Bad Takes is a column of opinion and analysis.
Republican presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush once went to bat for immigration. But how the shining city on a hill has dimmed since then.
In 1986, Reagan granted amnesty to nearly 3 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States. A year later, he deferred the deportation of their minor children, an executive order that protected at least 100,000 families from possible separation.
Even President Donald Trump went off script during his 2019 State of the Union to extol the virtues of those who immigrate here legally.
“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” he said. “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”
How does that square with the White House carrying out what the Associated Press has called has called “the largest single mass revocations of visas in U.S. history?”
Officials who requested anonymity informed the wire service that the administration is gearing up to revoke the business and tourism visas of up to 200,000 foreigners currently seeking asylum status.
If Trump sincerely wanted for “people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever,” then why will legal immigration be slashed by an estimated 33-50% by the end of his term, as estimated by the nonpartisan National Foundation for American Policy?
The State Department is now “refusing to process applications abroad,” the foundation said in a Forbes op-ed, sowing chaos for “spouses, children and other family members … as well as employers seeking workers.”
Meanwhile, the administration, under the guidance of Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, “also has stopped all refugees from entering the U.S. except white people from South Africa.”
I’m sure it’s the content of Afrikaners’ character, not the color of their skin, that fully explains the favoritism. But blanket inhospitality threatens our way of life all the same.
This summer, when the Supreme Court rubber-stamped the end of the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) held by hundreds of thousands of migrants, among the fiercest critics were those busy caring for elderly retirees.
“The most significant impact is the potential loss of experienced caregivers and frontline staff,” a spokeswoman for the American Seniors Housing Association told trade publication McKnight’s Senior Living.
The article also noted that the 1.3 million TPS holders are “vetted immigrants who arrive through legal pathways and hold valid work permits,” adding that some “20% of Haitians nationwide work in healthcare roles.”
Yet Trump has repeated the false and xenophobic claim that Haitians in particular are known to eat people’s dogs and cats, and amount to “a death wish for our country.”
The president’s anti-immigrant screeds come as the Kaiser Family Foundation contends that foreign-born workers make up 20-40% of employees in nursing homes, assisted living communities and at-home healthcare.
“There is no workforce waiting in the wings capable of replacing the long-standing relationships, in some cases built over years and even decades, that are so vital to quality care,” said Katie Smith Sloan, the CEO of LeadingAge, a national association for aging-services providers.
But nursing care isn’t the only industry facing headwinds right now.
“The fear sparked by enhanced immigration enforcement has added pressure to a preexisting labor shortage in the construction industry,” the Dallas Morning News reported this month.
The paper noted that immigrants represent 50.2% of the Texas construction industry’s blue-collar positions, meaning the administration’s crackdown is contributing to building delays, housing shortages and rising costs.
“I’ve been telling the administration, do not conflate the gangster with the gardener, the nanny with the narco,” U.S. Rep. Maria Salazar, R-Florida, recently told The Hill. ”The people who’ve been here for decades in construction, hospitality, agriculture, healthcare, manufacturing … the White House is not understanding that those people are needed. And that those are our values as Americans.”
Even as public demonstrations against the federal government’s heavy-handed immigration-enforcement sweeps grow quiet, ICE arrests and detentions have actually ramped up.
ICE officers “broke records for the second Trump administration with back-to-back months of arrests topping 50,000 in July and August,” The Hill reported, noting that 55% had no previous interaction with law enforcement.
It shouldn’t be surprising that new horror stories continue to pile up.
A recent American Prospect piece described the heartbreaking case of one young Haitian caught in the federal enforcement apparatus.
“On the morning of Aug. 31, Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old TPS recipient living in Springfield, Ohio, walked into highway traffic and was struck and killed by a truck. He had been fitted with an ankle monitor in July, which his family cites as being the source of his depression and subsequent suicide,” the article states.
Bel had begun taking courses at Wright State University after graduating high school with honors. However, after receiving an ankle monitor, he found himself targeted by bullies. He could no longer play soccer without the device beeping, nor did it allow him to be fitted for an ROTC uniform.
The young man’s father took two trips to ICE offices to ask agents to remove the bracelet.
Apparently, those pleas fell on deaf ears.
Failures of compassion aside, the never-ending newsfeed of avoidable cruelties has damaged the United States’ world standing.
In 36 countries surveyed by the Pew Research Center earlier this year, a median of just 37% of adults held a favorable view of the U.S., compared to 57% who held an unfavorable view.
“In many of the countries we have surveyed since 2002 — including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, the Philippines, South Africa, South Korea and the UK — positive ratings are at or near the lowest they’ve been,” Pew reported.
Pierre Damas Bel may have died from a tragically misplaced sense of shame, but the real shame rests with those of us who let the demagoguery spin so out of control.
Texas politics is a mess. We make it a readable mess.
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