Noah Smith:

So anyway, I want to go through a bunch of progressive issues from the 2010s — immigration, DEI, energy and climate, crime and policing, the welfare state, universal health care, unions, and trans rights — and explain why I think they’re all mostly stuck. 

Immigration

In the 2010s, immigration went from a technocratic consensus to a progressive cause célèbre. This happened for two reasons. The primary reason was that Donald Trump and his reactionary movement were against immigration, probably on racial grounds (though they never explicitly admit this). For many progressives, that made fighting for immigration a way of fighting against racism. A more minor reason was that many progressives either implicitly or explicitly bought into the idea that immigration would create a permanent Democratic majority. 

In the 2010s, pro-immigration sentiment soared. In 2020, Gallup reported that for the first time since it started keeping track in 1965, the percent of Americans who said they want more immigration was larger than the percent who said they want less:

More.