Los Angeles Is(n't?) Burning, Part 1

In certain respects, writing about the Trump administration is like trying to pin the tail on a live donkey: just when you think you’ve got it, it moves again, and maybe kicks you. On Thursday, June 12th, President Trump posted, or “truthed”:

“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace. In many cases the Criminals allowed into our Country by the VERY Stupid Biden Open Borders Policy are applying for those jobs. This is not good. We must protect our Farmers, but get the CRIMINALS OUT OF THE USA. Changes are coming!”

To take the president at his word,

1. The administration’s immigration enforcement policy is taking away—presumably through deportation—undocumented farmhands and hotel workers who, despite their lack of documentation, are good workers valued by their employers;

2. These workers are very difficult to replace—whether because American citizens refuse to take the jobs or none are available is unclear;

3. Often, criminals—presumably undocumented—that entered the country during President Biden’s time in office apply for the now-open jobs;

4. This is bad: we want the criminals out, and we don’t want to bother the farmers; and

5. Moving to a criminals out, farmers protected policy will require changes to the current approach.

The president’s post—which likely makes many liberals so mad they might choke—comes amid ongoing, escalating protests that began last Friday in Los Angeles in response to three raids conducted by Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) on area workplaces, then spread across the country in the wake of the president federalizing 2,000, then 2,000 more members of the California National Guard and activating 700 Marines from a base in Twentynine Palms, in each case ostensibly to protect federal property and prevent protests from metastasizing.

To make sense of it all, I think it helpful—at least for me—to take a step back.

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Thursday, June 5th. Los Angeles. The city is peaceful—no protests, no riots. Driverless Waymo cars are safe. California Governor Gavin Newsom and President Trump are on good terms. Discerning moviegoers line up to see Ballerina, or Lilo & Stitch, or the final(?) installment of the Mission: Impossible series, mentally rehearsing how to tell their parents they no longer feel comfortable supporting the Dodgers, and might start rooting for another California team, perhaps one found a few hundred miles to the north along the coast.

Actually, let’s take another step, this one up into and then beyond the clouds, as if we’re zooming out from a small town in the middle of Kansas to the vantage point of an abnormally strong bird, or a pop star on a Blue Origin flyabout. Suddenly endowed with the gift I assume Stephen Miller would ask for if he ever met a genie, we see a blinking light over the head of every single one of the 11 to 12 million people living in the United States without legal documentation. We see every garment worker, and line cook, dishwasher, and maid, and farmhand; we see every family, both whole and split across borders; we see the children, too young to know why their parents brought or sent them here; and yes, we see the criminals, the gangsters and unaffiliated wrongdoers, those who see America as little more than a lucrative market.

But now we’re back on the ground, giftless, in a country that elected a man who said—in part because he said—he would deport all of them.

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Were you given the option to do it all again—to be born in the country of your choosing—it’s plenty likely you’d end up right back here in the United States. Perhaps I read too much 20th century world history, but “hard to attack” and “very rich” are solid reasons to pick a birthplace. There’s a reason so many people came here, and a reason so many people still want to come here.

I start with that to acknowledge the obvious: much of life comes down to dumb luck. The circumstances of our birth may not be entirely determinative—although some would argue they are—but they are plainly predictive. My dad being an American lawyer did not predetermine my being an American lawyer, but it did make it more likely than it would have been had I been born to, say, a family of sheepherders in Tibet.

But that acknowledgment, and the sympathy it should inspire in us for those unhappy enough, or stuck enough, or in enough danger in their home country to risk life in the United States without documentation—a half-shadowed life that often comes only at the end of a long, hazardous journey with an uncertain end—does not mean we should do away with or not enforce immigration laws.

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Participants in the American immigration debate can be divided roughly into three camps. In the first, on the hard right—Miller, the president’s homeland security advisor, being its most prominent current exponent—are those who genuinely want every undocumented immigrant deported, damn the torpedoes, protestors, families, common sense—all of it. I suspect this camp is much, much smaller than you’d think; many who adopt its rhetoric are tourists, not true believers. In the second, primarily found on the hard left or libertarian right, are those who, whether for ideology or out of an abundance of compassion, prefer a policy that amounts to open borders, in function if not in law.

And then there is the third, largest camp, an ideologically diverse group of Republicans and Democrats and Neithers who might not readily admit common ground, but are ultimately unified by a shared discomfort with disruption.

This group generally approves of border security, some a little and some a lot: uncontrolled ingress over the border feels disruptive, destabilizing. First, as Vice President JD Vance recently told Ross Douthat of The New York Times, “social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.” Whether or not you believe that should be true, there are certainly many people for whom it is true, or who, by believing it to be true, make it true. Second, coming into the country without documentation is a violation of existing law. We live in a society bound in part by shared adherence to the law, and half-hearted attempts to enforce immigration laws don’t sit well with millions of people—including, it would seem, many legal immigrants. Now, bad laws should be changed—our immigration laws are a mess and a muck and a muddle, and it isn’t for nothing that even some Republicans had to swallow their frustration when President Trump put the kibosh on the latest serious attempt to amend them—but relatively few people believe the appropriate change is to eliminate border restrictions entirely.

This group also approves of deporting criminals—I’m not sure that requires much further discussion (yes, some may complain if you yeet alleged lawbreakers to a tropical gulag, but that’s more an objection to the destination, questionable accuracy of the allegations, and occasional disregard for court orders, not the deportation, per se).

But finally, this group generally frowns upon deportations that disrupt and splinter American communities. The lion’s share of undocumented immigrants are fairly well-integrated, or are in the process of becoming so: they have jobs; their children attend local schools, and play on neighborhood sports teams; they attend local churches, and spend their money at local businesses. Their families may be of mixed immigration status. Deporting them leaves employers without employees, teachers without students, and businesses without patrons—or, worse still, children without parents and spouses without spouses.

In short, most undocumented immigrants would be missed.

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And that’s the tension at the heart of the immigration debate: many Americans, even on the right, ultimately support what amounts to some version of amnesty for those undocumented but otherwise law-abiding immigrants who have been here for some reasonable, uninterrupted period—who are embedded in American communities, who are building an American life. Not a path to citizenship, necessarily, but a path to some sort of permanent status that gives them—and their families and communities—certainty.

But that raises two questions even before we begin a serious discussion of what legal changes that certainty might entail.

First, is it a good idea? Are we genuinely better off leaving these gainfully employed, contributing, integrating immigrants where they are, or will mass deportations, cruel though they may seem at times, accrue to our benefit?

Arguments the president and vice president made in support of mass deportations during the campaign often seemed to center on housing prices, crime rates, and employment opportunities.

Will mass deportations drop housing prices? My assumption would be no. Housing in the United States is expensive, yes, but it’s hard to believe much of the upward pricing pressure comes from illegal immigrants working low-wage jobs.

Will mass deportations lower crime rates? There are clearly undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes, or who committed serious crimes in their respective home countries—few would oppose ICE hunting them down and, as appropriate, deporting them or turning them over to other authorities for prosecution. But viewing undocumented immigrants as a whole group, I’m skeptical: all data of which I'm aware indicates that undocumented immigrants are arrested far less frequently than documented immigrants, who are arrested less frequently than native-born citizens. The logic is simple: if you’re scared of the police, you’re less likely to give them a reason to hunt you down.

Will mass deportations raise wages and bring Americans back into the workforce? Again, I’m skeptical. As I wrote last August:

“In ‘The Cost of Illegal Immigration,’ [Steven] Camarota[, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration restrictionist thinktank,] argues that “[t]here is an alternative way to fill low-skill jobs—namely by drawing more Americans back into the labor force. The share of less-educated native-born men who have abandoned the labor force (i.e., they are neither working nor looking for work) has increased dramatically over the last six decades. In 1960, 7% of native-born men ages 20 to 64 with no education beyond high school were out of the labor force; in 2023, it was 22%. These individuals do not show up as unemployed in labor statistics because they are not actively looking for work.’

But, as important as it is that we address that problem—and it’s a very real, very serious problem—I’m not sure immigration is the answer, one way or the other. If you look at the labor force participation by state as of June 2023, three states are at 70%: North Dakota (70.5%), Utah (70.4%—incidentally, CIS recently published an article about how Utah is a stealthy sanctuary state for illegal immigrants), and Wyoming (70.0%). The two lowest states are Mississippi, at 54.6%, and West Virginia, at 55.7%.

And here I think is what Camarota doesn’t properly address: the states with the lowest labor force participation rates aren’t that way because of immigrants—West Virginia has the lowest foreign-born population in the country, at 1.5%, and Mississippi is third, at 2.4%. Heck, there are tens of thousands of jobs available in West Virginia and Mississippi—more jobs than, or nearly as many jobs as, there are immigrants of all ages. It wasn’t immigration that drove West Virginians and Mississippians out of the workforce, and restricting it won’t bring them back. Camarota himself recently wrote that ‘The decades-long decline in labor force participation among the less-educated has a variety of potential explanations. Some researchers believe globalization and automation have weakened demand for less-educated labor and caused a long-term decline in wages, making work less attractive. Others point to overly generous welfare and disability programs that undermine work. For men in particular some research holds that changing expectations about men as providers, including the decline in marriage, has caused them to value work less. There is also evidence that substance abuse, obesity, and criminal records can be causes and effects of the decline in work.’”

What I believe proponents of mass deportations are left with is something more ephemeral, more difficult to define. From Vance's conversation with Douthat:

“[I]t’s easy to get locked in left versus right; the left respects the dignity of migrants and the right is motivated by hatred. Obviously, that’s not my view, but I think some liberal immigration advocates get locked in the view that the only reason JD Vance wants to enforce the borders more stridently is because he is motivated by some kind of hatred or some kind of grievance.

The point that I’ve tried to make is I think a lot about this question of social cohesion in the United States. I think about how we form the kind of society again where people can raise families, where people join institutions together. Where what I think [Anglo-Irish conservative philosopher Edmund] Burke would have called the mediating layers of society are actually healthy and vibrant.

And I do think that those who care about what might be called the common good, they sometimes underweight how destructive immigration at the levels and at the pace that we’ve seen over the last few years is to the common good. I really do think that social solidarity is destroyed when you have too much migration too quickly.

That’s not because I hate the migrants or I’m motivated by grievance. That’s because I’m trying to preserve something in my own country where we are a unified nation. And I don’t think that can happen if you have too much immigration too quickly.”

It is not unreasonable to care about the common good or social cohesion, although definitions of these concepts may vary from group to group. It is also not unreasonable to believe that too much immigration too fast—definitions of “too much” and “too fast” also varying from group to group—may harm social cohesion. Social cohesion is hard to measure: we can empirically measure a population’s size, or average household income, or demographic breakdown; I would have much less confidence in something so nebulous as a “social cohesion score.”

But I wouldn’t blame someone for calling it common sense: if you take a neighborhood of a particular character, with a particular demographic breakdown, with a particular language or set of languages, and particular traditions, then quickly introduce a large number of immigrants from another country—be it the United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, China, Sierra Leone, Malaysia, Uruguay, France, or any other—the neighborhood will change. Change and outsiders are not inherently bad, but our default is to oppose them, to distrust them; total openness is a dangerous strategy from an evolutionary standpoint.

And these feelings, feelings though they may be, matter, and our government should take them into account. The argument for why conservatives should take income inequality seriously despite improvements in the material well-being of lower income families is similar: whether because it offends their sense of justice or something else, people care about income inequality to the point where too much of it can destabilize democracies. Even if you believe those feelings are wrong, they shouldn’t be ignored.

But the social cohesion argument, which can be credibly cited in support of more border security, militates against mass deportations. An indiscriminate, wide-ranging push to remove longtime American residents is destructive: removing good, productive people doesn’t bind their communities together—it disrupts them.

Or, if you prefer the president’s formulation, the administration’s current strategy hurts “[o]ur great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business[.]”

However, there is still the second question: what kind of signal does the administration’s immigration enforcement strategy send?

Making it known publicly that the administration is narrowly focused on criminals and people with active deportation orders sends a message. It might be a message we like—an assurance to American voters that, if immigration authorities end up in a skirmish with a nine-months-pregnant woman born and raised in Los Angeles, it will be for a better reason than because they were trying to deport the maintenance worker father of her baby—but it’s not just Americans who are listening.

During the Biden administration, border encounters skyrocketed to levels not seen since we entered this millennium. They dropped during 2024 as Democrats, realizing how badly they were losing the immigration issue, tightened the screws, then plummeted after the election. There were 249,740 border encounters in December 2023, and just 8,400 in April 2025. If you want to know why Trump retains as much support as he does despite some actions on immigration that give Republicans legitimate pause, look no further than that drop.

I don’t think the drop or the uptick that preceded it can be explained by any change in border enforcement policy; Biden’s Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials stopped and deported people, and lots of them. No—in my view, the primary factor is that Democrats made America’s cities seem hospitable to undocumented immigrants, so they came; Trump and his ICE make America seem inhospitable, so they don’t. The primary change at the border is the message, not the interpretation of the law.

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And that raises the question so often asked in politics: can we have our cake and eat it too? Is there an immigration policy—an enforcement practice—that effectively limits illegal immigration but is also humane? What exactly is the administration doing now, and is there a realistic shift that would quiet most critics?

For that, tune in for Part 2.

Also featured in Part 2:

What is the likely political fallout of the showdown in Los Angeles?

Random Fact

Gavin Newsom was a good baseball player growing up in Larkspur, California, about 40 minutes north of San Francisco. In 2004, months into his first term as mayor of San Francisco, he threw out the first pitch at a Giants game. As he took the mound, the public address announcer (I wasn’t there, but unless she was off it was Renel Brooks-Moon, a bona fide Giants legend) told the crowd Newsom “played first base for the University of Santa Clara and was drafted by the Texas Rangers.”

But, as it turns out, Newsom was never drafted and never played an official game for Santa Clara, trying out for the team as a freshman and sophomore but not making it. He was apparently a junior varsity recruit, but that’s where it stopped.

Now, you might read that and think, “man—just another politician embellishing his background. Yet another sign this sleazeball isn’t to be trusted!”

But I played a single game for a junior college summer team; I got three hits—a bloop double, broken-bat grounder I beat out, and single lined to center—and a walk, then broke my ankle in the 8th inning.

And as a good high school player who also may or may not have embellished his career from time to time, let me tell you: this guy speaks my language!

Perhaps to my great shame and discredit, I’m pretty sure I’m only half-teasing.