The Root of the Route
Unraveling the Immigration Overhaul
“Actions speak louder than words” is the most versatile idiom in America’s current political dictum. The statement is employed in equal measure to defend and condemn, specifically concerning Donald Trump. Disapprove of rhetoric but support policy? Actions speak louder than words. Agree with the message but object to the behavior? Actions speak louder than words. Context distinguishes a sentiment.
On January 20th, when Trump officially returns to the White House and, with it, transitions from the lofty promises and theoretical plans made while campaigning to a position of tangible executive power, either a convergence or divergence of actions and words will occur. The question becomes: If Trump’s actions and words align, what will that look like? How will the country react? Will Trump’s judgment be clouded? Or if not, and Trump’s words on the campaign trail were only those, words, what will that entail and mean? According to Trump himself, as noted at the end of his victory speech, “promises made… promises kept.” Trump has stated intentions to carry out mass deportations, seek retribution against enemies, overhaul government establishments, impose sweeping cross-border tariffs, and has made cabinet appointments and taken measures indicative of meaningful change. Trump also desires to make Canada the 51st State, acquire Greenland and the Panama Canal, and do away with daylight savings. Trump has broken promises (re: playing less golf while in office, locking up Hillary for using a private email server, Mexico paying for the border wall, etc.) and fulfilled promises (re: remaking the judiciary, transforming foreign policy, increasing deregulation, etc.). Whether Trump’s departure from certain pledges and the achievement of others is positive, negative, or ineffectual requires case-by-case evaluation. Trump’s failure to execute his vision has been both harmful and a blessing just as Trump’s success in implementing his vision has proven good, and not.
I have always tried to maintain a healthy deliberation in separating an individual’s words from their actions – weary of being overly trusting or unfairly skeptical. Favoring an open-mindedness to possibilities over a paralysis by the unknown. Surrendering to this mindset is uncomfortable, but the alternative, stagnation, is imprisoning. Regardless of the circumstance, Trump is the incoming president, so I think everything he says has to be taken seriously, whether Trump himself recognizes that or not. As Jonathan Swan says, “Everything is a troll until suddenly there is something serious.” A moment of clarification is now upon us, and through nuanced, critical analysis, I will examine how this reality’s certain uncertainty can play out.
Trump will carry out mass deportations, and he will do so successfully. Successfully in terms of fulfilling his promise, but not necessarily successfully in terms of doing what is best for our country. As Tom Homan, former ICE director, shared on the RNC stage earlier this year, “undocumented immigrants better start packing now.” While millions of people disappearing from our country is a chilling, expensive, and time-consuming prospect, sure to produce ripple effects, like rising inflation and law enforcement activity stifled, it is neither impractical nor unrealistic.
Practically speaking, Trump will crack down on the immigration system through a collection of measures aimed at making life more uncomfortable for immigrants who are already in this country, deterring others from coming, and expelling many who are here. Where Biden used a softer, incentive-based approach, Trump will implement a more ruthless, consequence-driven one. For example, when Biden introduced the CBP One mobile application to stabilize some of the chaos at the border by providing access to a variety of services offered by U.S. Customs and Border Control, Trump will take away the app to make it more difficult for asylum seekers to get appointments at all. Trump will eliminate the Refugee and Humanitarian Parole programs – Biden initiatives aimed at establishing more regulated avenues for immigrants to seek legal asylum – and, most legally of an uphill battle of all, Trump will attempt to ban Birthright Citizenship – the U.S. Constitution 14th amendment which grants a legal right to citizenship for all children born in a country’s territory, regardless of parentage.
While each of these actions provides its own obvious ethical and legal controversies, they beget a less certain practical question, too: Will these measures prove effective in reducing immigration? Not will reducing immigration benefit our country? And what does benefit mean in the context of such a loaded question? But will these measures achieve their most foundational prerogative of reducing immigration? It may seem like an obvious answer, in that increasing the risk and consequences associated with a journey will surely result in fewer people succeeding in that journey or even attempting it, to begin with, but immigration is and has always been a dangerous and difficult endeavor. So, just as stigmatizing smoking has not solved cigarette addiction and increasing taxation on sugary drinks has not curbed soda consumption, reimagined immigration reform is not a guarantee to stop immigration. Furthermore, rather than abandoning the necessity or surrendering in the face of warped regulation, desperate workarounds, and replacements inevitably emerge that undermine the reforms’ original intention, compound existing harms, and backtrack on much progress. In the case of smoking, this reckoning materialized in the form of cheaper, mango-infused, child-marketed, odor-free, nicotine-heavy electronic vaporizers dominating the market in place of conventional tobacco products – creating higher levels of nicotine dependency among a previously untapped youth market and accelerating the prevalence of overall heart and lung health complications in the country; and, concerning the complete overhaul of immigration reform, will likely largely result in more perilous, expensive, longer immigration routes being haphazardly established and traversed, individuals willing to exercise more violent measures to cross the border abound, and more gang-related, criminal activity once in the country for lack of better work options once here and out of fear of facing arrest while pursuing honest labor taking place.
Entrusting your life savings and safety into the hands of a Coyote human smuggler to take an arduous trek across foreign trails with little to no resources, for the potential opportunity to end up in an unfamiliar territory where you know no one, do not speak the language, and is riddled with its own hardships, is a dramatic decision that speaks volumes to the horrors that inspired it. Trump has framed the root cause of immigration as a product of border deficiencies and overly lax preventative measures, but the real accelerant behind the immigration surge is the constantly widening set of unfair circumstances that immigrants are willing to risk their lives to escape from. I am under no illusions about the limitations of nature and mankind. I know that so long as humans remain human and the natural world remains unpredictable, selfishness, poverty, inequality, violence, disaster, and suffering will persist. I also do not believe that doing nothing is the solution. I just think that addressing the root of the immigration crisis by imposing humane, gradual reforms within our country, increasing our foreign aid and relief efforts abroad, educating the public on the realities of these peoples’ circumstances, and fostering compassion instead of rewarding animosity is a more ethical and practical means of progress.
Trump’s rationale behind flooding the courts and national conversation with so many different immigration reform policies and narratives is strategically two-pronged. For one, the sheer volume and chaos created by instituting such a wide variety of orders immediately and simultaneously overwhelms opposition efforts. Secondly, introducing so many new orders shifts the national perspective. It establishes a new point of reference for defining radicalism and reorients the conversation surrounding what is and is not acceptable. Like how when shopping at Best Buy, seeing a $6,000 TV suddenly makes the $2,000 flat-screen displayed beside it seem like less unreasonable of a purchase, ordering a ban on birthright citizenship, makes other prospective measures appear less extreme or outlandish by comparison. Queue: mass deportations.
While mass deportations require more than a stroke of pen to execute, as Stephen Miller has continually assured, “they are very doable.” The logic behind carrying them out will be intentional – calculated in terms of maximizing the volume of deportations, using the least amount of resources. Haitians and Guatemalans will be deported first. Followed by Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans. These nationalities are the most easily removable because we know who they are, the countries they come from take the most flights back, and many of them have entered through pathways that the U.S. developed and are familiar with. Working, non-criminal, single adults will be detained first. Working means ICE will know where to find them and be able to round them up more easily. Removing single adults is much less staff-intensive than holding, detaining, and putting up in hotels entire families. ICE will focus on getting people in eight major cities with airport hubs – Philadelphia, D.C., Chicago, Houston, Miami, Denver, New York, and LA. Those cities have the most heavily populated migrant communities, have access to quick ICE flights to people’s home countries, and will expedite the process of getting people out before they can get to a judge or a lawyer. Large-scale, militarized raids will be quickly operationalized. The raids will be focused on big industry factories, then schools, restaurants, and even hospitals. Tents, warehouses, and planes will be used to hold, detain, and transport migrants. With prisons across the country, including outposts like Guantanamo Bay, being converted into detainment camps, and having their standards lowered to be able to hold more people per cell. In another word, though the word seems more appropriate in describing the handling of a bedbug infestation than the removal of millions of human beings, efficiency.
The immigration crackdown is realistic because public support for mass deportation and intensified immigration policy reform is growing worldwide across the political spectrum. The Pandemic, climate change, storms, drought, disease, economic meltdowns, and political unrest have created an unprecedented reality of a planet on the move over the past years, and ideological, reactionary opposition to Trump on the left caused an overcompensation in addressing immigration which resulted in a surge in immigration both legal and unlawful. Legitimate concerns accompanying a spike in immigration have contributed to this sentimental shift, but Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric, blatant lies, and hyperbolic fear-mongering have reframed the conversation in terms of what immigrants take and the negative they bring, instead of what immigrants contribute.
Trump’s referring to unauthorized immigrants as “vermin,” “bloodthirsty criminals,” “animals,” or “poisoning the blood of our country” has led to an ugly normalization in the dehumanization of immigrants. Exclusively elevating the nastiest instances involving immigrant misconduct, like the murder of Laken Riley by Jose Ibarra, and promoting falsities like Haitians eating cats and dogs while foregoing sharing countless examples that characterize immigrants in a favorable light has led to an unfair and inaccurate understanding concerning the harms immigrants cause and the threat their presence in our country poses. Perhaps most significantly of all, however, misrepresenting and exaggerating the financial, criminal, and cultural woes immigrants are responsible for inflicting on our country has led to an incomprehensive perception regarding the national and personal benefits a removal of immigrants of this magnitude would provide.
Immigration is a complicated issue, both from an ethical and practical point of view. The biggest beneficiaries of immigration are immigrants themselves, who are most often immigrating for the sake of fleeing persecution, poverty, and an overall low quality of life. Properly regulated legal immigration is also in our national interest as it unites families, creates economic growth, cuts the cost of services – particularly tasks upper-class individuals are not eager to do themselves (i.e. yard work, daycare, etc.) – and, subjectively, creates an interesting culture through a more diverse population. On the other hand, an influx of immigration tends to reduce the wages of low-income workers, affect housing prices, and strain community resources (i.e. social, medical, and educational services). Ultimately, just as neither an iron deficiency nor iron surplus is dietarily healthy, neither an overly restrictive immigration policy nor a completely unrestrictive one is healthy either. Opposite truths exist simultaneously without being in opposition, and while Trump has managed to oversimplify and politicize the fate of our country as a binary choice between unchecked immigration and over-restrictive immigration, achieving national prosperity versus adversity is not a zero-sum game.
During the Ronald Reagan and George Bush administrations in the late 80s and early 90s, as immigration levels - both legal and unlawful – were experiencing a surge, Americans were increasingly viewing the border as chaotic, and legal immigrants were upset that new immigrants were “skipping the line,” a conversation concerning immigration and how it is affecting our economy and national identity entered the forefront of American politics. Barbara Jordan, a prominent social activist, political juggernaut, and moral philosopher, came out of retirement to deliver a message to the nation, articulating the distinction between “pro-immigrant” and “pro-immigration.” Through unifying rhetoric, consistent, factual messaging, and encouraging constructive discourse, Jordan’s leadership led to immigration policy reforms that strengthened the country and helped to combat hostility and discrimination against immigrants. The pursuit of such an ideal is not without obstacles, but let Barbara Jordan’s example and our nation’s historical record serve to remind us that overcoming adversity without compromising our values or interests is the American Way.