Benjamin Franklin famously stated, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”
Who would do that? Who would be willing to give up a life of freedom in exchange for being kept “safe,” even temporarily or permanently?
What if every American citizen today were confronted directly with this question: Are you willing to sacrifice your freedom in exchange for temporary safety?
One of the things that fascinates me about Americans living today is the willingness of many of them to treat immigrants like horse dung. I just don’t get it. No, I’m not saying that they treat people like that directly. I’m saying that they support and even get excited about how the U.S. government treats immigrants like horse dung.
Consider what the U.S. government has done to migrants it has sent to El Salvador. Pursuant to a deal that U.S. officials have entered into with the Salvadoran government that involved payment of $6 million in U.S. taxpayer money, U.S. officials are sending migrants to that country to be incarcerated in a brutal prison in which it is common knowledge that torture and other horrific human-rights abuses are taking place.
One of President Donald Trump’s major promises during the 2024 presidential campaign was to launch mass deportations of immigrants living in the U.S. without legal authorization.
The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency has said that, since January 2025, it is detaining and planning to deport 600 to 1,100 immigrants a day. That marks an increase from the average 282 immigration arrests that happened each day in September 2024 under the Biden administration.
Pity the poor state lawmaker.
They work hard on a law to punish Alabamians showing kindness to the vulnerable — normal, everyday stuff in the Alabama Legislature — and inadvertently revive the Fugitive Slave Act.
Wednesdays, am I right?
Republican Sen. Wes Kitchens of Arab said he didn’t intend SB 53 to reflect the language of that infamous antebellum law, which authorized kidnapping and threatened fines and imprisonment to those who helped enslaved people flee to freedom.
I was recently staying in a hotel and noticed that the two women charged with cleaning the guest rooms were Hispanic. I couldn’t help but wonder whether they were here illegally. If so, they are among the millions of other illegal immigrants who are currently experiencing deep fear over the possibility of being arrested and deported. What a horrible way to have to live life. Moreover, the hotel owner (or manager) has to also live in fear over the possibility of being criminally charged for knowingly hiring an illegal immigrant.
Threats of mass deportations loom on the post-2024 election horizon. Some supporters claim these will protect the country from immigrants who bring “bad genes” into America. But this is a misguided use of the language of science to give a sheen of legitimacy to unscientific claims.
Politicians invoke genetics to confirm false stereotypes that immigrants are more violent than native-born citizens as a result of biological differences. This is despite the fact that immigrants living in the country with or without legal authorization have significantly lower crime and violent crime rates than U.S. citizens. Moreover, there is no strong genetic evidence to support a biological predisposition for committing violent acts.
Vice President Kamala Harris has shown a long-standing commitment to the rule of law and supports a bipartisan border security bill. On the other hand, anti-immigration MAGA extremists in Congress, including House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), have played politics with the issue of immigration—even making up a nonexistent immigration role—but shown little interest in actually fixing the broken immigration system.
Contrary to what her detractors have long alleged, Vice President Harris was never placed in charge of the U.S.-Mexico border; rather, she has taken on a challenging task similar to the effort then-Vice President Joe Biden undertook during the later stages of the Obama-Biden administration: overseeing U.S. efforts to address the root causes of migration from El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala—the so-called Northern Triangle of Central America.
My mother is an immigrant.
She left Ireland when she was 17. That’s what the young Irish did in the late 1950s.
There were no jobs. And there was no opportunity. Forget college: There was no free secondary education until the late 1960s. Having finished the equivalent of eighth grade, the only way she could extend her schooling was by repeating eighth grade.
So she went to America. She was a poor teenager from rural Ireland who had to learn to live in a city.
HB 56 — the anti-immigrant bill passed by the Alabama Legislature in 2011 — is a perfect example of the laws our legislators make.
That’s not a compliment.
HB 56 was a mean, miserable statute. It was legalized bullying in line with Alabama’s very worst traditions of attacking people with few if any means of fighting back.
Proponents of America’s system of immigration controls lament what they say are “invaders” crossing the U.S.-Mexico border and entering the United States. Many of them say that this “invasion” is a conspiracy to alter the culture of the United States in a Hispanic direction.
Ironically, very few, if any, of these anti-invaders ever condemn what the U.S. government did with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848. That treaty did more to change the culture of the United States in a Mexican direction than immigrant “invaders” could ever hope to do.
The “great replacement theory,” whose origins date back to the late 19th century, argues that Jews and some Western elites are conspiring to replace white Americans and Europeans with people of non-European descent, particularly Asians and Africans.
The conspiracy evolved from a series of false ideas that, over time, stoked the fears of white people: In 1892, British-Australian author and politician Charles Pearson warned that white people would “wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by people whom we looked down.” The massive influx of immigrants into Europe at the time fostered some of these fears and resulted in “white extinction anxiety.” In the U.S., it resulted in policies targeting immigration in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Seeing the large number of immigrants illegally entering the United States, proponents of immigration controls decry what they label the “open border” between the United States and Mexico.
I live in Virginia. I sometimes enter Maryland by crossing the bridge that spans the Potomac River, which forms part of the border between the two states. There is no border-control station at which Maryland officials require me to stop and be subjected to questions and have my vehicle searched. There are also no border patrol agents patrolling the border to ensure that no one is entering Maryland illegally.
Imagine if Alabama politicians started treating geothermal energy as a crisis.
And not just criticizing particular practices or businesses. We’re talking about a heat pump apocalypse.
Introducing legislation to criminalize steam. Storming library board meetings and demanding the removal of any book with the phrase “hot springs.” Using Hot Springs, Arkansas as a snickering shorthand for everything wrong with the country. Putting on flak jackets and filming television ads outside Iceland’s geysers, vowing that Alabama will not become Reykjavík.
Although Congress is failing to pass laws to restrict the number of migrants arriving in the U.S., a majority of Americans – about 6 in 10 – believe there’s an immigration crisis along the Mexico-U.S. border. Politicians who want fewer people to move here often cast those arriving without prior authorization as a burden on the economy.
As an economist who has researched immigration and employment, I’m confident that economic trends and research findings contradict those arguments.
The U.S. is – and long has been – a pluralistic society that contains large immigrant communities.
Yet migration is an actively debated but poorly understood topic, and much of the conventional thinking and political rhetoric about migration are based on myths rather than facts.
For these reasons, migration policies and strategies for easing acculturation – which refers to the psychological process of assimilating to a new culture – usually end up being ineffective.
Republicans and conservatives are still celebrating Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’s immigration antic with respect to his shipping and dumping immigrants in Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. They are convinced that what DeSantis did was a brilliant political move because it supposedly exposed the hypocrisy of rich, elite progressives/liberals/Democrats who say they favor immigrants but then won’t take them into their homes to live.
As a historian of racism and white supremacy in the United States, I’ve become accustomed to callous actions like those of Republican governors who organized transportation for Latin American migrants to states run by their political opponents.
Governors Greg Abbott in Texas and Ron DeSantis in Florida are following the playbook of segregationists who provided one-way bus tickets to Northern cities for Black Southerners in the 1960s. At that time, the fight for racial equality was attracting national attention and support from many white Americans, inspiring some to join interracial Freedom Rides organized by civil rights groups to challenge segregation on interstate bus lines.
Ernesto Castañeda is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at American University and the Director of the Immigration Lab. Castañeda explains why immigration is an important force counteracting population decline in the U.S. and why that matters to the economy and America’s global power. Below are highlights from an interview with The Conversation. Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
Ten years ago this month, countless Latinx community members wanted to know what happened to their home, a state whose highway signs welcome visitors to “Alabama the Beautiful.”
They ultimately marched in the streets, wearing shirts with slogans saying, “We love Alabama. We are Alabama.” Their faces were marked with worry, panic, and tears amid an atmosphere of uncertainty.
The state had just enacted what lawmakers proudly proclaimed the nation’s toughest anti-immigrant law, one that “attacks every aspect” of an undocumented immigrant’s life. The Beason-Hammon Taxpayer and Citizen Protection Act – better known as House Bill 56 (HB 56) – was modeled after an Arizona law that granted police the authority to demand “papers” demonstrating citizenship or legal status during routine traffic stops. HB 56 was signed into law by Gov. Robert Bentley on June 9, 2011.
Which was the first generation in your family to arrive in America? Do you know why your family came to the United States?
Members of President Joe Biden’s administration – and key nominees – have answered these questions in their first days in office.
Upon his nomination as Biden’s secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro Mayorkas, a native of Cuba, tweeted: “When I was very young, the United States provided my family and me a place of refuge.”
