Democrats need to push back harder on Trump's immigrant hate
Polling show Trump's relentless fear-mongering is working. It's time to fight hate with facts.
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President Joe Biden this week announced an executive action allowing undocumented spouses and children of US citizens to obtain permanent residency in an expedited manner, without first having to leave the country. The move will help some 500,000 families. It’s the largest relief program for undocumented people since President Barack Obama’s DACA program in 2012.
Biden’s action is welcome. During a White House event in which he announced it on Tuesday, he contrasted his approach with Trump’s brutal dehumanization of migrants, saying “we are a much better and stronger nation because of Dreamers” and “the Statue of Liberty is not some relic of history. It still stands for who we are.” But Biden’s announcement is somewhat in tension with another recent policy he implemented that restricts asylum claims as part of an effort to secure the border.
The administration’s flirtation with tacking rightward on immigration reflects the polling — the American public’s views on immigration are being influenced by the sort of prejudice that’s a core part of Trump’s pitch to voters.
Against that backdrop, there’s a real need for a positive case for immigrants as an economic, cultural, and political boon to the country. And fortunately, the facts back that argument up.
Trump stokes fears because it works politically
Recent polling on immigration shows the country moving in a Trumpy direction. This is a grim development. Trump is pushing a draconian plan to deport some 15-20 million people, his campaign has taken to referring to migrants as “illegal people,” and lurid tales of “migrant crime” remain a staple of his rally speeches. (Nevermind that study after study has shown that if anything migrants actually commit crimes at lower rates than native-born Americans.)
Experts say Trump’s mass deportation would cost a staggering $321 billion. That money would be spent not on improving anyone’s lives, but on militarized sweeps through American neighborhoods, constructing massive prison camps, and on raids on places of employment. It would be a nightmarish, relentless intrusion on people’s daily lives.
But the American people largely don’t see the downsides. Polls consistently show the idea of a massive new program targeting undocumented people is far from unpopular.
For example, a new CBS News/YouGov poll found voters favor a new program to “deport all undocumented immigrants currently living in the US illegally” by 62 percent to 38 percent. There are some issues with the poll, such as the fact that “don’t know/not sure” isn’t an option, but the result isn’t a huge outlier.
Immigration is routinely cited by voters as the top problem the country faces, and the latest PBS News/NPR/Marist poll shows immigration as Trump’s most favorable issue, with him enjoying a 10-point advantage over Biden on the question of who would best handle it.
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To be clear, hostility toward immigrants is far from unprecedented in this country. On the contrary, the US has a long history of bipartisan nativist policies. Resentment and prejudice against Chinese people fueled the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, designed to limit Chinese immigration and reduce the number of Chinese people in the country. Immigration legislation in 1917 and 1924 expanded this discriminatory approach, putting in place quotas restricting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe and almost completely barring immigrants from Asia.
During World War II, President Franklin Roosevelt put tight restrictions on asylum seekers, preventing many Jewish people fleeing Hitler from emigrating to the US. After the war, President Dwight Eisenhower launched a brutal, chaotic deportation campaign with the racist title “Operation Wetback” — some 1.3 million people, some of them US citizens, were rounded up and sent to Mexico. Trump has claimed that Eisenhower’s racist deportation program is a model for his own.
This is bad policy
Right-wing media has done its part to turn Americans against immigrants with years of fear-mongering and conspiracy theories. In 2018, Fox’s midterm strategy centered on supposed waves of migrant caravans from Mexico which were supposedly funded by billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. The caravans allegedly threatened the US with disease and became part of the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that has inspired numerous mass shooters.
In the run up to this year’s election, Fox talking heads and the Republicans they promote have had a hard time concealing that they’re rooting for a terrorist attack linked to border crossings. Sure, it would cost American lives, but it would empower the Sean Hannitys and Lindsey Grahams of the world to insist that Biden has blood on his hands because he refused to crack down harder on migrants.
In response to poll numbers and GOP pressure, Biden has turned right on immigration. First, he signaled support for a conservative bipartisan border deal which tightened asylum conditions, ramped up enforcement, and provided for partial border shutdowns. When Republicans scuttled the deal for nakedly political purposes, Biden used executive actions to implement many of its provisions. That includes shutting down asylum processing when arrests for undocumented entries from Mexico reach 2,500 a day. Biden also blocked asylum for people who do not cross the border at designated ports of entry.
Immigration experts and advocates have pointed out that Biden’s executive action violates US and international law. The US Immigration and Nationality Act specifically states that any immigrant can apply for asylum “whether or not at a designated port of arrival.” Asylum seekers are, by definition, people who are desperately fleeing persecution; countries are not supposed to put up bureaucratic barriers to prevent them from accessing help.
Biden hopes his new tough-on-immigration policy will boost his struggling approval with independents, while his move to help undocumented spouses will please his base. He has framed both as a way to bring order to a chaotic immigration situation. Democrats, though, have struggled to make a case for immigration as a positive good.
Immigrants are good
That’s unfortunate, because there’s plenty of evidence that immigrants are a huge boon to the United States, and that we only harm ourselves by criminalizing and demonizing so many of them.
A 2022 study found that immigrants contribute some $382.9 billion in federal taxes and $196.3 billion in state and local taxes each year. A 2023 analysis weighed costs and benefits and concluded that immigrants contribute $4,846 per capita in 2012 dollars. In other words, each immigrant (including undocumented immigrants) adds around $5,000 per year to the US economy.
Immigration has also been key to the current strength of the US economy. The disruptions of the covid pandemic led to massive labor shortages in the US, in no small part because immigration plummeted. As the economy opened again, immigrants helped fill labor gaps, allowing the economy to grow over the last year while inflation has come down. And one of the reasons border crossings have increased during Biden’s term is because the US job market is the envy of the world, providing migrants with a powerful incentive to come here.
The conventional wisdom on the right, and even on parts of the left, is that immigrants take jobs from US workers and damage the labor movement. But what we’re currently seeing is that immigration creates jobs, and contributes to a healthy economy in which labor is showing unprecedented strength.
The long term health of programs like Social Security depends on immigration. Life expectancy in the US has increased over the years and fertility rates have fallen. That means the ratio of working age people 18-64 to retirees over 65 has fallen from 5.7 in 1970 to 3.7 in 2020.
Those numbers look dire. But in fact, immigrants provide a straightforward solution. Most immigrants come to the US when they are relatively young — between 15 and 44 — and they tend to have more children than citizens. The right’s proposals for “fixing” Social Security generally focus on reducing benefits and raising the retirement age. A better fix would be to lower byzantine barriers to legal immigration, making it easier for people to live and work in the US and to pay into the programs that protect and care for older workers.
Not just the economy
The benefits of immigration go well beyond the boost to the economy. To tick through just a few of many examples that could be cited, some of the best foods in the US — Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Indian — are the result of immigration, recent and not so recent. Cultural institutions and museums, like the amazing National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, celebrate and are made possible by immigration. America’s shocking upset against Pakistan in the recent cricket World Cup was made possible by the fact that South Asian players immigrated to the US. And American culture has always been heavily indebted to immigrants like Albert Einstein, Edward Said, Eddie Van Halen, Salma Hayek, and Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Biden’s new spousal policy is a reminder that immigrants aren’t dangerous outsiders spreading chaos and disorder. They’re friends, neighbors, acquaintances, and family. Trump himself is married to an immigrant.
It’s easy to draw lines and demonize people. It’s easy to put in place bureaucratic hurdles which create years long waits for citizenship, or delay asylum applications by months, or make it impossible to get a green card. Cracking down on immigration ultimately makes it harder for people to come into the country, which slows down processing, which encourages people to immigrate illegally — and then undocumented immigration is used as an excuse for even more restrictions.
The only way out of the spiral of hate, demagoguery, and misery is to earnestly make a case that immigration is a positive good, a gift rather than a danger. We are fortunate that so many talented, ambitious people want to come to the US to live, work, raise families, and create a stronger country. Biden’s program to help undocumented spouses is a step forward. But Democrats should do much more.
That’s it for today
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Thanks for reading.
Having grown up in a California community with a huge agriculture component, I was around migrants/immigrants for the first half of my life. Immigrants are humans. They are not animals. And it is absolutely UNChristian to demean them, call them animals, to marginalize them. It angers me as a Christian that there are so-called Christians who despise Hispanics (let's call it what it is - racism), yet gladly shove their grapes, lettuce, berries and apples in their mouths at cheap prices while looking at them as cretins stealing "their jobs" because their Orange God said so.
Hmmm. Let's see. Who do I want to elect to become the next Commander in Chief, Leader of the Free World, and holder of the nuclear launch codes?
Do I want someone who can effect change in reproductive rights, climate change, gun law reform, voting rights, LGBTQ+ freedoms, Court reform, and other rights and freedoms?
Or do I want to vote for the man who is "comin' for illegal people" like my friends, neighbors and colleagues to round them up, send them off to migrant camps to wait for deportation to a country in which they may or may not have ever lived? Which to choose?
Hmmm.