The Opinions - Trump Won’t Change the Fact That America Needs Immigrants

Episode Date: January 20, 2025

Donald Trump has promised to severely curtail legal and illegal immigration as he takes office for the second time. In this episode of “The Opinions,” the writer Binyamin Appelbaum argues that while the United States needs to improve its immigration enforcement, the country also desperately needs immigrants for cultural and economic vibrancy. Immigrants, Appelbaum explains, are the country’s “rocket fuel,” and he argues for specific legal changes to ensure the United States’ immigration policy matches its national interests. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is The Opinions, a show that brings you a mix of voices from New York Times opinion. You've heard the news. Here's what to make of it. My name is Bin Yamin Applebaum. I write for the opinion section of the New York Times, and for the last year, I've been spending a lot of time reporting on immigration, trying to understand what immigration means to this country, what is broken about the current system, how we can fix it. And today, on Donald Trump's second presidential inauguration, I'm watching with concern his plans to start cracking down on immigration. I think it is undoubtedly the case that the United States needs to assert control over who enters and lives and works in this country.

But it would be a profound mistake to reduce immigration or to try to deport the people who live here already. The United States needs immigration. Immigration is this nation's rocket fuel. It brings people to this country who bring with them. creativity, ambition, resources. Immigrants are people who have the skill, the talent, the daring to make what is often a very difficult journey to a new country. And they have a long history of contributing to American society. Indeed, they is almost a funny way to talk about it. We Americans are mostly the descendants of immigrants if we are not immigrants ourselves.

It is also the case that the United States needs immigrants, perhaps more than ever, because we are no longer making enough babies to sustain our own population. This is already happening in some parts of the developed world. Japan is the most striking example. It was the first developed country to tip into population decline about 15 years ago. And since that time, what we've seen in Japan is that large parts of the country are just emptying out. Many communities are no longer functional. Many houses have been abandoned. There are no longer enough postal workers to deliver the mail on Saturday. So when the population is continually declining, it's a big problem, and it's one that is very much in our national interest to avoid. I really wanted to get my hands

around what this looks like in practice, and so I visited a pair of cities, Houston, a city that has just seen a population boom that is built in large part on the arrival of millions of immigrants, and then Birmingham, Alabama, which is also a sunbelt city, but in a state that has made it as difficult as possible and as unattractive as possible for immigrants to come, and that has seen a lot of stagnation. And I think the contrast between those two cities is really the difference between what happens when you welcome immigrants

and what happens when you try to scare them away. Modern immigration to Houston really kicks into high gear in the 1980s, and it begins with a downturn. in the city's fortunes. The oil industry hit a rough patch, many oil industry workers left Houston, and some of the city's landlords started advertising in Spanish for new tenants, drawing in an immigrant population that until then had been more rural and more concentrated in the southern part of the state. And so Houston begins to attract large numbers of, in particular, Latin American immigrants and kicks off a boom cycle that continues right up to the present day,

and you get just this change in the face of the city, this cultural vibrancy and economic vibrancy that really has driven Houston right up to the present moment. Alabama is really the flip side of the coin. It is a state that has tried to make life very difficult for undocumented immigrants in particular, and not always particularly pleasant for legal immigrants, either. In 2011, the state passed a law that included some of the harshest immigration provisions in the country. Some of that law has since been repealed, but it's a state that really has gone out of its way to convey the message that they don't want people from other countries and especially undocumented immigrants to be in the state. And the consequences in what was the state's largest city, Birmingham, which has stagnated while other Sunbelt cities have boomed. And so now it's a city of vacant lots and job openings.

The story of the role that immigrant labor plays in this country actually begins in some ways with the civil rights movement. You know, if you look at the history of this, it is just as we are taking action as a country to say that it's not okay to treat African-American workers as second-class citizens. Just as that's becoming our national ambition, we are simultaneously making our peace and becoming remarkably comfortable with treating immigrants. particularly undocumented immigrants, in the same way as second-class workers who do not enjoy a full set of rights, who are not allowed to vote, who have no path to citizenship, you know, it's really a very uncomfortable echo in our nation's history. So entire industries like meatpacking or lawn care and home construction are heavily populated by immigrant workers who, frankly, are willing to work for less money than many American workers and in more difficult conditions. than many American workers. That's obviously enormously attractive to employers, and it creates

this perverse incentive to preserve their illegal status so that they can be taken advantage of. And that's not a good situation for the immigrant workers. It's not a good situation for American workers, and it's not a good situation for companies that want to play fair. There are three big changes, three big shifts that we need to make in federal immigration policy in order to create a system that effectively serves our national interests. The first is that we need to end this system in which there is a cast of workers who are doing jobs for less money and in inferior conditions. That requires border security. That requires overhauling the asylum process. But most importantly, it requires holding employers accountable for their workforces, which is something we've really never done.

Now, if you just do that in isolation, it'll be a disaster because we will very quickly run out of workers. So you need to expand legal immigration. You need to make it easier for people to come here. And then the third leg of this is that there is a population of more than 11 million people already in this country who have made their lives here. And there's an ineluctible unfairness in the fact that they're here while other people have been waiting to come in legally. but there is also no better option than to take advantage of the fact that they already are here and to create for the vast majority of them a path to citizenship that allows them to become full-figured members of this society because it's only by granting people citizenship that we can

guarantee them the rights and obligations that we ourselves have. I think our political debate about immigration has really gone off the rails. on the one hand, particularly in recent election cycles, you had Democrats moving quite close to the position that anybody who got into the United States on any terms should be embraced and thanked for being here. And it was sort of a defense of immigration by any means. On the other hand, you had Republicans increasingly arguing

that even legal forms of immigration were bad for this country, detrimental to workers, to the economy, to our culture, to our safety, and both positions are just out of alignment with reality. We need a legal immigration system that effectively serves the national interest, and there's enormous opportunity for political leaders to do so, to step forward and sort of reclaim a middle ground that was once regarded as conventional wisdom. The most important way to think about immigration is as an investment in this nation's future.

It is an opportunity for us to have the country that we want. If you like this show, follow it on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. This show is produced by Derek Arthur, Sophia Alvarez Boyd, Bishaka, Fibili Lett, Christina Samuoski, and Jillian Weinberger. It's edited by Kari Pitkin, Alison Bruzek, and Annie Rose Strasser. Engineering, Mixing, and Original Music by Isaac Jones, Sonia Herrero, Pat McCusker, Carol Sabarro, and Afim Shapiro. Additional music by Amin Sahota. The fact check team is Kate Sinclair, Mary Marge Locker, and Michelle Harris.

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