We have to stand for a fair immigration system that isn't built just for billionaires

Mass deportations and camps are coming. Democrats need to be loud about a better path forward.

If you believe Donald Trump, and totally get it if you don’t, this new year will bring us the most extensive mass deportations in American history.

This massive uprooting of human lives will be larger, Trump promises, than the short-lived “Operation Weback” carried out under Eisenhower or the much longer “Mexican Repatriation” of the 1930s where, according to historian Francisco Balderrama, a million people were deported, 60% of them American citizens.

There are many reasons to believe that Trump is overpromising, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council explained to Andrea Pitzer in a recent Next Comes What:

But we should expect spectacle and some shock and awe. Just to make the point.

Trump began his Republican political career by denying the citizenship of the first Black president and then launched his presidential campaign by targeting and tarring immigrants at a moment when border crossings were actually at a historical low. A glut of migration crises in our hemisphere combined with an immigration system that has purposely remained broken for decades means he has the opportunity to revoke legal status for millions while testing the limits of ICE’s deportation machine, which he plans to expand in a cartoonish way with a massive spending proposal that, if effective, will do nothing significant but gut our economy, since we’ve seen record drops in crime and something resembling full employment under Joe Biden.

Still, the raids, the roundup, and the camps are coming if all goes according to their plan. We know it.

So, how will Democrats respond?

You can suggest that Democrats “try something different” this time and work with Trump. That’s what Rep. Tom Suozzi did in a New York Times op-ed that isn’t as terrible in the details as it is in the headline or the approach:

For instance, while it is essential to secure the border and deport criminals, we must also reform the broken asylum system and modernize legal immigration to provide pathways to legalization for Dreamers, Temporary Protected Status recipients and farmworkers. Immigration must be governed by the rule of law while protecting immigrant families from fear and ensuring our economy is kept stable while treating human beings like human beings.

This pander ignores that Democrats did try this!

During the most prolonged government shutdown in American history, Democrats essentially offered Trump his wall in exchange for a permanent solution for the so-called Dreamers who were brought to this country as children. He refused that and offered a temporary extension for three years, more than any Republicans would support and not enough to win the Democratic votes needed to pass.

It also ignores that Democrats’ entire immigration policy in the 2024 election wasn’t just to work with Donald Trump but to give him exactly what he wanted. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris ran on trying to pass Trump’s border bill, which Trump had killed in the House.

When it comes to immigration in the US, too often, the parties have intersected in their goals and failed compromises.

The mass deportation regime that Trump now inherits was built in the 1990s under Bill Clinton. George W. Bush tried to pass immigration reform, but AM radio and the far right torpedoed his efforts. Barack Obama ramped up deportations to record numbers, hoping to pass reform. Still, his efforts were torpedoed when a far-right Republican defeated House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in the primary. Obama then transformed his policies to focus almost entirely on criminal removals. He also tried to expand on his DACA policies, which granted relief to Dreamers.

Biden offered vast yet insufficient improvements over Trump when it came to humane treatment toward refugees and migrants. Yet rhetorically, he got bound up in the right-wing media’s exploitation of the migrant crisis to fuel the fantasy of a crime wave as crime was actually falling. Success stories like the economic renewal in Springfield were turned into dog-whistling horror stories. And all Biden and Harris could offer in return was, “Mean Mr. Trump won’t let us pass his wonderful border bill.”

That has to change. The differences between the two parties on immigration must be made clear and real. We have to stop cowering to the strategic racism that has allowed the worst demagogues on earth to corner us on an issue that once united even Republicans.

And we have the perfect opportunity to do this in the form of the somewhat overhyped MAGA civil war on HB-1 visas. If you’ve read this far, you probably know the details of how some on the far right are nipping at Elon Musk’s heels over his stated love for the HB-1 visa program that allows college-educated foreign workers to be indentured to tech companies across the US. Trump has long used the HB-2 program to get cheap, non-college-educated foreign help for his businesses.

Unsurprisingly, Trump has sided with Musk in his shared love of exploiting foreign workers so they don’t have to pay Americans fair wages, even though he has explicitly called out the program before.

Hypocrisy is always a power move for Trump. So, calling out his contradictions will move almost no one. But elected Democrats do have the moment to begin what must be the project of the next four years and beyond: calling out the GOP as a conspiracy to divide and exploit American workers for the benefit of a tiny group of billionaires who laugh at our struggles as they live like gods on earth.

Here’s how I imagine the message goes:

America was built on becoming a place where we can find the freedom to thrive. But Republicans have spent decades making sure our immigration system stays broken. They’ve kept millions in limbo, in fear, separated from their families, dying to pay taxes. Meanwhile, guys who refuse to pay their fair share of taxes, like Donald Trump and Elon Musk, keep picking foreign workers over Americans. They do this to exploit foreign labor and to drive down the wages that we deserve.

They want you to be afraid of your neighbor. They want you to forget how your family got here. They want you to believe the billionaires should pick and choose visas for their cooks, their programmers, and their wives. All so they can keep ripping off our Social Security and deny us any security or retirement.

We need a fair system with a path to citizenship that billionaires can't rig. And we need to stop wasting billions on rounding up grandmas and Dreamers when they just want what we want: a fair chance to live our best lives in America.

Fighting mass deportations will require so much more than words. But Americans need to know there is an alternative and that these raids destroy lives and economies exclusively for the benefit of the billionaires who are currently picking foreign workers over you.

This requires us to break the third wall to expose clowns like Trump and Musk, who have no shame, no virtue, and no fear of their lies costing them anything.

We have to expose the plot against workers that permeates the GOP. The challenge is that all of capital is in on that plot, including many Democratic donors. But if we’re ever going to make people matter more than money, we must start by putting the people in charge of the Democratic party. That’s the only way to end the collusion that has doomed us to an immigration system that offers no benefits to anyone but right-wing demagogues. And that’s how we begin to beat back MAGA and authoritarianism in America.