This is a thorough conversation with my friend David Hollingsworth. David is a history professor at Polymore College and a teaching assistant at UC San Diego. I had David on because I believe current conversations about immigration are too shortsighted: they focus on what is happening now while ignoring the important history that explains how America arrived at Donald Trump and xenophobic politics.
We discuss everything from American hostilities in South America to how Democrats can win back Latino voters. I hope you enjoy!
In Solidarity — Joe
You can find David on Twitter/X here.
Joe Mayall: Hey everyone, I'm here with David Hollingsworth today. David is a US and Latin American historian, an adjunct professor at Polymore Community College and a teacher's assistant at the University of California at San Diego. He's very knowledgeable in Latin American and American history, particularly on immigration. So I wanted to talk to David today because as we all know, immigration was a central focus of the 2024 presidential elections and all the other elections.
It's really been at the top of American politics for at least a decade now. I'm a big believer that you can't really understand the present without understanding the past and how we got here. So I wanted to invite someone who is more knowledgeable than I to help us understand that. David thanks for being here today.
David Hollingsworth: Thank you for having me, man. And as a historian, I'm very happy to hear you talk about, you know, understanding the context of everything, because I really wish we did that more in the United States.
JM: I agree. I don't know what the Department of Education will look like under Donald Trump, but I assume it will not be one that encourages critical thought and sober analysis of America's past. So hopefully we can provide that little bit of a missing link that students and even all Americans can pick up on. Before we get into this, can I ask a little bit about like, your background is in US and Latin American history.
What made you want to focus on that topic? Why did you choose that out of the wide world of history?
DH: Yeah, great question. So to an extent, it almost chose me. You would never guess by my last name being Hongsworth, but I am Latino. I am half Mexican, as you can probably guess on my mom's side. And so, you know, that's always kind of been a part of who I am. For part of my life, we grew up in Virginia and I wasn't as connected with my Mexican heritage, my Mexican culture. But I was born in Los Angeles. We moved.
to Virginia when I was like two or three years old or something like that. When I was nine, we moved back to California. We've mostly been in the San Diego area ever since. And in the area that I grew up in, in Southern California, when we came back, we grew up in, or I grew up in Vista, California, which is kind of the part at least of Vista that I'm in is a working class Latino neighborhood, right? And so, you know, most of my friends are-
Latino, know, most of my kind of longer term childhood friends. And it's always just kind of been, you know, the world that I grew up in, right. And there are some events even in like my high school years, whether they were, you know, just hearing from friends that are immigrants and just knowing that, you know, they have these kind of tougher experiences to the starting of a sort of earlier immigrants rights movements in the 2000s and the aughts.
I kind of, you know, saw it as I was growing up. And then from there, when I was in community college, I actually began to learn more about US policy in Latin America, which oftentimes is pretty horrendous and creates a lot of new immigrants and refugees that are coming here to flee the conditions that the US has helped create in places in Latin America. And so when I started to learn about some of those things, you know, the, coups that the United States has done to
overthrow democracies in Latin America in order to stamp out just any semblance of the left, anything that would maybe threaten US corporate and sort of, you know, governmental interests over there. I started kind of getting deeper into that and it put me on the path toward becoming a historian.
JM: David, I am shocked that you would victim blame the US who is experiencing the worst immigration crisis for causing this problem. How dare you suggest that we had any fault in current dynamics in the two continents that we have just run rabbit over for the past century at this point. But all joking aside, glad to, you know, I really appreciate the, you know, the mention there because that puts me up a wall is, you know, we can get into this in our conversation, but here in Denver, we have a lot of influx of Venezuelan migrants and people act like as if Venezuela just happened upon itself into economic catastrophe and not the crippling sanctions that are honestly matched like one-to-one with emigration levels of, you know, we sanctioned their fuel in 2012. The first immigration wave comes further in 2016 and another one again in 2020 more and more. So I'm really curious to hear your thoughts on, you know, as we get into the US presidents and stuff like that, like not only how they responded to, to immigrations, but also how they, how they caused that. So with that, I'd like to start with the first question is, you know, as I mentioned, I wanted to bring you on to hear how you see the history of the United States and Latin American countries basically bringing us to this moment. And so my first question is, can you give us kind of like a brief rundown in your view of how we got here, right? Like what has America been doing over, let's say the last 30 years in respects to South American and Latin American immigration?
DH: Yeah, so first of all, I think you're totally right from a second ago. I think it's really unfair of me to pick on the United States. It's just, it's a small bean, you know, an innocent little small bean that's perfecting good and has never done anything wrong. So I do want to take accountability for my words, my very irresponsible words. No, seriously though. So I guess starting off just to kind of, in really broad terms, before we get to kind of more specific recent stuff, in really broad terms to kind of just summarize really quickly the first hundred or so years of US immigration policy in general, which will include, you know, Latin America. The US actually kind of had open borders, basically, when it was first founded as a country. And it more or less had that for from the founding of the country until the 1920s almost. And so during that time, yeah, the United States mostly had open borders, know, different states along the US-Canada border and Mexico-US border. Different individual states kind of sometimes had their own early equivalent to a sort of border patrol, but it wasn't a united, coherent federal thing.
The first kind of, maybe we could say landmark federal immigration policy was the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. You know, we've kind of hinted at the fact that we're going to be talking about labor a little bit in this episode, and this definitely was a consequence of that, right? You have all these economic downturns, the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s. You have a lot of tension between workers and their bosses during this time. There's a lot of labor strife. are even a lot of uprisings by the US working class during this time. But unfortunately, this is the late 1800s we're talking about. And so there is a lot of racism also kind of thrown into that medley of economic hardship and class tensions. And so one unfortunate kind of consequence of that is especially in the western part of the United States and even more so especially on the west coast, you have then the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 being implemented that excludes Chinese people. that's kind of, on the one hand, a first big step, on the other hand, kind of an exception to the US kind of generally having something of an open borders policy. But later on, we get to the 1920s. And that's where we get the first big federal immigration act. we have first the 1921 Immigration Act and what this one does is put some temporary restrictive quotas on immigration from the rest of the world and does so in a way that really only kind of favors northern and western Europe. So with this act it's really funny actually if you just
You know, if you ever for fun want to Google the debates over this, this piece of legislation, just type in like 1920s immigration act debates and you'll see debates from the 1920s that if you changed around a few of the specific names and a few of the specific countries that are kind of being, you know, boogeyman against basically, it would be the exact same shit that you see people talking about with immigration today. Even like
DH: A lot of the people who wanted to implement this immigration reform, they talked about how the old immigrants, the past generations of immigrants, those were the ones who mostly assimilated and did it the right way. But these new immigrants are not trying to come into the fabric of the United States and be integrated into it. So really, really kind of funny thing there. There is also in some of those debates, there was a socialist party member in the House of Representatives during that time, Meijer London. And, you know, he's giving a pro-immigration speech that would really even still resonate today, basically talking about how, you know, people always say that about previous generations of immigrants, but immigrants that are coming in are just trying to fit into the fold. They're not your enemy. The sort of stuff you'd expect a socialist to say. Anyways, you have the 19... Sorry, go ahead. No, yeah, go for it.
JM: That is, if you don't mind if I pause you for a second there, one that is unsurprising but darkly hilarious that we're still having the same debate 120 years later. I can only imagine, I'm sure some reactionaries took some thoughts and inspiration from that. But if you don't mind me asking, what is the reason that we get immigration or federal immigration law in the 1920s? As you said, the reconstruction error led to a lot of labor uprising, particularly in my view, and you can also correct me if I'm wrong here, because Americans had fought in the Civil War. The justified freeing of slaves changed the economics of the country and white American workers were extremely threatened by a cheaper workforce. But I'm a little unsure about why is 1920 the year where the federal government steps in and says, all right, we got to start doing quotas. We got to start making the border a real thing. And of course, as we know, it only got more prioritized since then.
DH: Yeah, that's a really good question. And I like what you said about reconstruction and there's other stuff about that too, but I could spend an hour just talking about that. So to more directly answer your question about the early 1900s, interestingly enough, Latin America wasn't really part of that worry. During that time, actually, we were getting a lot of people from Europe. And this was during the time where
A lot of Southern and Eastern European immigrants were not considered white yet, right? And so there was a lot of, you know, cultural panic and a lot of scapegoating of immigrants from Europe during that time, because again, they're not part of that category of white quite yet. And even further beyond that, not only do you have a lot of these European immigrants coming in,
But a lot of them are, they come to the United States, they're working in the lower paying jobs, the harder jobs. And of course then they are going to be advocating for their labor rights, especially those who are coming from countries that have a pretty strong trade union, if not even socialist movement. And so you kind of have this interconnection between the sort of general xenophobia that you see toward people that are considered as others, mixed with a fear of labor radicalism and even, you know, quote unquote, Bolshevism after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution in Russia. And so you have that combining of, again, you know, those normal kind of xenophobic fears with fears of labor radicalism, which actually was going to be a point. And one other thing, by the way, going back to the immigration act. So we have the 1921 immigration act sets up some of these, these quotas that were theoretically supposed to be temporary. 1924, you have basically a sequel to that act, which sets these quotas in place, again, pretty much only favors Northern and Western Europe. And so it's very harsh toward Southern and Eastern Europe, very harsh toward Asia and Africa.
Interesting fact about that though, and this kind of goes back to questions about Latin America, Latin America is actually largely excluded from the 1924 Act specifically because a lot of southwestern states have on their in their agricultural sectors a huge reliance on a lot of Latin American, of course, particularly Mexican because they're our neighbors to the south, but in general a lot of Latin American cheap immigrant labor in the Southwest, and so you actually have that exception carved out for Latin Americans.
JM: That doesn't surprise me. It always seems like immigration policy and the, what do we call it? don't know, whichever ethnic group gets scapegoated for a decade. Like it's always the one that doesn't help the capitalists make profits as much. So I'm not surprised there. That's super interesting. It's very... you know, going back to my high school history days, I remember the, of course, like the exclusion acts and everything, but immigration is so focused and so racialized now that it's all from pretty much South America where, you know, you don't hear a lot of anti-immigrant sentiment, you know, when, Donald Trump speaks bad about immigrants, you don't really get the sense he's talking about Finnish immigrants or Swedish immigrants. Or anything like that. A picture comes in your mind of like, I know exactly who this guy is mad at. Can you kind of take us like, when does that start? When does America's xenophobia start to focus less on, let's just call it the rest of the world and more on, to use the imperialist term, our own backyard?
DH: Yeah, yeah, great question. So I guess there's a couple steps to getting there. An interesting side effect actually, just kind of putting a bow on the European immigrant thing, is because of these restrictive quotas with the 1924 Immigration Act, this is actually how a lot of Southern and Eastern Europeans kind of become integrated into being considered white, because you have these quotas being implemented. And so
Of course, you're still going to have ethnic enclaves where you have, say, Italians or Poles or whatever in their own areas. But because there's not as much people coming from the old country, you have the groups that are in the US starting to acclimate more, to assimilate more. And so once you do have, an Italian American, an Irish American, a Polish American, Romanian, whatever,
Once they have been integrated into US culture, they are white in the sense that they have light skin comparable to that of say, someone who's of French American background, German American, whatever. And so they start blending in easier and that's how they became white. Anyways, with that said, so there's some kind of changes to immigration, immigration policy, immigration outlook throughout kind of the rest of the 20th century.
But definitely the real big one, the real big one before we kind of start getting into more, you know, stuff that happened within our lifetimes is the 1965 Immigration Act that is passed under LBJ. What LBJ's 1965 Immigration Act does is it pretty much, doesn't completely get rid of the quota system. It gets rid of it in a theoretical sense. It does still kind of keep somewhat of a formula for how many people are admitted from different parts of the world. But this new 1965 act is a lot less discriminatory for different parts of the world. So it's no longer just favoring, you know, Western and Northern European immigrants. Now, you know, people from those other parts of Europe, as well as Asia and Africa, are able to kind of come in bigger and better increasing numbers. And that is, by the way, you know, a large reason as to why we have, for example, different immigrant populations in the present, a lot of those started coming more after the 1965 reform. Now, a funny detail about that is the 1965 act did actually kind of bring Latin America into that system of having certain regulated amounts of immigration.
Even though pretty much everyone else from the global south and even eastern and southern Europe benefited from the 1965 act, for Latin America it's a little bit different because, you know, Latin Americans have been exempted before, now they're brought into the fold.
DH: But there was, of course, a number of experiences for Latin American immigrants throughout the 20th century. And so a big one worth mentioning, this one again specifically for Mexicans, is the Bracero Program. So the Bracero Program started in 1942, I believe it was. And it's essentially a guest worker program for Mexican workers who want to come over here. Here work the fields during times of need. But their kind of long-term status in the US was a little bit of a gray area, right? Like they're coming over here on a guest worker program, they're contributing, a lot of them are settling down, but their immigration status is a little bit hazy. And we even kind of see a going back on that in the beginning of 1954, or I'm sorry, no.
Beginning in 1954 this happened in June of 1954 where we have what was called Operation wetback, which was a mass deportation Yeah, it was literally called operation. What? Yeah, it's pretty
JM: That's a tough name. I was not expecting that. I thought you were going to give me some military code name like Operation Ice Pick or something. Just a nice slur right at the top so we know what we're going with.
DH: Right? Yeah. Yeah, pretty insane name. And so this was done in 1954. And this was a mass deportation of Mexican migrants, including ones who had come over from the Bracero program, right? And so you kind of, you see this, this tension where, you know, a lot of Americans, and of course this more or less comes to the present, benefit from the use of migrant labor, including undocumented labor. Now, the braceros kind of were documented, kind of weren't. It's again kind of a gray area. But basically, you have this immigrant labor that they're relying on, but you have these forces of racism. You also have these sort of racial labor tensions where some feel like bringing in these agricultural workers are threatening US jobs. No one thought this in 1942 when the Bracero program was started because that's during World War II. There's a labor shortage and so pretty much everyone is on board with the Bracero program then. But of course after the war things are a little bit different. So you really see this weird tension where on the one hand, know, the US political economy really relies on this immigrant labor. But on the other hand, you know, a lot of people are just not happy about it for one reason or another.
JM: Interesting. Definitely the World War II aspect came to mind. And I know that, you know, during this period of anti-communism unions and labor groups went above and beyond to try and show themselves as like being super patriotic and nationalistic. So I'm not surprised that, you know, this operation went back, as you said, had support of like, you know, the white working class at that time.
DH: Yep, yeah, exactly. to be fair, I don't know the full public opinion breakdown of it, but yeah, there was absolutely support for it, including among the white working class, unfortunately. But yeah, that happens in 54. And even then, it's kind of funny. This is happening in 1954, and yet the Rosetta program lasts until... I want to say about 1960s, somewhere kind of in that neighborhood. 1964, yeah, it lasts until 1964. So you have these deportations with Operation Wetback, and then you're still having migrants being brought over to do that work because they are, again, such a big part of the political economy. So this also, by the way, I won't get into detail about it too much here, but this is also why in the kind of southwest in general, right, where we have like the Mexican-American sort of the Chicano rights movement and stuff like that. You sometimes we think of the farm worker movement. For a lot of Latinos in the southwest, Latino civil rights and immigrant worker rights are very intertwined. And that's why, of course, you you have the Cesar Chavez movement with the farm workers in the valleys and things like that other farm worker movements that are, you know, maybe a little less known, but, you know, it's because there's that, that intersectional kind of, you know, meeting of the immigrant experience, the worker experience, and how if you're an immigrant worker, you are both an immigrant and a worker. And so you kind of, see that that legacy there, which spoiler alert is part of a reason why not to jump way ahead. What we can get back to this later, but
This is a big part of why Bernie Sanders is such a hit among Latino voters. But again, we can talk about that more later.
JM: Okay, I'll stay tuned. Yeah. You mentioned earlier like this is like how this all like this is not to say it's what's the word I'm looking for. You mentioned earlier how this is kind of like the the prelude to where we are now. I wondering if you kind of like take us into let's say like my living lifetime. Like I was born in the 90s. I don't really remember immigration, especially Southern immigration being an issue when I was young, you know, in the post 9-11 years, it was always like, is Al Qaeda immigrating in and stuff like that? Can you kind of take us to like that time period and explain like, how did we go from, you know, as you said, there have been these laws, but it wasn't really like, you know, I'm really getting the sense that this wasn't like the huge issue it is today until very recently. How did we get there, let's say over the past 30 years?
DH: Yeah, that's a great question, because you're right, you know, it really wasn't a huge, huge focus. Funny enough, you know, I'm also born in the the 90s. And so, yeah, we're kind of getting to the time of both of our lifetimes now. It actually did start when we were young, but it's like those were the baby steps, right? So it kind of starts to become a culture war issue, but it doesn't jump out of the gate as a an intense culture war issue that is as intense as it is today, right? So it's like when you and I were kids, we kind of start to see the baby steps of immigration as a culture war issue. And of course, you know, just just to kind of, you know, look at the time, the time in general, right? Like the the 90s, you know, you kind of have some people being a little bit more disenchanted with some things that are going on. I don't know if you want me to talk about NAFTA yet, or if you want me to talk about it after I talk about Clinton's immigration policy. I think those are, think NAFTA and not just NAFTA, but what it represents and then Clinton's immigration policy and the shift right on immigration. They're very kind of intertwined. So I don't know, which would you like me to talk about first?
JM: Let's start with Clinton's immigration policy and we can, yeah, I think if we start there that will give us like a kind of a good view of the immigration debate without trade and then we can circle back and touch on trade because I do think both of those kind of ladder up into basically Trump's anti-immigrant platform. So yeah, let's start with Clinton policies.
DH: Sounds good. Yeah. So Clinton, among a bunch of other very conservative policies that were passed during his administration, not related to immigration, but, you know, of course we're talking about immigration. So we get to the illegal immigrant reform and immigrant responsibility act in 1996. And so long story short, basically what this 1996 act does is it increases the strength of the border patrol and the INS.
It puts deadline applications for people who are seeking asylum so that when you come to the US, you know, hoping to claim asylum, you have to file everything with all the paperwork within one year. The Act also expedited the deportation processes that kind of the US immigration system already kind of had, but here it really kind of streamlines them, basically. It also makes appeals harder for people who are trying to appeal against deportation proceedings, and it gives the green light for building an extended border fence along the US-Mexico border. you you have Clinton passing this very conservative immigration act as there is a sort of culture war that is beginning to emerge in the 1990s, right, where, you know, politicians are talking less about general policies and definitely talking less about economics than they used to before. And you have these culture war issues that are starting to emerge with the conservative side really enjoying coming in, pointing fingers, accusing the liberals or the left of being too soft on crime, too soft on immigration, all these different sort of things. And so you have Clinton as this more conservative Democrat.
He was definitely more conservative than the sort of center of gravity of where the congressional Democrats were. Of course, there were some Democratic senators and representatives who were as conservative as him. But this was still during the time where the Democrats were at least mostly still kind of the party of the New Deal, right? I that had already kind of started losing a little bit of ground, even going to the 1970s and even a bit more in the 1980s. But it's still, roughly, at least in the shadow of being the Democrats of the New Deal. And so a lot of the Democrats don't really like some of the stuff Clinton is doing. This immigration policy, it gets a little bit less pushback from congressional Democrats and some of the other conservative shit that Clinton does. But you do still kind of see it in part of that broader culture war, where Clinton is kind of trying to appease the conservatives to an extent.
JM: That's that famous Clinton triangulation baby. Just take Republican policies, call yourself a Democrat and you get both parties. Deeply ironic that he was, correct me if I'm wrong, one of the first presidents to make building, let's just call it a wall because I've never really understood the difference between a fence and a wall. Building a wall on the border and then of course in 2016 that was Trump's thing and his wife lost to it. yeah, came back to hit the Clintons like a boomerang, I'll tell you that.
You mentioned NAFTA earlier. And you know, that is one, not only an immigration issue, or let me put it this way. A lot of people will hear NAFTA and think that's a trade issue. They typically don't think of that as relating to immigration. They probably, given that Democrats don't really talk too much about their union bona fides and protectionism, they probably know it because Trump started saying it's a very bad deal in 2016 and did replace it, although didn't really change anything. How does NAFTA and what is essentially a trade agreement between the United States, Mexico, and Canada tie into the larger immigration conversation?
DH: Yeah, and that's a really important question, especially because kind of as you're hinting toward, this is going to help fuel immigration from Mexico to the United States. So essentially with NAFTA, you know, it's the North American Free Trade Agreement, right? So you have this promotion then of free trade. What does free trade mean? Free trade basically means that when you have a different countries coming to a free trade agreement that you are going to put down the economic barriers between these different countries so that they can more easily have economic exchange. Now, on the surface, that sounds like a great thing, right? You're bringing countries together. You're making it easier for them to establish economic ties. It kind of sounds like a win-win scenario.
The issue of that is when you're also having industries from some countries, you know, going into others or having special access to other markets is in certain cases that can really do damage to the to the workers in different countries. Right. So, you know, we've heard, I think, sometimes in passing about how this affected US workers. Right. You have some jobs that are shipped to Mexico. Right. A lot of industrial jobs, for example, jobs in things like factories. You have the proliferation in northern Mexico of what are called the maquiladores, which are the big factories that go, these are US and Canadian companies, they're going to Mexico now and they are taking jobs over there because you can pay someone in Mexico you know, a quarter of what you're paying a unionized worker in Detroit or somewhere like that. And so you're able to save a lot on labor costs, right? So that's part of how NAFTA, you know, again, maybe for those of your listeners who are, you know, even just sort of decently tuned into NAFTA, that's kind of the part that a lot of people know, right? But the other side of that is that it had a really tough effect on the Mexican working class as well. One thing that was made very difficult, for example, and this actually goes beyond the working class and more toward farmers and stuff, but you have a lot of US agricultural business that because of these subsidies they receive from the United States government, they could flood the Mexican market with their goods and that put a lot of Mexican farmers out of business.
And so when you do stuff like that, you are then creating more unemployed people who before had been attached to the land in Mexico, and that is creating a driver of immigration northward. You also have with not just NAFTA, but in the lead up to NAFTA, you have Mexico passing a few laws to kind of grease the wheels for some of the stuff that's going to be done in NAFTA.
And so an example of what Mexico did before NAFTA, because this was stuff that was being negotiated under H.W. Bush, Clinton would sign it into office because he ultimately did also support it. But all three countries kind of knew that NAFTA was on the way, basically. And so in 1992, in Mexico, there is this article in the Mexican Constitution that is amended to make it easier for U.S. agribusiness to set up shop and to also buy land in Mexico.
Article 27, I believe it is, of the Mexican Constitution guarantees rights for what are called ejidos in Mexico. Ejidos are basically communal agricultural land, right? So not individually held private plots, but communal land for different agricultural communities, especially indigenous communities, right? Mexico actually does have, especially compared to the US, decently progressive constitution.
JM: If I can stop you and geek out for a little bit, I wrote years ago about the Mexican Constitution. And it, of course, has been liberalized and watered down. But if you read the Mexican Constitution, it is probably the most progressive and socialist document I've seen that has ever been brought into a modern nation state. I believe it has the language that the Mexican land and all its natural resources belong to the Mexican people. And while of course modern Mexico is, don't let me speak for you DH:, but not as progressive as we would like, I do think those values kind of carried through and manifest in not only the political project of AMLO, but also his successor, Claudia Scheinbaum. So that's kind of, I don't mean to derail you, that's just kind of like one of my, sources of light in the very dark political discussion nowadays. It's just looking to our southern neighbors about how they have been able to take those radical concepts and in some cases materialize them into goods for their modern population.
DH: Yeah, no, absolutely. I totally co-sign everything you just said. I mean, I would say like, you know, of course there are the socialist nations of say like Cuba or something and, you know, their constitution would be to the left of Mexico. But I would say of all the countries that aren't like explicitly, you know, self-consciously socialist, I would say Mexico is right up there with the most progressive constitutions. But
Exactly as you said, it's kind of been watered down. It's not always been lived up to You know, especially before AMLO, know the the decades of neoliberalism were affecting Mexico like it was affecting other places So there's this big gap between the reality of the Mexican Constitution And then you know what it's supposed to be in principle But yeah seeing what AMLO and and shine bomb are doing is like you said kind of a source of light in an otherwise pretty oftentimes depressing international scenes. So I'm happy to go, to have gone on that kind of little tangent for a moment, because I feel the same way.
JM: Nice, Sorry to really, I think you were talking about how NAFTA had impacted the Mexican farm workers and was, you know, we often hear NAFTA is bad for the American working class, but it's very interesting to hear the other side of that coin, that it, you know, impacted the Mexican working class as well. Was there anything else you wanted to say in that regard?
DH: Yeah, no, that's about it. Just that you have these policies that are being undertaken, you know, again, with NAFTA, but even in the lead up to NAFTA in Mexico, the policy of making it easier to, you know, kind of dismantle the AHEADOs, they weren't 100 % dismantled or anything, but the regulations around that were just kind of eased a little bit to make it easier for US agribusiness to move in there. And so, yeah, to kind of summarize, you know, NAFTA and everything leading up to it.
Like you just said, it's not just adversely affecting US workers and US farmers, but it's adversely affecting Mexican workers, Mexican farmers. And so you see this increase in migration, right? I mean, it's also not a coincidence that, you know, NAFTA is passed in 1994. But again, Mexico had kind of passed some preparatory laws leading up to the 1994 legislation. And so then you see Clinton's Immigration Act in 1996, right? After...
These things are starting to take place and therefore after the effects of them are starting to be felt.
JM: That's very interesting. One follows the other. I've always understood NAFTA and we're keeping it in the American context, but also like other trade agreements, Trans-Pacific Partnership is, know, capital has the ability to move across borders, right? It basically, these trade agreements destroy borders for capital only, right? So you can move an auto manufacturing plant from Detroit to Mexico and not pay any tariffs or anything like that. But the workers can't cross borders. They are still hamstrung by the border enforcement. So what you're doing is basically giving capital the ability to pick and choose its, let's call it the weakest labor market so that they can, you know, of course, decrease labor costs. They often go to countries with horrible labor protections, which is why I've never been sympathetic to the argument when someone from National Review will write, well, Free Trade gives Sri Lanka sweatshirt workers jobs and it's like, well, they get their hands chopped off in a machine every 12 hours. I'm not really sure that's worth the squeeze there. yeah, so I definitely know it had that effect as well. And of course, stoked a lot of racial and anti-immigrant sentiment, a lot of anti-Mexican sentiment over the American workforce who lost their jobs, which I'd like you to tell us a little about, please. That's called the Segway, folks. That's professional podcasting right there. So how did like, you you mentioned Clinton's 1996 or 1997, I apologize, Bill, take us into like the 2000s. you know, if we're...
I liked your analogy of early in our lifetimes, these were the baby steps. Like what are we seeing in the Bush years that gets us to Donald Trump can calm down a escalator, call Mexicans rapists and win two elections for it. How did we go from that point to where we are today?
DH: Yeah, we're definitely getting to the not even the the toddler steps, but I guess the sort of like kindergarten steps here, right? Like we really do see a large forward. And of course, part of it, I mean, you can't talk about, you know, how we view the other without talking about 9-11, of course. I don't I don't know how old you were when 9-11 happened, but I was.
Even though I was still a kid, I was kind of old enough to be aware of the world around me. like, boy boy, did shit get kind of crazy around that time.
JM: Yeah, I was in kindergarten and for some reason they wheeled the TV into the classroom. So it's like honestly, my first formative memory of just watching like one of the towers collapse and a thousand people die. I have no idea why my teachers thought that was something we should see as children. I don't know if they ever thought that one through. But yeah, it was, I don't know, I probably didn't pick up as well as you. I kind of, you know, got the sense my parents were scared, but.
I was not keen enough to notice a national mood chain or anything like that.
DH: Yeah, I think part of it for me is, it's very kind of funny or silly to say this, but like my group of friends growing up, you know, when I did come back into Vista, you know, predominantly Latino neighborhood, a lot of Latino friends, but also like I had a really diverse group of friends. My group of friends looked like the cover of like a college brochure, right? We kind of have every group represented. And so I had a couple of Muslim friends and it was a lot for them. And so I kind of saw that through them more, you know, what was going on. All of which is to say, so with Bush, you have the creation during this time, and, you know, we don't even sometimes necessarily think about it anymore. You know, we think of the Department of Homeland Security as this just, you know, part of the US government. We kind of almost feel like it's always been there in a way. Or at least even I do, you know, being a historian and knowing better, even I sometimes forget this, but we have the creation of the Department of Homeland Security only in 2002, thanks to the Homeland Security Act. And so with this act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, the previous sort of main federal body that kind of oversaw immigration, the INS, was replaced by the immigration and customs enforcement, which is ICE, right? And this kind of is a shift in how immigration is seen and dealing with, know, immigration, including like illegal crossings, you know, dealing with undocumented people, because even though in the 90s, you know, we have the culture war kind of starting to emerge as we had talked about, the main criticism of illegal immigration, right? The main criticism of undocumented people as a whole by the right and the center was more so that they were breaking the rules, right? You had a little bit of fear mongering, but it's more like, well, these people aren't waiting their turn. And so we should give priority to the people going through the process because it's the right thing to do. But there's not as much visceral fear that is attached to it, right? Here we kind of see that start to change. And so even just looking at the mission statement of ICE, right? The mission statement of ICE is to protect America through criminal investigations and enforcing immigration laws to preserve national security and public safety. And so, you you really see a shift of immigration as an issue initially before kind of being more a question of rules following and regulation and, you know, crime in the sense that, you know, immigrants are technically committing a crime by illegally crossing, but not crime in the sense of, you know, a visceral public safety issue that you have to be concerned about. And so you kind of see that shift during this time a little.
JM: Okay. Yeah, we're not quite, we're moving away from, you know, the thing about following the rules was always puzzling to me because no one likes the rules of American immigration. Like if you poll Americans, like 90 % will say the immigration system is broken, but they also say you have to follow the rules. So it's a little self-defeating there. But yeah, it sounds like we're getting more or less from the, they're breaking the rules to scary brown men are coming for your daughter or something like
DH: Yeah, exactly. kind of going off of that, you know, this is still kid steps. And so part of that is you actually do even see Bush trying to pass some kind of middle of the road immigration reform. And that would kind of give some people a path to citizenship while also beefing up border security. That's in 2007. But I should also say the year before that, should have brought this up first, in 2006, you actually see a really harsh immigration bill in Congress that does make its way past the House. But this helps lead to the emergence of an actual immigrants' rights movement. And so in 2006 and 2007, there are these mass demonstrations, including walkouts, right? I mean, the biggest walkouts, especially among Latino youth, probably since the 60s and 70s, where you have a lot of immigrant communities, and again, kind of especially, but not limited to Latinos, who are starting to push back against some of these harsher immigration policies. And so this is something I do remember pretty well, because this was my sophomore year of high school. And
As much as I wish I could say, was already fully down for the cause back then. I didn't really understand immigration as an issue. I almost participated in the walkouts, literally, not to give ammo to conservatives, but literally because my friends were doing it. I didn't fully understand the issue back then. But there was this momentum among immigrant communities, but especially the young people in these immigrant communities to take a stand for more humane immigration policy. And so that bill that had passed through the House, it ends up just not making its way through the Senate because there's so much, just so many people are kind of starting to take a stand and you see more of this grassroots pressure to not have super harsh, super draconian immigration policy, right? And so...
That bill is defeated. And then that takes us then to the bill that I had talked about a second ago that Bush was kind of pushing for that would, on the one hand, give legal status to some undocumented immigrants that met certain requirements, but on the other hand, still really beefed up the border. And was just kind of part of that, like both sides compromised basically.
JM: Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I'm not surprised to hear there was pushback against that. That sounds like it's in the time period of right when Americans were super distrustful of the American security state, government and the Bush presidency was falling out of favor. So that checks out or that tracks. It's very interesting to see how immigration and what gets passed and what doesn't relates to the national fervor at the time. Like you said, going all the way back to the Chinese Expulsion Act in the late 1800s. I wanted to ask you a question, particularly about Obama, because it sounds like during Bush, we're feeling this not only anti-immigrant sentiment, but the racial sentiment of it climbing and getting more and more built up kind of like a powder keg. And of course, between Bush and Trump, we have Obama. And I'm curious if you think there was any potential for Barack Obama to release the valve in some way. Was there a policy you think he could have passed that would have, you know, in my opinion, tempered immigration back down to, I just don't believe it's one of the biggest issues Americans face.
So like, do you think there was anything you could have done to release all this built up pressure, particularly for, let's say like the Republican base, if we want to call them that, or do you think that, you know, there was nothing Obama could do and this, the current state of anti-immigrant reactionaryism, which is existing outside the United States as well, was always inevitable for us?
DH: That's a really good question. And of course, I can only speculate. I do think if he could have done something majorly differently to avoid this, I really think the best thing he could have done would have been a much more ambitious, a much more progressive response to the Great Recession. As the Great Recession, you know, was unfolding basically at the end of Bush's presidency. And of course, as Obama is making his way into the presidency, Obama had a lot more stuff on the table, basically, that he theoretically could have done to essentially, you know, there's that old Occupy Wall Street slogan, right? That Wall Street got bailed out, Street got left to suffer, right? Where most of the assistance and reforms and stuff. Basically, in the immediate sense, during and right after the Great Recession, were really implemented to help Wall Street and the quote unquote economy on a macro scale recover. But there wasn't anything to help people who were losing their homes, who were losing their jobs, and who otherwise were just having a really tough time from the Great Recession. In a lot of ways, you know, the Great Recession, even though it technically ended by, I think they officially say it was done by like 2010 or 2011, you know, a lot of scholars have called it really the slow, uneven recovery of the Great Recession because so many people were left out to dry. And a lot of people who supported Obama based on his platform of hope and change, a lot of people kind of dropped out of politics and paying attention to politics after that because I don't know if you ever saw the Time magazine cover whether at the time or anytime since but there was this real hope that Obama could have been FDR 2.0 and so Time magazine actually had a cover you can look it up where it was Obama Photoshopped as FDR with like the long top hat and the long cigar and stuff like that photoshopped to look like FDR with a story about how he could have been the next Roosevelt and could have met the Great Recession with a new New Deal, essentially, which, of course, is not what ended up happening. So I really think that could have been a moment to where, you know, people would have the feeling like something was being done to help them, right? Whether, again, it was, you know, helping them from, you know, having their homes foreclosed on or having some sort of better public assistance program during the toughest parts of the Great Recession. And Obama himself even said in one of his memoirs that like, during this time, the pitchforks were out and they were pointed at, for example, Bush and the kind of conservative and even kind of more center establishment. Of course, Obama didn't use that exact wording, but
Essentially that people were pissed and they were ready for something else, but that ended up not happening.
JM: That's very interesting. I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this, but I think it's very noticeable that in 2016, Donald Trump ran on immigration in an explicitly racist way. Of course, the Mexicans are rapists comments, just pretty much everything he said. And this time around, and even I would say a little bit more in 2020, it was much more of an economic message via immigration. I want to clarify, I don't think Trump has, I'm not excusing Trump's racism at all or saying that he's right about this, but he would say, I remember someone asked him about healthcare costs and he said, well, one of the problems with healthcare costs is that illegal immigrants are taking up all the healthcare, which is why your wait times are longer and the prices are higher. That's not true at any point in American history.
And he always found ways to tie it back. Of course, right there's the old South Park joke, they're taking our jobs. But especially recently, he's really tied it back to economic anxiety, which is why I'm inclined to agree with you about Obama's choice to, you know, bail out the banks instead of the homeowners, because I think a lot of people, a lot of Americans have done what they were told to do graduated high school, got a job, got married, had some kids and are still struggling to get by. you know, even outside the American dream, we were always told like, as long as you don't break the rules and you do the right thing, like you'll live a happy, healthy, abundant full life. And that's just not really true. And then so Trump comes along and because, you know, no one pointed the finger at the bankers and the capitalists in 2012.
When he says the immigrants are the ones at fault, people are like, finally, I've got someone to get mad at and blame my woes on. Of course, immigrants are a scapegoat, but I think that's why we see so much willingness to listen to Trump on this issue. people, voters definitely trusted him more on immigration, which they saw as a top issue in this previous election.
DH: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think, you you've kind of already, you know, said this, but to kind of put it in my own terms, like when things are getting worse, you know, when you have declining standards of living, you know, when you have things like housing costs and healthcare costs that are going through the roof and things just, you know, it's very clear you're not going to enjoy the same level of economic security that your parents did. You're going to feel uneasy. You're going to start feeling upset.
And so the question then for the political class is what story do you tell to try to identify the problems that people are going through, come up with an explanation to it, and then of course offer your own solution for it? You know, like you're saying, everything that Trump says about immigration is full on racist bullshit. JD Vance, even more racist and even more full of shit than Trump is, which is quite a low bar that he just already went under. And so they're obviously spewing just racist bullshit. That said, they're at least creating a narrative. They're acknowledging the pain, the things that people are going through. They're filling it in with racist bullshit, but they're at least giving a story, an explanation for why this is happening. The problem, of course, with the Democratic Party and
I'm sure this is nothing new. I'm sure any of your listeners, you know, would already kind of agree with what I'm about to say. But of course, the problem with the Democratic Party is that they are trying to push out voices that can give a better explanation for why this stuff is happening, you know, a better economic explanation for why this stuff is happening, how it is not the immigrants who are trying to fuck you over. It is the corporations. It is the you know, people in finance. It is, of course, the conservative politicians who are like at the center of all the, you know, American governmental policies that have helped bring us to this point. It's all these different forces of power and money and reaction that have tried to siphon from us as much as they can to give as much as they can to the rich and powerful, but because those same forces have really kind of set up shop as a portion within the leadership of the Democratic Party, or rather as a portion of the Democratic Party, including especially the leadership, that better explanation, that more reality-based explanation is not given room to breathe. And so if you're Joe Shmo on the street and you hear Hillary Clinton saying,
America is good because it is great. America is already great. Everything's fine. And then you hear Donald Trump telling these stories about why things are bad and things in your own life are going bad. You're not going to listen to the lady that says, you know, again, America is already great because you don't feel that. And so as long as the Democratic Party, and I know I'm kind of jumping a bit ahead here, as long as the Democratic Party, you know, keeps up those practices, they're going to keep losing more and more people that aren't already secure, right? And we saw in this last 2020 election, the two voting groups that did not at all vote in lower numbers for Kamala as opposed to 2020 were older retirees who, you they've already got theirs. They're not as economically anxious for the most part. And then of course, you know, the higher educated and higher income earning whites, right? Like those are the two groups that fully stayed on board with the Democratic Party. Other people kind of started drifting away.
JM: Yeah, I wanted to, I very much agree with everything you said. I think in my post-election analysis article, I use the analogy where it's like, you know, if you and your family are drowning and Kamala Harris tells you everything is, you're actually fine, you're on dry land and Donald Trump throws you a rubber duck, you're going to take the rubber duck. Like it's not a solution to your problem, but it's in the vein of what you're looking for. And I think that is, kind of the death knell of the Democratic Party where, based on their, in my opinion, flawed analysis of this election, it seems like they're going to keep just insisting that they're the adults in the room and pat themselves on the back as they lose two terms to President Candace Owens or whoever we're going to be left with. Yeah, it's very possible.
DH: God. shit. That is possible, isn't it? fuck.
JM: Someone floated her for a communications director, so we'll see. Yeah. I wanted to ask you a little bit about that because, like you said in the election, Latinos, while Harris still won the majority, they generally shifted towards Trump. And I want to say this recognizing that, you know, I do recognize that vote turnout was down in like big blue cities. So that can be part of this, but it's still such a giant leap that I don't think it explains the whole thing. For example, Biden won Latinos in 2020 by 33 points. Harris won them this term by six points. What do you see as like, and this can even be similar to what you just said, as a way in which Democrats can win back the Latino vote? Because in my opinion, and you tell me if I'm wrong, as both a historian and a Latino yourself, I think what we're seeing is a little bit of Latinos becoming quote unquote white like you talked about with the Italians and the Irish earlier. And they've just, they're less responsive to let's say not openly hostile immigration policies and more concerned about inflation, economics, et cetera, et cetera. What do you think about that? Am I on the right track? Am I way off? Yeah, tell me if I'm right or wrong.
DH: Think you are on the right track. First, I want to go back to the 2020 election and then kind of look forward a little bit more. Or excuse me, the 2024 election. The two main things that come to mind for me and the first one you did already kind of touch on, but I do want to emphasize it. I think the lower turnout really is worth looking at because when you look at the raw numbers of how many votes Donald Trump got, from Latinos in 2020 versus 2024, he didn't really make that much ground. Now he did make some grounds and any ground that Donald Trump is making with Latinos is already worrisome and a little embarrassing, especially if you are Latino, it's fucking embarrassing. So, you know, he is making a little bit of inroads. That being said, I think the bigger story is the lowered Latino enthusiasm for Kamala Harris, for the Democratic Party. And I think there's like a couple ways to understand that. One is the fact that when we look at what Latinos are, it's a really fucking big umbrella, right? You have working class Mexican Americans, know, a second class working, excuse me, second generation working class Mexican-American family. You have rich white Cubans in somewhere like Miami, right? You have just fully impoverished Central American refugees who are here trying to find asylum. You have affluent, you know, kind of maybe upper middle class, you know, Italian Argentines, right, or German Argentines, all of these groups are within the broader category of Latino, right? Now, in the past, you know, the Democratic Party did a better job appealing to the, you know, Black and Brown Latinos, the poor and working class Latinos, and, you know, kind of really doing that through some sort of economic policy as well as, you know, especially in recent years before 2024, promises of some sort of humane immigration policy other side of things with the other Latinos that they in some ways just haven't been as politically engaged. know, and before things became as just hyper polarized as they are now, you know, some Cuban Americans, you know, they might vote for someone like, say, a Bill Clinton or whatever. But I think what has happened is the Democrats have gradually done a worse job of appealing to the more kind of like working class and more diverse elements of the Latino community. And I'll elaborate on that more in a moment. But then also the right has gotten a lot better at appealing to a lot of the grievances and prejudices that a lot of the more privileged parts of the Latino, I shouldn't even say community because like, a working class Mexican American and a rich white Cuban, they're not really in community. So in the Latino umbrella, the right has gotten better at appealing to those grievances and prejudices of those more affluent, white passing Latinos, which does take me to what you said before about the kind of shifting identity. I think Latinos might be in a broad sense where maybe like, you know, Polish Americans or Italian Americans were during say like the 30s and 40s where there is still kind of that otherization, but it is starting to evaporate. The only real difference that I see, between, the, the, different experiences between Latinos now and the, Southern and Eastern Europeans back then is Latinos are such a broad, you know, category that includes everyone from people who are essentially what we would consider white all the way to people who are, you know, black or indigenous, that it is kind of more of a spectrum. And so I think for Latinos, it's, they're proximity to how white passing or how considered white they are is connected to their own heritage and their own racial background and stuff. I'm just white, right? Even if my last name wasn't Hollingsworth, even though my mom is ambiguous when it comes to her racial identity in terms of her appearance.
You know, I came out white. I'm just a white guy. I am Latino, but I'm a white Latino. And so there's a whole kind of spectrum of experiences there.
JM: Yeah, that's always been very interesting to me how, you know, I understand that like, you might be able to say like, if you were to like talk to or talk about a voting block, you say like, okay, well the African American vote. And I get that like, you know, they generally vote consistently, but Latino to me was always weird because like, as you said, like that is such a broad
The amount of times I've told people, Louis C.K. is a Mexican and people don't comprehend that, yeah, because their vision of a… I think you're good to forget him and let him drift off into the white guy camp. I don't know if you really want to claim him, but yeah, because their version of a Latino is like, a poor Mexican migrant farm worker.
DH: (1:04:41)
That's right, I totally forgot about that
JM: And of course, I'm not saying that those differences don't exist for other racial groups, just Latino encompasses over two continents, right? So you're going to get so many different national identities, political thoughts, ways in which people came to America, all that stuff. Yeah, so that makes a lot of sense. I'm also warm to hear that, you you had the actual data behind Trump's Latino vote turnout because
DH: Exactly.
JM: I was like, how did they fucking lose 27 points, even with the deflated turnout? So that's good to have. As we approach the end, I'd like to ask you, like, what do you think, I don't even know if immigration policy is the right word for this, but what do you think it'll look like under Trump's second administration? My, you know, he's come in promising to be more efficient this time. think if we had one benefit last time, it was that he did not expect to win. And so he spent two years trying to figure out how to do things before he could even get anything going. I fear that this time, because specifically the conservative intelligentsia has been working with him for two years, there's going to be a lot of, it's gonna be a more efficient process, specifically on deportations crackdowns on the border, ice raids, that sort of thing. I think, you know, he, of course, pledged to deport 10 million people, which is an astronomical goal. And I hate the fact that I'm using the term goal in numbers to like talk about human lives and suffering. But, you know, if you deport 10 million Americans, like the economy is going to feel that society is going to feel that pretty much, I would say a good portion of the of the electorate is going to know someone through some like, if they know someone who knows someone, do they see it themselves, like an ICE fan coming into their neighborhood, whatever that may be. And so I'm really just hinging on the fact that that will be so visceral and flood throughout the country that there will be like a popular backlash to it. Of course, that is not a good spot you want to be in.
And I don't certainly don't want to rest my laurels on Donald Trump's incompetence because that is very last line of defense, as you would say. So yeah, if you could tell me like, you think that my concerns are justified? Do you think I'm being too fearful? I could calm down, more fearful. What do you think was in store for us for the next four years?
DH: Yeah, unfortunately, I think you're pretty on the mark. You know, it's interesting, the Republicans are acting like Trump has a mandate right now, even though, you know, he really only won because of deflated voter turnout. But, you know, the reason they're acting this way is because not only did Trump win, but the Republicans now have both chambers of Congress. there is public opinion that kind of
Public opinion is a little bit more murky than we might necessarily think when it comes to immigration. hasn't, the shift to the right isn't as total as we might initially think. And this is something we can wrap up on in a few minutes. And, you know, I can also kind of get to, you know, what I think might help the Democratic party as well to end on a more hopeful note. But before we get to that more hopeful note, yeah, no, I think you're right. I think that, like you said, Trump has kind of geared up to be able to hit the ground running a little bit more so than he did in 2016 where Again, yeah, like you said he he was not really expecting to win. He had actually taken out a patent for Trump TV Shortly before the election because he was counting on losing Being able to start Trump TV and just kind of be able to bitch about Hillary Clinton as he You know loses the election, which of course is not what happened
JM: That's the normal timeline. We're in the, someone went back in time and fucked up something. We're in the comic book timeline of just, hey, what if the Trump TV personality was actually given charge of the country for a decade? I'm envious of the people who got that timeline.
DH: Yeah, exactly, exactly. Where the timeline that like people from other timelines come to to be like, shit, it could have gone this way. Well, good thing things aren't as bad in ours. But yeah, no, I do think unfortunately that they're gearing up to do a lot of really horrible things. And again, you know, they control both chambers of Congress. Now, in the House, it's going to up being a very slim majority. And so if the Democrats had any courage and conviction and coordination, I think they could mount enough of a resistance to at least have the House be a stopgap against some terrible things that the Republicans would cook up. that's assuming that Democrats would have courage and conviction and the will to resist, which,
Given how the Democratic Party operates, there's a lot of question marks there. I think that this is really sad. I think if there is going to be any check on Trump's immigration policies, it's not going to come from elected representatives. It's not going to come from Trump listening to a re-burgeoning immigrants' rights movement, which I do think is going to of start to reemerge during a second term. I think it will be because capital is going to eventually say, hey, Trump, it's cool that you talked about all this stuff about mass deportations, and you can definitely step up deportations, but you're not going to do the big mass deportations you're talking about because we do also need some of that cheap labor. So my view of things is that I think more grassroots non-corporate, non-evil resistance to Trump's immigration policy. I think that will start to reemerge during his term, but before that, I do think that Capitol will kind of be there to certainly not stop his horrific policies, certainly not, but to act as something of a check against these policies, because I just don't see
Obviously not the Republicans. They've become the cult of Trump, even the Democrats, I just don't see them mounting an effective, you know, resistance at first.
JM: Yeah, they've already started trying to blame immigrants and Latinos for their loss. So I'm not too hopeful that they'll be our saving grace. As I lead into the last question, I think you, one thing that I'm, I hate to say even relying on, and I'm certainly not hoping for it, but I think because Trump will be more effective this time around, I think his anti-immigrant policies will be very hard to ignore specifically when people are being dragged out of their homes by ICE on camera. And this is cliche and everyone made fun of this and I get why, but there was a liberal pundit back in 2020 who said, let's get Donald Trump out of office so we can go back to brunch. And I do think that's how a significant portion of Americans view this. They might say I'm for deportations, but when they turn on the news and see something really unsettling, that is a different animal. And I think they just don't want to think about that. And so they might not be open for it. And I say this because I want to ask you before you go, like, what do you think a good immigration policy looks like at this point? If, you know, President DH: Hollingsworth gets into office, what are you trying to do? Yeah, I'll end on that.
DH: That is a great question. I'm going to come back to that. I want to go back a little bit to immigration in terms of public opinion and then also kind of segue to what the Democrat should do. And then I'll kind of end on what I would look at as ideal immigration policy. So I think that it's important to know the numbers a little bit about public opinion around immigration because, you know, it's become such a hot button issue. Obviously, you know, we've been talking about it this whole time together. But public opinion is a little bit more murky than we might be led to believe, right? So there are a majority of people who think that we should be decreasing immigration, right?
I'm looking at a Gallup poll. This is where I'm getting all my data from for the points I'm about to make. Basically, when asked if immigration should be increased, decreased or kept roughly the same, 55 % said it should be decreased, right? Also, when asked about significantly expanding construction of the border wall between the US and Mexico, 53 either supported or strongly supported the idea, while 46 % opposed or strongly opposed it. now you do have, this was taken back in, I think it was June of 2024. Let me double check. Yeah, June of this year. You know, you do have some of these rightward shifts on amount of immigration and immigration enforcement, which obviously isn't thrilling to me. At the same time, however, the exact same Gallup poll showed that 64 % of people in the United States believe that immigration is a good thing for the country, as opposed to only 32 % who thought it was a bad thing, right? So 64 % of people are broadly in favor of immigration. It's just that all this right-wing information about immigrant crime and stuff has kind of gotten to them to some extent or another. Asked they think that undocumented immigrants should have some sort of pathway to citizenship if they meet certain requirements over a certain period of time 70 % of people supported or strongly supported the idea versus 30 % who opposed or strongly opposed it. And when you look at undocumented children and giving them a pathway to citizenship, 81 % of people support or strongly support them having a pathway to citizenship as opposed to 19 % opposing it. I think that
The shift on immigration isn't as dramatic as we're necessarily being led to believe. It's just that a lot of people are being reached by a lot of this right-wing bullshit. And when in this 2024 election, you had the fucking Democrat, when you had Kamala Harris herself talking about how she wanted to toughen up enforcement on the border, when she can't even give a clear answer as to whether or not she thinks the border wall was a good thing, which I don't know if you saw her town hall, CNN town hall with Anderson Cooper. Did you see when she was asked about the border wall point, Blanken could not give an answer.
JM: Yeah, that whole thing was, that was bad. And I think looking back on that, that was the moment where everyone, myself, I'm pointing the finger at myself, have been like, she's not a good candidate. Like she doesn't really know why, why she's running or what her policies are. Yeah, I was, I'm trying to remember her exact answer on the border wall. I think she laughed and Anderson Cooper was like, but you said it was bad. Do you still think it's bad? And she couldn't come up with anything and pivoted to.
Why do I think she pivoted to something crazy? I can't remember, but yeah, that whole thing was a televised train wreck.
DH: It really was. Yeah. So, so he had asked, cause in 2019 she had rightfully, I think, called it a medieval vanity project, the wall. And so, yeah, when Anderson Cooper brought that up and was saying like, Hey, like, you know, what do you think about the wall now? You know, you've talked about, you had that bipartisan immigration bill that Trump tanked that you were trying, you and the Biden administration were trying to pass, which by the way, that right wing immigration bill, monstrous Trumpian, but they were trying to pass it knowing Trump would block it so they could then say he wasn't actually tough on immigration. But anyways, I digress. When Cooper brought that up, Kamala just couldn't give a straight answer. She could not give a straight coherent answer. She kept trying to redirect and talk about how she was going to be tough on the border. And then Cooper kept saying, OK, but then do you support the border wall? She just didn't have an answer. And so this kind of takes me back to the issue with Latinos.
Basically, not only did the Republicans do a better job of appealing to the, again, kind of the more privileged segments of people under the Latino umbrella, the Democrats were not trying to appeal to people who wanted, say, humane immigration reform, right? And beyond that, Latinos are generally more to the left economically, right? Even if some of their some of our cultural values are kind of, you know, a little bit all over the place, right? Like, you know, in some ways Latinos are more socially conservative and other ways we're more socially liberal, but, you know, broadly speaking, for as mixed as we can be on social issues, economic issues, we tend to slant more to the left. And that is why Bernie Sanders was the favorite candidate of Latinos in the 2020 Democratic primary, right? I mean, we all remember, of course, how he won Nevada off of the Latino vote. And of course he would go on to win other states in the Southwest, such as California, because of our Latino population. so all of this is to say, you know, looking at a path forward, the Democrats, you know, I know it's not going to surprise anyone in the listening audience right now to hear this, to hear us say this. If the Democrats want to really forge a path forward and pick up more elements again of the multiracial working class, they need to be listening to someone like Bernie Sanders, right? They need to have a more substantive and more consistently emphasized part of their economic agenda. And then also along with that, have some humane immigration reform to bring Latinos back into the fold. again, there are of course some kind of lower income, know, Black or Brown Latinos who went toward Trump in this election. But for the most part, most of his pickup, you know, is going to be more among the more privileged segments of the Latino world. so, you know, Democrats would do well instead of trying to run as Republican light, trying to always just sprint to the middle the way Kamala did and losing as a result by depressing the base.
You want to mobilize your base, right? You want to do that through good economic policy that's going to help people, right? Strong pro-working class policies. And again, for Latinos in particular, yes, some humane immigration policy. So to now then get to your final question, I'm left with Bernie Sanders, right? I am a Marxist. I personally believe in having the international and proletariat, the workers of the world uniting, and us just having a socialist democratic world where we all care about the common good and we're all democratically deciding things together and borders at this point don't mean anything. Now, that's what I want. Is that going to happen anytime soon? Would be very surprised if that happens. So to kind of...
DH: To come back down to earth a little bit, sticking still a little bit more of what I would want. I would essentially want or be in favor of a pathway to citizenship for anyone who hasn't committed a violent crime or some sort. But in this environment, even that is asking for a lot. And so this takes me back to the DREAM Act. So I didn't get a chance to talk about it in detail, but
Essentially, the DREAM Act was a piece of proposed legislation that was brought up a couple of times basically at the beginning of Obama's presidency. And it would have provided a path to permanent residency for undocumented immigrants who were basically young, you know, didn't have like a criminal record and had a few other kind of requirements, right? Like graduated from a high school, a US high school had a GED or were studying at an institution of higher education, were of good proven moral character, all that sort of stuff. I think that sort of legislation, it would very much still be an uphill battle. It didn't even pass in 2009 or 2010. And that's when things were a little bit less tense than they are now. But I do still think something like that would be a good piece of legislation worth fighting for. However, to kind of tie everything back together to economics and labor. I do think that if you're going to push for humane immigration reform, you have to pair that with better labor policies, better progressive economic policies, because if you only push for better immigration policy, then you're going to get other people who think that you're helping immigrants at the expense of Americans. So I think going beyond just policy and going to the message you want to send out and you know, not just the message, but have the full belief and conviction to follow through on that message is immigrants are not your enemies. It's the rich. It's the people that are trying to take as much of your labor and you know, your money as possible, right? Trying to squeeze as much from you as they can to enhance their own already humongous amounts of economic and political power. Let'sdo something that addresses that, that empowers the working class and on the way includes immigrants who are also part of the working class. And so that's what I think is both a moral message and a winning message.
JM: David, I think that's the perfect answer and a great place to end it. I thank you for your time. This was so informative and I really thank you because you helped me learn a lot of stuff that was just not in my knowledge set. So I really appreciate you coming in and walking us through all this. If people want to hear more of your work or thoughts, is there any place where they can find you?
DH: Yeah, you can find me at, twitter.com. I mean, I guess it's technically X, but I'm never going to call it that. my handle is, right. my handle is DavidLeftMMA. I am actually working on a book right now, completely unrelated to what we're talking about. I'm writing kind of, a condensed book about how Hitler came to power, in Germany, which feels more and more relevant as time is going on. So I'm just aiming to write,
JM: I know man, I think it's very much related to what we're talking about. Unfortunately, I wish it wasn't, but it's more similar than I would feel comfortable saying.
DH: Right. Yeah, definitely get some strong. Why more republic vibes right now? So I am writing that book i'm kind of aiming for it to be you know, maybe like 150 or so pages and just kind of like a good quick primer as to like How everything happened leading up to that point, right? So i'm not going to be talking about hitler in power other than the first couple years and some of the the big things like the enabling act and the night of the long knives and stuff like that, but overall more so looking at like how things even got to that point in the first place. So I'm working on that. It'll probably be out next year. But yeah, those are kind of my main plugs.
JM:Awesome. Well, I'll put your Twitter handle in the episode note so people can find it. And thanks again, David. Really appreciate it.
DH: Yeah, thank you for having me. I definitely feel good kind of being able to get some of this off my chest because all the rhetoric about immigration and how Democrats should be doing more to throw immigrants under the bus, it's been driving me insane. So yeah, thank you for the chat.
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