Discarding Our Nation’s Immigrants

​In 1958 then U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy wrote a book entitled “A Nation of Immigrants” which discussed the role of immigration in fueling the growth of the U.S. economy and how our nation’s immigration system should be improved. It was written in response to a growing sense of xenophobia that was then gripping our nation. If xenophobia was rising in the late 1950s, it has exploded over the past ten years; and is currently undermining the very essence of what enabled the United States to become the earth’s most advanced and productive nation.

In the first decade of the 19th Century, the two nations with the highest gross domestic product (GDP) were China and India. What set them apart was the sheer size of their populations. They simply had more people producing goods and services than all other nations. At that time, the U.S. had a population of 5.5 million (placing it 21st among the 44 sovereign nations recognized at the time) and a GDP of $486 million (placing it 12th among those nations). By 1900, the U.S.’s population had grown to 78.8 million (placing it 4th among the 119 then recognized nations) and its GDP had grown to $21.2 billion, placing it well ahead of all other nations. Unquestionably, population growth was a major factor in the increase of our nation’s productivity and economic power during the 19th century; and much of the increase in its population was due to its receptivity to immigrants.

​ It’s also instructive to understand how Europe’s three leading nations (Germany, England and France) fared economically during the 19th Century. All three began the century with significantly higher GDPs than that of the U.S. and with populations of roughly 8 times that of the U.S. By the end of the century, however, their populations had only grown minimally while their respective GDPs grew significantly (Germany’s grew to $4.66 billion, England’s to $3.64 billion and France’s to $3.16 billion) surpassing those of both China and India, but leaving them at only roughly 20% of that of the U.S.

​ Of course, the impressive population growth achieved by the U.S. did not fully account for all of its unprecedented economic growth during the 19th century. Specifically, the U.S. population increased by a factor of almost 15, while its GDP grew by a factor of over 43. The significant economic growth achieved by the European countries, while their populations remained relatively stagnant, also clearly indicates that another factor was fueling economic growth on both sides of the Atlantic. That factor was their collective embrace of the industrial revolution and the machines that could perform many of the tasks that had previously been performed manually.

A third factor which enabled the U.S. economy to grow far faster than those of its European rivals was the very character of its population. Throughout the 19th century, the European countries remained rigid class-based societies which eschewed universal education and in which the vast majority of their citizens were forced to remain in the social status into which they had been born. By contrast, the U.S. embraced universal education and offered all of its citizens the possibility to advance both economically and socially. That environment served as an irresistible invitation to those who chose to immigrate to America and who quickly became super-productive citizens.

While this factor may seem rather theoretical, in reality it may have been far more important in propelling the growth of the U.S. economy than either the increase in its population or the nation’s embrace of the machine age. That’s because immigrants, regardless of their race, sex or nationality, are a special breed of individuals who have imagination, courage and determination to overcome all kinds of obstacles to achieve their goals. Few individuals have the combination of qualities enabling them to pack up and leave their friends, neighbors and even close family members and set out to live in a distant land. They must also be willing to face significant and unforeseen dangers in crossing oceans and rivers, hiking over mountains and trekking through jungles to reach a country whose language they don’t speak or understand and where they will have to make new friends and find ways to support their continuing existence. As Adolph Hitler came to learn, a nation of immigrants, in reality, is a nation of ubermensch like the one he was trying to establish.

From its very formation the U.S., unlike other nations, did not consider immigrants to be a problem. Quite to the contrary, the expansion of our nation’s population was welcomed as it increased our nation’s power and productivity. This is not to say that there were no Americans who were skeptical of inviting strangers into their midst, but France, Spain and England were all seeking to stake their claim to territories within the North American continent which made it imperative that the United States increase its population. In this way, its citizens could build a strong economy and remain free of the social restrictions from which their forefathers had fled.

It was only in 1875 that the U.S. government first began to restrict immigration. By then, construction of the transcontinental railroad had been completed and our nation had grown more populous and economically stronger than those that had been seeking to control its fate. That led the U.S. Congress to reconsider its open-border policy. Initially, it focused on rejecting immigrants deemed to be undesirable, including prostitutes, idiots, lunatics, convicts, anarchists, beggars and others likely to become a public charge. Despite these restrictions, the U.S. continued to be largely receptive to immigrants. This was immortalized in Emma Lazarus’ 1883 poem entitled “The New Colossus” which is inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty. That poem exhorts the other nations of the earth to

“Give [us] your  tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free; the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me [and] I will lift my lamp beside the golden door”[referring to the entrance of New York harbor].

Beginning in 1921 Congress changed its approach to immigration restrictions, focusing on the number, nationality and race of immigrants that would be admitted. For example, the 1921 Emergency Quota Act and the Immigration Act of 1924 established numerical quotas based on the nationality of its citizens. It’s important to note that these national quotas were based on the U.S.’s 1890 census which heavily favored receiving additional immigrants from the nations of western Europe. Throughout the 20th century the U.S. Congress passed literally dozens of additional acts relating to immigration which adjusted the national immigration quotas and the procedures for admitting immigrants.

  While a relatively small immigration quota was placed on Mexico, it enjoyed a long and open border with the U.S. Each year several million Mexican migrant farm workers would be welcomed into the U.S. to help plant and harvest agricultural products being grown on U.S. farms. The numbers of migrant workers had grown substantially in the latter part of the 20th century as our western states continued to be developed. In 1986 Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) which enabled aliens employed in seasonal agricultural work for a minimum of 90 days to qualify for citizenship. It also made it illegal to knowingly employ illegal immigrants. This latter provision, however, was easily circumvented. In addition, the amnesty provision of the IRCA actually had the effect of encouraging further illegal immigration.

  To counter these unintended consequences, the Clinton administration initiated two programs to enhance enforcement of the nation’s immigration restrictions: Operation Hold the Line in 1993 and Operation Gatekeeper in 1994. While these initiatives curtailed the number of migrant workers entering the U.S. illegally, they also discouraged migrant workers who had not been granted amnesty by the IRCA from returning to their homes following the fall harvests out of fear that they would not be allowed to re-enter the U.S. the following spring. The result was yet another unintended consequence; namely, that between 1990 and 2007 the number of illegal aliens permanently residing in the U.S. increased from 3.5 million to 12.2 million. 

The presence of these permanent illegal alien residents did not present an economic problem as they were adding to the nation’s productivity. Nor did they have any significant impact on the health and safety of U.S. citizens as crime rates among illegal aliens has always been below those of U.S. citizens. They may not have even had an impact on the availability of housing as many of those now permanent residents worked in the construction trades when not working in the fields.

They did, however, become the focal point of a political problem. Democratic politicians felt that these individuals, like their children born in the U.S., should be placed on a path to citizenship and fully integrated into the nation’s population. Republicans opposed allowing them to become citizens, fearing  they would likely support the election of Democratic political candidates. Republican politicians also feared that if illegal aliens were granted citizenship they would become entitled to receive government benefits requiring higher taxes or increasing the nation’s deficit which had begun to grow during the Reagan administration.

The conflict over the status of illegal aliens grew worse when Donald J. Trump chose to run for president in 2015. He initiated his presidential campaign by claiming that Mexico was “sending” hordes of murders, rapists and drug dealers across our southern border. Trump’s perceived surge of illegal immigrants was pure fiction. It neither existed nor was it ordered by the Mexican government or even any government. What was actually happening was that illegal aliens from Mexico were moving back to Mexico as a result of job opportunities there created by the North American Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and were being partially replaced by individuals, principally from Guatemala and El Salvador, who were then seeking asylum in the U.S. to escape drought, crime and corruption in their home countries.

For Trump, reality is anything that supports the goals he is trying to achieve. In this case, his allegation of an invasion by illegal aliens was a politically motivated narrative designed to appeal to unhappiness of working-class Americans who rightly believed that their government had not been serving them well. To be sure, there was widespread unhappiness among working-class Americans who for the preceding 35 years had not shared in our nation’s economic growth. Their unhappiness, however, was the result of globalization and our nation’s tax policies which heavily favored the wealthy and not from illegal aliens taking their jobs or depressing their wage growth.

To combat this fictitious problem, Trump promised to build a “Great Wall” along our border with Mexico and would compel the Mexican government to pay for it. Trump’s message of out-of-control immigration not only resonated with economically stressed working class Americans, but fit well into the“strongman image” he was trying to project. Trump even promised to bring back the high-paying manufacturing and mining jobs that had been moved overseas in search of lower labor costs. These were images that hard-pressed individuals could readily visualize in contrast to the economic policy arguments that Hilary Clinton, Trump’s Democratic opponent, was espousing.

Following his election in 2016 President Trump immediately undertook to build his “Great Wall.” This was indeed a fool’s task because our border with Mexico is 1,954 miles long and much of it passes through sparsely inhabited territory. Trump’s effort, however, only covered a small portion of the border and even many sections of the wall that were constructed were highly porous. Finding himself effectively unable to prevent border crossings, Trump changed his strategy. He would treat those found to have illegally entered the country with such cruelty that they would choose to self deport. Specifically, he would incarcerate them in over-crowded cages exposed to the elements of nature and separate parents from their children. This would not only encourage them to return to their homeland; it would also deter others from even trying to enter the U.S.

This tactic was also designed for domestic consumption as Trump’s voter base was delighted at the thought that their president was punishing those whom they had been led to believe were their enemies. Although the number of border crossings did decline in the early months of the Trump administration, they subsequent went back up as the Trump administration reallocated its resources to deal with those illegal aliens then residing in the U.S. Ultimately, it was the Covid pandemic that temporarily stopped the caravans of immigrants coming to the U.S.  

When Joe Biden became our 46th President in January 2021, immigration remained a heated political issue. In response, Biden sought to reconnect the children of illegal immigrants with their parents and to step up efforts to curtail border crossings. His administration also increased the number of immigration judges to hear deportation cases. While the Biden administration deported a total of over 695,000 illegal aliens, those deportations were more than offset by an estimated 10 million aliens who entered the country during his administration. Trump and his acolytes attributed this significant increase in the influx of illegal aliens to the Biden administration weak enforcement of our nation’s border security. Those allegations, however, ignored the fact that over 8 million of those would-be immigrants had been turned away during Biden’s four-years in the White House. Moreover, the underlying cause of that influx was the destructive impact that the Covid pandemic had had on living conditions in South and Central America.

 It’s important to note that in February 2024 the Biden administration supported the passage of bi-partisan border legislation drafted by a trio of U.S Senators led by Republican Senator James Lankford. That legislation would have improved policing of the Mexican border, established stricter standards for granting asylum, faster adjudication of asylum claims and given the president the power to shut-down the border if border encounters exceeded 5,000 per day over a 7-day period. That proposal, however, was never enacted because Trump called upon Republicans in the Congress to block it. His stated reason was that he did not want the Biden administration to be able to remediate the nation’s growing problem of controlling immigration because he wished to exploit that issue in the 2024 election. This clearly evidenced that, for Trump, illegal immigration is a political issue to be exploited, rather than an economic problem in need of remediation. 

When Trump campaigned for re-election in 2024 he vowed to deport 20 million illegal aliens. This, of course, was pure bravado as the number of illegal aliens in the U.S. was then reported to be 11.7 million. Once re-elected, Trump’s new administration took up where his first administration had left off. It immediately apprehended 238 Venezuelan men whom it claimed were members of Tren de Aragua, a notorious Venezuelan gang, and shipped them off to CECOT, an even more notorious prison located in El Salvador.  

The Trump administration was so eager to generate headlines for this action that, in its haste, it made two major mistakes. First, included among those transported to El Salvador was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an individual who was neither a criminal nor a member of Tren de Aragua. This action, which the Trump administration initially admitted was “taken in error”, precipitated a series of court proceedings which revealed that none of the deportees had been accorded “due process” as required by the U.S. Constitution. Secondly, at least one of the three airplanes used to fly the 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador had taken off after a U.S. federal court had ordered that the plane not leave the U.S. Thereafter, the Trump administration unsuccessfully sought at least one more time to deport aliens it had apprehended without affording them a hearing. This effort confirmed that the courts were going to require that “due process” be accorded to all individuals being deported, something the Trump administration was apparently unwilling to do because its actions couldn’t withstand close scrutiny.

This led the Trump administration to adopt another strategy. It would engage private contractors to establish detention centers in the U.S. to hold immigrants detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Those detention centers were designed to be as gruesome as possible with one of the first being located in the heart of the Everglades swamp and dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz.” It is no accident that ICE routinely refused entry to this and others such facilities -- even to members of Congress.

 On July 4, 2025, the Congress enacted the One Big Beautiful Bill Act which included a $100 billion appropriation for ICE to carry out Trump’s plan to apprehend and incarcerate illegal aliens. Trump has repeatedly claimed that this appropriation, which dwarfs the budgets of all other law enforcement agencies, would focus on “the worst of the worst.” That claim, however, has proven to be totally disingenuous as more than 70% of those incarcerated to date have no criminal record and some were not even illegally in the U.S. The reality is that the Trump administration has focused on the quantity, rather than the quality, of those whom it was incarcerating.

To satisfy the 3,000 arrests/day quota set by the Trump administration, ICE agents have raided factories, farms, apartment buildings, court houses and public streets in search of illegal aliens. In doing so, they have made little effort to actually ascertain the immigration status of those whom they have arrested, but have often acted solely on the basis of the color of the skin or the language spoken by a detainee and sometimes simply on the basis of the detainee’s accent while speaking English.

 Perhaps more importantly, the tactics which ICE agents have used have been both cruel and highly disturbing. Raids have taken place in the middle of the night and homes have been broken into and ransacked. Moreover, ICE agents, have worn masks, refused to identify themselves and have utilized excessive force, often employing military tactics. This does not appear to be the isolated acts of a few individuals. Stephen Miller, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff who oversees the operations of DHS, has openly encouraged ruthless behavior on the part of ICE agents and has called for criminal charges to be brought against any person that interferes with ICE agents. Based upon news video reports, “interference” is being interpreted by ICE agents to include peaceful protesting. In short, the actions taken by ICE agents have seemingly been intended to provoke public protests. For example, at a peaceful protest located outside an ICE detention center located in a suburb of Chicago an ICE agent shot a Presbyterian minister in the face from two feet away while the minister was praying with his hand held over his head.

J.D. Pritzker, the Governor of Illinois, has asserted that the manner in which ICE agents have been conducting their activities is not merely to energize the President’s voter base or to even encourage other illegal aliens to self-deport, but primarily to engender widespread public reaction which the Trump administration intends to use as a pretext for deploying the national guard and the U.S. military. Underscoring that assessment has been the Trump administration’s assertions that Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon are war zones even though there is no evidence supporting such allegations. In fact, in his speech at the Quantico Marine Base before several hundred flag officers of the Army, Navy, Airforce and Marines, President Trump stated that cities in Blue States have become war zones and suggested that these “dangerous cities” be used as training grounds for the military to fight the "enemy within". Thus, the real motive behind Trump’s current campaign against illegal immigrants would appear to be a stepping stone for his current effort to establish a fascist dictatorship.

Another effort by the Trump administration has been to use Executive order to decrease the number of aliens within our borders. Specifically, it has altered the terms of various categories of humanitarian visas granted to foreign nationals. It has also lowered the overall cap on refugee admissions from 125,000 to 7,500. In addition, it has increased the barriers for asylum seekers. Yet another change has been to terminate the humanitarian parole program for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan refugees. These and a host of other changes can be found on the internet.

Trump seems altogether unconcerned that immigrants not only bring with them a determination to achieve, but currently serve as important factors in our agriculture, hospitality and construction industries. He’s undoubtedly hoping that the introduction of artificial intelligence will obviate the need for increasing the size of our nation’s population. While it remains unclear how quickly artificial intelligence will transform our economy, it’s even more uncertain whether it will facilitate the elimination of the jobs that many immigrants are currently performing. One thing that does seem certain, however, is that Trump is not planning to tell his MAGA supporters that AI is likely to eliminate many of their middle management and factory jobs, leaving them to fill the vacancies created by his incarceration and/or deportation of illegal aliens.