For Immigrants, Citizenship Now

Abolishing ICE isn’t enough.

naturalization ceremony at the Grand Canyon, 2010

After federal agent Jonathan Ross murdered Renee Good last week, the campaign to restrain ICE gained a good bit of momentum. Democrats like Representative Jimmy Gomez of California and Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut have called for a budget showdown over ICE funding. Michigan Congressman Shri Thanedar is introducing a bill to abolish the agency altogether. Illinois Congresswoman (and Senate hopeful) Robin Kelly is moving forward on impeachment articles for DHS secretary Kristi Noem.

These initiatives are all important. But accountability for ICE agents and administrators is only one part of what is needed if we want to end our current fascist nightmare. We don’t just need to punish perpetrators. We need to empower fascism’s victims and build antifascist power.

That means ending the conditions of inequality and injustice which allow fascism to flourish—specifically by offering mass reparations in the form of amnesty and citizenship to all legal and undocumented immigrants targeted by the regime. As long as immigrants lack full rights and full citizenship, the right will scapegoat them and use their existence as an excuse for massive violence. And as Renee Good shows, when the fascist state is using massive violence against its own residents, no one, immigrant or citizen, is safe.

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The problem is not immigrants.

Per Daniel Denvir’s excellent All-American Nativism, both parties in the US have spent the last 20-30 years telling their constituents that immigration is a problem that must be solved with greater border security and more draconian deportation policies.

The truth, though, is that immigration is not a danger or a disaster. Immigrants have lower rates of felony arrests and are less likely to be incarcerated than citizens; as immigration rose by 1.7 million between 2017 and 2022, the crime rate fell by 15%. Immigrants pay around $95 billion in taxes a year, and are over 18% of the US labor force. As employers and consumers are discovering thanks to Trump’s deportation nightmare, many parts of the farming industry are essentially unable to function without immigrant labor.

Denvir explains that many of the problems attributed to lax immigration enforcement have in fact been caused by the rush to criminalization and enforcement. Crackdowns at the border have prevented Mexican laborers from entering the US seasonally and returning home for the rest of the year; this means they have to stay in the US, causing the number of undocumented people to balloon. Shutting down the usual migration roots in the name of security has forced migrants into dangerous deserts and led to crossings at under-resourced points where communities and governments are not prepared to handle new entries.

“Anti-immigrant policy could not deliver the better country it promised,” Denvir writes, and adds “you can’t eat racism and war.” Every increase in border authoritarianism created more chaos, leading to calls for more authoritarianism, leading to more chaos, and on and on. Obama, Biden, and Congressional Democrats participated enthusiastically in this cycle and are still doing so. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has praised Trump for supposedly securing the border, as if ICE agents rampaging through blue cities, kidnapping and murdering, somehow makes anyone more “secure.”

The problem is hating immigrants

Jeffries’ embarrassing and ugly conflation of fascist violence with security is not an accident. Nativists, Democrats and Republicans, insist that border enforcement is the path to a safer, more stable America. But the rest of us have noticed that nativism does not make us safer. On the contrary, it creates a wellspring of inequality and hate which supercharges fascism and threatens us all—including the oblivious Jeffries and his colleagues.

The scapegoating of marginalized people who lack the power to resist is a deliberate fascist tactic. It’s laid out in a passage you’d think Democratic leadership would be familiar with.

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.

Martin Niëmoller’s famous poem is generally read as a parable about indifference and complacency. But as Nicholas Mitchell explains in his book On Bigotry, it can also be read as a blueprint.

Niemöller’s quote is a plain-text description of how bigotry uses momentum to spread and generate support and complicity for its violent designs. Contrary to popular belief, Jewish people were not the only victims of the Holocaust, nor did the Holocaust happen overnight. Communists, LGBTQ+ folks, Romany, and political dissenters were also targeted. The Nazis used the hatred of these other groups and antisemitism to build the necessary momentum to steadily increase the oppression of everyone whom they considered “undesirable,” until they could enact their infamous “final solution.” Niemöller’s famous quote should be read as wisdom, admonishment, and warning.

Fascists scapegoat those who cannot fight back, and those with few allies, in order to build support and power. For example, they rant about Jews in order to win votes and subject the entire population to a brutal dictatorship. Or, as another for instance, they target immigrants in order to win votes and generate support for a massive militarized deportation force. Once that force is in place, it can be used as threat and punishment directed at the fuhrer’s political opponents. It can be used to arrest opposition leaders. It can potentially be used to intimidate voters at the ballot box. It can be used to murder protestors.

Empower immigrants to empower us all

Republicans, and Democrats as well, have been telling voters and citizens for twenty-five years and longer that immigrants threaten us when they have too many rights—the right to work, to go to school, to drive, to receive health care, to vote. When immigrants are empowered, we are told, they disempower citizens, making us weaker as a country and as individuals. To protect ourselves, we must subjugate our neighbors.

But it’s pretty clear at this point that this is not only immoral, but factually incorrect. When immigrants do not have rights—when they can’t access healthcare, when they have no labor protections, when they can’t participate in politics and cast ballots against fascists, when their path to citizenship is a bureaucratic, expensive endless nightmare—we are made less safe, and our democracy is catastrophically weakened. We have effectively created a class of criminalized residents who do not have full rights and protection under law. Immigration enforcement is a small fascist state within our polity. And now that fascist state has metastasized, murdering Renee Good and endangering everyone.

If we want to make sure we don’t see more murders, we need to lance our fascist boil. That means abolishing ICE and holding everyone responsible for its depredations, from agents to the orange fascist in chief, accountable. But it also has to mean giving immigrants themselves the power to push back against scapegoating, undermining fascism at its root.

As soon as we have power, we need to embrace reparations for the communities Trump has targeted—and those reparations should include immediate citizenship for both legal and undocumented immigrants. The process should start with the Haitian and Somali immigrants who the Trump administration has singled out for special terror and torment. It should include all immigrants in blue cities that have been targets—Chicago, Minneapolis, LA, Wilmington, and wherever else ICE agents have been sent.

And it should expand to all immigrants in the US, whatever their status, who want citizenship. They have all been forced to live in terror; they have all been demonized and brutalized. They have been targets. Citizenship for all is a matter of justice— but more than that, it’s a matter of security. Until and unless immigrants have full rights, including voting rights, fascists can use their defenselessness to divide us and destroy our democracy. When one of us has no rights, none of us have rights. So let’s make sure everyone has rights.

This is only the beginning obviously. We also need to radically ramp down border security and put that money into providing resources for those entering the country who need legal aid, housing, and help finding employment. We need to start treating immigrants as a resource and as neighbors rather than as a threat. “Border security” must be transformed, until the very phrase means not, “keeping people out” but “providing people with a safe path in.”

Do what is necessary

People like Jeffries, and Biden, and Obama have acted for many years as if nativism is an undefeatable force which must be propitiated always and challenged never. And many people like them believe that the American people are so filled with hate and xenophobia that they will never accept immigrants as neighbors and will never extend solidarity.

The Trump administration’s assault on immigrants, however, has demonstrated that public opinion is much more malleable than Republicans or Democrats have claimed. Support for legal immigration has increased dramatically. A Gallup poll found a record high 79% of US adults think legal immigration is a good thing. ICE support has plummeted, with 59% disapproving of the agency to 39% who approve—a 20 point gap which is even worse than Trump’s currently dismal approval ratings.

There is obviously a long way from these numbers to support for mass citizenship for immigrants. But it’s worth noting that the dramatic turnaround on immigration has occurred with little messaging from Democrats, and with no positive Democratic program for immigration reform. Could Democrats create real support for dramatic change? Could they make the case that we are stronger when immigrants have full rights, and full citizenship, than when they are thrown to the fascists? We have no idea, because Democrats have refused to even try for decades.

Perhaps granting citizenship to immigrants would be very unpopular. But when facing fascism, you sometimes have to think about more than just votes, not least because fascist victory means the end of elections. Our current immigration process has undermined our democratic culture—not because immigrants do not understand democracy, as the right would tell you, but because denying them the full freedoms and privileges of citizenship makes them vulnerable to fascist attack.

The best way to fight fascism is not to acquiesce in fascist hatred and then hope and pray the fascists are satisfied. The best way to fight fascism is to reject hatred and give everyone the tools they need to stand against the bigots. Abolish ICE. Hold the fascists accountable. But also grant citizenship to everyone, so that the fascists, if they come for us, have to come for us all.