“I believe [immigrants are one] of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”
So declared Ronald Reagan on the last speech he gave as President. It’s a powerful message that the majority of Americans like to believe, while a subset is also simultaneously convinced that this refers to only a particular type of immigrants—those they deem as legal. It is clear this does not refer to actual legal status, however. Some of the more vocal supporters of this principle are also ecstatic that President Trump has done everything in his power to limit or curb every avenue for legal immigration. He began with the Muslim ban, a narrower proposal from what he had promised as a candidate, but devastating for those who came under its regime, and which had originally banned even those who had green cards. Since then the administration has systematically and deliberately slowed down all aspects of legal entry so that they are now sitting on a record-breaking number of applications; the denial rate is 80% higher than it was during a comparable period at the tail end of the Obama administration for all types of visas including high-skilled ones and even people who risked their life to help the United States in Iraq; the refugee program has been slashed to its lowest levels in decades and the goal of the administration appears to be to let no refugees in at all. International students now face higher visa fees. The diversity lottery visa was changed so that there are fewer people eligible for it and Trump has promised more than once that he will end it altogether. In truth, the administration has proposed both severely limiting legal immigration generally and doing away with birth citizenship entirely despite the 14th amendment. Indeed, it tried to change the rules so that the children of certain military members would not receive automatic citizenship either, although this last move received so much backlash, it is unclear if they will go forward with it.
Finally just last week, the Supreme Court permitted the administration to basically ban anyone asking for asylum—including unaccompanied children–if they had gone through a third country first. This means that, in effect, thousands of people who had been following the new rules the administration had set up and been ordered to wait in Mexico will no longer be eligible to apply for asylum at all. Given the extreme vulnerability of these populations, they already faced terrible conditions, kidnapping and death, now they will face an even harder choice. Most importantly, this ruling will affect not just Central Americans but everyone in the planet that is not a Canadian or Mexican. If this holds, for the rest of would-be asylum seekers in the world, the only way to have a shot at asylum will be if they go from whatever country they are from directly to the United States—something which itself is now even more difficult because of how the administration has systematically limited visas to come to the US and which was out of the question for most people in poorer countries in any case.
This is not the first time that the United States government has turned so dramatically against immigrants. We have banned whole groups of people before; turned down asylum seekers before; made people wait to have their asylum cases adjudicated outside the United States before; and saw migrants from a particular religion with suspicion before. Indeed, basically the entire history of the United States is just a previous wave of immigrants being worried about whoever the current wave of immigrants is and trying to stop their entry. Ben Franklin famously worried that if we did not do something the new German newcomers would soon have the entire colony speaking German and the American government itself would be in danger of collapsing. And yet, that is of little consolation now. There seems to be something fundamentally different not just because of the disconnect between the rhetoric of legality and the specific actions taken by this administration, but also because of the seeming cruelty that seems to be driving this. We do not know now and probably will never know the cost that we are incurring by following these policies. The damage to those affected is incalculable, but their loss is also our loss, and still, we go on ignoring President Reagan’s words. How much longer will that be?
