Local opinion: Two truths have emerged about immigration

White European colonization has never stopped.

That is the first truth to surface from the administration’s crackdown on immigrants.

Immigration policy should be based on economics, not politics.

That is the second truth, emerging as businesspeople in several sectors — agriculture and food processing, hotels and restaurants — say they are losing irreplaceable workers.

Let’s take these truths one by one, starting with colonization. Here are some facts:

• Immigration enforcement has accelerated, with an administration goal of 3,000 arrests a day and deportations without due process.
• People of color are almost exclusively the targets. Some 579,000 undocumented white people live in the country, 5% of all undocumented people, the Migrant Policy Institute estimates. Seven white people have been confirmed deported this year.
• Presidential aide Stephen Miller set the goal: “America is for Americans and Americans only.” Combine that with the president’s contempt for dark-skinned immigrants from “shithole countries” and his preference for white immigrants from “nice countries” like Norway, Denmark and Switzerland.
• When the first European colonizers arrived in 1492, they began enslaving Indigenous people, seizing their lands and natural resources and violently imposing what the colonizers hypocritically called Christian beliefs.
• That continues five centuries later with removing people of color, collecting taxes from undocumented immigrants without payback, seizing Indigenous lands, including in Southern Arizona for border enforcement, and declaring Christian principles that the modern colonizers trample on even as they profess them.

In her 2024 book, “Defectors: The Rise of The Latino Far Right and What It Means for America,” journalist Paola Ramos wrote: “The Latino mind is a product of centuries of colonialism. A brutal force that engraved Christian nationalism’s core tenets into our psyche.”

Some facts about the second emergent truth: Economics, not politics, should drive immigration policy:

• More than 40% of farmworkers are undocumented, the BBC reported, quoting the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Why? Because immigration policy does not allow farmers to legally bring in all the immigrant workers they need.
• The president himself said on social media June 12 that those workers and immigrant workers in the hotel and leisure businesses are “almost impossible to replace.” That is because most U.S. citizens don’t want the grueling work.
• Joblessness is at 4.2%, considered nearly full employment, meaning there are not enough people to take open jobs. Many positions at all levels of the economy go unfilled because of worker shortages. Deportations worsen the shortages.
• Economics drives much public policy, including setting corporate and business tax rates to stimulate growth; health care to keep doctors, hospitals and especially insurance companies in business; and lately, environmental policy that curbs restrictions to allow for business expansion, especially in fossil fuels.

Here’s a telling anecdote:

In the eight years that I lived and worked in Salinas, Calif., where 70% of the nation’s lettuce and big shares of broccoli, onions, garlic, strawberries, spinach and other crops are grown, I knew many growers and packers, almost all conservative Republicans.

Not once did any of them say anything to me critical or negative about undocumented immigrants. They knew who did the work — tilling, planting, irrigating, weeding, harvesting, packing and shipping — in all weather and workplace conditions.

What those businesspeople did say was that they would not survive if they had to depend on U.S. citizens to do the work.

Economist Zeke Hernandez, author of the 2024 book “The Truth About Immigration: Why Successful Societies Welcome Newcomers,” told Barron’s: “Immigrants are net-positive contributors to a prosperous society. ... The evidence tells us that they’re really good for us.”

If the administration’s colonization and anti-immigrant policies continue, they will harm society, by worsening racial animosity, and the economy will suffer, with reckonings in food supply, hospitality and tourism, the construction industry and other realms.

That means we must hold these two truths to be self-evident.