What are you asking, really? Can immigration be a positive sum game over time, even if it arranged in ways that harm the native working class in the short-term and contribute to inequality? Sure. 1/

But if that native working class has the political power to block such immigration and punish politicians who arrange it on those terms, won’t they? 2/

Will they be persuaded by a very uncertain whiggish liberal story that it will contribute to their grandchildren’s prosperity? Should they? 3/

(Note the “everybody better off” part of 20th C history also depended on transitioning from the Gilded Age to the New Deal. The inequality might have persisted, widened, in which case the history would not even generations hence be so whiggish and happy.) 4/

In any case, even if you are sure the long-term effect of unsegmented exploitative immigration is positive sum and good for everyone, you still are proposing something that creates profound short and medium term costs for many natives, who in the ling-term will be dead. 5/

How do you get these positive long-term results only if the working class you propose to place in competition with exploited immigrants — arguably a very large bloc! — is democratically enfranchised? 6/

My piece is about the politics of immigration. You can make immigration from poor countries popular if you exploit, segment, and broadly share the rents among natives. Whatever its long term virtues or demerits, exploitative immigration that competes with natives will not be politically popular. 7/

If you want positive sum immigration from poor countries to rich under conditions in which the native working class is enfranchised, you have to respect constraints that render the immigration beneficial or at least not costly to that native working class in the short term. 8/

Have there been times when immigration against the short-term interests of incumbent natives happened anyway, to their short-term detriment but our long-term benefit? Sure. History is full of peculiarities, borders used to be very weak, politics is complicated. 9/

Is it a good plan to just do that again? I’d say no, given the plain awareness by a potent plurality of the public that they may face important short-term costs from unsegmented exploitative immigration. /fin