Immigration Is Our Strength — with Some Prominent Exceptions

Turns out, the “worst of the worst” are in the White House.

A “No Kings” protester holds up an educational sign in St. Louis, Mo. (Photo by author.)

To say that Donald Trump and his MAGA minions are enraged about the Supreme Court’s 6–3 refusal to ignore the plain words about citizenship rights in the 14th Amendment is an understatement.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts called the ruling a “betrayal of the republic.” White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said SCOTUS was pushing the U.S. toward “national self-obliteration.” Trump immediately called on Congress to narrow the scope of birthright citizenship.

And right on cue, the right-wing echosphere lost its hive mind (think yellow jackets). They called Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who actually stuck with the Constitution, “a turncoat,” “a DEI hire,” “a disgrace.” (Chief Justice John Roberts also voted with the three liberal members of the Court, but MAGAs love to focus on “nasty” women who let them down.)

They’re complaining “bigly,” but they also know not to look a gift horse in the mouth.

That the decision was so close (really, 5–4, given that Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that he explicitly did not base his decision on constitutional grounds) gives the anti-immigration right both hope for a different outcome down the road and a rallying cry for the midterms and beyond.

As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye and others have pointed out, the right’s new Roe v. Wade is well in hand, and they will do all they can to whip up their xenophobic followers to more frequent paroxysms of anxiety about people of color swarming across our borders.

In the face of such fulsome rhetoric and political machinations, let’s remind ourselves how Donald Trump and a few of his Top Sales Agents of Xenophobia got to where they are today. I couldn’t find any birthright babies in the ancestry of the most vociferous anti-immigration Trumpists, but given that they are all white, it obviously would not be seen as a problem in any case.

Still, like nearly all Americans, each of the men below benefited from having had an ancestor who found a way to these shores.

Donald Trump: As many people know, the story of Trump’s paternal grandfather, Friedrich, is almost too good to be true — draft dodging, gold fever, hotels, prostitution, real estate speculation, exile! As that hoary maxim goes (with an emphasis on hoary), like grandfather, like grandson. According to the Wikipedia entry, Friedrich slipped out of Bavaria to the United States in 1885 to avoid mandatory conscription in the military. He speculated in Seattle real estate before being drawn by the Klondike Gold Rush to Yukon, Canada, where he ran a restaurant and a brothel for miners. Returning to Bavaria in 1902, Frederick (he’d changed his name) married Elisabeth Christ, and the couple moved to New York City. A year or so later, they moved back to Bavaria, but Frederick was then kicked out of the country for that aforementioned draft dodging. Elisabeth was pregnant when they returned to New York City and gave birth to Fred Trump, who became the father of three children — including a certain future convicted felon and world-renowned handsy lout — in 1905. Frederick claimed to have been granted citizenship in 1892, so if that is indeed true (and we would be taking a Trump’s word for that), Donald’s father was not an anchor baby. But even if he were, he would have been a white anchor baby, so no harm, no foul in MAGAland. Still, you gotta shake your head at the perfection of Donald’s seamy brothel-owner ancestry. Donald’s aesthetic sensibilities could be described as Nineteenth-Century Brothel.

Stephen Miller: Deputy chief of staff for policy in the Trump administration (but, more notably, chief white supremacist), Miller is descended from Russian Jews. Wolf Laib Glosser, Stephen’s great-great-grandfather on his mother’s side, arrived at Ellis Island in 1903, having escaped persecution as a Jewish person living in Antopol, in what became Belarus. You can read about Miller’s immigrant history in “Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State,” by The Nation’s Greg Sergeant, who notes that Miller’s forebears, and many others who immigrated to America to escape economic hardship and religious persecution, faced the same hateful rhetoric that Stephen feels to the core of his dark heart: “Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinister — an elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to ‘civilization’ in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors.”

Russell Vought: Trump’s second-time head of the Office of Management and Budget and primary author of Project 2025 and Trump’s subsequent executive orders, Vought is apparently of Dutch, French, and English descent, which I guess hits a Tribalist Trifecta for this self-avowed White nationalist. I cannot trace the first of his ancestors who may have benefited from the 14th Amendment, but they obviously came to America in search of creating a new life, one of greater opportunity and liberty. Their descendant, Russ, would now gladly shut that door against others — to people of color, that is. A zealot who insists that all Americans live according to his religious beliefs and moral views, Vought, in a 2024 speech, told his supporters, “God put us here for such a time as this.”

Kevin Roberts: According to a profile written by journalist Rone Tempest, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s ancestors immigrated to America to escape religious persecution. In that 2024 piece, Roberts is quoted as saying, “I am Acadian both on my mom’s and dad’s sides….Roberts, of course, is English, but my paternal grandmother was Fontenot and very Cajun. My mom’s family, Pitre, migrated from Nova Scotia in the 1700s, and my grandfather, who helped raise me, was a native Cajun French speaker.” Whether or not someone in Roberts’s line was a birthright baby doesn’t matter, and I have to admit I’m not interested enough to search. It is enough that one of the authors of Project 2025, which calls for a White Christian nationalism (i.e., the end of our separation of church and state and a return to a pre–civil rights America), had ancestors who came to this country to escape religious persecution. He’s a putative historian, and yet, this is how he rolls. (There’s a lot of money to be made in sowing hatred.)

Melania Trump: We don’t really know how America’s most, um, unusual First Lady feels about her husband’s cruel deportation policies, but by standing by his side (on occasion), she’s certainly complicit. Most of us know way more than we want to about Melanija Knavs’s immigrant story, in which a little-known Slovenian model who was in the country circa 1996 on a work visa and dating New York’s notorious The Donald was somehow granted an EB-1 visa, the “Einstein visa,” reserved for immigrants with “extraordinary ability” or who have “sustained national and international acclaim” in, what one would assume, important fields of endeavor. Melania became a naturalized citizen in 2006 and then sponsored her parents’ application for citizenship. Well, to the white winners (Should we blend those words to whiners?) go the spoils of chain migration.

When he rode down the golden escalator at Trump Tower in 2015 to announce he was inexplicably running for president, Donald infamously said of Mexican immigrants: “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” As frequently happens when he speaks badly of others (e.g., nasty, stupid, enemy of the people), Trump was unknowingly revealing unsavory things about himself.

Of course, we could do this all day long, because, again, nearly all American citizens are the progeny of the sons or daughters of immigrants, a very small number of whom were birthright babies. As for claims of “birth tourism,” that number is also quite small. Pregnant women with visitor visas can be turned away if border agents think they may give birth while in the country. That’s nothing new.

Even as the melting pot that we famously have been, the established citizens in the United States have traditionally treated immigrants rather badly — dopey fratboys always require a pledge period, and then some really stupid hazing — but once assimilation takes place, there is almost always a grudging acceptance.

While all that hyper-masculine nonsense is going on, all the non-fratboys (yes, yes, I was a fratboy, briefly — pledge class president, I’ll have you know) recognize the incredible value of diversity and how it enriches all of us.

In any commentary touching on immigration, it is always worth noting that both presidents Obama and Biden deported more people in the country illegally than Trump has done, and they did it within legal structures and without separating families.

The Obama and Biden administrations did it efficiently, too, without building up a huge army of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents (which Trump is clearly amassing to imprison his political enemies). They did it without having ill-trained ICE and border patrol agents rampage through so-called blue cities, pepper spraying and even murdering protesters. The Democratic presidents did it without taking citizens into custody and putting human beings in concentration camps.

Despite all of Trump’s claims of going after “the worst of the worst,” fewer than 14% of immigrants terrorized and taken into custody in his first year in office had a violent criminal record. Both Obama and Biden did a better job of prioritizing the deportation of illegal immigrants with criminal records.

And, come on: practically everyone on earth, outside the MAGA cult, knows that the “worst of the worst” are pretending to work while seriously grifting in the White House. Donald Trump is not only a compulsive liar; he simply cannot keep himself from psychologically projecting.

At great cost in terms of money and to our global reputation, Trump has succeeded in largely closing the border. But, simultaneously, he has caused many of America’s best and brightest — teachers, scientists, artists — to self-deport — to seek funding for research, after his massive cuts to the National Institutes of Health, and to find a more secure, higher-quality lifestyle, due to the endless chaos caused by his economic policies.

The passage of the 14th Amendment may have technically defined citizenship in this country, but the fight over who gets to be considered a full citizen continues. As New York Times senior writer Jia Lynn Yang wrote recently, in an essay about Frederick Douglass:

“The 14th Amendment had clarified the promise of the Declaration, but the full realization of the country’s founding words is always being postponed. American women, citizens in theory, fought for decades more to win the right to vote….Many groups were banned until not long ago from naturalizing as American citizens: most Asians, solely because of their race, until 1952; gay men and lesbians, deemed by U.S. law as suffering medically from ‘sexual deviation,’ until 1990. In the mid-20th century, the civil rights movement revived Douglass’s campaign for citizenship for all, before losing ground again.”

What all of our forebears wanted when they arrived in the United States was the promise of Douglass’s “‘mightier work’: the achievement of full national belonging.” If not for themselves, then for their children.

MAGA Republicans insist on defining who “real Americans” are. Well, take a good look at their models: Trump and his kakistocracy of religious-political grifters, and take stock of all the things they have promised working people and never had more than the concept of a plan to do — a few words scratched out with a stubby pencil, and then forgotten, on the back of a golf scorecard.

Our forebears may have been flawed men, but even in their own time, they saw the value in diversity — especially in religious (or nonreligious) beliefs. We are a strong country not because of the small-minded people who have benefited from immigration and want to pull the ladder up for others, but specifically because of how we have welcomed all the variously talented strangers who have ardently desired to share in the promise of us.

I’m sure beyond sure that the atheists I know are far more Christian than many on the right who make that claim.

If you insist that we are a Christian nation, I would be more apt to smile and not argue the point if you mean it in the old sense — of welcoming the stranger and asking more of the wealthy. In any case, I’m sure beyond sure that the atheists I know are far more Christian than many on the right who make that claim and are supporting, or quiet in the face of, Trump’s ethnic cleansing campaign.

Roger Bennett, the man most responsible for spreading the word in this country about the beauty of soccer and a man who also immigrated to live here, wrote a moving essay in the New York Times about the sheer joy Americans had with different teams and how those teams had fun in this country — even beyond discovering ranch dressing and the absurd sprawl of highway haven Buc-ee’s:

“Perhaps my favorite World Cup story occurred in Lawrence, Kan., where the Algerian team set up camp at a local DoubleTree hotel. The town’s citizens quickly fell truly, madly, deeply for North African soccer and culture. When the Fennec Foxes clinched their place in the knockout rounds last weekend, the Lawrencians stood side by side with Algerian fans to welcome the team back in the early hours of the morning.”

Sellers of hatred like Trump, Miller, Vought, and Roberts are lying to you. They’ve always been leading people away from what makes America strong. Spoiler alert: it’s never been incurious, little men like them.

Trumpists represent an undeniable strain (some might drop the “r”) of the American spirit, but it is the one of racism and misogyny, of intolerance of those who are different, and of anti-intellectualism. I wrote a couple of years back that Trump was never qualified to be president of the United States — or of anything else. But I was wrong: Trump has all the essential qualities to be the president of the new Confederacy.

The true American spirit is embodied by those Lawrencians, described by Bennett, waiting up into the wee hours to welcome the Algerian team…home.

That’s our strength. Anyone who says differently is a liar.