In this episode of “The Opinions,” the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy talks to the columnist Lydia Polgreen about the global panic around migration, and what President Trump’s efforts to curb it mean for the United States and its position in the world.
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The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America. This week I wanted to talk to my colleague the columnist Lydia Polgreen. For the past year, Lydia has been reporting from around the world about migration and how the global population is shifting.
She’s looked at who wins and who loses when a country decides there’s too much immigration. In many of the wealthiest countries, like the United States, these changes have sparked a wave of conservative political victories and policies. Now, as we all know, Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportation. That hasn’t happened in a widespread way yet. But his administration has started a very public clampdown in ways that courts have ruled unlawful or unconstitutional.
Trump wants to utterly reshape immigration in America and how America sees immigrants, and I wanted to talk to Lydia about what he’s doing here and where it may lead our society.
Lydia, thanks for coming in today.
Lydia Polgreen: It’s a pleasure, Patrick.
Healy: I wanted to touch first on two cases that have been in the news and that you and I have both been watching: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was accidentally deported to El Salvador, and Rumeysa Ozturk, the student arrested from Tufts University. How do you think about these two stories in the context of your years as a foreign correspondent and also as someone who has covered migration so deeply?
Polgreen: I think that both of these cases speak to something that goes to the heart of the question of what kind of country we want to be. And sfor both of these cases, the way that — in a matter that seems to me completely lawless — the Trump administration seems to be trying to demonstrate a ”do-not-come-here” message. And they will exercise an extraordinary amount of discretion in power in deciding who is undesirable and seek to remove them from this country without any sort of due process.
These cases, to me, speak to something that I think Americans have a really hard time wrapping their heads around, which is the idea that maybe people just won’t want to come to the United States. We have these policies of restriction that are so harsh and so draconian that people might look around the globe and say: “You know what? Actually, maybe that’s not the place for me. Maybe there isn’t the opportunity that I thought that there might be.”
And one of the things that I’ve done in my travels is talk to a lot of people, particularly people who oppose migration, and ask them the question, “How would it feel to live in a country that people wanted to leave rather than be a country that people wanted to come to?”
The tension of that dynamic, of people worrying that outsiders are going to come and take the good things that they have, without appreciating that those outsiders are wanting to come and participate in what you have, rather than take — it gets lost on people. I fear that the United States is becoming a country that really wants to turn its back on what it has gained from being a place that people want to come to.
Healy: Lydia, you just got at something that puzzles me so much about this. For much of my lifetime, so many Americans took pride in the fact that people from El Salvador and Turkey, students from China or Western, Eastern Europe wanted to come to America. And now, as you were also saying, it seems like many people now seem very, frankly, comfortable with the idea that this administration wants to either stop some of those people from coming or actually remove them. As you look at our recent history, is there a moment that stands out to you that makes sense about why this kind of shift happened among Americans?
Polgreen: Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the polling on immigration in the United States, particularly at this moment where we’ve seen support for Donald Trump really crater on the issues that he has traditionally done quite well on. And the one place he’s actually been above water is on immigration.
I think that what that reflects is a deep sense of unhappiness among Americans and Americans really of all races and backgrounds — including Americans of immigrant backgrounds — a sense that things had just really gotten out of control.
It’s very easy to look at the situation that was unfolding under the Biden administration and say we effectively had open borders, but we’ve had a political kind of deadlock on migration for a very long time. There has not been a serious immigration reform bill in Congress since the 1980s — we’re talking in the Reagan administration. When Americans talk about wanting to crack down on immigration, I think what they’re really looking for is some sense of control and some sense that there is an orderly process that they’re quite happy for newcomers to come to the United States and join our community, but there needs to be some way for that to happen in an orderly fashion.
And in the midst of that, I think you’ve had a very opportunistic Republican Party under Donald Trump that has realized that for them, blocking any sort of immigration reform is actually really good politics because it means you can use the specter of a huge flood of migrants coming into the country as a perpetual boogeyman, as an argument for “this is why we need to be in charge” because otherwise we’re going to have some sort of invasion. And it’s really worked well for them.
What you’re seeing when you poll the American people on this issue is actually a desire for compromise. They want something that makes sense. And instead we’re presented with a binary choice between open borders and what we’re seeing right now, which is basically shipping people off to foreign gulags. Obviously that’s not the range of options — there’s a huge range of options. But in the meantime, I fear that we’re doing extremely serious and really long-lasting damage to the reputation of the United States as a global destination.
Healy: Lydia, I’m having one of those moments of déjà vu that you and I get after decades of working at The New York Times and being reporters. I just left this focus group of Trump supporters on Monday night, and the most animated part of the focus group by far was about immigration. They touched on several of the words that you just touched on: this desire for some kind of control, a sense that things got out of control.
A couple of them remember that moment in the summer of 2019 when all the Democrats who were running for president against Trump stood on a debate stage and raised their hand essentially for a sense of open borders. These were people in the focus group who were Democrats who voted for Democrats in 2016 and 2020 and then flipped to Trump in 2024. They wanted the control that they thought Trump could get, but they also felt that sense of the puzzle, like what is the right outcome?
This is the thing about Trump. He promised to do a lot of the things when he was running for president that he’s now doing. He was true to his word to some degree. But I think what so many people that I’ve heard from over these last 100 days have said is that they didn’t expect students to be snatched on sidewalks by mass federal agents and they didn’t think things like that happened in America.
So I am wondering how you see this ultimately playing out. Will Americans accept this for very long?
Polgreen: I think it’s important to point out that the polling is on immigration broadly. But when you ask about specific tactics and policies, the support plummets, right?
Americans are — as recent polling captures it — horrified by the masked agents that you talked about, the idea that people are being shipped off without due process. I don’t think these are things that Americans, by and large, support. But I think that the reality is that perhaps they trust that Donald Trump will be able to make some kind of a deal without realizing that Trump’s entire political project requires not making a deal. And, in fact, there was a deal that Democrats in the Senate and Republicans in the Senate came together on. And Trump, who was not even president at the time, came in to block it. So, clearly there’s no desire.
I think that one of the big themes that I’ve tried to hit on in this series that I’ve done about migration is, that migration is actually a pretty rare phenomenon. It’s at an all-time high, but at the same time, it involves just 4 percent of the population of the world. And so that means that 96 percent of the world population lives in the country where they were born.
And if you really think about it and you imagine migrants as being human beings like you and me, then that makes sense. I mean, to pick up and leave where you’re from and go a long distance, leave everything behind, make a new life where you don’t speak the language, where you might not know anybody, where your educational credentials will be devalued — that is actually just a huge, huge, huge thing to do.
I think that immigration reform that actually reflected the fact that people want to be able to seek out opportunity, but also go back to their country where they’re from and have some kind of back and forth — I mean, that someone might want to come and spend some time in the United States and then go back to where their family lives, where their culture is and that we need to really imagine the full human lives of people who choose to come here and value that, and think about ways to have a system that reflects that.
I think those focus group people that you talk to, they would intuitively understand that because they themselves have experienced that. Maybe you move to New York City but ultimately your heart is always in rural Nebraska because that’s where you’re from.
In some ways that’s what’s missing in our conversation about immigration: a real recognition that these are people who want to live lives that we would recognize as lives that we live ourselves.
Healy: I get the sense in talking to people that you may be right. They may be open to that kind of flexibility, fluidity, kind of the nonbinary, but that they want security first. They want to see evidence that both parties take this seriously. They want some sense of control.
But I also do think they’re influenced by a point you made earlier, that even though it’s only 4 percent of the population migrating, the boogeyman effect has really taken hold for a lot of people that they see it as larger.
I remember in 2018 during the midterms, allies of President Trump tried to make it sound like there was going to be this invasion over the southern border that was going to reach Minnesota. And Minnesota was going to be in such danger. It did briefly have like a real impact. I empathize with a lot of these Americans who want some kind of change, who want to see that commitment first, but aren’t quite sure what happens next. And Lydia, I have to say, I think the biggest question on my mind is — I don’t know whether Americans will ultimately accept, if we get there, armed military camps in the southern states that become full of migrants being deported.
It sounds like if Trump really goes full-scale mass deportation, you may have some of these places erected, and you may have images and stories coming out that will make Americans look themselves in the mirror and say, “Is this what I want in my country?” And I do wonder, in your experience overseas or just in America, what you think the tolerance would be for that.
Polgreen: I think the tolerance could potentially be quite high. I think we have these individual stories that are quite compelling, but I think that if you’ve been told over and over again that this is a crisis, this is a crisis and the answer is we can only solve this crisis by having these huge armed camps in parts of the United States.
But, the other thing is that this deportation regime is actually not going particularly well. I think ——
Healy: He has not gotten the numbers he promised, right?
Polgreen: He’s not gotten the numbers that he promised. It seems to me that there’s been a reluctance to do mass roundups at workplaces. I mean, why are we hunting after students when there’s all of this kind of low-hanging fruit?
And I think that what that reflects is the sort of real political reality, which is that undocumented migrants are a really big part of the fabric of our communities and economies.
And at the end of the day, the price that Americans would have to pay in terms of the way that their lives would change is just intolerable. We already have a crisis in housing construction and small business owners who are facing worker shortages and not able to get people to work. So I think that the “solutions” that are being offered by the Trump administration actually have huge, huge, huge knock-on effects that people are not going to like. And I think that becomes a real political problem, and I think that that’s why you’re seeing them have this kind of opportunistic plucking-people-off-the-streets approach.
Healy: Lydia, I want to dig into the series on migration that you’ve been working on and particularly the fact that while so many countries have enacted policies to keep migrants out, countries across the world are going to need them more than ever, as you were just saying, whether it’s because of jobs or frankly because of plunging birthrates. What has your reporting revealed?
Polgreen: I should say that this series actually predated Trump coming back to office.
What I’ve seen is that there is just an absolutely huge mismatch between the needs of societies that are, as you said, facing hugely declining birthrates and having very, very real worker shortages, but also need the new blood, the new dynamism, the new ideas that migration has reliably brought, particularly when people from poorer countries migrate to wealthier countries. They bring with them new perspectives and new ways of thinking that have really brought a tremendous amount of innovation to the countries where they arrive.
I think that that is a story that we’ve been very used to celebrating. And it was not until the Syrian civil war, when huge numbers of Syrians really had no choice but to leave Syria, and about a million of them went to Europe. It sort of started this cascade of events, I think, that have defined our politics ever since, and called into question the core tenets of the postwar agreements about refugees and how we have a responsibility to provide asylum to people. We’ve just been living in the shadow of that ever since.
It strikes me, though, that it’s not just about people. People, I think, are ultimately manifestations of a broader set of questions about human progress and about globalization.
So I think that in some ways it’s reflecting a sense of having reached a bit of a dead end that societies that ultimately are saying, “We don’t want more migrants” are also saying, “We don’t see a future, we don’t see progress happening in our society. We have to hunker down and really focus on taking care of our own.”
I think it’s very hard for them to imagine a world in which no one wants to come into their country. I think it’s hard for Americans to imagine that.
Healy: Yeah. Lydia, why does migration cause such an impact on how regular people think about their countries and societies and themselves? Because I would argue that the migration you were talking about from Syria, parts of the Middle East, had a more profound effect on Europe over the last 10 to 15 years and how people in certain countries thought about themselves — thought about their lack of control and became resentful or angry then at the war in Ukraine or Brexit or Putin and Orban and the rise of authoritarians more than anything else. What is it about migration that sets people off so much?
Polgreen: Well, change is hard. Figuring out how to live alongside people who don’t look like you, who maybe speak a different language, who practice a different religion — this has always been a human challenge.
This country was really built on waves of different kinds of people coming here, and that was always uncomfortable. There have been periods in the history of the United States where certain groups of people have been declared undesirable: the Chinese Exclusion Act, the 1924 Immigration Act that basically set very, very harsh quotas that ended up tragically keeping huge number of Jewish people who would’ve very much liked to have left Europe in the run-up to World War II to seek safety in the United States. Many of them — scientists, people who could have made extraordinary contributions to the United States. We can look back on that and see that as actually a tremendous loss for America.
One economist who I spoke to had written a paper about the impact on innovation from that restriction act in 1924. In the paper she wrote that the loss to American science during this period was the equivalent of eliminating an entire physics department at a major university each year between 1925 and 1955.
But I think that at a moment where a lot of people are looking at their lives and wondering what the future looks like and if this kind of story of limitless expansion and always moving forward and being able to take the best people from all across the world and integrate them into our society, but then also have them teach us new things — I mean, this is the sort of fantasy version of the United States that you and I — we’re both Gen X-ers — grew up with. This is what we learned in civics class.
There’s a real sense that that kind of upward incline of our prospects is over. And what you get is the politics that we’re in right now.
Healy: It’s so interesting to me what you’re getting at the relationship that Americans have to change, and I feel like migration encapsulates that so powerfully because people again have to kind of look at themselves in a mirror and ask: Who am I? Who do I want for my neighbor? What am I comfortable with? Why am I uncomfortable with this? Those are really hard questions, especially, I think, for a society that may feel like things are out of control.
Polgreen: Yeah, and look, I spent most of my life living outside of the United States, in countries with very, very real problems. And so I am not that sympathetic to Americans who feel that things are out of control because I’ve lived in places where things were actually out of control, where the state’s ability to exercise a monopoly on violence was tenuous at best.
The U.S. is a rich country. This is a country of people who just don’t have problems in the way that other people in the world have problems. And so I think that’s part of the answer; I think we struggle to imagine what real privation and real problems might look like.
Healy: Absolutely. Lydia, in your years as a reporter and a columnist, you’ve covered autocrats, authoritarians; you’ve covered reformers, small-d democrats. You have insight into what drives leaders and why societies are drawn to certain kinds of leaders at certain points. What does it say to you about America and our society that half the country wanted Trump back as president?
Polgreen: Well, not quite half.
Healy: I get into fights with that. I sometimes say not quite half, and people are like, can’t you cut him some slack? He basically ——
Polgreen: No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. This man is a monster. You shouldn’t cut him any slack.
Healy: OK.
Polgreen: I personally don’t believe that the president of the United States needs any slack. You’re the most powerful person in the world and facts matter. But anyway ——
Healy: So, OK, some of our fellow Americans feel that way, but what does it say to you about what America — why did this country want him back?
Polgreen: I think that it all speaks to this desire for some kind of change, and the way that that’s been interpreted. People will grab at the options that you give them, and I think there is a feeling that the country is not going in the right direction. There’s dissatisfaction over globalization, over migration, over the state of the economy. There’s just all of this roiling dissatisfaction under the surface. And I think when you have a leader who has a simple story of how they can fix problems, and a voting population that feels that it is constantly being sold a bill of goods lied to, promises made and then promises not kept, that there’s a certain attraction to someone who’s offering up simple solutions.
The reality is that we have had these kinds of binary choices for much of my lifetime. I remember in the 2004 election when George W. Bush was re-elected, everyone thought that was the biggest catastrophe that they’d ever experienced. They just couldn’t believe after the WMD [war on mass destruction], the tax cuts, all of the things that Bush had done, that he could be re-elected. And it seemed after John Kerry lost that the Democrats were just going to be in the wilderness for a generation. But then what happened? A singular figure emerges. Things change. There’s a global financial crisis.
If you look at the 2012 election, where the shoe was on the other foot, the Republicans losing that election thought that they needed to go in this completely centrist, moderate direction. And what happened? A singular figure emerged who came in and upended everything.
I don’t want to compare Barack Obama to Donald Trump because I think they’re very, very different men. But I think that what they have in common is that they were able to articulate a clear and extremely compelling vision of where they were going to take the country.
Healy: Absolutely.
Polgreen: And so, we’re in this moment where, I’m not saying that we need to get down on our knees and pray for a savior, but I actually feel like we’re in a moment where both parties are facing this problem. People want to be inspired. I think the American character is to prefer inspiration over fear. But barring that, if you don’t offer inspiration ——
Healy: The boogeyman ——
Polgreen: Yeah, the boogeyman is the next best thing.
Healy: I think that’s so true, Lydia. I would just add that Donald Trump also inspired a lot of Americans, but I think he did fail to deliver in that sense, especially during Covid and now with what’s going on with the economy and tariffs. He may have had a very consequential first 100 days, but he may well end up having a pretty historically unpopular presidency.
Lydia, I want to end with going back to the world and America’s role in the world and what Trump is doing to that role. You have been so thoughtful over the years about America’s promise and what America gets wrong, its fundamental flaws. I want to ask you: What do you see Trump doing to America’s role in the world at a time when the world needs America and America needs the world?
Polgreen: Having spent most of my life living overseas and particularly living in poor countries, in Africa and in Asia, there’s such a mix of admiration, longing and resentment for the United States.
That experience of dependency, of needing American aid or needing America’s assistance if you’re a NATO country, of kind of living in a global economy that’s dominated by the United States — that has been a source of just extraordinary resentment.
What I think Donald Trump has done is actually given people permission around the world to give full voice to that anger and resentment at the United States that has always kind of bubbled below the surface. America has been the “hail fellow well met” on the global stage for a very long time — people are happy to see us, but then also resent our self-satisfaction and our wealth and our military power, but then also depend on it.
Not to get too psychoanalytic about all of this, but I think that what we’re seeing right now is in some ways an almost euphoric sense of liberation from having to pretend that America is some kind of benevolent player in the world, and that all has been well in the global compact that’s set by America. I just think it’s going to be fascinating to see how the world reorients itself. I think the United States will lose a lot from not being part of those conversations.
Healy: That’s the knock-on effect that I really wonder about Trump, if Americans are kind of tired of the world and want to break from it, and the world is tired of America and Donald Trump and doesn’t trust this country. What does that lead to?
Polgreen: Yeah. The United States doesn’t really have a lot of experience at being just one of many countries in the world in the past century. We don’t know what it’s like for people not to want to trade with us or not to want to come to us or not to want to use our money. I think it’s very hard for Americans to imagine what it’s like to be more isolated.
My mother is from Ethiopia. For many years, she traveled on an Ethiopian passport, and she’d get pulled aside at the Frankfurt airport and couldn’t go into the city with us when we had a long layover because they suspected that she was going to abandon her husband and children and live on welfare in Germany. I don’t know what they suspected.
So it’s been really striking to me to see the number of Americans who are thinking: “Hmm, should I be thinking about building a life somewhere else? Do I need options?” America was the world’s option, and if it’s no longer the option for outsiders, what does that mean for America? What does that mean for our options? I think we’re headed for a period of profound decline if things go on this continued trajectory.
Healy: Lydia, thanks so much for joining me.
Polgreen: This was great, Patrick. Thank you so much for your really thoughtful questions.
Thoughts? Email us at [email protected].
This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Jillian Weinberger. It was edited by Kaari Pitkin and Alison Bruzek. Mixing by Sonia Herrero. Original music by Carole Sabouraud, Aman Sahota and Isaac Jones. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker, Michelle Harris 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.
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