Yves here. I am highly confident that readers will have a field day with this article. In trying to claim the truthiness high ground on immigration, it includes many overt and implicit misrepresentations, such as skipping over the difference between legal and illegal immigrants. It depicts immigrants serving in health care as doctors and nurses as needed, when due to licensing requirements, it is a virtual certainty all are legal, and hence not in the category that Americans are concerned about. She further talks about immigrants as asylum seekers. Interviews of southern border wannbe entrant find they are pretty much all economic migrants and hence not allowed to enter save under an employer program like the H1-B visa. The asylum seeker positioning, even though many will try to claim that status, is thus largely a canard.
Kolhatkar further does not acknowledge that an ongoing influx of exploitable workers as a result of their shaky status does indeed perpetuate jobs that Americans righty are loath to fill, such as dangerous and repetitive-stress-injury-inducing meatpacking jobs.1 I am sure readers will find other dubious positioning in this article to discuss. And she depicts the immigrant influx under Biden, triggered by an executive order, as a problem only to small communities, when New York City’s and Chicago’s mayors, both Democrats, complained repeatedly about how their very large social service networks were overwhelmed and Federal help was nowhere to be found.
To put the matter more simply, Kolhatkar’s use of the word “narrative” is a big tell. “Narrative” is NewSpeak for information management and perception control well beyond the traditional “story line.” Narratives by definition are a form of propaganda, as opposed to a good faith effort to come to a reasonable approximation of reality.
By Sonali Kolhatkar, an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization. Produced by , a project of the Independent Media Institute
A quiet panic has broken out within immigrant communities across the United States ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025. Mixed-status families are expecting to be separated, DACA recipientsforesee their status being revoked, those with Temporary Protected Statusare pessimistic about the program remaining valid, and asylum seekers fear the worst. Indeed, if Project 2025’s anti-immigrant agenda is fully enacted, the horrors of family separation that the nation witnessed in 2018 under Trump’s first term will pale in comparison to what’s coming.
And yet, Trump might claim that this time, he’s merely following the public’s desires. The prevailing story of the 2024 presidential election is that voters were so fed up with immigration upending their lives that they picked a leader who promised to do something about it. Headlines such as this New York Times piece on Election Day claimed, “Voters Were Fed Up Over Immigration. They Voted for Trump.” Indeed, polls showed likely voters ranking immigration as either the top issue, or second only to the economy.
What has gone unsaid about public discontent over immigration and Trump’s coming assault on immigrant rights is that the Biden administration paved the way for it, manufacturing a “migrant crisis” and volleying it right into Trump’s hands so he could lob it all the way to the White House. What’s needed are not just better policies but a rewriting of the narratives about immigration and immigrants so that vulnerable human beings are no longer political scapegoats every four years.
Gallup polls show that national anxiety over immigration significantly increased over the four years that Joe Biden was president. The fraction of Americans wanting lower levels of immigration had been slightly decreasing for years, landing at around 30 percent. In 2020 that number began rising, and by 2024, it had jumped to 55 percent.
It’s tempting to conclude that this trend is merely a matter of perception, the result of successful propaganda, of Trump’s constant drumbeat that Biden opened the floodgates at the border, rolling out the welcome mat for millions of people with no papers. Indeed, far too many people hold false views of immigrants in the U.S., from assuming they are more prone to committing violent crimes—not true—to the idea that they are stealing jobs from native-born Americans and longtime residents—also not true. The adoption of such falsehoods is clearly Trump’s doing.
However, there are plenty of credible reports across the country, in small-town America and in urban centers, that demonstrate a real struggle with absorbing tens of thousands of newly resettled people from foreign nations. Such dynamics reinforced the notion that immigration is out of control and gave credence to Trump’s lies about immigrants.
What’s going unsaid is that migrants from nonwhite nations in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia are being deliberately dumped into towns and cities with no plan for orderly absorption and assimilation—in direct contrast to how well the Biden administration welcomed Ukrainian refugees. A February 2024 in-depth report by Jerusalem Demsas in the Atlantic is one of the few analyses that explored what happened and why.
“Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine brought a separate influx of displaced people into U.S. cities that quietly assimilated most of them,” explained Demsas. The numbers of Ukrainian refugees and nonwhite immigrants in many towns and cities have been comparable, but the ways in which they were resettled have sometimes been starkly different. Based on interviews with mayors and municipal leaders, Demsas realized there were “two major differences in federal policy” that explained the contrast.
One policy difference was that Ukrainian refugees were allowed to work as soon as they arrived in the U.S., while subsequent waves of migrants were prohibited from working and then demonized for using government aid.
The other difference was that the Biden administration carefully coordinated Ukrainian arrivals with local officials to ensure their proper assimilation. And it chose not to do so with groups arriving from across the Southern border. This meant that those local leaders who could politicize migrants did so by pointing to the chaos their presence seemed to provoke and by adopting policies that deliberately worsened the optics of immigration.
“To call this moment a ‘migrant crisis’ is to let elected federal officials off the hook,” concluded Demsas. If the federal government had treated nonwhite Latin American, Caribbean, African, and Asian migrants the same way it treated Ukrainian refugees, voters would likely not have been as swayed by Trump’s lies as they were.
A similar scenario played out with asylum seekers at the border. Rather than allowing those seeking asylum to make their case in an orderly way, the first Trump administration tried to break the entire system, creating chaos in order to blame asylees. Joe Biden’s administration blithely allowed the restrictions to remain in place, breaking his campaign promise.
The reality is that the undocumented immigrant population in the U.S. increased by only 800,000 people between 2019 and 2022 and remains below 2007 levels. In a nation of 335 million people, this is less than a quarter of a percent of the population. How can such a tiny fraction of people be the source of so many problems as Trump claims?
Americans are not anti-immigrant. In fact, they are pro-immigration. A new Pew Research poll released on November 22, 2024, finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans are happy to have undocumented immigrants remain in the nation with legal protections provided certain conditions are met, such as security checks and lawful employment.
The reason it appears as though Americans are anti-immigrant is because they’re being told that hordes of people are breaking the rules, sidestepping order, and forcing their way in to cause chaos, commit crimes, and steal jobs. This is both Trump’s fault, and Biden’s.
Migration is a large-scale phenomenon of vulnerable populations fleeing war, poverty, persecution, climate change, and more. When given accessible procedures to enter another nation legally, migrants, refugees, and asylum seekers will do everything possible to follow the rules. Because, why not? Why would they deliberately jeopardize their own long-term security when given the chance? It turns out, the system has been deliberately broken in order to manufacture a crisis and help gutless politicians claim they are being “tough on immigration.”
The U.S. desperately needs immigrant workers. This is true not only in low-wage industries but in such highly skilled fields as medicine where immigrants are disproportionately represented.
For example, the Migration Policy Institute found that “[w]hile immigrants represent 14 percent of the Illinois population, they make up 37 percent of its physicians and 19 percent of its registered nurses.” There is a nationwide shortage of medical workers—physicians, nurses, technicians, and home health aides—a gap that could be filled by skilled new immigrants.
As the U.S.’s elder population continues to live longer, needing more care, and as the national birth rate falls, immigrants have stepped in to provide care and pay taxes to fund services they aren’t even allowed to access. Indeed, many nations in the Global South are struggling with the “brain drain” of their most talented workers leaving to work in the U.S. and other Western nations.
The stories we are telling about immigrants are fueling misplaced panic in the U.S. We cannot rely on Trump to fix what he sought to break. In the coming months and years, the devastation the incoming president will wreak on vulnerable populations will test our collective morality.
What’s needed before the next election are truthful narratives about immigrants, including the fact that the migrant crisis has been manufactured and the legal immigration system deliberately broken for political gain, forcing most people into untenable situations.
Most importantly, we need to be clear that our nation needs immigrants just as, if not more than, immigrants need the U.S.
_____
1 Our white yardman in Alabama did farmwork, along with family members, while growing up. It is not clear to me that Americans would not perform some agricultural labor if pay levels were higher.
31 comments
Comments are closed.
I think “narrative” is used in the article in relation to competing power-holders be it D or R; but she also clearly implies there is some “right” or “truthful” narrative to tell as opposed to those of D&R. E.g. Pointing out that Biden administration did little for integration, and that government support and organisation are crucial for the possibility of “success”?
It’s disappointing that the focus is on narrative control rather than political and structural changes that would be needed to support a “liberal” position on immigration (legal and illegal). Ironically, in her text the common ideological “narrative” of “free market’s” reliance on cheap (migrant or not) labour is not at all discussed and yet it is hidden within her text (low wage – vs – “skilled” labour).
To be fair: she does argue for more engagement of the government, which could presumably solve some of the many challenges she fails to mention…
The competing narratives are made to evade the issue entirely.
Questions…
1. Why are immigrants coming to the US legally?
2. Why are they coming in such overwhelming amounts so as to easily exceed the legal limitations?
3. Why the disproportionate excess of immigrants in US doctors and medical professionals?
And some economically simple answers…
1. They are coming hear for the exact same reason my grandparents and great grandparents did, and most immigrants did — in pursuit of greater economic opportunity.
2. Immigrant labor = cheap labor. And cheap labor is never out of demand by employers. And the more desperate the situation is for the immigrant, the less the employer will have to pay for their labor. Only 2 possibilities exist under neoliberalism — either you import cheap labor to do the job, or you export the jobs to cheap labor countries.
3. Given that the neoliberal economic system is securely in command in the US, an individual pursuing an education to become a doctor will incur millions of dollars in cost, both in terms of education and lost compensation in their years of training and residency, only to emerge as an employee of some immense health insurance company with a mountain of unforgivable debt to pay off. They won’t be able to see the light at the end of the tunnel until they are 40. And if they do it just right, they can retire a millionaire in their 60’s. Or they can choose to pursue the finance route and get their bachelor’s and master’s degrees, and be drawing a lucrative salary with substantial bonuses, pay increases, and investment and job opportunities available by the age of 24. Even if they are mediocre at the finance gig, they’ll be substantially less in debt and financially better off than our doctor upon retirement. If they happen to have a talent for it, they will be a billionaire before hitting 30. In short, there is a substantial brain and talent drain from the medical profession that needs to be filled as a result of our dysfunctional neoliberal economic system. And it’s being filled by immigrant medical professionals in the neoliberal way, i.e. at a lower cost to the employer.
Neoliberalism is the issue that our competing narratives on immigration evades. And it is long overdue for us to tackle this issue head on.
The story is even worse.
The immigrant doctors were planned. The US anticipate an excess of doctor (this IIRC in the 1980s) and cut way back on med schools. Doctors from overseas were expected to take up any slack.
They then stopped coming when they found out how awful it was to practice here.
And in general, the promise of better living in the US is false. Many foreigners get their ideas from US TV and movies, which among other things have to have very large room sizes for the shots to work and so give an impression of more luxurious living. I see many many shows depicting supposedly middle class characters in upper class size (and sometimes decorated) spaces. And they don’t get the apparently higher wages will be chewed up in shelter and health care costs.
In many cases, the ideas were even more deluded. I think it was Bloomberg that had a story about middle class Chinese who paid coyotes to get them into the US via Central America. They believed it would be super easy for them to land jobs paying >$100,000.
Worse still: Between 1798 and 1994 the US is responsible for 41 changes of government south of its borders–and more since ’94 (cf Bolivia, Venezuela, etc.). This creates a constant stream of military and political refugees who are then persecuted and demonized in the US (good to know integration has been sabotaged, BTW).
Worse still, NAFTA made it possible for the US to ship subsidized Iowa corn to Mexico. The big Mexican corn farmers got a bailout in the treaty. The little subsistence corn farmers got to join a huge wave of immigration because they were bankrupted.
Corn is only arguably one of the most important food crops in the world, and those Mexican subsistence farmers were only keeping the disease resistance and diversity of the corn genome alive with the varieties they grew…but they weren’t making any money for Monsanto, so tough luck!
One final note: California’s Central Valley has accommodated literally hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees.
School for the Americas is the old,
out of fashiontoxic name for what is now the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.Do the School alumni still get together for reunions, and if so, where? /s
I saw videos of the Chinese ‘migrants’. They all seemed solidly ‘middle class’ and the report was that they came in the back door because of US visa restrictions on Chinese. For the most part, they wanted to visit their families and look after their businesses. Of course, right now conditions are less than stable in China. Still, wages and working conditions (including social benefits) are higher in China than the US these days.
That Mighty Wurlitzer providing the
musicalbackground for the Narrative is off key but that never stopped it before.There is plenty of blame, and not enough focus, to go around in the immigration mess. For example, why are unaccompanied minors admitted and then lost? The journey alone across oceans, deserts, the Darien Gap and elsewhere would be enough to kill many.
Those who manage to survive do so by sacrificing some humanity along with plenty of cash. Then the females in particular are subject to horrible brutalities and multiple rapes at the, uh, hands of coyotes, traffickers, cartels and how many others.
Those in government and media who encourage such policies, or turn a blind eye to them, are complicit.
Revealing and typical use of IdPol in the author’s “narrative” to mask underlying dynamics: the sole focus on race (not that it isn’t real) rather than geo-politics in regard to the different treatment and outcomes faced by Ukrainian versus other migrants. Of course, the Ukrainians are going to receive easier entry and better treatment – they’re taking one for Team America – and the icing on the gravy is that in time they’ll be integrated into the country’s move Right, as so many foreign policy-induced immigrant streams have in recent decades: how long before Azov “humanitarian refugees” join Zionist thugs in beating the s#@* out of pro-Palestinian college kids?
As a faithful #McResistance-ite, that’s why I waited on line for hours outside of Veselka in the East Village in February, 2022!
Slava Ukraina! Slava Judea and Samaria!
And, apparently, Slava Greater Türkiye, as well!
Respectfully, you overlook the dynamics of your own existence. There isn’t an immigrant in the United States whose original people aren’t “taking it for the team”. No brown ones anyway. Your justification for the elevation of this particular group is still racist (given, as you say, reality), and arguably unAmerican, especially considering the problems caused for Americans by the poor integration of the other groups.
Try checking your sarcasm meter; it seems to be malfunctioning.
My bad. You’re hilarious.
Agreed that I would rather read an article putting forth a sensible policy position on immigration. And yeah, I understand the concern about exploitation of workers and social services programs being “overwhelmed,” but it’s not realistic to shut the borders and hope employers will start paying fry cooks $35 an hour.
” the idea that they are stealing jobs from native-born Americans and longtime residents—also not true.”
Bullshit.
Jobs our teenagers did, delivering newspapers, waitstaff, bakery workers, adult jobs, Uber drivers, all the way up to unionized construction, all jobs monopolized by illegal, and legal migrants in the Western U.S.
Once a job site has a critical mass of Spanish speakers, only they can work a. jobsite. Any white, asian or black attempting to works such jobs often get items dropped on them or absolute hostility.
Her 800,000 number conveniently ignores refugees who are not illegal, and number in the double digit millions.
Then there’s housing. Those complaining about the lack of affordable housing often seem oblivious to the calculus of millions of migrants competing with them for housing units, as well as used cars, E.R. and health clinic spaces.
Americans and even legal immigrants have had enough of this as the election showed. Race hustlers like the Dravidian high caste affirmative action surfer Kolhatcar can go back to India if she’s not happy here.
one of many stories like this…absurd that activists look away
Labor Department investigating migrant child labor claims at HelloFresh
The popular meal kit service is being investigated over child labor allegations….
https://abcnews.go.com/US/labor-department-investigating-hellofresh-allegedly-employing-migrant-children/story?id=116530077
Is this not also a narrative? One which younger Americans are far more skeptical of as their wages are pushed down and rents pushed up by immigrant labor? Even in medicine, an alternative solution is to train more doctors domestically, and there will be no shortage of candidates given the salary. For the “meatpacking” jobs that Americans “do not want”, a large reason for that is their poor wages due to the unskilled labor glut.
An alternative exists. Let wages and prices rise. Give labor back it’s share of profit. A swath of social and economic malaises stand to be relieved if the decline of US labor is reversed. Ignoring class in favor of narratives about racism and and workshy natives is leading Western politics down the road to extremism. That’s what we desperately need to avoid.
US trained doctors and other professionals are too expensive, due to the profitized educational system. It makes more financial sense to exploit the public education systems of other countries by importing their doctors under H-1B visas.
In the field of medicine, specifically for doctors, there is no mechanism to just “import” via H1B’s. It is a meritocracy at the moment.
The field is highly regulated by having an extremely limited number of residency positions available. These are highly competitive where both domestic and foreign candidates have to compete, with the scales heavily tilted towards US citizens who have done their education in the US (as it should be). If a foreign doctor is still able to overcome the odds stacked against them, kudos to them and we as a country just gave a merit based candidate a legal way to work in the U.S. It has nothing to do with wages for doctors.
This is absolutely not the same in other fields like IT where companies deliberately push down and exploit wages of immigrants by leveraging an broken immigration system that forces employees to work for the same company or skill band till an 12-15 year green card process works it way. This is becoming a moot point now as companies are heavily outsourcing or offshoring the work – whole business units are being moved to other countries (India, Mexico, Eastern Europe and even China). We are Synthetically immigrating** whole countries population with the offshoring trend.
So what do we need to do as country? We hear a lot about what immigrants want or why this happens. But, we need to answer basic questions from OUR perspective. Why do we need Immigration? Do we need temporary workers? Do we need workers who will be here permanently? Do we want a certain skill level or competency level for the people we want to allow to immigrate? Where or Who is discussing these basic questions?
If we need basic low value jobs to be done and we do not need the people here full time, we can use the model that the Gulf countries use (but in a more humane way) and scale up Temporary or seasonal work options. If we need more able bodied people for our Army/Navy/Airforce, we should have a honest conversation about that. IF we need more doctors, fix the limited residency positions and fund more hospitals to have residency positions. And if we need more doctors that the ones joining domestically, lets talk about immigration at that point.
There are so many basic, honest conversations that we as a people need to have. How do we carve out the bandwidth – Time and effort to have these societal or political conversations? Between being a wage slave, raising a family, paying a mortgage, how do we allow or enable ourselves to be more engaged in a public square for these discussions???
I know a mini-rant, but we need to do better.
**Syntheric Immigration is an idea that was first explained in an article in this blog many years ago was applied in the context of offshoring manufacturing due to the free trade dogma’s. Eg with China joining the WTO, we essentially imported the WHOLE Chinese population into the USA to compete with our local labor force. We can see these results with our own eyes now after 24 years.
If medical workers leave their home countries to work in the US, who then provides medical care for all the needy people in their home countries?
I always wondered about that: a lot of Filipino nurses, I’ve run into in States. Makes you wonder how many nurses are left in the Philippines.
From US Reign to Brain Drain: The Mass Emigration of Filipino Nurses to the United States Harvard International Review
Philippines trains nurses for working abroad. Government has a overseas workers policy, regulations and training programmes. Overseas workers play the vital role in the Philippine economy, with their remittances accounting for nearly 10 percent of GDP.
The story (Narrative) is that we as a culture,society and economy need more new people all the time.
Why ?
Perhaps having less people will give everyone a bigger slice of the pie.
Governors in 14 states (including Iowa and Arkansas) have lowered the working age in their states and rolled back child labor laws. 14 year olds can work in slaughterhauses and 16 year olds can serve alcohol in restaurants. What could possibly go wrong there? Was this in preparation for the mass deportation of migrants, and the belief that child labor will replace the soon to be deported?
Liberals tend to ignore the fact that immigrants contribute to lower wages and worse working conditions for U.S.-born Americans, and portray opponents of immigration as ignorant, prejudiced racists. Such liberal arrogance is undeniably part of what helped Trump win.
There is an odd echo to the slavery debate: northern laborers opposed expansion of slavery because of the threat the institution posed to their livelihood more than the morality. Heck, a lot of slaveowners and their allies tried to depict the peculiar institution as somehow morally superior and the idea stuck around even decades after the Civil War…
All four of my grandparents were legal immigrants to the U.S. during the first decade of the last century. I firmly believe that immigrants form the backbone of American society.
However, this piece is advocacy, not reporting. Sonali Kolhatkar was lead plaintiff in Kolhatkar v. Arellano, which challenged unreasonable post-9/11 delays in processing legal immigrant citizenship applications. Although not a Muslim, she is a former Indian citizen raised in the UAE who came to the U.S. on a student visa to study astronomy, obtained a green card via marriage, and has written about trying to bring her Indian parents into the U.S.
She quite evidently has an axe to grind, which appears to be why she seems to be more interested in creating a “narrative” than in understanding how globalization, migration, and the worldwide population bomb are creating legitimate fear among U.S. residents — including immigrants and the children of immigrants. Not helpful.
“As the U.S.’s elder population continues to live longer…”
Well, life expectancy’s decreased over the past five years (it’s the same as it was 20 years ago), so I question the validity of the rest of this paragraph given the false premise.
The Murdochs have a lot to answer for. Without the unrestrained, pro- MAGA, hysterical, lying and racist commentary on Fox News the immigration “issue” in the US would have assumed far less importance for US voters.
The same goes for Murdoch’s influence on the original Brexit vote via his UK media empire.
Sometimes the laws of Karma are just way too slow to play out.
The Biden administration is quite guilty of the ‘migrant mess’, especially because as it wanted to weaken Venezuelan society it weaponized migration by offering easy entry to Venezuelans.
But bad policies go way back. Clinton militarized the border in anticipation of the distress caused to Mexican farmers by NAFTA’s cheap imported corn. Previously, young Mexican men would cross easily into border states to earn dollars working in agriculture, construction, and in restaurants, all jobs that were, for Americans, undesirable labor. That ended in 1994.
Worse still is that the effects of sanctions, wars, corruption, droughts and other climate disasters, made life intolerable for too many so as to drive them on a migration North.
To me, the blame lies on neoliberal policy that if reversed and reparations made, no one would choose to go into America.
The Mexican Peso went from 12.5 to the $, to 3,300 to the $ in the course of a dozen years from 1980 to 1992, which corresponds perfectly with the great influx of Mexican immigrants into the USA.
The Peso ended up being worth 1/264th of its 1980 value when the New Peso was introduced in 1993. (1,000 old Pesos = 1 New Peso)
Why would you bother being a good house painter in Mexico City-earning bupkis, when you could be up over taking in the big bickies in comparison?
It’s interesting here in the Central Valley where the average age of a Mexican-American field worker is 45, laboring in the 100 days of 100 degrees (an exaggeration, there’s only like 65 of them) during the summer, or brutal Tule Fog conditions in the winter.
It’s no wonder there aren’t any replacements, and not all Ag jobs can be mechanized, a lot of it is hands on.
Originally it was Filipino workers doing Cali Ag jobs, then Japanese, and Mexicans for a long spell. Who picks up their considerable slack regardless of what happens to immigrants during Trump’s tenure, part 2?