Today, during my slog through the Substack messages, newspaper headline notices, and podcast reminders that hit my inbox every morning, two stories drew my attention. Both had to do with the fact that human beings have always moved around this planet, beginning long before there were any countries or maps to display the borders where one nation ends and another begins. I was reminded of a decades-old song by the Venezuelan singer Soledad Bravo, “Punto y Raya”—“The Dot and the Dash”:

Entre tu pueblo y mi pueblo hay un punto y una raya,la raya dice no hay paso el punto vía cerrada

“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.

Porque esas cosas no existen, sino que fueron creadaspara que mi hambre y la tuya estén siempre separadas.

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).

Why does it matter that the US population is growing more slowly while also aging? As the Times points out, this country “needs a large enough population of young workers and taxpayers to finance care for the nation’s older residents, whose numbers are swelling as the Baby Boom generation retires.” As any good Marxist will tell you, labor creates all wealth. In other words, a nation’s wealth (including that of its millionaires and billionaires) represents the accumulated value of work done by actual human beings. And that means an economy lacking enough workers will not be able to satisfy the grow-or-die logic of capitalism. Nor, if a reduction of the workforce is concentrated in jobs traditionally performed by immigrants, will that economy be able to feed its people. In other words, the stubbornly high price of groceries is not unconnected to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) terror campaign around the country.

Immigration reductions are part of the story of slowing population growth, but there’s another piece of the puzzle. During the Great Recession that began with a mortgage meltdown in 2008, Americans began having fewer children. In my world of higher education, we’ve known about this precipitous drop for a while. It’s been described as a “demographic cliff” that would become a (predictable) emergency for college enrollment 18-20 years later—that is, now. The entire higher education sector, which has grown steadily since the institution of the GI Bill at the end of World War II, now faces layoffs, retrenchment, and the closing of institutions.

What of the second story I read this morning? It concerned Spain, a country taking an entirely different approach to immigration. I’ve been lucky enough to spend time in Spain, meeting there, in addition, of course, to Spaniards, farmworkers from Mali and other parts of francophone Africa, and Central American waiters and taxi drivers, who could use their native language in a new land. (I wonder if they sound to the Spanish much the way I do—like a hick from the faraway sticks.)

Like that of the United States, Spain’s population is aging, but its response is the opposite of the Trump administration’s. Our president and his minions have made it clear in word and deed not just that they want almost no new immigrants, but also which few they would consider accepting. “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right?” the president asked last December. “Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few from Denmark,” he added. (Of course, that was before his spat with that country over his urge to take possession of Greenland.)

Unlike Trump’s crew, the Spanish government has issued a decree permitting undocumented migrants already in the country to apply for temporary residency, with permission to work legally there. Recognizing their contributions to fueling the major engines of the Spanish economy—agriculture, tourism, and construction—Spain has bucked a European and American tide of anti-migrant sentiment, the very one Trump sought to stoke with his remarks at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. Because of mass migration, he opined, “certain places in Europe are not even recognizable.” Critics of Spain’s new policy on the left argue that the country has been less welcoming to African migrants, but the socialist government of President Pedro Sánchez denies this (at least publicly).

All of this has left me thinking about the sacrifices people make when they choose, or are forced, to find a new home nation. Those of us in the US, even many who support immigrants, documented and otherwise, can fall into a trap of believing that, given the choice, everyone would rather live here. But it’s not that simple.

I spent some time in the Nicaraguan war zone in the mid-1980s. In spite of everything I loved about the early days of that country’s revolution, and how angry I became at the campaign of sabotage and torture my country unleashed to support the anti-government “contras,” there were days when I ached for the familiarity of home. The Greek roots of the word nostalgia........

© Common Dreams