Donald Trump said on his Truth Social on Friday: “WE WANT VIOLENT CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” That continues the theme he began when he kicked off his first presidential campaign in 2015, but his erratic immigration crackdown is going far beyond rapists and murderers to fully documented persons who committed no offense, souring much of the world on this country.
Canadian Jasmine Mooney was locked up for two weeks in horrid conditions for no good reason.
ICE has also grabbed a German permanent resident and multiple European tourists. A California couple who’d been living here for 35 years without incident, attempting to get legal status the entire time, was recently detained pending deportation to Colombia.
So why would the international students who pay full freight (no aid at all) at our colleges and universities and expand our talent pool want to come here now? The same for the foreign researchers who do so much of the heavy lifting to advance scientific breakthroughs and the vacationers who spend billions on tourism.
We’ve shown them in no uncertain terms that no one is completely safe from the on-the-fly determinations of an empowered immigration enforcement system. Once-friendly countries have taken notice; in just the past week, Germany, the U.K., Finland and Denmark have issued some form of travel advisories for their citizens considering travel to the U.S.
A lot of people will say “just follow the rules,” but what exactly are those rules? The Trump administration seems to want to keep changing them on the fly. Some of the tourists who have been detained were accused of intending to work while on tourist visas, but how do you prove the negative that you are not going to work when some border official has decided you are?
International students and scholars were told that the United States is the land of free inquiry and expression, and that our world-class schools are sites of robust speech. Now, the administration is cancelling visas and taking green card holders into custody explicitly due to their political speech, which the secretary of state is personally evaluating for adherence to foreign policy goals.
Not to mention that much of the research itself has been cancelled or defunded, and Trump seems ready and willing to cancel more on a whim if the administration decides it dislikes its focus or wants to punish a specific university.
Tourists interested in our nation’s natural beauty will run into the reality of a National Park Service under siege, and will have to begin worrying more about the quality of our food, medicine, water and air as regulatory agencies step back. All this to say nothing of humanitarian immigrants, who for decades sought refuge in the United States and are now keenly aware that they are as likely to be victimized by an out-of-control government here as anywhere else.
We won’t feel the impacts of this all at once, but they’ll start becoming evident over time, as universities struggle to balance their books and pharmaceutical development slows, industries like health care and high-tech manufacturing suffer, towns and cities with significant international tourism see their economies stagnate and so on. Immigration has been this nation’s strength for its entire history. Trump seems hell-bent on killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
