Trump’s immigration policy has closed America’s doors and could change the way Americans think about citizenship and belonging. The Opinion columnists Carlos Lozada and Lydia Polgreen talk about the reporting that took her to countries all over the world to better understand what America’s future might look like.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Carlos Lozada: We’re here together because in a sort of serendipitous way, we’ve been working on parallel tracks for the last few months.
You wrote a terrific series in which you explored why and how and where people are moving in great numbers from the places where they were born to new countries, new regions, new lives. You’ve gone around the world for this, not really focusing on the United States, where the immigration debate seems to be all-encompassing.
In the meantime, I’ve been writing some columns a lot less systematically than you on the role of immigration in the U.S., looking in part on some policy questions — whether birthright citizenship or English as the official language — that surround this debate and also just exploring some of the rhetoric on immigration during the Trump era.
So in our infinite wisdom and that of our producers, really, we thought we should get together and compare notes on this issue that has become one of the defining forces and trends and debates of this moment.
Why did you take the approach that you took in writing your series? It could have been so tempting and so kind of easy and obvious to focus on immigration in the United States, but you went around the world.
Lydia Polgreen: Yeah. Well, obviously my background is as a foreign correspondent and I think just as a kind of matter of habit, I find it very useful and interesting to try to understand the United States, a country that I, frankly, barely lived in as a child, refracted through my experiences as a native-born citizen of this country who spent much of my life outside of the United States.
And sometimes looking at a subject, particularly a subject that’s very much the hot topic of debate, is a little bit like staring at the sun: If you look directly at it, you can’t really understand it. So it seemed to make sense to think a little bit about how this was playing out in the rest of the world.
The other reason was that it seemed clear that what was happening in the United States was in some ways an echo of what had happened, particularly in Europe, 10 years earlier. And that there was this shock that had happened in Europe, connected to the Syria crisis, and that was building on top of other crises that were kind of right at Europe’s borders.
It sort of seemed like this is a movie that we’ve seen before, and I think that one of my bugaboos in the way that we talk about migration is that there is this bedrock assumption that people from poorer countries are always going to want to move to richer countries and that basically anyone from a poor country, if they had the opportunity, would leap at the chance to come to a rich country.
That core assumption just felt so misguided to me and didn’t really chime with my experience as someone who’s lived outside of the United States and who’s traveled widely, and also who’s the child of an immigrant who, frankly, came to the United States quite reluctantly.
Lozada: That was one of the things that really struck me reading your series. We’re used to having countries compete for say, foreign direct investment or for money, for businesses to open up. But when we think of immigration, we often think of immigrants mainly as supplicants — as one begging to get in rather than being induced or incentivized to come by the host country.
But one of the early points you make in the series is that precisely some of the countries that are closing themselves off from immigration are the ones that have the most need of it and actually we’re starting to face a world where the scarcest resource is going to be people, and so that means that countries end up competing for migrants, rather than having immigrants be supplicants begging to get in.
You saw that come alive in some of the places that you visited. Can you show us what that competition looks like?
Polgreen: Yeah, one of the early themes that emerged when I started reporting on this series was that far from there being too many migrants, we may actually be facing a world in which countries are going to have to compete with one another in order to attract not just the most qualified doctors, engineers and things like that, but workers of all kinds.
On the one hand, we’re living in a world where there are more people on the move than ever. There’s something like a quarter of a billion people living outside of their home country. It’s the highest percentage in recorded human history.
But if you look at it another way, that’s only 4 percent of the population of the globe.
Lozada: So 96 percent of us are where we were born.
Polgreen: Ninety-six percent of people are living in the country where they were born. And as the shape of the global population changes, the need for actual human beings is really unevenly distributed. That inevitably sets up a world in which many more people are going to have to move from where they live to places where there’s opportunity and need for their skills.
And I think a piece of that is this assumption that people are always going to want to come to the West, or always going to want to come to the United States or Europe. But one of the things that I discovered in my reporting was that there are actually new destinations that have emerged and places that we, who live in the West, might not expect as being desirable locations for someone to build a life, have actually become places that are attracting some of the so-called best and brightest — particularly from the developing world, but not only from the developing world.
For example, we’re seeing Europeans migrate because their economies are not doing so well and some of them are going to Dubai, a city in the United Arab Emirates that I visited in the course of this reporting. It was really fascinating to see this stew of different folks from all kinds of places who were clearly drawn to a country that they saw as a sort of entrepôt of opportunity.
The piece that I wrote from that trip really focused on middle-class and upper-middle-class Africans who in a previous time might have tried to come to the United States or gone to Europe to build careers and build lives there, but had actively chosen instead to go to Dubai.
And there are real trade-offs in that choice. But the thing that I heard consistently from people was, we don’t want to be treated like supplicants, going hat in hand and treated like dirt at the embassies of these Western countries. If you’ve ever been to any of these, you know it can be a very unpleasant and degrading experience.
Also, they felt that in Dubai, there was the opportunity for them to actually use their skills and be treated as professionals and pursue their dreams in a way that didn’t discount their qualifications.
Lozada: My parents were both lawyers when they came here from Peru, but they couldn’t work as lawyers. They had to find other ways to make a living.
Polgreen: Exactly. I think your family’s story is really illustrative of this. And I think that notion that you could go to another place and even if that place doesn’t offer you the rights of citizenship, or the ability to truly belong in the same way that if you came and worked your way up in the United States, that’s still a bargain that frankly, you would prefer to take.
I think it illustrates this theme of competition and also the theme of agency. People who are moving from one country or to another, they’re making a choice about their lives and they’re going to look at the world and say, where is the place where I can tap into the most opportunity to live the kind of life that I want to live?
And we’ve assumed that will always be the United States. We’re No. 1. But I think that’s changing. And with the current occupant of the White House, I think that’s going to change even more quickly.
Lozada: The question of agency is so important and so interesting. One of the things you write is, you call immigration a “risky bet.” You say that “having the will to leave, to seek out something new and leave everything and everyone you know behind, it’s a profound act of self-creation.”
It’s so easy to think of these tides of immigration as people being pushed and pulled in different directions, but the agency of individuals really comes alive in what you’re writing about here.
Polgreen: Yeah, it’s funny, I think a lot of that thinking was, frankly, shaped by you and things you and I talked about on the Matter of Opinion podcast. I remember in one of the early conversations that we had about the Trump campaign and the way that Trump talked about immigrants, and you later wrote very eloquently about this, objecting to the idea that countries were not “sending their best.”
This idea of “sending” — I mean, frankly, it’s a kind of fever dream fantasy, right? That there is some force out there that is gathering up an invasion of foreigners who are going to come marauding over our borders, is such a fundamental misunderstanding of how migration works.
I think in a lot of ways, the story of your family is exemplary of how misguided that notion is. Nobody sent your family here.
Lozada: That was from Trump’s very first speech when he launched his campaign back in 2015. What he said is when Mexico sent its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. He said that twice. And he physically pointed at his audience, immediately creating this “us versus them.” The “sending” reflects not just how President Trump views immigration, but how he sees the world.
These all-powerful leaders are making decisions, unquestioned, unreviewable, over other people’s lives. But that “sending” robs you of agency over your own fate. It makes you not just a potentially unwanted immigrant, but a submissive one.
Speaking of the agency issue — I want to stay with that for a second, but take it back to your story about Dubai. You have this Ugandan lawyer who built a successful life away from her home country, first as a flight attendant and then as a top lawyer. And you talk to her about attachment and returning.
She has this amazing quote at the end of your piece where she says, “Maybe the future is just participation, not belonging. Maybe we’re done putting down roots and we’ll just keep moving.” What does it mean when immigration, in some cases, ceases to be about belonging, but instead is this transactional participating?
Polgreen: That was one of those moments — Laureen Fredah, I met her by chance. She just happened to come along to this lunch and when she said that line, I just about fell out of my chair. It was one of those great reporting moments where you’re just like, well, that’s it, that’s the quote. This person that I did not expect to meet actually becomes the center of the story that I write.
I think I’m often, in that kind of solipsistic way, drawn to people whose experiences have a lot of in common with my own. That feeling — that you don’t quite belong in the place that you’re from, and you seek something out in a different place and have a relationship of ambivalence across the board all around — is one that I relate to on a very profound level.
And I think for someone like Fredah, she comes from a kind of privileged, affluent background in Uganda. She took the New York bar exam, but ultimately decided to make a life and her career in Dubai, but kind of sees her options as being open.
And it was just this idea of participation — which is essentially what a country like the United Arab Emirates offers. You can’t really become a citizen, but you can get these long-term visas where you can stay as long as you kind of stay on the good side of the authorities and so on in this essentially absolute monarchy with limited free speech and all those kinds of things.
You would assume someone like Fredah would ultimately prefer to become a citizen of a country like the United States and that there are just more options, but I think that her somewhat studied indifference to that notion bespeaks this reality that we now have, which is that a lot of people are thinking about what the world look might look like in an era where all of these fundamental assumptions about human rights, about the rights of citizens, the right to asylum, all of these bedrock things that built the era in which we live — that if you move to a country and you start contributing to it that ultimately you’ll become a citizen — that maybe those are going away.
And that ultimately we need to make ourselves comfortable with a world in which a lot more people are going to be moving from place to place, looking for a contingent sense of belonging and a contingent sense of home that really lacks permanence.
That’s unsettling, right? It’s not how I think about citizenship. It’s not how you think about citizenship.
Lozada: No. That really struck me because it felt so alienating to be in that transactional mode all the time.
I mean, I understood it, reading the experience of this one person. But I feel that my instinct is to seek out that belonging, even if it’s made fairly clear to you sometimes that you may be needed, but not wanted. You may be taken in, but not exactly welcomed always. I honestly wonder if that’s part of why I end up writing so much about the United States and American identity and American history and literature in some ways is because I’m sort of craving that. I’m trying to justify my presence here.
Polgreen: You’re talking about something that’s really important, right? And that is: What does it actually mean to belong? I think that in the United States, we have a story that we tell ourselves about how someone becomes an American.
But I do wonder if that is going away as other countries move to these more transactional modes of bringing in people by necessity.
For example, there was a news report that Giorgia Meloni in Europe, who’s been at the forefront of anti-migration politics in Europe, she just announced that they’re going to bring in half a million new people on work visas — people from outside of the European Union.
And it seems that the goal is to have more of these transactional migrants, people who are coming in on a temporary basis who are there to work, and then ultimately lengthen the path to citizenship, so it’s harder for people who come in on that basis to become citizens and to belong.
And it seems like that’s kind of the way that much of the world is going. I think even in the United States, we’re starting to see that, talking about creating passes for people to come over the border to work in farms and things like that.
So there is this kind of push-pull of the American idea of citizenship and belonging and an experimentation that’s happening with a Persian Gulf-style transactional system of letting people come. It’s kind of a mutual interest in, “If it’s good for me and it’s good for you, then you can be here.”
But I’m just curious, what do you think is lost in a world where we think about participation rather than belonging?
Lozada: I wonder if there’s a moment, even from a selfish point of view, when the nation needs the people within its borders to feel a sense of belonging.
If there are moments of crisis or moments of tension when the country has to pull together in some way, and if you’ve deliberately cultivated a world in which that belonging is optional or is minimized, then that becomes more difficult. My mind is drawn toward wartime, but there have to be other kinds of crises or moments when being in and of America, for example, has to mean something.
Polgreen: Yeah.
Lozada: And if immigration becomes purely transactional because of its efficiencies — and I see the efficiencies — I think there’s a risk. You refer to the risky bet that immigrants make when they move. I think we engage in a different kind of risky bet if we make immigration purely a transaction that fits all sides.
Polgreen: Yeah, I think that’s so well put. I think that really gets at the heart of the conundrum. I feel like I spent so much time in my reporting talking to economists, who would talk about immigration in this very kind of “When you have more immigrants, you have these positive effects and when you have fewer ….”
And I had to keep reminding myself that migration is such a human phenomenon. And in the United Arab Emirates, there’s something sort of fundamentally unstable about the idea that it’s a country where just 10 percent of the people who live there are citizens.
Lozada: I was completely struck by that number, by the way. I did not realize it was that small.
Polgreen: It’s so small. And what that says to me, just to put it in your language, is it’s a very risky one-sided bet. The bet on the part of the Emiratis that they’re always going to be able to set the terms of those relationships is risky.
And then also there’s risk that at a moment when you find yourself all together in a crisis and don’t have glue that holds you together in some way, you won’t know how to move forward.
Lozada: I’m going to stick with this theme of agency because it seems like what we keep coming back to.
You write in this series about how the civil war in Syria was a hinge moment in history and how it didn’t just propel mass migration of people, particularly into Europe, but also was the impetus behind the visceral response or backlash, if you want to call it that, against the movement of people into Europe. And it’s something that has become emblematic of so much of the anti-immigrant animus right now in the world.
But you end with a story about people who left at the height of the civil war, built lives elsewhere and are now returning, trying to rebuild their country, their lives and their identities as Syrians.
I think the title of that piece was something like “Everyone Around Me Thinks That I’m Crazy for Wanting to Come Back.” It’s a quote from a Syrian woman who remade her life in Germany, in Berlin, and now wants to return.
This compulsion about going back is so fascinating to me and runs into the difficulty of, as they say, ever going home again.
What did you learn about this desire to return, even when what you’re going back to may be so difficult and when you’ve built a life someplace else?
Polgreen: It was really important to me to write about Syria because it did feel like this moment that really broke the world in a lot of ways.
And it underscores a couple of different things. One is, when we think about people who leave home and migrate, they tend to not go very far if they’re being forced to leave under duress. And then there’s a smaller handful of them who ultimately will make a kind of hopscotch journey, from Syria to Turkey, from Turkey ultimately to Berlin, which was the story of this woman, Wafa Mustafa, who I met in Damascus.
She had, I think, a very human desire to just live and be in the place that you’re from and to spend your life around the people and speaking the language and participating in the culture of the place that made you.
And it’s funny, I have my own strange relationship with this notion. I have always been very curious about people’s sense of rootedness, because of my own rootlessness. My mother is from Ethiopia. My father is American, and most of my life I lived in neither country. So I ended up having this sort of strange peripatetic childhood.
I think in place of a sense of rootedness, I got an ease in the world and a kind of cosmopolitan identity that has enabled me to live an extraordinary life. I wouldn’t trade that life for anything.
Lozada: Not bad training for a foreign correspondent, let it be said.
Polgreen: Yeah, and I think journalists tend to stand in borderlands. It gives you a perspective and a place to look at things.
But I’ve always been drawn to the stories of people who have that sense of deep rootedness and it was just remarkable in the context of Syria to see that put into such high relief, whether it was the guy that owned a carwash or this young journalist activist Wafa Mustafa.
These were stories of people who retained this deep sense of belonging to this particular place. It was so powerful, as to override what we assume is the undying attraction of having a life of safety and comfort in another place. And it’s funny that seems novel to people because it seems like the most common human impulse in the world.
Lozada: Oh, yeah.
Polgreen: In the modern world, we really do think that being confined and not being able to move is the most serious form of punishment.
But going back to the Bible and ancient epics, exile is the most profound form of punishment. It’s almost a kind of social death — to be cast out, whether it’s Dante or Odysseus or the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. It’s everywhere. It’s all through human history.
Lozada: For me, when I think about going back, it’s slightly different.
I don’t think as much about going back to live in Peru now. I think about going back in time, to the moment when my family decided to leave or when I then chose to come here myself. And that easily could have been different. We easily could have made a different choice.
I’ve always been jealous of Americans who don’t just claim a country, they claim a hometown: “I’m from Chicago,” “I’m from Dallas,” “I’m from New Orleans.” They instinctively know the streets and the rhythms and the smells and the sights.
I don’t have that anymore. When I go back to Lima, I feel out of place. I don’t get the jokes, not quite as well. And so I long for this place, but as with the immigrant experience, you always long for a place that no longer exists ——
Polgreen: Absolutely.
Lozada: Because to you, it’s captured at the moment in time when you departed and everything’s changed.
Polgreen: It’s funny, even though my mother really only came to the United States because she married my father, and he needed to come back and finish college. When she first got here, she didn’t like it. They were in Minnesota. It was very cold. She found the people very cold.
Lozada: No “Minnesota nice”?
Polgreen: No Minnesota nice. It’s a carapace. It’s not what it seems.
But I think she felt it was a strange and unwelcoming place. And my father very much wanted to go back to Ethiopia and live there, even though he was an American. But over time, my mom came to really admire and love the United States.
And so the story that I got of Ethiopia was one of almost having dodged a bullet — like I was so lucky to have been born in the United States.
Lozada: Oh.
Polgreen: If you think about the history of Ethiopia over the course of my lifetime — I was born in 1975 — Marxist dictatorship ——
Lozada: You kind of were lucky to ——
Polgreen: No, absolutely. I think that there’s a part of me that has always taken that for granted and that suppressed the curiosity of and, frankly, discounted the value of, even in the most painful of circumstances, being of and rooted in a particular place.
Lozada: And the outcome of that life, the one that your parents didn’t initially plan, but the one you ended up living is, as you put it, “I have always stood ambivalently at the psychic borders of American belonging.”
I don’t have a question there. I just sort of stared at that sentence for so long and I wanted to know more about those borders because it’s interesting even that you use the term “borders.”
I’m sure that was not accidental, but so much of the debate over immigration has become a debate about borders and not a conversation about the way that immigrants are enriching, reshaping, remaking, sometimes challenging, life inside those borders. And maybe your ability to stand ambivalently at the psychic borders of American belonging helps you glimpse that a little more clearly than most.
So Lydia, at the beginning of this conversation, you said you were drawn to this subject and this approach to it because it’s the topic of our time and our moment.
What have you learned elsewhere that you think informs what is happening here now in the United States?
Polgreen: I think that so many of the trends and political innovations, to put it in a neutral way, driven by anti-migration politics have come home to roost here in the United States in a way that feels, in some ways, almost outlandishly cruel and just unbelievably crude.
I was struck when JD Vance was trying to rally the troops in the Senate to vote for the president’s one big beautiful bill, he tweeted: “The thing that will bankrupt this country more than any other policy is flooding the country with illegal immigration and then giving those migrants generous benefits. The OBBB fixes this problem and therefore it must pass.”
I mean, this is absurd. If Trump wanted to do a border security bill, chances are he could probably get a majority and quite a few Democrats to go along with him.
But it felt to me really telling and I think of a piece with the reporting that I’ve done around the world that this force of using immigration as a cudgel, and a way to pull a plurality together around a very radical political program, is a thing that has come to the United States and how.
But I also take away that this is not a very powerful instrument and that it changes quickly. We are in the process of an experiment that will reshape America in ways that we can’t even possibly fathom. For the first time in 50 years we’re likely to have net negative migration in the United States in 2025.
This is just — I think people don’t or can’t even grasp the level of profound change this represents for us as a country. I think that people are not going to like it when that becomes clear. And this is something that we’ve seen play out in many other countries, that when people see what life is like without immigrants, they realize it’s not necessarily a life that they want to live.
I think that’s where we’re headed and we’ll see how we respond.
Lozada: Well, I think we can — not stop there, but pause there, because I hope we can continue getting together to talk about this in the months and years to come.
Polgreen: Something tells me it’s not going to stop being a story. I know that you are going to keep writing about it too. So we’ll reconvene.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur, Vishakha Darbha and Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski. The director of Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.
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Lydia Polgreen is an Opinion columnist.
Carlos Lozada is an Opinion columnist based in Washington, D.C. He is the author, most recently, of “The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians.” @CarlosNYT
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