I’m always amazipalled (portmanteau between “amazed” and “appalled” that I don’t expect to catch on) at how willing MAGA is to demolish the US’s future prospects and economy. Their own children and grandchildren will be poorer for it, and they simply don’t care.
A clear example of this is the extreme cuts to science funding under Republican rule. In 2025 alone, the administration terminated or froze almost four thousand NIH and NSF grants. This is an attempt to destroy a major source of economic growth:
Experts broadly agree that taxpayer investments in science can yield substantial economic returns by supporting new technologies and encouraging private investment. For example, a Brookings Institution analysis cited one recent paper showing that federal research and development investments have “been responsible for at least one-fifth of overall postwar growth of total factor productivity in the United States.” Similarly, a 2019 study found that every dollar spent on NIH grants leads to $2.34 in drug sales alone, before accounting for broader social benefits. Collecting the evidence, the Congressional Budget Office recently concluded that every dollar of federal nondefense research and development investment creates as much as $12.50 in economic growth over the following 30 years by encouraging capital expenditures and job creation.
Another major engine of US economic grown that Republicans are determined to destroy is immigration.
I can already hear my conservative readers objecting that the GOP has nothing against legal immigration. But that’s simply not true. The RAISE Act in 2017, endorsed by major Republicans like Trump, Tom Cotton, and David Perdue, would have cut legal immigration in half. Although the RAISE Act didn’t pass, their crusade against immigration – legal immigration included – continues to this day.
Attacking immigration is a direct attack on all Americans’ economic future. Immigrants are vital to the economy for many reasons: That many immigrants are entrepreneurs and innovators, that immigrants are on average younger than the US’s aging population, through paying taxes, and simply because it’s good for the economy to have more willing workers.
The attacks on immigration will make average Americans poorer over the long term – poorer culturally, and poorer in wealth.
But all of this is simply less important to most GOP voters – even those who claim not to have a racist bone in their bodies – than getting rid of brown people.
I considered making the magic wishing ball in this strip a little winged fairy or a talking fish – something with a face and expressions. But somehow, a floating shiny ball just seemed funnier to me. Plus, drawing a shiny ball is oddly fun.
The magic ball has appeared in one of my strips before, back in 2019. I was planning to color it gold this time, but I accidently switched the color to hot pink and liked it so much I kept it.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has six panels. They all show the same scene – an ordinary-looking white guy in a living room, talking to a shiny floating pink ball.
Panel 1
MAN: Magic wishing ball! Of course I’ve got nothing against brown people, but I’m desperate to fix unemployment and the deficit — so I wish all the immigrants gone!
Panel 2
The man is eagerly looking at his phone.
MAGIC BALL (thought): I’ll teach this rube a cruel ironic lesson!
MAGIC BALL: Wish granted!
MAN: Oh boy! I’ve gotta see this!
Panel 3
The man has a betrayed expression as he reads his phone.
MAN: Hey! Unemployment and the deficit are both much higher!
Panel 4
MAGIC BALL (thought): Buh bu bum! My trap is sprung!
MAGIC BALL: That’s right! Taking away millions of workers shrunk the economy. There was a major recession! The economy crashed!
Panel 5
MAGIC BALL You also made the country whiter — but those white people will be poorer for generations because of your bigo—
MAN: The country’s whiter?
MAGIC BALL: Yes, but—
Panel 6
The man jumps happily, clicking his heels together.
MAN (shouting): Success!!
MAGIC BALL (thought): Fuck.
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
“Chicken fat” is an ancient cartoonist term for unimportant details in the art.
PANEL 1: Woodstock from Peanuts is standing on the window. The empty cardboard box the Magic Wishing Ball came in has the slogans: “Fun!” “Amaze your friends!” “Irony!” and “Fake true love!”
PANEL 2: The cat on the sofa has two heads. In a table in the background, a mouse stands a bowl of nuts, holding up a knife and fork.
PANEL 3: Beaker from The Muppets is peering in the window.
PANEL 5: The character in the framed picture on the wall (last seen in panel 2) is climbing out of the frame. One of the flowers in the carpet pattern is smiling and smoking a joint.
PANEL 6: A bird flying outside the window has Groucho Marx’s face. A tiny Harpo Marx is peering out from behind the throw pillow. The corpse of Micky Mouse is lying under the sofa (we can only see his hand). The figure from the framed picture on the wall is now standing on the sidetable. (He has a letter on his shirt in every panel he appears: The letters spell out W O R D.) The three books in the lower shelf of the side table are entitled “Who Cares?” “Irrelevant” and “Unimportant.” And Itchy (from “Itchy and Scratchy”) is also on that shelf.
Excellent comic. i was surprised by the ending: I expected the white guy to say “FAKE NEWS! The country is actually richer!”
It really depends who you’re talking to and what they mean. Because I’m sure that you’re right, and there are people, perhaps even not a small number of them, who are ideologically opposed to immigration, and particularly immigration in the form of black or brown people, and they’d wish to deport all immigrants as opposed to all illegal immigrants.
Thing is… I’ve never met one of those people in the wild. I’m not sure if I’m lucky, or you’re particularly unlucky, or if the anti-immigration-writ-large position is just a strawman, but the people I interact with generally understand that some level of immigration is necessary and would be able to articulate a pro-immigrant, anti-illegal-immigration position. And unlike other instances where the administration is more than willing to upset norms for ideological reasons, America accepted the same million or so legal immigrants in 2025 as they have regardless of the party affiliation running the department since the 90’s, so even if a pure anti-immigrant sentiment exists, it doesn’t seem to actually flow through to policy. And if the point of all this ICE enforcement was to “whiten” America, why is the Trump administration business-as-normalling the green card process?
What I’m amazipalled by on this topic is the progressive drive to purposefully demolish the future prospects and the economy by way of letting too many people in. I honestly don’t know why you all seem so ideologically addicted to increased immigration numbers. When pressed, no one from your side will ever nail down their position on what level of immigration is appropriate. Is anyone here willing to do that, by the way?
Because I have the obvious counterexample: Canada.
For years, Canada has accepted about 400,000 immigrants per year to Canada via a number of both permanent and temporary programs. Over the course of the Trudeau administration, two things changed: First, the balance between permanent and temporary immigrants started weighing disproportionately towards temporary, and second, the total number of immigrants through all paths increased steeply, capping out in 2024 at slightly more than 1.3 million people.
For the record: This was insane. Canada increased from a country of 38 million residents in 2020 to a country of 41 million in 2024. Most of the people being brought in were either students or low-skilled labor, and their families. Canada tripled the number of immigrants taken in, without a plan… 800,000 excess bodies a year, without plans for where they were going to live, where they were going to work, where they were going to get a doctor, where their kids were going to go to school. Everything was strained at probably the worst time possible, because our systems were already stressed in the recovery from Covid lockdowns.
Trudeau kept on as if the market would just adjust to his whims… His ministers would continue to defend the policies as being fiscally sound: We heard time after time that Canada’s GDP was the only one growing in the G7… Which was technically true, but illiterate: It’s relatively easy to have GDP growth when you increase your population by 5% every year, In fact it would be market shattering if you didn’t… But at the same time our GDP was increasing as a nation, our GDP per capita was plummeting. For the record…. This kind of “lines-go-up” view on the economy, when politicians (Biden and Trump have both done this too) try to obfuscate how bad things are by pointing to metrics like the GDP, or unemployment, or the DOW as if they’ve done an economics is so painfully out of touch I get legitimately mad thinking about it. At the same time the gross GDP line was going up, the mortgage foreclosure rate was spiking, credit card debt numbers were as high as they’ve ever been in the history of Canada, and food bank usage was up 800%. Who the actual fuck cares what the GDP number is when people are losing their home, are leveraged to the gills, and starving?
What happened? Trudeau became so unpopular that his party defenestrated him and brought in an economist (one that even I have to admit is doing an OK job), we lowered immigration rates, deeply cut into the TFW program, and between lower entry rates and attrition, for the first time in a very long time, at the end of 2026 there will be fewer people in Canada than there were the year before, and things are starting to recover.
This is an example. A lesson. There is obviously a limit to the amount of immigration a nation can healthily take in, and if you stress that number, things start to break. The Canadian example was a repeat of what was happening in the UK, and they’re experiencing basically the same problem. America is different… Most of the increase to your normal immigration happened illegally, the increase wasn’t as large as the Canadian and UK examples as a percentage of your total population, and your social safety net is weaker than a lot of other nations, so your systems aren’t all feeling the same strains… But there probably is a very good argument that America did take in too many people over the Biden years, and some amount of correction to that is necessary.
Given that roughly 1/4 of physicians practicing in Canada are foreign medical graduates, including nearly 1/3 of family practice physicians, I think the question is more how will Canadians find doctor without immigrants.
(Source for above statements: https://www.cihi.ca/en/a-profile-of-physicians-in-canada. Sorry, the link function is not working for me or I’m not working for it. One of the two.)
This is another puzzler of an argument since the link does not ever make clear what the problem with the high level of immigration is. The one solid statement that they make is that many of the immigrants are healthcare workers. Is the UK oversupplied with healthcare workers? That’s a fairly unique problem, at least. It’s certainly not one we have in the US, so if the UK wants to send their excess doctors, nurses, phlebotomists, home health aides, etc this way, personally, I would be quite pleased.
“Is the UK oversupplied with healthcare workers?”
It’s both oversupplied and undersupplied. Patients can’t get appointments, and newly qualified doctors can’t get jobs.
All of which is likely due to an undersupply of tax revenue from wealthy people.
It occurs to me that the framing of the discussion we are having does not really address the basic problem: Good for a country or bad for a country, increased immigration is going to keep happening. Climate change is making parts of the earth essentially uninhabitable and increased wealth disparity is making more people desperate enough that getting on a questionably seaworthy boat or walking through thousands of miles of jungle and desert to get to the UK or even the US seems like the best available option. Walls and policies can only do so much to stop them.
So how are we (citizens of the five eyes and other wealthy countries) going to deal with it? Genocide, the Republicans and Reform’s preferred option, strikes me as a bad idea. So why don’t we prepare to help the people who are displaced by global issues that are more our fault than theirs anyway instead of hurting them further? Even if it doesn’t actually help us to do so. Out of common humanity or a desire to not be considered the worst civilization ever or whatever other motive you may have.
Corso:
So I think the thing for most of us here is that we are more concerned with the anti-immigration positions of the people currently in charge of the U.S. government than we are with the positions of random people you have met in the wild.
Where are you getting that from? The chart in that link cuts off at 2024.
Even if your statement about 2025 is true, at that point Trump had only been president for one year, and it’s possible the effects of his massive new restrictions on legal immigration–restrictions I am sure I do not have to spend time detailing for you–had not yet kicked in.
Also, I’m curious if you’d be willing to address the refutations of your false claims about US immigration enforcement that Amp and I made in this thread, starting here.
https://amptoons.com/blog/?p=27829&cpage=1#comment-491617
Yes, this is not a recent problem that just occurred because of Biden’s policies. Even forty years ago the number of undocumented people in the U.S. was so huge that Reagan agreed to sign an amnesty for undocumented people, because removing them all seemed untenable even then.
So, for well over forty years, huge, fundamental segments of the U.S. economy (agriculture, construction, care for the elderly and disabled) have become incresingly dependent upon undocumented workers. This is not a problem of individual people choosing to break the law. The system as it is today cannot function if people – employers and workers – do not break these laws.
It’s true that employers and workers both have to break the law but in practice the brutal treatment that is seen as justified to “lawbreakers” is meted out only to workers. Employers might be fined for knowingly employing undocumented people but ICE agents don’t drag them out of their boardrooms or HR meetings, club them and pepper spray them. (Perhaps they should!)
What we have is a situation where a large segment of the workforce gets to exercise their human rights only tenuously – they are always capable of being subjected to extreme force with at least the guise of legality. This is a near-ideal situation from the POV of capital.
So we have this odd situation where the base of the right is against the current situation, but their anger is mobilised to perpetuate the situation, since anti-immigrant sentiment actually makes the presence of large numbers of undocumented workers *better* for capital – since it maintains that precious, precious insecurity, and lowers the cost of repression (which is already very low, but when you’re a capitalist, you’re always looking to lower your costs).
The only problem with the system is that sometimes that anti-immigrant sentiment surges and creates short term and localised disruptions, but that’s a price well worth paying to maintain a disempowered, insecure workforce that is so frightened it won’t make wage demands, let alone self-management demands.
Dianne:
I don’t really know how you get to this position from what I said. I promise you that doctors immigrating to Canada aren’t doing so on the increased TFW Permits or Student Visas. When I say things like “the people I interact with generally understand that some level of immigration is necessary and would be able to articulate a pro-immigrant, anti-illegal-immigration position.” it’s because those positions exist, and are reasonable, the question, which you did not answer, is “How much immigration should we have?”, and then when I go on to say things like “For years, Canada has accepted about 400,000 immigrants per year via a number of both permanent and temporary programs.” it’s because that happened to be true, and also relatively uncontroversial. Canada, on a per capita basis, has always welcomed more immigrants in through legal pathways than America has through both legal and illegal streams. Our 400,000 would scale up to about 4 million a year if you wanted to match us. That’s about a quarter of what you actually take in. And we’re able to do this not because it’s something that comes naturally, but because we have a plan and the infrastructure in place to accommodate that. We did that purposefully, over time. But we never had a plan or infrastructure to ramp up to take in three times our normal rate of immigrants. I mean… Real numbers: We took in more immigrants in than America did as a gross number in 2024. This broke things. It got so bad that the team in charge of auditing the student visas functionally gave up, and wasn’t able to catch things like the schools that some of the students were registered to did not exist. We’re still disentangling some of the fraud.
There is obviously a limiting principle in the amount of immigration a nation can take in. But instead of grappling with that reality, you’re pretending that I don’t want doctors to immigrate in. I’m sorry, but do you actually believe I think that?
These are publicly available, uncontroversial arguments. The UK example was even more stark than ours, they historically took in about 250,000 people, and their spike in 2023 was just under a million. They took in almost four times as many people per year as they had historically, then there was the exact same stress on the system, and the exact same backlash in 2024 and 2025.
Daran:
Ish… There’s also a skills mismatch, last year there were something like 50,000 newly licensed doctors, but there was only something like 10,000 available training spots. That’s not a failure in economics, that a failure in planning. Most of the vacancies are in specializations that those newly licensed doctors just aren’t qualified for. Your argument could be used on a lack of available training spots, because there’s also a shortage on GP’s, and there’s been some back and forth on union negotiations, wages, and training spots, but regardless, even if all 50,000 found training spots, you’d still be short the specialists.
I guess in the meantime, Canada will be more than happy to have them immigrate here.
Chris:
To the first sentence, this is partly my fault, because I mistakenly said 2025 instead of 2026, but Biden was still president in 2025, so if you think there was some precipitous drop in 2025, talk to your guy.
To the rest, Again… This isn’t really controversial: The number of Immigrants to America has remained relatively static on an incline for the last 30 years: HW Bush, Clinton, W Bush, Obama, Trump I and Biden all took in about the same number of people per year. Trump’s first term wasn’t exactly pro-immigrant on the rhetoric, but they kept the status quo for four years. I’ve seen no indications that they’ll be drastically different for 2026. There is a difference between different types of immigration; Trump has instituted travel bans which will reduce the number of visitor traffic, and he has drastically cut the number of refugees allowed into America, but visitors aren’t immigrants and the number of refugees America took in 2025 was about 30,000, and Trump’s still taken in something like 10,000. The rest of the programs, including the permanent resident program, are relatively untouched. I guess time will tell, because these numbers end up being public record.
[This comment has been moved to another thread; it can be read here. –Amp]
It doesn’t look to me like comments on the “Centrist Dems” post have been closed.
Corso, do me a favor and repost your comment responding to that post, in that post’s comments? After you’ve done that, I’ll replace your comment here with a link to the other post.
“visitors aren’t immigrants”
The most numerically significant form of undocumented immigration into the USA is people who arrive on a visitor visa and then don’t leave when their visa requires them to.
Corso:
Biden was president for nineteen days in 2025. Trump was president for the other 346 days. What are you talking about?
No, he did not, and I’m genuinely stunned you still believe that lie.
https://www.wuft.org/politifact-florida/2025-05-01/kilmar-abrego-garcia-ms-13-knuckles
Did they warrant being deported to a foreign torture prison without due process? Because that’s what happened.
You said Canada had too many immigrants and you weren’t sure how people would be able to get appointments with so many immigrants. I pointed out that a lot of Canadian doctors are immigrants. It seems a pretty easy to follow connection.
That’s because you have too conservative a government and conservatives refuse to plan. Make some plans and build some infrastructure. (Well, it’ll probably be immigrants who do the actual building.)
Really? Because the Canadian government page on how to practice in Canada as a FMG talks about getting a work permit and this site explicitly lists a TFW visa as a pathway. Also, medical students would be on student visas. At least I presume so. Maybe they don’t stay long enough to need more than a tourist visa on average. Not something I’ve looked into in detail.
Amp:
Done
Watcher:
Right…. But also irrelevant. The difference between a rape and a really great Friday night experience for two partners is consent, not the base action. A little bit of context can make some very similar fact patterns materially different.
Dianne
Again…. Toddler logic. Having “too many” does not mean there should be none. There is a spectrum of possibilities between zero and one million, two hundred thousand. And I just don’t think you know enough about this to speak this smugly… Doctors never had a problem going through the process. When we increased immigration threefold, we weren’t allowing in a proportional number of doctors that were being held back in a queue, because there was no such queue.
And again: It is just painfully obvious that there is a limit to how much a nation can comfortably take in as immigration, and still no one on your side has been willing to take a stab at articulating where they think that limit is.
Justin Trudeau had been Canada’s PM for more than a decade. You think Justin Trudeau is conservative? Compared to what? Who do you think was more pro-immigrant?
I’m gonna breeze past that absurdity to point out that even before the last couple of years of insanity, Canada took in more immigrants per capita per year than every other Western Nation on Earth, and it wasn’t even close. The only nations that beat us were places like the UAE, Qatar and Kuwait, who use immigrant labor as the majority of their workforces.
Yes. And I’ll say it again and bold the important part for you: “I promise you that doctors immigrating to Canada aren’t doing so on the increased TFW Permits or Student Visas.” Again: There were no doctors being turned away before we did this ramp up, there were no extra doctors as a result of it. I could be wrong on some fringe cases, but I’d be legitimately surprised if there were even nurses or HCAs that weren’t automatically fast-tracked under the old program.
Sure. Processes that are easy and not time consuming always sprout entire industries. People are universally willing to pay for things that they could easily do themselves. I’m going to have to assume that you never tried to and don’t know anyone who has tried to get licensing in Canada. It is, true, easier than some countries (see the US’s doctor shortage), but “never had a problem” is about as true as…well, as that immigrants are ruining the US.
Prepare yourself for a surprise.
Let’s look at it from a different perspective: How many people are you willing to let die because you feel “uncomfortable”?
Dianne:
Your own link is self defeating – Foreign born physicians are having an easier time immigrating than they are getting their foreign credentials recognized. Don’t get me wrong, I agree with you that it’s more that a little frustrating that we’ve recognized their value enough to get them in, but not to let them do their jobs, but they were obviously able to navigate the immigration process if they’re here.
I mean…. Two things. First, I reject the premise: There’s no one that’s going to die specifically because they couldn’t immigrate to Canada. And second, and more importantly, this isn’t just about comfort… People here died because we took too many people in, people lost their houses and died on the street, people died waiting for overcrowded services. This is going back to my original point: I am still “amazipalled” by the lack of responsibility that people exactly like you take in regards to the effects your policy prescriptions have on people. Anyone that has worked in the charitable sector can attest to this: There is an unlimited black hole of need out there in the world, a hole that we cannot possibly fill. We try our best to do what we can, as we can… No one is suggesting doing nothing, I’m just trying not to kill the chicken that lays the eggs.