Prior to LBJ, immigration was essentially proportionate to countries already represented in the US. Lots of Americans of British and German descent, for instance, was matched by lots of immigrants from Britain and Germany. LBJ changed that, making immigration increasingly dependent on academic achievement or potential, understanding the importance of knowledge workers and diversity in the information economy.
Kamala Harris's parents met at grad school at UC Berkeley - he from Jamaica and her from India. Once they graduated they became part of the academic and research professionals who define the leading edge of progress in developed nations. Her father taught economics at Stanford. Her mother was a cancer researcher at UC Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The Bay Area where they worked and Kamala lived before moving east for work has an immigration rate that is nearly triple that of the US as a whole. (And, of course, plenty of children of immigrants as well.)
Quite a few Americans were thrown by the fact that these immigrants were less likely to look like the folks who'd previously immigrated here from places like Northern Europe. LBJ's new immigration policy also resulted in immigrants who are generally more productive, innovative, and entrepreneurial.
The Bay Area, for example, has levels of entrepreneurship that has led to the creation of more wealth than anywhere else in the world - a rate of entrepreneurship enhanced by the portion of immigrants it has. The 12 most valuable companies in the Bay Area alone have a combined value that is 6X the value of Germany's entire stock market, 4X the value of France or the UK's entire stock market, and 2X the value of Japan's. There is no place or time in history that has even come close to the Bay Area's ability to create wealth, an ability enhanced by its diversity.
Of course most Americans are far more interested in taking power from women over their own bodies and lowering the portion of immigrants in their communities than they are in creating wealth and prosperity.
And the American leading in the polls for president thinks that state legislatures rather than individual women should have control over women's bodies, and actually thought that the country's first African-American president was literally from Africa ... and because of that won the affection of nearly half of Americans for whom such a claim seemed sensible and brave. In the eyes of some, Kamala Harris is a wonderful success story: in the eyes of most Americans she is alarming.
Biden - and presumably Harris - will win the Bay Area by a 4 to 1 vote but will lose rural Mississippi and quite possibly Ohio, Georgia and other states that value "tradition" more than progress, places that find immigrants alarming.
How alarming? Trump is leading in the polls, a majority of Americans delighted with his promise to deport about 15 to 20 million immigrants. To put the scale of this roundup, internment and deportation in context, only 4 states have populations greater than 15 million. Trump has expressed a willingness to to create internment camps to hold these immigrants. We could have a total internment camp population greater than the population of all but 36 states. And Americans who got angry about wearing face masks are very excited by the prospect of armed immigration officers busting into homes and businesses across the US to roundup people without proper documentation. (And of course this will mean millions of children born here, with citizenship, who presumably have a choice between orphanages or being deported from a country in which they have citizenship, causing the numbers who will be rounded up to swell.)
Hitler's was the last administration in the West to attempt internments at this scale.
But Joe Biden is old so we'll have to go with the much younger (by more than 2 years) Donald who promises us chaos and violence that will dwarf his last presidency. (How violent was his last presidency? His own VP had his life threatened on January 6 and now refuses to endorse the president he served with. Only one other time in all of American history has a VP turned against the president he served under. In 1832 - nearly a century ago - Calhoun resigned as Jackson's VP.)
It is doubtful that we'll have Harris as VP next year - and certainly won't have a minority woman as president. Not in a country where nearly half of Americans are convinced that if only history gave some nation a second chance at internment camps they could get it right. We have millions of angry Americans because, you know, egg prices went up last year. Polls now suggest that most Americans prefer the prospect of immigrant roundups and internment camps with populations greater than Ohio's to a president who stutters. It's a curious set of values we have.
Americans. We're not interested in creating wealth or in progress. We just don't want to be around people who look different.
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