I recently posed this question to a friend who knows tons about immigration policy. His reply:
A lot of conservatives just don't want refugees period, and REALLY don't want Brown Muslim ones. The US Refugee Program was historically treated as immune from immigration politics (Reagan and Bush championed it, it was a huge feather in the US cap during the Cold War to admit so many people fleeing communism), but Trump obliterated that and now it's intensely political.
A good amount of the above has been quieted by the rabid, massive engagement of US veterans on this issue. They vouch for these folks and they really feel like the US government owes it to them. [Many talk] … about what a black mark it is for [their] generation to have left so many Vietnamese behind.
This is also why the Afghan Adjustment Act has Republican cosponsors like Tillis, Moran, Wicker, Graham. These are not security doves or refugee advocates, they're people that listen to the military.
I think the biggest culprit is the Biden Administration. … Senator Biden was against Vietnamese refugees in 1975 and he's against Afghan refugees now. I think he really does believe that “we” equipped them, we trained them, we bled and died for them and that's the extent of our responsibility. I think he also believes that Afghanistan wasn't his war, just the war that he had the courage to end when all the other politicians didn't, and he thinks a lot of the criticism of this is bad faith politics by people who are actually upset he ended the war at all.
And yes I think it's always lurking in the back of his mind that every day conservatives are calling him “Open Borders Joe Biden” and that if a Ukrainian refugee commits some horrible crime nobody will screech about [Uniting for Ukraine] or blame Biden, while if one Afghan parolee commits a horrible crime it's going to be hung around his neck 24/7. And since he doesn't feel any particular obligation to these people in the first place, there's nothing pushing back against the incentive to mitigate that risk as much as possible.
And then you just have the regular old partisan cowardice where Dem leadership folks like Schumer and Pelosi won't criticize the White House (in an election year!) and whip their memberships to stay in line as much as they can.It's not any individual piece of this, it's how they all fit just together enough to choke all these pathways down to nothing. But the bottom line is if we had a President who actually felt some sense of duty or honor or obligation to these people, the rest of that stuff would be inconsequential. Conservative rhetoric about Democrats and open borders has been completely detached from logic and reason for years, nothing Biden does ACTUALLY pacifies any of this stuff because they're not responding to what's actually happening in the first place.
This is a failure of duty and responsibility and humanity from the White House above all else.
That all sounds right to me.
I think it's likely a combination of three things: 1) voters often have specific reasons to prefer policies that might not be optimal overall, e.g., tariffs that protect their own jobs; 2) voters might not be super aware of all the negative effects of interventions, if these are tangential to their own jobs, etc; and 3) voters might not be fully rational, a la Caplan. Relative to Bryan, I would emphasize the first two. I am not saying all voters are fully rational all of the time. But I think the accurate description is a bit less harsh than Bryan's characteriziation.
Do you think this has anything to do with what Bryan Caplan calls the myth of the rational voter, where voters hold factually incorrect views (e.g. the supposed negative economic effects of immigration) even after being confronted with contrary evidence thanks to the backfire effect?