Immigration is complicated. That makes polling on the topic difficult, as the same Americans who will tell you they support mass deportation one day will turn around and say they back a path to citizenship the next. So, which is it? Well, it depends.
As crowded scenes of immigrants clustering at the southern border were endlessly repeated on TV, many Americans felt the Biden administration was not taking national security seriously and had flung open the golden door to anyone with a pulse and a sob story.
Then, as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descended on Minneapolis, masked, heavily armed, and dangerously encouraged to ignore people’s constitutional rights — ultimately killing two U.S. citizens because they dared to question authority — even many Donald Trump supporters rose up to say this is not what they voted for.
Unsurprisingly, most Americans fall somewhere in the middle — where balancing immigration control with humanitarian values looks at what makes the most sense for the country and for the people who are looking for a better life here.
But that’s illegal immigration. On legal immigration, most Americans are all in, with only one in five opposing it. Why, then, is the Trump administration hell-bent on making life miserable for legal immigrants?
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Earlier this month, a court ruled against an administration decision that froze processing of immigration benefits like work permits and green-card applications for nationals of 39 countries targeted by a travel ban. These are people already in the United States legally who found themselves in limbo for months — many losing their jobs and risking deportation — after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services determined in January it would keep the $1 billion in fees these immigrants paid and give them nothing in return.
Meanwhile, renewals under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program for immigrants brought here as children have been hit with delays, and approvals of legal permanent residency applications, known as green cards, have fallen by around 16% — all part of the administration’s strategy of bureaucratic sabotage in the guise of “enhanced security.”
The administration has also banned permanent legal residents from qualifying for government-backed small-business loans, while some immigrants, including DACA recipients, can no longer hold commercial driver’s licenses, regardless of possessing a legal work permit.
Two U.S. Supreme Court decisions released last week will only continue to embolden the administration’s anti-legal immigrant push.
On Tuesday, the court’s conservative justices affirmed that border officers do not need “clear and convincing evidence” that a green-card holder seeking to reenter the U.S. has committed a crime to deny them entry. While I hope that one day the Clarence Thomas “border vibe check” joins the “Kavanaugh stop” in the annals of legal ignominy surrounding immigration enforcement, the court’s 6-3 decision makes a mockery of the idea that someone is innocent until proven guilty.
Perhaps even more immediately concerning is the high court’s ruling Thursday allowing the president to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
The TPS program, a bipartisan congressional creation under President George H.W. Bush, gives immigrants work permits and protection from deportation if they come from countries determined to be too dangerous to go back to. While the word temporary is right there in the name, some program participants have been in the country for decades and have built lives here. For others, the nations they fled are still unsafe to return to, including Haiti, which is in the grip of gang violence and widespread hunger.
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That the conservative justices also found that Trump’s comments against Haitians were not “overtly racial” is absurd. Trump infamously referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries” in the same 2018 meeting in which he wondered aloud why America couldn’t have more immigrants from places like Norway. For context, this is the same administration that considers white South Africans the only persecuted minority worthy of asylum in the U.S.
For the moment, the court’s decision applies only to Haitian and Syrian immigrants with TPS, but it has opened the door for the president to do what he has wanted to do since his first term, which is to end the program wholesale. That would impact the 1.3 million TPS holders from around 17 nations and their families, many of whom are U.S. citizens.
While the human impact on communities of this mass de-legalization effort is immeasurable, the economic damage of Trump’s anti-immigrant policies is not.
The 500,000 or so DACA recipients, for example, contribute nearly $17 billion to the U.S. economy annually, also paying into federal social safety net programs they are not legally able to access themselves, according to the immigration rights group FWD.us. TPS recipients contribute about $29 billion a year to the economy and pay $7.8 billion in combined federal, payroll, state, and local taxes.
An immigration policy calculator produced by the Manhattan Institute finds that the kind of policies favored by the administration would add $618 billion to the national debt over 10 years, and leave every American poorer.
Reasonable people can disagree on immigration, but at the very least, Trump’s exclusionary ideas are an economic dead end.