Don’t come here and don’t stay
Rebecca
Gordon for the TomDispatch
“Between your people and mine,” says the song, “there’s a
dot and a dash. The dash says, ‘No entrance,’ and the dot, ‘The road is
closed.’” Bravo goes on to say that, with all those dots and dashes outlining
the borders of nations, a map looks like a telegram. If you walk through the
actual world, though, what you see are mountains and rivers, forests and
deserts, but no dots or dashes at all.
And she adds, “Because those things aren’t real, they were
created so your hunger and mine would remain separated.”
Two Immigration Stories
Two morning news stories brought that song back into my mind, along with the human reality it expresses. Both appeared in the New York Times (and no doubt elsewhere). The first reported that the “United States population grew last year [between July 1, 2024, and June 30, 2025] at one of the slowest rates in its history.”
Such a reduction in growth was in large part due to the Trump
administration’s immigration policies. In 2025, immigration rates to the United States dropped
by 50% compared to the previous year. Perhaps surprisingly, Trump’s vicious and
deadly deportation efforts accounted for only about 235,000 of the 1.5
million-person net decline in immigration.
Much more significant were the barriers to entry created
under Trump, largely through the influence of Stephen Miller, the
man Steve Bannon has
labelled the president’s “prime minister.” Those include the effective closing
of our southern border to undocumented arrivals. The administration has also
made legal entry to the US much more difficult in a variety of
ways, including:
- Instituting
a $100,000 fee to be paid by employers seeking to
hire professional workers under
an H1-B visa;
- Erecting
barriers to foreign students, leading to a 17% drop in new ones
enrolling in American universities;
- Fully or partially restricting entry by the
citizens (including refugees) of 19
nations: Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial
Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen (full
restrictions) and Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone,
Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela (partial
restrictions);
- Pausing all asylum applications by citizens of
any nation in the world, leaving a backlog of 1.4 million cases;
- Capping all refugee admissions at 7,500 per year,
a reduction of 94% from previous limits (with the
exception, of course, of white South African farmers).
