As part of the Inflation Reduction Act, a tax credit that previously applied to a limited set of clean energy technologies could soon be expanded to include nuclear power.

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Several Western allies have signalled they are open to Ukraine using their weapons against Russia.

What’s the United States’ most important problem? For the past three months, Americans have offered the same answer: immigration. More than inflation or political polarization, Americans are vexed by the influx of migrants. Republicans’ concerns spiked after the most recent southern-border crisis. But they’re not alone. In April, the number of independents who said immigration was the country’s biggest problem reached a high in Gallup polling dating back to 2014.

Scolding Americans for their alarm is pointless. The state of U.S. immigration policy is objectively chaotic. When Joe Biden became president, he rolled back some Trump-era restrictions, at the same time that migrants began to take greater advantage of loopholes in asylum law to stay in the country longer. Meanwhile, a sharp rise in crime in parts of Central and South America, combined with the strong U.S. economy, created the conditions for migration to surge. In 2022, illegal crossings hit a record high of 2.2 million. As asylum seekers made their way north, cities struggled to house them. In New York City, so many hotel rooms are taken up by migrants that it has created a historic shortage of tourist lodging.  

In a perfect world, the brokenness of America’s immigration system would inspire Congress to swiftly pass new legislation convincing voters that the U.S. controls whom we let in and keep out of the country. The basic contours of this grand bargain have been fairly clear for decades. In exchange for expanded opportunities for legal immigration—more visas, more green cards, and targeted policies to increase immigration in technology and science—liberals would agree to stricter enforcement and control at the border. But major immigration reform is stuck. Changing the law requires Congress, and in the latest example of feckless delay, Donald Trump has instructed congressional Republicans to sandbag negotiations with the White House, to avoid giving the Biden administration an election-year win. What we’re left with is the perception of immigration chaos, anger about the chaos, and dithering in the face of it.

If American politicians are ever going to think about immigration policy through the lens of long-term opportunity planning rather than immediate crisis response, they first need to convince the American people that those long-term opportunities exist. This case is actually easy to make. Cheaper and more plentiful houses, higher average wages, more jobs, more innovation, more scientific breakthroughs in medicine, and more state government revenue without higher taxes—all while sticking it to our geopolitical adversary, China—require more immigration. Across economics, national security, fiscal sustainability, and geopolitical power, immigration is the opposite of America’s worst problem. It holds clear solutions to America’s most pressing issues.

Immigration has for decades, even centuries, created a temporal paradox in American discourse: pride in the country’s history of immigration coming up against fears of its present and future. Benjamin Franklin, whose father was born in England, complained that migration from Central Europe would swarm the young nation’s Anglican culture with undue German influence. In the late 1800s, a more Germanic nation feared the influence of incoming Italians. A century later, a nation that had fully embraced Italian Americans bemoaned the influence of incoming Mexicans.

[Ari Berman: The conservative who turned white anxiety into a movement]

Although this brisk history of nativism might seem to make light of today’s anti-immigrant sentiment, ignoring the fears that people have about a sudden influx of migrants is counterproductive. The border crisis is not just a news-media illusion, or a platform for empty grandstanding. It really has endangered thousands of migrants and drained city and state resources, causing a liberal backlash even in deep-blue places. Last September, New York City Mayor Eric Adams predicted that the migrant crisis would “destroy New York.” As tens of thousands of migrants moved into Chicago, the city spent hundreds of millions of dollars to provide them with housing and education, building resentment among Black residents. What’s more, papering over anxieties about competition from foreign-born workers is not helpful. The Harvard economist Gordon Hanson asked me to think about the experience of a barber in an American city. If immigrants moving into his area open barber shops, they might reduce his ability to retain customers, raise prices, or make rent. The logic of fear is understandable: More competition within a given industry means less income for its incumbents.

Many Americans—and, really, many residents of every other nation—think about immigration through this lens of scarcity. If the economy includes a fixed number of jobs, then more foreign-born workers means less work left for Americans. If America contains a fixed number of houses, more immigrants means less space for Americans to live.

But the truth is that no nation comprises a fixed amount of work or income. Population growth, economic growth, and income growth can be mutually reinforcing. “At the national level, immigration benefits from a more-is-more principle,” Hanson told me. “More people, and more density of people, leads to good things happening, like more specialization of labor.”

Specialization of labor might sound drab and technical. But it’s a key part of why immigration can help even low-income workers earn more money over time. Last month, the economists Alessandro Caiumi and Giovanni Peri published a new paper concluding that, from 2000 to 2019, immigration had a “positive and significant effect” on wage growth for less educated native workers. The key mechanism, they found, is that, over time, immigrants and natives specialize in different jobs that complement one another. As low-education immigrants cluster in fields such as construction, machine operation, and home-health-aid work, native-born workers upgrade to white-collar jobs with higher pay. To take the example of the American barber, let’s imagine that his son decides to go to a trade school or college to increase his skills in response to intense competition for barbers. He might be better off, making a higher wage than he would have had he remained in the profession. Although such specialization can be difficult for some people who switch out of their parents’ fields, it can lead to a more dynamic economy with higher wages for all.

For the past few years, I have been thinking and writing about an abundance agenda to identify win-win policies for Americans in housing, energy, health care, and beyond. Immigration is an essential ingredient in this agenda. The U.S. must contend with a national housing shortage that has contributed to record-high living costs and bone-dry inventory in some major metros. This is a story not merely about overregulation, zoning laws, and permitting requirements, but also about labor supply. The construction industry is short several hundred thousand jobs. In the largest states—such as California, Texas, and New York—two in five construction workers are foreign-born, according to estimates by the National Association of Home Builders. “The biggest challenge that the construction industry is facing [is] that people don’t want their babies to grow up to be construction workers,” Brian Turmail, the vice president of public affairs at the Associated General Contractors of America, has said. If Americans want more houses, we might very well need more foreign-born workers to build them. Achieving clean-energy abundance requires immigrants too. One in six solar and photovoltaic installers is an immigrant, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and “23 percent of all green job workers are foreign born,” according to a report by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

The debate over low-skill immigration and its effect on the economy can get a bit technical, if you’re an economist, and emotional, if you’re an anxious native worker. But even if Republicans and Democrats can’t agree on the complex macroeconomics of letting less educated migrants enter the U.S. in higher numbers, we cannot let that disagreement hold hostage the obvious benefits of expanding our recruitment of foreign-born talents into the U.S.

Immigration-as-recruitment is a particularly useful framework as the U.S. embraces a new kind of industrial policy to build more chips and clean-energy tech domestically. As The Wall Street Journal’s Greg Ip wrote, America’s new economic strategy has three parts. The first is subsidies to build products in the U.S. that are crucial to our national security and energy independence, such as advanced semiconductor chips and electric vehicles. The second part is tariffs on cheap Chinese imports in these sectors. The third is explicit restrictions on Chinese technology that could be used to surveil or influence U.S. companies and people, such as Trump-era laws against Huawei equipment and the Biden-era law to force the sale of TikTok.

But this newly fashioned stool is missing an essential leg. If the U.S. is going to become more strategically selfish about protecting key industries such as computer-chip manufacturing from foreign competition, we need to revamp our high-skill-immigration policy too. In fact, the new American economic paradigm doesn’t make any sense otherwise. As a rich country, the U.S. will be at a disadvantage in semiconductor manufacturing because of our higher labor costs. If we can't win on costs, we have to win on brains. That means staffing our semiconductor factories with the world’s most talented workers.

[Jack Herrera: Is Texas about to turn Latinos into single-issue voters?]

Semiconductor manufacturing requires a highly specialized workforce that is distributed around the world and concentrated in Asia. A large share of workers in advanced-chip manufacturing live in India and China. But green-card caps limit their ability to move to the U.S. As a result, we’re at risk of spending tens of billions of dollars on factories and products without a plan to staff them. “The talent shortage is the most critical issue confronting the semiconductor industry today,” Ajit Manocha, the president of the industry association for semiconductor equipment and materials manufacturers, said in 2022. This is a fixable problem. The Economic Innovation Group, a centrist think tank, has proposed a “Chipmaker’s Visa” that would annually authorize an accelerated path to a green card for 10,000 immigrants with specialized skills in semiconductor manufacturing.

What’s true for chipmaking is also true for AI development. According to the Federation of American Scientists, more “top-tier” AI researchers are born in China than in any other country in the world. But two-thirds of these elite researchers work in the U.S. The number could probably be even higher if the U.S. had a smarter, future-looking immigration policy regime. The administration has already taken small steps forward. In October, Biden issued an executive order that asked existing authorities to streamline visa criteria for immigrants with expertise in AI. More could be done with congressional help.

If the U.S. is in the early stages of a new cold war with the authoritarian axis of China, Russia, and Iran, we can’t logically pursue an industrial policy without an equally purposeful immigration policy. Immigration policy is industrial policy, because immigrants have for decades been a linchpin in our technological growth. As Jeremy Neufeld, a fellow at the Institute for Progress, has written, 30 percent of U.S. patents, almost 40 percent of U.S. Nobel Prizes in science, and more than 50 percent of billion-dollar U.S. start-ups belong to immigrants. And yet, we’ve allowed waiting times for green cards to grow, while the number of applicants stuck in immigration backlogs has gotten so large that some talented immigrants have stopped waiting and left the U.S. entirely. This is madness. Failing to solve the immigration-recruitment kludge as we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on technology subsidies is about as strategic as training to run a marathon while subsisting on a diet of donuts. When it comes to high-skill-immigration policy, we are getting in our own way.

Immigration is central to America’s national security, industrial policy, abundance agenda, affordability crisis, and technological dominance. Without a higher number of foreign-born workers, the U.S. will have less of everything that makes us materially prosperous. But none of these advantages should distract immigration proponents from the fact that failure to secure the border is a gift to immigration restrictionists. Border chaos is horrendous branding for the pro-immigration cause.

“Immigration is too important to be chaotic,” Hanson, the economist, told me. “Chaos leads to short-term policy fixes. But you don’t want a 10-month immigration policy for the U.S. You want a 100-year immigration policy.”

Taking that 100-year view leads to perhaps the most powerful case for expanding immigration. The Lancet recently published an analysis of global population trends through the end of the 21st century. By 2064, the worldwide human population will peak, researchers projected, at which point almost every rich country will have been shrinking for decades. Fertility is already below replacement level in almost every rich industrialized country in the world. In Japan and South Korea, there are already fewer working-age adults with every passing year. China’s birth rate has fallen by 50 percent in just the past decade. Within a few years, immigration will be the only dependable lever of population growth for every rich industrialized nation.

The U.S. faces a stark choice. Politicians can squander the fact that the U.S. is the world’s most popular destination for people on the move. They can frame immigration as a persistent threat to U.S. national security, U.S. workers, and the solidity of U.S. culture. Or they can take the century-long view and recognize that America’s national security, the growth of the U.S. labor force, and the project of American greatness all depend on a plan to demonstrate enough control over the border that we can continue to expand immigration without incurring the wrath of restrictionists.

Both pro-Palestinian critics of the US approach to the war on Gaza and Israel sympathisers are turning against Biden.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. smiled, threw up a stilted wave, and made eye contact with nobody in particular. He was shuffling into Puckett’s restaurant in Franklin, Tennessee, earlier this month for a plate of midday meatloaf. No advance team had peppered the room with stickers or buttons bearing his name. No one had tipped off the local media. Flanked by his press secretary and a couple of plainclothes security guards, Kennedy made his way toward a large table back near the kitchen, where he and I were scheduled to meet for an interview. The roughly two dozen lunch patrons didn’t appear to clock him, nor did the waiter.

Kennedy’s independent campaign for the White House has a loose, confounding energy to it. Most presidential candidates would glad-hand at a place like Puckett’s; Kennedy didn’t bother. Rather than run on a policy slogan—“Medicare for all,” “Build the wall”—Kennedy has opted for something closer to mysticism. He uses the word existential in nearly every speech. He spends an inordinate amount of time on podcasts.

“You know, so much of life, we see from the surface,” Kennedy told me that day. “It’s like the surface of the ocean. There’s a storm going on, there’s winds blowing, and we get preoccupied with ambitions, with fear, with, you know, trepidation. And then if you sink a few feet below the ocean, it’s calm there. And that, I think, is where we’re supposed to spend as much time as possible, in that place where it’s peaceful, where you understand everything is kind of an illusion. We’re walking through a dream, and our job is to be kind to people, to be open, to be tolerant.”

Despite this hazy rhetoric, establishment Democrats consider Kennedy to be a concrete danger to the future of democracy. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called Kennedy “a living, breathing false-flag operation” whose “whole campaign is being run by right-wing political operatives who have one objective: try to take down President Joe Biden.”

When I first interviewed Kennedy last year, many people derided him as a distraction who would quickly fade into obscurity. Five months out from Election Day, Kennedy is polling in the double digits and fighting for nationwide ballot access. His team insists that voters will be able to pull the lever for him in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Many political observers have argued that, like past third-party candidates who have hurt Democrats, he is poised to draw more votes from Biden than from former President Donald Trump. A recent New York Times/Siena poll showed that Kennedy has particularly strong support among young voters and Latinos, two groups Biden needs more than Trump. Yet he’s also drawing support from Republicans and conservatives. Many of these voters are willing to look past his conspiratorial, anti-vaccination statements. Some may share his views.

[Read: The first MAGA democrat]

While Biden and Trump fight for first place, Kennedy is zigzagging around the country, talking about our need to reconnect with the Earth and rediscover our shared humanity. Born and raised an East Coast Catholic, he now resembles an aging California hippie preaching New Age mantras. He’s not running a winning operation so much as he’s on a public self-actualization journey. And America will have to live with the consequences.

Like with Biden and Trump, Kennedy’s mental state receives armchair diagnoses on a daily basis. But, unlike Biden and Trump, Kennedy says he once had a parasitic worm in his brain. I asked him if he would consent to undergoing a cognitive test. “The cognitive exam is called the debates. I would gladly take it,” he said. “I take a cognitive exam every time I do a podcast—I challenge the other candidates to take the cognitive test with me.” He added that he’d release his medical records if his chief opponents did the same.

Three nights before our lunch in Tennessee, I showed up at Kennedy’s rally in Austin, Texas. Outside the venue I spotted one attendee with colorful markers scribbling out a homemade sign: WORMS NOT WARS. The man, a 39-year-old named Steven Kinsey, told me he had spent his entire adult life supporting Democrats, including Biden. But several months ago he happened to hear Kennedy on Theo Von’s podcast when the episode came up on shuffle. “I was like, ‘Oh, isn’t that that crazy Kennedy?’” he said. “So I just left it on for entertainment purposes. And I was blown away. I was like, ‘This isn’t the same guy that everyone says is wacko.’”

[From the May 2024 issue: Is Theo Von the next Joe Rogan?]

Kennedy’s rhetoric—whether you believe it to be wacko or compelling—is full of contradictions. He views himself as a pacifist—an anti-war candidate who nonetheless falls to the right of many liberals on key issues of the moment, including Israel in its war with Hamas. Kennedy told me he is “very pro-Palestinian,” but like Biden, he is steadfastly supporting Israel. “I think, for Israel’s future, for Gaza’s future, Hamas has to be gotten rid of,” he said. “I don’t see what happens in a cease-fire. I don’t even understand what people, you know, expect out of it.”

Kennedy made headlines in early May for saying he supported abortion rights up until the moment of birth. But over lunch with me several days later, he explained why he had already modified his position, supporting abortion rights only to the point of fetal viability. “I’ve had 40 years that show that I’m pretty indifferent to a political cost of whatever issue,” he said. “If I’m wrong about something, if somebody shows me facts, I’m going to change my mind.” When I asked whether he’d enshrine abortion rights at the federal level, he was cagey. “Maybe an early—you know—before viability,” he said. “Listen, I don’t tell people I’m going to do something I don’t think can be done.”

In the early 2000s, Kennedy helped popularize the idea that vaccines cause autism, a theory that remains scientifically unproven. Last summer, he falsely claimed that the coronavirus pandemic may have been “ethnically targeted” to attack Caucasians and Black people, and that “Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese” are most immune from the virus. Nevertheless, he rejects the anti-vax label. “First of all, virtually everything that the press has written about my opinion of vaccines is wrong,” he told me. He said he believes that his position on vaccines is “aligned with what 99 percent of Americans feel.” In a bit of revisionist history, he said his stance boils down to “If people want vaccines they should be able to get ’em. I’m not going to do anything to interfere with that.” He told me that he wants people to have “the best science” on risk and efficacy. “And that’s all I’ve been saying for years. And that the people who are injured by vaccines, there’s a certain amount of people who are injured, and that we ought to be listening to them, not telling them that they’re fine and gaslighting them.”

Kennedy has practically zero chance of winning the White House and turning these policy positions into laws. As of now, he won’t participate in the first presidential debate in June. During our lunch, I asked him which state he most believes he’ll win, or, more generally, if he has a viable path to 270 electoral votes. He mentioned a few spots where he’s gaining traction, but couldn’t answer either question definitively. “I’m only peripherally involved in that part of the campaign,” he said of state-level plans—he was saying, in other words, that he’s not involved in the part of the campaign that’s concerned with trying to win the election. He deferred my nuts-and-bolts queries to his campaign manager, Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, his daughter-in-law.

“You know, there’s a mathematical answer,” she told me by phone last night. “But there’s also an answer that really has continued to transcend math all the way through.” She referred to this as “the America that almost was and what could be,” paraphrasing the author Charles Eisenstein. “Part of what I think a lot of observers, at least at this stage in the cycle, get wrong, is looking at national races rather than looking at individual states and how together they deliver a new leader to the White House,” she said.

I asked her which individual states her campaign will win.

“Well, you know, John, I would love to tell you that list,” she said. “One of the aspects to our electoral map that’s extremely important is not signaling where we’re going to be focused, ensuring advertising rates and attention and so forth are affordable and achievable there. So I can’t share the states with you except to say that Bobby is speaking to all Americans, and most especially to Americans who’ve been completely ignored by the map of the two-party system for decades and decades and are ready to have a say in the system.”

I asked her again. She eventually said that her team has a list of 29 states, but refused to share any of them, raising the possibility that Kennedy’s opponents may try to infiltrate their campaign. “Where we see the strongest numbers right now is, you know, the matter of a lot of internal polling. I’m sure the other campaigns are doing their own internal polling. But in the balance of resources, it wouldn’t be wise for us to spend a lot of hours on polling and then share them publicly.”

Though Kennedy will almost certainly lose the election, he could still affect its outcome by being a spoiler. The Democrats sense this. The DNC recently hired the veteran operative Lis Smith to lead a team focused on attacking third-party candidates, Kennedy in particular. Outside Kennedy’s rally in Austin, a black box truck drove laps around the venue. Among the rotating messages on its exterior about Kennedy and his running mate: WHY IS TRUMP’S TOP DONOR SPENDING $20 MILLION TO PROP UP RFK JR. AND NICOLE SHANAHAN? Beneath Photoshopped images of the two candidates in MAGA hats was a disclaimer: PAID FOR BY THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL COMMITTEE.

The Democratic pollster and strategist Ben Tulchin has recently been looking closely at two swing states, Arizona and Pennsylvania. In Arizona, in particular, Tulchin’s data indicate that Kennedy is a bigger threat to Biden than he is to Trump, especially among young people and Latinos. “I’ve been raising the alarm with the Democratic Party and anyone who will hear me in the Biden campaign,” Tulchin told me.

At the national level, though, a clear picture has yet to emerge. Patrick Murray, director of the Monmouth University Polling Institute, told me in an email, “There is no evidence in the current polls that conclusively points to RFK pulling more support from either side.” He continued, “The problem is, of course, with expected close outcomes in a few key Electoral College states, any small spoiler effect that’s hidden in the polling margins can have major consequences. Sample polling may not be precise enough to find it, unless you can interview every voter. That type of polling is called an election.”

Kennedy keeps steadily attracting not just independents but a mix of Democrats and Republicans alike. This aligns with what I’ve noticed at his events—a diverse generational cross section: crypto bros, cowboys, crunchy hippies. Kennedy looks out from the stage and sees it, too—all the wide-eyed voters looking back.

To stiff-arm the spoiler characterization, Kennedy refers to his own polling that shows he’d defeat either Biden or Trump in head-to-head matchups. “I’m not a spoiler, because I can win,” he told me flatly.

Trump rallies brim with a dystopian, campy Americana. Biden rallies barely exist. Kennedy rallies, meanwhile, tend to feel like giant house parties. Opening acts usually include cover bands, and many attendees mingle while sipping drinks. Inside the downtown-Austin venue, nearly 1,000 people milled about multiple bars and listened to a band cycle through crowd favorites: Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?,” and, in an ironic twist, Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Fortunate Son.”

One of the first speakers that night was the regenerative-farming influencer Ryland Engelhart. He quoted the mystic poet Rumi and affectionately likened the RFK Jr. campaign to Noah’s Ark—“a big foolish project.” Engelhart told the crowd that he had been sitting on the toilet scrolling through his phone when he first discovered Kennedy and his message. He spoke wistfully about a recent fundraiser that ended with Kennedy joining his donors in a sweat lodge. He paraphrased another Rumi line at the end of his speech: Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. Then offered a 2024 addendum: “There is a president beyond Donald Trump and Joe Biden. I will meet you there.”

[Read: The RFK Jr. strategy clicks into focus]

Shanahan made a rare public appearance that night. A Silicon Valley businesswoman and reported billionaire, she has no political experience and is not a natural public speaker. Most of her message was not about the election, but about topics such as healthy soil and the danger of forever chemicals in food. “A lot of our most innovative solutions come from outside conventional politics—they are in the realm of what’s been called ‘alternative,’” she said. “Yes, I know that sounds so radical. It shouldn’t. I have seen the power of these little alternative ways of thinking in my own life. I have used alternative health practices to restore my health, my fertility … I know what is possible when you think with an alternative, creative mindset.”

When Kennedy took the stage, he told the crowd, “Every time I see her speak, I fall a little bit more in love with her.” He went on, “Most of the presidential candidates we have today, they sound like they’re doing a satire of Veep. And that’s not what you hear from Nicole—you hear a lecture about soil!” He warned that the more Americans spend on medicine, the unhealthier we get. “What is it that is causing us not to see that?” he asked. “What is it that is causing us to constantly feed this beast that is making us more and more sick all the time? It’s the corrupt political system. It’s the subversion of our democracy.” His message built toward a call-and-response finale. “If Nicole and I get into office, everything is going to change,” Kennedy said.

“Don’t you want everything to change?”

“Yes!” the crowd shouted.

“Is there anything that you want to keep the same?”

“No!”

Some of the people most concerned about Kennedy’s impact on the election are members of his own family. Last year, a few Kennedys began speaking out against what they saw as the dangers of his campaign. His brother Christopher Kennedy recently characterized RFK as “unreachable,” a “true believer” with “fringe thinking,” “crackpot ideas,” and “unsound judgment.” On St. Patrick’s Day this year, dozens of Kennedys gathered at the White House and took a family photo with Biden—an unsubtle message to RFK.

I asked Kennedy what had gone through his mind when he saw that photo. He stared off at a refrigerator along the wall separating the restaurant’s dining room from its kitchen. He wiped his eye. He leaned forward with both elbows on the table. All told, it took him 34 seconds to formulate his answer. Kennedy acknowledged that he has family members who are “not enthused” about his candidacy, and some who are supporting him. “I don’t harbor resentments anymore,” he said. “I just don’t. I think they’re corrosive. They’re like swallowing poison and hoping someone else will die.”

[Read: Where RFK Jr. goes from here]

He told me that he had expected to be polling well among his fellow Baby Boomers, because they were the ones with the most nostalgia for his father and uncle—the Camelot era. But so far, he said, younger people were his strongest bloc of support, people who likely didn’t think much about that history. I asked if he felt primarily like a Kennedy, someone carrying on a family legacy, or if he saw himself as just Bobby.

“Where do we get our sense of self?” he asked. “It comes from the principles which are the boundaries of that entity. The principles, the places where we say to ourselves, ‘I would never do that.’ And it comes from, you know, feelings that are the product of our history and our culture and our genes. You know, I grew up in this family. That lucky event, for me, has been one of the formative features and forces of my life. And has crafted everything I believe in as a person. It’d be hard for me to separate myself from my family.”

He characterized the past year of campaigning as “a very intense lesson on all the things that you’re supposed to learn in the course of your life.” Running for president, he said, teaches you how to process antipathy. “You got a lot of hatred coming in, and anger, and then, you know, the opposite of that, too.” The goal he chases is to treat “everything as an imposter,” even the adulation. But he seems to have a harder time with that last part.

“I think one of the inspiring things for me is how many people have put hopes in me for change. And I’m sure if you interview some of these people who are following me, it’s extraordinary to me that so many people show up,” he said. “A lot of them come to me crying and just voice their hopes. And it feels like a big responsibility.” He told me that this has changed him in a “fundamental” way. “It’s made me try to be the person that, you know, people hope I am.”

It’s hard to know who that person is, or what he stands for. Kennedy told me that he believes the worst things Trump did as president were instituting lockdowns during the early phase of the pandemic and walking away from a nuclear-weapons treaty with Russia. He referred to Biden’s border policy as “a catastrophe.” He wants voters to distrust the government, yet he also wants to run the government. Kennedy remains a magnet for the disillusioned. His philosophy isn’t profound, but his supporters seem to know that he’s saying something, and that it’s a little dangerous and alluring. In an election with two deeply unpopular major-party candidates, that message—even if it doesn’t add up to much—is resonating.

Biden is allowing Israel to 'operate with impunity' despite his warnings against an assault on Rafah, activists say.

The Ukrainian president says his US counterpart's absence would "only be applauded by Putin".

Speaking to donors earlier this month, former President Donald Trump laid out his plan for dealing with campus protests: Just deport the protesters.

“One thing I do is, any student that protests, I throw them out of the country. You know, there are a lot of foreign students. As soon as they hear that, they’re going to behave,” the presumptive Republican nominee for president said on May 14, according to The Washington Post.

The threat is classic Trump: vindictive, nonsensical, disproportionate, and based on the assumption that deportation is the answer to America’s problems. Protest is an essential element of American freedom and is not itself against the law. (Some protesters have been charged with crimes.) One would think it goes without saying that U.S. citizens cannot be deported for it. Although some of those protesting the war in Gaza and American support for it are international students, no evidence indicates that most or even a large minority of those protesting on campuses are non-U.S. citizens. (Foreign nationals can lose their student visa if they are suspended from school for any reason, political or otherwise.) In short, Trump is proposing a heavy-handed plan that wouldn’t solve the problem.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s only real worldview is pettiness]

Trump’s remarks about protesters follow a pattern seen elsewhere, in which he takes an idea already circulating in conservative circles and ratchets it up a notch. “I think the students, if they’re foreign students on visas, their visas should be canceled and they should be sent home,” Florida Governor Ron DeSantis said last month. “For those international students who defied university orders, and police instruction, in favor of acting on pro-terrorist views, this should result in immediate expulsion from their host institution and our generous country,” Senator Marco Rubio wrote in a letter to administration officials in May. “No questions asked.”

Asked about the demand at the time, Biden White House spokesperson John Kirby said, “I would just tell you that you don’t have to agree with every sentiment that is expressed in a free country like this to stand by the First Amendment and the idea of peaceful protest.”

Calling DeSantis’s and Rubio’s statements nuanced would be incorrect, but Trump’s version is even more sweeping—no surprise from someone who has in the past reportedly suggested shooting protesters. He conflates all the protesters with international students, and proposes a penalty, deportation, not permitted for citizens. Americans can lose citizenship for treason, and naturalized citizens can be denaturalized for a small range of offenses, but protesting U.S. foreign policy is not one—which is good, because that would mean criminalizing dissent. But Trump has shown that although he fiercely resists even minor constraints on himself, he has no problem violating, or suggesting violating, the basic civil rights guaranteed for other people by the Constitution.

Even as Donald Trump relies on unprecedented support from Black and Latino voters, he is embracing policies that would expose their communities to much greater police surveillance and enforcement. The policies that Trump is pledging to implement around crime and policing in a second presidential term would reverse the broad trend of police reform that accelerated after the murder of George Floyd, four years ago today.

Trump has endorsed a suite of proposals that would provide cities with more funds to hire police officers; pressure officials in major cities to employ more aggressive policing tactics, such as “stop and frisk,” in high-crime neighborhoods; and strengthen legal protection for law-enforcement officers accused of misconduct.

“I suspect that in many places, you would see policing that is much harsher, much more punitive, [and] not nearly as concerned about the racial disparities in the way that policing happens,” Christy Lopez, a former Justice Department attorney who led multiple federal investigations of racial bias in police departments around the country, told me. “All of those things that we have been working for years to dismantle will be built up again.”

The cumulative effect of Trump’s proposals would be to push local police departments toward arresting more people. That dynamic would inevitably increase the number of Black and Latino people entangled in the criminal-justice system, after years of declines in the total number of arrests.

The magnitude of Trump’s plans on policing and crime has drawn little attention in the presidential race so far. But on virtually every front, Trump proposes to use federal influence to reverse the efforts toward police reform that have gained ground over roughly the past decade, and especially since Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 spurred the largest nationwide protests since the 1960s. “We will give our police back their power and their respect,” Trump declared in his appearance at the National Rifle Association convention last weekend.

[Juliette Kayyem: The government isn’t ready for the violence Trump might unleash]

In a campaign video last year, Trump laid out a sweeping second-term agenda on crime and policing. He promised “a record investment” in federal funds to help cities hire and train more police. He said he would require local law-enforcement agencies receiving federal grants to implement an array of hard-line “proven policing measures” including “stop-and-frisk, strictly enforcing existing gun laws, cracking down on the open use of illegal drugs,” and cooperating with federal immigration agencies “to arrest and deport criminal aliens.”

Trump has also pledged to launch federal civil-rights investigations against the reform-oriented progressive prosecutors (or “radical Marxist prosecutors,” in Trump’s terms) who have been elected in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, among other big cities. He has promised to pursue the death penalty for drug dealers and has repeatedly called on police to shoot shoplifters: “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” he said in one speech.

Perhaps most dramatically, Trump has indicated that he will dispatch the National Guard and other federal law-enforcement personnel “to restore law and order” in cities where “local law enforcement refuses to act.” Trump, in fact, has said on multiple occasions that one of his biggest regrets from his first term is that he deferred to city officials, who resisted his calls to deploy the National Guard or other federal law-enforcement forces onto their streets. Trump and Stephen Miller, his top immigration adviser, have also said they intend to dispatch the National Guard to major cities to participate in his planned mass-deportation campaign.

Trump has not provided detail on his crime proposals; some experts say that makes it difficult to evaluate their potential impact. “Reading over the Trump plan, I would say it is a mix of the good, the bad, the puzzling, and the incoherent,” Jens Ludwig, director of the University of Chicago’s crime lab, told me.

Trump’s most frequent promise has been his pledge “to indemnify all police officers and law-enforcement officials,” as he put in his NRA speech, “to protect them from being destroyed by radical-left lunatics who are angry that they are taking strong action on crime.”

Exactly how Trump, at the federal level, could provide more legal protection to police officers is unclear. Experts point out that police officers already are shielded by the doctrine of “qualified immunity” against litigation, which the Supreme Court has upheld in multiple cases. Even in cases where law-enforcement agencies admit to misconduct, the damages are virtually always paid by the city, not the individual police officer.

In 2021, with President Joe Biden’s support, House Democrats did pass police-reform legislation, named the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, that limited qualified immunity and would have made suing police for misconduct easier, but that bill died in the Senate. Some states and local governments have since moved to weaken qualified immunity as a defense in state courts. Trump appears to envision passing national legislation that codifies broad protection for police and preempts any state effort to retrench it.

Trump could also face problems precisely defining the policing tactics he wants to require local officials to adopt as a condition for receiving federal law-enforcement grants. Trump, for instance, has repeatedly praised the stop-and-frisk program launched in New York City by then-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Under that program, the New York Police Department stopped large numbers of people—many of them young Black and Latino men—and claimed to be searching for drugs or guns. But eventually a federal district judge declared that the program violated the Constitution’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure, as well as its guarantee of equal protection, and the city later abandoned the tactic.

Lopez, now a professor at Georgetown University Law School, says that Trump can’t order other police departments to precisely replicate the aggressive stop-and-frisk practices from New York City that have been found unconstitutional. But, she says, tying federal aid to stop-and-frisk and the other hard-line policies Trump is promoting could nonetheless exert a powerful signaling effect on local law enforcement.

“At the federal level, you can use your influence, your dollars, your training to encourage practices that are more or less alienating to communities,” she told me. Trump’s touting of stop-and-frisk, Lopez added, is “a signal that his administration is going to really promote some of the most aggressive, alienating practices that police departments have partaken in.”

Reinforcing the funding message is the approach Trump has laid out for civil-rights oversight of policing. Trump’s Justice Department stopped nearly all federal investigations into allegations of bias in police enforcement: His administration launched only one investigation of a police department (a single unit in Springfield, Massachusetts), abandoned a consent decree that Barack Obama’s Justice Department had negotiated for reforms in Chicago, and ultimately effectively banned department lawyers from seeking further consent decrees with other localities.

Now Trump is pledging to instead pursue federal civil-rights investigations against the reform prosecutors who are challenging local policing and charging practices. That shift in emphasis would likely provide another nudge for cities toward more intrusive enforcement approaches. The rollback “in federal oversight of policing” that Trump pursued in his first term, Lopez says, “will look like child’s play if Trump is reelected.”

Public-safety analysts sympathetic to Trump’s vision say it represents a necessary course correction after the array of criminal-justice reforms that policy makers have advanced roughly since the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, in 2014. Rafael Mangual, a fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute, argues that, partly because of those reforms, policing has “become a much harder job to do.” Mangual agrees that Trump’s agenda could result in more arrests of minority young people, but says that would be an acceptable cost for improving safety in the low-income, heavily minority neighborhoods where crime is often most prevalent. “If you are talking about things like adding more police and having them be more proactive in the field, I think it is absolutely the case, especially in high-crime communities, what you are going to see is improvement on those measures,” he told me.

[Russell Berman: The voters who don’t really know Donald Trump]

But critics believe that Trump’s approach would reduce police accountability and increase incarceration rates without providing more public safety. The unifying idea in Trump’s proposals seems to be “that all we need for public safety is more enforcement and punishment,” says Daniela Gilbert, director of Redefining Public Safety at the Vera Institute for Justice, a liberal police-reform advocacy group. “If that was effective, we’d already have safer communities.”

Ludwig agrees with Mangual that low-income minority neighborhoods would gain the most from a reduction in crime. But, like Gilbert, Ludwig says it’s not clear that the agenda Trump has laid out would achieve that goal. “He’s saying two things: more policing and more aggressive policing,” Ludwig told me. “I think the more policing [is] good, the more aggressive policing—not helpful.”

Although some other criminologists disagree, Ludwig says the evidence is that hiring and training more police does lower crime, and that those benefits will be felt “disproportionately in low-income communities of color.” But, Ludwig adds, the aspects of Trump’s agenda that are designed to pressure cities to stop and arrest more people for nonviolent offenses or to participate in deportation efforts would likely prove counterproductive by heightening tension and reducing cooperation between police and minority communities.

The backdrop for this policy debate is an extremely volatile political environment on crime.

Polls consistently show that significantly more voters say they trust Trump than Biden to handle crime. Although Biden usually leads on that question among nonwhite voters, even a substantial minority of Blacks and Latinos typically say they trust Trump more to address the problem. Trump’s strength on those measures is one component of the overall racial inversion evident in polling so far about the 2024 race, with Biden largely holding his 2020 support among white voters but suffering substantial erosion to Trump among racial minorities.

A crucial question for the election is whether Trump can maintain those inroads among nonwhite voters while offering such a racially polarizing agenda across a wide range of issues. Trump’s embrace of criminal-justice and policing policies that could disproportionately affect Black and Latino communities is a prime example of that dynamic.

Biden, in a manner reminiscent of Bill Clinton during the 1990s, has tried to find a “third way” on crime between Trump and the most liberal reformers in his own party. Biden backed the sweeping police-reform bill that the Democratic-controlled House passed in 2021 and issued a 2022 executive order prescribing various reforms on federal law-enforcement agencies. But he has also touted the $15 billion he won in the 2021 COVID-recovery act to support local law-enforcement budgets, and he has continued to push for federal aid to help cities hire 100,000 more police officers.

Biden’s Justice Department has released findings of civil-rights investigations into the police departments of Minneapolis, where Floyd was murdered, and Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was killed during a botched raid on her apartment, and is conducting investigations of nine other jurisdictions. But the department has not completed legal consent decrees with any local police departments, a stark contrast with the 14 that Obama reached over his two terms. Lopez, who led those efforts for Obama, praises the quality of the Biden investigations into Minneapolis and Louisville, but says the diminished quantity of agreements reflects Biden’s general sympathy for traditional approaches to policing. “I think there is much more ambivalence under the Biden administration about this work than there was under the Obama administration,” she told me.

But, as on many issues, a huge gulf still separates Biden’s careful balancing act from Trump’s sweeping plans to unshackle and unleash police. Even if Trump could not implement all the proposals he has unveiled, his overall agenda would likely encourage police to adopt more punitive tactics. “I want to think that we are all being alarmist about all this,” Lopez told me, “but I fear that it’s actually quite realistic that he is going to go much further than he did last time.”

For good or ill, the Trump effect on policing would likely be felt most acutely in the heavily Black and Latino neighborhoods of places such as Detroit, Philadelphia, and Las Vegas that may decide whether he wins a second term and the chance to reverse the past decade’s fitful advances toward rethinking policing and criminal justice.

Illustration Sources: Angela Weiss / Getty; Brett Carlsen / Getty; David Ryder / Getty; James Devaney / Getty; Jim Vondruska / Getty; Kyle Grillot / Getty*

Nuclear energy occupies a strange place in the American psyche—representing at once a dream of endless emissions-free power and a nightmare of catastrophic meltdowns and radioactive waste. The more prosaic downside is that new plants are extremely expensive: America’s most recent attempt to build a nuclear facility, in Georgia, was supposed to be completed in four years for $14 billion. Instead it took more than 10 years and had a final price tag of $35 billion—about 10 times the cost of a natural-gas plant with the same energy output.

But the United States might not have the luxury of treating nuclear energy as a lost cause: The Department of Energy estimates that the country must triple its nuclear-power output by 2050 to be on track for its climate targets. For all the recent progress in wind and solar energy, renewables on their own almost certainly won’t be enough. Arguably, then, we have no choice but to figure out how to build nuclear plants affordably again.

Half a century ago, nuclear energy seemed destined to become the power source of the future. The first commercial-reactor designs were approved in the 1950s, and by the late ’60s, America was pumping them out at a fraction of what they cost today. In 1970, the Atomic Energy Commission predicted that more than 1,000 reactors would be operating in the United States by the year 2000.

In the popular history of atomic energy in America, the turning point was the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant in 1979. In the aftermath of the accident, environmentalists pressured regulators to impose additional safety requirements on new and existing plants. Nuclear-energy advocates argue that these regulations were mostly unnecessary. All they did, in this telling, was make plants so expensive and slow to build that utility companies turned back to coal and gas. Activists and regulators had overreacted and killed America’s best shot at carbon-free energy.

This story contains some kernels of truth. The safety risk of nuclear energy is often wildly overblown. No one died at Three Mile Island, and later studies found that it didn’t have any adverse health effects on the local community. Even including the deadly meltdowns at Chernobyl and Fukushima, nuclear power has most likely caused only a few hundred deaths, putting its safety record on par with wind turbines and solar panels, which occasionally catch fire or cause workers to fall. (The immediate areas around the sites of the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters have, however, been rendered uninhabitable for decades because of the potential dangers of radiation.) Nuclear waste can be harmful if mishandled, but isn’t difficult to store safely. Air pollution from fossil fuels, meanwhile, is estimated to kill anywhere from 5 million to 9 million people every year.

[Read: Nuclear is hot, for the moment]

The claim that excessive regulation single-handedly ruined the American nuclear industry, however, doesn’t hold up. The cost of building new nuclear plants was already rising before Three Mile Island. Several nuclear-energy experts told me that a major driver of those cost increases was actually a lack of industry standards. According to Jessica Lovering, the executive director of Good Energy Collective and a co-author of a widely cited study on the cost of nuclear energy, throughout the ’60s and ’70s, utilities kept trying to build bigger, more ambitious reactors for every new project instead of just sticking with a single model. (Lovering used to be the head of nuclear policy at the Breakthrough Institute—a think tank that tends to warn against excessive regulation.) “It’s like if Boeing went through all the trouble to build one 737, then immediately threw out the design and started again from scratch,” she told me. “That’s a recipe for high costs.” The 94 nuclear reactors operating in the United States today are based on more than 50 different designs. In countries such as France and South Korea, by contrast, public utilities coalesced around a handful of reactor types and subsequently saw costs remain steady or fall.

Lovering also noted that the overregulation story leaves out a crucial fact: Because of a slowing economy, electricity demand flatlined in the early 1980s, causing American utilities to stop building basically every electricity-generating resource, not just nuclear plants. By the time the U.S. finally did try to build them again, in 2013, the American nuclear industry had all but withered away. “In the 1970s, we had a whole ecosystem of unionized workers and contractors and developers and utilities who knew how to build this stuff,” Josh Freed, who leads the climate and energy program at Third Way, a center-left think tank, told me. “But when we stopped building, that ecosystem died off.” This became obvious during the disastrous Vogtle project, in Georgia—the one that ended up costing $35 billion. Expensive changes had to be made to the reactor design midway through construction. Parts arrived late. Workers made all kinds of rookie mistakes. In one case, an incorrect rebar installation triggered a seven-and-a-half-month regulatory delay. Experts estimate that by the time it was finished, the project was four to six times more expensive per unit of energy produced than plants built in the early ’70s.

Given the impracticality of nuclear energy, some environmentalists argue that we should focus on wind and solar. These technologies can’t power the entire grid today, because the sun doesn’t always shine and the wind doesn’t always blow. With enough advances in battery-storage technology, however, they could in theory provide 24/7 power at a far lower price than building nuclear plants. “The nuclear industry has been promising cheap, clean energy for decades at this point,” David Schlissel, a director at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, told me. “Why waste our money on false hopes when we could be putting it towards technologies that have a real chance of working?”

He may be right about the technology. But just because it might one day be technically feasible to power the entire grid with renewables doesn’t mean it will ever be politically feasible. That’s because wind and solar require land—a lot of land. According to Princeton University’s “Net-Zero America” study, reaching net-zero emissions with renewables alone would involve placing solar panels on land equivalent to the area of Virginia and setting up wind farms spanning an area equivalent to Arkansas, Iowa, Kansas, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma combined. The more land you need, the more you run into the meat grinder of American NIMBYism. Efforts to build renewables are already getting bogged down by local opposition, costly lawsuits, and permitting delays. These challenges will only intensify as the easiest sites come off the board.

Transmission lines, which are needed to transport renewable energy from where it’s generated to where it’s used, may present an even bigger challenge. Some lines have taken nearly two decades just to receive their full suite of approvals. “There’s a chance we will suddenly get our act together and overcome the many, many constraints to deploying renewables,” Jesse Jenkins, who leads the Princeton Zero-Carbon Energy Systems Research and Optimization Lab, told me. “But I’m certainly not willing to bet the fate of the planet on that happening.”

The case for nuclear, then, is less about technological possibilities than it is about political realities. Nuclear can generate the same amount of power while using 1/30th as much land as solar and about 1/200th as much as wind. Reactors can be built anywhere, not just in areas with lots of natural wind and sunshine, eliminating the need for huge transmission lines and making it easier to select sites without as much local opposition. And nuclear plants happen to generate the greatest number of high-paying jobs of any energy source, by far. (On average, they employ six times as many workers as an equivalent wind or solar project does and pay those workers 50 percent more.) That helps explain why four different towns in Wyoming recently fought over the right to host a nuclear project. Nuclear power is also the only energy source with overwhelming bipartisan support in Washington, which makes Congress more likely to address future bottlenecks and hurdles as they arise.

[Brian Deese: The next front in the war against climate change]

As for how to make the economics work, there are two schools of thought. One holds that if America forgot how to build nuclear because we stopped doing it, we just need to start back up. Pick a design, build lots of plants, and we’ll eventually get better. Other countries have done this with great success; South Korea, for instance, slashed the cost of constructing nuclear plants in half from 1971 to 2008. Here, the Vogtle project carries a silver lining: The second of the plant’s two reactors was about 30 percent cheaper to build than the first, because workers and project managers learned from their mistakes the first time around. “I consider Vogtle a success,” Mike Goff, acting assistant secretary for the Department of Energy’s Office of Nuclear Energy, told me. “We learned all kinds of hard lessons. Now we just need to apply them to future projects.”

The second school of thought is that we’ve been building nuclear reactors the wrong way all along. This camp points out that over the past half century, basically every kind of major infrastructure project—highways, skyscrapers, subways—has gotten more expensive, whereas manufactured goods—TVs, solar panels, electric-vehicle batteries—have gotten cheaper. Lowering costs turns out to be much easier when a product is mass-produced on an assembly line than when it has to be built from scratch in the real world every single time. That’s why dozens of companies are now racing to build nuclear reactors that are, in a phrase I heard from multiple sources, “more like airplanes and less like airports.” Some are simply smaller versions of the reactors the U.S. used to build; others involve brand-new designs that are less likely to melt down and therefore don’t require nearly as much big, expensive equipment to operate safely. What unites them is a belief that the secret to making nuclear cheap is making it smaller, less complicated, and easier to mass-produce.

Both paths remain unproven—so the Biden administration is placing bets on each of them. The president’s signature climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, included generous tax credits that could reduce the cost of a nuclear project by 30 to 50 percent, and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law included $2.5 billion to fund the construction of two new reactors using original designs. The Department of Energy, meanwhile, is exploring different options for permanent nuclear-waste storage, investing in building a domestic supply chain for uranium, and helping companies navigate the process of getting reactor designs approved.

There’s no guarantee that the U.S. will ever relearn the art of building nuclear energy efficiently. Betting on the future of atomic power requires a leap of faith. But America may have to take that leap, because the alternative is so much worse. “We just have to be successful,” Mike Goff told me. “Failure is not an option.”