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Thursday, February 12, 2026

12: Immigration

Who, exactly, is ICE arresting, jailing, and abusing? History will judge this a crime against humanity. ............. less than 14 percent of the 400,000 immigrants arrested by ICE in the past year have either been charged with or convicted of violent crimes. ............... The vast majority of immigrants jailed by ICE have no criminal record at all. A few have previously been charged with or convicted of nonviolent offenses, such as overstaying their visas or permission to be in the country. .............. (In the past, alleged violations of U.S. immigration laws were normally adjudicated by Justice Department immigration judges in civil — not criminal — proceedings.) ............... A large proportion of the people ICE has arrested are now in jail — some 73,000 — and being held without bail. They’re in what the Department of Homeland Security calls “detention facilities.” ........................ The Times reported this morning that a New Jersey woman, Leqaa Kordia, who has been held at the Prairieland Detention Facility in Alvarado, Texas, for nearly a year, suffered a seizure after she fell and hit her head. She was involved in an pro-Palestinian demonstration at Columbia University in 2024 and detained for overstaying her visa, but has never been charged with a crime. A judge has twice ruled that she is not a threat to the United States. .......... A 2025 U.S. Senate investigation uncovered dozens of cases of medical neglect, with instances of detainees left without care for days and others being forced to compete for clean water. .............. People held in detention facilities are deprived of the most basic means of communication to connect with their lawyers and the rest of the outside world, including phones, mail, and email. Some have been split off from the rest of their families, held hundreds if not thousands of miles away from their loved ones. Some of them are children. ................. Many are in the United States legally, awaiting determinations about their status as refugees fleeing violence or retribution in their home countries. Or they have green cards that would normally allow them to remain in the United States. Others have been in the United States for decades as law-abiding members of their communities. ..................

They are hardly the “worst of the worst.” Many are like our parents or grandparents or great-grandparents who came to the United States seeking better lives. We are a nation of immigrants.

.................. these data pertain only to ICE. They don’t include arrests by Border Patrol agents deployed by the Trump administration to places far away from the U.S.-Mexico border, such as Chicago and Minneapolis, where Border Patrol agents have undertaken aggressive and sweeping arrest operations, targeting day laborers at Home Depot parking lots and stopping people — including U.S. citizens — to question them about their immigration status. .........

This is a moral blight on America, a crime against humanity. As Americans, we are complicit.

Making America Stagnate Again Deportations don’t create jobs and will increase deaths of native-born Americans. Who knew? .............. Since January 2025 the economy is estimated to have added 359,000 jobs, down almost 900,000 from job growth the previous year. This indicates that

the job market is very close to complete stagnation

. ................ Manufacturing employment, notably, fell. So Trump’s economy is not exactly delivering the “manly jobs” that he promised. ................. Oh, and while both Donald Trump and Scott Bessent have recently asserted that construction jobs are booming, employment growth in construction, which was high under Biden, has in fact fallen precipitously: ............. Compulsive lying aside, however, the fact that Trumpists are attributing stalled job growth to reduced immigration is astonishing, because it’s an admission that the fundamental economic premise behind mass deportations was always false. ................. So what are those mass deportations about, exactly? Oh yes, we’re getting rid of violent criminals — except that very few of those being swept up by ICE have violent criminal records, and crime rates among undocumented immigrants are actually low. .................. while reducing the number of foreign-born workers may not help the native-born, does it actually hurt them? Yes. ............ There are two big reasons mass deportations and shutting out or scaring away future immigration will hurt the native born. ............... First is demography. Like every advanced nation and many developing countries, the U.S. has seen fertility decline below the rate needed to keep the population from shrinking, and growth in the working-age population and hence the potential labor force has already slowed to a crawl: ..................... the working-age population would already have been declining, Japan-style, without immigration — and although we don’t have reliable numbers, it seems likely that the Trumpists have effectively cut off the inflow of working-age immigrants. ................ Without those immigrants, who will pay the taxes that support Medicare and Social Security? True, immigrants place some demands on government services, but these are hugely outweighed by their contribution to government revenue, both through the taxes they pay directly and through their role in boosting economic growth. The Congressional Budget Office just released its latest fiscal projections; these have gotten substantially worse compared with a year ago, in part because the budget office is factoring in the negative effects of reduced immigration. ................... In fact, CBO’s numbers probably understate just how extreme anti-immigrant policy has become. Also, the projection only extends for the next 10 years, and the adverse fiscal effect of cutting off immigration will be even larger further in the future. ..................

Beyond worsening our already unsustainable fiscal situation, a cutoff of immigration raises the question of who will provide essential services to our still-rapidly-growing population of senior citizens:

............... This demographic concern about immigration interacts with the second big reason reduced immigration hurts native-born Americans: We need immigrant workers to do jobs the native-born can’t or won’t do. ............................... As I have repeatedly pointed out, the available evidence suggests that immigrants are mainly complements, not substitutes, for native-born workers. Foreign-born workers aren’t evenly spread across the economy. They are, instead, concentrated in occupations where they make up a large share of the work force, so they aren’t really competing with non-immigrant workers, but are making some goods and services cheaper and more available than they would be without immigrants. ..................... Examples of occupations in which immigrants play a crucial role include farm labor, meatpacking and other food processing, and construction. Foreign-born workers also play crucial roles in providing health care: .................. With healthcare facing severe labor shortages, cutting off the supply of immigrant workers will raise the cost and reduce the availability of care — which will be especially hard on seniors, who are 19 percent of the population but account for more than 40 percent of health expenditures. ............... the arrival of an extra 1000 immigrants leads to employment of an additional 28 aides, 49 nurses and 19 doctors. ...................

increased immigration leads to lower senior mortality, and conversely that blocking immigration and deporting foreign-born workers will increase deaths among older Americans.

................... reducing the immigrant population by one million immigrants, which is what Stephen Miller wants to do every year, would lead to around 15,000 extra deaths per year among U.S. seniors. .............

the reality is that the war on immigrants, in addition to being a moral and civil liberties nightmare, will make native-born Americans poorer — and send thousands of us to an early grave.

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