As he readies himself for his second term, Donald Trump is making it clear that he has every intention of carrying out the agenda he outlined during his campaign. Among his promises is one to end birthright citizenship, and another to deport all immigrants who are here illegally. What will happen to those who are citizen children of those without papers? The solution is artful in its simplicity: deport entire families, en masse.
Unsurprisingly, not many media outlets have a thorough analysis of what all of this might mean. About two decades ago, most major newspapers had immigration beats and journalists dedicated to covering them. But then, about about two decades ago, we still had thriving newspapers. Today, the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times have journalists covering the issue, but for the most part the media landscape is filled with reactions to whatever might be happening, instead of a constant coverage. We are living in the illusion of a golden age of media, with Substacks and podcasts crowding for attention alongside legacy papers. Your favourite Substacker may have a fiery op-ed about immigration, but real reporting and analysis require resources that they don’t have. The reality is that actual journalism and writing takes time and labour, the kind that most readers neither understand nor are willing to support and, consequently, very few publications are willing to invest in covering immigration.
Nor can they afford to, because immigration simply isn’t a sexy topic these days. Remember the Dreamers? For a long while, starting in the early aughts, the Dreamers and the Undocuqueers were much sought after by media outlets, with their fresh-faced eagerness to distinguish themselves from the immigrants who had come before them, like their parents. These were not the day labourers who waited in the sun and the cold at Home Depots, hoping for one ill-paid job after another or who picked strawberries in hot, dusty fields. These were, instead, youth who had grown up here, often echoed the words of Audre Lorde, and were all, it seemed, on their way to Yale and Princeton to become doctors and lawyers. Who could resist them, with their affirmation that America was in fact the land of promise?
The Dreamers were an undemanding, compliant lot and despite their veneer of radicalism never made any demands beyond inclusion in the national fabric, with promises that they would be good citizens: a conservative agenda disgused as radicalism. With not much beyond media stunts, dressed in their graduation robes, they demonstrated no real power. Barack Obama threw a bone at this lot: DACA, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, but it wasn’t an actual piece of legislation, merely an executive order that could be erased by the next president.
Which is exactly what Trump tried to do. Much has been made of the fact that Trump tried to erase DACA (stopped only by the Supreme Court), but few in liberal and left media will point out that Obama could have done a lot more than simply offer a toothless measure. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both, in succession, sought to portray themselves as not just strict on immigration but actually, wantonly cruel. Biden placed harsh and severe restrictions on asylum seekers, putting lives at risk at the border. Harris, when asked about her policy on immigration, responded that the Biden administration’s attempts to create tougher laws had been stymied by Trump. She sought to be even more right wing than him, and, during their only debate, praised herself for aligning with conservatives: “And let me say that the United States Congress, including some of the most conservative members of the United States Senate, came up with a border security bill which I supported. And that bill would have put 1,500 more border agents on the border to help those folks who are working there right now over time trying to do their job.”
All of this runs counter to what should be a better, more humane approach to immigration. As Daniel Costa and Heidi Shierholz, conservative scaremongering about immigrants taking away jobs “is often used as an intentional distraction from dynamics that are actually hurting working people—such as weak labor standards and enforcement [and]anti-worker deregulation…” Nathan J. Robinson points out that “We need to fight this fear-mongering aggressively and to stand strong for the rights of our undocumented sisters and brothers. …The solution is to figure out how to accommodate those migrants.”
In other words, we have to significantly and substantially shift the frameworks through which we address the issue of immigration. I fear that this will be a long time coming, in large part because of the Immigration Rights Industrial Complex (IRIC), that large and significantly powerful collection of “immigration rights” organisations which presents itself as progressive and which dictates how the media represents its issues. Massive and powerful entities like the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (ICIRR) as well as smaller organisations consistently portray immigrants as sad, fearful people in need of society’s protection rather than as humans who need and deserve rights: they pay no attention to the systemic, global conditions that have created migration crises everywhere and actually seek to deflect attention from them by relying on tropes and stories about good immigrants and their innocent children. They are aided in their efforts by a media apparatus that feeds off suffering. On Democracy Now, Amy Goodman is fond of recounting and replaying the sounds of children crying after being separated from their parents at a Customs and Borders enforcement facility. That tape has become the soundtrack to the current immigration “movement,” such as it is. Even on the supposed left, there’s very little offered, in terms of a response to Trump. There’s not much that goes beyond a white-saviourism-tinged idea that the first signs of deportations will be greeted by crowds of people showing up to protect their immigrant brethren. Citizen activists everywhere have been voicing some version of, “I will stand up for you, comrade!” to their immigrant brethren. There is much talk of people rushing to protect deportees.
You and whose army?
In early 2017, thousands of protesters showed up at airports everywhere to protest the infamous “Muslim Ban.” Buoyed by their memories of such actions (which eventually did nothing to stem the rise of anti-immigrant measures even in the Biden administration), activists are now dreaming of the days when they might do the same in a second Trump administration. But this kind of work is not sustainable over the long term, and Trump is now much better prepared, with a potentially much deadlier team of lawyers behind him with advice. (And it’s worth noting that the harm of the Muslim Ban remains, because families are still separated by its effects). Without a significant shift in the national conversation—away from talk of saving people towards actually treating them as humans with minds and histories of their own—nothing will change. The left has long been a miserable failure on immigration (see my links below for the many times I’ve proven this), and it continues to be so, with no actual plan besides, “I’ve got your back!” As for the organisations that could bring about real demands: their very existence depends on Trump. Without Trump, where would ICIRR be? Without their favourite bogeyman, their precious Voldermort, how would such groups survive in their fundraising efforts?
As I write this, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that Tom Homan, Trump’s “border czar” has declared that the city will be “ground zero” for mass deportations and that the city’s mayor and the state’s governor need to get out of his way.
A lot of what Trump has to say about immigration is probably bluster—the 14th amendment guarantees birthright citizenship, so he’ll need more than luck with changing that. Mass deportations require the manifestation of an orchestrated police state, and Americans may not warm to the overt presence of such. But countless numbers of the most vulnerable, in places that are not crowded cities but suburban and rural areas will see the brunt of his attacks—the day workers, the undocumented sex workers, the many children still separated from their parents, people already stuck in the prisons we so graciously refer to as “detention centres”—will see their suffering continue. And most Americans don’t care about them, so matters can and will become much worse for them. The left and the immigration rights “movement” have made this kind of callousness possible because they have collectively, over the past many decades, focused only on likeable, innocent, sad immigrants and have failed to even propose a single piece of legislation that could change lives. It may shock many liberals and leftists to find out that the last president who actually tried to push through a comprehensive immigration reform package was George W. Bush. Not Obama, not Biden.
What can anyone, especially those of us on the left, do? For starters, we can resist foolish and ill-advised talk about protecting people when we don’t have the resources. The first rule of organising is: never make a promise you can’t keep.
We need to change the ways we talk about and conceive of the figure of the immigrant. That means we stop describing immigrants as poor, sad people who bring their beautiful ancestral spirits everywhere they go and, instead, see them as part of a larger historical reality that has to do with labour and globalisation as well as the simple desire of people to move in order to find different lives. We have to stop talking about them as people who enrich countries, as hard-working immigrants whose work makes our lives better. Everywhere among liberals and leftists, the first impulse is always to justify immigrants as, for instance, people who do the work most Americans won’t do. This is not a progressive or leftist vision but in fact a deeply racist idea of the immigrant, ingrained in the notion that they are lesser people simply here to make our lives easier. It reduces them to servile dependents who need our condescension and kindness to be allowed to survive.
Tied to this is the often repeated statement that, if not for immigrants, we might see the prices of essential goods and services soar. This is racism masquerading as economic analysis. Is it true? Maybe. But saying some version of, “Oh, no, if we can’t have underpaid/almost free Mexican immigrant labour picking our oranges, we might have to pay $10 for our morning glasses of juice” is a lot like saying, “If not for slaves, we might not have those beautiful mansions in the plantations.” Also true. But the point ought to be, “Those mansions are hideous manifestations of truly oppressive and genocidal impulses, and should never have been built. If there were no slave labour, they would not exist, and we wouldn’t be sitting here, contemplating the history of a country literally built on the sweat of slaves.” As for cheap strawberries or corn or cilantro: What if we paid day labourers an actual livable wage, the kind we might mandate for American citizens, and fought for a world where the vast majority of us don’t feel like we’re just praying we don’t face a calamitous health emergency that could wipe us out? In a world without the kind of economic inequality we see (and which we have naturalised), everyone, from labourers to teachers to executives, could live without fear of precarity and penury. The point about cheap, exploited labour is not to justify it because it brings us our inexpensive lifestyles: the point is that we should not be using it in the first place.
There is a great deal more that needs to shift in the conversations we currently have about immigration and immigrants, and that includes the relentless drive to force them to live up to unrealistic and outdated stereotypes about moral character and likeability. Immigrants are not allowed to simply be people: they are faced with a demand that they bring magical stories of their native lands: of the cumin-scented hands of their abuelas, the gentle sing-song rhythmic cadences of their nanas, the scent of jasmine trees, and the succulence of mangoes. They are praised for and admonished to be hard-working, as if Americans are all such uniformly industrious folk. What if an immigrant simply wanted to come here to get a job that allows them to take more leisure time? To be—dare we say this out loud—lazy? What if, instead of compliant and needy youth sobbing that they just wanted to be the best Americans they could be, the left had made space for angry, fierce young people who were both undocumented and critical of the entire imperial US agenda?
In the months and years to come, ICIRR and its ilk will feed and fatten themselves on the bounty that is Trump. Without his vitriol about immigrants, they have no cause to ask for funds. After all, if we had a sound government that, magically, decided to institute real immigration reform, ICIRR and the others would have to look shiftily around and admit that they haven’t made a single, substantive demand of any administration, Democratic or Republican.
If we are to bring about real change in immigration, we have to turn our backs on the groups that have so far only exploited the ongoing immigration crisis. On the left, we have to turn the conversation back to the problems arising from neoliberalism and its threat to local and global economies, and we have to do all that without only choosing to fight for the immigrants we might like or feel sorry for. Trump’s immigration agenda didn’t come about because the right brought it about: it came about because the left has never had an adequate response beyond sad stories and crying children. On immigration, the left has only ever had bandaid solutions and is always mired in a scramble to save the immigrants it can sympathise with.
So far, the left has only had reactions to a worsening immigration crisis. What we need right now is action, in the shape of actual, fierce, brave demands for real change.
For more of my work on immigration, see:
On Immigrants, Criminality, and Changing the Narrative
“Undocumented”: How an Identity Ended a Movement
Trauma and Capitalism or, Your Trauma Story Will Kill You
Romancing the Border: Or, Making (Self) Deportation Sexy
Undocumented vs. Illegal: A Distinction without a Difference
Critical Race Theory Won’t Save Us
DACA Was Always DOA: Let’s End It Now
Travel, Passports, and the Differences between Expats and Immigrants
There’s much more: use the search engine on this site to look for my work on immigration.
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