William Galston recently argued that immigration has become so central to American politics, economics, and society that it warrants a new cabinet-level Department of Immigration. He suggests that immigration policy has outgrown the Department of Homeland Security, which was created after 9/11 primarily to fight terrorism. The implication is that a structural reorganization would better align federal institutions with present realities.

I find the argument unpersuasive—not because immigration is unimportant, but because reorganizing government without diagnosing the structural defect it is meant to cure is a category error. When the Department of Homeland Security was first proposed in 2002, I argued against it on two grounds. First, it would add an unnecessary layer of management. Second, consolidating multiple but not all domestic enforcement functions into a single department would make that department insular.

Both predictions have come to pass.

The Redundancy Problem

The creation of DHS merged 22 agencies under one umbrella. But “merged” is misleading. What actually happened was not simplification but accretion. Existing agencies retained much of their internal culture, operational autonomy, and statutory authority. What was added was a superstructure: a new secretary, new undersecretaries, new compliance offices, new review processes, and new coordination mechanisms.

In other words, we added a layer.

In complex systems, corporate or governmental, adding a coordination layer without eliminating underlying complexity rarely produces clarity. It produces reporting overhead. It produces bureaucratic friction. It produces delay. The core statutory frameworks governing immigration, border enforcement, disaster response, and intelligence did not meaningfully change when DHS was created. What changed were reporting lines.

Twenty-plus years later, DHS is one of the largest federal departments. It is not simpler. It is not notably more coherent. It is simply larger.

Reorganizations are seductive because they create the appearance of action. But unless they alter incentives and statutory authority, they mostly rearrange boxes on an organizational chart.

The Insularity Problem

Before DHS, immigration enforcement and related functions were embedded in larger institutional ecosystems. They were part of Justice, Treasury, Transportation. They were subject to broader departmental cultures and cross-pressures.

DHS consolidated many enforcement-heavy agencies into a single department defined by a unifying mission: homeland security. Mission framing matters. When an organization’s identity is tied to preventing catastrophic risk, it naturally evolves toward risk aversion, secrecy, and internal cohesion. Those traits are not inherently bad but they are self-reinforcing.

At the same time, not all enforcement agencies were consolidated. The FBI remained in Justice. ATF remained separate. So we did not create a unified domestic enforcement system. We created a large enforcement bloc with its own culture and intelligence apparatus, operating alongside other enforcement bodies.

That is a recipe for institutional insularity.

Over time, large consolidated departments tend to defend their turf, justify their budgets, and interpret data in ways that reinforce their mission. That is not a moral failing. It is bureaucratic physics.

Does a Department of Immigration Solve Anything?

Galston argues that immigration is no longer primarily a security issue and therefore should not sit inside DHS. He proposes a new Department of Immigration, along with a Bureau of Immigration Analysis to assess economic needs. But what specific dysfunction would this cure?

Is the asylum backlog caused by DHS reporting lines? No. It is caused by statutory design, procedural rules, and insufficient adjudicative capacity.

Are deportation controversies caused by departmental placement? No. They are driven by executive priorities, prosecutorial discretion, and political mandates.

Is the emphasis on family reunification versus economic migration a structural problem inside DHS? No. It is embedded in immigration law enacted by Congress decades ago.

You do not fix statutory architecture by moving boxes.

The proposed Bureau of Immigration Analysis raises a deeper issue. It would assess “the needs of the economy.” But that phrase hides an assumption. Which economy? At what wage levels? Under what capital-labor balance? With what automation trajectory?

If the bureau takes current sectoral dependence on immigrant labor as given, then it is not analyzing needs it is ratifying existing business models. That is circular. It treats present economic structures as optimal and adjusts immigration policy to sustain them.

But immigration levels influence wages. They influence labor force participation. They influence automation incentives. They influence fiscal burdens on states and localities.

Those are political choices. They are distributional questions. They cannot be rendered technocratic simply by creating a bureau.

The Lesson of DHS

The lesson of DHS is not that we need another reorganization. The lesson is that structural consolidation without incentive reform produces bureaucratic insulation. If immigration policy is obsolete and I believe much of it is, then the remedy lies in:

• Rewriting the statutory balance between family and economic migration.
• Reforming asylum procedures.
• Designing workable guest-worker programs.
• Enforcing employer verification consistently.
• Clarifying federal-state responsibilities and compensation mechanisms.

Those are legislative and policy questions.

Creating a Department of Immigration would not answer them. It would elevate immigration symbolically to cabinet status. It would trigger new congressional committees, new political appointments, and a multi-year transition process. It would consume administrative energy. It would not necessarily produce clarity.

In large organizations, structural reorganization is the most expensive and least reliable form of reform.

I opposed DHS because it added a layer and consolidated enforcement culture in ways that encouraged insularity. Both occurred. We should hesitate before repeating the experiment.

If there is a structural change worth considering, it would be more modest and more surgical: separating adjudication from enforcement, creating independent immigration courts, or embedding economic migration functions within departments already oriented toward labor markets and economic analysis.

In complex systems, decomposition by function is usually more stable than centralization by theme.

Immigration is indeed central to our national life. That is precisely why we should resist cosmetic reorganizations and instead focus on the harder work of statutory reform and incentive design.

Rearranging the chart is easier. It is also less likely to work.

It’s never too early to start speculating about 2028. That’s what Matthew Continetti is doing in his Wall Street Journal op-ed. In it he opens by considering the present state of the race:

Former Vice President Kamala Harris leads with 31%, followed by California Gov. Gavin Newsom at 22%. From there, the drop-off is steep. Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg is in third place with 9%. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is close on Mr. Buttigieg’s heels. The only other Democrat to earn more than 5% in national polls is Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro.

You may notice that at this point everything is proceeding exactly as I have predicted. I’ll repeat myself: barring the entry of a dynamic, new figure not presently running Kamala Harris is the favorite to be the Democrats’ standard-bearer in 2028. Her 2024 loss will be explained away by the party in the same way she has: she didn’t have enough time; it was all Joe Biden’s fault.

He continues with some prognostication:

Socialism’s rise raises troubling questions about the party’s future. The shift has electoral consequences. A radicalized base, animated by anti-Trump resistance, may be an asset in special and midterm elections. But open borders, social disorder and transgender ideology have hurt Democrats in presidential years. They will do so again if unchecked.

Success in 2028 thus depends on finding an appealing candidate who embodies change not only from Mr. Trump, but also from the Democrats’ reputation. That requires exactly the sort of self-examination Democrats are determined to avoid. The Democratic National Committee won’t release its autopsy of the 2024 election—a telling refusal to debate the party’s future.

For the moment, an ascendant left celebrates presidential aspirants who oppose Mr. Trump’s values and policies root and branch. What happens, though, when the moment passes and the public must decide between two non-Trump alternatives?

He continues by examining various candidates’ shortcomings.

The question that needs to be asked is who can win in a Democratic primary? The Democratic primary voter is more likely to be progressive, more likely to be black, and more likely to be a party insider than the average Democratic voter. That rules out most of the candidates stepping forward. Since 2008, Democratic nominations have been determined in large part by which candidate consolidates black primary voters early. White candidates who succeeded did so only after receiving visible validation from trusted black political figures. That has not happened yet.

Every single one of the present candidates has serious what are called in sales “knock-offs”, i.e. disqualifications.

I continue to believe that, unless she withdraws from the race, Kamala Harris remains the odds-on favorite. She is the most experienced and the most acceptable to a larger number of likely Democratic primary voters. At present, there is no visible path for another candidate to assemble a broader and more cohesive primary coalition.

Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has a brusque op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. In the op-ed he challenges Europe’s leaders to literally put their money where their mouths are, i.e. to back up their speeches. Here’s his peroration:

The last time I looked, the U.S. supplies 70% of NATO spending and almost all of its nuclear deterrence (depending on what you believe about the French force de frappe), as well as 95% of heavy-lift capacity.

European leaders need to be serious. They either need to show that they mean it—that they are willing to do something big, risky and strategically autonomous to help Ukraine, which they show no sign of doing—or else they need to put a sock in it.

I think his earlier prediction is also just about correct:

Unless these European leaders are prepared to do something brave and perhaps very expensive to make good their rhetoric, the best hope for this economically stagnant, welfare-addicted Continent is to maintain the strategy that has worked for the past 100 years and more. That is to do everything we can to persuade Americans of the truth that their security is bound up with ours, and that in return for that commitment we are willing to spend more on defense, and glad to accept the continued reality of American military hegemony in Europe.

The additional food for thought I would offer them is that American military hegemony requires American economic hegemony. We cannot afford the former without the latter. The implications of that are extremely broad, extending beyond military spending to their trade within the European Union, their trade with China, and the inexpensive consumer goods that accompany that.

Mr. Johnson is right about the dependency. But he understates the cost structure. American military primacy in Europe is not merely a function of defense budgets. It is a function of dollar dominance, trade flows, and industrial capacity as well. If Europe wishes to preserve American security guarantees, it must consider not only its defense spending but also its economic alignment. Military hegemony without economic hegemony is unsustainable.

The opinion piece that caught my eye this morning was this one in the Washington Post by A. Wess Mitchell contrasting the differing visions articulated by Sec. of State Marco Rubio and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, respectively, at the Munich Security Conference. Each was hortatory but they differed markedly in their underlying premises and what they were exhorting their audience to do. Sec. Rubio emphasized shared history, culture, and values:

The secretary of state told the Europeans that this civilization was in peril from within. He pointed to years of domestic policies — open borders, deindustrialization, outsourcing of sovereignty, obeisance to the “climate cult” — that have weakened the West not just materially but spiritually. He called on Europeans to stop tinkering with a broken status quo and turn their attention to rekindling the West’s very identity and confidence as something worth defending.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez, on the other hand, assumed universal values and focused on an administrative structure:

Ocasio-Cortez, by contrast, called for a restoration and refinement of the international “rules-based order.” She described this order not in organic and moral terms as Rubio did but as an essentially administrative construct built in the service of certain abstract goals, which revolve around fighting “income inequality” and “social instability.”

The problem, she said, was not the construct itself but the fact that in recent years its rules have been applied unevenly, in ways that treat the West more favorably than the developing world. “What we are seeking,” she said, “is a return to a rules-based order that eliminates … hypocrisies.” She called for a return to “dozens of global compacts” that the Trump administration has “withdrawn from” and a redoubling of efforts to “stave off the scourges of authoritarianism.”

Dr. Mitchell correctly notes the issues with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s formulation:

Rubio’s speech put its finger on what has long been a fundamental problem for the progressive vision of order: that it attaches value (indeed, the ultimate value) to institutions that are the by-product of a civilization that it holds to be uniquely and irredeemably iniquitous.

I would articulate that slightly differently. The rule of law is part of the superstructure of Western civilization and honored more in the breach than the observance.

Dr. Mitchell clearly favors Sec. Rubio’s formulation. I think that both views are severely flawed and peculiarly American. IMO the idea of “the West” as presently articulated is largely a sales pitch by the British over the last century or so to draw the United States into wars they feared they were losing. It lies in stark contrast to the disdain in which our European cousins held us for the previous century. There is a kernel of truth in it but it is greatly exaggerated.

The other problem with Sec. Rubio’s formulation is that although we do derive much from our European heritage we also derive aspects of our culture and values from Africa, Asia, and native Americans which the Europeans do not share other than as they have been mediated through us, something the French and Germans, in particular, actively deny. Perhaps more of their cultures and values will be derived from other sources in the next century but they are not now.

The additional problem with Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’s formulation is that there are no universal values. The two to which she drew attention, income equality and social stability, are conditional goods not universal. The “hypocrisy” about which she complains is inherent in that lack of universality, i.e. they are honored on a strictly instrumental basis by virtually every country, not just the United States or the countries of Europe.

American culture is not marble; it is tectonic. Its dominant substrate shifts over time and place, absorbing new populations, new experiences, and new pressures but it does not dissolve into abstraction. Institutions and policies are superstructures resting on that moving ground. When the ground drifts gradually, reinterpretation is possible, indeed necessary, and the civil religion expressed in the Declaration, the Constitution, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, and our national mythology can be renewed without being discarded. When the ground is denied or despised, however, when reinterpretation gives way to repudiation, cohesion fractures and institutions become hollow. America’s strength has never lain in static purity or imported theory, but in its capacity to let its cultural plates shift without shattering the republic built upon them.

I’ve been thinking about a strategic question in Democratic politics.

Do Democratic leaders believe they can keep winning elections primarily by running against Trump and Republicans or does governing eventually have to justify itself?

Negative partisanship works. Fear is a powerful mobilizer and modern politics runs heavily on it. But it has usually functioned as a supplement to performance rather than a substitute for it. Voters will accept anxiety about the alternative for quite a while. They don’t accept unsatisfying daily experience forever.

State government is where the wheel hits the road.

In states where one party governs consistently politics isn’t a message it’s a condition. People experience housing costs, taxes, schools, disorder, services, and whether ordinary transactions of daily life are easy or difficult. They may disagree about causes but they don’t experience them as abstractions.

At the moment many of the states most durably governed by Democrats are showing visible strain: budget stress, high living costs, or residents relocating elsewhere. Every state has problems but these are places where Democrats unmistakably own the outcomes.

That creates a real strategic test. A national campaign built around stopping the opposition can win elections. The question is how long it can outrun accumulated experience.

So the coming elections may tell us something broader than who voters like or dislike.

Are they still primarily voting to prevent the other party from governing?

Or are they beginning to judge the places where one party already does?

If the latter starts to dominate, then politics shifts back toward results — and fear stops being enough.

Once upon a time there was a norm in American politics, first articulated by Arthur Vandenberg: “Politics ends at the water’s edge”. That norm is well and truly gone, as events at the Munich Conference have demonstrated. “Politics ends at the water’s edge” did not just mean Americans agreed about foreign policy; it meant that when speaking abroad they spoke as Americans rather than as campaigners.

In a world of social media and 24 hour news an American political campaign speech in Munich will be instantly heard in Muncie. The voters’ ears in Muncie are the actual targets for the speech not those of the assembled dignitaries in Munich.

In the past I have warned Americans that the histories, views, and politics in other countries differ from ours. Context is important. “Right wing” and “left wing” don’t mean the same things in Hungary or Romania that they do here. We should be wary of seeing allies in foreign political figures who actually believe in and pursue very different things than we do despite being labelled the same way in their own countries that we are in ours.

I can see now that the same warning applies to foreign politicians. They shouldn’t see likely allies in American politicians who oppose the same American president they do. Their goals and objectives are likely very different from yours. Their context matters as much as yours does.

I think the editors of the Washington Post are failing to make an important distinction in their new editorial on the implications of LLM AI on “white collar” jobs. That distinction is between what generative AI is actually likely to accomplish in the near term and how it is being sold by AI service providers and how American managers are interpreting that. The editors remark:

Artificial-intelligence catastrophism is everywhere. This month saw stock-market ructions after Anthropic, a leading AI company, announced that it had developed and deployed AI “agents” to autonomously execute legal, marketing and sales tasks. The economic potential is real, but the hand-wringing is overblown.

Yes, AI appears to be a transformational technology, and that transformation will sometimes be disruptive. But it won’t render humans obsolete, and the disruption of white-collar work might do a lot of good.

The editors treat AI as a technological phenomenon whose labor effects depend on capability. But corporations do not wait for capability; they act on forecasts. Whether those forecasts are accurate is economically secondary. The layoffs occur at the moment executives believe the technology will soon substitute for labor not when it actually does.

Even if the editors are technically correct, their conclusion about disruption being overblown is wrong because economic behavior precedes technological reality. The economic impact of AI will be driven less by actual technical capability and more by managerial belief in vendor claims. Consequently, job loss can occur even if the technology is immature.

Just a few days ago Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman predicted that AI would automate most tasks in white collar jobs with human-level performance within 18 months. Anthropic CEO Dario has repeatedly warned that AI would eliminate half of all entry-level white collar jobs within the next 5 years. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna paused hiring at IBM, explaining that a large number of jobs will be “replaced by AI”. Those are the sales pitches.

How these sales pitches are being interpreted and utilized by Fortune 500 CEOs is equally clear. In 2024 Carol Tomé, CEO of UPS, laid off 14% of the company’s managers, explaining:

We will constrain head count growth through the end of the year, in addition to a limited reduction in roles across the firm… These targeted steps are consistent with our priorities of gaining more agility and creating the right team structures in order to implement effective AI solutions

This year the company has already laid off a significant number of non-managerial workers due to loss of contracts. The contracts were lost in large part due to AI. The CEO of the financial technology company Klarna has frozen hiring—AI can do all of the jobs. Last year David Solomon, CEO of Goldman Sachs, announced a hiring freeze due to AI. I cannot distinguish between the actual results of AI and confidence in the future promise of AI but these CEOs are responding to the sales pitches by improving their companies’ bottom lines by reducing headcount. In the final analysis it doesn’t make any difference whether they’re right or wrong. The jobs are gone in either event.

That’s not alarmism. Those layoffs and freezes are cold, hard facts with serious real world implications for young people who now have thousands of dollars in student loans in anticipation of jobs that are not materializing.

Update

Mohammed El-Erian echoes a number of the things I’ve said above at the Financial Times:

There are also reasons to believe that this period of decoupling of employment from growth may prove more persistent and more consequential.

This time around, it may well last longer because we are just at the start of the AI adoption process, with robotics just around the corner and quantum computing further behind. Moreover, the current mindset of many firms in their initial consideration of AI does not help. Too many executives seem to think of AI more in terms of its labour cost minimisation potential (doing the same with fewer workers) rather than the bigger productivity potential (doing more with the same or additional workers). The latter comes with increasing the capabilities of existing and new workers.

This decoupling of GDP growth and employment also comes at a time when affordability is already a big political and social worry. An intensifying gap between robust growth and a weak labour market would likely increase income and wealth inequality in an economy already featuring a large divide in the fortunes of the wealthier and less well-off.

This would undermine low-income household consumption as an important driver of growth. It is also taking place at a time when the US Federal Reserve, already under political scrutiny, now faces the prospects of a bigger conflict between the two components of its dual mandate — maximum employment and price stability.

The most dangerous four words in economic and investment analysis — “this time is different” — could well end up applying here. Rather than gradually slowing to a crawl as has happened in the past, we should expect this decoupling phase to accelerate absent any holistic mitigation by companies and the public sector. Indeed, part of the challenge for 2026 is managing a lot better the economic, political and social risks of an economy that, without corporate and policy adjustments, may no longer need as many workers to grow.

Something unmentioned by Mr. El-Erian is that consumption spending by higher income individuals comprises an unusually large proportion of the whole. If job freezes continue to transition into actual job cuts, that could have serious implications for the greater economy.

European settlement of the colonies that would become the United States began roughly 500 years ago. European elites did not settle in those colonies. Although we did have European gentry the European nobility who settled here were not landed. They, too, depended on acceptance, elections, and performance. The United States is what evolved from western European countries without those elites. We created distinctive institutions and practices to replace them. That has been well-documented.

We don’t have a hereditary aristocracy. We don’t have established churches. We have an abundance of land. We developed our own self-defense militias and local governments assume a much greater role here than in most European countries.

The editors of the Wall Street Journal observe concerning Sec. of State Rubio’s remarks at the Munich Conference:

America and Europe are now at another inflection point. Mr. Rubio offered the Administration’s by now familiar critique about Europe’s policy mistakes on mass migration, defense, climate and energy.

But he rooted that criticism in the shared history and values of Western civilization. “We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally,” he said. “We believe that Europe must survive, because the two great wars of the last century serve for us as history’s constant reminder that ultimately, our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours.”

Mr. Rubio outlined a renewed trans-Atlantic alliance “ready to defend our people, to safeguard our interests, and to preserve the freedom of action that allows us to shape our own destiny—not one that exists to operate a global welfare state and atone for the purported sins of past generations.”

Judging by the comments by the EU Foreign Minister reported by the Associated Press:

MUNICH (AP) — A top European Union official on Sunday rejected the notion that Europe faces “civilizational erasure,” pushing back at criticism of the continent by the Trump administration.

EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas addressed the Munich Security Conference a day after U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio offered a somewhat reassuring message to European allies. He struck a less aggressive tone than Vice President JD Vance did in lecturing them at the same gathering last year but maintained a firm tone on Washington’s intent to reshape the trans-Atlantic alliance and push its policy priorities.

Sec. Rubio’s remarks fell on deaf ears and rightly so. America’s culture and Europe’s cultures began to diverge nearly 500 years ago. We are a very different place from the United Kingdom, France, or Germany now and, not to put too fine a point on it, we don’t get to define their cultures. Only they can do that.

Across the Atlantic this difference repeatedly appears less as disagreement over interests than as mutual incomprehension over moral language. American officials tend to describe policies in universal terms—fairness, rules, legitimacy derived from present consent—and assume those categories travel easily. European leaders more often speak in historical terms like continuity, stability, social order, or responsibility shaped by accumulated experience. Each side hears the other as making claims it does not believe it is making: Americans think they are stating neutral principles while Europeans hear instruction; Europeans think they are describing prudence while Americans hear evasion. The result is not simply conflict but misinterpretation. We are allies, but we do not reason about public legitimacy in quite the same way and rhetoric that assumes a shared civilizational conscience therefore lands badly even when the strategic relationship itself remains intact.

This post is a response to a comment.

In 2023 roughly 8% of Chicago’s registered voters cast a primary ballot for Brandon Johnson for mayor and most primary voters chose someone else. He received a majority of the votes cast in the run-off election against an extremely unpopular incumbent and an individual cast as a Trump supporter.

A government can be validly elected and still rest on a very narrow base of participation. The rules worked. But it becomes harder to say the outcome represents a shared civic decision when so few take part.

In a democracy authority ultimately rests on the consent of the governed and consent is easier to infer when participation is broad. When participation narrows, elections begin to select leaders rather than express the public will.

I worked nearly 30 years as an election judge. Voters once approached the polls as if they were exercising power. You could see it in their postures, in conversation, in their anticipation. Today many arrive irritated or detached, as if the result exists elsewhere and they are only acknowledging it. I would call that discouragement.

Maybe ranked-choice voting would help by requiring broader coalitions, though it may also confuse some voters. Mandatory voting might raise participation, although countries that adopt it often later weaken it. I don’t know the answer, but a system in which fewer citizens feel they are choosing their government is moving away from what democracy is meant to be like.