June 13, 2025
by Marc Stier
When they fully understand it, many Trump voters don’t support his roundup of undocumented immigrants. Talk to them and they’ll say, “I want the criminals deported, but we didn’t vote for hardworking people who have been here for years to be thrown out of the country.” Support for Trump’s immigration policies depends largely on people believing the big lie that a substantial number of undocumented immigrants are criminals or that they are receiving government benefits, which aside from K–12 education for children, is rarely true.
But there are some who say that undocumented immigrants have “violated our laws” and “jumped the line” and so should be deported.
I want to reply to that objection and do so in a way that supports the belief that most Americans—including Trump supporters—hold, which is that most undocumented immigrants should not only be allowed to stay in this country but should be even better integrated into our public life.
The United States has been utterly hypocritical about immigration for decades.
We have all enjoyed the economic benefits of “illegal” immigration as immigrants have worked in jobs that would otherwise have gone unfilled. Our agriculture and construction industries would be undermined without these workers. There would be a loss of people who maintain our gardens, who take care of our elderly, and who play a vital role in so many other industries.
As we have shown elsewhere, immigrants today—just like immigrants in the past—make a huge contribution to our economy. They pay taxes, including Social Security taxes, despite not being eligible for most government benefits. They are essential workers. They are entrepreneurial workers—20% of main street businesses in Pennsylvania are owned by immigrants. And they and/or their children become successful in fields such as medicine and software development.
We shouldn’t be surprised by immigrants’ success. It is immensely difficult to pick up and move from one’s country of birth to another country. Those who do it are usually among the most ambitious, far-seeing, and capable people. That is why immigrants to do well and contribute so much to the US and why the children of immigrants so often rise to positions of achievement and wealth.
But for immigrants to be successful and contribute as much as they can, we need policies that not just regulate immigration but that support immigrants. Instead, we have inconsistent laws and practices that send mixed messages by both encouraging undocumented immigrants while blocking their path forward at the same time.
We have not enforced our employment laws, allowing employers to hire undocumented individuals. But we reduce immigrants’ economic prospects (and in doing so fail to benefit from their talents and abilities) by limiting their employment opportunities through inconsistent application of employment and Social Security laws, and denying them driver’s licenses as well as access to affordable higher education, worker training, etc.
With the support of government policy, businesses have created and taken advantage of—and taken for granted—a second-class workforce with members who have few rights and little ability to complain without reprisal if at all, so they are often abused and exploited. Immigration fraud is a substantial business in the United States that provides fake papers that allow other businesses to generate profit by hiring and taking advantage of this second-class workforce.
It is the abuse of workers in this second-class workforce, not the presence of undocumented immigrants in our country, that undermines the wages of workers who are American citizens.
And now we are terrorizing those same people with random roundups by an irregular militia that often does not identify itself or wear proper uniforms, followed by legal proceedings that too often make a mockery of due process. We separate families, tearing away not just immigrant children but American citizens from their parents. This hearkens back to the former Trump administration’s practice, beginning in 2017, of separating children from their parents in order to deter people from crossing the border—in March 2024, it was estimated that 2,000 children and their parents still hadn’t been reunited. We can’t let history repeat itself.
Instead of cruelty, most of us would prefer a regular system in which immigrants who strengthen America or need asylum are allowed to come here. (And they are not mutually exclusive.) And we would prefer a system in which, once immigrants are here, they have the same workforce protections and opportunities as citizens—not just to benefit them but all of us. We’d also prefer a system to give those who commit to living here a clear path to citizenship.
But that’s not what our hypocritical country has created. And to honor our own ideals and treat people decently who have lived here with us for a long time—in some cases for decades—we must stop the attack on immigrants and give those who are here a path to legal residence and eventually citizenship.
Yes, remove immigrants who have committed crimes, although even they deserve due process and a better fate than a life sentence in a horrible prison in El Salvador. But that is a tiny number of people.
But we must protect undocumented immigrants who we have allowed—and implicitly encouraged—to come to the United States and take steps to better integrated them into our society.
After the election, many Democrats were tempted to pull back from supporting immigrants if not throw them under the bus. As I hope I’ve made clear, this is the wrong approach morally. But it is also the wrong approach politically.
If you look at the polls, protecting and integrating most immigrants while creating a safe border and a regular process for immigration has broad support across the nation.
Trump and his henchmen are looking to the worst traditions of our country, which are appealing to certain Americans. But they are a minority. We can see from polls that, though they rightly want a secure border and protection from crime, the majority of the American people don’t suffer from the hate and bigotry that’s at the center of Trump’s immigration policies and rhetoric. If we share the truth with them plainly and persistently, we can build support for an immigration policy that serves our country by treating immigrants with the decency and respect they deserve.