(2025-07-13) Guinn Shitholes Sanctuaries And Springfield

Rusty Guinn: Shitholes, Sanctuaries, and Springfield. The thing about early 18th century migrations from Ireland and England is that it is very hard to know precisely who it was that actually made the trip as a European and who was born here as an American. Early censuses are notoriously incomplete, many destroyed by fires and others by war

By the mid-to-late 18th century, records get better. That's how I know that 31 of my 32 great-great-great-great grandfathers - thanks a lot, John McCreary - was born on these shores

I am what some today are increasingly referring to as a “Heritage American.”
The whole idea is a red-white-and-blue-washing of a painfully ordinary strain of ethnonationalism that latches onto a shred of truth about America's exceptionalism to conveniently forget half the things that have made America exceptional. It is also a load of rubbish.

it is also a fascinating tale of just how a nationwide narrative can emerge and explode and shape our collective processing of world events in a distinctly measurable way. It is also a tale of three pivotal moments that shaped the stories being told today about immigration: the shithole moment, the sanctuary moment, and the Springfield moment.

The Shithole Moment

we first have to grapple with the fundamental problem in any kind of media commentary: disentangling the stories we tell from the realities they place into narrative frames is difficult

"the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent"". I’ve never liked it very much.

I am more than happy to point out that it is very dumb to believe that the market is being irrational any time it disagrees with what we think is real. Most of the time when we call something irrational it is just us being wrong with extra steps.

It is far more useful to understand that people can be story-driven longer than you or I can stay reality-driven

In either case, the utility lies in understanding that there are far fewer transmission mechanisms between story and reality than we imagine. In markets, credit events are reality transmission mechanisms. In politics, things like elections and wars can be reality transmission mechanisms. You can’t story away bankruptcy and you can’t story away the occupation of your capital.
Within those hard boundaries, stories usually survive until a better one comes along. And by better I don’t really mean better. I mean better adapted. More easily spread.

But a story that rhymes with the evidence of our eyes and ears – or at least one that contains parts of it – helps the formation of common knowledge.

A single grain of truth can be weaponized into a system of conjecture that treats the grain of truth as adequate proof. And as we will see at the end of this story, a sufficient breakdown in verisimilitude, especially if it is accompanied by a story that is becoming increasingly divorced from what we need to be true, can destroy even the most powerful and ascendant narrative.

But all of this is why disentangling reality from story in the wake of actual events is hard

So how do we disentangle the realities of an extraordinary impulse of unchecked undocumented immigration over multiple years from the stories that appear in its wake?

You measure them.

The first immigration story I think it is useful to measure is the trope that Americans in general are fine with or very supportive of immigrants but don’t want law-breaking illegal immigrants to be rewarded

I think it was once a story that a huge majority of Americans both believed and told

What I’m not so sure about

is whether we still believe it.

story which has been on a steady decline into oblivion over the past 7 1/2 years (see graph)

When we first started exploring the Semantic Signatures of stories like this, one of the first observations we made was that even oppositional “stories” and “framings” often move together. The reason is pretty intuitive.

(rest paywalled)