There are many self-respecting Americans who support President Trump’s aggressive agenda to clean up the mess of illegal immigration because they rightfully want to hold America as a nation of laws.
Wouldn’t letting them live and operate freely amongst us amount to a mockery of the law of the land? And so, even those supporters of Trump’s immigration agenda who are not racists or mean-spirited feel righteous in wanting these illegal immigrants deported.
However, this righteousness is flawed — because it places the entire blame of this racket only on the border crossers — as if we, the rest of the Americans, are simply innocent bystanders or, worse, the victims of this influx of undocumented immigrants.
Immigrants are necessary
That is a blatantly self-serving narrative. Over 11 million undocumented immigrants can come into a country, move into its communities, set up homes and families, send their kids to school, and live and work amongst the citizens if — and only if — the host country is complicit in the act.
Unlike Mafia dons, these migrants were not underground operatives. For more than two decades, they have been a highly visible bedrock of the country’s labor force: building houses, maintaining lawns, working in restaurants, factories, farms, and in just about every industry that depends on cheap labor.
Notwithstanding the token outbursts against them, we continued to condone them, employ them, and enjoy the fruits of their labor. In boom times, businesses sanctioned them, consumers sanctioned them, and lawmakers sanctioned them. Seduced by their cheap labor, we Americans implicitly laid out the welcome mat for them, knowing the vital role in our economy that these “illegals” were playing.
We didn’t boycott the farming industry, knowing fully well that it was “illegal” workers who were plucking the onions and oranges found in our kitchens. There were no sustained or forceful appeals to our legislators by masses of Americans to stop the trend in its tracks—when it was the right time to do so: before these hard workers and their families became entrenched into their American lives.
Uprooting 11 million lives
Now that the phenomenon has ballooned to a scale that makes us uncomfortable, suddenly turning our backs on them and wanting to kick them out is sacrilege. If our laws regarding border crossing were so vital to us, why did we allow the phenomenon to flourish for over a couple of decades, allowing these families to get entrenched in our nation?
Are we so ungrateful to think nothing of uprooting 11 million lives and the havoc it would cause on these families and their American-born children? To now ask sanctimoniously, “What part of illegal don’t you understand?” amounts to being clueless, if not a heartless hypocrite.
Worse, it amounts to entrapment. First, to lure them in for decades through a “nod-nod, wink-wink” policy of looking the other way on their legality, and then to suddenly do an about-face in wanting them out of here, uprooting their American lives built on hard labor, is an act of entrapment.
Yes, comprehensive measures are urgently needed to stop this continuous onslaught of illegal border crossings. But for those already here, it is the nation’s moral responsibility to formally accept them by conferring a legal status upon them.
Trump or Harris
This brings us to the issue of which presidential candidate can be relied upon to take action on this pressing issue. Going by the rhetoric, Trump is clearly the most anti-immigrant presidential candidate in recent history. Does it mean he will also be the most effective on the issue?
By now, all except the naïve and gullible have learned that there is a wide gap between Trump’s campaign promises and his deliverables. Remember his first-term promise: “I will build a big, beautiful wall on our southern border, and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.”
Trump is an absolute master at making you feel he is your man to fix things. With him, talk is cheap. He knows if you tell people what they want to hear, you own them.
Trump reduced legal migration
But when it comes to actual performance, his first-term track record speaks for itself. He had promised to build the wall, triple the size of ICE’s deportation force, and withhold federal funding from so-called “sanctuary cities.” He failed miserably on all of them.
According to the Cato institute, “Trump oversaw a virtual collapse in interior immigration enforcement and the stabilization of the illegal immigrant population.” What Trump succeeded in was drastically reducing legal immigration — the kind that benefits America, and he tried to ban the H1B visa category, of which India is the biggest beneficiary.
Meanwhile, Democrats have been the only adults in the room when it comes to actually tackling the illegal immigration issue. People seem to forget that Obama was dubbed “Deporter-in-Chief” precisely because he took border control seriously. Kamala Harris has been a two-term attorney general of a border state and has prosecuted criminals for cross-border trafficking of guns, drugs, and human beings.
While Trump has been all-noise and no action on illegal immigration, Harris knows the nitty-gritty of the issue from having worked in the trenches — and she was part of the Biden administration that succeeded in coming up with a bipartisan bill for border security and immigration reform — which Trump shot down! According to an article in Politico, he described it as a “great gift to the Democrats,” revealing his clear political agenda in killing the bill.
The choice for those of us who are seriously concerned about solid, long-term solutions to reform our broken immigration system is clear. If you want anti-immigrant bluster and the potential of extremist overreaction such as mass deportation, Trump is your man. Just know that such debauched actions come with the risk of a historic recession — so say economists.
If real, constructive, enduring solutions are what you want for one of our nation’s most urgent issues, Harris is the only sane choice.
Parthiv N. Parekh is the editor-in-chief of Khabar, an Atlanta-based monthly print magazine.
