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The Opinions

And what happens when your country becomes a place people no longer want to come to.

By Patrick Healy and Lydia Polgreen

Produced by Jillian Weinberger

In this episode of “The Opinions,” the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy talks to the columnist Lydia Polgreen about the global panic around migration, and what President Trump’s efforts to curb it mean for the United States and its position in the world.

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion, and this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America. This week I wanted to talk to my colleague the columnist Lydia Polgreen. For the past year, Lydia has been reporting from around the world about migration and how the global population is shifting.

She’s looked at who wins and who loses when a country decides there’s too much immigration. In many of the wealthiest countries, like the United States, these changes have sparked a wave of conservative political victories and policies. Now, as we all know, Donald Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportation. That hasn’t happened in a widespread way yet. But his administration has started a very public clampdown in ways that courts have ruled unlawful or unconstitutional.

Trump wants to utterly reshape immigration in America and how America sees immigrants, and I wanted to talk to Lydia about what he’s doing here and where it may lead our society.

Lydia, thanks for coming in today.

Lydia Polgreen: It’s a pleasure, Patrick.

Healy: I wanted to touch first on two cases that have been in the news and that you and I have both been watching: Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was accidentally deported to El Salvador, and Rumeysa Ozturk, the student arrested from Tufts University. How do you think about these two stories in the context of your years as a foreign correspondent and also as someone who has covered migration so deeply?

Polgreen: I think that both of these cases speak to something that goes to the heart of the question of what kind of country we want to be. And for both of these cases, the way that — in a matter that seems to me completely lawless — the Trump administration seems to be trying to demonstrate a ”do-not-come-here” message. And they will exercise an extraordinary amount of discretion in power in deciding who is undesirable and seek to remove them from this country without any sort of due process.

These cases, to me, speak to something that I think Americans have a really hard time wrapping their heads around, which is the idea that maybe people just won’t want to come to the United States. We have these policies of restriction that are so harsh and so draconian that people might look around the globe and say: “You know what? Actually, maybe that’s not the place for me. Maybe there isn’t the opportunity that I thought that there might be.”

And one of the things that I’ve done in my travels is talk to a lot of people, particularly people who oppose migration, and ask them the question, “How would it feel to live in a country that people wanted to leave rather than be a country that people wanted to come to?”

The tension of that dynamic, of people worrying that outsiders are going to come and take the good things that they have, without appreciating that those outsiders are wanting to come and participate in what you have, rather than take — it gets lost on people. I fear that the United States is becoming a country that really wants to turn its back on what it has gained from being a place that people want to come to.

Healy: Lydia, you just got at something that puzzles me so much about this. For much of my lifetime, so many Americans took pride in the fact that people from El Salvador and Turkey, students from China or Western, Eastern Europe wanted to come to America. And now, as you were also saying, it seems like many people now seem very, frankly, comfortable with the idea that this administration wants to either stop some of those people from coming or actually remove them. As you look at our recent history, is there a moment that stands out to you that makes sense about why this kind of shift happened among Americans?

Polgreen: Yeah. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the polling on immigration in the United States, particularly at this moment where we’ve seen support for Donald Trump really crater on the issues that he has traditionally done quite well on. And the one place he’s actually been above water is on immigration.

I think that what that reflects is a deep sense of unhappiness among Americans and Americans really of all races and backgrounds — including Americans of immigrant backgrounds — a sense that things had just really gotten out of control.

It’s very easy to look at the situation that was unfolding under the Biden administration and say we effectively had open borders, but we’ve had a political kind of deadlock on migration for a very long time. There has not been a serious immigration reform bill in Congress since the 1980s — we’re talking in the Reagan administration. When Americans talk about wanting to crack down on immigration, I think what they’re really looking for is some sense of control and some sense that there is an orderly process that they’re quite happy for newcomers to come to the United States and join our community, but there needs to be some way for that to happen in an orderly fashion.

And in the midst of that, I think you’ve had a very opportunistic Republican Party under Donald Trump that has realized that for them, blocking any sort of immigration reform is actually really good politics because it means you can use the specter of a huge flood of migrants coming into the country as a perpetual boogeyman, as an argument for “this is why we need to be in charge” because otherwise we’re going to have some sort of invasion. And it’s really worked well for........

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