveys suggest that
Americans chiefly want better border security, a deal to legitimise
undocumented immigrants and a more meritocratic visa re-
gime—an appealing mix, drawn from the left and the right. It is,
for the same reason, almostunimaginable. 7Stranger danger
Hostility to immigration used to be found in both parties. No longerLexington