When President Trump entered office, his strongest issue was immigration. “We will quickly re-establish control of our sovereign territory and borders.” Now, a year later, as Americans have gotten a taste of the cruelty of the administration’s deportation program, whether that’s their rendition of immigrants to a prison in El Salvador —— “If you come to our country illegally, this is one of the consequences you could face.” Whether that’s the use of ICE and Customs and Border Protection to harass and terrify American communities —— “He’s not doing anything!” “Stupid, come out!” “I’ve got my baby!” Whether that’s the arrest of children and their detention in squalid holding camps across the country. Having seen all of that, Americans have a much dimmer view of the president on immigration. His approval of his handling of immigration has declined precipitously. Americans don’t like the behavior of ICE. “They don’t have a warrant.” They don’t like the behavior of Customs and Border Protection. They don’t like the way that the administration is indiscriminately targeting all immigrants, not just those who they say are criminals. “Isn’t it wonderful that we’re keeping criminals out of our country? Why can’t you just say that?” Which is what the public expected in the beginning: a targeted program focused on people who had broken laws, not a dragnet meant to capture anyone who doesn’t appear to belong. “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden? Just a few.” And Democratic rhetoric on this has emphasized the way that the administration doesn’t so much focus on criminals or people in jails, but focus primarily on anyone they can get their hands on, whether or not they are here lawfully. “They round up U.S. citizens as they strip our rights.” “They’re going to be held accountable one way or the other.” Whether or not they are productive members of their communities. “That is what takes place in dictatorships, in authoritarian societies.” But one thing missing in the public conversation about immigration right now is an actual defense of immigration, an actual defense of immigrants. It was missing in the 2024 presidential election, when Vice President Kamala Harris was more focused on her ability to be tough on border security than she was on making any positive case for immigration. “We will quickly remove those who arrive here unlawfully, prosecute the cartels, and give Border Patrol the support they so desperately need.” In fact, an active, positive case for immigration has been missing from American political life for some time. “Democrats say: Please don’t call them animals. They’re humans. I said: No, they’re not humans. They’re not humans. They’re animals.” Instead, we get a zero-sum view of immigrants and immigration, in which every immigrant that comes is taking something away from an American citizen, whether that is a house, as JD Vance has argued —— “Because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants who were taking houses that ought, by right, go to American citizens ——” Whether that’s a job, as Donald Trump has argued —— “Americans are being squeezed out of the labor force and their jobs are taken.” Whether that is somehow, in some amorphous sense, a kind of feeling of community with one’s fellow Americans. That is the tenor of the conversation in this country, that immigrants represent a taking from us. Now, my own experience living in a place where there are many immigrants is that this is just false. But we can also look at the facts, which are quite clear about the positive impact that immigrants and immigration have on the United States. Immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, contribute billions of dollars to tax receipts. They are paying into Medicare and Social Security in particular, without ever being able to utilize it in the future. When you look at the utilization of social welfare services in this country, what you find is that immigrants utilize them at a lower rate than native-born Americans. Immigrants are less likely to commit violent crimes than native-born Americans. This, despite this administration’s efforts to portray all immigrants as direct dangers to people’s public safety. And when you look at their overall impact on the economy, immigrants are a huge net positive. They fill vital gaps in the labor force, especially in sectors like construction, hospitality and the larger world of care work. There has been a notable shortage in the number of people available to build homes, for example, or work in nursing home centers, or work in hospitals, or work in child care. And while anti-immigrant voices in our country insist that every immigrant that comes is taking a job from a native-born American, what the facts show is that immigrants are complementary to American workers. The construction workers building a home and buying food for lunch are benefiting the restauranteur, who then hires new people to support his business, and so on and so forth. You can see the relationship there, interconnectedness that benefits everyone. And the children of today’s immigrants are assimilating in much the same way as previous generations of immigrants. It is honestly hard to find a negative here. We received a large influx of immigrants under President Biden and the opposite of what anti-immigration voices said would happen happened. “The unemployment rate is at 3.4 percent, a 50-year low.” The president is on his back foot when it comes to immigration. Democrats are pressing him to fire Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller and make serious changes to his immigration program. “The kind of dishonesty we see from Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller is the bread and butter of authoritarian regimes.” But what we’re still missing in the public conversation is just for someone to say clearly and straightforwardly that immigration is good and that we should welcome as much of it as we can. And that the voices who say otherwise, that immigration is a threat to our way of life, that immigration is a threat to community, is a threat to our economy, that they’re simply wrong. The facts say they’re wrong. And I would say that common decency says that they’re wrong.
