Most people have nuanced views on immigration. That includes President-elect Donald Trump, whose political resilience is in no small part a product of the American electorate’s rejection of open borders. Yet the man who led chants of “build the wall” and has spoken hyperbolically at times about Muslim immigration has been noticeably slow to rein in his tech bro pals on H-1B visas, though they have done some backtracking of their own.
The Trump phenomenon is at its best an attempt to push back against the excesses of proposition-nation talk, treating America as a real place that is the home of real people and not just an abstraction. You can, of course, push too far in the opposite direction, and some Trump allies do—particularism has excesses that are as ugly as universalism can be divorced from reality—but most Trump voters take the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty seriously, not literally.
In other words, you can simultaneously believe the immigration has enriched the American experience and been an important part of this country’s story without rejecting the need for an orderly border and strong mutual bonds of citizenship. As the founders of this magazine once put it, “We believe that America has gained and still does from new immigrants. But we also, after two decades of intense immigration, believe that the nation needs a slowdown to assimilate those already here.”
Except you can now revise that to more than four decades of intense immigration, much of it illegal, with the biggest surge in U.S. history taking place under President Joe Biden. The Biden border crisis was sparked in part by that wealthy, historically Western countries do not have the right to keep out migrants who outscore (some of) the native-born on various intersectionality tests. Similar cultural self-doubt has plagued our allies in Europe and elsewhere, often leading to political upheaval.
Most Americans, including vast numbers of citizens and lawful permanent residents of recent immigrant stock, reject this idea in theory. Even more reject it in practice, as it leads to chaos and strained social services, often most acutely felt in homegrown communities of color. That’s how Trump broke George W. Bush’s record (for a Republican presidential nominee) Hispanic vote share despite speaking rather differently about immigration, bilingualism, and multiculturalism.
The broken border has prompted the American people to contemplate deportation programs that might have triggered blowback as recently as Trump’s first term. The Biden administration itself has quietly had to step up deportations, even as the outgoing president once said that Barack Obama’s deporter-in-chief posture—adopted to build credibility for a congressionally enacted amnesty—was a “big mistake.”
The big mistake was really allowing the transfer of wealth and power from the working class to a globalized elite under the guise of woke language. If liberals are vulnerable to defending the importation of a cheap, perpetually marginalized servant class on these grounds, conservatives and libertarians easily fall victim to descriptions of programs like H-1B as some kind of pure free-market solution to American labor problems.
Elon Musk is a centrist Democrat who became a relatively recent convert to libertarianism. Vivek Ramaswamy is younger, but he is a more entrenched representative of America First’s more libertarian wing. Saved By the Bell references aside, in another context much of his recent cultural commentary would have been at home in conservative (and neoconservative) publications since at least the 1980s. And while vastly oversimplified, it isn’t wrong in every particular.
Ramaswamy and especially Musk played important roles in getting Trump reelected. Their Department of Government Efficiency could play a crucial role in his administration. Trump himself, as I’ve written before, mixed populist and nationalist instincts about foreign cheating with the sensibilities of a pre-Reagan moderate business Republican. It’s no wonder he’s less of a systematic thinker on immigration policy than Stephen Miller.
But it will be a variation of the same error Biden made, and given the multiracial working-class coalition that elected Trump in 2024 potentially a far graver one, to accept the bizarre argument that solidarity with one’s fellow citizens when evaluating foreign-worker programs is somehow closer to DEI than conservatism. It would at least represent the latest triumph of sloganeering over thinking on immigration policy.
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