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The question of whether to have kids sits at the awkward intersection of intensely personal decisions and important policy issues. That dynamic can lead to societal confusion. Policy makers and researchers debate how economic policies can stop birth rates from declining, while individual people ask themselves how they want to live their life and whether that includes children.

To express overt concern about why women are having fewer children can imply that the good life requires childbearing and rearing. As a result, those left of center—especially those who value pluralism—have largely opted out of debates about the merits of parenthood. After all, a fulfilling and valuable life can include children, but it doesn’t have to.

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with Anastasia Berg, a philosopher and co-author of the recent book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Berg wants to rid the left of any discomfort it might have with engaging in conversations about, well, what children are for.

“If we look at the kind of things that leftists are committed to, be it climate change or significant social and political reform—if it’s education, if it’s welfare—these are the kind of things that presuppose the possibility of a human future,” Berg argues. “And what we hope to do in part, at least, is to liberate people who identify themselves politically in that way to also just have the courage to embrace the role of children in human life without thinking that … immediately commits them to a conservative, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-equality stance.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: In 2023, nearly half of childless adults under 50 didn’t want kids. That was a 10-point jump from five years earlier, according to Pew Research Center. In that time, the public conversation about having kids has felt dominated by conservative voices—whether it’s Elon Musk, who has at least 12 children with three different partners and called the birth decline “one of the biggest risks to civilization,” or J. D. Vance, who seems to have a particular disdain for the childless.

J. D. Vance: We are effectively run in this country via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC—the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children.

Demsas: As a result, I’ve seen many on the left begin to disengage from caring about this issue at all.

[Music]

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives.

This is a very different conversation than our usual episodes. My guest is Anastasia Berg, philosopher and co-author of the new book What Are Children For? On Ambivalence and Choice. Anastasia isn’t focused on investigating the economic or other structural factors for why people are increasingly opting out of parenthood.

Anastasia rejects the focus on the causes of declining birth rates. She even rejects the idea that she particularly cares what the birth rate is. She instead heads down to the level of the individual. How are individual people understanding, explaining, and avoiding the conversation about child-rearing? And why should the left view itself as part of the project of caring about this at all?

I hope this episode gives you a different way to engage if you’re visiting with any pushy relatives this week.

[Music]

Anastasia, welcome to the show.

Berg: Thank you so much for having me.

Demsas: So your book is kind of provocatively titled What Are Children For? I want to start with why you wrote this book. And who is it for?

Berg: So the book came out of conversations that my co-author and best friend and I, Rachel Wiseman, were having in our late 20s and early 30s, respectively, and we were both dealing with the personal ramifications of this question, wondering what shape our own lives are going to take and also struck by a certain kind of shallowness or dissatisfying qualities of the way we saw the public conversation about the role of children in human life was happening at the time.

And so we started off with a short article called “On Choosing Life” that really focused, in particular, on kind of the satisfactions we had with a discourse around climate change and how climate change is giving us reasons not to have kids. And then we just saw the public response to it, the enthusiasm for a kind of investigation that was both sort of stylish and interesting and provocative and thoughtful, but also one that wasn’t sneering. And that, combined with the sense that we ourselves just started to scratch the surface of the sources of ambivalence and what kind of ethical and philosophical resources we might have to address that ambivalence to help people work through it—that kind of combination seemed like a good ground to write a book.

Demsas: So the focus on birth rates or why people aren’t having more kids has largely been, I think, seen as a concern dominated by right-wing thinkers and spaces—whether it’s sort of, like, rationalist, tech right people, and Elon Musk has been a big part of this conversation, or more of those trad-wife, classic conservative right people. Even kind of registering concern about the decline in fertility codes as right wing. But you see this as a progressive issue, one that left-leaning thinkers should engage seriously with. Why is that?

Berg: Yeah. That’s a great summary of where we stand on the political positioning of this question. So I think there are two things we need to notice. While there are a lot of aspects of the conversation, our children are indeed political.

There are two things that I think transcend politics: The first is that what is at stake really is just the shape of one’s own personal life. And when I say that, I don’t mean that is not, in itself, political and has political aspects. But the idea that we should decide what our personal lives will look like just because of our political allegiances—like, that’s something I think we should be suspicious of. And the second thing is that what is at stake is also a deep philosophical, ethical question, which isn’t just, Should I have children? Is it morally permissible for me? But it’s the question of the value of human life in the present and in the future.

So one thing I like to point out is that despite many differences between people on the left and the right, most of them are still in agreement about the following, and it’s a commitment to just the bare idea of a flourishing, robust, good human future. And I think from that perspective, we can recognize that this question—Should we concern ourselves with the future of humanity? Is human life the kind of thing that we should perpetuate into the future, despite suffering and despite our own failures, ethical and political?—that is a question that I think that people who are liberal or progressive, the answer is a robust yes.

If we look at the kind of things that leftists are committed to, be it climate change or significant social and political reform—if it’s education, if it’s welfare—these are the kind of things that presuppose the possibility of a human future. And what we hope to do, in part, at least, is to liberate people who identify themselves politically in that way to also just have the courage to embrace the role of children in human life without thinking that, as you were saying, immediately commits them to a conservative, anti-women, anti-progress, anti-equality stance.

Demsas: But there’s this view that the declining number of kids actually represents progress—that progress for women, in particular, who aren’t anymore saddled with, like, one vision of the good life, which is to get married, have a family, pop out as many kids as possible, and then find your meaning in that. But then, of course, the secondary aspect: No matter how egalitarian men or workplaces get, there’s just no way to equalize the costs of having kids to a woman’s body for being pregnant and birthing children, particularly, I think, under a regime where we no longer have Roe v. Wade.

And people have often seen this as a narrative of progress, and of course we see these sorts of correlations between highly educated groups and declining birth rates. So why isn’t this just a standard story of progress? Why don’t you see this as just another step in feminism liberating women from having to consign themselves to motherhood?

Berg: Let’s begin with where the book begins every time it picks up a possible explanation or a narrative that is driving ambivalence about having kids. And it starts with the kind of concerns that people themselves are raising. So it was really important for us not to start with the kind of explanations for declining birth rates you might hear that are kind of purely causal explanations. So people say, Women are more educated, or, The sperm counts are declining.

And one of the things we noticed is that no one—when they’re talking about their own ambivalence or their own uncertainty—no one starts by talking either about their own declining sperm counts, or no woman that I’ve spoken to has said, I’ve reflected on my years of education, and hence, I can’t make up my mind, or, This kind of gives me an answer to the question of how many kids I should have.

And so we wanted to start with the things that they really cared about. When we talk about women and men, about the things that would have made it easier for them to navigate the decision, about why they decided as they did, the question of the role of motherhood in a woman’s life—with the possibility of leading a fulfilling life, of determining one’s own future, of being equal to men—that was one concern, but it wasn’t the only one.

And so the first thing that we want to say is that we need to understand that we’re faced here with a lot of women and men who are having difficulty, so much as thinking through this question. That’s really our concern. So our concern is not an objective concern with a declining birth rate. We kind of leave it to others. Economists can explain to you what is the problem with an aging population, and other people can explain to you why a society can sort of overcome those issues.

But what we thought is a problem is that there is a question of incredible significance to human life, both, as I was saying, on this very subjective level and on this grand level—a huge existential question. And people are expressing a real difficulty of navigating it. And we thought, Here’s a place where we can help.

And so on particularly the question of progress, I think that we are many—and we were naming them—there are many arenas of progress in this kind of field. There are also things we wanted to point out that we think more progress can be made, even from a feminist perspective. So one of the things that we point out is that, at least in liberal and progressive circles, there is a growing understanding that men should take equal part in domestic labor, in housework and childcare. But there is a very different understanding of what men’s role is when it comes to the deliberation and decision making around children.

And in particular, we’ve placed almost a taboo—kind of it felt taboo on liberal and progressive men to even consider this question as one that is relevant to their life, let alone raise it in conversation. So we’ve spoken to men who said, you know, When I think about raising the question of kids with a potential partner, I immediately feel creepy and oppressive and controlling. Now, that seems like, on the one hand, a right kind of impulse. On the other hand, we’ve spoken to the women who are partners to those men who are telling them, Whatever you want, honey. And they describe being very frustrated and isolated, alone with that decision.

Demsas: But I think many people on the left, maybe even folks who have not, you know, come across your work yet, are open to the idea that people may just choose not to have children and that they might be ambivalent about having children, and that would be fine. Why are you seeing this as something that people should be concerned about?

Berg: So to be clear, again, the very fact of the declining birth rates is not something that we’re directly concerned about, nor do I, in putting forward the book, hope to help people embrace children in their own lives. I hope to help them navigate the kind of ambivalence that we found many are finding troubling.

So we’ve spoken to hundreds of Millennials and Zoomers and Gen Xers, and they’ve talked about the difficulty and hardship of navigating that question. And that means not knowing how to raise it with themselves, not knowing how to raise it with their partners, not knowing when they meet the kind of standards of readiness that can seem only higher and higher and murkier and murkier in their professional lives, in their personal lives, in their romantic lives, so much so that they never know if it is appropriate for them to raise the question of children. So for those who feel like they are in a happy place vis-à-vis the question of children, it doesn’t matter if that means a confident yes or a confident no. That’s great.

We found that there is a large and, in fact, growing swath of the population that is finding this question harder to navigate. It’s them that we wanted to offer a kind of space, a kind of dialogue to enter into in the same way that we wanted to find it when we ourselves were and still are, in many ways, grappling with the different aspects of this question.

Demsas: You’ve sort of glanced on this answer, but I guess I want to get it directly: Why do you think people aren’t having kids? And I don’t mean that in the sense there have always been reasons why people haven’t had children. But why do you think we see a clear decline in the number of children that people are having in younger generations?

Berg: I think to answer that, I’ll take us a little bit through the things we think about in the book. What we always try to do is start with the kind of reasons that people are finding very salient (i.e., they’re in the forefront of their minds), the things they’re thinking about, the things that give us an answer to the question, Why are you not having kids?

However, we also find ourselves wanting to push a little further than the kind of way that an argument first presents. Let me give an example: One thing that looms very large in the U.S., certainly, and also in places like the U.K. is the economic reasoning. People are worried, ostensibly, about the affordability of children. When you start talking to people more, you find that, at least as often as people are worrying about actual affordability, what they’re more worried about is meeting a standard of readiness. And that standard of readiness is very, very high. So one of the things we like to point out is that there is a cliché kind of stereotype of millennials, in particular, as immature—they’re eternal children. And as part of that narrative, they point to the fact that they’re having fewer kids, and they’re saying they don’t want to have kids. They’re kids themselves.

Against that, we want to point precisely to what I was talking about a second ago, which is the fact that they hold themselves to such high standards of maturity, of success and readiness, suggesting that, in a way, they’re almost too mature, as opposed to immature. And we see that across different aspects of their life.

So we see that in their financial and professional sense of self. We see them in their personal growth, so the idea that, My 20s have to be about self-exploration and self-fulfillment, and only when I’ve accomplished all of that, only when I am myself, only when I am sufficiently psychologically kind of come to my own self can I think about having children.

The same thing happens romantically. People are postponing the milestones of relationship and are holding their relations to very high standards of readiness, of stability and security, before they so much as think about having kids.

I mention all of these because I think one of the phenomena that we’re not thinking about seriously enough is not so much how any one of these explanations drive someone to make a kind of very intentional decision, Okay. I’ve considered my options. I’ve decided not to have kids. That happens. People certainly do that. But for a lot of people, that’s not what happens. What happens is that this self-evidence of a logic of postponement—postponement until we meet those standards—is putting off not just having kids but so much as thinking about having kids.

And so what happens is that people are starting to think about children as something that they should actually kind of concern themselves with quite late—and, in fact, later and later. And as that is happening, we see the decision whether or not to have children—and certainly how many children people are going to end up having—decided for them, not by them.

That’s what I care about. What interests me is the sense that people are having this decision made for them in a way where they are then left frustrated by it, not the case where somebody has weighed their lives and decided, I have a greater calling. I have a different vocation. I’m consciously making the choice early on, resolutely, that I would like my life to take a different shape.

Demsas: This is sort of the thesis of your book, and it’s even the tagline, “on ambivalence and choice,” this idea that ambivalence is really a driving reason for your concern for why people are putting off children. As you’ve said, it’s not that people have decided, I don’t want kids, but that there is this kind of failure to be able to even engage fully with the question. I wanted to ask you how—

Berg: Let’s just qualify that. I do not think that it is never the case that no one makes a conscious, intentional decision. They certainly do, in the same way that we still have people embracing kids, and people are telling us, It was never a question for me. It was so obvious. I lived my life accordingly. What we’re focused on is a growing part of the population for whom this is not the case.

Demsas: And I think that what I wanted to ask you about is where you learned that ambivalence was really driving a lot of people’s decision making here, or lack of decision making. Can you talk to me about the surveys you did or what sorts of research you’re pulling on?

Berg: Sure. Our approach in the book was wide-ranging, which is to say it was very important for us to hear from people. So we invited them to answer, first, written surveys, and then we followed up with a few dozen of them in kind of longer interviews.

This was mostly educated, middle- and upper-middle-class Americans that mostly leaned to the left, so liberals and progressives. In our conversations with them, we found evidence for it, but we also looked at kind of a wide array of both social studies data—so looking at people who have investigated directly the growing ambivalence, the lifting of a parenting mandate in America and globally, the kind of wide-ranging surveys of people’s life priorities—and also some of the stuff that is most rewarding for Rachel and myself, given our own interests, has been looking at things like the motherhood-ambivalence literary genre.

So this was a literary genre that grew over the past couple of decades. It’s associated with figures like Sheila Heti, Rachel Cusk, Rivka Galchen, and others. In the writing, for the first time, they’re taking motherhood, the difficulty of thinking through the choice, and then the difficulty attending the experience of growing up, mothering early infants—young infants, excuse me—and making it the focus of their artistic and intellectual explorations, so much so that the genre got its own title, this kind of genre of domestic or motherhood ambivalence.

We also look, similarly, at a growing, kind of exploding literary genre of what’s called “climate fiction” or “eco lit,” so ecological literature, seeing the kind of evidence for ambivalence, not directly about having kids, although sometimes, but ambivalence about the very value of a human future. So these are works that consistently represent human beings as kind of completely abject, which is to say they’re neither deserving of a future nor are they capable of bringing a better future about. For us, that was also a very interesting touchpoint in this exploration of this growing ambivalence.

And then we also looked at the popular cultural examples. For example, we wanted to figure out not just how pregnancy, let’s say, or motherhood are depicted, but also looking at questions like: What kind of women do we see represented in our popular films and media? And in that context, we point out that, if until recently, women would play the roles of the second fiddle. They would be the mother and the wife and the secretary. We now have them taking center stage. They’re protagonists of their own dramas and action and comedy.

However, it is remarkable how rarely those protagonists are mothers. So whether or not they’re the stoners of Broad City or they’re political operatives, like in Scandal and House of Cards, or they’re spies in Homeland or they’re superheroes, you can be anything you want to be as a woman, if you would just kind of watch the TV for the message, unless you try to be a mother.

And the mothers who are depicted are either highly, highly ambivalent—so Homeland, I think, is an example where she is a mother, but she’s abandoned her child, in effect—or they’re very, very bad ones. Fans of Succession can reflect on how we see the character of Shiv get pregnant at the very end of the show and how hard it is to be happy for her—let’s just put it that way.

So we want to point to the fact that we’re also having this kind of cultural messaging that is signaling that there is a big conflict between the possibility of any kind of self-fulfillment, in particular to women, and the possibilities of motherhood, which we think are incredibly important.

And maybe I’ll add one of my favorite pop-culture examples, and it’s that both Friends and Girls, which are both kind of age-defining shows in their own way for Millennials, they both basically end on the trope of an unexpected pregnancy. In Friends, it’s Rachel almost at the end of the show. In Girls, it’s Hannah having an unexpected pregnancy, and the minute she gives birth, the show ends.

And they suggest two things that I think are representative of a big mood in our culture. And the first is that once you have a child, our interest in you, as an adult, ends in a way that is particularly threatening to women. Your life as an intellectual, creative, socially exciting person that we would have an interest in—that’s over for you. And secondly, I think the fact that it’s an unexpected but embraced pregnancy speaks to the anxiety of choice. I think there is such a fantasy—I don’t think it speaks to some direct wish for everyone to get accidentally pregnant. I don’t want to suggest that. I do think it speaks to a kind of indulged-in fantasy—of, Maybe this could just be decided for me.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, Anastasia helps us figure out if the choice to have kids can ever be a rational enterprise.

[Break]

Demsas: I think this ambivalence is something. I mean, I do not have children. I do want to have children at some point. And I think this ambivalence is something I’ve noticed in conversations with friends and people in my peer group about when they’re thinking about having kids. And when I read your book, I saw a lot of that reflected, but I tried to go and look and see if there was some data that would help illuminate how ambivalence was playing a role.

And one surprising thing I found—and I wonder how you would react to this—is there’s a Pew poll earlier this year that looked at adults over 50 and adults under 50 who did not have children. And when asked why they never had kids, people 50 or older were most likely to say, It just never happened. But for those under 50, they say pretty clearly that they just don’t want to, or they want to focus on other things, or they list specific concerns about the world, affordability, or the environment.

Doesn’t that sort of indicate, contra to maybe our experience here and what I’m talking about in my experience with my friends, that rather than ambivalence, younger people are actually pretty clear about why they don’t want to have kids?

Berg: Yeah. So I thought that the poll is very interesting. It’s interesting because that’s not how I interpreted that particular data point, although you could.

So what I saw is the possibility of speaking about one’s experience—let’s call it kind of a journey of figuring out what one’s with children—with a way that was, I actually thought, in many ways, less defensive of older people who are able to say It didn’t work out for me.

So one of the things and this just corroborates that data: Until very recently, the second most common reason that people gave in the U.S. and the U.K. for why they didn’t have children—so people who are childless—was, I just didn’t find the willing and suitable partner, after, I didn’t want to have kids. What we see, which I think is consistent with the thesis of ambivalence, is that there is a growing embrace of other kind of, as you’re saying, priorities and projects and other shapes that a life can take, and less of a possibility of embracing the circumstances of life.

And why I think that is significant is that one of the things that we point out in the book is that many times when you talk about why people aren’t having kids, they talk about opportunity costs. Until not very recently, people thought of themselves essentially intergenerationally, and they thought of children as something that belonged to the very framework of human life.

So we can think of, at a moment—maybe it’s a moment that’s eroding, itself—but the way college featured in the lives of many Americans, so it’s the kind of thing that you do no matter what it will take from you. Maybe it’ll be easy. Maybe you’ll have to take on incredible, crippling amounts of debt. But you’re going to go for it. And that’s what children were. It wasn’t the thing that you put this question mark over and you weigh against your other project, you weigh against your other goals. It was something that you participate in because it belonged to the very framework of life.

And in lieu of that, what we see today is the fact that the children question becomes a question like any other question—like a career question, like an education question, like a Where am I going to live? question. The kind of things that we bring this framework, we compare it to other things, and once we start doing that, we’re going to be feeling the cost of making this very difficult and completely life-altering decision.

Demsas: What that raises for me, though, is: Why is that bad? Why is ambivalence about having children bad?

Berg: Put it this way: The very fact that this is a kind of question that’s going to be very hard to navigate—it’s going to bring up a lot of things. A person is going to want to consider many, many things before jumping into it. None of that is bad.

The bit that seems bad is the bit where that ambivalence becomes debilitating—where, because it’s so hard to navigate, on the one hand, and because there’s a kind of celebration of the ambivalence for its own sake, as if that’s the sophisticated position to take if I’m intellectually and professionally and artistically ambitious. If I have those kinds of aspirations, then being unsure about kids is almost how I’m supposed to be responding to this question.

When we combine these things, what we find is a kind of unhappiness, not the unhappiness of the proverbial childless cat lady. That’s not what we’re talking about. What we’re talking about is the unhappiness of feeling, I don’t know how to start thinking about this question. I don’t feel comfortable raising it with my partner.

That is a huge problem. I don’t feel that there are the kind of public resources to navigate this question, because anything that I find when I look for them is conservative and reactionary. So I think that is the problem, which is why, when we thought about the subtitles or how to talk about the book, every time somebody said, Well, do you want to talk about overcoming ambivalence? I said, Well, I don’t want to. You know, ambivalence is worthwhile. We want to take it seriously.

Demsas: You’re ambivalent about overcoming ambivalence.

Berg: I’m ambivalent about the ambivalence. And one of the things I like to remind us of is actually the original meaning of ambivalence. So ambivalence, kind of originally in psychoanalysis, it meant the ability to have opposing feelings about one of the same objects, a positive and negative. I think today when we talk about ambivalence, a lot of times what we really mean and refer to as a kind of negativity. It’s like a courage of negativity. So when we say the eco lit novels or climate fiction are ambivalent, what we really mean is that they’re very, very negative about human beings.

And I think a lot of times when we talk about ambivalence about motherhood, what we talk about is the kind of the courage of negativity, which, in some ways, is long overdue. True ambivalence, the ability to really have and contain and work through both valences—the fears that attend a decision to have children, the things it can raise for us personally in terms of our ambitions, in terms of our families, in terms of the kind of big ethical concerns we care about—that doesn’t seem to me to be bad. When it’s debilitating us, when it’s—again, I really like this phrase—when it’s contributing to having that decision made for us and not by us, that’s when I worry about it.

Demsas: You view your project with your co-author as trying to kind of lift the ambivalence so that people can make a decision, so they can actually engage fully with this question about whether or not they should have children on their own. And in order to do that, you sort of attack some of the reasons why people say they don’t want to have kids. Jay Caspian Kang in The New Yorker calls your book “a corrective to liberal neuroses about having kids.” How do you feel about that tag?

Berg: Yeah. That’s a great question because, as I was saying before, I think there are parts of Jay’s characterization—we also went on his podcast—that we were happy to embrace, and part of it we wanted to kind of hold off on. He said, This really gratifies a debate bro in me. I think that’s not in The New Yorker. That might just be on the podcast. And we said, Oh, that’s nice, Jay. That’s really not all that we want to do.

And that kind of goes to what I was saying before. A lot of people are taking cheap shots at people not having kids today, including our newly elected vice president. And it seemed to us, as people who were ourselves struggling with the question of the role of children in our own lives and in human life, that that kind of attitude would not guide us through our own ambivalence. So it is true that we look at the kind of dominant narratives and scripts and arguments that are not helping people think through this, that make this decision harder to navigate. But I wouldn’t say we attack them, and certainly not the people who hold them. And in fact, what we often do is allow people to, I think, productively move through them.

So notice, again, I’ll recall an example and use a new one. When I was talking about the financial concern, the point isn’t to just say, Well, look—by the way, the Nordic countries. Look at them. Every material hurdle to having children has been lifted. They’re not having kids. End of story. So whatever people are saying when they’re talking about finances might just be bad faith, and that’s it.

No, I don’t think it’s just bad faith. I think those concerns are looming very large for people. What we wanted to understand is why and how. What we found was, as I was saying, a concern with a kind of ideal—a mirage, perhaps—of sufficient readiness that was underlying what often presented itself as just talk of money. The mirage is that I can ever be so rich, so successful that I would be completely confident in my choice to have children. That is the potential mirage, because a standard could be so high that we’ll never know if we’ve ever reached it.

Demsas: And so why did those standards change?

Berg: I think that’s a great question. The reason why it’s hard to answer is because we see it across very different arenas of life. Like I was saying before, people, when they think of their own personal development, they’re thinking, I need to be very mature, very stable. It’s kind of jokes around adulting—so, I’m not there yet. We see that in romantic relationships, so the idea that we have to be in a relationship for a very, very long time before we ever progressed to the next stage.

So people are taking longer to vet potential partners, taking longer to go exclusive, taking longer to introduce them to their parents, taking longer to move in, to get the pet, to get the child. So how to explain the change? More locally, we can think about the kind of upheavals that the Millennial generation, in particular, had undergone. It does seem to be very much the case that there is this myth of readiness that we certainly didn’t see before that I think is truer and more interesting than the kind of dithering, immature, Millennial caricature that we’re used to.

Demsas: Well, one of the big concerns—and this is, as you mentioned, what really kicked off your decision to write this book—is this idea that people are afraid of bringing children into the world because of climate change, that they’re worried about the idea that you are consigning your kids to a world where it’s unclear how their stability will look like, whether that’s literally the changes that will occur with weather, whether it’s floods or droughts or hurricanes or whatever it is, but also just that there’s tons of costs that children may add to the planet by increasing pollution.

You know, you cite one person saying that this is a good reason that people can proffer, but it’s hiding their actual underlying ambivalence. Why isn’t that, by itself, a reason that you find credible that many people are using to not have kids?

Berg: Again, I definitely don’t characterize anything through the paradigm of, like, they’re hiding one explanation with another. And that’s really important to emphasize.

What we do is we quote a kind of academic, ecological activist who had studied the decision processes of people who are environmentalists vis-à-vis the decision to have kids. And what he found was that for those for whom children were a positive prospect—they’re leaning towards kids—they will talk about climate change as a reason to have children. They’ll say, I’m having children so I can raise people who are responsible vis-à-vis the environment.

And people who are leaning against having children will cite the environment as a reason not to have children, along the lines that you mentioned. And moreover, they consistently said that they will then emphasize that reason of their deliberations in order to affect positive change around them. That doesn’t seem to me as something to be sneered at, and I wouldn’t call that as hiding. I would call that as trying to use your personal choice to have these larger ramifications to show other people that the damages of climate change—the cost that it exacts from us are not something in the distant future. It’s something that is happening right here and right now.

Briefly, the reason why we think that that is the case for most people is because all the data—both our kind of more local and qualitative conversations, as well as large surveys of how people are ordering their preferences and how much is climate change figuring in their procreative choices—as of yet, climate change is not featuring as a significant driver of the decision to have kids or have fewer children.

Although, of course, there wasn’t a month that would go by without us being able to find in The New York Times an op-ed along the lines of, Can I have children, given climate change? So it was very much the way that the public conversation was framed, but it just wasn’t what was—and still isn’t what is—driving the personal, deliberative choices.

Demsas: One implication of your book, I think, is that ambivalence can sort of be cured by more rumination. When Rachel, in the intro, asks her mother about how she decided to have a family, her mother responds, “I always knew. It was never even a question.” And to me, part of what your book is trying to do is it’s trying to help you shed some of these mirages around whether you could ever be ready financially to have a kid, or this idea that, you know, climate change necessitates you not having children. But is it really a rational enterprise, whether or not people choose to have children?

Berg: That’s a fantastic question. So the way I think about our project is as one that can actually do something quite limited. Does it have anything to say about what is the shape that your own life should take? No. I hope the book can show people that for most people, it is the case that they are, in fact, committed to the possibility of a good human future. And as such, that might be something they want to contribute to directly in some way. But what way you do that, that’s up to a person to navigate.

As for how to navigate that choice, I do have something to say about that, but we don’t say it in the book, which is: I’m a big pluralist as to the actual personal reasons for people to have children. And the reason I am is not just because I’m generally a pluralist, and it’s a very personal, fraught decision you shouldn’t judge people about. These are all good reasons to be a pluralist, but that’s not why I’m a pluralist here. It’s because one thing that you can realize without having kids—but having a child, really, this is one thing it really brings home—and it’s the fact that whatever it is that you’re thinking you’re doing it for, whatever you’re trying to get out of it, whatever was your motivating reason, having the child can never be reduced to that.

So maybe you did it because you really like the company of kids, but no matter how much you like the company of kids, parenting is going to confront you with a lot of things that are not just the joys of the company of children. Maybe this is your vanity project—you wanted the child to do everything that you never could do. Well, no matter how many times that child succeeds in doing that, parenting is never reducible to the vanity project, inherent, you know, that one can find in having a child.

And I think that’s true for anything. You wanted a pension plan? Trust me—there are other ways of going about it. And this one is going to bring a lot more. And it’s because what’s at stake in having a child is not any of your goals. It’s another human being that you’re going to enter into one of the most intense and intimate relationships that human beings can enter into. And so that’s why I’m, really—I’m a pluralist.

And I’m with you in thinking, in some sense, that means that you can’t quite enter this rationally, not necessarily, as we hear sometimes philosophers say, Because it will transform you. That’s one thing that can happen. It’ll transform you so much that how could you even kind of rationally choose it? You don’t know who you’re gonna be on the other end. I think it’s because whatever you’re trying to get out of it, another human being and that intensity of a relationship and that responsibility that you’re going to be taking for them is going to absolutely exceed that. So whatever is helping you jump over that ledge, that’s really cool by me.

Demsas: Well, so you just glanced at it, but I think one of the reasons why I feel that it’s very difficult to even enter into the idea of whether or not to have children in sort of a cost-benefit analysis is, is L.A. Paul’s work on transformative experiences. Just to summarize briefly for our listeners, the idea is that, you know, before undergoing a transformative experience, you cannot imagine what it would be like. If your cost-benefit analysis is wholly changed by the event, your preferences, your goals, your personality—it’s just completely different once you’ve entered into parenthood. If this is right, doesn’t it kind of call into question even the idea of trying to figure out if you’d be happier or not with a kid? And I know that you are a bit skeptical about this line of reasoning, so I’m curious for your take here.

Berg: Right. So you said, if this is right. So if this is right, yes, that’s correct. I don’t think it’s right—not that it’s not right sometimes. I think it’s not necessary.

And we should say, to Laurie Paul’s credit, her biggest claim, I take it, is about transformative experiences and the challenges they present to rationality. Parenthood, and particularly motherhood, is an example. And the reason why I kind of use a funny tone to use that is, I think, something that L.A. Paul definitely did not intend, but oftentimes culturally we talk about motherhood as a transformative experience, by that, meaning exactly what you mean and more.

We even sometimes mean that not only do you get a new identity you could not predict the significance of in advance, but, in fact, this comes at the cost of your other identities, perhaps identities that you liked and worked very hard to cultivate. And so somebody is now telling you: Not only you’ll have new preferences you can’t predict, but maybe you’ll lose touch with the things you care about most.

One thing that’s really important to notice, even before we get to my own kind of objections to the necessity aspect of this claim, is that it has a very strong kind of, I think, ultimately, a sexist undercurrent. We don’t talk about fatherhood as being transformative, nowhere as frequently as we do about motherhood being transformative.

Again, it’s a case where the intention is right—we want to be able to see women, acknowledge the special challenges that they undergo. But in the process, oftentimes what we’re doing is we’re sort of reifying the tie between parenting and women. And we’re reinforcing the idea that for them it is significant, meaningful, and important in ways that it might not be for men. So that’s something I really want to push against.

And then I just want to introduce the claim that motherhood can be all those things, but it might not. And luckily, the way to show the falsity of a universal claim is you just need one counterexample, so I do it in my own person. And so I share that, in fact, I don’t think that the experience of motherhood has been a rupture in my life. I have no problem recognizing myself after having children. The same things that I cared about before, I care about now.

However, one of the things that I thought was so interesting is people who said to me, you know, I have been transformed by motherhood, but it didn’t happen in the way that you usually hear about it, which is either instantaneous with birth or something that’s kind of lodged in that first year of parenting, which is often how we portray parenting today. It’s all about being a parent to a baby. The transformation is one that happened over decades. It’s one that happened over the life of my child.

And I thought, Oh, wow. That is very poignant. That’s very interesting. And then I thought, But over decades, we all change. So the childless will, too, be transformed over decades of their life, by the projects they undertake, by the relationships they enter into. So that’s kind of my caveat now, is that I am more open to the long-term transformative potential of entering into such a significant relationship. It’s not a necessary one.

And I think this is so important to emphasize for two reasons, and I’ll rest there, which is, first I alluded to: It’s very anxiety provoking when the framing of the possible choice is whether or not to take on a new identity that might erase all others. And insofar as that’s not a necessary framing, I think it’s very important to introduce it to others.

And the other thing is that once you undergo the experience—and you see the prevalence of this narrative of sort of utter, complete, rupturous transformation—but you yourself don’t recognize yourself in it, you might feel like you’re doing it wrong. And in looking at responses to the book, it has been really interesting and, I admit, gratifying to hear from other women who are mothers, I have found in what you described a narrative that I could identify with more than I could identify with many of the narratives that I saw around the idea of the necessarily transformative power of motherhood.

Demsas: I wonder, then, how you think about what happens to someone when they finish reading your book, right? So let’s say they’ve removed the mirages that you want to take away from them, and they’re free now to engage fully in the question of whether or not they actually want kids.

At some level, I feel like, if I were to just—and you know, I guess this is hinted in my earlier questions—but if I was just, like, to kind of tally up the costs of having a kid, even putting aside sort of the transformative-experiences point, I think that if I were to just say, Okay, the potential risk of what will happen to my career, to my body, and then, of course, just the necessary risk, even if everything goes well, of all the costs of raising a child, of saving up for their future, I think even freed of some of the ideas that you’ve talked about here, most people would rationally assume that children don’t fit in with their lives. Do you agree with that, or do you think that that’s not what you find in your experience?

Berg: Well, it’s not what I found in my experience, given the choices I’ve made. But my hope is that while reading a single book cannot transport you to a different age to which we do not want to be transported, for many other reasons—where having children, you know, you just a kind of unthinkingly engage in this activity and make the choice—I do hope that the fact that we provide an analysis, that helps them see that the frames of evaluation that they’re bringing to the children question are not the only ones possible, that by reminding them that what’s at stake is, in fact, not just this personal experience for them, not just sum some satisfaction that they’re going to be enjoying in their own lives, but that what’s at stake is ultimately how they will or will not be contributing to a human future, which by the end of the book I hope to have shown is something that most of us are, in fact, concerned with to one degree or another.

So once you’re at the end of the book, and you kind of realize, Actually, I’m not indifferent to what happens, to put it a bit crudely, after my death. I’m not indifferent to the possibility of there being not just more human beings but, in fact, human beings that live a kind of existence that I, as a human being, can be proud of, not just something I should be ashamed of, as we kind of talked about is represented in that eco lit.

I think then you are confronted with the questions: What are you going to do about this? How are you going to be contributing to that future? This is vague, because, as I said, this is not a book for somebody who wants, at the end of it—I got, recently, a question about a decision procedure. There is no decision procedure that we can offer you, by the end of which you’ll be like, Oh yes. Okay, I see now. It makes sense for me to have kids.

In fact, I would put things more strongly than you did. I think considering the kind of risks a person takes on themselves in having a child, which, just to kind of remind all of us listening to this conversation, is every possible horrible, bad, and tragic thing that can happen to you can happen to your child. And then, bringing a child to the world, you’re becoming that much more vulnerable. Like, for every child, you’re becoming vulnerable in another person. I think it never makes sense if what we think about making sense is this kind of weighing of pros and cons or an instrumental calculation of how to increase satisfaction or minimize risk. It does make sense once you think of your own existence as something that’s not reducible to you just maximizing your satisfaction across your own lifetime.

And I think the book helps you recover a sense of that perspective and raises that question for you, and how you’re going to answer it is up to you. Although, it is a conversation that one-on-one I do love having, so people can reach out to me for heart-to-hearts about what shape their own lives should take.

Demsas: Well, that’s a great part to go to our last and final question. What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Berg: I really wanted to answer this by saying, “having children,” but just in the sense of, like, I love my children. I stand behind my choices.

I wanted to use the question, though, to say basically what we were just talking about, which is that the considerations of the book, those lifting of norms, those reminding us of different perspective, reorienting us to the fact that what’s at stake is the future of humanity—all those things can only get you so far. And the nitty gritty reality, not of, I don’t know, the diapers and the crying that we see—as I was saying, we see parenting today represented just through infancy—but of the whole arc of the life of a parent.

And in particular, the one thing I think is truly universal in parenting—this is my big controversial claim—is that nothing is universal in parenting. You don’t necessarily become a better person. Only some people do. You don’t necessarily relive your happy childhood. Only some people do, etcetera, etcetera. What’s universal is that you become inalienably vulnerable to the risks, pains, sufferings, and tragedies that can befall another human being. And in doing that, in entering this incredibly intimate and demanding relationship, it’ll always sort of exceed in its wonder, in its joys, but also in its pains and in its horrors, anything that we can write in a single book.

Demsas: Thank you so much for coming on the show.

Berg: Thank you so much for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

In the aftermath of Donald Trump’s victorious reelection bid, Democrats are searching for an explanation of Kamala Harris’s loss in order to begin rebuilding for the future. So it goes every election cycle—a loss, a scramble for causality, and competing narratives begin to set.

Just one week out from Election Day, there are multiple dissenting and overlapping arguments being made to try to make sense of the results. In 2016, many Democrats believed that Trump’s attack on trade policies was core to his victory. As a result, the Biden-Harris administration pursued Trump-like policies on trade, none of which seem to have made a significant difference in increasing the union vote share, reducing Trump’s likelihood of victory, or stemming the flow of working-class voters out of the Democratic Party.

Now, again, various parts of the Democratic coalition are seeking to define the party’s loss. But what do we actually know about why the Democrats were defeated? There are still theories forming, but on today’s episode of Good on Paper, I talk with the former Republican strategist and current host of The Bulwark Podcast, Tim Miller about the postelection narratives jockeying for power.

“But for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes, that still is a unique experiment in the world. That “America is an idea” type of thing. The idea is pretty dim at this point,” Miller argued.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Jerusalem Demsas: In the aftermath of a bruising electoral loss, the losing party begins participating in a well-worn democratic tradition: slinging takes about what happened.

This is democracy! When the voters send a dissatisfied response, the messy work of recalibration requires parsing the signal from the noise.

Were voters mad because of a global inflationary environment that no Democrat could dig their way out of? Did they want to see specific breaks between Harris and Biden on policy? Were they frustrated by a candidate they saw as too left on cultural issues?

There are data points in favor of many different theses. Here’s where I’d put my stake in the ground, with the caveat that we still don’t have a complete analysis on subgroup dynamics, or even a final vote count on all the races:

First, incumbents worldwide were facing tough election odds. Electorates were frustrated by the COVID inflationary years and were clearly seeking change. In Australia, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, and beyond, ruling coalitions lost power across the political spectrum.

Second, I don’t think Kamala Harris was ever going to be a great candidate. After Biden’s disastrous debate effort in late June and it seemed he might be pressured to drop out, I wrote an article calling on Democrats not to coronate their vice president, and pointing to key vulnerabilities she displayed and the value of an open democratic process.

Figuring out how much of this is in the campaign’s control—would it really have mattered that much if she’d gone on Joe Rogan’s podcast?—or figuring out what this means for America’s two political parties will take months, if not years. As you’ve heard on this podcast, I’m still arguing about what 2016 really meant on trade and immigration.

My name’s Jerusalem Demsas, I’m a staff writer at The Atlantic, and this is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. As a disclaimer, I worked for the Harris primary campaign in 2019 before becoming a journalist, and my guest today, Tim Miller, is a political strategist who was Jeb Bush’s 2016 communications director on his presidential campaign. He’s been an anti-Trump conservative since then and is the host of The Bulwark Podcast.

Today we’re going to talk through some of these inchoate narratives and debate which ones we think are likely to hold water.

[Music]

Demsas: Tim, welcome to the show.

Tim Miller: Hey Jerusalem. What’s happening?

Demsas: Well, we’re recording this six days after Election Day. And—as you have seen on Twitter, and I’m sure in your various interviews—the takes are already coming in very, very hot. And this is a show where we often look at narratives that have already baked, and kind of look at the research and data behind how these narratives formed and what truth is there and what sorts of things have gotten ahead of themselves.

But we’re in an interesting moment right now where we’re seeing very important narrative formation happen in real time. In the aftermath of an election, everyone’s scrambling to define what happened in order to maybe wrest control of the future of the party from an ideological perspective or just a pure power perspective. And so we’re seeing a bunch of people arguing about why Trump won and why Harris lost in a time where there’s a bunch of unknowns. So we’re going to go through a few of these different narratives that are coming up.

But Tim, right off the bat, I wanted to ask you: What’s your perception of why Trump won and Harris lost?

Miller: I’m going to preempt my answer by saying that I think that uncertainty is important in this moment, and that false certainty can lead to some very mistaken and disastrous results. I say this from experience, having worked on the Republican autopsy in 2013, when the conventional wisdom congealed very quickly that Republicans, in order to win again, needed to moderate on immigration and cultural issues to appeal more to Hispanics and women. And not only was that wrong, but the person that became the nominee and then the president used that autopsy for toilet paper and went exactly the opposite direction.

It also always didn’t also work out in Trump’s favor. In 2022, the conventional wisdom was that Trumpism was badly hurt and that Ron DeSantis was ascendant. Right? So anyway, in the week after the election, bad takes abound.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: That said, my answer is, I’m open to a variety of different things that the Democrats might have to do, among them being maybe nothing and watch Trump self-implode. Might be as simple as that. That said, the one thing that I think is certain that the Democrats need to reflect on when it comes to this question of why Trump won and why Harris lost—it’s that the Democratic message is not landing outside of a particular demographic of middle- to upper-income, college-educated, not particularly religious, urban- and suburban-dwelling white Americans, in addition to Black women, right? Those are the demos that the Democrats are doing well with, that Kamala Harris grew her share with from last time, at least in the case of college-educated women. And I think that the Democrats are doing a very poor job of communicating to people in all of those other demographics.

On what they need to do, I’m very open to various possibilities about whether it’s about affect or vibe or policy or whatever. But I’m certain that there is—fair or unfair, there’s a perception that the Democrats don’t care about these other demographics, particularly working-class demographics, particularly working-class men. And that they did not offer them something that was more appealing than the nostalgia and promises of gold bullion that they got from Donald Trump. And so we can hash through all the different theories about why that was. But I think the fact that what happened—you can’t argue with.

Demsas: Yeah. I think that that’s very descriptively true. But I guess what I would want to know from you is do you feel like there are specific things that Democrats have done that tipped the scales against them? I think that what you’re outlining here is very sound. There’s a difference between why Harris may have lost and what the Democrats need to do going forward to be a more electorally relevant party at the presidential level. And so from your perspective, though, is there something about the Democratic argument around the economy or other issues that you think was particularly relevant this time around?

Miller: I think that, for starters, people were unhappy with the economy. And I don’t think that the Democrats presented a message to them about how they plan to change that for the better. But, again, I’m also not even really ready to concede that, with the exception of inflation being annoying and that broadly hurting people, the Democrats were hurt based on their economic argument. It might simply be cultural. It might be the way that they spoke, and having people feel like they weren’t being heard.

I think the Democrats in particular—I always want to immediately go to, What is the policy prescription that would have appealed? And I’m like, It’s possible that there wasn’t one.

Demsas: Yeah. An important backdrop that I think you’re alluding to here, as well, is that the inflationary environment was really, really bad for incumbents across the world, right? You’re kind of going into an election where the fundamentals are sort of rigged against incumbents because the inflationary episode was just really, really hard for people. I think one narrative that I’m seeing come up a lot is about campaign strategy. And this seems like something that’s going to be hashed out significantly. But I guess the question I have here is whether you think Harris could have won with a campaign run differently, even given the shortened timeline.

Miller: I’m giving another “I don’t know” answer to that question: I don’t know. I think that she, by all accounts, ran a strong campaign that was based on her strengths. And I think she had an undeniably dominating debate performance. They ran a nice convention. Her speeches were good. The messaging pivot, the launch was good. There wasn’t a lot of drama inside the campaign, right? There are other things that she isn’t particularly strong at. I don’t think that she is that great in unscripted moments. Sometimes she’s better than others.

And so then that’s the other thing that people come to, which is like, Oh, she should have done Rogan and all this. And I agree. I think she should have done more of those interviews, but they also weren’t really her strong suit. And I think that this was something that might’ve borne out had there been a longer primary, and maybe somebody else would have emerged. But that said, I don’t think so. I think Kamala Harris was going to emerge from a primary, no matter when Joe Biden dropped out.

And so I’m not saying, Oh, this was inevitable. Just give up. Life is pain. [Laughs.] That’s not really what I’m saying. Any specific thing that people are like, Oh, if this tactic had been different, that would have helped—I don’t really buy that. I mean, I think that broadly speaking, her having the ability to separate herself from the administration would have been helpful, and I think that was very challenging to do given the situation Joe Biden left her in and the time period that was left. And I think that it’s very likely that she might have separated herself from the administration more and still lost, and we would have been here on this podcast with people saying, Why did she distance? [Laughs.] You know what I mean? Why did she break up the Democratic coalition?

Demsas: Yeah. I mean, it’s funny. I think that, on the tactics, I’m sort of with you here. I was looking at some of the data analyses that are coming out now, and it looks like, at this point, given the data we have, while the national average from 2020 to 2024 shifts roughly six points, in battlegrounds, that number is going to end up closer to three points. And that speaks to campaign effects. That speaks to the fact that in battleground states where, again, the majority of the money is going, people are putting ads in battleground states, the campaign is putting rallies there, she’s visiting, they’re really working the press in those places to get her story and message out in a way that you’re not really going to do in a safe, Dem county in Illinois or something.

And so as a result, what they see is that the campaign effects were good on a tactical level. Their ads were persuasive. There’s evidence from Dan Rosenhack at The Economist that it looks like the campaign effects were more effective than Trump’s on things like—indicating things like ads and rallies were better for Harris.

I think on this kind of broader meta question that you kind of raised, right, about Harris as the nominee, I don’t think this is inevitable. I mean, I wrote an article on July 9th arguing that she was unlikely to be a good nominee and the party shouldn’t coronate her, and Nancy Pelosi to The New York Times—I don’t know if you saw this quote, after Harris’s loss—she says that she had expected that if the president were to step aside that there would be an open primary. And that maybe Kamala would have been stronger going forward if she’d gone through a primary and that the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, which made it impossible to have a primary at the time. But it sounds like you’re saying that you think that, regardless, this would not have really changed the game that much.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, I think that had Joe Biden followed the—you can argue whether it was a promise or whether it was an indication that he was going to be a one-term [president] and pass the torch. And had there been a two-year process, maybe Kamala Harris does not emerge. But, look, there are three things that I think of when I hear this counterfactual about what would have happened had it been a more open process. The first thing is, the Democrat—one of the things that the Democrats have a lot of baggage around is identity politics. I think it would have been very challenging for a Black woman to be passed over.

Demsas: But the Democratic primary voters did this in 2019, right? There was this argument being made, but they said, no, we care most about electability and they chose Joe Biden.

Miller: Right, that’s true. But Joe Biden had been the vice president in that case. Kamala Harris was the vice president. You already saw this on social media. I saw this on social media, and I was basically for Kamala but also, at the same time, was like, maybe I think it’d be healthy to have an open process. And I guess if you could wave a magic wand, I probably would want Shapiro, Whitmer. Because hopefully that would win two of the three states you need to win the presidency. And that just seems like a safer bet to me. That was my position: It was like pro-Kamala and/but. And I had hundreds of people calling me a racist over that.

So, I think that it would have caused a lot of turmoil within the party.

Now, again, in a longer, two-year process, is that a lot of heat that then just dies out after a while, and you settle on something that’s a little bit more electable and everybody gets behind it except for a few people who have hurt feelings? Maybe.

No. 2, an open process opens up Gaza [as a] wound and rips that apart even wider, and I think creates potentially even greater turmoil than she already was dealing with on that issue. And that’s cost her, frankly. And then No. 3 is then if the theory of the case is a more electable person with someone that could get more distance from the Biden-Harris administration, that assumes that the Democratic voters were looking for somebody to do that.

And that is really where the tension is here, Jerusalem, because if you look at the data, a majority of the Biden-Harris Democrats were basically happy with the administration, right? There were surely big parts of the Democratic coalition, particularly younger voters, particularly working-class Black and Hispanic voters, the types of people that they lost ground with, that were unhappy with the Biden administration. But I think that there was a plurality within the party that was not going to be for somebody—look at the response to Dean Phillips, not exactly the most talented candidate, but total rejection and mockery for somebody who ran trying to get distance from the Biden-Harris administration.

So I think it would have been very challenging to run as a candidate and get distance. So to me, it’s like if we lived in an imaginary world where identity politics wasn’t an issue, Gaza wasn’t an issue, and there was no backlash to distancing yourself from Biden, then certainly the Democrats could have come up with a stronger option.

We don’t live in an imaginary world. And I think that within the world that we live in, within all those constraints, I think it’s very challenging to see a situation where you end up with somebody stronger than Harris.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, all those points I think are very well taken. And I think I’m seeing a lot of people make that argument of both Harris’s inevitability as the vice president, and also this sort of sense of It would have been a worse candidate. I do think that kind of my general belief is sort of, when you think you’re behind, you run a high-variance play. If you’re gonna lose anyway, you just kind of throw everything you can at the kitchen sink.

And on this kind of inevitability point, right, I think there is this burgeoning sense that Democrats were just repudiated across the board here. You kind of brought this up, this idea that Democrats do not have a good answer on economic issues or on the issues that Americans care about.

But I don’t know, how do you reconcile that with the clear ticket-splitting you see going on here? [Nebraska’s Dan] Osborne ran seven points ahead of the Harris ticket. [Montana Senator Jon] Tester ran seven points ahead of the ticket. Amy Klobuchar ran six points ahead. That’s just in the Senate. And in the House, we see over-performances from everyone from AOC to Jared Golden in Maine, who’s a much more moderate member of the Democratic coalition. Doesn’t that indicate at some level that candidate quality was important here and that there were other candidates that were much more electable?

Miller: For starters, running the presidential race is so far different from running a Senate or House race that it’s almost not even the same sport.

It’s literally like T-ball versus the major leagues. What people expect from their—I mean, nobody’s like, Oh man, does Amy Klobuchar have to go on Joe Rogan? Nobody watches Amy Klobuchar’s debates. Obviously it’s a little different in Montana, where you’re running a competitive race. But again, just the interest in Senate races is different. I think that the Democrats have a coalition that is perfectly durable and able to win nonpresidential elections. I think that this trade in the voters that has happened where the Democrats are picking up more high-trust, more middle- to high-income, more college-educated voters, and the Republicans are picking up more low-trust, more middle- to low-income, and less educated voters. As a trade, that accrues to Democrats benefits in off-year elections and midterms and special elections, just because it’s the type of person that shows up for those types of things, and it accrues to the Republicans benefit in presidential elections. So that’s not good when the Republicans are nominating Donald Trump, and the Republicans’ presidential nominee is an existential threat to the fabric of our republic. And so that’s a problem.

And so I agree that you can’t look at the data and say, oh, the Democratic brand is irreparably harmed. Like, no, the Democrats won. And a lot of these Senate races are going to end up very narrow minorities, in the House and the Senate, that they will probably be able to win back in the midterms, depending on what happens.

But I think that there are two things, which is, No. 1, the Democrats are not well suited to running presidential elections right now, in this media environment, and then No. 2 is that the Democrats have abandoned huge parts of the country where they are not viable. And that’s particularly problematic, given the Senate and Electoral College and the way that’s set up.

So okay, back to No. 1. Democrats are really good at running campaigns that are set pieces. They have professionals that are running these campaigns: the ads, the conventions, the speeches, the going to the editorial-board meetings, the 2004-type campaigns. And that’s how Senate and House campaigns are basically still run in most of the country, and even governor’s races, right? People just don’t care about those races at that deep of a level. But the presidential race is—the media environment around it is so different. I mean, people are consuming information about the presidential race on their TikTok, listening to sports talk, listening to their random podcasts that aren’t about sports at all that are cultural, on women’s blogs, at a school function, people are talking about it casually, you know what I mean?

I’m a parent, and obviously this is a little bit of selection bias since I’m in politics and people know that, but people don’t come up to me and ask me what I think about the House race in my district. Nobody’s mentioned Troy Carter to me at any events,, at any school functions or any of my kids’ sporting events.

Demsas: He’s got to get his name out there. [Laughs.]

Miller: And so the information environment is just a total category difference. And Trump and even J. D. Vance in certain ways were able to take advantage of that by running campaigns that are a little bit more unwieldy, that are better for viral clips, that are also better for sitting down for two hours and broing out with the Theo Von and talking about how you can’t even do coke in this country anymore because the fentanyl is in it, right?

She wasn’t doing any of that. And doing one of those interviews isn’t really the answer, right? It’s like, can you communicate in a way that feels authentic? It might be fake authenticity, but in a way that feels authentic to people in their Instagram Stories, in their TikTok, in their podcasts, whatever.

And Democrats are not producing a lot of candidates who I feel are good at that.

Demsas: But I think there’s also this broad concern that the media ecosystem itself is not producing convincing, progressive-sounding or left-leaning media personalities. There’s a 2017 AER study that I remember being very, very shocking to people when it first came out, right after Trump’s election in 2016. And there are a couple economists, they look at the effect of Fox News, and they find that watching Fox News for an additional 2.5 minutes per week increases the vote share by 0.3 percentage points. But watching MSNBC has essentially no effect, and they see that Fox News is actually able to shift viewers’ attitudes rightward. And they look at 2004 and 2008 and find that Republican presidential candidates’ share of the two-party vote would have been more than three points lower in 2004, and six points lower in 2008 without Fox News.

And so that’s something where I’m just like—there is something to the fact that the media ecosystem does not have that sort of targeted apparatus. But my usual belief about these sorts of things is that we’re discounting the fact that so much of the media is so liberal that Fox News can have this large effect because it I think stands out among a pack of more liberal institutions, but I am kind of surprised at MSNBC.

Miller: Yeah, I mean, as a person on MSNBC, did that study go on before I was a political contributor? I think it did. So we might need to update the study and have them focus on my hits and see if that changes anything.

I guess I want to noodle on that for a little bit. That does surprise me a little bit as well, but I would say this: I think that I’m less concerned. I think there’s a category of person out there, and maybe this is right, that is focused on Republicans have better propaganda outlets than the Democrats do.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And maybe that’s true. I don’t know. So to me, then the question is, okay, what can be done? What is realistic in this media environment? And it goes back to this question of, can the Democrats speak more through using existing outlets or finding a candidate who has a compelling story in their own right, or compelling communication skills to figure out how to speak to people that don’t watch mainstream news?

And that’s just really what it comes down to. The Democrats are very good at talking to people that are high-information, high-engagement, high-education, middle-to-high-income, and offering persuasive arguments. I think that they’re not good at talking to anybody else. And Obama was good at that, and Clinton was good at that. And we’re in a totally different media environment now than we were back then. But I think that there’s still things that can be learned from that.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break, why the abortion-ballot-measure strategy didn’t pan out for the Harris campaign.

[Break]

Demsas: I want to pull us out of this media conversation here, because I think that there’s also this, let’s say things go a little bit differently—and again, the margins here are not very big—and Harris has won.

I think one of the big things we’d be hearing right now is that she won because of abortion, right? And looking at Election Night, you see a lot of wins for abortion. There are 10 states that have referendums on abortion policies, and seven of them win: New York, Maryland, Arizona, Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri. And in Florida, where it loses, the threshold is 60 percent and it earns 57 percent, so it lost, but there’s clearly a majority in favor.

And, going in, I mean, especially after the midterms, there was a real feeling, kind of the big narrative that came out of those midterms was that abortion is the place where Democrats can clearly distinguish and can clearly win over Republican candidates, even in deeply Republican states, and especially in deeply purple states.

And I’m trying to think through this. What explains in your mind the sort of difference between how many voters were saying, Yes, I do have more liberal views on abortion; I’m willing to express those in these ballot measures; but no, I’m not going to then reward Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris for it?

Miller: Well, a couple of things. No. 1, this tension has always existed as old as time, and it’s particularly existed as old as time in places like Florida. I did one of these, you know, time is a flat circle—

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I forget which election it was at this point, but it was like, how did the minimum-wage-increase ballot initiative in Florida pass at the same time that Ron DeSantis won by 18 points or whatever, whichever election that was.

And it’s like, voters are complicated. Voters have complex views. And so you see this as kind of just a common thing in voter habits. In this case, I think that there are a couple of complicating factors in addition. No. 1 was, Donald Trump muddied the waters on his views.

Demsas: Yeah.

Miller: And I think that Donald Trump’s whole brand and vibe—I know we’re getting outside of the data space that you like to be in, Jerusalem, but there’s a certain group of people that are like, Yeah, that guy’s not gonna ban abortion. You know what I mean? And there’s just some percentage of voters out there that that’s just it. He doesn’t come off like Ted Cruz on abortion. He comes off as different, because they assume that he paid for an abortion or whatever, that he doesn’t care about it, and that he’s not gonna—this isn’t gonna be what he’s focused on. There are going to be people that are pro-choice that prioritize their economic views or their nativist views, right?

So that is going to be some of it. I think less so in Florida, but more in Arizona. To me, I think that there is actually a strategic backfiring of having these ballot initiatives on the ballot almost gave some people an out to do both, right? People that did not like Kamala Harris or that were more center-right and said, Oh, okay, great, I can protect abortion in Arizona and also vote for Donald Trump. I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Demsas: Yeah, I mean, I think my read of it is more that when you think about the specific argument being made about abortion, it was largely, he’s to blame for all these horrible things that are happening to women in states that have made abortion inaccessible. And by he, I mean Trump is to blame for that. And also, you know, he appointed these Supreme Court nominees who overturned Roe v. Wade. But as a prescription for the future, I feel like there was not a real clear argument made to voters of how Kamala Harris is going to actually protect abortion.

But again, it all comes back to the overarching question, did voters view this as an abortion election? And it seems clear that they viewed it as an inflation election. That was the core thing that they were focused on. And I think that one thing that I’ve heard a lot is what this means for understanding America, right?

So after 2016, people were just, I think, in shock, and were saying, I can’t believe this is the country I live in. And again here I’m hearing the sort of question of, you know, this is a black mark on the conscience of America, that people would vote for someone who threatened to overturn the results of the 2020 election, who talks with such liberal disdain for women and immigrants.

Something someone said to me in 2016 was really interesting: If your entire perception of America would have shifted if a few hundred thousand people voted differently, maybe don’t completely change everything you believe about everyone. And to me, I think that this framing about Trump’s reelection means something really dark about all the people that voted for him doesn’t really sit well with me because it seems like people are voting based on cost of living. At the same time, too, I think they’re taking their signal from Democrats who, if they’d taken their own warnings about the threat of fascism or the threat to our institutions, I think would have behaved very differently over the past couple of years in trying to win.

Miller: Yeah. It doesn’t change my view of the American people, really, that there are good people and bad people everywhere, that we all have good and bad inside of us. I’ll say that what it does impact for me—and maybe this is wrong and maybe I’m raw and it’s six days out—but for those of us who do have a belief that there’s something kind of special about the American system and that have revered America, that understand that America is flawed and has made mistakes but still is a unique experiment in the world. You know, the “America is an idea” type of thing.

The idea is pretty dim at this point. And, to me, that is the change, having him win again, that I’m having trouble getting over. Mentally, it’s not that it makes me look poorly at my neighbors, but that we just might be at the end of the experiment and the sense that America is something different than Hungary or Switzerland or whatever, any country—you name the country.

It was the old fight with Republicans and Democrats during the Obama years, which is, Obama doesn’t think of America as any different than Belgium. Obama believes in Belgian exceptionalism. And that to me is kind of where I am. I think that we’re about to move into an era where America’s flaws, in addition to all of our existing flaws like gun violence and our history of racism, et cetera—the American system’s flaws look a lot more like what flaws look like in other countries.

There’s going to be oligarchy, kleptocracy, corruption. There’s no special sense that the huddled masses around the world are welcome here any more than they might be welcome anywhere else. They frankly are probably going to be welcome here less than they’re welcome in certain other places.

And so to me, that is what I see differently. I reserve the right to change my mind about that at some point, but that’s where I’m at right now.

Demsas: Yeah. I think in contrast to this large view about the American idea of maybe being different than we believed beforehand is this, I think, really popular take that’s picking up steam, which is about just Democrats need to moderate on cultural issues, whether it’s about immigration, or it’s the issue of trans women and girls in sports. They’re just too left of the median voter, and you don’t actually need to do a bunch else other than accept that people are where they are on those places and not go so far away from it.

The data point that’s kind of in favor of this, particularly on the trans-girls-in-sports one, is Kamala Harris’s leading super PAC, Future Forward, finds that the most effective, or one of the most effective, Trump ads is one of the “Kamala is for they/them, President Trump is for you” ads. They find that it shifted the race 2.7 percentage points in Trump’s favor after people watched it.

How relevant do you think that the Democratic Party’s leftward shift on cultural issues is to Harris’s loss? And I mean, there’s some people who I think are really making the claim that you could just really focus on this and you don’t need to make these kind of larger arguments about strategy or how we’re speaking to America on economic policy.

Miller: I don’t think that this was alone to account for Harris’s loss or even maybe the biggest thing to account for her loss. I think that she didn’t really respond to that ad in particular quite well, and that maybe that was a strategic mistake. I think her campaign—and she didn’t run like an overly “woke,” culturally left campaign. Ao the question is, did the Democratic brand on those issues drag her down? I think possibly.

To me, look, could Kamala Harris have squeaked out a victory this time while holding the same positions on trans issues had inflation been 20 percent better? Maybe. Probably. It was a clear victory for Trump, but it wasn’t, you know, Reagan ’84.

A couple of things changed, and had that one, the cultural stuff stayed static, could she have still won? Clearly. I mean, Biden won in 2020, when all of those issues were more high-salience, I think, than they were this time. Biden, not a Black woman—so maybe there’s something to that as well, that he was able to be a little bit more resilient against attacks on those issues.

So maybe that’s worth thinking about. I would say this, though. If the Democrats want to have 60 senators again ever, then yeah, they got to moderate on cultural issues. You know what I mean? There are two ways to look at this: Can Democrats still win elections by maintaining their views on everything? Yes. Are the Democrats giving away huge swaths of the country by not really even engaging with their concerns about the leftward shift of the party on a wide array of issues? Yeah, they are. I get the land-doesn’t-vote thing, I get it, but look at the map.

Demsas: [Laughs.] We’ve all seen the map.

Miller: The map is still the map, you know what I mean?

And Trump gained in all of those little red counties out there where it’s just land, all right? But he gained. There are a handful of people out there, and he got more of them, in every county. And the Democrats’, I think, choice to just say, Well, we’re just giving up on that and we’re just going to focus on the more dynamic parts of the growing parts of the country and, eventually, demographics are destiny and blah, blah, blah, that looks like a pretty bad bet today.

I’m not out here being like, yeah, you got to throw trans people or migrants under the bus for them to win. But certainly the cultural leftward shift has created a ceiling on Democratic support that I think has a negative effect for the party, but also for progress on a lot of those issues.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s obviously very up in the air here, how people are gonna take this mantle of how you should moderate, and I think that there’s bad and good ways that people can take this. And I think that there’s a level to which people—you don’t have to be throwing trans people under the bus. Maybe we need to figure out ways, whether it’s how Democrats responded to this with gay rights, where they talked about federalism a lot and made sure the country moved toward the issue before making it a national issue.

But I think the most important and damning thing that Democrats are clearly responsible for in the choices they have made is about the poor governance in blue cities and states. This is one of my hobbyhorses, but you see massive shifts, as you mentioned, in high-cost-of-living places that are heavily democratic, in New York and in California and in a lot of the Northeast. And I think it’s hard to see that as anything other than just a repudiation of Democratic governance and particularly the cost of living and the cost of housing in these places.

And so, to me, when you talked about the Democratic brand, I mean, when you’re in a cost-of-living election, yes, there are marginal effects on these cultural issues we’re talking about here. Yes, there are things that campaigns can do better. Yes, there are candidate effects. But if people are asking themselves, What does it look like, how does it feel to my pocketbook to live in a Democratically run state versus a Republican one? I feel like they’re being told a very clear story.

Miller: I think that that’s true. I’ve been ruminating on this a lot over the past week. I live in Louisiana, so there is the kind of emotional guttural response I have to this, which is, do you think Louisiana is being governed that well? Because I don’t.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, on cost, though, right? It’s cheaper, obviously, to have a house in Louisiana.

Miller: It’s cheaper to have a house in Louisiana because of the economic destruction of the state over the past couple of decades and the fact that everybody that grows up in parts of the state that’s not this corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge leave home. And a lot of people in these places leave home, too, looking for better economic opportunities. And that’s sad for the state.

That is my initial response, which is emotional, which is like, okay, sure. But why does Kamala Harris have to carry the baggage for the place I used to live—Oakland—but Donald Trump doesn’t have to carry the baggage for the hollowing out of big parts of Louisiana? That said, it’s true that it hurt the Democrats, right? And it’s also true that the Democrats have been badly managing these big cities. And if you just look at the numbers, suburban Democrats—and this could be a counterargument. Now, I’m going to really give you a galaxy brain, Jerusalem, to your original data point earlier that the three-point effect in the battleground states versus national speaks to a campaign effect? Maybe.

Maybe it also speaks to the fact that a lot of these battleground states are made up of places that have mixed governance and big suburbs where the Democrats are doing better. Democrats are doing better in suburban America because they know they’re not feeling the acute pain of governing issues that have plagued a lot of the big cities. And surely there are a couple of big cities in those seven swing states, but none of the ones you think of when you think of major disruptions, and that maybe that explains it and that the Republican gains were in a lot more of those places like that, Illinois, New Jersey, California. Anyway, just something to noodle on.

But I think that it is objectively true that Democrats are doing better in places that have not been plagued by some of these bad governing decisions on crime and on housing that we’ve seen for in Democratic cities, and the Democratic mayors and Democratic governors in blue states should fix that.

And it’s the No. 1 thing—the last thing I’ll say on this is—the No. 1 thing that comes to mind when I already hear stupid parlor-game stuff about 2028 and it’s like Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker. And to me, the No. 1 thing Gavin Newsom and J. B. Pritzker need to do if they want to run in 2027 is make Illinois and California run better in the meantime. Otherwise, nothing against either of those two guys, but I think that they’re going to carry this baggage that you’re talking about.

Demsas: Well, I could go on about housing in blue states forever. And there’s an article popping, I think today, listeners, as you’re hearing about this, about why I think this was a big issue for the election.

But Tim, always our last and final question.

Miller: Okay.

Miller: What is something that you once thought was a good idea but ended up only being good on paper?

Miller: Oh, okay. Hold on. I wasn’t prepared for this. I misread the question. I thought it was an idea that was only good on paper that then ended up being not good on paper.

Demsas: Idea could be good.

Miller: No, no, no. I’ll come up with one where I’m wrong. I’m happy to bet where I’m wrong. I was just saying the ideas are endless on those.

Demsas: Oh. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something that you held, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Miller: An idea that I thought that was good on paper that ended up not being good on paper. Well, I guess I have to give the obvious answer to that question, sadly. I don’t get to rant about daylight savings time as I hoped to—an idea that was certainly good on paper in the 1800s or whenever they came up with it that’s no longer good. Falling back, that is. Permanent daylight saving time: good idea.

Changing times: not good.

Demsas: Four hundred electoral votes for whoever does this.

Miller: Yeah. The idea that I thought that was good on paper that is relevant to this podcast—because I literally put it on paper and wrote it—was the aforementioned 2013 GOP autopsy.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Miller: Well, how great! Compassionate conservatism. Republicans can diversify their party by getting softer on cultural issues and reaching out to the suburbs and reaching out to Hispanic voters and Black voters, criminal-justice reform, and that through criminal-justice reform and immigration reform and softening on gays, that Republicans can have a new, diverse electorate, and we can all move into a happy, bipartisan future.

That was a great idea on paper that backfired spectacularly, and now the Republicans have their most diverse electorate that they’ve had ever, I think, voting for Donald Trump after rejecting all of those suggestions that I put on paper. So there you go.

Demsas: As one vote of confidence for younger Tim, there are very many ways that history could have gone. I think that people often forget how contingent things are and how unique of a figure Trump is. And right now we’ve talked through a bunch of different ways that people are reading this moment, but there are a lot of ways that people can go, depending on what candidates do and say and how they catch fire and their charisma and what ends up being relevant in two years and in four years. So a little bit of sympathy for younger Tim.

Miller: I appreciate that. And that is true. Who the hell knows, right?

Demsas: Yeah, exactly.

Miller: Had Donald Trump not run that time and he decided he wanted to do some other scam instead, then maybe Marco Rubio is the nominee and those things do come to pass.

Demsas: [Laughs.] Yeah. If Obama doesn’t make fun of him at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, we’re not even sitting here on this podcast.

Miller: Great job, Jon Lovett, or whoever wrote that joke.

Demsas: [Laughs.]

Miller: I’m just joking.

Demsas: Yeah. Well, thank you so much, Tim. Thanks for coming on the show.

Miller: Thank you, Jerusalem.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Claudine Ebeid and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.

Subscribe here: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Overcast | Pocket Casts

Why are people frustrated by high levels of immigration? As refugee crises proliferate, this has become a central political question. In order to justify anti-immigration policy or rationalize restrictionist sentiment, commentators and elected officials have repeatedly returned to one hypothesis: Immigration must be bad for American workers.

There’s just one problem: This hypothesis is wrong. Economists have studied this question repeatedly, in a variety of contexts and in every segment of the population, and they have found that the demand effect consistently outweighs the supply effect. Simply put, when immigrants come to a place looking for jobs, they also demand goods and services—thus creating jobs for native-born workers. Immigrants need legal services and taxi drivers; they need groceries and cars. The question has always been which effect is bigger. And the literature has resoundingly answered that the demand effect wins out.

This doesn’t explain away all immigration worries. But it should force politicians to seriously reckon with why xenophobia exists instead of resigning themselves to treating new immigrants as an economic burden, when, for example, they were actually the “sole source of growth in the U.S. working-age population in 2021 and 2022.”

On today’s episode of Good on Paper, I’m joined by my colleague Rogé Karma who recently dove into the economics literature, originally expecting to find some negative effects on wages, only to be repeatedly struck by the truth: Anti-immigration sentiment has no economic justification.

“I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with non-materialist explanations,” Rogé argues. “I think one of the most revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed to immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive of immigration are working-age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought, Okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with … you would think, Oh, this would show up where the immigrants are, and it doesn’t.”

The following is a transcript of the episode:

Jerusalem Demsas: It’s Election Day, and in place of any exit-poll astrology, we’re going to talk about something that’s been a driving force in the campaign: immigration, specifically the research about the relationship between immigration and wages.

A common line bandied about in politics is that immigration reduces the wages of native-born Americans. It’s most commonly been pushed by restrictionists on the right, like J. D. Vance and Donald Trump.

J. D. Vance: And then I think you make it harder for illegal aliens to undercut the wages of American workers. A lot of people will go home if they can't work for less than minimum wage in our own country. And by the way, that will be really good for our workers who just want to earn a fair wage for doing a good day’s work.

Donald Trump: Decades of record immigration have produced lower wages and higher unemployment for our citizens, especially for African American and Latino workers.

Demsas: However, I’ve noticed a growing openness to the idea that immigration hurts American workers, not just from longtime restrictionists, but also from Democrats and liberals who are scarred by their loss in 2016 and fretting over the possibility of losing the 2024 election. But sometimes a lot of smoke is just a smoke bomb.

[Music]

This is Good on Paper, a policy show that questions what we really know about popular narratives. I’m your host Jerusalem Demsas. I’m a staff writer here at The Atlantic, and today I’ve asked my colleague Rogé Karma to come on the show. We’re going to talk about a recent deep dive he did into the economics literature on the relationship between immigration and wages.

The common thinking goes: If you increase the supply of labor, then you’ll reduce the price of that labor. If immigrants simply weren’t allowed in, then companies would be forced to pay American workers high wages. It seems so obvious, so why does study after study find this to be so wrong?

[Music]

Rogé, welcome to the show!

Rogé Karma: Thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.

Demsas: This is one of those episodes where I’m actually having trouble deciding which narrative is the conventional narrative.

Karma: (Laughs.) It’s because you’ve been steeped in the economic literature for far too long.

Demsas: Exactly. But there’s the conventional wisdom in academic circles that immigrants do not reduce native-born wages. But that’s not, I think, the average person’s perception of this, especially if they’re listening to politicians who, on both sides of the aisle, will be kind of making these arguments.

So I want to walk through the evidence together here because, Rogé, you recently wrote a piece, and you’ve spent a big chunk of time this year diving into the research space and really trying to figure out what’s going on. Like, Where is the evidence actually leading us? And I want to start with the Mariel Boatlift. Can you tell us what that is and then what economist David Card found when he looked into it?

Karma: Of course. And the first thing I will say is: I do think there is a little bit of a man-on-the-street, common-sense view that goes something a little bit like, Well, given that there is a fixed pool of jobs in a country, if you add a bunch of foreign-born workers, they’re going to take those jobs from natives. And if you just apply Econ 101, as the supply of a good goes up, like labor, then the price of that good, i.e. wages, falls. And so I think there is a little bit of an intuitive sense that more immigrants would mean lower wages and lower employment prospects. And I think this was actually the conventional view on both sides of the aisle for much of the 20th century, in much of the economics profession for much of the 20th century, until this study came along and shattered the consensus.

And so what happened was: In 1980, Fidel Castro lifted Cuba’s ban on emigration. And that caused about 125,000 Cubans to migrate from Mariel Bay in Cuba to Miami, Florida, and about half of them settled there, which represented a 7 to 8 percent increase in the Miami workforce, which is 25 times the amount that the workforce expands due to immigration in the U.S. every year. So this is a huge change, an incredibly large change.

And years later, what the economist David Card—who will go on to win a Nobel Prize for his work in empirical economics—what he realizes is that this created a perfect version of what economists call a “natural experiment,” that because of this big one-time influx of immigrants to Miami, you could compare the trajectory of native-born wages in Miami to a variety of other cities that prior to the boatlift had similar employment and demographic trends. These include Atlanta, Los Angeles, etcetera. And I think the view was, Look—if there’s any place you’re going to see the negative effect of immigration on wages, it’s going to be with this unprecedented, large, random shock.

And that’s why the finding that Card comes to is so surprising, because he finds that the boatlift had virtually no effect on the wages of native-born workers, including those without a college degree. If you look at a chart of the wages of workers in Miami compared to most of these other cities in the U.S. at the time, there’s almost no difference. You can’t even tell the boatlift happened. And I think what that points to—and the big, overarching explanation that I think the common-sense wisdom got wrong—is that immigrants aren’t just workers. Immigrants are also consumers. They buy lots of things, like healthcare and groceries and housing.

And so at the same time that they are competing with Americans for jobs, they’re also creating more demand for those jobs. They’re creating more employment opportunities. And when you increase the demand for labor, that pushes wages up, even if you increase the supply of labor that pushes wages down. And we can talk about some ways in which this was later challenged and complicated, but I think that’s the big missing piece of the common-sense take.

Demsas: Yeah. I think there’s a level to which you have to really draw out how this works in the real world, because people come, and they’re like, Okay. Now there’s more people who want to eat at McDonald’s. You have to hire more people on shift to service that demand. There are more people demanding taxi cabs. There are more people who now need immigration-lawyer services, so that means you need more legal assistants. That means you need more paralegals. That means you need more janitors cleaning the buildings because they’re expanding into new office space.

There’s a level to which this positive flow is not intuitive to people, because it’s so downstream of the initial event, which is: People are here looking for jobs. It’s the immediate, first thing they see happening.

Karma: Exactly. But it’s funny because when we think about this in a slightly different context, it’s very intuitive. For example, you don’t see Republican politicians going to high-school or college graduations and yelling at graduates or complaining that all of these graduates are about to undermine the wages or employment prospects of adults in the labor force.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Karma: And that’s because we understand, when it comes to native-born people, like, Wait—population growth doesn’t necessarily mean less for everyone. And so I think when you take this to a slightly different context, it’s like, Oh, wait. This actually does make a lot of sense.

Demsas: Well, I think there’s one thing that I really want to draw out here. Because if you’re an individual person who’s—let’s say you are a high-school graduate. You are working in the types of service-sector jobs that are usually competing with immigrants. Maybe on net what you’re saying makes sense for the entire labor market, but doesn’t it change when you look downstream at the people who are the most likely to be competing with new immigrants for jobs?

Karma: This is exactly the right question. When I mentioned the complications earlier, this is where they come in. There is an argument that has come up in response to the Card paper and its response to a lot of the natural experiments on this. And I should say, also, in addition to the Mariel Boatlift study, there were similar experiments in the subsequent years in Israel, in France, in Denmark that all came to very similar results.

But then there was a backlash set of critiques, which was just this: Okay. On average, wages might not be affected, but what about the least-skilled, the least-educated workers? And, particularly, what about those without a high-school degree who work in the professions that are most likely to be competing with these new immigrants, most of whom—if we’re talking about, at least, undocumented immigrants—are less skilled themselves?

And this was the critique made, and has been long made, by a Harvard economist, George Borjas. And in 2015, he went back to the Card study, and he looked specifically at this group of high-school dropouts. And he found—or, at least, at the time, it seemed like he found—that actually there was a sizable negative effect on this smaller group. And again, this was the explanation: Okay, maybe on average it works out, but the supply-and-demand effects of immigrants are asymmetric.

Immigrants who are unskilled, who come into a country—they compete only with a certain subset of the least-skilled workers, but they’re spending their money broadly. So they might get a job as a lettuce picker or construction worker, but they’re spending their money on a lot more than just housing and lettuce. And so on net, they end up hurting these less-skilled workers more.

Demsas: It’s an inequality story too. All of us get the benefits, especially those of us in high-skilled jobs that aren’t really experiencing this competition, but they’re not concentrated for the lowest income.

Karma: And this is the most, I feel, poignant critique because, yes, this makes higher-skilled workers better off, but it hurts the least of us. And what is really interesting, though, is that Borjas’s debunking of Card has since been debunked.

Demsas: Oh, my gosh. Recursive debunkings. (Laughs.)

Karma: I know. This is all the fun of an academic debate. It has all the titillating content we want.

Demsas: (Laughs.)

Karma: So if you look at what Borjas did, what’s interesting is he didn’t just look at high-school dropouts. He also excluded from his sample women, nonprime-age workers, and, most confusingly, Hispanics, which is sort of absurd. And his justification was that these exclusions left only the workers that were most directly competing with the Marielitos. But it left a total sample of just 17 workers per year.

Demsas: I find this fact so insane. It’s one of those things where I don’t understand what the point of extremely rigorous journal processes for econ journals are if they’re allowing something like this to go by unnoticed, unflagged.

Karma: And I think the reason is because at that point, it’s really hard to tell the difference between an actual empirical finding and just statistical noise.

Demsas: I mean, it’s 17 people.

Karma: It’s 17 people. It’s this extremely specific and hard-to-justify group. And then, what’s interesting is there’s a couple follow-up studies, one of which finds that the effect that Borjas found was because of a change in the way that the census counted Black workers and Black individuals.

Demsas: Oh, yeah.

Karma: And if you just take the way that they were measuring it before, the entire effect goes away.

Demsas: Even with those 17, the sample size?

Karma: Even with those 17.

Demsas: Wow. Okay.

Karma: But I think the broader critique is, Wait. This is ridiculous. Let’s just actually do what the critique says, which is: Let’s just look at all workers who don’t have a high-school degree. And when you actually look at that, Card’s original findings hold up. Actually, workers that lack even a high-school degree didn’t have their wages negatively affected.

And in the subsequent years after this debate, there have been other natural-experiment studies that have found the same thing. One that I really think was done quite well was on Puerto Rican immigrants after Hurricane Maria who came to Orlando. It found the same effect. It actually found, to your point, that while wages for construction workers, specifically, actually did become depressed a little bit, that was offset by a boost in the wages for leisure and hospitality workers. And so, actually, one wrinkle to this story is that maybe some sectors might experience a little bit of this. But on net, it won’t affect the entire skill group. The entire skill group ends up pretty well off. And I think this, for me, was a very counterintuitive finding. And when I asked economists about it, the leading explanation is what was described to me as “specialization plus scale.”

On paper, it looks like—and the assumption has long been—immigrants without a high-school degree are perfect substitutes for native workers without a high-school degree. But it turns out that that’s actually not true. And I think the restaurant industry is a good example of this. Take fry cooks: A bunch of new immigrants come in, and they take jobs as fry cooks working in restaurants. That might depress the wages of local-born fry cooks. But what also happens is: Because the cost of labor has gone down for fry cooks, and because now there’s all this more demand for restaurant services, you get restaurants expanding. You get more restaurants opening up.

And what happens when restaurants open up? They don’t just have to hire more fry cooks. They hire more waiters and waitresses and bartenders and chefs. And it turns out that a lot of new immigrants can’t fill those roles, because they don’t have the English skills or the tacit cultural knowledge to do so. And so, actually, if you were a native-born worker and you just stayed a fry cook, you might have seen your wages depressed, but you’re actually far more likely to have gotten a job in one of these professions that is now more common, that actually pays more, because immigrants have entered.

Demsas: So you get promoted.

Karma: Exactly.

Demsas: I think the other group of people that people often point to as being harmed by this are actually recent immigrants, right? It may be the case that there’s not a substitution effect between native-born workers and foreign-born workers. But if you are the first person off the Mariel Boatlift, and then the thousandth person is coming off, you guys are probably competing.

I always find this a bit of a weird argument because people usually talking about this are immigration restrictionists. Are they taking the position of the most-recent immigrants who’ve come to this country?

Karma: Yeah. Don’t you care about all the other immigrants?

Demsas: Yeah. Yeah. What’s going on there?

Karma: That is a really good point. And I should say, just because these studies don’t find much of an effect on native-born wages of natives of all skill levels does not mean that immigration has no cost at all. And I think this is actually one of the most-important, most-consistent findings, is we do see a pretty sizable effect on the wages of other immigrants, in large part because they don’t have the substitution effect.

Another cost is inequality. A lot of these studies find that, even though a lot of lower-skilled native workers aren’t affected, immigration ends up boosting the wages of higher-skilled workers, in part because immigrants are also demanding the services of, let’s say, architects or computer programmers, etcetera. And so it’s not a huge change in inequality, but it does slightly exacerbate inequality.

And then I would say the third one is what I talked about earlier, which is if you look sector by sector. It’s very possible that a construction worker or a worker in a specific sector where a lot of immigrants come in might experience some wage losses. That is very possible. Even if the aggregate effect on an entire skill group is not negative, you can see concentrated losses.

Demsas: But this is just true of all effects, right? If the average effect is positive, 50 percent of people are below the average of all things.

I think the thing that I’m getting at here is—and one of the things I really liked about your approach to this—that you were very, very careful to try and be as fair as possible to both sides of this debate. And what I’m hearing is that there’s so much reaching you have to do to really find serious costs to immigration. Even when you do, it’s like, Slightly exacerbate inequality. Maybe there are certain industries where you have some impacts, but those people are also benefiting from the growth, and they’re also benefiting from substitution effect, etcetera.

And it’s not to just pooh-pooh all that, but I think it’s really interesting to talk about why there’s such an intense desire to find this effect. And I don’t know if you have a thought on why this narrative is so important to people, because there are other reasons that people could say they’re anti-immigration, but there’s a real desire to make it about wages. There’s a real desire to make it about economics.

Karma: Yeah. I will say: I want to definitely talk about these different reasons. And I’d be very interested in your theory, too, and I have my own. I will say, one good-faith reason for this concern, one that I think will be brought up a lot is, Well, what about when we look at history?

And so it is true, and lots of folks, including David Leonhardt, liberal columnist at The New York Times, has pointed out that during this mid-century, quote-unquote, golden-age period—1940s, ’50s, and ’60s—you saw really high wage growth for the working class. You saw a really big reduction of inequality, really fast rise in living standards, and also very low immigration. And then from the 1980s on, you see much higher levels of immigration, and you see wage stagnation for the median worker. You see an exacerbation of inequality. And so I think one thing is, If we look at history, maybe these experiments aren’t capturing everything. They’re only looking at one city at a time. And when we look at the broad sweep of American history, it really does look like this is happening.

And I think that is a critique that’s important to take seriously. But at the same time, one of the golden rules of social science is “Correlation does not equal causation,” right? There were a lot of things happening starting in the 1970s and ’80s that also affected workers, also affected inequality—everything from technological change to globalization to the weakening of labor unions and concentration of corporations. And I think a lot of those other things were going on, and I think two data points are really instructive here.

Demsas: Well, before you get into that, I actually think you’re being super generous to this argument, which I think is your MO here. I think it’s important to be intellectually generous at the front part. But I want to be very clear here: This is not looking at the broad sweep of American history. This is looking at the ’40s and ’50s and ’60s, and going, Huh. This extremely transformative time in American history, where there’s tons of growth happening because World War II is ending. Also, the World War II production, in general—lots of stuff happens, of course, following that, anti-growth stuff that we’ve talked about in this podcast in the past.

And I think it’s kind of weird and, I think, feeds into the question I was even asking you earlier about, like: There’s such an intense desire to make this true, and when you look back at the foreign-born share of the population in the United States over, actually, our long term, in 2023, 14.3 percent of Americans are foreign-born, and that’s in line—and lower—than large parts of the 19th century. So what you see in American history, when looking at the foreign-born share of the population, is: You see we’re at roughly 14.8 percent, even throughout the 1800s. You see a massive dip start to happen during the Great Depression—normal. People kind of stop emigrating when that happens. And then you don’t really see a catch-up happening until very recently.

And so there’s a level to here where I’m like, If Leonhardt and others want to make this critique, they need to then explain the entirety of the 1800s in American economic history. And I think there’s a desire not to really wade into that debate, because they’re just pointing at a simple correlation and going, I’m sure this explains it. I actually don’t find this even minimally persuasive.

Karma: I know. I think you’re totally right. And also, you don’t even have to go back to the 1800s. You can just go back, I don’t know, the past four years, where we’ve had a huge, massive surge of undocumented immigration. And at the same time, we’ve had wages at the very bottom of the income distribution rise at their fastest pace since the 1940s, a huge reduction in wage inequality.

And so even if you’re going to make the correlation argument, it’s like, Wait. The last couple of years sort of disproved this. And even over this time period that Leonhardt and others are talking about, what you have is: The places that receive the most immigrants are the places that have the least wage stagnation. It’s Texas. It’s Florida. It’s the Acela corridor. And so I think you’re right. I really wanted to put that out there because I think it is a very common argument, but it’s not one I find remotely persuasive.

Demsas: There’s one other thing that I think other folks point to a lot, and I’m going to ask you to explain it, because you’re explaining all these studies for me so nicely. But the National Academy of Sciences has a study called the “Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” I feel like this is a calling card for a lot of folks who are pro–immigration restriction. What does it say, and what’s important about that study?

Karma: This was a large report that looked at, or at least purported to look at, a bunch of different studies that claim to be a sort of meta-analysis of a lot of the immigration literature and tried to come to a conclusion on what it all says. And the big conclusion that they came to was, when we look on average, wages are not affected, especially when we look in the long term. But there was a disagreement within the panelists over, specifically, high-school dropouts. And there’s a chart that often is linked to or is often brought up by immigration restrictionists. It is table 5-2.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, you know exactly where it is.

Karma: It shows a lot of negative numbers. And the thing that I will often remind people is: That chart is basically talking about high-school dropouts. Okay, put that aside. There are a lot of studies on there that seem to show negative effects. One of them is the Borjas study that we talked about earlier. And George Borjas was actually one of the panelists on this report, which may indicate or may give you a hint of why it turned out the way it did. But when you actually go through and look at these studies, most of them are not the kind of high-quality, natural-experiment study we’re talking about. A lot of them just focus on Black men, Hispanic men—like, very particular subgroups.

And then, also, a whole bunch of these studies are in a category of, what they’re called, “skilled-cell studies.” And these studies are different, right? They’re not looking at a specific causal link created by a natural experiment. What they’re saying is, We’re going to just look at the entire group of unskilled workers in the United States. We’re going to look at immigration flows, and then we’re going to make a bunch of assumptions, and a bunch of assumptions about the substitutability of native-born and foreign-born workers, about how fast capital adjusts. And based on those assumptions, we’re going to make big claims.

And so there was this famous other Borjas paper in the early 2000s that made the claim that when you do one of these studies, it shows really intense negative effects. And so this report that is often used, and I know this is so wonky, is just—

Demsas: We love wonky here.

Karma: Yes. But I think it is just a case study, in that listing a bunch of studies with varying qualities, looking at varying different groups, is just not the most-accurate way to do things. And then, yeah, I could go on. There are lots of other problems with it, but I just think that that is one of the ones that frustrates me the most and frustrates a lot of the economists who I spoke to for this piece.

Demsas: I asked you a question earlier, and now I’m just going to give you the answer that I have to it, which is this question about why it’s so persistent, people desire it. One of my theories for this is that there’s a real desire to sane wash anti-immigrant sentiment.

When large parts of the population hold opinions, and particularly when they are different than the kinds of people who are in media or are in elite spaces—like, most people who work in media are living in cosmopolitan cities, have gone to college, have often maybe interacted with people who are from foreign-born countries repeatedly throughout their lives because they’re, like, living in New York or Chicago or L.A. or something like that. And as a result, like, they are not really in touch with some of the more common anti-immigration sentiments, and as a result, they feel kind of uncomfortable being like, Well, they’re all racist and xenophobes. They don’t want to sound like that. And so in order to look at this sentiment in the country and go, like, Well, I don’t want to call them a bunch of people who hate immigrants, I need to find some more material explanation for their opposition to it.

And I think it’s weird here, because I actually think it’s important to take very seriously what people are saying. Like, there are people who have serious cultural concerns with people coming into the country. And some of those things, I find not reasonable, and some of them I find—I don’t find really any of them reasonable, but I understand why someone would feel that way without having to be a bad person. Like, do I wish that people didn’t have those attitudes? Sure. But I think that they’re not lying when they tell you the things that are actually concerning them. And you write something really nicely on this, in your piece, and I'll let you say it, but can you just talk to us a little bit about what surveys of public opinion actually find in regards to people’s opposition to immigration?

Karma: Well, first of all, I think that analysis is really spot on. I think sane washing is a good descriptor. The one that I haven’t had is often a veneer of respectability. And I think there is a lot of this deep discomfort with nonmaterialist explanations, in part, also, because—especially, if you’re thinking about, let’s say, center-left folks—if you’re part of a political party that you think needs to respond to people’s views on immigration, it’s much easier to say, Well, look—we already believe in raising worker wages.

And so, all of a sudden, if immigration gets looped into the set of values that we already believe, we’re then comfortable to give in to people’s instincts here. Whereas if it feels like pandering to darker forces, I think that makes liberals, especially, less comfortable with doing it. And I think to your point, though, it’s like: If we don’t acknowledge those darker forces, it’s not always great. And I think what you’re getting at, too, is in this piece, consistently what you find in sort of surveys of public opinion is that it’s not primarily material explanations that explain things. It’s things—a lot of them are about cultural difference, about violations of social norms, about crime, about national identity.

And I think one of the most-revealing things here is that the demographic that is most opposed to immigration are older folks living in rural areas, many of whom are retired. And the people who tend to be most supportive of immigration are working-age people living in big cities where immigrants are more common. So if you thought, like, Okay, this is a product of the people who immigrants are directly competing with are the most anti-immigrant, you would think, Oh, this would show up where the immigrants are, and it doesn’t. And so I think that really speaks to it.

I think the other thing that really speaks to it is, like, have you just listened to the Republican Party? Like, Donald Trump and J. D. Vance will occasionally mention wages, especially when it’s Stephen Miller talking to The New York Times, when it’s J. D. Vance in a vice-presidential debate or talking to a New York Times interviewer. That’s when they will bring up this wages argument. When they are speaking to an audience that they know is very center or left, they will, like, bring up this wages argument. But if you listen to the guy at the top of the ticket, right, it is, These folks are “poisoning the blood of our country.” It is portraying immigrants as a sort of psychopathic horde of murderers. It’s spreading conspiracy theories about pet-eating immigrants. Like, it’s very hard to take seriously that this is actually the main concern when the leader of the party who is anti-immigration is, like, so openly pointing to a very different set of issues.

[Music]

Demsas: After the break: why less immigration would mean a poorer quality of life in America.

[Break]

Demsas: I think one of the things that I also find reasonable for why people struggle is the Econ 101 explanation you give right at the beginning is intuitive. And it shows up in many different parts of our econ reporting, this question of thinking outside of partial equilibriums, right? If you were to just say, I’m looking at just the impact of immigrants on wages, holding equal all other effects on the population, on the economy, then you would see negative downward pressure on wages.

But economists don’t do that. Our lives aren’t lived in partial equilibriums. We live in general equilibrium. There are multiple different markets working together at all times. And you have to look at not just what’s happening with the effect on the labor markets, what’s happening in the effect on the housing market, the consumption of random household goods. And so I think that that’s really difficult to do in normal conversation. And what I think is really funny is that now—you kind of foreshadowed this—there’s a big push to blame immigrants for the housing market, and it’s like, Oh, the only time immigrants are consumers of anything is when they’re consuming housing. Otherwise they’re just competing with you for wages. They’re not buying anything else.

What I wanted to ask, though, is about this other argument that people also make, which is: Okay—maybe you’re right that in the world that we live in, given that immigration is always happening, companies can rely on there going to be some level of immigration. They’re used to a high level of immigration happening. You don’t see these negative effects on wages. But in a world where you were to just, like, really, really tamp down—really, really stop immigration from coming in—companies would have to reshape how they’re doing their hiring practices. The entire American economy would change if it wasn’t reliant on foreign labor.

And so this idea that there are these, quote, jobs Americans won’t do isn’t true. They would do them at a price. They would do them if the wages were better, if the working conditions were better, and that we should strive for these higher-quality jobs. And companies that can’t do that, well—they should just not do that anymore. They should just literally stop relying on foreign labor. And so I think that how you respond to that is really important because, you know, I do think a lot of people are starting to, like, fixate on that argument.

Karma: This has actually been one of the largest justifications for what Donald Trump has called the largest deportation effort in American history that he wants to enact when he’s in office. Any of his advisors are talking about this. They talk about: This is going to force employers to hire workers at higher wages, to give them better jobs, and that’s a big reason why we should do it. So I think it’s a really important one to address.

And what’s nice is we actually have some really good empirical studies on this. We don’t just have to guess as to what would happen and assume as to what would happen. My favorite of these studies, although there are a few, looked at the Secure Communities program, which was a DHS program that deported about 500,000 immigrants between 2008 and 2014, so during the Obama administration. And the way that this happened was: It happened sort of semi-randomly across communities, such that it created a sort of natural experiment where you could look at how it affected communities where it had happened and how it affected not-yet-affected communities.

And the findings were shocking even to me because I would think, Okay, maybe when you get rid of a lot of these workers, there’s just going to be more jobs available.

Demsas: It’s like a shock.

Karma: It’s such a big, immediate shock. But what the authors find is that for every 100 immigrant workers who are deported, there are actually nine fewer jobs for natives. And this isn’t just temporary jobs. This is, like, permanently, there are fewer jobs for natives in the community, unemployment goes up, and wages slightly fall. And I think this kind of finding is repeated across different examples through American history.

There’s another great study of the H2B program, which allocates low-skilled workers to companies, and also finds that when companies aren’t allocated those workers, they don’t hire a bunch of natives. They actually just produce less. And so what happens when immigrants are ripped away from these communities is the interconnected web of employment and workers whose jobs depended on each other all gets torn up, right? Businesses close. Businesses have to stop producing as much. There are just less child-care services. There are less meals served. There are less houses built—either for reasons of: Employers actually can’t have a viable business with higher labor costs, whether it’s because natives don’t always want to do these jobs, or whether it’s just because, for the reasons we talked about earlier, there’s just a lot of benefits from the specialization of labor that occur when immigrants are in a place.

One way I think about this is sort of the opposite of the story that we were talking about earlier. When we talked about immigrants coming in and creating the specialization plus scale, that just happens in reverse. Instead of businesses expanding, and therefore being able to hire more natives because they’re expanding, businesses are shrinking. They’re shutting down. They’re closing. And when that happens, native-born workers get caught in the crossfire. When there’s less demand for your services as a restaurant, and your costs are higher, and so you have to close down, you’re not just getting rid of your immigrant workers, you’re getting rid of all the native-born workers who are working there too. And so I think that’s what these studies are finding, is you just can’t neatly remove immigrants from communities without having huge backfiring effects on the native-born.

Demsas: Yeah. I think it’s even useful to play it out in the best-case scenario. I think the best-case scenario for the folks who are making this argument is that there’s this short-term harm, but then you just need to let the economy play out and develop new businesses to figure out new business models that work. And in the best-case scenario, you’re talking about a poorer country. You’re talking about a country where your output, your growth is literally less. And that sounds very abstract, but we’re talking about less stuff. You have less money. You can buy fewer things. You can buy a worse quality of life. Your housing is probably worse. Even the basic stuff where you’re talking about, Can you afford child care?—fewer people can do that.

A lot of things are worse when the output declines, when it’s harder for businesses to try new things, when there’s difficulty with dynamism in the economy, where you can’t start a bunch of different kinds of businesses quickly, see what works, and have that kind of churn. And so I think it’s even difficult to conceptualize: When people are making this argument, they’re saying, We should take on the costs of being a poorer country for the sake of national homogeneity of where you were born.

And so I think that that’s the trade-off we’re talking about here. It’s not that America would cease to exist, right? There are a lot of countries who follow the sort of principles we’re talking about here, where they are really strict on who gets to come in, and they’re just poorer than America. And I think that that’s the really clear trade-off that I think often restrictionists won’t make baldly.

Karma: First of all, even the best-case scenario you’re talking about is one that has actually no empirical evidence. It’s all theoretical. So that’s the first point. The second is that this gets back to, I think, your point about general versus partial equilibriums, too. Because when we’re even just looking at these wage or employment studies, they’re holding a lot constant. And everything they’re holding constant also changes in an actual scenario where you deport millions of immigrants.

So there is another great study from the economist Ben Jones and a few others looking at immigrants and entrepreneurship. And they looked at basically every single business that opened up between 2005 and 2010 and looked at basically the country of origin of the person who started that business. And they found that immigrants are 80 percent more likely to start new businesses than native-born individuals.

And when they actually did the math, they found that immigrants, by entrepreneurship alone, are creating far more jobs than they take. One response to that would be, Oh, okay. Well, maybe this is high-skilled immigrants. Maybe this is the Google-founder kind of effect. But actually, they found that there was no difference in the rate of entrepreneurship between individuals from OECD countries and from non-OECD countries. And if you just think about this for a second, think about the people who end up coming here, the amount of risk they have to take, the perseverance that it takes to, like, actually get to the U.S.—it wouldn’t be surprising that these people are, like, more intrepid and more entrepreneurial.

Demsas: Just huge selection effects. Like, if you can make it through the Darién Gap, what does that say about you?

Karma: Exactly. And so that’s one effect that is completely lost in a lot of these studies. One of my favorite studies of this is one that was done in Denmark, because in Denmark, what is interesting—unlike in the U.S., where you have to just look at a specific city—Denmark has data on individuals for the entire country. It’s a pretty small country. And so researchers can actually track what happens to every single individual worker when new immigrants come in. And that gives you a sort of accuracy that you don’t necessarily get with the natural-experiment studies in the U.S., at least at a countrywide basis. And what they found is that native-born—even less-skilled native-born—workers end up responding to immigration by entering higher-paying occupations, by moving to higher-opportunity cities, and by actually getting better education, such that they actually had higher wages as a result of it.

And so I could go on. You could talk about the amount of women who are able to be in the workforce because of immigrants providing child care. Like, you can list this out, and there are all these ways in which even these studies are missing the sort of beneficial effect that immigrants are having that you would be taking away if you just suddenly got rid of all these people, in addition to this atrocious humanitarian effects.

Demsas: I find that the Danes—like, I wanted some sort of poll on their privacy concerns. I’m just like, Do you guys not care? I mean, like, I think it’s great. I would be pro-this everywhere, but I’m just surprised that countries are able to do this. There would be a revolt in America.

Karma: Even if the data is anonymized, I’m like, The data the researchers got was anonymized, but the data the government has is not anonymized.

Demsas: We don’t even let the government share data like that. Like, the IRS can’t just send the Treasury Department, like, all the data they have on people’s tax returns.

Karma: But you know what? You know what? Great for the Danish for doing it, too, so we can learn more about immigration through them.

Demsas: So true. But so the thing that’s interesting is: We’ve made a bunch of arguments here about why this is actually really positive for the economy. But regardless of that, there’s been a backlash, and we’re seeing that right now. I mean, this is airing on Election Day, and so we’re, I’m sure, in the future, just pacing nervously to see what’s going on.

Karma: (Laughs.) Apologies to anyone who was listening to this looking for a soothing distraction.

Demsas: But this has been probably the most-important issue of this election. Maybe inflation is another one. But the two most-important issues. I did an episode earlier this year with John Burn-Murdoch where we talked about the sense that Americans are very xenophobic and this narrative that they hate immigration—they hate immigrants—and that’s, like, just a fact of the world, and that all immigration has basically been this plot by elites to shove it down our throats. And, of course, we explored how a lot of that narrative is really overblown and underestimates just how strong pro-immigrant sentiment is in America, particularly relative to other countries.

And I still stand by that analysis, but there has been a shift in public opinion, even in the past year. You’ve seen polls come out that have really indicated that there’s been a backlash effect to the high levels of immigration that are kind of returning us to the 1800s averages.

And so first, can you just talk us through that backlash? What are the numbers there? What are we seeing?

Karma: Totally. The thing that first drew my attention to this was, as you were saying: The way this has impacted the election is that you’ve just seen such a hard right turn in the rhetoric from candidates on both sides. And I remember listening to Trump in 2024, making 2016 Trump sound like JFK in just how crazy he was. And then looking at the Democratic side, where the message went from, in 2020, Joe Biden promising to restore moral dignity to our asylum system, and then in 2024 Kamala Harris saying that, Actually, no. She is the one that will fortify the border, not Trump.

Demsas: Do not come.

Karma: Do not come. And underlying this is quite possibly the most dramatic shift in public opinion that I’ve ever seen. So going back to the 1960s, Gallup asks Americans every year this question: Do you think immigration should be increased, kept the same, or decreased? In 2020, only 28 percent of Americans said that immigration should be decreased. Actually, more Americans said it should be increased. By 2024, just four years later, the percentage of those who wanted it decreased had nearly doubled to 55 percent, the first time that there had been a majority of Americans who wanted immigration decreased since the early 2000s.

And just to put this shift in context, I think when Americans think about big public-opinion shifts, they think of gay marriage. And they think of the increasing support for gay marriage. Support for gay marriage, according to Gallup, increased about 20 points over the course of around a decade, maybe eight or nine years. This shift we’re talking about was nearly 30 points in four years. It makes gay marriage look gradual and small by comparison. And this immigration shift is most concentrated among Republicans, but it’s also Democrats. It’s also independents. And it’s especially been sharp in the past year.

Demsas: This is one of those things where I think it’s really important for people who, like myself, are in favor of high levels of immigration, first of all, to accept that, at some level, if you get that, you will have some negative effects, but I think also to really narrow in onto people’s specific concerns.

So I did an article earlier this year. It’s called “Something’s Fishy About the ‘Migrant Crisis.’” And basically, I was just like, Okay, there are high levels of immigration in a lot of places in this country. But not every place in this country is experiencing backlash, right? Like, you’re hearing these stories in New York and Chicago about people sleeping on the floors of police stations in Chicago. In New York, I had, like, an affordable-housing lawyer tell me—she was a very liberal person telling me that she was kind of concerned because there were migrants in the street in midtown Manhattan who were just, like, lying on the ground.

And there’s a lot to which I’m like, You know, if these people who are talking to me are some of the most-liberal people on immigration are expressing kind of like, Well, we can’t handle this. Like, we obviously can’t handle this, it indicates a very specific problem, right? Like, people—these New Yorkers, Chicagoans—they’re not afraid of immigrants or foreign-born people. There’s huge levels of foreign-born share in New York and Chicago. And the number of people that were entering we’re talking about, you know, that were coming in and demanding services from local government were a very small fraction of this.

So I was trying to understand what was going on there, and I really came down to the specific concerns people have. People don’t want to see local tax dollars being spent on newcomers to their city, if they feel like they need things that the city’s not actually taking care of. They don’t want to see their schools being used as shelters instead of being used in order to service, you know, their kids. And there’s just kind of general sense that, like, Now there are people sleeping on the streets. There’s nowhere for them to be housed. Like, It’s actually reducing my quality of life a bit. Clearly, there’s a sense of it being overwhelmed.

But then when I looked in places like Miami and Los Angeles, and in Texas and in Houston—Miami and Houston, in particular—I was like, There are way more immigrants who have come through a Houston, in Texas, than have come through a Chicago. So why are we seeing such backlash?

And I came to like two reasons. One is that many of the immigrants were not able to get work permits. The other thing that’s really important here is the Greg Abbott busing program. Because, most people, they come into the country, and, you know, what happens? They have networks that they’re following. Like, either they have populations of people that they’re able to get help from, or there are even people who are kind of recruiting them as they’re kind of coming over, like, Oh, we need work. We need people to come do this. And so there’s a level to which, like, there’s a natural flow to where they end up.

Greg Abbott has, I think, maybe the most-effective political stunt in American history—I genuinely think, like, reshaped the entire conversation on immigration by doing this. And then he says, Okay, I’m gonna bus people—effectively breaking these kind of natural shifts—to Democratic cities. And when people kind of show up randomly, there’s, like, of course, this massive transaction cost that’s enacted. And, you know, Texas is a border state, and I think, at some level, I kind of understand. They’re like, Oh, everyone should have to experience what it’s like to have all this kind of flow of people coming in. But Texas has boomed as a result of this too.

So anyway, I think the real thing that’s important here is that people who are in favor of immigration have to address these specific concerns. You have to make sure that there is, like, actually a clear, orderly process by which people are being resettled. If there’s not, I mean, that’s going to lead to backlash, even from people who are in favor of immigration. And the most frustrating part of my reporting is learning the Biden administration had basically abdicated their responsibility to try and help with the resettlement process of people across the country, because they were afraid of being blamed. And to me, I’m like, Well, you were still blamed. So I’m not sure it worked out for you.

Karma: Everything you’re describing here, I think, falls under the banner of what has been called either, colloquially, “chaos theory” or, more academically, the “locus of control theory” of immigration, which is that populations tend to be able to handle high amounts of immigration if they think the process is orderly and fair, and they become much more likely to oppose immigration when they see the process is chaotic and unfair and disorderly.

You know, you have a great example in that piece of the U.K., post-Brexit, having very high levels of immigration and anti-immigrant sentiment decreasing. Something you see in the U.S. is that even as you have these massive shifts in the amount of immigrants people want let in, when you ask questions like, Do you believe undocumented immigrants make a contribution to society? or, Do you support a path to citizenship for nondocumented immigrants? and even, Should it be easier to immigrate to the U.S.? people’s views actually haven’t changed nearly as much. And they remain more pro-immigrant than they were in 2016, which speaks to the fact that what people are upset about here—they’re not suddenly xenophobic. They don’t suddenly hate immigrants. A lot of what’s happening is that they’re responding to the chaos of the process.

I think my favorite part of that piece that you wrote was this point that you made about how there’s a way of looking at Greg Abbott’s busing program as working, in the sense of, like, Look—didn’t this prove his point? He said that liberal cities should have to handle this, and he proved that they couldn’t. But the process by which he did it was engineered to achieve that outcome, right? You point out in that piece that there are 3 million foreign-born people in New York City, in a city of 8 million, and they’ve been bused a couple tens of thousands. And it has led Eric Adams to say, like, New York is falling apart. That does not mean that New York can’t handle that amount of immigrants. The specific process by which this happened was engineered to achieve an outcome of chaos. And that’s what people are responding to.

Demsas: Well, let’s leave it on an optimistic note. Always our last question: What is something that you originally thought was good on paper but didn’t pan out in real life?

Karma: So this is quite a pivot from what we were talking about earlier. Last year I got engaged to my girlfriend.

Demsas: Oh my gosh, yes! Congratulations!

Karma: That was not the thing that was—

Demsas: Oh god.

Karma: That would be bad. But the way I did it was: It was our five-year anniversary, in Rome, very romantic. I knew I wanted to propose in front of the Pantheon, which was my partner’s favorite building in Rome.

Demsas: She’s an architect.

Karma: She’s an architect, yes. But I didn’t want to do it when there were a bunch of crowds around, so I was like, How can I figure out a way to get us there, like, early in the morning? And so I decided, in a decision that looked very good on paper, to book a Vatican tour for, like, 9 a.m. And so I was like, Oh, I’ll propose, and then we’ll go on this tour of the Vatican, and it’ll be, like, really cool. And it’ll be, like—we’ll see the Sistine Chapel. Sounded great. Looked good on paper.

It turns out that immediately after you have one of the most emotionally riveting experiences of your life—

Demsas: (Laughs.) You don’t want to go on a tour!

Karma: The last thing you want to do is go on a three-hour tour of the Vatican where you have to wait until the last 15 minutes to see the Sistine Chapel. We’re just, like, so badly just wanting to get out of there and be with each other, and we were just in such a great mood, only to have, like, the biggest buzzkill in the world be the Vatican.

Demsas: This is so funny, Rogé. I didn’t know the story. Wait. I can’t believe—so you went on the tour?

Karma: We went on the tour. I wish so badly I would have said, Let’s just forget the tour. But we were in such good spirits after. We’re like, This is going to be so great. Like, actually, looking back, I’m like, Was that even good on paper? I don’t think so.

Demsas: I was actually with you. I was like, Okay, yeah. Then you had a fun tour.

Karma: Like, a nice walking tour, architecture tour—probably great. When you’re, like, confined to the Vatican and just looking at, like, our guide—she was great, but she was just explaining every little thing, and we’re just like, We don’t want to be in public with a million people. We just want to be with each other. This is very strange.

Demsas: I think this is my favorite “good on paper” yet. This is unreal. (Laughs.)

Karma: I put a lot of thought into this, and I was like, This one was bad. This is not my best. It’s a funny story now.

Demsas: Yeah.

Karma: You know, I look back on it—I’ve looked back on it very fondly. So yeah, that’s my “good on paper” story.

Demsas: Thank you so much, Rogé. Thanks for coming on the show.

Karma: It’s been a pleasure being here. Thanks so much for having me.

[Music]

Demsas: Good on Paper is produced by Jinae West. It was edited by Dave Shaw, fact-checked by Ena Alvarado, and engineered by Erica Huang. Our theme music is composed by Rob Smierciak. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio. Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.

And hey, if you like what you’re hearing, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts.

I’m Jerusalem Demsas, and we’ll see you next week.