The Welcoming Community Has No 4-Year "Pause Button"

Immigration is the national fight of a lifetime, and it starts now

Mike, a native of Central America, has lived and worked in the United States for 24 years, mostly legally.

He’s not legal now. Some of it seems to be due to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services not pivoting when he moved from New Jersey to Illinois. Some of it is because when he first came to the U.S., and was asked why, he said, “For a better life for my family.” 

He didn’t mention that his father had been found floating in a river with his tongue cut out.

Mike should have told the CIS about that. Granting asylum in the U.S. seems to depend on people telling the feds that they are in abject terror.

Mike thought that avoiding wanton murder of relatives was just another facet of looking for a better life. He thought it went without saying.

His lawyer had been assuring Mike that it was only a matter of time before his family would be able to get straight with the nation. Mike has been postponing immigration court, however, building up cash to cover fees and pay the lawyer. 

It may be a bad time to have a case of the shorts.

It’s hard to say what Mike should do. He could borrow money to at least get his family’s cases in the pipeline before Jan. 20. Or maybe he should lay in the weeds and avoid more paperwork that would point toward him.

Even a veteran immigration attorney might have a hard time advising which choice to take. That’s because Donald Trump, Stephen Miller and their minions have pursued their pledge to evict countless individuals with a boundless bloodlust. The only indication of a plan’s parameters in their rush to judgment is their promise to start the roundups as soon as they cross the White House threshold.

And I haven’t heard anyone say, “Don’t worry, we’ll take care not to violate anybody’s due process rights under the Fifth Amendment.”

Ironically, we need more immigrants, even of marginally hinky legal status, because of the declining U.S. birth rate. It’s doubly ironic that Trump and his pal Elon Musk are the loudest voices decrying that decline.

A nation needs 2.1 babies per age-appropriate woman to sustain the population. We have, as of two years ago, 1.66.

The birth rate pertains to immigration because of taxpayer funding of Social Security and other entitlements. If you don’t have the babies, you’ve got to get tax-paying people from somewhere. Lots of people. 

We could wind up like Japan, with its 1.26 birthrate, and no appreciable effort to attract immigration before 2018. 

A couple of years ago, Japan started giving women 100,000 yen as a baby bonus. That’s just enough for an iPhone 13. 

They’re way behind the 8-ball on the population front and worker supply, needing to quadruple the immigration rate by 2040. 

Prime Minister Fumio Kishida said last year that Japan is “on the brink of not being able to maintain social functions” due to the population drain. Japan is spending big on daycare, other child-support services and incentives. 

Former Japan Prime Minister Fumio Kishida

None of it seems to be helping all that much. Japan has a lot of old people who need their version of social security, and there aren’t going to be nearly enough workers to pay for it.

Japanese life expectancy is 84. U.S., 77.5. Our premature deaths are a national tax advantage.

Population decline is happening all over the developed world. Factors include better employment opportunities for women, the high cost of child-rearing and dissatisfaction with modern life.

Trump’s mass deportations could cost $150 to $350 billion, according to various experts on guessing things. Those figures don’t include what undocumented people pay annually in taxes – about $97 billion, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy.

They don’t get all that much for it. In 2022, they paid $25.7 billion in Social Security taxes, $6.4 billion in Medicare taxes, and $1.8 billion in unemployment insurance taxes. None of those services are available to the undocumented.

There seemed to be an assumption on the part of Democrats that Hispanic citizens would vote against Trump because of his obsession with getting rid of asylum-seeking Spanish-speakers. Not so much.

They don’t necessarily like being associated with illegals. They’ve got troubles of their own.

And if they, or their parents, originally got here the same way, that doesn’t mean they want company. They wouldn’t be the first demographic group to raise the drawbridge behind them.

There are two basic ways to legitimately get into this country if beset by peril at home: candidates already in this country seek asylum; those seeking refugee status apply before coming. 

Refugees are also different from asylum-seekers in that they more often have sponsors here to help them with homes and jobs. That helps make resettlement of refugees relatively low-impact.

So far in 2024, about 100,000 refugees have been vetted and admitted to the country – a 30-year record. It took until this year to rebuild the refugee system, decimated by Trump during his earlier adventure in the Oval Office.

Refugee admissions during the Trump administration were only 118,000, by far the fewest in a four-year term since 1975, when data was first collected. One Trump year, less than 12,000 were let in. Trump purposely made it much harder to be admitted as a refugee, with Muslim limits, local sign-offs and other intentional obstacles. 

The average during a four-year presidential term, before Trump, was 316,000. As the Biden administration rebuilt the refugee system with new personnel and offices, refugee resettlement took a while to pick up again, with the entire Biden term coming to only 197,000, so far.

Seven years of pent-up demand.

During Trump’s term, when there were so few refugees, the number seeking asylum rose from 83,000 in the final year of Barack Obama’s presidency to an average of 207,000 in the last two years of Trump’s term. Then it dropped to 89,000 in 2021 before rising again.

Had there been no Trump to eviscerate the refugee system, it’s arguable that hundreds of thousands more Central and South American applicants would have tried that strategy instead of the much harder trek through Mexico, during both the Trump and Biden administrations. 

And there would have been many fewer people suffering in Venezuela and Haiti, and instead finding new lives in the United States. 

When they are able to get here, these people have been very law-abiding. Generally, they don’t steal or kill or eat pets.

I can’t imagine many asylum seekers heading here while mass deportations are underway. Unless there’s a sudden change in understanding by Trump and his goons, there probably won’t be many refugees, either.

And we need them badly. These become some of our best citizens, partly because we saved them. And partly because they recognize the value of what they won.

This is the best and most popular place on Earth for refugees of any legal status to come to, because we can hack it. We have room for them, and we need them for our economy, our diversity and our identity.

It’s not a zero-sum game. They come here and make us better, taking little from us. 

We are not America without them.

One thing we do well in the United States is foster human beings. We give them a place where they can breathe and grow. No matter how we err on the world stage, this is our abiding legacy. Here is the source of our forgiveness by nearly every human being on the planet who would otherwise have no use for us.

This is truly what makes America great. Again and again and again.

What good is living here if we can’t share our blessings with the world? If we let ourselves fail at what the world loves us for?

We shouldn’t be willing to demonstrate that the people who built the greatest haven for the downtrodden in the history of the world have become monsters. Midnight raids. Internment camps. Children screaming as a parent is dragged away.

Some things are worth fighting for. This is one of them. 

I need you to fight, and so does Mike. We’re better than this.

It’s time for the street.