How the Migrant Crisis Destroyed American Liberalism

On January 9, students at James Madison High School in Brooklyn discovered that they would be spending the next two days in front of their computer screens learning from home. But it wasn’t the usual winter weather causing this cancellation of in-person classes – instead, it was because the city of New York was planning to move nearly 2,000 illegal migrants from their encampment and resettle them at the school, displacing the students.

The move prompted understandable outrage from parents and recriminations from local officials who pleaded helplessness. What were they supposed to do? Allow the migrants to freeze to death in the coming storm? In a single cold evening in New York City, one example illustrated the bankruptcy of two decades of liberal discourse on immigration.

When history is written, the decision of Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who was widely mocked by the mainstream media when he announced it in 2021, to bus migrants from the border into blue-state sanctuary cities may be remembered as one of the most momentous in modern history. It was definitely among the most politically clever.

Over nearly three years, Abbott’s decision effectively nationalized the costs of an issue that had previously only produced localized winners and losers – border state residents paid the costs of mass illegal migration while blue state residents far from the border enjoyed cheap labor and the chance to be morally righteous.

For all Democrats like to talk about redistribution of resources and “privilege,” the bussing of migrants was the most successful redistributive policy in recent memory – one which has left Democrats with no answer.

One reason it succeeded was because it played on the class divisions that define American politics.

Modern American liberalism is less a collection of policy positions based on a worldview than an effort by individuals to demonstrate their own social status through demonstrating contempt toward those beneath them. Critics of the shift away from the basics of math, science, and reading, toward DEI and weird sexual education curricula in schools often miss that, for liberals, sending one’s children to a school that teaches gibberish rather than reading, writing, and arithmetic is in effect a method of demonstrating that your family is connected enough to ensure that your children can secure college admission and employment without the need to learn real skills.

That is why the inability of those graduates to secure employment or repay student loans is such an issue for Biden’s base. The ability to take useless degrees and succeed is intrinsic to their identity.

Immigration took on a similar tone. The ability to make high-minded moral proclamations such as “no human is illegal,” “walls are racist,” or “borders are illegitimate” advertised that those making such claims had the economic clout to build their own domestic walls to keep the consequences of their own ideology out of their communities.

“Well, I have never had a problem with migrants,” the liberal from suburban Boston would say, before noting how much harder Ecuadorians worked on their vacation home renovation than local Americans who were probably addicted to opioids. The ability to prioritize foreign illegal migrants over native workers implied that liberals were above both and in a position to pass judgment upon them. Support for open borders became a way to punish working-class Americans for failing to show adequate deference to their “betters.”

The policy of bussing migrants to sanctuary communities in blue states cleverly destroyed the basis of this ideological worldview. This was not merely by causing liberals to feel the pain in their communities – that was an element, and an effective one at that, but the assault went deeper.

Many upscale liberals define themselves by their distance from issues. Their sense of class identity was defined by the fact that there were no migrants or homeless people in their communities. They had paid housing premiums to move into leafy suburbs with no migrants, and now the presence of migrants and the problems of crime, littering, and safety they brought punctured those bubbles.

At its root, the upscale liberal dream has always been about control. If migrants are going to be hosted in a town or school, it is because local parents have decided to bring in a dozen Somali refugees and settle them in the local church, not because migrants showed up and had to be housed. If schools are going to hold anti-racist training, it is because parents decided to so they could explain to friends at work what they were doing to combat “systemic racism,” not because gang warfare was breaking out at their children’s schools.

In short, the nature of high-income American liberalism is that every problem must have an on-off switch, at which point turning the problem on becomes a sign of power over less fortunate Americans, while the ability to turn it off ensures that progressive politics remains an extracurricular activity.

The crisis of American liberalism in 2024 when it comes to the migrant crisis is that the off switch is broken. Brooklyn parents are liberal, and there may well have been some who in other circumstances would have happily taken the woke points from agreeing to allow a few dozen migrant families to stay in their high school’s gym over a vacation – provided, of course, they were out well before students returned to classes, and with enough time to fully clean the premises.

What happened at James Madison High School, however, was different. New York officials did not choose to act. They were forced to do so. The migrants were rehoused in the middle of a school week with little notice, parents who may well have had important work-related meetings were forced to scramble to accommodate, and kids were forced home. They had lost control.

If one listens to the rising criticism of Biden from the left, that is voters’ real qualm – that Biden has lost all control over a crisis he created. This is the true genius of the move by Abbott and other Republicans. They have realized that the most critical issue for millions of otherwise liberal Americans is the question of control and ensured that the only way they can regain control of their own lives and communities is by bringing the border under control.

If thousands of migrants are present in camps, they cannot be allowed to freeze or starve, which means the weather can force the hand of the local government. As long as red states continue to send migrants, those states and not local blue state authorities control the tempo of the crisis.

This is also why politicians such as Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson and New York Mayor Eric Adams have alternately denounced Abbott, threatened to sue him, and tried to ban arrivals. They know that he is in control of the crisis in their communities. They also know they are impotent, a tone that was evident when Johnson went so far as to accuse Abbott of deliberately trying to oust “mayors of color.”

Johnson is correct on one thing: Abbott has successfully undermined him by reorienting American politics around an issue for which liberalism has no answer, and the Democratic Party, as long as it remains committed to that 21st-century version of liberalism, cannot resolve.

The border is far from under control, but in one sense, liberals have already lost. Control has become the dominant issue in American politics, and that is not an environment in which modern liberalism, as we have known it for the last decade, can function.

Biden, who was elected to make liberals’ position in society secure, cannot deliver the social security that they need to exist. This contradiction explains the demoralization of his “base” and the sense of despondence among even the most committed partisans who see no future even if he somehow survives.

They know that their project is dead, killed by a collision with the reality of mass illegal migration.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.