Immigrants: A Love Letter
It has never been easy to be an immigrant to the United States – for most economic, linguistic, and cultural barriers make life here a struggle, even if they were escaping a worse life elsewhere. The utterly evil bill that just squeaked through in Congress, among other harms, aims to make many immigrants' lives go from difficult to terrifying nightmare. It gives ICE a truly outrageous amount of money, and we've already seen ICE turn since January into a faceless, unaccountable Gestapo grabbing workers, nursing mothers, sick children off the streets, out of their cars, from their homes, indifferent to what their legal status is, sometimes sweeping up citizens in their frenzy, sending the captives to domestic concentration camps or to gulags overseas or deporting them to countries they've never visited or left decades ago. Many people are simply disappearing, their friends, family, employers, coworkers simply unable to find out where they've been taken. Thousands have been directly impacted; tens of millions are indirectly impacted as they find themselves living in fear of these fates, and it is ravaging both mental health and the ability to continue to participate in everyday life and earn a living. Many are, with good reason, afraid to leave their homes.
Students from other countries, here legally, as we saw earlier this year, have been grabbed and incarcerated for exercising their free speech rights. Elected officials, from California Senator Alex Padilla to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander have been roughed up by ICE for standing with immigrants. Trump just suggested looking into deporting the winner of New York City's Democratic primary, Zohran Mamdani, making it clear that deportation will be used as a political weapon, and this too, whether or not it punishes individual people, will intimidate and perhaps silence many more. They're talking about "denaturalizing" naturalized citizens, and while there's precedent for doing that under extraordinary circumstances, this too could become a political weapon against opponents of the regime. There's even talk about deporting citizens and a mounting attack on birthright citizenship. All this will create more fear and political repression.
It is a shocking, obscene, and endlessly cruel reign of terror already, and this budget bill intends to make it far worse. Which means all of us are called on to act in solidarity, to stand with immigrants, stand for their rights, and stand against ICE and this regime. I know many of you have, especially in Los Angeles; I believe that things will get worse and far more will be demanded of us.
But this is also a war of ideas and values, and at the heart of it is another Trumpian Big Lie, that immigrants are a burden and menace to us. We need to fight the false story with a true one: this country absolutely needs its immigrants and they are a blessing and an enrichment of what this country is and in many ways its heart and soul.
There's a racist/white supremacist fantasy that only a certain kind of white and descended from Europeans who got here in the seventeenth-to-early-twentieth centuries is a real American – a descendant of immigrants, but the right kind at the right time (until recently, Protestant was part of the criterion; Jews and Catholics were outsiders to these nativists). One idea driving the claims Joe Biden wasn't legitimately elected in 2020 was that he was elected by city people and by women and Black and brown people, including naturalized immigrants and their children, while Trump got the majority of the white Protestant rural, suburban, and male vote, and some of the latter regarded themselves as "real Americans" and the rest of us as not so.
That is, there's an idea that some of us are more legitimate and more American than others. And this is part of why some people who are that particular subspecies of American can fear and hate the beautiful diversity of big American cities, hate immigrants, hate brown and Black people. Those big cities – New York, Houston, Chicago, Los Angeles – are in the present what the right portrays as a terrifying future. In actuality, of course, all those cities are far from the threatened chaos and disorder the right insists any place with such diversity must be, and a lot of people who live in them love them passionately, and also enjoy them, and so do the throngs of visitors to them. (Meanwhile, many rural places are not short on crime, violence, and drug addiction, but the pretense that crime and welfare are purely urban matters is part of an old story that keeps getting told.)
You can see in these nonwhite majority cities, cities in which a diversity of languages are spoken at home, high-percentage immigrant cities, cities of cultural and religious diversity, cities in which people are straight and gay and bi and nonbinary and trans, that actually diversity works out pretty well in reality. New York City, which is almost 40% immigrant and a little over a third white, is the most linguistically rich place on earth, with more than 800 languages spoken there, and 62.2 million people visited it in 2023, some for practical reasons, a lot for pleasure and culture.
Progressives often defend immigrants by portraying them as victims or as our responsibility or something else that casts them as deserving recipients of what we and this country have to give. But we native-born citizens are recipients of what they have to give on many levels, political, social, economic, cultural, imaginative (and yeah, culinary). So there's an another, maybe better way to tell the story, one in which immigrants are not only vital to our economy but enrich and renew our society. We the US-born are the beneficiaries, and our position should include gratitude and appreciation, as well as solidarity.
Many immigrants come fleeing despotic regimes; many immigrants have been great champions of democracy and upholders of the ideals of this country, including elected officials like Congressmen Ted Liu and Eugene Vindman. They know that democracy is fragile and precious and needs to be defended, while many born here took it for granted. Meanwhile the right insists it's the real America, but seeks to undermine the Constitution, the separation of powers, the rule of law, democracy, voting rights due process – and sometimes engages in terrorism against all that, whether it's laying violent siege to Congress or driving cars into first-amendment protected demonstrations or preaching the rhetoric that inspired a far-right fanatic to kill Minnesota state representative Melissa Holtman and her husband earlier this month. They seek to create a nation of radical inequality, of terror and oppression for some, and of unchecked privilege for others. It will benefit the few. It will wreck the whole.
The economy part – I've been saying for a while that if you like food, you like immigrants, because without the Latino and Caribbean immigrants who do most of the agricultural work in this country from Florida to Washington State, the whole food system would collapse. And by that I don't just mean agricultural work, including harvesting crops but also working with livestock, on dairy farms, and in food processing and the restaurant industry. The fuel we run on is literally provided by immigrant labor.
Too, because the US has a low birthrate, we'd be a sadly aging population, if it were it not for the infusion of young, energetic, hardworking people who will be paying into Social Security (if Trumpists don't destroy it) and keeping it all running for decades to come. As is often reported, "In 2022, for example, undocumented immigrants paid nearly $100 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, including nearly $26 billion in Social Security taxes and $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes."
As I know from my own mother's decline, the elderly in many places are cared for largely by immigrants who bring kindness and generosity as well as skill to the job. Same with childcare, home healthcare, and pretty much the whole care industry. The same could be said of the construction industry and many other vital parts of this society and economy. Grabbing construction-worker day laborers from Home Depot parking lots is one way ICE is fulfilling its quotas right now, and the quotas mean that rather than pursue people who might actually be criminals, they're just grabbing whoever's easiest to get.
Impoverished immigrants come and do service and manual-labor jobs but of course highly educated immigrants also come and work as doctors, engineers, professors, experts of many kinds. As for the medical profession, here's a 2021 report, "Nearly 2.8 million immigrants were employed as health-care workers in 2021, accounting for more than 18 percent of the 15.2 million people in the United States in a health-care occupation.... Approximately 1.6 million immigrants were working as doctors, registered nurses, dentists, pharmacists, or dental hygienists." But I don't just want to emphasize the practical aspects.
We are lucky immigrants are here. We are lucky more are coming – at least I hope they are. We is a tricky word, and the real American we is one that includes immigrants and in which their voices and dreams also define us. E pluribus unum – out of many one – was the motto on our coinage before it was replaced by In God We Trust. This nation was diverse when it was founded as thirteen colonies on unceded indigenous land, with significant populations of Black and Indigenous people present. The whole southwest was inhabited by the Spanish-speaking people we now call Hispanic or Latino before the US seized the regions from Texas to California, and of course that too is unceded indigenous land and Native people are also present in these states.
We need to defend immigrants but also value them and respect their contributions, and we need a we in which there is no them, a we that does not divide us, a we as big as this country. And maybe we have it already: we the people. That opening line of the Constitution,does not break down by immigration status, race, gender or other criteria (though obviously it was a deeply discriminatory society, but this rhetoric transcended it for at least a few lines). The other great founding document, the Declaration of Independence begins with the we of its signatories, the we who hold these truths, but it is a proclamation that all people "are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights." That's a we worth reclaiming and defending.
