In the end, the officials graced me with clemency, thanks in part to advocacy by the boat’s captain. “Not long ago, they would have ignored you, but things have changed”, the captain later explained, referring to Venezuela’s ongoing crisis.

The experience showed me first-hand how Latin-American countries enforce their borders when confronted with mass migration — and taught me a valuable lesson about cross-border travel. Had I been deported, however, the penalty would only have been a speedy return to the United States — as opposed to life inside a “Terrorism Confinement Center” in El Salvador: the fate of hairdressers and landscapers — in addition to hardened criminals — under President Trump.

Many in MAGA World seem to believe that no corrective is too severe, no countermeasure too cruel, in response to the border chaos inherited from Joe Biden. Yet more than 100 days into his second term, Trump’s deportation effort is a failure on its own terms — notwithstanding the shock-and-awe impression.

Make no mistake: the border was in a catastrophic state under the previous administration. According to the Congressional Budget Office, the number of illegal immigrants swelled by approximately 10 million during Biden’s term. The parameters under which irregular visitors could claim asylum were stretched to such a point that the term “refugee” lost all meaning, leading to a backlog of 3.2 million claimants. Industrial-scale smuggling boomed, and vital public services across the United States groaned under the weight of mass migration.

Ordinary Americans, including many Latinos, warned that economic migrants were abusing an overly generous asylum regime — a reality I observed firsthand in 2022 and 2023 as an immigration case worker. Finally, in June 2024, Biden stanched the flow somewhat with an executive, prompting a decline in the numbers. Yet under Team Biden, removals from within the homeland dropped to about half of what they had been in Trump’s first term, about 50,000 a year.

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Confronted with this reality, an overwhelming majority of voters expressed support for cutting illegal immigration and ramping up deportations. On the former (cutting the flow), Trump has unquestionably delivered. By March, border crossings fell to just 7,000, a quarter-century low. This has been, by far, the most unambiguous success of an otherwise confused presidency.

Mass deportations, however, are a different story.

Thus far, the pace of total deportations is lower than it was under Biden in 2024. True, this is in part a function of fewer crossings. But there is no question that many of those who entered in recent years are still here. While credible data on interior removals under Trump II have yet to be released, it’s plausible that the deportation figure hovers around 50,000. It’s far more than under Biden, to be sure, but still a far cry from the 120,000 deported at the same point in 2009 by Barack Obama (earning Obama the moniker “Deporter in Chief” from progressives).

Having failed at delivering big numbers, Trump officials have apparently resorted to spectacular stunts and sadism as substitutes.

In March, the administration deported 238 Venezuelans and 23 Salvadorans to Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele’s so-called Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, a latter-day gulag. Like many others, I gave the White House the benefit of the doubt, assuming that a Department of Justice renowned for prosecuting gang members couldn’t possibly send civilians with no criminal sentences to a prison built for MS13 and Barrio 18’s most hardened members.

Except, the White House continues to withhold the names and purportedly heinous crimes of those deported to Bukele’s CECOT, treating them as state secrets. Most of the inmates were designated as “alien terrorists” and stripped of the ability to contest that designation under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act — the White House’s ridiculous theory of the case being that the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang is conducting an “invasion” of the US homeland at the behest of the Caracas regime. Under the terms of the agreement with El Salvador, outsourced detainees are imprisoned indefinitely in the CECOT. No trial, not even proper sentencing.

On 20 March, CBS published the names of the imprisoned Venezuelans from a leaked government document. A subsequent investigation by The New York Times ran all 238 names through public databases in the United States, Venezuela, Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, and Chile, finding serious accusations or convictions for just 32 of the deportees. Another two dozen were accused or found guilty of lower-level offenses, such as trespassing and speeding. The remainder had no criminal records in either the United States or abroad; an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official also admitted in a sworn declaration that “many” of those deported had no criminal records. Deported, to be clear, to a gang confinement center. For life.

In deciding if someone is a member of Tren de Aragua, Trump officials placed inordinate emphasis on tattoos. A separate government document obtained by the Times, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide”, uses an eight-point system to identify gang members, with tattoos yielding four points. One such case with no criminal record was that of Arturo Suarez Trejo, a landscaper and urban musician with numerous tattoos who was detained while filming a music video.

Two others with no criminal records — Francisco García Casique, a barber, and Neri Alvarado, a bakery-shop worker — had tattoos of family members’ names, one of which included a ribbon for autism awareness. As Ronna Rísquez, the author of a 2003 book on Tren de Aragua, has noted, the group doesn’t use tattoos as markers of affiliation — in marked contrast to the likes of MS13 and Barrio 18.

Given that ICE arrested 976 gang members in February, it’s fair to describe the vetting process behind the Salvadoran deportations as incompetent, and that’s being generous. A charter flight even arrived with eight women — a surprise that proved too extreme for even Bukele, who harangued his American counterparts for violating the terms of their agreement. The women were ultimately returned to the United States, with many claiming that officials asked passengers to sign affidavits confessing membership in Tren de Aragua.

Beyond Trumpian chaos, the GOP’s characteristic incoherence appears to have contributed to the Salvadoran debacle. Days into Trump’s presidency, Venezuela’s Maduro regime acquiesced to deportation flights in exchange for the renewal of Chevron’s oil license in the country. Furious, Miami hawks in Congress threatened to withhold their votes from the slim GOP majority. The White House immediately caved, leading to an abrupt end to Venezuelan repatriations and the subsequent invocation of the Alien Enemies Act. The plight of CECOT deportees has since been a propaganda boon for Maduro, as thousands have poured onto Venezuelan streets to protest against Washington’s forced disappearances to El Salvador.

The Trump administration also wrongfully deported the Salvadoran national Kilmar Abrego García, though his case is a complicated one. Kilmar’s family business was allegedly extorted by Barrio 18 in his home country. Had he solicited asylum when he first traveled to the United States, he could have claimed a credible fear of persecution. Instead, ICE nearly deported him in 2019. By that point, Kilmar wasn’t eligible for asylum, but a judge granted him “withholding of removal” on the grounds that his life was still at risk in El Salvador.

Kilmar’s alleged ties to MS13 remain unproved, and he complied with yearly check-ins at ICE. Yet the reality is that the case is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate. It’s reasonable to question Abrego García’s current immigration status; by 2019, his family business was defunct and the threat of Barrio 18 diminished. At the same time, he should have been eligible for residency through his marriage to a US citizen. Ironically, recipients of withheld removal like him are ineligible for permanent residence but can receive work permits.

None of this excuses the Trump administration’s denial of due process to Kilmar Abrego, let alone hundreds of apparently nonviolent offenders condemned to life in a foreign gulag. Surprising as it may be to MAGA, the Fifth Amendment entitles noncitizens to due process. Considering that the president is floating sending US citizens to the CECOT, and is attempting to deport legal residents over anti-Israel op-eds — it’s fair to wonder if Trump is bent on importing Maduro’s and Bukele’s governance model, even as he deports their citizens.

Instead of governing by decree like Maduro or Bukele, the White House could pursue long-term, durable reform in the legislature. A reasonable compromise with Democrats could be to close the loophole in the Immigration and Nationality Act which allowed virtually any border-crosser to apply for asylum under Biden. In exchange, Republicans could acquiesce to the regularization of spouses of US citizens, a move which would help accelerate deportations by annulling the ongoing issue of custody for the children of illegal spouses.

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Unfortunately, much of the GOP is currently committed to ending asylum outright. It’s similarly telling that Christian conservatives justify imprisoning the fathers of US citizens in CECOT. The fact that immigration enforcement was more or less abrogated during most of Biden’s term doesn’t justify violating constitutional amendments. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s once-vaunted approval on immigration is in free fall, particularly among Latinos, a key segment of the Republicans’ new base.

Contrary to much of the party’s narrative about serving a “multiracial working class”, the GOP appears bent on alienating previously die-hard supporters, such as Venezuelan-Americans. Unlike MAGA partisans, the broader working class has little interest in terrorizing migrants for the sake of likes on the X app.

For their part, Democrats would do well to acknowledge that popular support for restrictionism is an inevitable consequence of mass illegal immigration. The fact that migrants’ own countries of origin have experienced the same trend — as I learned on my trip to Peru — suggests that more is at play than Left-of-center parties “accepting conservative frames on immigration”, as progressives worry. Even in Left-wing Mexico, 55 percent oppose allowing entry to foreign migrants.

For Left and Right, the Obama administration’s common-sense mix of pathways to citizenship and overwhelming enforcement was a key source of its appeal with Latino and working-class voters. It should, moreover, give Democrats pause that Biden’s — and Hillary Clinton’s — abandoning of Obama’s winning formula subsequently enabled both of Trump’s ballot-box victories. In their Fox News-distorted reality, Republicans also fail to recognize that the “Kenyan-born” Obama respected due process, even as he deported almost 3 million in his first term.

The mistake of MAGA Republicans and progressive Democrats alike is that they each fail to understand that their priorities are comparably unpalatable to most Americans. So long as both factions remain beholden to the preferences of nativist incels and cosmopolitan elitists, respectively, they will continue to sow maximal cruelty, exploitation, and sectarian hatred among the very people they claim to represent.

The crackdown has been accompanied by highly produced advertisements, combative press conferences, and photos of shackled prisoners ushered out of the country onto military jets. Never missing an opportunity to claim victory and provoke its opposition, the White House’s official X account has used cartoon AI images and ASMR-style videos to trumpet its harsh approach.

Naturally, these efforts have prompted fury in the media. Most Americans will now be under the impression that President Trump is delivering on his biggest campaign promise. But the theatrical measures and draconian legal measures mask the reality that this administration’s immigration policy is much more business-as-usual than it would care to admit.

It’s true that the number of attempted crossings of the US-Mexico border have plummeted. But, despite the vast numbers of illegal migrants still in the US, Trump’s actual deportation record is below that of last year, when the Biden administration sent back more people on a month-to-month basis. Perhaps most significantly, Trump has so far ignored the biggest magnet for those crossing the border without authorization: the many corporations luring migrants with the promise of employment. There is a discrepancy between the White House’s rhetoric and policy, and it raises profound questions about the administration’s true priorities and whom it ultimately serves.

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Consider the likeliest destinations of illegal migrants. Those without documentation tend to make up a significant portion of the workforce in construction, slaughterhouses, restaurants, hotels, janitorial work, and gig delivery services. Yet businesses in these industries have reported few significant raids from US Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. These pillars of the economy are virtually untouched by the supposed crackdown.

What’s more, despite ample laws that exist to prosecute employers for knowingly employing or recruiting illegal labor, Fortune 500 American executives have faced no scrutiny. You might expect the largest housebuilder in the country, KB Home, to have been bothered by ICE agents since the change in administration. But Robert McGibney, the company’s president, told investors on a recent call that “We’ve seen nothing at all related to immigration”.

Similar quiescence was reported to investors of Taylor Morrison Home, another homebuilder. “We’re happy to report that we haven’t seen anything hit the job site,” said an executive. A counterpart at Tri Pointe Homes reported that the apparent crackdown had resulted in “no impacts at all”. 

This is not to suggest impropriety on the part of KB, Taylor Morrison or Tri Pointe. I mean simply to point out that the construction industry, being one of the industries believed to employ illegal migrants, seems to be receiving little scrutiny. There is a considerable distance between the media firestorm and business reality. 

And the collective sigh of relief from corporate employers comes as the administration has officially signaled leniency for business interests. Trump has, in fact, offered a generous reprieve to industries involved in employing illegal migrant labor. For all the suggestion of zero-tolerance, he has recently mooted the idea of allowing undocumented agricultural workers to leave the country and return as guest workers. “We have to take care of our farmers, the hotels and, you know, the various places where they tend to, where they tend to need people,” the President told reporters earlier this month. 

The contradiction at the heart of the administration’s approach reveals a fundamental tension between populist rhetoric and pro-business reality. While cameras roll for dramatic deportation footage, the industries dependent on illegal migration are maintaining business as usual. This disconnect could ultimately undermine the economic nationalism that propelled the Trump campaign to victory.

What has caused this disconnect? For a clue, we should look to high-dollar donations. The Trump Vance Inaugural Committee Inc, in a filing last week, revealed that its biggest single contributor was Pilgrim’s Pride Corporation, a chicken processing company in the United States. The egg-producing conglomerate gave $5 million to fund the inauguration, far outpacing business donors with much deeper pockets, such as Amazon, Meta, ExxonMobil, and Pfizer.

Pilgrim’s Pride has much to gain from a lax approach. Last year, the company confirmed reports that it used buses to transport Haitian workers to its plant in Russellville, Alabama. It also employs thousands of migrant workers, many of whom are alleged to be without documentation, at its poultry facility in Moorefield, West Virginia.

The activity of Pilgrim’s Pride, then, exemplifies the industrial-scale employment of undocumented workers that has become standard in certain sectors of the American economy. In this, the company is representative of an industry that has done more than any other to ruthlessly exploit migration.

Other firms have been accused of using child labor to work dangerous jobs for low pay. The New York Times, for instance, has identified immigrant children employed in poultry plants from Delaware to Mississippi. This sort of exploitation goes beyond the food industry; the newspaper also reported that 12-year-old migrants were working in the construction sector as roofers.

All of this is at odds with the promises that the Trump campaign made before taking office. Last year, the soon-to-be Vice President, JD Vance, said that migrants’ below-market pay had “undercut the wages of American workers”.

Accepting the nomination, Vance said: “We’re done importing foreign labor — we’re going to fight for American citizens and their good jobs and their good wages. We need a leader who’s not in the pocket of big business, but answers to the working man, union and nonunion alike. A leader who won’t sell out to multinational corporations.”

Such remarks represented an incursion into the traditional, labor-centric offering of the Democratic Party. It is the kind of argument that is likely to have contributed to GOP success last year. In this way, the Republicans have taken advantage of the slow abandonment by Left-leaning politicians of blue-collar industries. They have adopted trade and immigration-friendly policies that have brought American workers directly into competition with foreigners willing to work for far less. In all, the Democrats have shifted their concern away from physical labor and brick-and-mortar workplaces and toward the professional service sector and the highly-educated knowledge economy. As such, it has left itself vulnerable to such a challenge from the populist Right.

Studies have shown the negative impact of immigration on wages for competing American workers, especially those with lower levels of education. And over the past five years, the US has inadvertently conducted a live experiment on reduced migration and wages. During the early years of Covid, when the border was shut down, migration levels plummeted to record lows. According to new analysis, the corresponding tight labor market produced rapid salary increases among those working at the bottom of the income scale, particularly those in leisure, hospitality, and transportation — the very industries with the highest concentrations of migrant workers.

The rapid “wage inflation” rate angered corporate America and provoked a furious push to import more workers. The major business lobby groups, including the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce, successfully pressured the Biden administration to loosen immigration restrictions and to grant protected status to a variety of immigrant groups so they could take jobs in American factories, restaurants, and meatpacking plants, thus alleviating the pressure to continually raise wages. As migrant workers streamed into the country, wages for blue-collar industries returned to stagnation.

Again, investor calls reveal the interests of corporate America. “Any pro-immigration policies that would be implemented will benefit us [by] increasing the availability of labor throughout the country,” said Andrew Masterman, then a leading landscaping executive, on one such call.

There is no doubt that the Trump administration could level the playing field and hold business groups liable for their role in fueling the migrant crisis. Even now, employers and staffing agencies routinely place advertisements in social media and in Latin American newspapers, beckoning workers across the border for better employment opportunities. There is ripe potential for a crackdown on corporations tapping illicit forms. The legal framework for such enforcement already exists; what appears to be lacking is the political will to implement it systematically.

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Instead, there has been a broad relaxation of accountability towards corporate actors. In recent months, the government has announced an abrupt rollback of investigations for corporate crimes on a variety of matters. The Department of Justice recently abandoned a foreign bribery inquiry into the outsourcing giant Cognizant, while financial regulators have voluntarily dismissed fraud lawsuits against Bank of America and J.P. Morgan Chase. These developments signal a broader retreat from corporate accountability. The retreat encompasses not only immigration enforcement, but other regulatory domains.

What’s more, if the first Trump administration is any guide, there will be no significant criminal enforcement actions on employers soliciting illegal labor. Even in the aftermath of the largest employer raid during the four-year period — an August 2019 ICE raid on several Mississippi poultry plants, which rounded up about 680 illegal workers — the only corporate leaders to face charges were low-level supervisors and human resource officials. The owners of the plants were not prosecuted. 

In December, there was a rare outbreak of migration-related concern among information technology workers. Grassroots supporters of the President pointed out that major corporations have used H-1B visas to ruthlessly outsource and replace American employees with lower-wage Indian tech workers. Executives such as Elon Musk angrily defended the foreign worker program, calling it essential. Trump was forced to pick a side.

Should he remain committed to his campaign promises to clamp down on migration of all types and do away with the H-1B program, which he had previously called “very, very bad for workers”, or should he largely keep the program in place, as Silicon Valley executives had demanded? This decision represented a critical test of the administration’s priorities and its willingness to challenge powerful business interests.

Ultimately, Trump sided with business executives such as Elon Musk, whose companies have long relied on a significant H-1B workforce. 

The immigration issue will come down to similar priorities. So far, the administration has focused on splashy enforcement actions that do little to resolve the root causes. Draconian arrests of students over speech concerns and symbolic arrests of alleged gang members may play well to the conservative tabloid press, yet these actions do little to address the systemic causes of mass migration and its impact on the American worker. Revamping the way corporations exploit foreign labor will require a crackdown on the businesses that have long fueled the crisis. Doing so would mean upending the traditional cozy alliance between politicians and corporate donors, an act that appears not to be attractive to the White House. Nevertheless, the administration’s ultimate legacy on immigration is likely to be judged not by the spectacle of enforcement actions, but by whether it fundamentally changed the economic incentives that drive illegal immigration in the first place.

The men, mostly from West Africa, are the latest arrivals at a 2,200-bed, male-only migrant center that opened two weeks ago. Some have come from other parts of the city, where shelters are closing down; others from out of state, with one telling me he was sleeping on the subway for two weeks until he heard about the new opening. “I was kicked out of the last shelter for getting in a fight, so I had to find somewhere new,” he says.

It’s conditions like these that have triggered a massive backlash among working-class communities of color in New York. The South Bronx, where I visited, saw a significant red shift in the 2024 election, along with several other neighborhoods in New York’s outer boroughs. This shift has prompted some soul-searching — and shape-shifting — on the Democratic side. Most notably, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo has rebranded himself from a pot-legalizing progressive to a law-and-order moderate in his bid to become the next mayor of New York City.

Given his clear frontrunner status, Cuomo’s “clean-up-the-mess” campaign has already attracted a number of key endorsements. And with the incumbent Eric Adams’s approval rating in the drain, it is likely that Cuomo will clinch the June primary (which would make him a shoo-in for the general election come November, in light of the city’s Democratic tilt). The question, though, is whether his hardened rhetoric will translate into real policy — or if, like Adams, he’ll find himself trapped between an angry electorate and an uncooperative party.

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New York’s migrant crisis is not over. An estimated 44,000 newcomers are still being housed and sheltered — the same number that the city’s entire homeless-shelter system served just three years ago. To date, it has cost the city nearly $7 billion (more than all emergency services combined). According to a poll last month, more than half of Gotham’s residents believe that the situation is “less under control” than it was four years ago, while 32% believe it is “about the same”. Just 9% believe conditions have improved.

It’s true that some shelters are closing, and 188,000 migrants have, according to the mayor, been “helped… to take the next steps in their journey”. It is not exactly clear, however, what these next steps are. No measures have been taken to track or monitor those who have left, and many have been found living in squalid conditions.

Some have crammed into apartments in New York’s outer boroughs, while others have slept outdoors, on trains, or in houses of worship. Last month, for example, the New York Fire Department discovered 70 migrants living in the basement of a Queens furniture store, followed by another discovery of dozens more living in a commercial space in The Bronx.

“They’re either on the street or selling items illegally,” Robert Holden, a Democratic member of the City Council, tells me. “They’re selling food illegally, they’re selling drinks in traffic, they’re on the expressway. And they commit crimes, because many can’t work.”

Holden, who represents a district that swung for Trump in last year’s presidential election, says that residents were tired of the “anarchy” during the Biden administration. Border crossings soared under the Democratic president, averaging two million per year between 2021 and 2023, the effects of which are still being felt today. “Everyone knows people that have moved out over the last five years,” Holden says. “They see the quality of life of their neighborhoods around the city dropping. Everywhere was affected but it hit the working people the hardest.”

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Then there are the shelters that still exist. The mayor’s office states that a total of 53 shelters will close down by June 2025, but new ones, such as the converted storage facility in the South Bronx, are still popping up. “No one told us this was happening,” Alejandro Lopez, a South Bronx resident, says, “so now we have hundreds of jobless men hanging around the neighborhood. It can’t be good.”

“I want them gone — all of them,” says another passerby. “All they do is bring trouble.”

Over the past three years, city leaders struggled to cope with the influx of migrants into their neighborhoods. From deep-blue neighborhoods like Clinton Hill in Brooklyn to more Trump-supporting areas like Staten Island, the message was the same: get them out. But as frustration grew, it created an opening for the ghosts of New York’s past to return.

Andrew Cuomo, who resigned as governor over sexual-harassment allegations in 2021, leveraged the crisis to quietly tiptoe back into the limelight. In a Wall Street Journal op-ed last year, he described the migrant crisis as a “tipping point” for Gotham, suggesting that the city was stuck in a “death spiral” — a point he doubled down on two months later. And in last week’s announcement video, he tapped into similar themes. “You feel it when you walk down the street and try not to make eye contact with a mentally ill homeless person,” Cuomo said. “Or when the anxiety rises up in your chest as you’re walking down into the subway … the graffiti, the grime, the migrant influx, the random violence — the city just feels threatening.”

This marks quite the turnaround for a man who once proudly described himself as an “undocumented person”. In a decade as governor, Cuomo pushed or acquiesced to a raft of progressive measures to support illegal immigrants. In 2019, he strongly backed DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) and signed the New York DREAM Act, which provided illegal students access to state financial aid for college. That same year, he passed the Green Light Law, granting illegal immigrants the right to obtain driver’s licenses in the Empire State.

As part of the first anti-Trump #Resistance, he issued executive orders opposing Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids and sued the Trump administration over policies like the Public Charge Rule, which aimed to deny green cards to immigrants using public benefits. Most famously, when he announced his opposition to the then-president’s so-called Muslim ban, he declared: “As a New Yorker, I am a Muslim. As a New Yorker, I am Jewish. As a New Yorker, I am black, I am gay, I am disabled, I am a woman seeking to control her health and her choices, because, as a New Yorker, we are one community, and the New York community is composed of all of the above.”

Yet the Big Apple in 2025 is vastly different from what it was when Cuomo left office in 2021. Public fatigue with traditionally liberal policies on immigration, public safety, and crime allowed Trump to expand his support across nearly every neighborhood, particularly in districts with sizeable migrant populations.

In The Bronx, for example, where there was (and still is) a big migrant presence, 27% of the borough’s residents backed Trump — almost three times the share in 2016. “Most migrants are good, hard-working people,” says Lisandra Martinez, who lives 10 blocks away from the new South Bronx migrant center. “But there are always one or two who cause problems. If the shelter closes, where are they gonna go? What are they gonna do? We are a close community, and I don’t want them doing bad things around here.”

This, in large part, explains Cuomo’s own transformation from progressive governor to a law-and-order moderate who now says that he will “work” with Trump. New polling shows that 81% of New Yorkers support deporting illegal immigrants convicted of violent crimes, versus just 16% who oppose it.

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But New York’s status as a sanctuary city, combined with resistance from progressive Democrats, has made even this straightforwardly popular initiative difficult to accomplish. Adams in recent weeks has endured heavy attacks from members of his own party for cooperating with ICE in deporting criminal illegal immigrants. Recently, he issued an executive order to allow federal immigration authorities into the Rikers Island jail complex, which prompted calls by House Democrats that he was “selling New York out”.

The question then, is whether Mayor Cuomo would continue in the same vein as his predecessor. As governor, Cuomo was not afraid to take on the progressives in his party when dealing with relatively “safe” issues like taxing the rich, universal health care, and education reform. But on immigration, he marched in lockstep with the Left, even criticizing the ultra-progressive Mayor Bill de Blasio for failing to do enough to protect illegal immigrants from federal enforcement. And when de Blasio maintained that city law enforcement would not cooperate with ICE unless absolutely required, Cuomo went further by threatening legal action against ICE during Trump’s first term.

All of which casts doubt on Cuomo’s rebrand as a border hawk. If the Trump crackdown turns ugly, and ICE deportations accelerate, Cuomo may find it politically expedient to return to his previously progressive positions. Ever attuned to shifts in public sentiment (and among his own party), he will not want to be seen as bending the knee to Trump.

But it is not Cuomo or any political leader who will suffer as a result. As Robert Holden tells me, it is New York’s forgotten class: “My constituents are middle class, and the illegal immigrants are threatening their very existence. They’re making New York less affordable to live in and it’s driving people away. For the past four years we’ve been losing our city. We need to get it back.”

The Washington Post had just published a story in which migrants processed through Gitmo alleged mistreatment. The media, Hegseth told the service members, don’t appreciate what the joint task force is up to, and their coverage “frankly is, you know, full of a lot of bullshit”.

Between his salty language, camo hoodie, and the “We the People” tattooed across a forearm, the former Fox News anchor is unlike any previous Pentagon chief. To spend time with Hegseth is to remember that feeling of crashing parties on Greek Row as an undergrad.

His bro-y-ness — which gave rise to serious allegations of womanizing and hard drinking, some false or exaggerated, others harder to sidestep — made him Trump’s toughest confirmation battle. In the end, it took a tie-breaking vote from Vice President JD Vance to get him through. Tapping Hegseth to run the Department of Defense attested to the President’s utter disregard for DC convention, doubly so the second time around.

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Yet the bro vibes can also be deceiving. The Ivy-educated Hegseth has a sophisticated grasp of the challenges facing the United States this century. He represents a generation of officers embittered by what used to be called the War on Terror, and is bent on ditching the bipartisan consensus that led America to take up regime change and nation-building. As one senior defense official in his inner circle told me: “Pete believes he was lied to, and he believes he has to shake up the [national-security] complex”.

The visit to Gitmo was a strange homecoming of sorts for Hegseth, who served as a National Guard lieutenant on the prison facility before volunteering to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which he earned the Bronze Star. “A lot of guys and gals of my generation started out just proud to be serving, proud to be contributing,” he tells me. “‘Hey, we were attacked, and we wanna be part of that collective response, and no questions asked, let’s go do it.’”

In Hegseth’s case, this meant not only personally fighting in George W. Bush’s wars, but making the case for expanding and escalating them. In 2007, in between military stints, Hegseth became executive director of Vets for Freedom, a Bill Kristol-advised group that advocated for the Iraq “surge” and assailed politicians of both parties — but especially Democrats, and one Barack Obama, for insufficient hawkishness.

Looking back on the post-9/11 wars now, Hegseth tells me “we would be foolish not to” notice that “they cost our country dearly: in blood, in treasure, in reputation. And the more you look at them, the more you realize the depth of the folly around what we thought we were gonna create in Iraq and Afghanistan”. The results: “Iran effectively controls Iraq, the Taliban effectively controls Afghanistan”.

Against that backdrop, you can see why the Trumpians’ repurposing of Gitmo — from a retirement home for aging al-Qaeda masterminds into a deportee-processing center — would be popular. “We’ve spent 20 years defending other people’s borders,” Hegseth told US troops. “It’s time to lock down ours on behalf of the American people. We deserve to know who’s coming into our country, what their intentions are, and where they’re coming from.”

Since 31 January, the migrant operation, drawing from every branch of the military except the Space Force, has constructed 195 tents to house deportees while they’re processed. Once the administration’s plans are fully realized, capacity will ramp up to as many as 30,000. I wasn’t permitted to view the high-security area used for 9/11-era detainees and the particularly bad hombres. The still-unoccupied tents in the non-classified area lack air conditioning, and even in late February, the Cuban climate was sweltering.

“I was like this for four months in Baghdad — no AC,” I overheard Hegseth telling an officer while inspecting the tents. “But fact is, you are safe, you are fed, you are not in the rain.” Fair enough. And then, too, the newcomers face much harsher conditions on the trek to the southern border, during which they are frequently preyed upon by smugglers, with women and girls routinely raped.

The question is whether all this is worth the expense. So far, Gitmo has processed a grand total of 177 deportees, according to one Department of Defense adviser I spoke to. Most have been “high-priority” cases, as determined by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) based on gang affiliation and criminal histories. The day I visited, a massive C-17 aircraft delivered nine more for processing. “The C-17 costs $25,000 an hour to operate,” I overheard one service member. “So those nine that came in, you could’ve given each of them a first-class ticket.”

Isn’t this all typical Trump showiness?

Hegseth disagrees. The Department of Defense “has sheer capacity that DHS and [Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)] don’t have. . .  If I don’t have a border wall, and I don’t have [barbed] wire everywhere, and I don’t have eyes everywhere. . . then how do you secure the border? Well, that becomes a pretty manpower-intensive effort at the beginning. Because you’ve got to flood the zone and interdict”. The armed forces can certainly do manpower. Border crossings are down 94% from the same period last year, according to the Border Patrol, “stupidly effective numbers” that Hegseth in big part credits to the military’s assistance to DHS and ICE.

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The fear associated with the very name “Gitmo” is part of it, too, something Hegseth didn’t shy from underscoring: “If you’re [a migrant] looking around going, ‘Hey, if I cross the border, I’m going to get immediately arrested, and instead of being facilitated and processed into the country, I’m going to be held temporarily, put on a C-17, and flown home — or flown to Gitmo?’ A lot of people start to say, ‘Meh, not gonna do it.’”

***

The US military is a miracle of state capacity, a fact showcased by the migrant-housing buildup on Gitmo. It should have taken 21 days on paper but was accomplished in a little more than a week. Such capacity doesn’t come cheap, however. The armed forces take up the largest non-entitlement share of the federal budget, $824 billion last year. And with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) squeezing the federal budget, is Hegseth worried about weakening capacity?

“Other than contingencies and our troops in the field . . . that’s the thing that occupies my mind the most,” he says. “We’re refocusing our priorities, we’re looking for efficiencies, we’re gonna pass an audit.” Still, “when I look at the budget, I’m always going to make recommendations to the president” — the emphasis here seemed to signal: not to Musk — “that we fund it in a way that ensures that we are always the biggest, the baddest, and most prepared for the next conflict. And I don’t care what the dollar amount is.”

Notably, Hegseth has directed the Pentagon not to comply with Musk’s recent ukase requiring all federal employees to write an email summarizing five things they achieved the previous week. Did he make that call on his own? Yes. “We made the call to say, ‘We’re going to do this process internally,’ because of the sensitivities of the Defense Department. But also respecting Elon and DOGE and what they’re doing. If there are people that can’t answer their email and reply with what they’re working on, then what are we doing here?”

One big driver of budgetary bloat is the Pentagon’s dependence on a handful of defense contractors: Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and General Dynamics, the so-called primes which have earned a lousy reputation for delivering late and typically billions of dollars over-budget. During his confirmation, Hegseth touted his independence from these mega-firms and vowed to shake up the procurement process.

“Get creative, disrupt the process, bring in people who are not part of the revolving door,” he says of his approach to procurement. “I don’t know how you can do this job properly, on behalf of the American people and under the guidance of the commander in chief, if you’re invested in one contractor or another.”

He adds: “I think we’ve had plenty of clouded judgment over the years: stacking the deck in favor of a company or [weapons] system instead of saying, ‘Clean plate, here’s what we’ve got, here’s what’s working, here’s what isn’t, here’s contractors that are bloated and out of control, and we’re going to use the Defense Production Act and emergency powers to renegotiate, because we’ve been bent over a barrel on this.’”

Under the existing procurement model, smaller firms have a hard time getting a foot through the door. “Your classic examples are your Palantirs and your Andurils,” a reference to defense-technology startups that integrate artificial intelligence into warfighting. Palantir and the like, says Hegseth, are “investing their own money in R&D, [and] have far more commercial business, so they’re not fully dependent on the DoD, but they’re patriots who want to invest.”

Hegseth is committed to making room for such innovators, yet it’s hard to pin him down on what, concretely, the procurement shakeup might entail: “We’re gonna do the same competitive processes, but we’re not going to play by the same bureaucratic rules that we have in the past. Obviously abiding by the law, but there’s a lot of things the president can do when you recognize the urgency of the moment.”

All this is unfolding amid a long-term shift toward the Asia-Pacific region as Washington’s primary zone of geo-economic rivalry in the 21st century, over and against an ascendant China. The change in emphasis was conceived in President Barack Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, which remained largely unfulfilled. Hegseth credits Trump’s first-term national defense strategy for “operationalizing” the concept, and promised more of it for the second term.

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“I also think we’ll see this keyword — in a world of finite resources, you have to prioritize,” Hegseth adds. Under ideal conditions, “the Department of Defense has a $2 trillion budget, and we can do everything, everywhere. That’s not what exists, so you have to look to allies and partners for burden-sharing.”

That message, delivered by Hegseth at a Nato gabfest and reiterated by Vance at the Munich Security Conference, has rankled America’s European allies. Yet Hegseth remains unsparing. “If your alliance is only flags, you don’t have an alliance,” he says. “You need armies. And if you have armies, that’s good for us and good for you in your backyard. And we’re having those same conversations with our allies and partners in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific” who are alarmed by Beijing’s widening ambitions.

The reprioritization also involves curbing Chinese influence in America’s own backyard: “We’re also looking at areas where we’re under-resourced like South America, like Panama, where we’ve allowed the Chinese to move their way in, and that shit’s gonna stop under President Trump…America First means things that we’ve paid for and fought and resourced,” like the Panama Canal, “better be neutral in navigation, and if they’re not, we’re gonna make sure that they are.”

Still, can Hegseth put himself in the shoes of nervous traditional allies? “Look, if you talk to Israel, we’re not abandoning that fight. We’re right there with them. You talk to our allies that are investing in Europe, they get it. I just talked to Saudi Arabia — they get it.” There is no doubt, though, that everyone from Latin America to Kyiv to Beijing has to reckon with the realities of Trump 2.0: “There’s a new sheriff.”

Yet even with Trump’s electoral mandate and iron resolve, it remains to be seen if the new administration can break Washington’s addiction to unipolar hegemony. The avatars of the older consensus — those committed to fighting for “democracy” everywhere, all the time — are down. But they aren’t out.

Like other braceros, my grandfather was sprayed with DDT, a toxic pesticide, upon entering the United States — a ritual humiliation born of American paranoia about Mexican “disease”. Wages were low and often stolen, while housing and transportation conditions were inadequate or downright dangerous. The program also helped depress wages for local workers, and to undermine their organizing efforts. Among the braceros themselves, organizing was extremely difficult; it was easy to deport any ringleaders back to Mexico.

The experience of men like my grandfather impelled the old Left, Mexican-American civil-rights groups, and the labor movement to oppose guest-worker programs. That opposition should extend to modern-day equivalents, such as the H1B visa, which allows tech firms to import what amount to white-collar braceros — and which has become the subject of an ongoing civil war on the American Right.

It’s no surprise, then, that Right-wing opponents of the H1 scheme found an unlikely ally in Sen. Bernie Sanders. Back in 2007, Sanders’s skepticism of guest-worker visas led the Vermont socialist to vote against a Bush-era immigration-reform bill that would have expanded such programs. Neoliberal Democrats would weaponize that record against Sanders in his subsequent runs for the party’s presidential nomination.

Today, as the Democratic Party reckons with its dramatic failure in the November election, Left populists have the chance to take the lead in forging a pro-labor approach to immigration — and, perhaps, a grand bargain with the populist Right that imposes order at the border and ends exploitative visas, while extending citizenship to the immigrant workers who have toiled and lived in the United States for years and sometimes decades.

The history of US agricultural labor underscores the need for a more worker-focused approach than the one progressives in recent years have adopted. Agriculture is the largest economic sector that remains excluded from basic New Deal-era labor protections. While workers in most other sectors have a federally protected right to form unions to defend their mutual interests, agricultural laborers do not.

Crucially, Mexicans were exempted from the 1924 Immigration Act that ended the Ellis Island era of mass immigration — often cited by a number of immigration skeptics as their ideal law — precisely because agricultural employers in western states wanted to continue exploiting Mexican workers. The easy deportability of these migrants was a significant selling factor for agricultural employers, continuing a long tradition of employers preferring labor that is easier to exploit and get rid of.

This is the same pattern — do what the boss says or get deported — promoted by modern guest-worker programs. That pattern goes back to their bracero origins, which proved so popular among employers that it continued to grow long after the war had ended, and even as demobilized vets — such as a young Cesar Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers union, where I work — came home and went looking for work in the fields. It was only after a horrific accident involving an overcrowded employer-owned vehicle that killed more than 40 bracero farm workers in 1963 that the program came to an end.

Notably, within a year of its termination, the first successful effort to unionize US agricultural workers began with the UFW’s historic 1965 grape strike in Delano, California. The confidence that striking workers could no longer be easily replaced by braceros was indispensable.

This history echoes today in the H2A agricultural guest-worker program, which is also rife with abuse. Federal investigations have repeatedly uncovered everything from forced labor to employers stealing worker wages to make political contributions. Unlike the H1B visa, which nominally gives recipients a chance at becoming Americans, the non-immigrant H2A visa explicitly excludes agricultural guest workers from future citizenship.

Even worse, workers’ visas are entirely dependent on their employers, effectively allowing bosses to deport a worker at will, or to simply not renew the visa for the next harvesting season — the most convenient way to ensure any potential troublemaker asking about wages or workplace safety will never again set foot in America. Needless to say, the H2A scheme has exploded in size over the past decade, severely undercutting the wages and jobs of the US-citizen workers who still make up a significant share of our agricultural labor force.

Could populist conservatives end such abuse on their own? The short answer is no.

Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-led blueprint for the incoming Trump II administration, explicitly called for a “cap and phase-down” of H2A guest-worker visas with the aim of “increasing employment for Americans in the agricultural sector”. Yet Big Agriculture, a much more powerful Republican constituency, wants to see H2A expanded and made cheaper by lowering wages.

As it is, the H2A visa program is already uncapped, meaning there is no legal limit to how many workers it can bring in. The only limits are the costs it imposes on employers required to provide housing, food, and transportation, with growers frequently cutting corners to keep costs down and ignoring the requirement to first offer jobs to local workers.

Still, employers are bent on expanding the H2A program to year-round industries, and worst of all, they want to reduce the federally mandated wages they must pay these workers. In a bitter irony, the prospect of mass deportations is now being used by some industry lobbyists as just the latest excuse to expand the H2A program, saying, in effect: If you get rid of one cheap foreign workforce, we’ll need another one to replace it.

Shockingly, the agricultural lobby, with help from several Republican attorneys general, has even opposed a Biden administration rule requiring seat belts on company vehicles transporting H2A workers. This includes the attorneys general of Idaho and Washington state, where deadly bus crashes involving seatbelt-less company vehicles have left dozens of H2A workers dead.

Unbelievable as it may seem to many conservatives, it was the Biden administration that sought to protect jobs of American workers against displacement by H2A workers. In sharp contrast, it was the first Trump administration that accommodated Big Ag’s priorities on H2A, cutting their wages and thus making it cheaper to displace American workers. Donald Trump even granted H2A workers a special exemption to his Title 42 executive order closing down the border, making sure H2A workers could continue to enter the country during the pandemic.

Put another way: the populist Right, on its own, doesn’t have the influence within the Republican coalition to restrict programs like H1B and H2A in the face of powerful corporate constituencies like Big Tech and Big Ag. The populist Right’s arguments against mass migration may have helped the GOP make historic gains among working-class voters, including with many Latinos who compete in the same economic sectors with new arrivals. But that doesn’t change the fact that Right-wing populists lack the muscle to take on Silicon Valley’s preferences on H1B or Big Ag’s preferences on H2A. The nonstop pilgrimages of tech barons such as Elon Musk, Tim Cook, and Mark Zuckerberg to Mar-a-Lago will see to that.

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Thus, any serious effort to reform the legal immigration system will need to attract progressives like Sanders who understand the negative impact of guest-worker programs on American workers of all races. Trade unions would be critical in forging such a bipartisan coalition. However, labor has one major demand from any immigration reform effort: an amnesty for existing undocumented workers.

This demand is born out of the most basic duty of any union: loyalty to members. Every union has a legal duty to represent every member of a bargaining unit, regardless of immigration status. The threat of deportation isn’t theoretical to labor. Organizers know from bitter experience that workers who are afraid of getting deported are harder to organize. Many have seen first-hand how the immigration status of outspoken worker leaders is used to silence or even deport them.

Expanding union density in the 21st century, then, requires taking into account the interests of undocumented workers. While employers may be happy to exploit these workers indefinitely without ever extending citizenship rights, the labor movement is locked in as a powerful constituency in favor of a pathway to citizenship. This disposition unavoidably complicates the populist Right’s efforts to consolidate into a coherent pro-worker project.

Despite this, there remains the outline of a deal here for those paying attention: legislation that restricts exploitative guest-worker programs such as H1B, H2B, and H2A, while extending a pathway to citizenship to the undocumented workers who are already here. Such a compromise could be combined with E-Verify provisions to effectively ensure a closed labor market going forward and assuage concerns on the Right about spurring further migration.

This would be an immigration platform designed to appeal to Main Street, not Wall Street, and one which the emerging populist center of American politics can rally behind. Call it the American Workers First Act, with four major provisions: restrictions on guest-worker programs; amnesty for undocumented workers without criminal records; mandatory E-verify going forward; and substantial investments in US workforce development.

This is admittedly a long shot in the current political climate. Any deal would need to include a sizable enough amnesty for Democrats to turn on powerful constituencies that would oppose any restriction to guest-worker programs, such as Silicon Valley. In turn, any deal that includes the dreaded A-word, would have to overcome significant skepticism on the Right, and likely necessitate other significant concessions to restrictionist priorities.

But despite the obvious challenges, it’s easy to see what both the populist Right and the labor Left have to gain from such a bargain. For the Right, America would keep the predominantly Latino (and mostly socially conservative) longtime residents already living here, while compelling them to learn English and pay taxes. In exchange, restrictionists would get to slash the number of migrants coming legally for the first time since 1924.

For the labor Left, such a deal is first and foremost a pathway to citizenship for very deserving and hard-working people. Extending full citizenship and labor rights to the undocumented workers who make up a large share of the workforce in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality, caregiving, and construction also creates new organizing opportunities. Many Democrats would no doubt still strongly oppose a compromise that went against the interests of major corporations. But the political pressure to seize the long-awaited opportunity for a pathway to citizenship would be unavoidable.

Could any Democratic senator really tell her constituents that she voted to keep the Mexican grandmothers undocumented in order for Elon Musk to continue bringing in tech workers on demand from India?

This is the conversation we should be having. The days of relying on business interests to deliver Republican votes for immigration reform are clearly gone, and have been since at least 2013. For a labor Left looking to protect and empower our undocumented members, it is the populist Right we should be negotiating with.

An immigration policy truly concerned with the interests of American workers would recognize a highly exploitable permanent immigrant underclass as a threat to American jobs and wages — one best eliminated by extending the rights and responsibilities of citizenship, not by the cruel and unworkable fantasy of removal. American workers would be the biggest winners of a compromise which would leave them able to compete on a fair and level playing field.

Abdul Ezedi, from Afghanistan, became a Christian in order to game the asylum system and gain a permanent right to remain in the UK — or so it appears. In 2018, Ezedi was convicted of a sexual assault charge at Newcastle Crown Court. Last week he was suspected of throwing a highly corrosive chemical at a mother and her children in Clapham, inflicting horrific life changing injuries. The unnamed priest who apparently admitted him into the church has come in for a lot of stick for being gullible in helping him convert. There but for the grace of God go I. I have probably baptised thousands of people. I do not know if any of them have gone on to do terrible things, but it’s perfectly possible. I do not judge this unnamed priest one bit for baptising Ezedi. Baptism is not a certificate of good character. It is an outward expression of the desire to be saved. And that is available even to the very worst of us.

But theology aside, it is important to emphasise that the church has nothing to do with assessing the validity of asylum claims. That is for the Home Office. Perhaps the Home Office did decide to take into account Ezedi’s “conversion” – but that is entirely up to them. And it is perfectly true that being a Christian in Afghanistan is a potential death sentence. There are reports that the Taliban have tortured Christians to ask them to give up the names of fellow believers – not unlike Elizabeth I as it happens. And there really are Christians in Afghanistan, and they are in grave danger. So you can see why the Home Office might take conversion to be a significant matter when considering asylum claims.

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So, was the priest naive? What was he supposed to look for? Eyes too close together? Evidence of past wrongdoing? Polygraph before baptism? There is no foolproof epistemological test for sincerity.

Take the case of Emad Swealmeen. He arrived in the UK from Iraq in 2014. The following year, he started visiting the Cathedral in Liverpool. He took an Alpha Course to learn about the faith and was baptised then confirmed as a Christian in March 2017. The Cathedral didn’t put obstacles in the way of his conversion. It had no reason to. But the Cathedral is more cautious in supporting claims for asylum. “We would expect someone to be closely connected with the community for at least two years before we would consider supporting an application” explained a spokesman from the Cathedral. That seems about right — the best test of sincerity is consistency of behaviour with professed belief over time.

But despite many in the church community writing in a private capacity to support Swealmeen’s asylum application, the Home Office rejected it. Perhaps they knew things that the church didn’t. He had been detailed under the Mental Health Act in 2015 and later arrested for wandering around town openly carrying a knife. In November 20231, and facing immediate deportation, Swealmeen detonated a bomb with several hundred small ball bearings in a taxi outside the Liverpool Women’s Hospital. He was the only fatality.

Was the church at fault here? Headlines mentioned “fake Muslim conversion to Christianity” as if the church were deciding asylum claims. It wasn’t. If there was fault, it was with an asylum system that took so long in moving to deportation. His asylum claim was first rejected in 2014. He was informed that all his appeal rights had been exhausted by 2015, yet he was still in this country in 2021.

Writing in the Telegraph yesterday, former Home Secretary Suella Braverman blamed the failure of Brexit to limit immigration on … the churches! The Conservatives have been in power for 14 years with a thumping majority. She was one of the most senior members of government, responsible for making our laws and enforcing them. But yes, it’s your local vicar that is to blame for mass immigration. “While at the home office, I became aware of churches around the country facilitating industrial scale bogus asylum claims,” she writes. This is desperate and pathetic stuff.

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Of course, it’s not just Muslim converts who try and game the church system. Sharp elbowed middle class parents looking to get their offspring into a good church school are often masquerading as pious believers in order to jump the queue. I know from long and bitter experience that some stop coming to church when their child has gained a school place. I also know that some have come to church with mixed motives and then discover something worth staying for. My own view is that the best way deter would be “fake Christians” is to make the conditions for church entry into church schools prohibitively high. Generally speaking, regular attendance at church for two years is just too much for those who want to get on their knees to avoid the fees. In the end, the lure of a warm bed on a Sunday morning gets the better of them.

In terms of identifying sincerity, fake converts from Muslim countries are hardly different in kind from pushy middle-class parents. I have had numerous asylum seekers in churches I have run. We had a woman from Iran whose entire prayer group was raided and “disappeared” by the authorities. That same night, she escaped to Turkey in the back of a lorry under a pile of fruit. She knows the Bible better than I do. I am not a particularly trusting kind of person, but I have absolutely no doubt that her asylum claim was genuine. But clearly, there are asylum seekers from certain Muslim countries who are encouraged to convert to Christianity in order to game the system. In theological terms it is for God (not the church) to sort the sheep from the goats. In secular terms, it is for the Home Office. Blaming a handful of clergy who might lean on the side of generosity of interpretation for the systematic failures of your bankrupt government is scraping the barrel of excuses.

There is a reason for this. Has is known as “Little London” because so many of its people have left for the UK to find, if not a better life, at least some form of work. Its population was once 17,000 but now, thanks to migration, it hovers at around 5,000, of which only 14% are employed. According to its mayor, Liman Morina, more teenage boys leave the town for England than from anywhere else in Albania. He recently explained that 80% of “his constituents survive thanks to the “hard and honest work of their relatives in Britain”.

Yet Has is more than a peculiarity; it is an intense microcosm of a wider youth exodus afflicting Albania. Remittances (sending money home) now make up 31% of the country’s GDP. In the first six months of 2022 alone, emigrants sent home €376 million. In the UK, this is a story about migration. But in Albania, it is a homily: about what happens to societies whose people no longer believe in anything.

***

The man’s hair is slicked back fastidiously. He sips a drink in the bar of the Hotel Gjallica, in the town of Kukes, just up the road from Has. He clutches a dark rucksack like it’s a sick child. His name is Agim Mazreku and he is a local legend. Back in the Nineties, he was a successful currency trader and wrestler — a surreal combination that seems somehow perfectly normal here. When Albania’s financial system collapsed, Agim withdrew all his savings and stuffed the cash into a dark rucksack that he never let out of his sight. He was a wrestler; he could handle himself. Then one day the gangs came. Armed with guns, they took it all. Ever since, he has wandered the streets with an empty rucksack — a testament, both to his loss and that of his nation.

During the Nineties, Albania was an even tougher place than it is now. For almost 40 years, the country was ruled by the Communist tyrant Enver Hoxha, who lead an insurgency against the Nazis and then set about brutalising and imprisoning his own people. Hoxha was a strict adherent to Stalin’s take on Marxist-Leninism and he made Albania as close to a European North Korea as it was possible to get.

Eventually the people got tired of it all. In 1989, student uprisings led crowds to tear down Hoxha’s statue. Multiparty elections came in 1991; a year later, the Democratic party won for the first time. After decades of extreme communism, Albania was now officially capitalist.

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What happened next was, of course, a disaster. People now had a chance to take part in the capitalist ideal: to accumulate wealth. But the sudden transition to a market economy meant there was little understanding of how to make it all work. A fall was inevitable, and it came in 1997 with the pyramid schemes — Firmat Piramidale.

Capitalism in Albanian was born in trauma. In the immediate post-communist years, three private state banks had held 90% of national deposits, but bad loans meant the Bank of Albania placed stringent credit ceilings on them — leading to unsatisfied demand for credit and the growth of an informal market and deposit-taking companies which were investing on their own accounts instead of making loans. These companies gradually turned into pyramid schemes, whose nominal liabilities eventually amounted to almost half of the country’s GDP. According to the IMF, two-thirds of the population invested in them. So when the schemes collapsed, the country descended into anarchy.

“In 1997, the money went away like… poof.” My fixer Endri Guri snaps his fingers. “The gangs started killing each other.” We are sitting in a restaurant in Kukes. Endri is explaining his people’s relationship to money — and to the UK. “Here, for some, there is a belief that if you work a normal job you are a sucker,” he says. “And this leads people to the UK.”

He continues. “The majority of houses were rebuilt using money sent home by migrant workers who have gone to the UK to work, either with the false belief that the state will help — or the idea that there is a quick way to make cash. Many work in the drug trade. But this is all fantasy. If it’s not easy for British people, then it won’t be easy for Albanians.” Endi is in contact with an NGO called Terre des Hommes that seeks to help integrate returning migrants back into Albanian society. Many have been deported or simply come back after too much exploitation, from people smugglers and drug or trafficking gangs.

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There are, he tells me, two types of people who make the journey to the UK. The first are the majority: honest, hard-working people, driven to it out of economic necessity. “The type of Albanians who stay here are the type you British don’t see. In this town, you can leave your door unlocked.” But times are tough. The average family income is $1,500 (this assumes two working adults), while 69% of Albanians cannot meet their monthly bills. The second type, he says, are those who see a stigma in honest work. He mentions my hotel, which is filled with African migrants employed to help construct a local bridge. “Ask yourself why in a town of such high unemployment there are no locals. They don’t want to work there.”

Instead, they see the returning drug dealers as the epitome of success. “This place during Christmas is amazing,” Endi tells me. “All the migrants come back to the city, and it transforms — filled with new cars, most of them just rented for show, some of them worth two apartments, and this inspires all the kids: losers stay, winners leave.”

“Please understand one thing. It’s the youth who always leave, and the youth are easy to fool,” he continues. “Look at this fuckhead,” he indicates a teenage boy sitting on another table, with what I am quickly learning is the informal uniform for young men here: a puffer jacket (ideally Adidas), tight dark jeans and white trainers. “This is the Albanian youth style: the ‘gangsta’ look that does not privilege honest work — that is just for suckers. These Ali Gs love the idea of ‘easy money’ — the drug money Albanian rappers constantly talk about in their songs, and kids lap it up.”

I ask why this is. “It’s hard to go from extreme communism to extreme capitalism. Under communism, the issue was never ideology but survival: we’d line up for bread and there would be none.” Communism failed, and then, after the pyramid schemes wiped out the savings of those who had worked honestly for years, so did capitalism. Now democracy is seen to have failed, too. What is left in terms of authority is simple: who is the strongest or wealthiest. If you don’t join a gang, you will end up as a “loser”, a teacher or janitor who earns $300.

“So they go where their money is — and they become smugglers and they come back and are proud of it. People here don’t give a crap about how you earn your money — only that you have it. “Money is like a drug: the more you get, the more you need.”

***

Rifat Demilaj is the Executive Director of the Centre for Youth Progress, a local NGO that works on civic engagement and human rights, with a focus on youth. “We have been working with returnees from the UK,” he explains. “Most are looking for money to go back again. They didn’t find paradise in the UK, they found… different things. The most unfortunate get involved with trafficking groups. First they charge them £20,000 to get into the country which they have to work off. The gangs then find ways to keep them trapped. It’s modern slavery.”

I ask him why the UK is such a favoured destination over, say, France or Germany. “Well, first it’s that you need fewer documents to work there,” he replies. “And it’s not just the money; people here are sick of the endless bureaucracy.”

And there are other things, too. My mind flicks back to a conversation I had with a local barber who has recently returned from four years in London because he missed his children. “British people are more cultured,” he told me. When I asked if he would return to the UK, he replied: “Every kid in Albania wants to go to the UK because there are no jobs here and even when there are, they pay terribly. Even my kids want to go to the UK. If I had a chance to go with my children, I would.”

Demilaj continues: “After 30 years, politics has done nothing for the people while politicians have gotten rich. Even the opposition and government work together. They both tell people to stay in Albania while their children are educated outside. A lack of belief in anything is the problem.” The desire to leave is so entrenched that it has now entered the culture. “Go into school and ask the children what they want to be when they grow up and they say: ‘an immigrant’…”

“Yep,” says Endri, with a drawl. “It’s the British Dream.”

***

Later in the day, I meet Met Tobli, Director of the Municipal Office of Pre-Tertiary Education, a white-haired man who sits in a bare office underneath a portrait of the founder of modern Albania, Ismail Qemali. On his desk, Tobli has a holder containing three small flags: Albanian, American and EU. “My input would be to tell them not to leave. There are people here; if we can live here, you can live here too.”

I ask how they are trying to stop kids from leaving. He tells me that they avoid mentioning the subject directly so as not to give the students ideas. “[I’d say that] if you go to the UK, you will need to work to live. If you stay, you will work to live. You must work in both places. It’s not free or easy money.” I then ask him about the flags on his desk. “These?” he replies. “They symbolise where here we are going.” If Albania joins the EU will things change? I ask. “Of course.” We leave and walk through central Has. All around are refurbished buildings painted in bright colours. Just off a main thoroughfare is a house run to seed with a modern, glass-heavy extension bolted onto it like a small space station affixed to a hut. This, Endi explains, was built with migrant money.

Outside the Britain Resto Bar, I meet 17-year-old student Sara. She tells me that many of her classmates think about going to Britain. Her own brother is there — working in construction. “He says it’s a lot harder and it’s a lot different. And the thing is that many go without papers, which means people can blackmail them.” People see the UK as a very rich country where things come easy. Through her brother, she knows that is not the case — but still she wants to go one day, even just to visit.

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Inside, the bar is enveloped in a haze of cigarette smoke. “It was built in February,” Endi tells me. The owner worked in the UK before coming back and bought it. Sitting in a corner sofa area with four of his friends — all in regulation jackets, jeans and trainers — the owner’s nephew tells me that his dad put in 20% of the money for the bar. They named it Britain because they have so many family members there. His family, he told me, has been working there for years, and now own a scaffolding business. I ask him if he intends to go; he grins and flicks open his passport, proudly showing me a UK visa. “You can’t stay here,” he says, “because of both the government and the state.” As we leave, I remark to Endi that the nephew seemed nice. “Yeah,” he replies. “He was a good fuckhead.”

It’s a strange compliment, but strange things happen when societies no longer believe in anything. In Russia, the people eventually just went through the motions of communism knowing it was all nonsense; now they do the same with democracy. In Has, where they grow up with no local institutions to believe in, the people festoon their town with the long-discarded accoutrements of another city. It’s a place where residents bolt UK licence plates to their cars, where they hang out in British-themed bars, and where a middle-aged man has spent decades walking the same grid of streets, clutching an empty rucksack that has become a mausoleum to all that has been lost.

***

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I ask if they care about what happens to Kukës, but the question is redundant. It is basic economics — people will move if they are paid more. A decade of unprecedented migration into this country is proof of that. Loyalty to land and community has lost. Still, I try to resurrect that dead idea: is there not more dignity in being a professional in Albania than a labourer in the UK? “I did dignity for 20 years,” says a police officer, smoking behind us, “and now I have nothing.” To prove his point, he takes me out on patrol. “Look,” he says pointing to the streets, “all old people, no future.” Corruption, neglect: this is the story of Kukës he gives me. A place where after the fall of communism, the end of history never arrived. The last major construction work that was completed on time? A nuclear bunker on the orders of the country’s mad dictator Enver Hoxha, finished just as the Cold War was winding down.

Out of town, we head into what has become known as “the exodus zone”: the villages nestled in the foothills of an Albanian mountain range nicknamed the Accursed Mountains, from where most of its men have left to work undocumented in England. Here, the journey across the Channel starts to make sense. In one abandoned hamlet, 72-year-old Zehrito emerges from her newly refurbished house. Three years ago, her son landed in a dinghy on the shores of Kent. He walked into town, jumped on the train and spent the next three years building luxury apartments in London. The money he sent home paid for his mother’s heart surgery. “If it weren’t for him,” she says, “I’d be dead.”

Soon all this may end. Everyone I speak to in Albania, from the Crown Prince to the hotel receptionist, is trying to imagine a future in which half the population does not flee. They know the British Government is trying to close the door. News of Conservative ministers who want to bar Albanians from seeking asylum and fast-track deportation schemes make the evening news. More who leave illegally are being sent home. And for a country where 31% of GDP relies upon money sent back home by emigrants, this is not good news. The economics of the great diaspora are starting to be tested. The population is ageing. In some towns, patients must cross the border to Kosovo or Greece for healthcare. Schools are emptying out. Beyond the capital, large swathes of civil society are virtually non-existent because there is no one to do the jobs required. The World Bank predicts that soon a third of the country may be below the poverty line. This is despite the country’s consistent rise in GDP in the last decade — one largely driven by foreign investment. For those left behind, the age of exodus is starting to unravel.

On Albania’s Day of Independence in late November, the grandson of its last King, Crown Prince Leka, walks me through the capital. The Crown Prince recently broke his ceremonial silence to appear alongside Piers Morgan and Reform UK leader, Richard Tice, and defend his countrymen from Suella Braverman’s talk of an Albanian “invasion” in Kent. When I meet him, the prince is full of hope for the country. Guiding me through the open boulevards of Tirana, he talks not only about the country’s past but the promise of its future. We walk past the national bank being rebuilt, a place that will soon coordinate the growing investment in the country’s tourism sector. Despite the pandemic, visitors to the country generated more income than ever. Cranes tower over half-built apartment buildings.

“Albania has always been on the edge of Great Empires and this is what makes it unique,” he tells me as we near his grandfather King Zog’s old palace. It was the last European colony of the Ottoman Empire, the last under the most severe form of communism. In Albania, history has often happened too late. But now it is at the vanguard of trying to solve the global problem of international exodus. It has become the testing ground for different policies aimed at deterring people from leaving the country. British investments to prop up the country’s local economies and stop the flight have seen £6m poured into the region of Kukës. The money will be used to build infrastructure and  kickstart the region’s hopes of making the Albanian Alps a tourist destination. For a country weary of politicians swindling public money, there is scepticism. But the model of investment makes sense, and the £6 million is a trifle compared to the estimated £150m it would cost to find and deport those who have crossed the channel illegally this year alone.

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For Lavdrim Krashi, MP for the Dibra region just south of Kukës, this is only half the problem. There is also a need to lure back the people who left the country. “The diaspora is our biggest asset,” he tells me on the night of Albania’s Independence Day. The former senior local government manager from London, a poppy pin in his lapel, is an example of his own vision in action: to see those who have lived and worked abroad bring back their experiences and regenerate Albania. Others have done the same. One of his constituents arrived illegally in the UK and ended up serving the Queen lunch. Now he has returned to Tirana and runs a successful chain of restaurants. Lavdrim also makes it clear that he wants the values of these countries brought home too — particularly those of Britain.

When I hear this, I tell Lavdrim the story of Xhevahir, the schoolteacher I met in Kukës. Before the pandemic his visa application for the UK was rejected. Now between his job as a teacher and running an English-language school, he spends his time trying to convince his students not to leave. I had asked him in Liverpool House what he said to them, and he laughed at me: “It’s hard to know what to say when you are planning to leave too.”

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I ask Lavdrim if the hope of the returning diaspora, “British values”, and targeted investment in Albania’s local economies can really be enough to stop the lure of higher wages. He found it difficult to answer. Much of this wishful thinking is dependent on factors beyond the country’s control. To end the exodus, whether progressive thought likes it or not, requires countries such as Germany, England and France to stop encouraging the country’s “brain drain” with visa schemes. In addition, it requires a commitment by both the Albanian government and private enterprise to invest in something whose returns may not be immediate: the local economies of the nation-state. To rebuild a community, and indeed a country, hollowed out by a decade of hyper-globalisation.

Curiously, to explain their frustration, the men in Kukës turned to those values that Lavdrim seemed to want to bring home. A sense of respect and integrity they saw in Britain, but also its monarchy and history. They could not understand why other nationalities — Afghans and Iraqis — had apparently escaped the Home Secretary’s ire. A visa should be about love for the Queen and respect for the country, said one.

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After I spoke with Lavdrim, I went to see the statue of Skanderbeg, one of the heroes of Liverpool House (along with Steven Gerrard) who, in Albanian historical legend, saved Europe from the scourge of the advancing Ottomans in the 15th century. On the night of the Independence celebrations, a stage was being prepared for a concert by London-born English-Albanian popstar Dua Lipa. The day before, she had been given citizenship. There were plenty of young people on their way to the concert. They reminded me of the teenagers I had seen at Liverpool House, watching on TikTok the lives of their luckier contemporaries in England.

Beneath the husks of Tirana’s new construction, they walked past the statue of Skanderberg and towards the lights of the concert. I remembered something Bedri had told me in Liverpool House. “Deep down, no one wants to leave their home country.”

 ***

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Such progressive posturing may soon run out of steam: faced with a looming humanitarian crisis, the Democratic mayors of both cities, Eric Adams of New York and Muriel Bowser of D.C., are now begging the federal government for assistance.

Yet perhaps the most surprising element of all this chaos is the way the media have blamed the Right for this crisis. “Cold-Blooded Texas Guv Vows to Dump Asylum Seekers in the Middle of D.C.,” was how the Daily Beast covered the story. “GOP Governors Cause Havoc by Busing Migrants to the East Coast,” explained the New York Times. White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called Abbott’s policy “shameful” and a “political ploy”.

The migrants themselves, however, are under no illusions about who deserves credit for their arrival in the US. “Biden promised us that everything was going to change,” one migrant told reporters back in March. “He promised the Haitian community he will help them,” a Haitian migrant told Fox News. “I just need [the US] to tell me when we can cross,” a Honduran woman told Politico.

Where did millions of migrants get the idea that Biden had invited them in? From Biden himself, naturally. During the 2020 primary debates, then-candidate Biden said that migrants illegally crossing the border should not be detained, and like nearly every other candidate on the debate stage, he said he would decriminalise illegal border crossing. Millions of migrants were listening, along with the human traffickers who extort, torture, rape and kill them.

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And Biden has more or less followed through as President. From Day One, he stopped construction of a border wall with Mexico, ended President Trump’s travel ban restricting travel from 14 countries, and dramatically reduced deportations — from more than 267,000 in 2019 to just 59,000 in 2021. The Biden administration also vowed to end Title 42, a Trump-era restriction that allowed migrants to be turned away due to the pandemic, though a federal judge in Louisiana has for now blocked Biden’s attempts to end the policy. Meanwhile, the Department of Homeland Security said this week that it plans to end another effective Trump-era program, Remain in Mexico, which allowed border agents to turn migrants away and have them wait in Mexico until their removal hearings.”

What’s most peculiar about all this is how the administration’s de facto open-border policy represents a remarkable U-turn on the Left. Until very recently, free-market Republicans were the ones pushing for things like amnesty and easy access to migrant labour, while the Democrats were on the side of limiting immigration. Back in the Nineties, Barbara Jordan, the first black woman from the South elected to Congress and Democrat Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform, wrote that the commission found “no national interest in continuing to import lesser skilled and unskilled workers to compete in the most vulnerable parts of our labour force”.

“Open borders? No, that’s a Koch Brothers proposal,” socialist Senator Bernie Sanders scoffed as recently as 2015. “What Right-wing people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don’t believe in that.” Fast forward to that 2020 primary debate and Sanders, just like Biden, said he would support decriminalising illegal border crossing.

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This reversal is especially surprising given that the Democrats’ base — or what used to be their base — agrees more with Bernie 2015 than Bernie 2020. In 2019, a large majority of black and Hispanic Americans said they would vote for a presidential candidate who stood for strengthening border security to reduce illegal immigration. This shouldn’t be surprising: Illegal immigration has been tied to a 20-60% decrease in black working-class wages. Another recent study suggested that immigration accounts for a third of the decline in the black employment rate over the last 40 years. “Black Americans are more supportive of limiting immigration than any other bloc of the Democratic coalition,” the sociologist Musa al Gharbi reported. “And Hispanics actually tend to be more concerned about illegal immigration than are whites or Blacks.”

Why did the Democrats abandon these voters? Many who support mass immigration do so ostensibly because of the overall effect on GDP, which is positive. But they tend not to ask, positive for whom? As the economist George Borjas has argued, immigration primarily boosts the incomes of the immigrants themselves, while redistributing wealth from the native poor to the native rich. In other words, among Americans, it is the elites who benefit from open borders, people whose professional-class jobs would never be threatened by someone who doesn’t speak English. For the American working classes, good jobs are sacrificed on the altar of helping those from other countries.

Point this out and you can count on a member of the Squad to call you racist — a ridiculous accusation given who has paid the highest price for mass immigration. “The history of citizenship in the US is deeply woven with the history of racism,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said back in 2019. “It has been used as the legal enforcer of racism for most of US history.” When Vice President Kamala Harris told would-be migrants to stay home, Ilhan Omar tweeted: “We should not abandon our values and rights to far-Right white nationalists.”

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But these accusations of bigotry hide a class divide that has seen the Democrats choose educated white elites over the working class again and again. Remember that immigrants make up nearly 50% of America’s household servants, 42% of taxi drivers and chauffeurs, and 35% of grounds maintenance workers. It is these migrants’ employers, not the migrants themselves, who are the target audience for Democrats’ “anti-racist” moralising.

Of course, many of these progressives also have compassion for migrants crossing the border in search of a better life. I do, too. It’s impossible not to feel for people seeking a better life for their children. But what about America’s own struggling workers? Why no compassion for them? Like so much of what passes for political debate in America in 2022, the fight between Governor Abbott and Mayors Adams and Bowser is less about values and more about interests. Big-city Democrats want to flatter the moral vanity of their elite base by rhetorically supporting illegal immigration, but only so long as border states such as Texas and Arizona are the ones who foot the bill.

Moreover, the “compassionate” approach is incentivising truly dangerous behaviours, leading to parents drowning in the Rio Grande with their infants and to children riding La Bestia migrant train and watching as others fall off to their deaths. A third of women who make the trip across the border admit to being sexually abused, and nearly everyone is preyed upon in some way by the powerful cartels that now effectively control the border. Trump may have gone too far with his family separation policy, but his relentless approach to the border ended up preventing a lot of suffering, both to would-be migrants and to American workers. Since the start of 2022, authorities have found 609 bodies on the border, a record high that doesn’t even include those discovered further north in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Some of these deaths made headlines, such as the 50 migrants who perished in the back of an abandoned truck in south Texas earlier this year, or the migrant from Nicaragua who drowned crossing the Rio Grande in May, or the 22-year-old who drowned in April. But most of these tragic and totally preventable deaths go unnoticed.

This is Leftist compassion curdled into cruelty. And it’s not Governor Abbott’s fault — it’s President Biden’s.

Hypocrisy is the easiest vice to diagnose because one only has to hold one’s rhetorical opponents to their standards and need not articulate one’s own. If you charge me with a sin, moreover, but then prove to have committed it yourself, your shame spares me the burden of defending myself.

This is not to claim that hypocrisy has no immoral implications. It is almost inevitably an act of deception — and a demand that others meet standards one is either unwilling or incapable of meeting. All of us are hypocrites, to some extent, inasmuch as it is easier to say something than do it, but that does not make it right.

Yet I think in most cases it is one of the lesser vices. Consider two men: John and Joe. John is a habitual and callous cheat with no pretensions to virtue and Joe is a religious family man who once betrayed his wife. I think most of us would agree that John’s behaviour is more condemnable — and that Joe’s worst sin was cheating and not hypocrisy. Joe might be more satisfying to condemn, because dragging the righteous from their perch has a thrill which denouncing the lowly does not, but that isn’t quite the same thing.

People on the Right love to talk about hypocrisy, in its undeniable and contentious forms. Check out any Right-wing website and you will find article after article about hypocrisy — and, more specifically, staggering hypocrisy. The “staggering hypocrisy” of the BBC. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Jean-Claude Juncker. The “staggering hypocrisy” of Labour.

But then I love to criticise hypocrisy as well. On the Right, our red meat is an environmentalist who takes a plane, or an advocate of socialism with a second home, or a male feminist who gets handsy after dark. Progressives idealists and scolds who cannot, or will not, live up to their own lofty ideals are entertaining archetypes, who make for good copy, but there are limits to this kind of rhetorical manoeuvre.

First, instances of “hypocrisy” can be nothing of the kind. For example, this year Dan Hodges of the Mail declared that Labour politicians “have to stop being a bunch of holier-than-though, self-serving hypocrites”. What makes them hypocrites? Hodges wrote: “Two years ago, Corbyn announced he was launching a campaign to oppose plans for a range of new grammar schools, roundly endorsed by his Shadow Cabinet. Corbyn attended Haberdashers’ Adams Grammar School in Shropshire. Sir Keir attended Reigate Grammar School in Surrey.”

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How is this hypocrisy? What are Corbyn and Starmer meant to do, go back in time and insist on their parents sending them to different schools? Left-wingers who rail against private schools while sending their own kids to them can be accused of hypocrisy, perhaps, but I don’t think we can hold Corbyn and Starmer’s education against them.

A classic example of misplaced hypocrisy-hunting came when Tory MP-cum-“Never Trump” fanatic Louise Mensch scoffed on Have I Got News for You about “Occupy” protestors who had iPhones and bought drinks at Starbucks, prompting Ian Hislop to ask whether one needs to advocate a return to the Stone Age to oppose state cuts. One must be careful that one’s charges of hypocrisy are not just hymns for the choir, intended to affirm Right-wing impressions of coddled progressives without illuminating the smallest substantive insight.

Another weakness with charges of hypocrisy is that using someone’s failure to uphold their standards as a means of discrediting those standards is a classic example of the ad hominem fallacy, or, in British English terms, playing the man and not the ball. I don’t want to be too much of a debate nerd. Such accusations can reveal some things about those standards — not least that they are hard to keep. But it does not prove that they are wrong to hold.

If Harry and Meghan use private jets while handwringing about climate change, for example, it might say something about Harry and Meghan but it says nothing about climate change. If Neil Ferguson meets his girlfriend while in lockdown it might say something about Neil Ferguson but it says nothing about epidemiology. If I tell people smoking is dangerous but indulge in a quiet cigarette behind closed doors, that does not mean tobacco is a health product.

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The ubiquity of these charges would be more understandable if they were effective. The biggest problem with Right-wing hypocrophobia, however, is that it acts as a cheap and toothless substitute for explicating and defending principles and policies. When Gary Lineker attacked people who oppose Britain accepting immigrants who illegally travel across the English Channel, for example, MP Lee Anderson called him a hypocrite for not accepting immigrants into his own home. Lineker then took the wind out his sails by inviting migrants to, yes, live in his home.

To be fair to Anderson, it is relatively easy for Lineker to say this when he has a mansion. Yet it is still lazy and weak to hunt for examples of personal inconsistency when he could have mentioned how accepting such immigrants encourages dangerous, illegal crossings, enables people smugglers, runs the risk of Britain accepting hostile actors, strains public resources and makes a farce out of British border control. Perhaps the latter would have made for a more strenuous and controversial argument but it would have been more honest and more effective — that is, to a conservative illegal immigration in itself is a bad thing, whatever the personal conduct of those advocating for it.

Right-wingers often argue, correctly, that Left-wingers use charges of personal bigotry as a means of avoiding difficult debates. Yet conservatives often do the same with the charges of personal inconsistency. The difference is that bigotry is a powerful charge, while inconsistency has fewer such damning connotations.

Again, this does not mean that charges of hypocrisy are worthless. For example, the enthusiasm with which many leftists greeted Black Lives Matter protests in the midst of lockdowns they had tended to ferociously support might not have proven anything about coronavirus but it was a powerful indictment of their priorities. Yet the Right should recognise their limits, since their opponents use charges of hypocrisy too. Long before the #metoo’d male feminist, the Christian moralist with a colourful sex life, for example, has been a classic archetype, as Jerry Falwell Jr. recently reminded us.

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Back-and-forth accusations of inconsistency have a lot to do with the decline of a shared moral language. In her book Ordinary Vices, Judith Shklar wrote: “This is the normal character of political discourse between irreconcilable ideological opponents… the contempt for hypocrisy is the only common ground that remains, and that is what renders these accusations so effective.”

Leftists, however, are far less reliant on accusations of hypocrisy, preferring charges of cruelty, prejudice and intolerance. This is because progressive values are more fashionable than conservative principles, so leftists have fewer qualms about articulating their own worldview.

This makes it more understandable that Right-wingers hope their opponents will hang themselves with their own cord. But it can also be tedious and ineffectual. It allows progressives to lead the conversation — with their values front and centre, even when they are being criticised — and reduces conservatives to the role of anklebiters. One should have enough pride in one’s own beliefs not to spend all of one’s time holding others to theirs. I mean, if your opponents lived with scrupulous consistency, would you have to admit that they were right all along?

Using the controversy surrounding a group of Covington Catholic High School students filmed in front of the Lincoln Memorial last year as a prime example, I complained that staffers and contributors at mainstream progressive outlets increasingly seem to see themselves more as activists and cheerleaders whose job is to fall on the “right” side of a given controversy, rather than journalists whose job is to investigate that controversy fairly, with a critical eye.

Not two weeks later, I stumbled into a wonderfully specific example of how these dynamics work in action. It involves Huffington Post, a controversial novel, and imaginary Mexicans eating chicken dipped in barbecue sauce.

In the United States, the book publishing industry — or parts of it, at least — is swaying and buckling from certain seismic cultural forces. As America’s conversations on race and identity have gotten louder and more public, some in and around publishing have argued that the industry is unwelcoming to people who aren’t white, straight, cisgender, and so forth, and that this discrimination is apparent when you look at which books gets published, and by whom.

There’s more than a kernel of truth to this. Publishing is (and has long been) a redoubt of the privileged, and the editorial offices of major New York publishers tend to be staffed largely with graduates of top colleges. Publishing isn’t quite as lily-white as some claim it is — yes, it’s about 76% white, but that’s in a country that’s about 72% white, and half of all interns are non-white — but few insiders would argue that there aren’t certain significant issues to address in making it more accessible to a broader swath of the population (which, after all, often leads to better stories anyway).

If the core claims of those criticising publishing on identity grounds are reasonable, that doesn’t mean that individual campaigns targeting supposedly “problematic” books always have been. Far from it, in fact — in the last few years there has been a succession of fundamentally unfair online pileons targeting books, mostly in young adult publishing, that are deemed offensive and emblematic of publishing’s broader diversity issues.

As Kat Rosenfield and others have shown, these campaigns tend to be based on highly exaggerated, ripped-from-context misreadings of the books in question, often spread via social media. Sometimes, for example, the argument a racist character in a book about overcoming racism said something racist, and therefore the book is racist is presented unironically, by grown adults familiar with literary conventions, as evidence of wrongdoing on an author’s part.

In one incident I covered, members of the Twitterati decided a character in the fantasy universe of the then-upcoming novel Blood Heir was black (there was no real evidence to suggest this), decided an allusion to modern-day slave trafficking in Asia was actually about American slavery, and decided that they therefore didn’t like the book’s handling of race and slavery.

They raised a sufficiently loud outcry that the imminent publication of the novel, authored by Amélie Wen Zhao, a Paris-born woman of Chinese ancestry who lives in the United States, was cancelled, though the book was later revised and released. In another instance, a black male author’s book about two foreign boys escaping Kosovo as it is engulfed in warfare was cancelled entirely based, again, on questionable claims.

These campaigns might now be spreading from young adult to general literature. Since late 2019, the biggest story in American publishing has been American Dirt, a novel written by Jeanine Cummins about a Mexican woman, Lydia, and her son, Luca, who are forced to flee their home in Acapulco to the United States after a drug cartel murders much of their family, including Lydia’s husband (Luca’s father), at a relative’s quinceañera barbecue.

While the book appears to be selling quite briskly — reaching Number One on the New York Times’ fiction bestseller list (it now sits at number three) — it sparked a raging controversy that appears to have popped off after Oprah picked it for her very influential book club. Since then, an endless parade of articles and essays have lamented how deeply offensive and harmful American Dirt is, most of them focused on the fact that Cummins is neither Mexican nor a migrant but a white American-born woman who is a quarter Puerto-Rican.

American Dirt’s critics insist, almost unanimously, that it isn’t Cummins’ race that is animating their anger, but rather her handling of the novel’s subject matter, combined with the fact that Latino authors, and authors from migrant backgrounds, rarely get seven-figure advances like Cummins’ (you will notice this hefty sum is mentioned quite frequently; the YA campaigns, too, tend to focus on authors who earned enviable advances).

Their campaign has been successful: according to a press release reported on by the LA Times, Macmillan, the parent company of Flatiron Books, which published American Dirt, met with a group of the book’s critics and stated that they would be “substantially increasing Latinx representation across Macmillan, including authors, titles, staff and its overall literary ecosystem” as well as to “regroup within 30 days with [the activist group] #DignidadLiteraria and other Latinx groups to assess progress.” Cummins’ book tour, meanwhile, was cancelled because of safety threats.

The problem, as I noted in my newsletter, is that many of the examples of the supposedly awful parts of American Dirt bemoaned by its critics are strained at best. In one widely circulated Medium essay, for example, the Mexican-American author and translator David Bowles made extremely basic errors about the book’s plot. For this misleading essay, he was rewarded with a New York Times column (which repeated some of his errors) and a chance to be one of the activists who met with Macmillan. In Jezebel, the writer Shannon Melero exhibited a similar lack of familiarity with the actual writing contained in the novel.

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But the article that is really sticking with me, for reasons that will become clear, ran in Huffington Post. It’s headlined “American Dirt Isn’t Just Bad — Its Best Parts Are Cribbed From Latino Writers” and is written by David J. Schmidt, also an author and translator.

His very strange main argument is that Cummins’ erred, somehow, by including real-life places and events in her novel based on the work of Mexican non-fiction writers — non-fiction writers she explicitly thanks in the book’s Author’s Note, and in one case references in the text of the novel itself. It’s difficult to even suss out a genuine criticism here, given that novelists include real-world elements in their books all the time and, like Cummins, frequently thank the individuals and texts that help inform their world-building.

Schmidt’s piece also includes this sentence: “[Cummins] describes an imaginary country where people put sour cream on their street tacos, dress their chicken with BBQ sauce rather than mole, eat black licorice drops rather than mazapán, and fear the Bogeyman rather than El Coco. American Dirt is also riddled with linguistic gaffes, including a character thinking of her own mother as abuela (grandma).”

This is a useful example of how, during a public outrage, so much smoke is generated by bad-faith actors that the casual passerby will assume there must be a roaring conflagration generating it, that whoever is being targeted did something truly wrong.

Because it’s remarkable, once you’ve read the book, how little there is here, and how conveniently devoid of proper context these examples are. American Dirt contains a single mention of licorice drops — Lydia recalls that her recently-murdered mother enjoyed that particular candy.

I’m not saying Mexicans are huge fans of black liquorice, but is it impossible a middle-class Mexican woman living in a major city lousy with American tourists (Acapulco) could enjoy, and have access to, that particular candy? And Lydia thinks of her own mother as abuela in the same way an English-speaking person might think of her mother as grandma, because that’s how she’s known to her children.

There are two mentions of “bogeymen” in the book, and they both come in the narrator’s voice, not out of the mouths of a Mexican character — “Because these are the modern bogeymen of urban Mexico,” Cummins writes of cartel assassins early on. Later she writes, in relation to a terrible incident in the United States, that “The vigilantes wanted to stoke community fear and incite outrage by inventing a group of murderous migrant bogeymen”. There’s no scene in which Mexicans “fear the bogeyman” himself.

As for the sour cream, it is not served with a street taco. Rather, Lydia and Luca buy it in the food court of “a vast shopping mall with a Sephora and a Panda Express and even an ice rink” in Mexico City — one which also includes a Crepe Factory. The idea of an establishment like this, plopped in the middle of a cosmopolitan megacity, having American-style sour cream, is a lot less ridiculous than the image Schmidt is attempting to conjure.

It’s Luca who eats the tacos with sour cream; he’s the English-speaking son of middle-class Mexican parents and grew up, again, in an American-tourist-heavy city, so in context, the idea of him enjoying sour cream isn’t ridiculous, either. The point, here and elsewhere among some of Cummins’ least honest critics, is to make her look as ignorant as possible, even if that requires massaging the facts a bit.

But when it comes to the chicken dressed with barbecue sauce, the facts aren’t even massaged, but rather snapped in half like a wishbone: there is no scene, anywhere in American Dirt, in which a single Mexican slathers a single piece of barbecued chicken in barbecue sauce. It simply doesn’t happen.

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I think Schmidt confused himself. Right at the beginning of the novel, when Luca and Lydia’s extended family is murdered (I’d say “spoiler alert” but the book’s literal first sentence is about a bullet whizzing past Luca’s head as the massacre commences), Cummins writes: “The clatter of gunfire outside continues, joined by an odor of charcoal and burning meat. Papi is grilling carne asada out there and Luca’s favorite chicken drumsticks. He likes them only a tiny bit blackened, the crispy tang of the skins.”

Then, a bit later, as Lydia, in shock, surveys the scene of the massacre with investigators: “In the shade of the backyard, there’s the sweet odor of lime and sticky charred sauce, and Lydia knows she will never eat barbecue again.”

Nowhere here, in the only mention of a sweet and/or sticky sauce that could possibly apply to Schmidt’s claim, is there any evidence of a Mexican person eating chicken with barbecue sauce on it. These passages prove neither that the sauce in question is barbecue sauce (all we know is that it’s sticky, at least when charred) or that it was intended for chicken (“Papi” is grilling both carne asada, meaning beef, and Luca’s “favourite chicken”).

I emailed Schmidt to ask him about this, and he replied that “The sauce is described as sticky, sweet sauce that is put on barbequed chicken.” But nowhere does Cummins say the sauce is for the chicken, and even if she did, that wouldn’t make it American-style barbecue sauce, which is the basis of Schmidt’s accusation of cultural illiteracy.

I found out who the story’s two editors were and emailed one of them about this, suggesting she correct this. She forwarded my request to the other, a fairly well-known progressive journalist — one whose name I recognised and respect. “The debate about the sauce seems like you’re projecting your own guess on the text rather using the context clues,” she wrote, declining to correct the story.

I was very surprised by this, and I found myself dwelling on it ever since, somewhat fixated. This barbecue chicken issue is a little thing, sure, but it’s a big little thing. That is, whatever disagreements may exist between journalists, we all agree — or at least publicly claim to agree — that, at root, our job is to print stuff that’s true.

Suggested reading

Why Incels are the losers in the age of Tinder

By James Bloodworth

Other critiques of American Dirt may be unfair, but they’re fundamentally subjective. This one isn’t: Huffington Post is telling its readers that a controversial book was written by someone so ignorant of Mexican culture she thought Mexicans dress their barbecue chicken the exact same way Americans do, even though this simply doesn’t happen anywhere in the book. If this doesn’t warrant a correction, what does? If we can’t agree on the norm “Don’t print stuff that plainly isn’t true,” what norms can we agree on? This is the lowest-hanging journalistic fruit imaginable.

I don’t think Cummins or Flatiron Books are blameless here. Setting aside linguistic critiques of the book’s Spanish I’m ill-equipped to evaluate, they did make two very silly unforced errors that warrant criticism: an Author’s Note in which Cummins refers to her previously “undocumented” husband without noting he is Irish (which, yes, is still a stressful situation to be in, but is miles away from being an undocumented Mexican migrant), and a book party at which barbed wire was used, rather insensitively, as a “cute” decorating motif.

But these issues don’t bring us anywhere near the apocalyptic storyline that has settled in as fact — that this is a disastrously ignorant, under-researched, harmful book — in some quarters. Watching the outrage bloom has been deeply depressing, and has only solidified my worries about rightside norms in journalism.

It’s one thing for resentful critics, eager to jump on outrage-bandwagons, to publish bad-faith misreadings of books on random blogs or their Facebook walls. There will always be unfair critics. But when major outlets like the New York Times and Huffington Post are helping to amplify this nonsense, without even checking whether the critics have closely read the books they claim to be furious about? When they won’t even correct textbook errors which hinge on objective facts about the contents of the books in question? We have a problem.