Hello Downriver,
Has an immigrant ever done anything to you?
Ever taken your job on the line or in the office?
Ever prevented you from seeing your doctor, from getting nursing care?
Ever started a business you intended to start?
Ever keep your child from taking a seat in class?
The truth is immigrants — and unless you’re Native American, you either are or are a product of an immigrant yourself — are not the problem politicians would have you to believe.
But he’s not the first: The very word “immigrant” has, over our history, being used to foster fear, distrust, hatred, exclusion and discrimination.
It hasn’t much mattered which immigrants were the target — at one time or another every group was: Irish, Chinese, Hispanic, Italian, Slavic and Middle Eastern.
Each in turn has suffered from xenophobic attacks depending in part on the economics of the time.
And every — and I mean EVERY — time, demagogues have used the “immigrant” as a way to deflect public attention away from their own graft, corruption and incompetence.
Don’t blame Corporate American for sending jobs overseas to maximize their profits — sending your job to another country.
No, blame immigrants who took your job here.
Don’t blame insurance and drug companies for profiteering off of prescription drug prices, causing costs to skyrocket, along with premiums (if you can even find coverage).
No, blame immigrants for getting free healthcare at your expense, driving up costs.
Don’t blame unemployment, bad schools and a general lack of opportunity driving up crime in our cities.
No, blame immigrants for bringing crime into our communities.
In each instance — and in many more examples — immigrants have been deliberately, unfairly and incorrectly blamed for things that are either endemic in our society (corporate greed) or have demonstrable other reasons.
For example, when it comes to crime, an analysis of 2023 data found that legal immigrants had an incarceration rate of 319 per 100,000 and undocumented immigrants had a rate of 613 per 100,000.
But the incarceration rate for native-born Americans — people like me — was twice that, at 1,221 per 100,000.
And here’s another statistic worth repeating: From 1980 to 2022, the immigrant population in the U.S. more than doubled — from 6.2% to 13.9%.
But during that same period, the total U.S. crime rate dropped by more than 60%, and violent crime dropped by 48%.
More recently, from 2017-2022, the U.S. immigrant population grew by 1.7 million people — from 13.7% to 13.9% — but the crime rate dropped 15.3%.
Clearly, immigration isn’t the cause of any spike in crime — because there isn’t any — and an overzealous statistician might even suggest that immigration has led to a DROP in crime in America.
Yet that hasn’t stopped Trump from demonizing the immigrant — specifically, those from Latin American, Middle Eastern and African nations — as criminal.
Indeed, Trump is well-known to characterize undocumented immigrants as drivers of urban lawlessness, even though (as I just showed you) the data says that’s not true.
Of course, facts haven’t stopped Trump and his Homeland Security sycophants from saying that ICE’s actions are only targeting “the worst of the worst.”
Which is demonstrably a lie.
Of course, just last week, the Guardian reported that “masked, heavily armed federal immigration agents arrested a U.S. citizen in the parking lot of a Los Angeles Home Depot store, then entered his car and drove away with his toddler, who is also a U.S. citizen, in the backseat.”
Citizens.
For many Americans, that sight brought back images from Trump 1.0 when his family separation policy saw more than 5,500 children (including infants) being separated from their families at our southern border, held in cages and then spirited away to locations unknown.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, as of March 2024, about 2,000 children taken from their parents have yet to be found.
Hate, xenophobia, racism; call it what you will, but so flagrant has been Trump’s lies and vile behavior — including in 2018 when he called Haiti and African nations “sh–hole countries” while sitting in the Oval Office — that he truly hopes we’ll buy it.
And to illustrate his racist streak, he followed that up last year with a complaint that the U.S. doesn’t get enough immigrants from “nice” countries — “like Denmark (or) Switzerland.”
He meant, “white,” of course.
But enough with the numbers — and with Trump’s racism for the moment.
Instead, I have two simple follow-up questions for you:
First, do you personally know someone who is a first-generation immigrant; that is, s/he personally came here from another country?
Second, has that person done you any harm?
I suspect that if your first answer is yes, your second one is no.
Why should I suspect that?
Because once we know someone by name — and no longer by label — it becomes difficult, if not impossible to demonize them.
I’ve written about it many times, but it’s worth repeating: we put labels on people deliberately to strip them of identity — so it becomes easy to hate them, to fight them, to kill them.
They’re no longer people; they’re “the other.”
Of course, anytime someone highlights the value immigrants bring to our economy, Trump and his minions latch on to the “secure our borders” mantra.
Yet those people, looking for a better life in our country, do nothing but add to our way of life, not detract.
Consider that immigrants fill labor shortages in critical sectors like healthcare and food production, and provide workers in housing and construction.
And that immigrants are twice as likely to start businesses as native-born Americans.
Oh, and then there’s this: The Congressional Budget Office estimates that immigration will boost our GDP by $8.9 trillion between 2024 and 2034.
The bottom line is that immigration has been not only good for America, but it IS America.
Yes, yes, yes, fix our immigration laws to make a path to citizenship a smoother one.
But in the meantime, lay off the hatred steeped in racism and xenophobia.
Sadly immigrants have been a perfect historical target for hysterical politicians; those who thrive on division among us and need a boogeyman to distract from their own inadequacies and incompetence.
Can you spell T-R-U-M-P?
I just did.
To read this full essay — and others —check out Substack.com and look for me at “Farrandipity.” It’s free. Craig Farrand is a former managing editor of The News-Herald. I can be reached at craig.substack@gmail.com
