Is the NYT Becoming Realist on Immigration?

Yet another Times article sounds like what I was writing for VDARE 25 years ago.

It’s almost completely forgotten, but the editorial stance of the New York Times was fairly realistic about immigration policy up through 2000. For example, it editorialized against amnesty for illegal immigrants as being bad for American workers on February 22, 2000.

It was only in 2001 when the new Republican president got to the left of the NYT on immigration that it switched to being pro-amnesty. And it was only after being financially bailed out by Mexican monopolist Carlos Slim in early 2009 that the NYT became viciously anti-realist on immigration.

Is the voice of the center-left establishment now drifting back toward moderation and pragmatism on immigration policy? The Times has now run two major articles in recent days — first on Somali corruption in Minnesota and yesterday on the Biden Administration’s foolishness on immigration policy — that sound like what I was writing 25 years ago for VDARE.

Joe Biden and his inner circle were basically Replacement Level Democratic politicians: they weren’t very bright, but they also weren’t as crazy as many Democrats during the Great Awokening. That they badly flubbed immigration policy suggests that in 2021 virtually every elite Democrat, other than the handful of lower-ranking specialists who actually understood the realities of immigration, would have made similar mistakes for similar ideological/emotional reasons.

The fundamental problem is that the American establishment’s standpoint on immigration policy had drifted not exactly into Open Bordersism, but into anti-anti-Open Borderism: any American who wanted to do anything to violate the sacred right of any of the other 8 billion Earthlings from moving to the United States is probably a vicious racist, whom the Establishment automatically hated with a visceral loathing.

Not surprisingly, that brain-melting prejudice led to policy and political disasters for the Democratic White House.

From the New York Times new section:

How Biden Ignored Warnings and Lost Americans’ Faith in Immigration

The Democratic president and his top advisers rejected recommendations that could have eased the border crisis that helped return Donald Trump to the White House.

By Christopher Flavelle

Christopher Flavelle interviewed more than 30 former Biden administration officials who worked on immigration and border policy, as well as members of Congress, state and local officials, lawyers and migrants.

Dec. 7, 2025

In the weeks after Joseph R. Biden Jr. was elected president, advisers delivered a warning: His approach to immigration could prove disastrous.

Mr. Biden had pledged to treat unauthorized immigrants more humanely than President Donald J. Trump, who generated widespread backlash by separating migrant children from their parents.

But Mr. Biden was now president-elect, and his positions threatened to drastically increase border crossings, experts advising his transition team warned in a Zoom briefing in the final weeks of 2020, according to people with direct knowledge of that briefing. That jump, they said, could provoke a political crisis.

“Chaos” was the word the advisers had used in a memo during the campaign.

They offered a range of options to avert that crisis, by better deterring migrants. Mr. Biden seemed to grasp the risk. But he and his top aides failed to act on those recommendations.

The New York Times article is vague on who were these experts, or even on just how numerous were the immigration realists inside Team Biden. Presumably, they were a small number of people who’d actually thought hard about immigration, which has not been, believe me, a fashionable job in recent decades.

Did the immigration experts find any allies within the upper ranks of the Biden Administration? I don’t see any mention of that.

The warnings came true, and then some. After Mr. Biden became president, migrant encounters at the southern border quickly doubled, then kept rising. New arrivals overwhelmed border stations, then border towns, and eventually major cities like New York and Denver.

Anger over illegal migration helped return Mr. Trump to the presidency, and he has enacted even more aggressive policies than those Mr. Biden first campaigned against. …

But a New York Times examination of Mr. Biden’s record found that he and his closest advisers repeatedly rebuffed recommendations that could have addressed the border crisis faster, and eased what became a potent issue for Mr. Trump as he sought to return to the White House and justify the aggressive tactics roiling American cities today.

Former Biden administration officials told The Times that Mr. Biden and his circle of close confidants — including Ron Klain, who was chief of staff during the president’s first two years, Mike Donilon, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon and Anita Dunn — made two crucial errors.

The four Biden ultra-insiders are mainstream Democratic operatives, two Irish Catholics (the two Donilons) and two Jews (Klain and Dunn). When it comes to immigration policy, Irish Catholics and Jews tend to be Ellis Island sentimentalists rather than hard-headed analysts.

First, they underestimated the scale of migration that was coming. Second, they failed to appreciate the political reaction to that migration — believing that stronger enforcement would alienate Latino and progressive voters,

Democrats have been advocating for a couple of decades that Latinos get more racist about immigration and demand the opening of the borders to overwhelm white voters demographically, and they came to believe their own sermons. After all, most Hispanic ethnic activists that Biden insiders know are racist anti-whites. Klain, Dunn, and the Donilons don’t interact with ordinary Latino voters, who tend to find whiteness not hateful, but aspirational.

and also that a border surge would not be an important issue to most voters.

Democratic elites have come to assume that all people on earth have a civil right, as embedded in the Zeroth Amendment engraved on the Statue of Liberty by Founding Father Emma Lazarus, to move to the United States if they really want to. It’s not that Democrats have thought through the practical implications of this remarkable theory, it’s just that they hate the people who have figured out its implications.

As I Substacked last May 29:

Yglesias: Why did Biden’s handlers go nuts?

Biden insiders turned out to be boring mainstream Democrats. Yet, they still went crazy for transgenderism, immigration, George Floyd, and “equity.” How come?

… As I responded repeatedly to the conspiracy theorists, the feeble old Biden’s shadowy “handlers” weren’t anybody interesting: they were just Democratic political lifers who had been handpicked by Joe and Jill for their loyalty to Biden. …

So why did the Biden Administration push what, from the perspective of 2025, seem like crazy leftwing policies on transgenderism, immigration, crime, and “equity?”

Because it wasn’t 2025 then. It was still the Great Awokening. Biden’s dull old moderate Democrat advisers were influenced by the zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, as embodied in their younger advisers, to push policies that would seem nuts in either 2011 or 2025.

A central problem was that Biden’s inner circle were, like all respectable people, just plain ignorant about the relevant facts.

How many of them had ever heard of autogynephilia? How many of them knew that the Black Lives Matter fad had twice driven up the black death rates from murder and car crashes? How many of them knew how big were the racial gaps in shootings and IQ? How many had thought about how how bad unlimited Third World immigration would be for America if the U.S. really did let in all the Wretched Refuse like Founding Father Emma Lazarus demanded?

Nice people just plain don’t know deplorable stuff like that these days. You have to be a bad person who reads bad me, the ultimate bad guy because I believe that knowledge is better than ignorance, to learn about things that nice people are stupid about.

And yet, what the White House didn’t know became crucial to the main domestic policy issues of their Administration.

Back to the NYT yesterday:

Paywall here.