When Bryan Jarrell, an Evangelical pastor in Ligonier, Pennsylvania, came across an election-themed episode of a podcast, he’d skip right over it. He would mute the TV when political ads came on, tried to teach his social-media feeds that he wasn’t interested in politics, and would throw campaign mailers straight in the trash. He’d skim news headlines sometimes, but if he could tell that the story was about national politics, he’d keep scrolling.

Today, exactly one week before the election, he will begin researching both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump and make a decision about whom to support. He’s not sure where he’ll land—he is conservative on some social issues, but he doesn’t like Trump’s character.

Jarrell represents a set of Americans who, out of anxiety, exhaustion, or discouragement, are mostly tuning out campaign coverage yet will ultimately participate in the election. They’re political ostriches who, at the last minute, will take their head out of the sand. “For a decade now, people have started talking about news fatigue,” Ken Doctor, a news-industry analyst, told me. “People are tired of being bombarded with the news. And then it kind of matured into news avoidance.” This tendency escalated with the increasing ubiquity of both online news and Donald Trump, Doctor said.

[Derek Thompson: Click here if you want to be sad]

Jarrell started purposefully ignoring campaign coverage after he noticed that his parishioners would come to him in the lead-up to elections and describe genuine fear about one candidate or the other taking the White House. He decided to recommend this strategy, of abstaining from the news until the final week of the race, to his parishioners, and to follow it himself.

“How much energy did America collectively spend imagining a Biden-Trump election only in July to have Biden drop out?” Jarrell said to me. “If you wait ’til the last week, that’s still enough time to make an informed decision, but you haven’t wasted all that emotional energy stressing about something that may not even come to pass.”

A sizable percentage of Americans seems to feel similarly. A 2022 Reuters Institute report found that 42 percent of Americans “sometimes or often actively avoid the news,” up from 38 percent in 2017. The most common reasons people gave for avoiding the news were that it focused too much on politics and COVID, that it was biased, or that it made them feel unhappy or fatigued. In April, the Pew Research Center reported that 62 percent of Americans were already worn out by coverage of campaigns and candidates. A May poll by NORC at the University of Chicago found that 49 percent of those surveyed either agreed or strongly agreed with the statement “I’m tired of receiving and processing news about the 2024 presidential election.” Not caring about politics is a hallmark of what political scientists call “low information” citizens, but unlike many in the low-information camp, political ostriches do intend to vote. They just don’t feel the need to follow the news in order to do so.

The reason ostriches and others avoid political news is simple: “It’s all negative; it’s divisive; I’m sick of it,” the Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told me, relaying the views she hears in focus groups.

In Jacksonville, Florida, 31-year-old Tawna Barker didn’t watch the debates, and on social media, she scrolls past political news, skipping what she feels are “inflammatory, heavily one-sided articles.” She plans to vote for a third-party candidate. “Neither [Trump nor Harris] really seems like they’re actually going to do anything to help us,” she told me.

Barker, who in 2016 supported Bernie Sanders, seemed disappointed by the fact that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic nominee that year. “Whoever’s running stuff behind the scenes is just gonna pick who they want to pick, and we just have to go along with it,” she said.

Cheryl Wilson Obermiller, a 66-year-old near Kansas City, Missouri, told me that she and her husband have swapped watching the news for taking walks or watching, say, Masterpiece Theater. She finds the news inflammatory, addictive, and occasionally insulting to people like her—she’s voting for Trump. She asks herself, “Am I wasting time watching politics when I could be helping my neighbor? And I think that’s something we all have to consider. Am I watching politics that are feeding in me an attitude that would make me look down on or dislike people?”

Obermiller still spends about an hour a day either reading or watching the news, down from about four to six hours several years ago. She gets the news that she does consume through Facebook groups and from Fox News’s Greg Gutfeld, “because I think he’s funny, even though a lot of times he says things that I kind of laugh about but I think are kind of mean,” she said.

[James Fallows: The media learned nothing from 2016]

Ignoring political news has become easier in recent years. Nearly half of Americans don’t subscribe to any news sources. Those seeking to dodge campaign coverage can choose to spend their time on apolitical TikToks and Instagram reels, and watch Netflix instead of CNN. “For people who are not interested in politics, which is most people, it’s actually easier than ever to not watch news shows, to not have the algorithm in your social-media feeds give you political information,” David Broockman, a political scientist at UC Berkeley, told me.

Broockman found in a recent study that just 15 percent of Americans watch at least eight hours of “partisan” TV, such as Fox or MSNBC, each month. “However little you think voters care about politics, you will still always overestimate how much they care,” Broockman said. This helps explain why both Trump and Harris are appearing on podcasts such as The Joe Rogan Experience and Call Her Daddy—they’re trying to get around people’s “I hate politics” filters.

If people are tuning out, it might not matter much for the election results. Most people already know whom they’re going to vote for; the universe of truly undecided voters is very small—likely less than 15 percent of the electorate. “The vast, vast, vast majority of voters settle into who they’re voting for, for whatever reasons they are, and then that’s kind of that, and there’s no information that they can get that is going to bump them off,” Dan Judy, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, told me. “There’s really a small number in most political campaigns of voters who are truly persuadable.” The willfully tuned-out will likely end up voting for whichever party they’ve always supported, but they will have suffered less agita in the process.

Jarrell, the pastor, feels that his approach to the news has made him more serene, and has given him more time to focus on his church and his family. “I believe that there’s a loving God in control of the universe,” he said, “and no matter who’s in the Oval Office, God’s still in heaven. And things are going to be okay.” That’s a hope he shares, surely, with Americans of all political persuasions.

America’s immigration debate has taken a restrictionist turn. Eight years ago, Donald Trump declared that “when Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” and promised to build a “big, beautiful wall” on the southern border. That rhetoric, extreme at the time, seems mild now. Today, he depicts immigrants as psychopathic murderers responsible for “poisoning the blood of our country” and claims that he will carry out the “largest deportation operation in the history of our country.”

Democrats have shifted too. In 2020, Joe Biden ran on the promise to reverse Trump’s border policies and expand legal immigration. “If I’m elected president, we’re going to immediately end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” he said during his speech accepting the Democratic nomination. “We’re going to restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers.” That kind of humanitarian language is gone from Democrats’ 2024 messaging. So is any defense of immigration on the merits. When asked about immigration, Vice President Kamala Harris touts her background prosecuting transnational criminal organizations and promises to pass legislation that would “fortify” the southern border.

[Rogé Karma: The truth about immigration and the American worker]

The change in rhetoric did not come out of nowhere. Politicians are responding to one of the most dramatic swings in the history of U.S. public opinion. In 2020, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration should decrease. Just four years later, that number had risen to 55 percent—the highest level since 2001. (Other surveys find similar results.) Republican attitudes have shifted the most, but Democrats and independents have also soured on immigration.

Although public opinion is known to ebb and flow, a reversal this big, and this fast, is nearly unheard-of. It is the result of a confluence of two powerful factors: a partisan backlash to a Democratic president and a bipartisan reaction to the genuine chaos generated by a historic surge at the border.

Political scientists have long observed that public opinion tends to move in the opposite direction of a sitting president’s rhetoric, priorities, and policies, especially when that president is an especially polarizing figure—a phenomenon known as “thermostatic public opinion.” No president has kicked the thermostat into action quite like Trump. In response to his incendiary anti-immigrant rhetoric and harsh policies, including the Muslim ban and family separation, being pro-immigrant became central to Democratic identity. In 2016, only 30 percent of Democrats told Gallup they wanted to increase immigration; by 2020, that number had grown to 50 percent. In just four years under Trump, Democratic attitudes toward immigration levels warmed more than they had in the previous 15.

But the thermostat works the other way too. When Biden took office, he immediately rescinded many of Trump’s border policies and proposed legislation to “restore humanity and American values to our immigration system.” This triggered a backlash. Right-wing media and Republican politicians sought to turn Biden’s policies into a liability. By mid-2022, the percentage of Republican voters who said immigration should decrease had risen by 21 points. And with Trump no longer in the White House to mobilize the opposition, Democratic immigration attitudes began by some measures to creep closer to their pre-2016 levels as well. “The paradox of Trump was that he inspired an unprecedented positive shift in immigration attitudes,” Alexander Kustov, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, told me. “But because it was a reaction to Trump himself, that positivity was always extremely fragile.”

Trump is not the entire story, however. Public opinion continued to drift rightward long after Biden took office. From June 2023 to June 2024 alone, the percentage of Democrats who favored decreased immigration jumped by 10 points, and the percentage of Republicans by 15 points. That’s the single largest year-over-year shift in overall immigration attitudes since Gallup began asking the question back in 1965.

[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]

Voters may have been responding to the sharp rise in so-called border encounters—a euphemism for the apprehension of undocumented immigrants entering the country from Mexico. These reached a record 300,000 in December 2023, up from 160,000 in January of that year and from just 74,000 in December 2020. The surge overwhelmed Customs and Border Patrol, and scenes of overcrowded immigrant-processing centers and sprawling tent encampments became fixtures on conservative media outlets. Texas Governor Greg Abbott began sending busloads of asylum seekers (about 120,000 at this point) to cities such as New York, Chicago, and Denver, which were caught off guard by the influx. Suddenly blue-state cities across the country got a taste of border chaos in the form of stressed social services, migrants sleeping on streets, frantic city officials, and community backlash. “I don’t think the shift in attitudes is surprising, given what’s been happening at the border,” Jeffrey Jones, a senior editor at Gallup, told me. “People are sensitive to what’s going on, and they respond to it.”

Some experts call this the “locus of control theory,” or, more colloquially, the “chaos theory” of immigration sentiment. The basic idea, grounded in both survey data and political-science research, is that when the immigration process is perceived as fair and orderly, voters are more likely to tolerate it. When it is perceived as out of control and unfair—perhaps due to an uncommonly large surge of migrants—then the public quickly turns against it. Perhaps the best evidence for this theory is that even as Americans have embraced much tighter immigration restrictions, their answers to survey questions such as “Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society?” and “Do you support a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants?” and even “Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S?” haven’t changed nearly as much, and remain more pro-immigrant than they were as recently as 2016. “I don’t think these views are contradictory,” Natalia Banulescu-Bogdan, a deputy director at the Migration Policy Institute, told me. “People can simultaneously have compassion for immigrants while also feeling anxious and upset about the process for coming into the country.”

One implication of chaos theory is that leaders can mitigate opposition to immigration by introducing reforms that make the process less chaotic. That’s what the Biden administration tried to do in June of this year, when it issued a series of executive orders that would, among other things, bar migrants who cross illegally from claiming asylum and give the Department of Homeland Security the ability to halt the processing of asylum claims altogether if the volume of requests gets too high. Border encounters have fallen steadily throughout 2024, reaching about 100,000 in July and August—still a high number, but the lowest level since February 2021. Perhaps not coincidentally, the salience of immigration for voters has also been falling. This past February, 28 percent of Americans told Gallup that immigration was the most important problem facing the country; by August, that number had dropped to 19 percent. (It crept back up to 22 percent in September, for reasons that likely have more to do with the wave of disinformation about Haitian migrants than with crossings at the border, which continued to fall.)

The very fact that Biden had to rely on unilateral executive orders, which are being challenged in court, illustrates a deeper issue. Even though most Americans want a more orderly and fair immigration system, the nature of thermostatic public opinion gives the opposition party strong incentives to thwart any action that might deliver it. Earlier this year, congressional Republicans killed a border-security bill—which had previously had bipartisan support—after Trump came out against it, lest the Biden administration be given credit for solving the issue that Trump has staked his campaign on. And if Trump is reelected, the pendulum of public opinion could very well swing back the other way, putting pressure on Democrats to oppose his entire immigration agenda.

What’s clear is that the current hawkish national mood is not the fixed end point of American popular sentiment. Attitudes toward immigration will continue to fluctuate in the years to come. Whether public policy changes meaningfully in response is anyone’s guess.

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In our scattered social-media age, a strange little problem has emerged: It is hard to figure out how to invite people to a party. A slew of digital tools is available—Paperless Post, Instagram stories, Partiful, a simple group text—that should theoretically make it easier to reach people. But it also means you have no one way to contact everyone you want to invite, and you’re left sending out multiple emails and posts for a single party. Sending a few extra texts hardly ranks among the world’s most pressing problems, but finding ways to gather people together is a meaningful act during a time when so many Americans—even the ones with friends—deal with loneliness and isolation. The challenge of the modern party invite is the story of the changing web in miniature: In recent decades, everyone seemed to be hanging out in the same few places online. Now people are dispersed widely across platforms, with even more variability based on age and affinity.

If you are loyal to a particular invitation method—or if you simply call your friends when you’re having a party—you may be scratching your head, wondering what I am talking about here. That’s fair enough. But according to my unscientific surveys, I am not the only one living in a dispersed invitation landscape. The other day, I texted a group of family members asking in what formats they get invited to parties. My Boomer mom responded first: Paperless Post, always, she said. My Gen Z sister, scoffing at the idea of receiving an email invite, said she mostly gets invites via the app Partiful, or group texts with friends (“grexts,” as she called them). My Millennial sister-in-law said she usually receives emails or texts from friends. Another, just as unscientific, poll of my colleagues indicated a similarly diverse range of invite approaches.

Geography seems to play a part too: My East Coast colleagues, especially those based in New York City, were familiar with Partiful, whereas that name meant little to people in other regions. (Partiful declined to share information about its users’ age and regional distribution with me.) These different experiences mirror the broader feeling of spending time online right now. Compared with a decade ago, when the internet was loosely understandable as a cohesive body, the web now is splintered and evacuated of any semblance of monoculture, as my colleague Charlie Warzel has written. That lack of common practices can breed a sense of disorientation—there’s no one TV show everyone seems to be watching, or one funny post or viral moment of the day. It can also cause logistical headaches.

The party-invite patchwork is especially new to Millennials, many of whom, for years, relied on the trusty Facebook event as their go-to method—one that let hosts be very inclusive about whom they were inviting without needing to have everyone’s phone number or email address. But now the platform has dramatically declined in popularity among younger generations. Hosts, turning to other options, risk inadvertently excluding potential invitees who aren’t on the same apps—especially those outside one’s inner circle. (Meta didn’t respond to my inquiry about its event feature.)

Am I being dramatic? Perhaps. Lizzie Post, the great-great-granddaughter of the etiquette doyenne Emily Post and a co-president of her eponymous institute, was far too polite to say as much to me when we spoke on the phone. She did note that although navigating a varied invite landscape is not an entirely new phenomenon, the digital world has introduced novel etiquette questions: For example, if you see an Instagram story about a party, are you really invited?

Post told me that my approach for inviting people to my recent birthday party, at which I served a six-foot sandwich to my friends in Prospect Park, was both clear and “so cool” (not to brag or anything). In addition to my Instagram “close friends” story invite, which stated that anyone who saw it was invited, I sent some personal messages to people who may have missed it, and told other friends about it in person. Was this extra work? A bit. Was it worth it? Absolutely. That our online lives are so diffuse only reinforces the value of in-person gathering. Parties alone can’t fix what my colleague Derek Thompson has called “a hang-out depression,” caused in part by the demands of technology. But, for all the annoyance of our new party landscape, putting in a bit of extra effort to get people together can be a beautiful thing.

Related:

Why Americans suddenly stopped hanging out Partiful calls itself “facebook events for hot people.”

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

How do you forgive the people who killed your family? It’s time to stop taking Sam Altman at his word, David Karpf argues. Yuval Noah Harari wants to reclaim Zionism.

Today’s News

The longshoremen’s strike has been suspended until January 15, after the union reached a tentative agreement with the U.S. Maritime Alliance. Last month, 254,000 jobs were added to the U.S. economy, and the unemployment rate dropped to 4.1 percent. The U.S. military launched strikes that hit more than a dozen Houthi targets in Yemen, according to U.S. officials.

Dispatches

The Books Briefing: Karl Ove Knausgaard’s exploration of the art of Edvard Munch is moving and worthwhile, Emma Sarappo writes. Atlantic Intelligence: What if your ChatGPT transcripts leaked?

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read

Warner Bros. / Everett Collection

More Evidence That Celebrities Just Don’t Like You

By Spencer Kornhaber

Examples are stacking up: Celebrities just don’t like us. Last year, Donald Glover enlisted his famous friends to make a gruesome TV show about a killer pop fan. This year, Chappell Roan, the breakout singing sensation of 2024, called her most ardent admirers creepy. Now Joker: Folie à Deux offers a tedious lecture about the challenges of fame. Audience members may walk out feeling punished for the crime of wanting to be entertained by a comic-book-inspired movie-musical starring some of the most successful performers on Earth.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Lithium is making a comeback. We’re entering uncharted territory for math. Amir Tibon: “How my father saved my life on October 7”

Culture Break

Simon Ridgway / HBO

Watch. Ever feel like your life is determined by powerful forces beyond your reach? Industry (streaming on Max) is the show for you, Zachary Siegel writes.

Read. “The Ghosts of Wannsee,” a short story by Lauren Groff:

“On my runs around Wannsee, from the corner of my eye, I could glimpse the furious ghosts of the place seething in the middle of the lake, transforming into whitecaps if I looked at them directly.”

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

Among the many meats on my six-foot birthday sandwich was capicola. This cured meat has long been a staple of my Italian sandwiches, so I was tickled to see it among the words and phrases Merriam-Webster added to its dictionary this year. It is in good company with touch grass and nepo baby.

— Lora

Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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Donald Trump and his allies on the populist right believe they have a compelling argument for why the GOP is the true blue-collar party: Immigration is killing the American worker, and only Trump will put a stop to it. “Kamala Harris’s border invasion is also crushing the jobs and wages of African American workers and Hispanic American workers and also union members,” Trump declared at a recent rally. At other times, he has referred to immigration as “all-out economic warfare” on the working class. It’s a message that the former president repeats in one form or another at just about every one of his public appearances.

The argument carries a certain commonsense logic: Immigration means more workers competing for jobs, which translates to lower wages and employment rates for the native-born. During Tuesday night’s vice-presidential debate, Republican Senator J. D. Vance said that his boss’s proposal to round up and deport millions of undocumented immigrants would “be really good for our workers, who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.”

Mainstream Democrats used to vigorously dispute the notion that immigration hurt native-born workers. No longer. Today, the two major parties are jockeying to convince voters that they are the ones who will truly secure the border. To the extent that liberals still defend immigration, they often do so by arguing that deporting migrants would reduce the labor supply and send prices soaring again—an argument that implicitly accepts the premise that immigrants do in fact depress wages.

This is a tragedy. The effect of immigration on wages is one of the most thoroughly studied topics in empirical economics, and the results are clear: Immigrants do not make native-born workers worse off, and probably make them better off. In many domains, the conventional wisdom among progressives is mistaken, oversimplified, or based on wishful thinking. The economics of immigration is not one of them.

Econ 101 tells us that when the supply of a good, like labor, increases, then the price of that good falls. This is the lens through which economists viewed immigration for much of the 20th century: great for corporations (cheap labor) and consumers (lower prices) but bad for native-born workers. Then a study came along that shattered the consensus.

In 1980, Fidel Castro briefly lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration, leading 125,000 people, most of whom lacked a high-school education, to travel from Mariel Bay to Miami in what became known as the Mariel Boatlift. In a few months, Miami’s workforce expanded by about 25 times as much as the U.S. workforce expands because of immigration in a typical year, creating the perfect conditions for a natural experiment. The economist David Card later realized that if he compared Miami with cities that did not experience the boatlift, he could isolate the effect that immigration had on native-born earning power. If immigrants really did depress wages, then surely the effect would be visible in Miami in the 1980s.

Instead, in a paper published in 1990, Card found that the boatlift had virtually no effect on either the wages or employment prospects of native-born workers in Miami, including those who lacked a college degree. Economists have since used similar natural experiments to study the effect of immigration in countries including Israel and Denmark, arriving at the same conclusion that Card did. (These studies mostly focus on low-skill immigration; high-skill immigration has long been viewed almost universally as economically beneficial.)

[Derek Thompson: Americans are thinking about immigration all wrong]

The simple Econ 101 story turned out to have a blind spot: Immigrants aren’t just workers who compete for jobs; they are also consumers who buy things. They therefore increase not only the supply of labor, which reduces wages, but also the demand for it, which raises them. In the end, the two forces appear to cancel each other out. (The same logic explains why commentators who suggest that immigration is a helpful inflation-fighting tool are probably wrong. I have made a version of this mistake myself.)

Inevitably, not everyone accepted the new consensus. In a paper first circulated in 2015, the Harvard economist George Borjas reanalyzed Card’s data and concluded that even though average wages were indeed unaffected, the wages for natives who lacked a high-school degree—and thus competed most directly with the Marielitos—had fallen as a result of the boatlift. Borjas’s study seemed to back up restrictionist policy with empirical data, and for that reason became a pillar of anti-immigration discourse. In 2017, for example, Stephen Miller cited it when pressed by a New York Times reporter for evidence that immigration hurts American workers.

But Borjas’s debunking of Card, such as it was, has itself been debunked. The data underlying his argument turned out to be extremely suspect. Borjas had excluded women, Hispanic people, and workers who weren’t “prime age” from his analysis, arguing that the remaining group represented the workers most vulnerable to immigrant competition. As the economist Michael Clemens has pointed out, Borjas ended up with an absurdly tiny sample of just 17 workers a year, making it impossible to distinguish a legitimate finding from pure statistical noise. Another study looking at the same data, but for all native-born workers without a high-school degree, found no negative impact on wages. Subsequent natural experiment studies have yielded similar conclusions. “Economic models have long predicted that low-skill immigration would hurt the wages of low-skill workers,” Leah Boustan, an economist at Princeton University, told me. “But that turns out not to be true when we actually look at what happens in the real world.”

On paper, immigrants and natives without a high-school education might look like easily substitutable workers. In reality, they aren’t. Take the restaurant industry. New immigrants may disproportionately get hired as fry cooks, which, in turn, depresses wages for native-born fry cooks. But by lowering costs and generating lots of new demand, those same immigrants enable more restaurants to open that need not just fry cooks but also servers and hosts and bartenders. Native-born workers have an edge at getting those jobs, because, unlike new immigrants, they have the English skills and tacit cultural knowledge required to perform them.

This dynamic helps explain why many efforts to deport immigrants have hurt native-born workers. From 2008 to 2014, the Department of Homeland Security deported about half a million undocumented immigrants through its “Secure Communities” program. Because the initiative was rolled out in different counties at different times, researchers were able to compare how workers fared in places where mass deportation was under way against outcomes for those in as-yet unaffected places. They found that for every 100 migrant workers who were deported, nine fewer jobs existed for natives; native workers’ wages also fell slightly. Other studies of immigration crackdowns throughout American history have reached similar conclusions. When a community loses immigrant workers, the result isn’t higher-paid natives; it’s fewer child-care services provided, fewer meals prepared, and fewer homes built.

Low-skill immigration does have some economic costs. Most studies find that the income of other immigrants takes a hit when a new wave of migrants arrives. Low-skill immigration also tends to slightly exacerbate inequality because it increases demand for college-educated professionals such as doctors, managers, and lawyers, resulting in even larger wage gains for that group. But these complications don’t mean that immigration is crushing the American working class.

Hold on, immigration’s critics say: Natural experiments can only tell you so much. You must instead look at the broad sweep of American history. As the liberal New York Times columnist David Leonhardt has pointed out, the decades in which American workers experienced their fastest income gains—the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—occurred when immigration was near historic lows; since the ’70s, immigration has surged while wages for the median worker have stagnated. “The trajectory of American history tells a very clear story,” Oren Cass, the chief economist at American Compass, a conservative think tank, told me. “High levels of immigration are correlated with poor outcomes for workers.”

The problem with relying on history is that correlations also only tell you so much. Some readers will recall that quite a few things have changed since the 1970s; most relevant for our purposes, these include the loosening of trade policy, the weakening of labor unions, and the enormous rise in corporate concentration. All of these trends have been more persuasively linked to the declining fortunes of the working class. Without some evidence of causation, the co-incidence of stagnating wages and rising immigration really does look like just that: a coincidence.

[Michael Podhorzer: The paradox of the American labor movement]

Two data points are instructive here. First, the parts of the country that have received the largest numbers of immigrants in recent decades—Texas, Florida, the D.C.-to-Boston corridor—are those that have experienced the least wage stagnation. Second, since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, the U.S. has experienced both a huge surge in illegal immigration and perhaps the most significant reduction of wage inequality since the 1940s. That doesn’t mean high levels of immigration caused the spike in wages at the bottom. But that’s exactly the point: Historical trends don’t necessarily imply neat causal relationships.

The other problem is that you can just as easily make the circumstantial case that the natural-experiment literature underestimates the economic benefits of immigration. The aforementioned Denmark study tracked every single individual across the country (something that isn’t possible in the U.S. because of data constraints) over a 20-year period and found that low-skill natives who were most exposed to immigration responded by pursuing higher levels of education and moving to higher-paying occupations. Ultimately they achieved higher earnings than their peers who weren’t exposed to immigration. A study in the U.S. found that immigrants were 80 percent more likely than native-born Americans to start a business, and that the rate of entrepreneurship was just as high for immigrants from low-income countries as those from high-income countries. “Immigrants to the U.S. create so many successful businesses that they ultimately appear to create more jobs as founders than they fill as workers,” Benjamin F. Jones, one of the authors, wrote in The Atlantic last year. Immigrants, he noted, are inherently risk-takers. “We should not be surprised that they are exceptionally entrepreneurial once they arrive.”

I admit to being partial to this view for personal reasons. My grandfather came to the U.S. in the 1960s as an undocumented immigrant from Lebanon, having never finished high school and speaking very little English. Within a few months, he landed a job as a car mechanic at a local gas station, leaving for work each morning before his kids woke up and returning after they were asleep at night. An economic study might find that he helped depress the wages of native-born mechanics, which might have been balanced out by his spending in other areas. What it probably wouldn’t capture is what happened next: He opened up his own station, and then another, and then another, employing dozens of mostly native-born mechanics, attendants, and cashiers. Along the way, he became a darling of his community, bringing a little bit of Arab hospitality to a mostly white suburb of New Jersey. His life was its own kind of natural experiment.

The appeal of restricting immigration has, to put it lightly, never been primarily about economics. Surveys of public opinion generally find that people’s feelings about immigration are driven less by material concerns than they are by cultural anxieties about crime, social norms, and national identity. Anti-immigrant sentiment is much higher among older Americans (many of whom are retired) living in rural areas that contain few immigrants than it is among working-age Americans in immigrant-heavy cities such as New York and Los Angeles.

Even if conservative policy wonks sincerely believe that limiting immigration would help the American worker, the guy at the top of the Republican ticket clearly has other things on his mind. In his debate against Kamala Harris, Trump, who has accused immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” mentioned the supposed economic impact of migration exactly once. He spent much more time portraying undocumented immigrants as a marauding horde of psychopathic murderers “pouring into our country from prisons and jails, from mental institutions and insane asylums.” At one now-infamous moment, he even claimed that immigrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio. In Trump’s hands, the economic case against immigration is a fig leaf that barely obscures a much larger and more nakedly bigoted body of work.

[Gilad Edelman: Donald Trump’s theory of everything]

The example of Springfield is a revealing one. In the past few years, thousands of Haitian immigrants—overwhelmingly with legal status—have settled in the town of 58,000. This has led to some problems. Housing prices rose quickly. The health-care and education systems have come under stress. And relations between longtime residents and the new arrivals have at times been contentious, especially after a traffic accident caused by a Haitian immigrant last year resulted in the death of an 11-year-old boy.

But after decades of dwindling population and shrinking job opportunities, Springfield has also experienced a jolt of economic energy. The immigrants have helped auto factories stay in operation, filled shortages at distribution centers, and enabled new restaurants and small businesses to open. Wage growth in the city took off during the migration wave and stayed above 6 percent for two years, though it has since slowed down. And the flip side of strain on the housing, education, and health-care systems is that there are now more jobs available for construction workers, teachers, and nurses to meet that increased demand. “What the companies tell us is that they are very good workers,” Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, a Republican, said in a recent interview, referring to the Haitian immigrants. “They’re very happy to have them there, and frankly, that’s helped the economy.”

For DeWine and other public officials, this is a trade that is well worth making: Immigrants might cause some social tensions, but overall they make the place better off. Others, of course, disagree. According to Gallup, 2024 is the first year in nearly two decades that a majority of the public wants less immigration to the U.S. In the past year alone, the desire to reduce the amount of immigration has jumped by 10 points for Democrats and 15 points for Republicans. No matter who wins in November, we will likely see more restrictive immigration policy in years to come. If that is the will of the voters, so be it. Just don’t expect it to do anything to help the working class.

More than a year since the World Health Organization declared the end of the pandemic public-health emergency, you might expect the remote-work wars to have reached a peace settlement. Plenty of academic research suggests that hybrid policies, which white-collar professionals favor overwhelmingly, pan out well for companies and their employees.

But last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company’s more than 350,000 corporate employees must return to the office five days a week come January. In a memo, Jassy explained that he wants teams to be “joined at the hip” as they try to out-innovate other companies.

His employees don’t seem happy about it. The Amazon announcement was met with white-collar America’s version of a protest—a petition, angry LinkedIn posts, tense debates on Slack—and experts predict that some top talent will leave for companies with more flexible policies. Since May 2023, Amazon has allowed corporate employees to work from home two days a week by default. But to Jassy, 15 months of hybrid work only demonstrated the superiority of full-time in-office collaboration.

[Derek Thompson: The biggest problem with remote work]

Many corporate executives agree with him. Hybrid arrangements currently dominate white-collar workplaces, but a recent survey of 400 CEOs in the United States by the accounting firm KPMG found that 79 percent want their corporate employees to be in the office full-time in the next three years, up from 63 percent the year before. Many of America’s executives have had enough of the remote-work experiment, and as the Amazon announcement suggests, some are ready to fight to end it. They seem to be fighting not only because they believe that the evidence is on their side, but also because they long to return to the pre-pandemic office experience. (Management professors even have a name for this: “executive nostalgia.”) Quite simply, they are convinced that having employees in the office is good for business—and that having them in the office more is even better.

Managers have some empirical basis for preferring in-person work. A 2023 study of one Fortune 500 company found that software engineers who worked in proximity to one another received 22 percent more feedback than engineers who didn’t, and ended up producing better code. “When I was on Wall Street, I learned by showing up to the office,” Imran Khan, a hedge-fund founder and the former chief strategy officer of Snap, told me. “How do you learn if you don’t come to work?”

Remote work can also take a toll on creativity and culture. A study of Microsoft employees found that communication stalled when they went remote during the pandemic. Another found that people came up with less creative product pitches when they met over Zoom rather than in person. Eric Pritchett, an entrepreneur and a Harvard Business Review adviser, had the ill fortune to launch Terzo, his AI start-up, in March 2020. He left California for Georgia, where social-distancing rules were laxer and he could call people into the office. “You think of these iconic companies,” he said, counting off Amazon, Tesla, and Nike. “These iconic companies didn’t invent themselves on Zoom.” (Even Zoom, in August 2023, told employees to come into the office two days a week.) Jassy, the Amazon CEO, wrote in his back-to-office memo that he wanted Amazon to operate “like the world’s largest startup.”

But some Amazon employees don’t buy Jassy’s argument. CJ Felli has worked at Amazon Web Services since 2019. When the pandemic sent workers home, he was apprehensive about spending every day at his Seattle apartment. Now he’s a work-from-home evangelist. “I was able to deliver projects,” he told me. “I could work longer than I could in the office, I could eat healthier, and I was able to get more done.” He earned a promotion during the pandemic and was praised for his efficiency, which he sees as further evidence of his productivity gains. His colleagues who have kids or who get distracted in Amazon’s open-floor-plan office tell him that their work has improved too.

If remote work is such a drag, its defenders ask, then why has business been booming since the pandemic? Profits are up, even as employees code in sweatpants or practice their golf swing. As one Amazon employee wrote on LinkedIn, “I’d rather spend a couple of days being really productive at my house, taking lunch walks with my dog (or maybe a bike ride). This is how my brain works.” One mid-level manager at Salesforce, who spoke on condition of anonymity in order to publicly criticize his employer’s policies, pointed to the company’s success throughout the pandemic. “We’re not machines either,” he told me. “People aren’t meant to just be wrung like a towel to get every drip of productivity out of them.”

The big-picture data are a bit fuzzy. Some studies have found a modest negative effect on productivity—defined as work accomplished per hour on the clock—when companies switch to fully remote work. But this can be at least partly offset by the commuting time that workers regain, some of which they spend working longer hours. “There is no sound reason to expect the productivity effects of remote work to be uniform across jobs, workers, managers, and organizations,” as one academic overview puts it. The debate between bosses and workers “feels a lot like my view of how productive my teenager is being when she says she’s working while talking to her friends on her cellphone,” Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford professor who co-authored the study, told me. “She’s probably doing more work than I think—which is zero—and probably less work than she thinks, which is a lot.”

In theory, hybrid work should be the compromise that satisfies both sides. A May Gallup poll found that only 7 percent of employees wanted to work in person five days a week, 33 percent wanted to be fully remote, and 60 percent wanted some kind of hybrid arrangement. A study by Bloom found that employees of the travel site Trip.com who spent three days in the office were just as likely to be promoted as their fully in-person counterparts. They wrote code of the same caliber, and were more likely to stay at the company. Crucially, after a six-month trial, managers who had initially opposed hybrid work had revised their opinion. All of that helps explain why the percentage of companies with a hybrid policy for most corporate employees doubled from 20 percent at the start of 2023 to about 40 percent today, according to the Flex Index, which tracks work arrangements.

[Ed Zitron: Why managers fear a remote-work future]

But as Amazon’s announcement shows, the decisions around work arrangements were never going to be just about the data. When Jassy spoke last year about the company’s decision to move from a remote policy to a hybrid one, he said that it was based on a “judgment” by the leadership team but wasn’t informed by specific findings. Executives might just have an intuition that in-office work is better for the companies they helped build. It may make their jobs easier to have everyone close by. They also seem to find it hard to believe that their employees are doing as much work when they’re at home as when they’re in the office, where everyone can see them. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, said the company fell behind in the AI arms race because employees weren’t in the office. “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning,” he said in a speech at Stanford. “The reason start-ups work is because the people work like hell.” (He later claimed that he “misspoke about Google and their work hours.”)

“I largely do believe we are moving toward some truce between executives and employees,” Rob Sadow, the CEO of Flex Index, told me. “But I also think this is much less settled than the average person thinks it is.” He predicts that the battle will drag on for years. Companies might have trouble actually enforcing a full-time in-office policy for workers who have gotten used to flexibility. Talented coders are still in high demand. Theoretically, if enough people from Amazon decamp to Microsoft, say, then Jassy could be all but forced to backtrack. Bloom has followed one company that officially requires people to be in the office three days a week; most employees spend fewer than two days in person. He was skeptical that Amazon would discipline a high-performing employee who preferred to code from the couch. The middle manager at Salesforce told me that he is preparing a list of excuses he can offer to executives who ask why his team isn’t in the office.

But executives have tools at their disposal too. Amazon and Google have already begun tracking badge data and confronting hybrid workers who don’t show up as often as they’re told to. (An Amazon spokesperson told me that the company hopes to eventually stop surveilling employees’ work locations.) Even if bosses struggle to penalize their employees, perhaps they can lure them in with promises of career advancement. Eighty-six percent of the CEOs in the KPMG survey said they would reward employees who worked in person with promotions and raises. “You’re a young person coming out of college, and you want to be CEO someday—you will not get there via remote work,” Ron Kruszewski, the CEO of the investment bank Stifel, says of his company. “It just won’t happen.”