Attacking immigrants makes America weaker, not greater

Donald Trump cannot Make America Great Again by shutting down one of this nation's most vital sources of strength and vigor. His anti-immigrant crusade is not only morally wrong, but economically self-defeating.

While Trump demonizes the 11 million undocumented immigrants now living in the United States, he's trying to terminate many avenues of legal immigration as well. With America's birth rate plunging to historic lows— a trend even Vice President JD Vance has called "profoundly dangerous and destabilizing" — the best way for the nation to prosper is to import younger hard-working, taxpaying people to fill the demographic gap.

And yet, as The New York Times reports, Trump's flurry of executive orders focusing on immigration threatens to "reimpose an agenda that would fundamentally upend the United States' global role as a sanctuary for refugees and immigrants." Sharif Aly, president of the International Refugee Assistance Project, adds: "These are attacks on the very idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants."

Yes, chaos on the southern border poses a serious threat to national order and security, and the Biden administration was painfully slow to meet that challenge. But it's also true that asylum is a globally recognized, completely legal concept, and many of the migrants that seek entry into the U.S. can legitimately argue that they qualify for protection from dangerous conditions back home.

In order to hear those cases in a sensible way, Biden eventually created a system called CBP One, which enabled asylum-seekers to make an online appointment with an immigration officer. Almost 1 million migrants have scheduled sessions through the app in the last two years, and in December alone, 44,000 were able to plead their cases.

But on the day of Trump's inauguration, all pending appointments — about 30,000 of them — were cruelly and abruptly canceled. About 270,000 other asylum-seekers who were still trying to make a date saw their hopes dashed.

"The termination of the CBP One appointment process means there is now no way for anyone to seek asylum at the border, even for families," Lee Gelernt, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who is challenging Trump's action in court, told NBC.

Shutting out refugees, harming America’s reputation

Asylum is only one legal pathway blocked by Trump. Another is the refugee program, which resembles asylum, but with one key difference: Refugees don't appear at the border or enter the country; they first make their cases for sanctuary to a United Nations agency abroad.

Trump decimated the program, allowing only 11,000 refugees into the country during 2020. Biden resurrected the effort, and upped the number to 100,000 last year, but one of Trump's executive orders closed down the program entirely for at least four months.

"The U.S. refugee resettlement program has in many ways been an extraordinary win-win situation for the United States and the refugees it welcomes," reports the Migration Policy Institute. "A generous refugee resettlement policy has long bolstered the United States' moral standing globally, and also has fiscal benefits. From (fiscal year) 2005 through (fiscal year) 2019, refugees and asylees contributed $123.8 billion more than federal, state and local governments spent on them."

"Ending refugee resettlement as we know it would be devastating, not only to thousands of families desperate for safety, but also to our reputation as a global humanitarian leader," Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president of Global Refuge, a faith-based nonprofit that aids refugees, told USA Today. "When we step back, other countries use that as an excuse to also shut their borders."

Trump also closed down a program that has helped bring almost 200,000 Afghans to the U.S., many of them former employees of American forces before they withdrew from that country in 2021. Other executive orders are shuttering a program that gave temporary refuge to more than half a million migrants fleeing Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela; preparing the way to issue travel bans against nations Trump once derided as "s---hole" countries; and ending birthright citizenship, the legal principle that makes any child born in the United States a citizen.

"What the Trump administration is readying goes well beyond immigration policy," Vanessa Cardenas, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration think tank, said to The New York Times. "The push to gut 150 years of settled law and hard-won progress by attacking birthright citizenship, for example, seeks to reshape America's future by moving this nation backwards."

Many of Trump's orders are already being challenged in court, and some will never be implemented. But when it comes to immigration policy, Trump is determined to take the country backward. His own policies make America weaker, not greater.

Steven Roberts teaches politics and journalism at George Washington University.

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