In our political and cultural landscape, seemingly countless issues represent clear divides along party lines. While certain issues remain hopelessly polarized, the Republican Party should be proud of several key and monumental successes. One example is obviously the protection and expansion of gun rights across the country. Another could be immigration — unless some on the fringes of the Right have something to say about it.
Under President Donald Trump’s second administration, the border crisis that existed for decades and exploded under the inept leadership of former President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris is now over. Yes, Trump actually solved a problem he promised to solve. Not only that, but he essentially solved the problem in an afternoon.
With this success now comes a dangerous void where the issue of illegal immigration once stood. If we’re not careful, that void will become occupied by a growing faction of the Right that views immigration, both legal and illegal, as a negative feature of the American experiment, with a particularly vile layer of overt racism applied in order to portray the United States as a white nation that needs protecting from non-white invaders.
This goes far beyond the rantings of those such as white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who labeled Vice President J.D. Vance a race traitor for daring to marry an Indian American. The notion that all immigrants are equally bad is becoming more mainstream under an increasingly nationalist conservative agenda, blurring the lines between the complexities of notions of sovereignty and culture in the exact same way as the multiculturalism-obsessed Left.
It remains true that there are undeniable problems within our immigration system, with policy loopholes that are being abused to enrich powerful industries while undercutting American workers. The H-1B program, for example, may have started with good intentions as a way to import high-quality talent, but it quickly became a shortcut for businesses to suppress wages artificially while enforcing an almost slavish control over their employees in a bizarre form of imported outsourcing.
It is also true that the continued embrace of hundreds of thousands of Chinese students by American educational institutions poses a grave threat when we consider the Chinese Communist Party’s penchant for espionage, subversion, and intellectual property theft.
However, it is also ridiculous to argue that the United States could not possibly benefit from the world’s best and the brightest joining our ranks and contributing toward the greatest civilization in human history as long as their ideology aligns (or, at the very least, can coexist) with our Judeo-Christian principles. It is also equally ridiculous to argue that immutable characteristics such as race have any impact on such a calculation.
TRUMP’S PAINFUL BUT NECESSARY MASS DEPORTATIONS
Yes, we need to have serious conversations about assimilation. And, yes, we need to have serious conversations about the impact of mass immigration, legal or otherwise, of people whose entire mission in life is to make our nation precisely like the countries they are supposedly fleeing, all while treating their new neighbors as sources of welfare.
But we must do so while protecting the fundamental idea of American immigration, which should celebrate, rather than scorn, those who want to come here to find their own American dream not through the ever-deepening pockets of the federal government but through the sweat of their brow.
Ian Haworth is a syndicated columnist. Follow him on X (@ighaworth) or Substack.
