I am so incredibly tired of hearing about immigration. I’m tired of Republicans screaming like it’s the bubonic plague and the end of civilization as we know it. I’m tired of Democrats doing their best ninja impressions trying to avoid the topic altogether.
I certainly don’t claim that our nation’s immigration policy isn’t a valid political issue. It most certainly is. But so are poverty, women’s rights, escalating tensions in the Middle East, the economy, climate change, renewable energy, terrorism, Chinese competition, Russian aggression, international alliances, prescription drug costs, healthcare costs, the solvency of Social Security and Medicare, AI policies, an unaccountable Supreme Court, the decline of U.S. education ratings, teacher shortages, cancer research, and gambling legalization (hey, it’s my list). We have no shortage of issues that need to be addressed by our elected representatives. On my docket, immigration policy is somewhere on page 2.
But, fine. Let’s talk about immigration. The topic, however, is massive and I have little desire to write a book. Hence, here’s a random walk through my observations on the hot-button issues at the forefront of the related political conversations.
[Upon finishing this post, I now see that I did almost write a book. Sorry about that. I had a lot to get off my chest.]
Terminology
So exactly when did “immigrant” become a pejorative? Only Native Americans aren’t descendants of immigrants. My great-grandfather immigrated from Scotland and immigrants built this country. [Well, after we stole it from Native Americans. But that’s another post.]
The answer, of course, is that many Republicans today use “immigrant” as a short-hand for “non-white immigrant”.
At the hands of Trump & Company, the issue of immigration policy is conveniently packaged with a tasty topping that has proven to be quite popular at MAGA rallies: Racism. While not exactly a new phenomenon, the GOP has recently graduated from dog-whistle “those people” references to in-your-face depictions of white neighborhoods being overrun by people of color.
Despite little underlying supporting data (see below), the constant messaging is working, and the resultant political polarization is staggering. According to Gallup, 47% of Republicans think immigration is the number one issue facing our country. Only 8% of Democrats rank it as the most important issue.
A Smattering of History
Simplifying the vast complexity of recent immigration history, the U.S. started to see a major surge of migrants at the southern border around 2014. Prior to that time, most migrants were men from Mexico seeking work in the U.S. Then, rather suddenly, the border started to see masses of women, families, and unaccompanied children from multiple countries seeking American asylum. Many were fleeing repressive regimes that threatened their lives. The surge quickly overwhelmed the asylum process and completely drained both public and private resources. The resultant chaos has never really subsided.
Note that the issue at the border is somewhat orthogonal to the issue of undocumented immigrants already living and working in the U.S. While it’s easy to paint a giant circle around the “immigrant problem”, the two issues are very different and require different solutions.
A Country-Wide Problem?
While it stands to reason that our national immigration policy would have an outsize impact on the southern border states, the GOP insists that undocumented immigrants are an issue across the entire country. Really? Illegal immigrants are a problem in Idaho?
No, they’re not. They’re just not.
First, Idaho borders Canada, but not Mexico. Scratch any border issue.
As for undocumented immigrants already living there, it turns out that they’re an important part of the Idaho economy. The University of Idaho’s McClure Center for Public Policy Research estimates that the state has about 35,000 undocumented immigrants – a number that has held steady since about 2005. In 2014 (the most recent year for which data was available), Idaho’s unauthorized immigrants paid $26.3 million in state taxes. Idaho ranks third in the country for milk and cheese production, and they have an on-going shortage of dairy workers. U.S. citizens simply don’t want those jobs. Unlike farms, dairies operate year-round, and seasonal visa programs for foreign workers don’t work. Thus, many laborers in the state’s dairy industry are undocumented immigrants and the state’s economy would suffer without them.
Variations on this theme repeat across the U.S.
The Wall
Campaigning before the 2016 election, Trump promised to build a wall spanning the 1,954 miles of our border with Mexico and he promised to make Mexico pay for it. After four years in office, the Trump administration managed to add a grand total of 80 miles of new barriers for which Mexico paid exactly [checks notes] $0.00. In 2024, Trump is again promising to build the wall. Sure, he will.
Many years ago, I devoted a post to The Wall and my opinion hasn’t changed. It was a stupid idea then; it’s a stupid idea now.
Voting by Non-Citizens
The GOP claims that Democrats are relying on votes by non-citizens to win in November. Thus, Republicans are tripping all over themselves trying to pass laws to prevent such election fraud. The issue is certainly a MAGA crowd-pleaser but has no factual basis whatsoever.
Federal law already prohibits voting by non-citizens and any attempt to do so is punishable by imprisonment or deportation. Moreover, such attempts very rarely occur, and no one has cited a single reputable source that even implies otherwise. In fact, the Heritage Foundation – a decidedly right-leaning organization – identified exactly 100 cases across the U.S. of non-citizens who fraudulently voted in the decades between 2002 and 2022. Assuming only a billion votes were cast in that timeframe (a low estimate), that’s a fraud rate of 0.00001%.
It’s simply not a problem.
VP Harris’ Immigration Task
The GOP has recently been quite busy trying to tag Harris as Biden’s “border czar” and thereby laying all blame for everything on her shoulders.
Yeah, no.
Biden never called Harris a “border czar” nor did he even imply that she’d be responsible for the administration’s immigration policies. Biden did ask Harris to work specifically with the governments of the Northern Triangle (El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras) on the “root causes” of people leaving those countries and heading to the U.S. There was nothing related to the border – nor even to Mexico – in her portfolio.
Was she successful? It’s just too early to tell. She did help set up centers where potential migrants could apply for U.S. asylum without making the trek to the border and those centers seem to be working. The number of migrants showing up at the border from the Northern Triangle is actually down, although they still represent a significant percentage.
The point, however, is that Harris was never the Biden administration’s point person with respect to immigration policy. It’s fair to argue that she was the Vice President of an administration that was responsible for that policy – as long as we also acknowledge the limited constitutional power invested in the VP’s office.
Economics
Despite Trump’s claims that undocumented immigrants are taking “black jobs” (yes, he actually said that), they’re not.
The Brookings Institution found that “undocumented workers often work the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do.” As in Idaho, these workers are largely handling jobs that would otherwise go unfilled. In the process, they are also paying federal taxes. In 2022, undocumented workers paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, helping to fund a program from which they are ineligible to benefit. Also, despite claims to the contrary, undocumented immigrants DO NOT qualify for welfare, food stamps, or Medicaid. Even legal immigrants can’t receive such benefits until after they’ve been in the U.S. for five years.
But, yes, undocumented immigrants can receive public schooling and emergency medical care. The Supreme Court ruled back in 1982 that children, regardless of immigration status, must have access to elementary and secondary education. They reasoned that the harm imposed on society by denying undocumented children an education was far greater than the resources saved by excluding them. That’s just common sense.
Deportations
During the recent presidential debate, Trump claimed there were 18 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. The most recent government estimate, however, puts that number at about 11 million. Regardless, Trump is heavily campaigning on a promise of “mass deportations” of undocumented immigrants, utilizing the DEA, ATF, FBI, DHS, and local police forces.
But here’s the thing: It’s just not going to happen.
Quickly deporting millions of people is a logistical impossibility. It’s not just putting people on planes. You have to first identify the millions of people that you want to put on the planes, you have to have a means of monitoring and finding them while they’re “in line”, you have to find the planes you’re going to use, you have to deal with host nations that will need to let the planes land, you have to get appropriate travel documents for everyone, … and THEN you can put them on a plane.
Such a mass deportation would also be astronomically expensive. The ICE budget for transportation and deportation in 2023 was $420 million and in that year the agency deported 142,580 people. That rounds to about $3K per person and that cost would logically increase as available logistical resources become scarce at the suggested scale. But even at a low estimate of $3K per person for the low estimate of 11 million undocumented immigrants, the raw spend alone equates to about $33 billion dollars – or about $10 billion more than the 2024 budget of NASA.
That direct cost doesn’t include the substantial lost government revenues incurred after we’ve deported undocumented immigrants who were paying federal, state, and local taxes and who were contributing to the nation’s workforce and consumer economy.
We also have to consider the lost opportunity costs of using agents from the alphabet soup of agencies mentioned by Trump. One assumes that they currently have other jobs that would no longer get done. Also, given the partisan split throughout the country, the federal government would need to fund some means of enforcement and punishment for states and cities that refused to cooperate.
From an international standpoint, let’s also be real. Few countries are going to let any of our planes land without first cashing a huge check from Uncle Sam.
Finally, I’ll only mention the horrible optics of loading crying children onto planes and splitting up families of mixed status where the children are U.S. citizens.
As I said: Mass deportations are just not going to happen.
Of course, none of this implies that the U.S. should not have a sane deportation policy, at a considerably smaller scale, for people that deserve to be deported. But here’s the thing from a political perspective that’s mostly being missed:
The Biden administration has already removed more undocumented immigrants from the U.S. than Trump ever did.
During just their first two years in office, the Biden administration removed over 2.8 million undocumented immigrants. In Trump’s four years, his administration removed only 2 million people. Without getting too far into the weeds, one reason that different numbers are tossed around has to do with the difference between “deportations” and “expulsions”. Deportations require a lengthy judicial process; expulsions (under Title 42) are immediate. Both, however, result in the removal of someone from the U.S. While Trump “deported” more people than Biden, Biden “removed” more people than Trump. The latter, obviously, is the only metric that matters to anyone not playing word games.
Before I step off of this particular soapbox, I will acknowledge that the Biden administration’s removal numbers did recently drop subsequent to a decision to stop using Title 42 to turn back unaccompanied minors who arrive at the border without a parent or guardian. The GOP is already gleefully using that drop against Harris… and Democrats should take full responsibility.
To those self-proclaimed, self-serving “Christian” politicians who loudly insist that a single-cell American organism is entitled to the full protection of the United States government, but can’t see fit to shield a scared, hungry, foreign-born child who sits at our nation’s border…
Good luck explaining that dichotomy to St. Peter.
Crime
Republicans – and particularly Trump – would have us believe that immigrants are responsible for a massive crime wave in the U.S.
First of all, there is no crime wave. According to FBI statistics, violent crime (homicide, rape, robbery, & aggravated assault) is now lower than it was in 2020, Trump’s last year in office. In fact, violent crime is at a 50-year low and is still on the downswing. My own hometown of Austin, TX saw a 30% drop in violent crime since last year.
Second, placing the blame for the majority of crimes that we do have on immigrants is unsupported by any facts. While there are certainly individual cases of immigrants committing crimes, those are simply bad actors – and any random group of people has individual bad actors. Just because one white Republican took a shot at Trump doesn’t imply that all white Republicans are potential assassins. As a group, immigrants today are actually 60% LESS likely to be incarcerated than U.S.-born citizens.
Third, the GOP seems to have a bucket-full of fabricated stories that they repeat as though they were undisputed facts. For example:
- Multiple Republicans, including Trump and GOP House Majority Leader Steve Scalise, have claimed numerous times that foreign prisons are being emptied so that their prisoners can invade the U.S. Of course, there is zero evidence of any such thing. If there is anything remotely resembling proof, no one has produced it.
- The GOP keeps trying to draw a direct connection between illegal immigration and fentanyl smuggling – a connection unsupported by any facts. A Cato institute study estimated that 93% of fentanyl is smuggled into the U.S. at legal ports of entry by U.S. citizens and, unsurprisingly, 89% of convicted fentanyl traffickers are U.S. citizens. Less than 0.01% of the people arrested by Border Patrol for illegally crossing into the U.S. possessed any fentanyl whatsoever.
Solutions
Spoiler Alert: Immigration policy is a tough issue and there are no easy solutions. Reasonable people could propose reasonable remedies that are diametrically opposed to each another. I can certainly offer no panacea. But do you know who tried to find a solution? Believe it or not, the United States Senate did.
With blessings from leadership of both parties, a bipartisan group led by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) proposed legislation after months of hard negotiations. Was it a perfect solution? Of course not. Not from my perspective nor even from the perspective of those who wrote the legislation. It was a compromise solution. While many Democrats called the deal “unacceptable”, Democratic leadership stood behind the compromise and were ready to push for passage. Doing something was better than doing nothing.
The legislation, however, went nowhere SOLELY because Trump didn’t want any solution enacted during Biden’s administration. Trump wanted to campaign on the issue of immigration, and he didn’t give a rat’s ass about any practical consequences for real people. Sadly, but predictably, Republican leadership in Congress kissed his ring and tanked their own bill. They wouldn’t even allow it to come to the Senate floor for debate.
Sigh.
Are we as Americans so callous that we can’t treat immigrants like human beings? Is that who we are? While we have neither the obligation nor the capacity to house and feed the entire world, can we not show a little compassion to those who make a dangerous trek to our nation’s border seeking only a better life for themselves and their families? Isn’t America supposed to welcome the “tempest-tossed”? I seem to remember reading that somewhere.
The details of an immigration solution are well above my pay grade. However, it seems quite clear that the general contours of any valid solution should include:
- Streamlined processes and increased capacity to handle migrants who are attempting to enter legally into the U.S.
- A technology-driven, virtual “smart wall” similar to a bipartisan proposal from 2017.
- A sane, humane plan for dealing with the millions of undocumented immigrants already living and working in the U.S. who are contributing to our society and economy.
- A quick, effective means of deporting those undocumented immigrants who are not contributing members of our society.
It also seems quite clear that any valid solution will not involve the MAGA rally applause lines of “Build The Wall” and “Mass Deportations Now”.
Conclusion
My preference would be for our political candidates to concentrate first on issues other than immigration. However, if Republicans really want to die on this hill, Democrats need to open fire. They should stop playing defense and mount a frontal attack. In fact, I’d personally suggest making immigration the SOLE topic of the upcoming Harris/Trump debate. There is a real problem here deserving of attention and, if the GOP has serious solutions to propose, I’d seriously like to hear them.
However, if Republicans are just going to continue fact-free fear-mongering about black and brown people invading white neighborhoods, taking jobs away from white people, and murdering white people in their sleep, they should at least have the common decency to wear white sheets so that we can more easily see them coming.