The War on Immigrants: New York Theatre

New York City needs an immigrant mayor.

Licensed via Adobe Stock

New York City has the largest immigrant population in the United States. To put that into perspective, the city’s foreign-born residents, 3.1 million people, would form the third-largest city in the country, ahead of Chicago. As a sanctuary city, New York falls squarely within the crosshairs of Trump’s immigration war machine. It’s only a matter of time before the Big Apple gets the L.A. treatment, at which point we’ll need a mayor who actually gives a shit about immigrants. Who better than

Zohran Mamdani

, an immigrant himself?

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One of the most disquieting realizations I’ve had during Trump 2.0 is how little people in the U.S. give a shit about immigrants. I’m not just talking about Republicans and racist white people, although there is plenty of that. I’m talking about Black people, Asian people, Democrats, and yes, even other immigrants.

According to an NBC Poll from June 15, more than half of Americans (51%) approve of Trump’s handling of immigration. I’ll never forget how much Americans tolerated. The following is a non-exhaustive list:

• luring immigrants to green card hearings as a ruse for detention

• ICE agents kidnapping immigrants with green cards and other legal protections

• deporting immigrants to maximum-security prisons without due process and in violation of court orders

• mobilizing the National Guard and the U.S. Marines against immigrants and U.S. citizens

• the increasing militarization of the southern border

• the litany of abuses against brown immigrants that has been characteristic of ICE, CBP, and BP long before Trump became president, including tearing mothers apart from babies, rape, and denying life-saving healthcare to children

Americans will rationalize this cruelty by piously invoking “the law,” even though there are countless examples of ICE breaking the law, including, but not limited to, detaining permanent residents and U.S. citizens. It’s telling how quickly people forget about the law or the Constitution when it applies to immigrants, but I digress.

The War on Immigrants is predicated on two fallacies: There’s an invasion, and immigrants are criminals.

the invasion fallacy

There is no evidence of an invasion. It’s unadulterated fearmongering.

the criminal fallacy

Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born citizens, according to a Northwestern study that pulls from 150 years of data. Additionally, immigrant violations are inherently petty, as I wrote out in a previous post:

The following are a couple of the most common immigration violations: overstaying a visa and entering the U.S. without authorization. The former is a civil violation adjudicated in an immigration court, and the latter is a misdemeanor, which rises to a felony on a subsequent offense.

A civil violation is not considered a crime, resulting in no jail time. It is punishable by fine or other penalty. Examples of civil violations include jaywalking and illegal parking. These are as minor as legal infractions come.

A misdemeanor is a minor criminal offense. Examples include shoplifting, vandalism, and, in Massachusetts, throwing a loud toga party.

Or as

Jenn Budd

, former Border Patrol agent and current immigrant rights activist, has pointed out in her work, including her book, Against the Wall, Border Patrol agents are more likely to commit violent crimes than migrants and noncitizens.

In other words, the criminal immigrant invasion is a myth.

Qasim Rashid, Esq.

, a human rights lawyer and activist, wrote this helpful post debunking the most common and harmful myths about immigrants.

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Alas, in spite of how easily disproven these myths are, the immigrant remains the perennial scapegoat for U.S. citizens unhappy with their lives and the boogeyman our corporate overlords dig out of the vault whenever they need to divide the working classes. If middle-class Americans would realize they have more in common with noncitizens than they do with Jeff Bezos, we would all be better off. Until then, Stephen Miller will keep getting rich off of immigrant misery.

“Moderate” Democrats are nearly as bad as their Republican counterparts. Chris Cuomo recently took a well-worn far-right conspiracy theory out for a spin, advancing the notion that the ICE protests are not about ICE at all but rather about destroying Western democracy, a theory that is nothing more than a thinly veiled distraction from an actual threat to American democracy today: ICE.

Other “moderate” Democrats argue that immigration isn’t a hill the Democrats should die on, that opposing ICE is politically unviable. They like to think they’re being practical, that they’re, you know, the grownups in the room, not realizing how cowardly and morally bankrupt they are. Some things are bigger than political expediency.

A couple of weeks ago, one spineless Substacker made this very argument, smugly asking the readers commenting on his glorified shitpost if they wanted to win elections or not. If the choice is between winning an election and retaining my humanity, I’ll choose the latter every time. I refuse to surrender fellow human beings to the maws of a ravenous money-making bureaucracy that the

The Border Chronicle

refers to as “The Border Industrial Complex.” From my cold, dead hands, friend-o.

All of which is to say, migrants and noncitizens need more people standing up for them. They’re too vulnerable and scared to do it alone. Unfortunately, those “moderate” Democrats refuse to stand up for noncitizens. Why should they? Noncitizens can’t vote. That’s not politically expedient.

Fuck that.

Just because noncitizens can’t vote doesn’t mean they don’t deserve our support and respect. We don’t have to throw immigrants under the bus to win elections, as Mamdani just proved. Upon clinching the Democratic nomination, Mamdani vowed to reject Trump’s fascism and its enforcement arm, ICE. Meanwhile, Republicans are already urging Trump to deport Mamdani. Sounds like our young socialist hit a nerve. Good.

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My wife and I used to live in Astoria, Queens in New York City, the same district where Mamdani was elected as an assemblymember in 2020. With residents from more than 100 countries, Astoria—and more broadly, Queens—is one of the most diverse populations in the world and a shining microcosm of New York’s expansive diversity. Walking down 30th Avenue, Steinway, or Ditmars Boulevard, you might hear Greek, Spanish, Arabic, Russian, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, Korean, Urdu, French, Tagalog, and more, so much more.

The riot of culture and language and food, the infinite permutations of collision and cross-pollination, roiling and settling into a wholly inimitable and impossibly dense culture is a sight to behold and a cornucopia for the senses. I love Astoria, and I love New York, because of its wild imagination expressed in tireless gyrations across the concrete and through the brick, stone, and glass. Say what you will about New York, but it’s one of a kind. A big part of that is the immigrants who bring their traditions.

Those who favor draconian immigration enforcement fear change. They want to preserve the way things are, but New York can’t be preserved. Its resting state is flux. I once heard that you could eat at a new restaurant for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day in New York and never get to every restaurant because of the staggering number and breakneck turnover. I don’t know if that’s factually true, but it is spiritually true.

The City That Never Sleeps has long been a port for immigrants, famously enshrined by Lady Liberty, with each successive wave of immigrants adding another layer to the ever-accreting cultural palimpsest that is New York City. In Mamdani I see someone who understands the fundamental truth about New York: You can’t preserve the city because its present is ephemeral. The city is change, and you can’t resist change, not successfully at least. All you can do is embrace it.

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