Canadian PM Justin Trudeau, European Commission Pres. Ursula von der Leyen, US Pres. Joe Biden, and British PM Rishi Sunak visit the Itsukushima Shrine during the G7 Leaders' Summit in May 2023. (Kenny Holston/AFP via Getty)
Not so long ago, as many of us reeled from the political earthquakes of Brexit and Trump, it seemed sensible for responsible mainstream political parties to adopt tighter immigration control to keep the populist right at bay. Mass migration in Europe had led to a far-right resurgence; in the US and UK, Trump and the Johnson-era Tories seemed to grasp this and moved to co-opt the anti-immigrant fervor. Democracy was working to accommodate a shift in the public mood.
Or so it seemed. Nearly a decade later, something else has happened: an immigration explosion. In response to a volatile public mood, Western elites actually intensified their policy of importing millions of people from the developing world to replace their insufficiently diverse and declining domestic populations.
The recent figures from the US, UK and Canada are mind-blowing. The graphs all look like a hockey stick, with a massive spike in the last three years alone. Under Trump, the average number of illegal crossings a year was around 500,000; under Biden, that has quadrupled to two million a year — from a much more diverse group, from Africa, China and India. To add insult to injury, Biden has also all but shut down immigration enforcement in the interior; and abused his parole power to usher in nearly 1.3 million illegal migrants in 2023 alone. The number of undetained illegal migrants living in the US has thereby ballooned under Biden: from 3.7 million in 2021 to 6.2 million in 2023, according to ICE. If a fraction of those millions turns up for asylum hearings, I’ll be gob-smacked.
Canada has seen something similar. For much of the 21st century, Canada had around 200,000 to 300,000 immigrants a year; but in the last two years, this has nearly doubled. In Britain, the same story. In 2015, the year before Brexit, net migration (the numbers of people immigrating minus the number emigrating) was 329,000; in the last two years, it has more than doubled to over 700,000. And whereas most immigration before Brexit was from the EU, today, immigrants from the developing world outnumber European immigrants by almost 10 to 1. For those Brits who voted for Brexit to lower the number of foreigners in the country, it’s been surreal.
If you want to understand why Biden keeps trailing in the swing states, why the Tories are about to be wiped out in a historic collapse, and why Trudeau is at all-time low in approval at 28 percent, this seems to me to be key. As the public tried to express a desire to slow down the pace of demographic change, elites in London, Ottawa, and Washington chose to massively accelerate it. It’s as if they saw the rise in the popularity of the far right and said to themselves: well now, how can we really get it to take off?
This week, CNN ran a poll on Biden and immigration. Here’s what they found: in May 2020, only one percent of Americans put immigration as their top concern — in 15th place among issues; in May 2024, 18 percent put it first. In 2020, Biden edged Trump by one percent on who was best to tackle the border crisis; four years later, Trump is ahead on the issue by 27 points. As a coup de grace, CNN also found that foreign-born Americans preferred Trump to Biden on immigration by 47 to 44 percent. Turns out that this immigrant’s worries are widely shared by my fellow new Americans.
Biden, of course, is now desperately scrambling to salvage something from this disaster. This week, he contradicted himself by saying he has the unilateral capacity as president to shut down the border, and attempted to blame the GOP for the problem. Yes, the GOP was unhelpful and cynically political earlier this year — but that won’t muddy the waters for most voters who have been conscious for the past three years. But I am grateful nonetheless to hear the president echo what the Dish has been saying for years now, and for which I was routinely called a racist:
To protect America as a land that welcomes immigrants, we must first secure the border and secure it now. The simple truth is there is a worldwide migrant crisis, and if the United States doesn’t secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who may try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America.
Now that didn’t hurt, did it? But why did he keep telling us there was no crisis for the last three and a half years? And why would anyone trust a re-elected Biden to enact this if he had a Congressional majority? I sure don’t.
Even under Biden’s “crackdown”, he is still prepared to admit at least 1.75 million illegal immigrants a year! Last week, Chuck Schumer declared that the ultimate goal was to legalize every single illegal immigrant — because Americans are not having enough children. Without open borders, of course, our economy wouldn’t look so good: in the last year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, foreign-born workers gained 600,000 new jobs, while native-born Americans lost 300,000. But don’t you dare mention the “Great Replacement Theory”!
Europeans will be voting this weekend for the toothless European Parliament, essentially a performative exercise that nonetheless tells us something about where the continent is heading after wave after wave of migration. And guess what? The far right is expected to do much better than in the past and, in the latest polls, may even gain more seats than the center-right coalition in the EU parliament.
In Britain this week, there was another seismic shock. Nigel Farage, the Brexit pioneer, unexpectedly reversed course to say he would run for parliament in the election next month, as part of the Reform Party (an evolution of the Brexit Party). In the polls, Farage’s party — which backed the Tories in 2019 — is now creeping closer and closer to them, just as the far right is beginning to eclipse the center right in Europe as a whole.
A ten-day rolling average puts Reform at 11.4 percent and the Tories at 23.7 percent. But a poll taken after Farage declared this week put the Tories at 19 percent and Reform at 17 percent. In other words, the great Tory achievement — coopting and moderating the far right — has collapsed, because of the Tory betrayal on immigration. It could reduce the Tories from 365 seats to 66. The lowest number of seats won by the Tories since 1918 is 165, in 1997. This will be Boris Johnson’s legacy: the near destruction of his own party in the pursuit of replacing Britain’s native population at a pace never before seen in British history. There is even a chance the Tories could come third in the popular vote.
Farage made his case this week in a pub in Clacton — an overwhelmingly white seaside town. He said he had endorsed Boris and believed the Tories’ promises on immigration last time around — but never will again:
It is a complete betrayal of the trust that I put in them, a complete betrayal of a trust that you put in them, and a complete betrayal of 17.4 million people who voted Brexit back in 2016.
Does Labour’s looming landslide mean that mass immigration has become popular? One way to answer that is to hear what Keir Starmer, the next prime minister, said about the subject in the first televised debate this week:
The levels of migration are at record highs. ... It’s never been that high, save in the last year or two. The prime minister says it’s too high. Well, who’s in charge? He’s the most liberal prime minister we’ve ever had on immigration. We’ve never had numbers like this before ... This year alone, 10,000 people have crossed on boats. That’s a record number.
When a Labour party leader is accusing the Tory prime minister of being “the most liberal” in British history — just eight years after Brexit — you can see how profoundly the politics of immigration have shifted. Or you can just look at the polls in the US: 51 percent of Americans now support mass deportations of the kind Trump is proposing; including 42 percent of Democrats, and 45 percent of Hispanics. That was unthinkable four years ago — and it’s entirely on Biden. The revolt against this basic failure of governance is now strong even in big cities, run by Democrats, and among non-whites, who are moving toward Trump.
Joe Biden’s main campaign theme seems to be that he alone can defend liberal democracy from Donald Trump. What Biden has never understood is that restricting immigration is absolutely critical to defending liberal democracy. Everything else is just words, condescending words. If Trump triumphs in November, Biden will be responsible for simply ignoring basic political reality, alienating the very people he needs.
In 2019, a full 60 percent of Americans said, “Things have changed so much that I often feel like a stranger in my own country.” Biden’s response was to dramatically quicken the rate of change. At the D-Day ceremony in Normandy, one US veteran said: “I feel like a foreigner in my own country lots of times, and I don’t like it. It makes my heart real heavy.” Maybe this is partly bigotry. But maybe it’s also a very human thing not to want to see your world changed overnight.
One person was responsible for Trump’s first term: Hillary Clinton. And one will be responsible for his second: Joe Biden.
I guess it’s worth reiterating at this point that I’m not anti-immigration. It remains the lifeblood of America, and immigration is vital for our future fiscal balance. I’m a proud immigrant myself — and America will always be able to integrate newcomers in ways European countries simply cannot. But, like a huge majority of Americans, I’m in favor of legal, orderly, controlled immigration — and not the chaos we now see everywhere in the West. This is not racism or xenophobia; it’s a recognition that borders and the rule of law matter; and that without secure borders, we risk losing the core reality of a nation-state; and without a better-paced influx, we risk delegitimizing immigration altogether, and balkanizing our societies.
We need a new paradigm: all the investments in immigration security (yes, more wall), courts, judges, asylum officers, and detention centers that Biden says he wants; and a viable mass deportation program that Trump says he wants for those who broke the law so flagrantly these past three years. Trump, of course, was a lot of hat and not much cattle in his first four years on this topic; but Biden, having made everything far, far worse, has less than zero credibility on reform.
All that means, it seems to me, is that if you care about the issue at all, as more and more Americans do, then Trump is the obvious choice this fall. Which is one reason I fear the election result will not be as close as most people think. Our elites have had almost a decade to respond to the public mood and a new global reality. And they still don’t get it.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: a great chat about conservatism with George Will; listener dissents over Noah Smith on China; reader dissents over my November vote and immigration; six notable quotes from the week in news, including an Yglesias Award; 16 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a Mental Health Break of Shaq’s huge sense of humor; a view of the Atlanta skyline; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
So Dishy! On a day when basically everyone else is playing legal pundit for a day, the Dish goes deep on two of the most salient cultural topics: South Park and the Pet Shop Boys. In doing so, you remind me why I subscribe. This was a welcome reprieve from a world of tiresome hot takes about Trump.
How another subscriber describes the Dish:
Honest, sincere, intelligent search for truth, without forgetting humor. Grounded in real life. Exploring high and low topics without pretension or coddling.
New On The Dishcast: George Will
George writes a twice-weekly column on politics and foreign affairs for the Washington Post, a column he launched in 1974. He is also a regular contributor to MSNBC and NBC News. The author of 14 books, his latest is American Happiness and Discontents, but the one we primarily cover in this episode is The Conservative Sensibility (which I reviewed for the NYT).
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on why the presidency has too much power, and the necessity of stopping Putin. That link also takes you to pushback on last week’s pod with Noah Smith on Cold War II. We also hear from readers on South Park and Pet Shop Boys, Hamas’ evil, and the ongoing thread over the culture clash of migrants.
Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Nellie Bowles on the woke revolution, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, Tim Shipman on the UK elections, Erick Erickson on the left’s spiritual crisis, Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy on animal cruelty, Van Jones, and Stephen Fry! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.
We didn’t get any critical emails over my column on South Park and Pet Shop Boys, but the following reader dissents over my recent take on Biden’s Morehouse speech:
Sorry, I was too busy to respond to your piece at the time, but it’s yet another case of what I consider unjustified and disproportionate Biden hatred. I mean, I agree with you that Obama is a more optimistic and aspirational speaker than Biden, and that the left’s message of oppression and victimhood is destructive, but do you really think that everyone went through the last eight years in a vacuum? Like, nothing changed between 2016 and now?
I remember a political cartoon where Obama was standing at a distance from a Republican politician and promising to meet him halfway, so he took three steps forward toward the middle, and the Republican instead took three steps back. The politics of the current right is not only moving the goalposts; it’s moving the window of what is considered mainstream further and further away from the moderate or even conservative toward the outright reactionary. And you keep falling for it.
You act as though the left is the bigger or more immediate threat than the Trump Party, and even when you grudgingly concede otherwise, you act as though Trump is invincible, unstoppable, and inevitable because anything we do to stop him only makes it worse. It’s always the Democrats’ fault for being “extreme”.
The fact is, Obama was the common-sense, traditionally liberal, color-blind approach to achievement in America. And that’s why the right lost its shit. Certain atavists in the country decided that if that example was allowed to be the norm, their way of life would be over. Their reaction was Trump. What did you think the reaction to Trump would be?
We both agree that Obama was more moderate than the Democrats of today. But in his time, Republicans called him radical left. Now we have Biden, who remember was brought onto the ticket to be the normie Washington influence on the Obama administration, and you act like he’s Che Guevara. Gimme a break.
Even if Biden were not catering to the leftists, you can’t expect Republicans (or even independent moderates) to remain accommodating to a party that doesn’t even believe in co-existence, let alone moderation. The Trumpniks think that Ronald Reagan is radical left. I am not joking. You remember that one debate he had in the 1980 primaries with HW Bush, and the subject of immigration came up?
You see how Bush said illegal immigrants were “honorable, decent people”? You see where Reagan said that in our relations with Mexico, “we haven’t been sensitive enough to our size and our power”?? You think somebody like that would be tolerated in the Trumpnik Party? No. They’d send their Internet stalkers to find out where his family lives.
Quit assuming good faith from these people, and quit acting like they have no agency in choosing to be that much more radical than the left. You’re just trying to avoid coming to grips with the fact that this is the choice we have.
You said it yourself last week, after a reader asked why you won’t hold your nose and vote for Trump: “Because he is an unhinged, malignant, sociopathic criminal who is a one-man solvent for any kind of liberal democracy.” I have absolutely no qualms about choosing Biden over Trump, because one is a typical politician, for better and worse, while the other is a whiny little child — and a very stupid one at that. And his underlings (e.g. Congress) are that much dumber than he is, and his influencers (like Steve Bannon and Vladimir Putin) are that much more evil.
Now, if I had my choice between the Biden Democrats and the Trumpniks, I would vote for the Republican Party — but that party doesn’t exist anymore. I would really prefer to vote for the Libertarian Party, but THAT party doesn’t exist anymore either.
Just one response to this righteous dressing down. The difference between the Reagan era and now is simply the scale and pace and chaos of mass migration. That is in part what created Trump. As we get nearer to the election, I’m going to air my own conflicts and try to resolve them — with your help.
More dissents are over on the pod page. As always, please keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the coming SCOTUS rulings on speech, MDMA news, and “normophobia”. Below are a few examples, followed by a new podcast:
“The crisis in Sudan is neither forgotten nor ignored,” says Cameron Hudson, “It is de-prioritized. And that is worse.”
If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. A sleuth from Chicago commemorates D-Day:
Alas, I am on vacation, with little time or bandwidth to find that NAPA shop. Instead, I’ll share a View From A Bunker overlooking the Easy Red segment of Omaha Beach taken a few minutes ago:
