Presidential Threats: Xenophobia Drives Trump’s Immigration Agenda, with Existential Costs to…
Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the undocumented — and to immigrants more broadly. His agenda amounts to a death sentence for…
Presidential Threats: Xenophobia Drives Trump’s Immigration Agenda, with Existential Costs to Immigrants
Donald Trump poses an existential threat to the undocumented — and to immigrants more broadly. His agenda amounts to a death sentence for many, an aggressive effort to return American immigration policy to its racist past of quotas designed to keep out the supposedly less desirable while ratcheting up his rhetoric and removing the “shackles” from federal immigration authorities and allowing them free rein to detain just about anyone.
This has many in the immigrant community terrified. Many have slipped back into the shadows, and even some with whom I’ve spoken in the past, who have been active in the immigrant rights movement, have become reticent in the face of potential administration retribution.
This kind of behavior tends to rise and wane, depending on the federal priorities. Under President Obama, immigrants experienced both a heightened fear of deportation and a sense that some could relax. Deportations increased, and each time a federal priorities were restated to explain enforcement priorities — as they were in early 2016 — rumors would start flying and immigrant communities close rank.
“Everybody is afraid of ICE,” Jose Avila told me in 2016. “We are afraid to even go walking.”
Jennifer Ayala, who runs the Center for Undocumented Students at St. Peter’s University in Jersey City, N.J., made a similar point about potential college students during a New Jersey legislative hearing on providing state aid to undocumented students.
“We are seeing the stress on students,” she said, referring to the already difficult task of attending college without state or federal help. This stress and the heightened fear, she added, mean “fewer happy endings and more students in hiding.”
I had a student in the fall 2016 and spring 2017 semesters. She missed several classes in November, immediately after Donald Trump won the presidency. She was a U.S. citizen but her mother wasn’t here legally and there was panic in the household. Her mother was afraid to work, to go to the grocery store, to leave the house. My student was drafted to run the family errands, to work extra hours at her job — which caused her to fall behind in her course work. The same thing happened during the spring semester. The Trump anti-immigrant argument was having an impact that reached beyond just those without legal authorization to be here to affect whole families. Citizens and entire communities are being affected, as well.
I asked Louis Kimmel, director of New Labor, about the impact of Trump on workplace issues for immigrant workers. New Labor describes itself as “an alternative model of worker organization that combines new and existing strategies to improve working conditions and provide a voice for immigrant workers throughout New Jersey.” Among its most successful campaigns has been its effort to fight wage theft — essentially, any effort to short the wages of workers. Passage of several local ordinances have given the organization and the group of largely undocumented immigrants significant leverage when dealing with employees who have withheld overtime pay, pay less than minimum wage, or refuse to issue paychecks.
Trump’s election, however, has meant “a culture of fear has become a little stronger.”
“Since the beginning of 2017,” he told me in an email, “the amount of workers coming in with wage theft issues has gone down,” though not because “conditions have necessarily improved.”
He said other factors might be in play, like a tighter labor market that “means folks want to hold onto the jobs they have regardless of immigration climate,”
It’s easy to see where this fear comes from. Trump’s rhetoric, for the most part, has been the harshest we’ve heard from a sitting president and his immigration team. John Kelly, his chief of staff, oversaw a ramping up of enforcement during his short tenure as homeland security secretary, and Attorney General Jeff Sessions has been equally aggressive. Trump has referred to Mexican immigrants as that nation’s worst, as rapists and gang members, has conflated Dreamers with the MS13 gang, sought a ban on Muslims entering the United States, has attacked the legal immigration framework, and called non-white nations “shitholes.”
And it hasn’t been just talk. Arrests are way up under Trump — in particular arrests of the so-called “lowest-hanging fruit of deportation-eligible immigrants,” as Immigration and Customs Enforcement attempts “to meet the president’s unrealistic goals.” ICE, The Washington Post on reported Monday, is “replacing a targeted system with a scattershot approach aimed at boosting the agency’s enforcement statistics.”
The result, the Post writes, is that,
as ICE officers get wider latitude to determine whom they detain, the biggest jump in arrests has been of immigrants with no criminal convictions. The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The category includes suspects facing possible charges as well as those without criminal records.
The Trump immigration approach is an attempt to codify xenophobia. Trump repeatedly claims that we can’t have a country without borders, but that is not the real issue. Borders are man-made, designed to create a common geography in which a group can abide by shared rules and norms. And nations have a right to control their borders, to set rules for the flow of people, goods, currency, etc. These notions, I think, are givens.
The questions that need answering are: How do we, as a nation, regulate these borders in a humane way? Who gets to come in and why? And how do we treat the approximately 11 million immigrants who lack legal authorization, but who are Americans in nearly every other way?
These are not easy questions to answer, despite the rhetoric we hear from Washington, where the debate is framed narrowly and legalistically.
I’ve written about this before, but I think it bears repeating: immigration cannot be addressed in a vacuum. It’s not enough to talk about our borders; we have to consider its root causes, and this likely will require redefining the word refugee and broadening its application to a greater number of migrants.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency,
a refugee as a person who is outside his or her country of nationality or habitual residence; has a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of his or her race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion; and is unable or unwilling to avail him — or herself of the protection of that country, or to return there, for fear of persecution.
The word persecution, in this case, is too narrowly defined and does not account for the shifting realities of a world beset not only by war and political violence, but brutal disparities in income that often govern one’s access to basic rights, gang violence, and economic degradation. We rightly assume that war and political persecution drive people from their homes and prevent them from returning, but we assume those fleeing their homelands because of economic and environmental factors are doing so by choice. This bears little relationship to the actual lives lived by those who option to flee their homelands.
I spoke with a young Dreamer for El Salvador recently. Her parents fled Central America 15 years ago to escape an earthquake and opted to remain in the United States to protect her and her sister from the narco-traffickers and gangs that control significant territory. Legally, they are not refugees, though it is difficult to see much difference between the world they are fleeing and those escaping war-torn Syria.
As for the estimated 11 million who are here, we need turn down the volume of the debate and be both realistic and humane. Deportation is a fools errand — the police apparatus needed to accomplish something like this would leave little money for other priorities, while transforming our nation to a full-on police state.
We need to rethink our approach, bringing the undocumented fully into society. Despite what the immigration hardliners say, we cannot treat 11 million people as a permanent underclass, as criminals who are best ignored. These are people who are working, paying taxes, and contributing like the rest of us. This is what the DACA debate is about, what the push to allow the undocumented to drive is about, and why we need to develop a humane approach that allows them to stay in the United States and continue going on with the lives they’ve developed. Criminalizing them does nothing more than drive them into the shadows and leaves them vulnerable to abusive employers, landlords and others.
Dreamers, the subset of undocumented immigrants who came here as minors, some in their infancy, currently have some political cover, as White House and Congress attempts to hammer out legislation that would allow them to stay in the country legally — a Senate debate was to start today. But the Dreamer discussion as it is now framed is based on a lie. The crisis — the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in March — is a crisis of the president’s making. He could have left the DACA program in place and called for changes, or put his proposed trade off — a path to citizenship for 1.8 million Dreamers in exchange for the border wall he promised his base — but that would have meant leaving an Obama program in place. On immigration, despite an occasional bow toward decency, his first instinct is always toward the more punitive, law-and-order measure.
So while Trump — and, as of Monday, Republican Senate leadership — proposes a pathway to “earned” citizenship for Dreamers, a concept designed to sound easier to obtain than it may prove to be in practice, the Dreamers are not really the focus. Restricting immigration is — in particular, the family unification program that hardliners like to call chain migration and a lottery meant to diversify the green card pool.
Compromise seems unlikely — Democrats strongly oppose much of the GOP immigration agenda — which raises the stakes, and increases the chances that Trump will engage in more verbal fisticuffs and that his administration will cast its net wider, with immigrants again being the targets and the victims.