Analysis & Action
- Oct 26, 2025
- 27 min read
Welcome to my six-part series on immigration in the United States! I hope it will be a helpful tool for you as you navigate the confusing and contradictory messages we hear about this topic. I recommend reading the articles in the order listed, but you can do whatever you want. I'm not the boss of you.
Analysis & Action (this article)
It’s no secret that immigration policy in America has been a problem for a long time. But the exact nature of what the problem is and when it started is up for debate.
For decades, we remained pretty much at homeostasis with around 11 million illegal immigrants. It wasn’t the same 11 million; there was regular turnover as some people gained citizenship or permanent residency and new people came illegally. This number remained mostly steady through the immigration debates of the Bush, Obama, and Trump 1.0 years. I’m calling it homeostasis because that number of illegal immigrants living here did not have a felt impact on most Americans. They largely blended in with society and did not have an obvious effect on our economy or crime rate.
The homeostasis was thrown off in 2022 and 2023, with numbers of unauthorized immigrants and migrants reaching 14 million, largely due to high numbers of people coming under humanitarian parole programs or asylum. Most of those people were coming through a legal process, but did not have secure legal status. The numbers started decreasing in 2024 and have continued decreasing, but we are still around 13 million (it’s hard to say exactly, due to the nature of undocumented people being, well, not documented).
We saw mayors and governors bussing migrants back and forth across the country, unable to absorb them into their communities. We heard Border Patrol complaining about having to do paperwork to let illegal crossers in instead of law enforcement work to keep them out. We watched Jocelyn Nungaray’s mother testify before Congress about her daughter’s murder at the hands of two Venezuelan men who had entered the country illegally.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump pointed to the high immigration numbers of 2022 and 2023, and stories like Jocelyn’s, as evidence that immigrants in general are a severe threat to our nation. It was the same argument he’d made back in 2015, before the excesses of the Biden administration even happened.
Trump vowed to eliminate this threat. He has continually referred back to his winning the election as not only permission, but as a mandate to overhaul the entire demographic makeup of our country by any means necessary.
I understand the wisdom behind bringing the number of undocumented immigrants down dramatically. I agree with Trump that the government should know who is in the country at any given time. I think it would be better for all of us if everyone was accurately accounted for and had access to the same rights, resources, and protections.
But those who voted for Trump because they hoped he would effectively handle immigration to best protect us and our economy have been sorely fooled.
Sadly, those people—the moderate majority—are not the ones with the biggest influence. Many of the key people who have helped shape Trump’s immigration policies are motivated by a very particular, insidious belief: that foreign-born people (especially non-white ones) are inherently more criminal, stupider, lazier, less American, and less deserving of human dignity than native-born and white people.
This is not me being sensationalist. This belief is blatant, readily observable in the things these people have been saying and doing for many years. Remember Stephen Miller and AmRen, with their “race realism”? That’s not a one-off. It’s a deep, dark rabbit hole that I’m not going to go down here. You can do that on your own time, if you have the stomach for it.
Only now those people are not just hanging out in musty corners of the internet, thanks to Donald Trump. Now they are mainstream. Some of them are seated in the highest halls of our government, with as much political power as a person can have in a modern democracy, continually grasping for more. They have the ability to enact their long-time agenda, winking and nodding to each other, while they peddle a story to the moderate majority that it’s all about keeping our country safe.
I have no tolerance for the belief that foreign-born people (especially non-white foreign-born people) are inherently more criminal, stupider, lazier, less American, and less deserving of human dignity than native-born and white people. None whatsoever.
It takes five minutes of reading the Bible to understand that viewing yourself as more deserving of goodness than other people is antithetical to the heart of God. The theology of immigration is a deep well that I encourage you to explore with people more qualified than me, like Reverend Bethany Rivera Molinar of Ciudad Nueva.
Similarly, it takes five seconds of reading the Declaration of Independence to understand that Americanness is not defined by race or customs, but by commitment to a free and fair system of governance, derived from the consent of the governed. (Do I have to say this? Apparently I do.)
But even beyond my Christian faith and my American values, I have no tolerance for this position as a practical matter. I’ll explain why, starting with crime and then moving to economics. Then, I’ll talk about the Trump immigration policies I think have merit.
Making Immigrants Dangerous Again
Remember in 2015 when most Americans weren’t too concerned about immigration but Trump launched his campaign by talking about it? That was a clever angle. Terrorism was, in fact, a key concern for many Americans at that time, as ISIS’s global influence had grown considerably in the previous few years.
Trump used this fear of terrorism to turn immigration into a national security issue. He blurred the lines between refugees, asylum seekers, temporary visitors, legal immigrants, and illegal immigrants, which was easy to do since most people didn’t understand the system anyway.
In the opening paragraphs of “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” (one of his signature 2017 executive orders), Trump framed the issue by saying, “Aliens who illegally enter the United States without inspection or admission present a significant threat to national security and public safety.”
His statement sounds like something that could be true. Borders need to mean something. A government needs to be aware of who is in its lands and whether they are dangerous. But were illegal immigrants a significant threat to national security and public safety? No. No they were not.
The federal government does not currently track immigration status alongside criminal convictions, but it should; that’s an area where I agree with Trump. Most states don’t keep good records of the immigration status of criminals, either. Texas is one of the only states that does, so that’s where these numbers come from. If there is a correlation between immigration status and crime, it’s that illegal immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born citizens.
The federal government does track the race and ethnicity of criminals. In 2019, white people and black people committed far more murders, proportionately, than any other racial group, including Hispanic and Latino people (who make up our largest illegal immigrant population). Among Hispanic and Latino murderers, many of them were statistically likely to be citizens, making the disparity between native-born murderers and immigrant murderers even larger.
In a meta-analysis of all terrorist attacks on U.S. soil between 1975 and 2017, Cato researchers found that native-born terrorists had carried out nearly four times as many attacks as foreign-born terrorists. Even including the nearly 3,000 people killed on September 11, 2001, the risk of being killed by a foreign-born terrorist was 264 times less than the risk of being killed in a normal homicide. If you take out September 11, the average annual murder rate by foreign-born terrorists was essentially zero. In 2015, we weren’t exactly facing an urgent national security crisis of foreign-born terrorists.
But what about gangs? Trump and his spokespeople, including then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen, repeatedly pointed to the extremely violent gang MS-13 as a primary reason cracking down on border security and interior enforcement was necessary. In June 2018, Nielsen said, “The kids are being used as pawns by the smugglers and the traffickers. Those are traffickers, those are smugglers and that is MS-13.”
Again, it sounds like something that could be true. Central American gang members are trafficking in children as pawns? Terrifying! Shut it down! Keep them out!
But for those most closely affected by gang violence, tightened border security is not the solution. A 2016 ICE operation that apprehended 1,133 gang members within five weeks found that 80 percent of them were U.S. citizens. A magic wand that immediately got rid of all illegal immigrants (which isn’t how it works anyway) would, at best, leave 80 percent of the problem untouched.
Suffolk County in Long Island, New York, was suffering from increased MS-13 activity in 2016. In May 2017, the Suffolk County Police Department issued a 19-page testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. Police Commissioner Timothy D. Sini shared the evidence his department had gathered about the nature and tactics of MS-13, and described the effects the gang had had in his jurisdiction.
Most MS-13 members had not snuck or been smuggled across the border (although some had). Rather, Sini explained, unaccompanied minors (UACs) from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala often were recruited to MS-13 after arriving. Their country of origin was only a fraction of the reason these children (yes, children; some as young as 10 years old) were recruited, he said:
Several factors lead individuals to become members of MS-13, including, but not limited to, social alienation, the need to be part of a group, a sense of cultural unity, the promise of protection, and economic gain.
As Gregory Boyle of Homeboy Industries says, “No hopeful child has ever joined a gang.”
After demonstrating the ways his department had been battling and would continue to battle MS-13, Sini proposed five ways the federal government could help stop the homicides and dismantle the gang:
Assign far more Assistant United States Attorneys (AUSA) to the area, as they were severely understaffed.
Award grants to the jurisdiction for enhanced strategic policing.
Provide more resources to school-based and community-based gang prevention programs, focused on vulnerable people like UACs.
Create a database of MS-13 members using shared data from various law enforcement agencies.
Do a better job screening sponsors of UACs and notifying schools and local governments when a UAC is getting placed there; give the district more money for resettlement services for UACs.
Sini also clarified why the department did not regularly inquire into someone’s immigration status:
Although cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security is mission critical to removing dangerous gang members from our streets, the Suffolk County Police Department must also ensure that undocumented individuals feel comfortable providing information to law enforcement…If individuals believe that they cannot freely cooperate with law enforcement because of their immigration status, the mission of the Police Department and the safety of all residents are compromised.
It was a complex problem with a complex solution. Cutting funding to resettlement programs and scaring immigrants from coming forward with information to the police department (by threatening mass deportation) actually hindered efforts to keep communities safe from dangerous gangs like MS-13.
But that did not matter to the Trump administration. What mattered to them was communicating their message: THOSE OTHER PEOPLE (especially brown people) are dangerous to PEOPLE LIKE US and we’ve got to keep them out.
Upon taking office again in 2025, Trump resumed beating this drum publicly. After reading through every single one of his immigration-related executive orders, I had almost started to believe him.
Jeeze Louise! I thought. We’ve got millions of military-aged men flooding across the border, completely unmonitored, lurking in our cities and towns, shoving fentanyl down the boys’ throats and raping the girls? That IS dangerous and scary!
It took looking at data from the real world—the people who are at the border, in the police departments, in the detention centers and shelters—to calm myself down. That wasn't what was happening at all. “Military-aged men” is a rhetorical choice designed to frighten people. It simply means males who aren’t children or very old men. It could just as accurately be “working-age men.”
We do not have legions of Latin American soldiers entering the country unsupervised, unleashing havoc on innocent Americans. We just don’t.
None of what I’m saying is intended to minimize the horror of violent crimes committed by illegal immigrants. I feel deeply for those victims and their loved ones. Those families deserve justice, support, and protection.
At the same time, casting terror, gang violence, and crime primarily as issues of keeping the bad guys out grossly misunderstands these dangers. Individual stories are important because each person is precious. But you can’t form effective policy based solely on individual stories. The testimonies of parents whose children were killed in school shootings or people who were raped by their pastors are as heart-wrenching as the testimonies of parents whose children were killed or raped by illegal immigrants.
I spent some time on FAIR’s website (John Tanton’s restrictionist organization that I don’t like), intentionally searching for stories about crimes committed by immigrants. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing anything. And there were a few stories. But not that many, and I had already heard the most egregious ones.
The majority were car crashes, not intentional homicides. Many were old, dating back as far as 2002. This, despite the fact that FAIR is dedicated to reducing immigration. This, despite the fact that both Trump administrations have established a federal office whose sole purpose is to find and support victims of crimes committed by illegal immigrants.
Drugs
What about drugs? Trump is correct that opioid overdoses are a massive problem. The crisis began in the 1990s with doctors indiscriminately overprescribing opioids for pain management. It’s gotten worse in the past decade because foreign drug cartels have figured out how to manufacture and import massive amounts of illegal heroin and opioids.
From 2016 to 2021, deaths from fentanyl alone tripled, from 19,413 to 70,601. Fentanyl is a manmade opiate that is far more lethal than most other drugs; just two milligrams can kill you. That’s the equivalent of 10 to 15 grains of salt. In addition to lives lost, the economic cost is staggering—nearly $1.5 trillion, or seven percent of our gross domestic product (GDP) in 2020.
Having a sizable portion of its population addicted to drugs is really bad for any country, for all kinds of reasons. It’s especially bad when most people can’t tell the difference between lethal and non-lethal versions of the drug.
Most of the fentanyl in the U.S. is made in Mexico from ingredients (“precursor chemicals”) imported from China, then smuggled across the Mexico-U.S. border. It’s easy to do because one lethal dose is virtually undetectable. The average amount seized by authorities is 2.6 pounds, or 50,000 lethal doses.
Two Mexican cartels, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, run most of the networks that manufacture and distribute the drug. However, those networks rely heavily on U.S. citizens to do their dirty work for them. In recent years, over 86 percent of fentanyl traffickers were U.S. citizens. Around 40 percent of those people had little or no criminal history.
After spiking during the COVID-19 pandemic and reaching a peak in 2022, fentanyl deaths have been declining over the last couple of years. Biden declared opioid trafficking a national emergency in 2021, applying sanctions to manufacturers and distributors, especially those from China. His administration’s Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) cracked down on domestic distribution of fentanyl. He also alerted the public that many “prescription” drugs were actually fake pills laced with a deadly dose of fentanyl. Finally, under Biden, the FDA approved Narcan, an over-the-counter nasal spray that can, in a pinch, reverse an overdose and save lives.
The Trump administration has tackled the issue primarily through two means. The first is about labels. First, he designated cartels as foreign terrorist organizations, then relied on that designation to launch Navy attacks on boats off the coast of Venezuela and deploy federal agents in fatigues to U.S. cities to raid apartment buildings without the permission of state or local authorities.
This use of military force is being challenged in courts on the grounds that the cartels mentioned in the executive order do not meet the definition of enemy combatants and that it violates our basic laws regulating the different spheres of authority for federal, state, and local law enforcement.
With far less pomp and circumstance, the administration is also tackling the opioid crisis through a Republican-sponsored bill proposed in Congress to designate all fentanyl-related drugs as Schedule I controlled substances, meaning they have a high potential for abuse and have no current medical value.
Trump’s other favorite tool, besides military force, is tariffs. In response to his tariffs and subsequent negotiations, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum deployed 10,000 troops to the border. Before Trump took office, she had already taken a much harsher approach to dealing with drug and human traffickers than her predecessor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador. (His slogan was “hugs, not bullets.”) Sheinbaum began cracking down on illegal fentanyl trafficking, seizing thousands of kilograms of the drug and arresting more than six thousand people. Trump has seen little such cooperation from China to control manufacturing and trafficking on their end.
Sheinbaum’s cooperation has helped reduce the flow of drugs into the U.S. Labeling all fentanyl-related drugs as Schedule I controlled substances might be a good idea. However, Trump’s policies have consistently failed to grasp the true nature of the problem. In his first term, he was obsessed with the border wall, claiming it would keep out drugs. But the majority (73 percent) of drugs are smuggled through ports of entry; even if the wall had been completed and Mexico had paid for it, it wouldn’t have come close to solving the problem.
Remember that tripling of fentanyl-related deaths? That happened on Trump’s watch, not Biden’s. He was determined to stick to his story that the opioid crisis is an immigration issue, even when the data was telling a different story. He has carried that out-of-touchness into his second term, only this time, he is more emboldened and aggressive.
Trump’s first mistake is what we talked about in the Trump 1.0 piece: he believes Americans (especially white Americans) are being victimized by the rest of the world. This faulty premise is the driving ideology behind all his decisions. His second mistake is that he fails to account for two major pieces of the opioid crisis: 1) the nature of drug addiction and 2) supply and demand.
It’s true that people cannot try a drug they do not have access to. In that sense, if we had been able to curb the flow of fentanyl into the U.S. much earlier on, like starting in 2012, we probably wouldn’t have the same crisis we have today, at least not the same levels of lethal overdoses.
However, many people were already addicted to opioids in 2012 because of the careless overprescription from the 1990s and early 2000s. Why were Mexican cartels making the drugs? Because there was a market for them. Cartels are most definitely for-profit operations, not charities. They increased supply to meet demand.
When you are addicted to something, your body and mind believe you need that high to survive. The more you use a drug, the less of a high you get from it. Then you need a stronger drug to experience that same high. This is why cartels started making more and more powerful opioids. They improved supply to meet demand.
When public health officials during the Biden administration warned that many fake prescription medicines were laced with lethal doses of fentanyl, some addicts actively sought out the dangerous varieties. They wanted the good stuff, top shelf, the most powerful drugs on the market.
Once someone is addicted to a drug, if they run out, they’re not just going to stop using it. They simply get more creative—and more dangerous—in their attempts to get their hands on it. I don’t have to explain this desperation. You’ve seen Breaking Bad.
Many people rejoiced at the explosion of the Tren de Aragua boats carrying thousands of pounds of drugs, and understandably so. As Marco Rubio said, “What will stop them is when you blow them up.” It was satisfying, in a way. We want drug traffickers to be scared of the consequences of their actions.
But what Rubio fails to consider is that, when you blow up a load of precious cargo, all the people waiting on that cargo for their next hit—or their next paycheck—don’t just say, “Oh well. That’s that. I guess I’ll get back to working my respectable job and taking care of my family.”
They get mad. They get revenge. They re-route supply lines, find new dealers, forge new alliances, borrow more money to account for the increased price of their drug of choice. The illicit drug trade is a Hydra. You chop off one head, two more grow in its place, just like in the Percy Jackson movie.
You can’t stop drug manufacturing and distribution networks by profiling a certain type of person and using military force against them. The drug trade is made up of Venezuelans and Americans (and many other nationalities as well), immigrants and citizens. They are rich and poor, male and female (okay, mostly male), criminals and regular Joes.
Sophisticated criminal networks that rely on U.S. citizens and complicit law enforcement are very different from people fleeing for their lives from those criminals. However, sophisticated criminal networks can and do exploit people fleeing for their lives. This is the worst part of the whole situation.
In a later post, I’ll share stories from my immigrant friends that highlight this tragedy. The poor and the immigrants are not the most likely to be participating; they’re just the most likely to get caught.
The language of war is exciting, but it’s not effective. We’ve already tried a war on drugs, and it didn’t work. We put a lot of sick people in prison and destroyed a lot of communities without significantly reducing drug abuse or violent crime.
Let’s not do that again.
Accurate Diagnoses Lead to Effective Solutions
Since there is no direct correlation or causation between immigration and crime, policies that restrict immigration as a means of lowering crime are ineffective. As economic and social policy scholar Alex Nowrasteh says, “A goal of Making America Safe Again requires prosecuting criminals who hurt people and not enforcing immigration laws in an indirect attempt to reduce overall crime rates.”
To repeat: immigration enforcement is not an effective way to prevent crime. Although new data is always unfolding, we already have robust research on crime prevention to guide us. The data points toward solutions similar to what the police commissioner from New York mentioned in his report on MS-13, but on a larger scale:
adequate staffing (with qualified people) of justice system positions
adequate resources and good training for law enforcement
reliable data and clear communication
addressing people’s physical, mental, and emotional needs
community engagement and connection.
We have processes for preventing crime and punishing criminals. “Due process,” we call it. Due process does not mean letting bad guys off the hook. It’s not a matter of who deserves due process and who doesn’t. It’s a matter of being a country that has decided due process is the best way to ensure safety and justice for everyone.
Sometimes, part of that process is preventing a person from entering the country or deporting a person who is already here. The Biden administration failed at this responsibility in some cases. Some changes need to be made to make sure everyone entering the country is accurately accounted for. But Biden did not fail nearly to the extent Trump would have us believe. And not in a way that introduced significant threats to America.
I understand there is an extra layer of tragedy in considering that certain crimes could have been prevented if the perpetrator had been kept out of the country. It seems logical to conclude that the solution, then, is to err on the side of keeping anyone who might be a threat out of the country. Better safe than sorry, right?
But that belies another erroneous belief, one that relates not just to crime, but to economics.
Immigrants are Not a Luxury Good
“Sure, it’d be nice to let the huddled masses in,” some people may be thinking. “But we have to look out for ourselves first, and since some immigrants commit crimes and use up taxpayer money, we might as well keep them out and/or deport them. That will save us the trouble of their crime and expense. It’s no skin off our nose because they’re not Americans, so we’re not responsible for them.”
But here’s the thing: it is skin off our nose. That argument is like saying, “I looked at my monthly expenses and I spend too much at the grocery store. So I’m not gonna go to the grocery store anymore, and that will save me a lot of money.”
On paper, that might be true. If you cut out the $1,000 a month you spend at the grocery store, you’d save $1,000 a month. Right?
Wrong! If you stop spending money at the grocery store, you still have to feed your family. What will likely happen is that you’ll eat out more often because you don’t have groceries in the house. Then—oops!—you’re spending more than $1,000 a month feeding your family.
Similarly, if we get rid of all illegal immigrants and restrict legal immigration, it would be a net negative. Immigrants are not a “luxury good” for the United States. They are an essential good. Yes, one part of the ledger might look better, but other parts of it will look far worse.
It’s true that, on a small scale, in communities quickly overwhelmed by large numbers of immigrants or refugees, there can be a shortage of resources at first. The large influx of immigrants in my Texas community over the last few years has indeed strained public resources like the food bank and public schools, who are trying to serve larger numbers of people with the same staff and budget. This is difficult for everyone, and can mean fewer resources for citizens.
However, we can find ways (and many communities HAVE found ways) to better absorb large influxes of people without concluding that our country is better served by restricting immigration in general. After the initial pain point, immigrants become absorbed into the community (or move elsewhere) and become independent. With very few exceptions, people come to the U.S. to work. Living on the margins of society, dependent on charity and public resources, is difficult and unpleasant. The vast majority of immigrants prefer to get out of that space and into the mainstream as quickly as possible.
It’s also important to note that often, when there is a too-big influx of immigrants to a certain area, that influx has been artificially created by politicians to generate outrage or fear. Most immigrants, understandably, desire to go where their sponsoring family member lives. But when politicians want to make a point, they’ll round up a bunch of immigrants, load them on buses, and deposit them in a community where they have no pre-existing connections or support. This intentionally violates the rights of the immigrants, the equilibrium of the community, and the intended flow of the immigration process.
The answer is not to restrict immigration. If you take away only ONE thing from this entire series, let it be this: we are absolutely cutting ourselves off at the knees by purging illegal immigrants and restricting the flow of legal immigrants.
Here is where my ski resort metaphor completely breaks down. We needed it when discussing the structure of immigration so terms like “USCIS” had somewhere to stick in our brains. But now that we’re talking about the effects of immigration, I want you to crumple that ski resort metaphor up and toss it in the wastebasket.
Immigrants are not guests taking a leisurely vacation at a posh resort. They’re not traipsing through our pristine landscape, leaving a trail of Dr. Pepper cans for us to clean up. We’re not doing immigrants a favor by letting them come here. They’re doing us a favor by coming.
One of the most strategic things we can do to become more prosperous is to dramatically increase the number of people we let into the country. Cato analysts have gone as far as to say that Biden’s single biggest mistake, immigration-wise, was failing to boldly defend his immigration policies. They argue that the increased immigration numbers during the Biden administration helped us avoid a recession, slowed our population decline, and reduced the crime rate.
A 2024 Congressional Budget Office report projected that increased immigration numbers (like those seen during the Biden administration) would increase the national economy by $7 trillion and reduce the deficit by $1 trillion by 2034. Increasing immigration is our best shot at slowing our population decline, filling our labor force, and keeping us competitive in the global economy.
Over time and in the big picture, immigrants (both legal and illegal!) contribute more than they take (roughly $237,000 more per person). Remember, illegal immigrants pay into Social Security using an ITIN, but they can’t claim any Social Security benefits.
By contrast, over the next decade, Trump’s policies are projected to reduce our GDP by 2.6 to 6.2 percent and raise prices by 9 percent. Texas’s economy could shrink by 10 percent. Those grim figures aren’t even taking into account the very high price tag ($170 billion allotted so far) of executing these policies in the first place.
We are already feeling the financial hit, especially in agriculture. On October 2 of this year, Trump’s own Labor Department filed a report saying that “the near total cessation of the inflow of illegal aliens combined with the lack of an available legal workforce, results in significant disruptions to production costs and threatening the stability of domestic food production and prices for U.S consumers.” They don’t see this as a temporary blip, but as a problem that’s going to worsen as we continue to deport and restrict entry for more people.
Americans are getting older and sicker. We are not having enough babies. We rely heavily on immigrant workers to keep us alive, literally. They grow our food, they build our homes, they take care of us when we’re unable to care for ourselves. Immigrants also account for a good chunk of our high-skilled workers and business owners.
We already have labor shortages. That same Labor Department report concluded that “qualified and eligible U.S. workers will not make themselves available in sufficient numbers, even at current wage levels, to fill the significant labor shortage in the agricultural sector.” Mass deportation will not improve or increase jobs for American workers. It will shrink the economy, decrease tax revenue, and lower wages for Americans.
In addition to the problems with mass deportation, Trump’s policies negatively impact the economy by detaining so many people. Even if the administration is able to deport one million people per year—which is unlikely—it will take 11 to 14 years to deport everyone. During that time, these policies are keeping millions of people who would normally be working, caring for their families (a valuable economic contribution), and spending money locked up, draining government resources.
(A terrifying but real possibility is that Trump will try to combat this problem by turning immigrant detainees into forced laborers, another spin on slavery.)
We know that social and family connections and meaningful work are key insulators against mental illness and criminal activity. Trump’s policies will take hundreds of thousands of people who are decidedly not criminals and create just the right conditions to turn them into criminals.
A super-majority of immigrants are law-abiding people who contribute to our economy. We simply cannot afford to lose them.
For a community like mine with a lot of immigrants (both legal and illegal), if they all disappeared tomorrow, things would break down. Children would cry for their missing friends—and their missing parents. Our already-strained foster care system would be totally overwhelmed. Crucial jobs wouldn’t get done. We would lose some of our most devout Christians.
In the process of executing Trump’s immigration policies, our country is going to become not only financially poorer, but also less lawful, more dangerous, more divided, more chaotic, and more spiritually bereft.
I am not prone to hyperbole, but these policies are an absolute disaster. Economic suicide. Cultural suicide. Spiritual suicide.
This Is Me Trying to Find Something Nice to Say
There is one component of Trump’s policies, both from his first term and his second, that I do think is valuable: better data collection and sharing. We don’t track crimes by immigration status. We don’t record immigration status in the census. The various federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies do not have reliable systems for sharing data about potentially dangerous individuals.
Remember the police commissioner from New York who was combating MS-13 in his community? One of his requests was a database of MS-13 members using shared data from various law enforcement agencies. To me, this seems like something that should obviously exist.
Immigration advocates have worked against this type of data collection and sharing in the past because they fear the government will use it to bypass due process or unjustly target people. That’s a valid fear; it has always happened, and is happening far worse under the current administration. I don’t love the North Korea vibes of continuous automatic monitoring of all non-citizens using biometric data. Watching social media accounts for “anti-American” sentiment is scarily similar to something the Chinese Communist Party would do.
However, I don’t believe it’s wise to block good policy altogether because it’s sometimes misused. Donald Trump will not be president forever (despite what he says). It will serve future, more immigration-friendly administrations well to have clear records, to know who is in the country, what is happening with their case, and who might be a safety or flight risk.
To be sure, that is already largely the case. DHS does their job well, for the most part. But there is room for improvement. It is in everyone’s best interest for the government to have accurate records of the people in our country.
We Will Not Leave American Culture to Trump
Remember Trump’s letter to new citizens that was like, “Our history is now your history. Our customs are now your customs”? This is a theme in all of his executive orders about immigration: defending and preserving American culture.
What is that American culture? Even though he doesn’t define it in the letter, we know exactly what he means because he’s been saying it in his speeches and X posts for a decade now. American culture, according to Trump, reached its zenith in the 1950s. (Hence “Make America Great Again.”) And what was America like in the 1950s?
We were in the post-war economic boom; people were buying houses and having babies. We had the strongest military in the world. Ninety percent of Americans identified as Christian. Married (heterosexual) couples comprised 79 percent of households.
But also: Black people were intentionally and systematically kept out of government positions, good neighborhoods, and business and educational opportunities. White people said and did what they wanted to people of color, largely with impunity. There were extremely high domestic expectations for women and very little regard for their physical or mental health. Christians discriminated against racial and religious minorities.
(Also, apparently unbeknownst to Donald Trump, trade unions were robust. International alliances were diplomatic and stable. Public health innovations like the polio vaccine and antibiotics were saving and extending lives.)
Trump seems to mostly remember the first part: the economic prosperity, the stable households, the pride in our military. To hear him talk, it’s almost as if he thinks those positive things existed because white people were allowed to say and do what they wanted with impunity and because women’s well-being was disregarded.
As one small example, on the campaign trail, he said, “We will support baby booms, and we will support baby bonuses for a new baby boom. How does that sound? That sounds pretty good. I want a baby boom. You men are so lucky out there. You’re so lucky.”
I wish I was making this up.
Think back to when you were eight years old, as Donald Trump was in 1954. Unless you lived in a particularly traumatizing home, you probably remember that period fondly. A child’s universe is inherently egocentric. They assume that their experience is the whole story. I don’t know exactly what Young Donald was up to in the 1950s, but it’s safe to assume that he had a generally positive view of the world, being a young, wealthy, white boy. In the time since, he’s used that myopic, childish lens to form an entire ideology of what American culture was, is, and should be.
There are elements of truth to his ideology. That’s why it has resonated with so many people. But much of it is based on bad information. And much of it is based on preferring prosperity, freedom, and good treatment for some people at the expense of others.
I am actually sick to my stomach when I think about how rapidly he is redefining American culture. The preference for whiteness. The indiscriminate use of force. The opulence for a few and desolation for the many. The disregard for truth and resistance to accountability. The erasing of dark parts of our history, so necessary for the continued pursuit of justice today. And the worst part, the part that literally keeps me up at night, is the way he paints the language of Americanness and Christianity over all of it.
Action Items
I just have one action item for you, and it’s this: give yourself, your friends, your enemies, and your politicians permission to contain multitudes.
That’s it.
Allow your heart to be wrenched by any story of pain, even if it pokes a hole in your belief system. Give yourself room to grow and change, and be compassionate with earlier versions of yourself that didn’t know better. Having contradictory opinions doesn’t make you a hypocrite; it makes you a human being in a complicated world.
Don’t assume that your friends need to agree with you on every issue. Be patient and understanding while they externally process. Take them as a whole person. They are more than their ideology, and so are you.
Give your enemies space to evolve. Don’t make it your goal to prove to yourself that everything they think or have thought is problematic. The sixth step of Kingian Nonviolence is reconciliation: Begin with the end in mind. Make room for the relationship to remain intact. In other words, create a pathway for them to acknowledge agreement with you on some things while still saving face.
The politicians, bless them. I know it’s easy to use politicians as a punching bag. When things get complicated or awkward, it’s tempting to say, “It’s the darn politicians’ fault. They’re corrupt. They’re the worst.” And then throw up your hands like that, at least, is something we can all agree on.
But that’s not really fair. If politicians are monsters, they’re monsters we’ve created. We’ve sent them a message increasingly clearly in the last 12 years or so: never compromise. So they’ve stopped compromising. They’ve begun operating in the same mock-your-enemies style we operate in on social media, raising up straw men for the glee of striking them down, pointing out all the hypocrisy on the other side, but never answering the legitimate questions the other side poses.
As a result, politicians have lost their ability to do their job, which is to make and enforce laws that somewhat adequately meet the competing demands of 340 million people. This is why our government is literally shut down right now.
Let’s walk that back. Let’s stop requiring our politicians to cower to every demand our side makes. Instead, let’s expect them to consider all the information, have reasonable conversations with each other, and come up with plans that sorta kinda work.
I have my own list of practical action items to resist the Trump administration's terrible immigration policies: voting, donating to my food bank, learning how to accompany detainees to their court hearings, interviewing immigrants, handing out pamphlets explaining people’s rights, and calling and emailing my representatives.
But I don’t know what yours should be. I don’t know your capacity or convictions or spheres of influence. For now, all I'm asking from you is to make space for all of us to hold competing thoughts and feelings.
My Letter to Immigrants
Here is my word to you, immigrants: Those things that Donald Trump promotes are not American culture. They are not what makes America great. I echo Barack Obama’s definition of American culture in his letter to new citizens: “Hard work and honesty, courage and fair play, tolerance and curiosity, loyalty and patriotism.”
It may take some time, but we will return to being a country that welcomes you. You do not—I repeat, you do not—need to embrace a MAGAism that denies your humanity just for a shot at being accepted here. There are millions of us who want you just the way you are.
Please, bring your culture. It will become part of ours. It will be a little awkward for all of us. We will have communication problems. You don’t have to like everything about America and we don’t have to like everything about you. But the beauty of America, as I learned in college, is that diversity and unity build a community.
We want you to get your papers fixed, not because we fear what illegal immigrants do to our country, but because we fear what our country does to illegal immigrants. For too long, too many of you have lived on the margins of our society, without the rights and protections most of us enjoy.
There are lots of us here who are committed to living cooperatively with you and with each other. We are committed to the rule of law. We are committed to protecting all people’s rights to live how they choose, without harming others. We are committed to participating in our democratic form of government, even when it’s risky or inconvenient.
We choose welcome, for your sake and for ours.
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