I think over the long and even the median term, we benefit from arbitrarily-skilled migration over the southern border. I'm to the left of the median Democrat on immigration. But in the short term of 2023 and 2024, we had chaos and direct costs. Black voters in the west side of Chicago noticed that services for their neighborhoods, and for Black homeless people in particular, we underfunded, while large allocations for housing and wraparound services for migrants were expedited on an emergency basis.

We could have taken in an integer multiple more migrants than we did in 2023. But we'd have to have the programs in place to do it. Instead, they built a clownfire clusterfuck of policy and procedure all while sending gravely mixed signals about the likelihood of success for economic migrants, which were (quite reasonably, and, in fact, correctly) interpreted by those people --- people smart and tenacious enough to cross the Darien Gap on foot! --- as a flashing green light.

It's not that the country doesn't have the capacity for those people. It does. But only if the mechanisms are in place to on-board them --- sufficient immigration judges, temporary housing, routing throughout the country, tracking. We had absolutely none of that, and the southern governors knew it and called the bluff.

I think people who care about Democratic party electoral success should be extremely wary of self-soothing explanations about how we did everything right and it was Republican misrepresentation and sabotage that got us here. I don't agree with conservatives on immigration and don't think the institutional Republican party is a good-faith actor on this issue, but that doesn't matter --- the only thing that matters is what the median voter thinks the next Democratic president will do on immigration. If they believe it's the same thing Biden did, that's going to cost us.