This is the second in a six-part series on how to talk-back to Trump’s lies about immigrants. We’ll start with his stated agenda for mass deportations, then counter his claims about open borders, why they come, jobs and the economy, crime and welfare and ask why Trump scapegoats immigrants and what are the real solutions.
Republicans from Donald Trump to Governor Parson to State Reps and Senators in Missouri and Kansas are confused. Missouri and Kansas are not border states. A caravan of migrants wearing flip-flops with babies on their backs rolling toddlers in strollers is not an army. Where are the attack weapons? Where are the generals?
Yes. there’s an upsurge in migration, and there are a number of reasons for it, but to talk about migrants as invaders demonizes and victimizes them. Why is it that when Ukrainians immigrate, we don’t call them invaders? Is it because they’re white like Trump and most Republicans?
Why have Republicans been beating the anti-immigrant drum since globalization began to drive thousands to our borders? Why? Because deep in our history as a nation of immigrants is a strain of xenophobia (fear of foreigners) perpetrated by those in power against new arrivals. Why? Because spreading fear of immigrants wins elections.
The English colonists did it against German indentured servants. Ward bosses in the 1840s spread lies that the Irish brought disease. Business owners and unions in 1880s California wanted the Chinese railroad builders kicked because they were competition. The Klan did it in the 1920s against Catholic immigrants. Jews fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry. And now, Trump says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the nation” and along with other Republicans he spreads lies about immigrants because they have nothing else to offer us but fear.
Indeed, describing migrants as invaders is fear-mongering, racist, and flat out wrong. Immigration is and has always been the life blood of our nation’s prosperity.
So, how many are coming. Who are they? Why do they come?
The numbers are indeed alarming. Trump used COVID to stop admitting refugees and asylum seekers. Thousands waited in refugee camps and in Mexico. Biden did away with Trump’s illegal policies, and the numbers surged. But, the immigrant population as a portion of the whole is less today than it was a century ago. In 2022 foreign-born residents made up 13.9% of the population. In 1890 they were 14.8%. As our birthrate declines, and baby boomers retire, the U.S. is more and more dependent on immigrants to keep things going.
Some say, “It would be OK if they just came legally.” That’s a pipedream. Our immigration system has been broken for a long time, and Congress refuses to fix it. For most of the foreign born who are picking our vegetables and fruit, cooking and washing our dishes in restaurants, roofing our houses and suffering from poverty wages with no overtime there is no legal path. If you don’t have family or an employer to sponsor you, the only way to “get legal” is asylum, but in the Kansas City Immigration Court 72% of asylum claims are denied. In the first two years of the Biden administration 215,000 people were deported.
Where do the unauthorized immigrants come from? That’s really interesting. Of people arrested for crossing the border illegally (many turn themselves in and ask for asylum), the top six sending countries are Mexico, Venezuela, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and Cuba. Haiti and Nicaragua wouldn’t be far behind, but a new program has allowed for them and Venezuelans and Cubans to get what’s called “advance parole.”
So what do all these countries have in common? All have been subject to repeated US intervention through coups (Honduras, Guatemala), crippling economic sanctions (Cuba, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Haiti), “free” trade agreements (all), US military “training” of death squads (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia) and an economic development model that favors US corporations which extract wealth, provide bad jobs with no labor rights, privatization of essential services, and escalating foreign debt.
Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez wrote a book about Latin American immigrants called Harvest of Empire. That’s no lie.
You will hear our government officials tell us that the roots of migration are corruption, gangs and drugs, but all of those things are the result of the policies imposed on these countries in cahoots with native oligarchs who have been ripping people off for centuries. So, it’s not an immigration problem that we have, it’s a global economy and imperialism problem, and if you want to fix it, then you’ll have to do what we as union members and supporters already know we have to do: restore democracy, bring big corporations under control and address the tremendous inequality of wealth not just here but around the world.
