Sonali
is Senior Editor at YES! Magazine. She is the author of
Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial
Justice (City Lights, 2023). She is also Senior Correspondent
and Writing Fellow of the Independent Media Institute‘s
Economy for All project.
A
quiet panic has broken out within immigrant communities across
the United States ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration
on January 20, 2025. Mixed-status families are expecting to
be separated, DACA recipients foresee their status being revoked,
those with Temporary Protected Status are pessimistic about
the program remaining valid, and asylum seekers fear the worst.
Indeed, if Project 2025’s anti-immigrant agenda is fully
enacted, the horrors of family separation that the nation
witnessed in 2018 under Trump’s first term will pale
in comparison to what’s coming.
And
yet, Trump might claim that this time, he’s merely following
the public’s desires. The prevailing story of the 2024
presidential election is that voters were so fed up with immigration
upending their lives that they picked a leader who promised
to do something about it. Headlines such as this New York
Times piece on Election Day claimed, “Voters Were Fed
Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.” Indeed,
polls showed likely voters ranking immigration as either the
top issue, or second only to the economy.
What
has gone unsaid about public discontent over immigration and
Trump’s coming assault on immigrant rights is that the
Biden administration paved the way for it, manufacturing a
“migrant crisis” and volleying it right into Trump’s
hands so he could lob it all the way to the White House. What’s
needed are not just better policies but a rewriting of the
narratives about immigration and immigrants so that vulnerable
human beings are no longer political scapegoats every four
years.
Gallup
polls show that national anxiety over immigration significantly
increased over the four years that Joe Biden was president.
The fraction of Americans wanting lower levels of immigration
had been slightly decreasing for years, landing at around
30 percent. In 2020 that number began rising, and by 2024,
it had jumped to 55 percent.
It’s
tempting to conclude that this trend is merely a matter of
perception, the result of successful propaganda, of Trump’s
constant drumbeat that Biden opened the floodgates at the
border, rolling out the welcome mat for millions of people
with no papers. Indeed, far too many people hold false views
of immigrants in the U.S., from assuming they are more prone
to committing violent crimes—not true—to the idea
that they are stealing jobs from native-born Americans and
longtime residents—also not true. The adoption of such
falsehoods is clearly Trump’s doing.
However,
there are plenty of credible reports across the country, in
small-town America and in urban centers, that demonstrate
a real struggle with absorbing tens of thousands of newly
resettled people from foreign nations. Such dynamics reinforced
the notion that immigration is out of control and gave credence
to Trump’s lies about immigrants.
What’s
going unsaid is that migrants from nonwhite nations in Latin
America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia are being deliberately
dumped into towns and cities with no plan for orderly absorption
and assimilation—in direct contrast to how well the
Biden administration welcomed Ukrainian refugees. A February
2024 in-depth report by Jerusalem Demsas in the Atlantic is
one of the few analyses that explored what happened and why.
“Russia’s
2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced
people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them,”
explained Demsas. The numbers of Ukrainian refugees and nonwhite
immigrants in many towns and cities have been comparable,
but the ways in which they were resettled have sometimes been
starkly different. Based on interviews with mayors and municipal
leaders, Demsas realized there were “two major differences
in federal policy” that explained the contrast.
One
policy difference was that Ukrainian refugees were allowed
to work as soon as they arrived in the U.S., while subsequent
waves of migrants were prohibited from working and then demonized
for using government aid.
The
other difference was that the Biden administration carefully
coordinated Ukrainian arrivals with local officials to ensure
their proper assimilation. And it chose not to do so with
groups arriving from across the Southern border. This meant
that those local leaders who could politicize migrants did
so by pointing to the chaos their presence seemed to provoke
and by adopting policies that deliberately worsened the optics
of immigration.
“To
call this moment a ‘migrant crisis’ is to let
elected federal officials off the hook,” concluded Demsas.
If the federal government had treated nonwhite Latin American,
Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants the same way it treated
Ukrainian refugees, voters would likely not have been as swayed
by Trump’s lies as they were.
A
similar scenario played out with asylum seekers at the border.
Rather than allowing those seeking asylum to make their case
in an orderly way, the first Trump administration tried to
break the entire system, creating chaos in order to blame
asylees. Joe Biden’s administration blithely allowed
the restrictions to remain in place, breaking his campaign
promise.
The
reality is that the undocumented immigrant population in the
U.S. increased by only 800,000 people between 2019 and 2022
and remains below 2007 levels. In a nation of 335 million
people, this is less than a quarter of a percent of the population.
How can such a tiny fraction of people be the source of so
many problems as Trump claims?
Americans
are not anti-immigrant. In fact, they are pro-immigration.
A new Pew Research poll released on November 22, 2024, finds
that nearly two-thirds of Americans are happy to have undocumented
immigrants remain in the nation with legal protections provided
certain conditions are met, such as security checks and lawful
employment.
The
reason it appears as though Americans are anti-immigrant is
because they’re being told that hordes of people are
breaking the rules, sidestepping order, and forcing their
way in to cause chaos, commit crimes, and steal jobs. This
is both Trump’s fault, and Biden’s.
Migration
is a large-scale phenomenon of vulnerable populations fleeing
war, poverty, persecution, climate change, and more. When
given accessible procedures to enter another nation legally,
migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers will do everything
possible to follow the rules. Because, why not? Why would
they deliberately jeopardize their own long-term security
when given the chance? It turns out, the system has been deliberately
broken in order to manufacture a crisis and help gutless politicians
claim they are being “tough on immigration.”
The
U.S. desperately needs immigrant workers. This is true not
only in low-wage industries but in such highly skilled fields
as medicine where immigrants are disproportionately represented.
For
example, the Migration Policy Institute found that “[w]hile
immigrants represent 14 percent of the Illinois population,
they make up 37 percent of its physicians and 19 percent of
its registered nurses.” There is a nationwide shortage
of medical workers—physicians, nurses, technicians,
and home health aides—a gap that could be filled by
skilled new immigrants.
As
the U.S.’s elder population continues to live longer,
needing more care, and as the national birth rate falls, immigrants
have stepped in to provide care and pay taxes to fund services
they aren’t even allowed to access. Indeed, many nations
in the Global South are struggling with the “brain drain”
of their most talented workers leaving to work in the U.S.
and other Western nations.
The
stories we are telling about immigrants are fueling misplaced
panic in the U.S. We cannot rely on Trump to fix what he sought
to break. In the coming months and years, the devastation
the incoming president will wreak on vulnerable populations
will test our collective morality.
What’s
needed before the next election are truthful narratives about
immigrants, including the fact that the migrant crisis has
been manufactured and the legal immigration system deliberately
broken for political gain, forcing most people into untenable
situations.
Most
importantly, we need to be clear that our nation needs immigrants
just as, if not more than, immigrants need the U.S.
