Making Immigration Great Again

Trump has reminded America that immigrants are people

The picture above isn’t a scene from a dystopian movie about an imaginary future U.S. civil war. It’s a photo from last week of heavily armed federal agents conducting an immigration raid in Los Angeles’ MacArthur Park.

Fortunately, this show of force ended up being more a show of farce. Area residents, warned of the impending raid, cleared out, leaving the agents to spend an hour or so stomping around an empty park, shouting “Resistance is useless!” OK, I made up that last part.

But ICE keeps bringing heavily armed men along while rounding up people they think look like illegal immigrants. That’s not hyperbole: Tom Homans, Trump’s border czar, claims that ICE has the right to detain and question people based on their “physical appearance.” It seems all too likely that at some point one of these raids will turn into a massacre.

As far as I can tell, however, until recently many political analysts assumed that high-profile roundups of suspected illegal immigrants were a politically savvy move, playing to one of Donald Trump’s perceived strengths.

But it’s beginning to look as if there’s more basic decency in the American body politic than is dreamed of in many pundits’ political philosophy.

Gallup made a splash, at least among us wonks, with new polling on immigration showing that approval of immigration in general is now at a record high:

And as G. Elliott Morris points out, the detailed polling suggests overwhelming disapproval of Trump’s immigration policies. Notably, voters are twice as likely to support giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship than they are to support deporting them. By the way, in 2023 Congress seemed likely to enact bipartisan legislation that would have opened such a path. But Trump killed it.

What’s going on? Why were cynical, seemingly savvy takes on the politics of immigration so wrong?

Part of the answer is that there is almost always a “thermostatic backlash” against the policies pursued by a party that has recently gained power. Pundits who imagined that Trump’s war on immigrants would become more, not less popular once it began were assuming that he could defy all historical precedent.

But, like Morris, I think there’s more going on here than just the thermostat.

First, it’s important to understand that the call for mass deportations and/or imprisonment was based on a lie — the claim that America is facing a huge immigrant crime wave. “They’re not a city of immigrants, they’re a city of criminals,” declared Kristi Noem about Los Angeles last month. Last week city officials reported that LA is on track to have the fewest homicides in 60 years.

It's true that many Americans have remained willing to believe that big cities like LA and NYC are scary urban hellscapes, even though they’re quite safe these days.

An aside: There was a period in the 1970s and 1980s when New York, in particular, actually was the kind of scary place people like Trump and Noem claim it still is. As it happens, that sort-of hellscape period coincided with an era when New York had fewer immigrants than at any time before or since:

Source: NYC.gov

In any case, however, it seems to me that the lie is beginning to unravel as it becomes clear that ICE is having a really hard time finding violent immigrants to arrest.

According to the Miami Herald, only around a third of the people being held in “Alligator Alcatraz” — a cute name, but it’s a concentration camp, pure and simple — have any kind of criminal conviction.

Why aren’t they rounding up more undocumented criminals? Because that would be hard work, and anyway there aren’t that many of them. Morris did a back-of-the-envelope calculation suggesting that there may in total be only around 78,000 undocumented immigrants with criminal records, and 14,000 convicted of violent crimes. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is demanding that ICE arrest 3,000 people a day. Do the math, and you see why they’re grabbing farm workers and chasing day laborers in Home Depot parking lots.

So Americans may be turning on Trump’s immigration policies in part because they’re starting to realize that they’ve been lied to. But an even more important factor may be that more native-born Americans are beginning to see what our immigrants are really like, rather than thinking of them as scary figures lurking in the shadows.

It’s a familiar point that views of immigration tend to be most negative in places with very few immigrants and most positive in places where there are already many foreign-born residents. You can get fancy about why that’s true, but I would simply say that if you live in a place like New York, where you’re constantly interacting with immigrants, they start to seem like … people.

And the Trumpies — for whom, as Adam Serwer famously observed, the cruelty is the point — are inadvertently humanizing immigrants for Americans who don’t have that kind of daily experience. The nightmarish ordeal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia has probably done more to highlight the humanity of immigrants, documented or not, than any number of charts and tables. And while some Americans are instinctively cruel, most are, I believe, instinctively decent.

Will the public backlash against Trump’s immigration policies force ICE to stand down? Probably not, although the courts may at least slow the mass arrests. Business may also have a say, as labor shortages disrupt agriculture, construction and more.

In any case, however, harsh anti-immigrant policies are looking like a political loser, not a winner.

MUSICAL CODA

Immigrants are people