Time to Call Out the Immigration Con

By Mike Koetting February 26, 2025

Everyone knows the story of the emperor’s clothing. No one was willing to say the truth until a child blurted it out.

There are parallels in our national discussion of immigration. Republicans, led by Trump, have inflated some real—but manageable issues—into a national panic. The fact that the panic is caused by a con gets lost in the day-to-day coverage.

It is a real problem that our system for managing immigration is broken. It is broken from lack of funding and from incoherence in our rules and laws, in large part due to conflicting interests. There are any number of feasible solutions to those problems. None of them are addressed by deporting people. Fixing the core system requires nuanced, rational political discussions of the various trade-offs—which Republicans have been systematically undercutting for 20 years.

It is also a problem that, although many cities are handling this influx without major problems, there are real logistic and fiscal concerns in some cities near the border and in some cities where the problems have been deliberately manufactured to feed the narrative. But all of them could be managed in the context of a huge and wealthy country by better coordination, some modest additional funding, and a modicum of goodwill.

That’s not how it’s being played. It’s being portrayed as a moral crisis—immigrants are “criminals and rapists poisoning our country’s blood.” Questioning whether this is true or where the benefits of more immigrants outweigh the alleged problems is portrayed as favoring “open borders”. Enough speeches, rallies and rabid internet posts, and large portions of the public have taken this as a self-evident truth.

In this world, Democrats are out of the mainstream because they haven’t been hard enough on immigration. But that assessment is against the created conviction that the country is facing a catastrophe so loud and so obvious that it precludes people from asking “What are the real problems…and what are the solutions that best serve the country?” We seem to have accepted that since enough people have been persuaded this is a nation-threating problem, Democrats must be “out of touch” if they don’t accept that diagnosis, even if the facts to back it up are as elusive as the cat-eating Haitians. This is not a circumstance conducive to good decision making.

It appears that the unwillingness to treat immigration as a manageable policy issue was chosen predominately for its ability to create a level of outrage to justify the belief that the only solution was an authoritarian figure like Donald Trump who was willing to break through the constraints of normal society in order to save that society.

Ever since Donald Trump glided down on the golden escalator, his constant overstatements, outright lies and villainous rhetoric have had exactly this purpose. And people seem to have fallen for it.

There is a second aspect to the constant focus on immigration–its latent appeal to racism. The truth is that our country’s agitas has more to do with non-white immigrants than immigrants in general. When Trump rails against immigrants (and DEI) he’s doing it in full knowledge that while it is no longer acceptable to openly attack people for their color, plenty of people are fine with attacking people of color.

There are real issues around immigration. The country needs to address those, which they could do with good faith efforts. In fact, polling shows healthy majority support for specifics that would go a long way. Solving our problems with immigration would be considerably more straightforward than the issues of inequality, the Middle East or the environment. But our political system can’t even discuss this issue because righteous indignation unburdened by facts has taken all the oxygen.

It is time to point out the emperor has no clothing. It is a mistake to let the Trump vision of the world frame the discussion of immigration. Today’s political crisis on immigration is less that the Democrats are out of touch with the mainstream and more that the mainstream has been manipulated to be so out of touch with the reality of the issue that attempting to re-introduce reality is scorned.