By Ben Jealous
Guest Column
In hard times, people look for answers. The decimation of American manufacturing starting in the 1990s with trade agreements like NAFTA led to decades of downward economic mobility for working families. That creates ripe conditions for demagogues to come out of the woodwork offering an easy answer for people’s pain. And if history teaches us anything, that answer is usually someone else to blame.
Today’s anti-immigrant movement follows the same dangerous pattern: stoke fear, tell lies, and divide working people against each other. We should recognize the humanity of people fleeing poverty, violence, or climate chaos, who come here with little more than the hope they will find opportunity and be treated with dignity. Instead we get bombarded with claims that immigrants are taking jobs, draining welfare programs, and driving up crime.
Let’s be clear – the data says otherwise.
Immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than US-born citizens, according to studies from the Cato Institute and the American Immigration Council. They contribute more in taxes than they receive in public benefits. And far from taking jobs, immigrant labor fills critical shortages in healthcare, construction, farming, and more – keeping our economy going while supporting their families and ours.
The myths persist because the truth is harder to confront. Our economy has failed too many people for too long. Factory towns across the Midwest and elsewhere are hollowed out. Wages have stagnated. Housing costs have skyrocketed. College debt weighs down the next generation before they can even begin. When real solutions feel out of reach, fear finds a foothold.
But the solution is not scapegoating. The solution is building.
Right now, the green economy is our best shot at economic revival. Spurred on by legislation like the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, we are opening new factories for wind turbines, electric school buses, and solar panels. We are building a power grid for the next century. We are creating careers – not just jobs – that pay well, reduce pollution, and lower energy bills.
This transition is already underway. But the budget reconciliation bill just passed by the US House and heading to the Senate attempts to bring it to a grinding halt. Instead of investing in the jobs that will power the global economy, the bill guts clean energy funding. It slashes Medicaid and food assistance for working families to pay for billions in tax cuts for the top one percent.
The bill does not solve a single problem. It makes every one of them worse.
What is in that disaster of a bill has been well reported: Attacks on Americans who get their health care through Affordable Care Act exchanges … deep cuts to Medicaid and food assistance … all to pay for tax cuts for billionaires and corporations and Trump’s immigrant deportation (and detention) agenda.
The House-passed bill would also repeal most IRA clean energy tax credits and investments and undermine public health by inviting a flood of air and water pollution. The repeal of the clean energy tax credits alone would reportedly increase US household energy costs by $16 billion by 2030, and cost more than 830,000 jobs and $1 trillion in GDP over the next eight years.
The cruelty of it is the point. The pain inflicted on everyday Americans is across the board. It tells struggling Americans: You will not get affordable healthcare. You will not get relief from rising rent or energy prices. But we will show you someone to blame – and punish them in public.
Scapegoating is about power. It’s about exploiting people’s anxieties and frustrations to gain that power. And it’s about making an example of a group to chill dissent and create a climate of fear. We’re already seeing how this administration is trying to retaliate against those who are calling out and standing up to its dehumanizing immigration sweeps. That is also part of the playbook.
Meanwhile, the real drivers of hardship go unaddressed.
Climate change, for example, is already uprooting communities around the world. In El Salvador, climate-fueled droughts forced rural families into overcrowded cities where gangs preyed on their desperation. Many fled north to escape the violence. Some walked thousands of miles. Along the way, they risked kidnapping, assault, rape, and death. Many did not survive the journey.
Imagine how bad things must be to make that trip with your children in tow.
It is also worth remembering that some of the people we just honored on Memorial Day were immigrants. Foreign-born Americans have always served and sacrificed for this country – from the Civil War to Afghanistan. It is but one example that shows creating paths to citizenship and legal status is not giving people a handout. It is giving them a chance to fully belong to the nation – a nation many of them have already helped defend.
We can choose to turn away from politics that prey on fear. And turn toward a future built on shared prosperity, shared responsibility, and shared humanity. That’s an America worth fighting for.
Ben Jealous is the Executive Director of the Sierra Club, former President and CEO of the NAACP and a Professor of Practice at the University of Pennsylvania.