Sometimes, in this strange world of ours, I wonder where I would be today if Donald J. Trump had been president when, as my Aunt Hilda wrote me so many years ago, "Your great-grandfather, Moore Engelhardt, a boy of 16, arrived in New York from Europe in March 1888." He took that "Moore" as his first name later in life but it was probably "Moishe" on arrival. "It was," she added, "during the famous blizzard and after a sea voyage of about 30 days. He had no money. He often said he had a German 50-cent piece in his pocket when he landed. His trip had to be in the cheapest part of the ship -- way down below in steerage. Poor boy, I'm sure he was seasick a good deal of the time. Since he was alone, he sort of attached himself to a family of a lot of children, and for the first few months in America, I imagine he slept behind the stove in somebody's kitchen."
Today, almost a century and a half later, having started his immigrant journey in what's now Ukraine, he would undoubtedly soon have found himself on a ship or plane heading in the opposite direction. Perhaps he would even head for Spain which, as the New York Times recently reported, actually offers undocumented immigrants a "legal way to stay." There, the Socialist-led government of Prime Minister Pedro Sa'nchez only recently issued a decree "that gives hundreds of thousands of undocumented migrants a path out of legal limbo." But in these increasingly dis-United States of America, no such luck.
After all, the moment Donald Trump (whose mother was an immigrant) returned to the White House in January 2025, he issued an order "protecting the American people against invasion." Ah, yes, that puts my grandfather's experience in some perspective. He was a desperate young immigrant then, but today he would be an "invader" from the equivalent of outer space, a sci-fi monster of the first order.
And with that in mind, let TomDispatch regular Rebecca Gordon in her -- yes! -- 100th piece for this site fill you in on what it means for this country's population growth to both slow and age while all too few immigrants are arriving like" well, yes, Donald J. Trump's mom and my grandpa. Tom
On Seeking Asylum and Refuge
In a Hostile United States
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 v-a 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 creadas
para que mi hambre y la tuya este'n 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 U.S. 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 U.S. 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.
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