In 1876, France gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States as a monument to republican liberty. Conceived by French abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye and built by artist Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the statue commemorated both America’s centennial and a century of Franco-American friendship.
Equally important to bringing the statue to the U.S. was building its pedestal. When Congress failed to pass appropriations to construct it, the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer—himself a Hungarian-born immigrant—announced an auction to help raise funds for the $100,000 needed. Emma Lazarus, a poet and supporter of Jewish refugees, penned a sonnet for the fundraiser that included these now-familiar lines: “Give me your tired, your poor / Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Lazarus’s poem helped reconfigure the symbolism of the Statue of Liberty into a beacon for immigrants. Since it was erected in New York Harbor in 1886, the statue has been recognized as an icon of our country’s status as a haven for refugees.
But what it means to be an immigrant in the United States is changing rapidly. For a century and a half, America offered a “golden door” to refugees who sought to escape poverty, war, famine, and political unrest; a promised haven to find a peaceful life. When historian Oscar Handlin wrote the 1951 book The Uprooted, which redefined immigration history, he began it by telling readers, “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”
Today, it seems the term immigrant is now more a pejorative than a compliment. To be a noncitizen at any point means facing the risk of detention and deportation. To be among those tired, poor, huddled masses today means being the first target in a new deportation regime engineered by the Trump administration to strike fear.
Seven months into the second Trump administration, we have observed a new deportation regime that is designed to expel as many noncitizens as possible and erode civil liberties. While it still lags behind the average number of deportations of the Obama administration, the use of fear by Trump, along with a total disregard for the rule of law, has resulted in a new immigration policy centered on expulsion.
The question that Americans need to ask themselves is what immigration will look like after the Trump administration. If Handlin once described the immigrant as the cornerstone of “American history,” what will be immigrants’ future in a xenophobic America?
To read Handlin’s study is to engage with a work that was far from perfect; much of The Uprooting concentrated on European immigrants and promoted an assimilationist view of immigrants erasing their roots in favor of adapting to American culture. But it sparked a rethinking of the relationship between the United States and its immigrant past. Handlin also represented a generation of scholars who informed federal policy; he lobbied extensively for the passage of the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965, which ended the outdated national quota system and eliminated all geographic immigration bans. In the context of the Civil Rights Movement, the act represented to policymakers a new era of immigration that welcomed all.
Since The Uprooting, scores of historians have filled the gaps in the literature of immigration from other parts of the world. Ronald Takaki’s 1989 book, Strangers From a Different Shore, reminded readers that another ocean—the Pacific—was a major conduit for immigrants from Asia. George Sánchez’s 1993 tome Becoming Mexican American offered one of the most comprehensive studies on Latin American history and inspired a generation of scholarship.
But the story of immigration came coupled with a long history of immigration control. Alongside the hundreds of ethnographies on immigrant communities, there are hundreds of studies on how the federal government decided who to welcome into the United States. Until 1882, the concept of federal immigration exclusion was absent. Mae Ngai was among the first to provide a long study of the federal government’s expansion of immigration control and the criminalization of immigrants, in her 2004 book Impossible Subjects. Beth Lew-Williams’s The Chinese Must Go captured the early history of the anti-Chinese movement in the West, which led to the passage of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that established the idea of immigration control. Kelly Lytle Hernandez’s comprehensive study on the history of the Border Patrol, Migra!, offered an authoritative report for the origins of the exclusion system we live with today. Even though the methods of immigration control have changed, the causes remain largely the same—xenophobia driven by economic strife and corporate greed.
Immigration control, although over a century old, has grown dramatically in recent years. Under the current Trump administration, however, the unprecedented expansion of policing and use of fear to enforce deportations have split the country in dramatic ways.
Americans today are more concerned about immigration than in recent years. The 2024 election put xenophobia as a central topic of the campaign. A Gallup poll from July 2024 found that 55 percent of Americans wanted less immigration to the U.S.—the highest it has been since 2001, when xenophobia swept the nation in the wake of 9/11.
But how much has immigration actually changed? During most of the first Trump administration, immigration to the U.S., both documented and undocumented, remained steady despite the visible increase in Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity. The Migration Policy Institute found that, despite the increase in ICE raids, legal migration to the United States only dipped slightly during that time. During the Covid-19 pandemic, world migration, including that to the United States, dropped drastically.
The recent rise in xenophobia can be traced to rhetoric around increasing immigration during the Biden administration. Although Biden retained several Trump-era immigration policies, such as keeping Title 42 until 2023, and issued 605 executive orders related to immigration—more than the 472 during Trump’s first term—conservatives regularly slammed the Biden administration as ineffective. Even though studies showed that undocumented immigration declined throughout 2024—long before the election—Trump’s use of misinformation during the campaign portrayed the Biden administration as ineffective in dealing with immigration.
Although experts regularly note that immigrants have a positive effect on the overall economy, immigration again emerged as the scapegoat for the inflation that occurred during the Biden administration. Indeed, the Migration Policy Institute found in their study of immigration and the 2024 election that Trump’s statements on immigration mimicked the anti-immigrant backlash of the 1920s that led to the passage of the 1924 Immigration Act.
The anti-immigrant sentiment of today, just as in the 1920s, specifically targets immigrants of color. Historically, the demonization of immigrants—notably Chinese, Japanese, and Mexican Americans—has been used as a tactic to strike fear into white voters.
Yet it is also thanks to these immigrants, such as Wong Kim Ark, the plaintiff in the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark, that the definition of birthright citizenship is enshrined in our legal system to benefit all Americans.
Anti-immigrant rhetoric promoted by Trump and Stephen Miller is not only appearing in political discourse but is also embedded in today’s culture. To offer a comparison from history, we can see F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic novel The Great Gatsby, published the year after the landmark 1924 Immigration Act. You can find the xenophobia of the period represented in the character of Tom Buchanan, who regularly repeats lines from the work of Lothrop Stoddard (he misremembers his name as “Goddard”), and who quotes Stoddard’s most infamous text, the 1920 volume The Rising Tide of Color. In it, Stoddard prophesized the end of white supremacy because of the rise of nations of color and called upon the U.S. to ban immigrants and maintain racial segregation.
The text influenced the 1924 Immigration Act, which banned immigration from outside of Europe and placed harsh limits on non-Nordic European immigrants, and became a staple of white supremacist literature. Trump’s past remarks on the negative genes of immigrants echo Stoddard’s own arguments for eugenics—that European genes should define the United States. Evidence of such remarks are emboldening white supremacist groups such as Return to the Land, an Arkansas-based white Christian group whose proclaimed goal is to establish white communities in Arkansas and Missouri.
Not only have the immigration policies of the current Trump administration brought into question the historic identity of the United States as a nation of immigrants, but the wholesale raids on immigrants have jeopardized the rule of law.
As the Supreme Court showed in its ruling in United States v. CASA, the court has given the president unchecked power over federal judges to enforce his order against birthright citizenship. Now, according to the courts, the Trump administration can define who it will deport, regardless of citizenship status. As Justice Sotomayor put it so clearly in her dissent: “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates.”
Under the current Trump administration, immigration has been redefined broadly as a question of national security to justify the expansion of ICE sweeps and deportations. The shoehorning of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to justify mass detentions and deportations, and the Supreme Court’s lackadaisical response to its use, has also called into question the fragility of checks and balances to protect constitutional rights.
When the legal system fails to defend one minority group, such as immigrants, it threatens the freedoms of other citizens. When the U.S. government detained 120,000 Japanese Americans in concentration camps during World War II, the government failed to protect the rights of its citizens by caving to the demands of special interest groups: white farm owners seeking to remove Japanese American farmers as competition, newspaper moguls who profited off of the hate speech and rumormongering, and politicians wanting to score political points among their wealthy constituents. In fact, the nativist group the Sons of the Golden West, citing the incarceration, sued the County of San Francisco to eliminate Japanese Americans from San Francisco’s voter rolls in a failed attempt to overturn Wong Kim Ark and strip confined Japanese Americans of their U.S. citizenship.
When the Supreme Court agreed with the government in the cases of Hirabayashi and Korematsu v. United States, it not only failed to provide justice for Japanese Americans but also created a framework for mass detention of any particular group during a state of emergency.
And, unlike previous administrations, the current administration has deployed new tactics, such as inhumane detention facilities and deportation to third-party countries like South Sudan, to deter future immigration. Whether the rhetoric is about the economic security of the United States or the supposed criminality of immigrants, the status of immigrants in the U.S. is now more tenuous than ever. As Justice Robert Jackson presciently warned in his Korematsu dissent, once established, the precedent lies around “like a loaded weapon” for an unscrupulous future administration to use with a plausible claim of need.
Now the great question of the current Trump administration is the future of all immigration. As recent policy changes, such as Congress’s approval of the tripling of ICE’s budget, have demonstrated, the Trump administration hopes to curtail all immigration—illegal or legal.
First, ICE’s arbitrary detention of undocumented citizens and green card holders—those who went through the legal process of acquiring residency—represents a new moment in American history. Criminality, as the rhetoric indicated, was the basis for excluding immigrants. But as we have seen in the past seven months, the targets of ICE sweeps have been largely immigrants without criminal records. Examples range from ICE’s detaining of Jon Evans, an immigrant from Jamaica who purchased a firearm for his job as a reserve police officer for the town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, to Caroline Dias Goncalves, a University of Utah nursing student detained following a traffic stop in Colorado. Recent data has shown that 70 percent of detainees are immigrants, documented or otherwise, with no criminal record.
The use of mass, indiscriminate deportations is designed to strike fear among immigrants and citizens alike. For those with ties to, or who are supportive of, immigrant communities, criticism of the Trump administration or attempts to document ICE arrests have led to assaults and unjust detentions. Courtrooms—trusted sites for justice—are now traps designed by ICE. The recent assault on Senator Alex Padilla at a Department of Homeland Security press conference by an ICE agent represented a new low for the Trump administration’s attempt to silence criticism.
Cory Booker, who co-sponsored legislation with Padilla to unmask (literally and bureaucratically) ICE agents with the VISIBLE Act, told his colleagues: “For weeks, Americans have watched federal agents with no visible identification detain people off the streets and instill fear in communities across the country. Reports of individuals impersonating ICE officers have only increased the risk to public and officer safety. The lack of visible identification and uniform standards for immigration enforcement officers has created confusion, stoked fear, and undermined public trust in law enforcement.”
Along with increased policing, the Trump administration has implemented economic barriers to keep new immigrants and refugees from entering the country. As part of Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” refugees will be asked to pay $1,000 just to apply for asylum—with no guarantee of approval.
Even tourists aspiring to the visit the United States are being taxed to enter the country. On August 4, the Trump administration announced a new policy requiring some foreign visitors to pay up to $15,000 in bonds before entering the U.S. As part of a pilot program, the bond policy would require individuals from countries with high overstay rates to pay at least $5,000 upon entry—with a promise for the money to be returned if the individual does not overstay their visa.
The sure consequence of these policies will be a decline in net migration to the U.S. across the board. Such a result will have a negative impact on the economic growth of the country. The U.S. Census Bureau in 2023 developed several net projections for the available immigration workforce up to 2040. Based on 2023 projections, the immigrant working-age population in the U.S. would grow from 36 million in 2025 to 37.3 million. Future anti-immigration policies projected the workforce to decline drastically, ranging from a fall to 31 million in a limited immigration scenario to 18.5 million in the event of no immigration after 2025. For the U.S. population, which continues to age as the baby boomer generation enters retirement, the need for workers will remain as more individuals enter retirement.
But more than just economically, the United States will face an identity crisis. The more the Trump administration continues to slouch toward authoritarianism and disregard the Constitution, the less its citizens will have faith in its principles.
We need to remember that the freedoms outlined by the Constitution are only as good as the protection they offer to those most marginalized in society—particularly noncitizens. The freedoms of all Americans become ever so fragile when the powerful strip them away from the powerless in the name of national security.
It’s hard to predict what will happen after the end of this administration. But if the past seven months are an indicator of the future, the United States will progressively lose its status as a “nation of immigrants.” From there, we could lose much, much more—our economic health, our international standing, and the promise of a constitutional order that once aspired to endow us all with the inalienable rights we have enjoyed for generations.
The post The Future of Immigration in America—After Trump Is Gone appeared first on New Republic.
