I am writing on Christmas morning and now the day after. Unlike most Friedmans, Christmas has great meaning for me, evoking the deepest personal connections to my dearly departed Italian American mother. I was born in an America when religious differences tore people apart—though never as deadly as the racial divide. So, as a boy, I was told I was simultaneously responsible for killing Christ but could not seek sanctuary in Israel. My family was split in two: the Hungarian Jews and the Italian Catholics. But my mother persevered and won some of my father’s Jewish family over—on the surface, at least—once a year, on Christmas, with her extraordinary many-days-in-the-making lasagna.
I will admit, with my mother gone and unable to answer the phone, Christmas has lost some of its luster. But more than that is the toll my occupation has taken on me. Yes, it is bad enough that we all have to live with the ever-increasing madness and the corrosive effects of the move toward authoritarianism. But I have to apologize for the many times, week after week, that I bring this reality to your attention, acknowledging and amplifying it.
I can’t really help it. My mother, along with her extraordinary lasagna, had what was in those days called a big mouth. She could not, would not stop telling it like it was. For a young son, it was inconvenient as hell. I spent a good part of my youth cringing. My father was a brilliant, completely self-taught intellectual who became a communist as a young man and, as one of a handful of publicly known party members, was an editor at The Daily Worker. But it was my mother who was the working-class hero in our home—organizing waiters and waitresses in the restaurants where she worked, then at night catering and bringing home a pocketbook full of glorious scraps for her three kids. Transcending a learning disability, she went to night school in her spare time to get her high school diploma, then her college degree to become a public school teacher, and eventually became a librarian.
My mother never stopped fighting for basic human decency. Unlike my father, she could not stand ideology or theory or radical rhetoric. She detested the meetings and the endless talk, talk, talk because for her it was always down to how you treated people. And she could sense that so many of these communists did not really care about the people for whom they supposedly were fighting.
So, this Christmas, I have a lasagna ready for the oven and some thoughts about how we are doing when it comes to peace on Earth and good will to men. Above all, I wonder: Who are we?
Oftentimes, it feels to me that things are getting worse not better—the wretched encroachment of evil on the good and the innocent, the dark overcoming the light. Most recently, along with the antisemitic slaughter in Australia, I have had to watch the pathetic, desperate display of the MAGA movement trying so hard not to acknowledge, let alone repudiate and repel, the antisemites amongst them. Yes, hate seems ever present these days: How is it that those brave Somalis who, against all odds, survived civil war and Islamic terror and then miraculously made it from squalid refugee camps to America are now supposedly our enemies?
The New York Times explains:
After Mayor Andrew Ginther of Columbus said that its policy prohibited local cooperation on immigration enforcement, Elon Musk called him a ‘traitor’ … Naturalized citizens in Ohio’s capital, Columbus, have taken to carrying passports with them. Businesses and nonprofits that serve immigrants around the city are delivering goods to customers who are afraid to venture outside their homes. Churches in immigrant neighborhoods are all but empty.
A surge of enforcement in Columbus by Immigration and Customs Enforcement over the past week has created turmoil there and angered local leaders, who find their city the latest target of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
A blue city in a red state, Columbus is home to the Ohio State University and a host of immigrant communities. The increased ICE action in the city comes weeks after federal agents carried out big sweeps in New Orleans and Charlotte, N.C., which, like Columbus, are Democrat-led cities in states where Republicans hold much of the political power. In a statement over the weekend ICE highlighted the arrests of 10 men in Ohio as part of ‘Operation Buckeye,’ saying they had criminal records and were in the country illegally. Of the 10, three were arrested before the operation, according to the statement. The agency did not respond to an email sent Tuesday asking how many had been apprehended in the operation.
‘We figured if they were going to come, it was going to be to Columbus,’ said Lourdes Barroso de Padilla, the first Latina elected to the City Council and the daughter of Cuban immigrants.
Mayor Andrew J. Ginther, who has called ICE agents’ presence ‘unwelcome,’ promised that city police officers would not assist ICE arrests based solely on immigration status. His stance has provoked attacks on social media by Stephen Miller, the architect of President Trump’s immigration policy, and by Elon Musk, a former adviser of the president …
Somalis make up one of the largest immigrant communities in Columbus, and Somali immigrants nationwide have been a target of President Trump. Earlier this month, he called them ‘garbage’ and said he wanted to send them back to their troubled homeland in East Africa.
The Somali immigrant population in Columbus is the second largest in the country, after Minneapolis …
‘Never in a million years did I think I would have to prove I was a United States citizen when I was born here in Ohio,’ said Ayub Abdi, 24, the son of Somali immigrants who is studying accounting at Ohio State. He recently began carrying his passport when he leaves home. A notice posted at an entrance to the Banadir Mall warns that ICE agents may not enter without a judicial warrant. Sam Guleid, an American citizen from Somalia, said he had to reassure his third-grade son, who did not want to go to school because he was afraid of immigration agents.
[Emphasis added.]
The other day, I watched two videos taken by brave ordinary citizens with their cellphones, one of ICE agents dragging a handcuffed pregnant woman on the street and another of two ICE agents screaming at a carpenter atop the roof he was repairing, one agent drawing his pistol and aiming at the guy.
My mother, even at the end when cancer ravaged her body, believed and preached perseverance. And I try to hold on.
Not so long ago, we were a nation that took pride in the fact that we were a melting pot. We proudly acknowledged that so many of us could admire our grandparents, they who so wanted the freedom and opportunity that America offered that they sacrificed everything to come. How is it that we have moved so quickly to publicly declare our hatred of this new wave wanting to join us?
It would be one thing if we could have an open and honest debate about immigration. But these haters are liars as well. The New York Times has more to say about Stephen Miller’s position:
As it seeks to end birthright citizenship, the Trump administration is arguing that immigrants bring problems that extend for generations. The data shows otherwise … When Stephen Miller, one of President Trump’s top advisers, makes the case for the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, he is focused not only on the actions of those who came to the United States from another country. Increasingly, he blames their children as well.
Mr. Miller’s belief that seven decades of immigration has produced millions of people who take more than they give — an assertion that has been refuted by years of economic data — is at the heart of the Trump administration’s campaign to restrict immigration and deport immigrants already in the country. But he is now stressing an argument that immigrants bring problems to the United States that extend through generations.
‘With a lot of these immigrant groups, not only is the first generation unsuccessful. Again, Somalia is a clear example here,’ Mr. Miller said on Fox News this month, adding, ‘You see persistent issues in every subsequent generation. So you see consistent high rates of welfare use, consistent high rates of criminal activity, consistent failures to assimilate.’
The attack line comes as the administration is calling for the Supreme Court to uphold Mr. Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, the long-held principle that children born on American soil are automatically citizens … Experts questioned the underlying argument made by Mr. Miller.
‘Just as we saw with immigrants who arrived around the turn of the 20th century, the children of immigrants who have arrived to the United States since the 1960s consistently learn fluent English, obtain more education than their immigrant parents and achieve higher earnings, showing strong patterns of integration,’ said Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute. ‘Study after study has demonstrated the upward mobility of children of immigrants.’
But facts do not seem to matter:
Not surprisingly, the MAGA embrace of anti-immigration rhetoric enthusiastically implemented by Trump 2.0 is a shockingly clear policy of discrimination based on lies, lies repeated again and again. There is nothing new, of course, about blaming the other for our own problems. It is the foundation of much of what Trump says these days. It is the Biden economy that is the problem. Ukraine was Biden’s war. Our housing problem and our loss of jobs are the fault of the 20 million illegals Biden let in. Deaths are up, crime is up, costs are up because of them.
But Stephen Miller and Donald Trump are lying. A study titled “Law Abiding Immigrants: The Incarceration Gap Between Immigrants and the U.S. Born, 1870 – 2020” recently revised by the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2024 found the following:
The authors explain:
The tendency to associate immigration and crime has been pervasive throughout US history. For example, in 1891, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge advocated closing the border, warning that Italian immigrants were ‘members of the Mafia, a secret society… using murder as a means of maintaining its discipline’ (Lodge 1891). Indeed, over the past 150 years, Congressional speeches about immigration were twice as likely to mention words related to crime (per speech) than were speeches on other topics (Card et al. 2022).
Contrary to this anti-immigrant rhetoric, we document that, as a group, immigrant men have had a lower incarceration rate than US-born men for the last 150 years of American history. We combine newly assembled full-count Census data (1870–1940) with Census/ACS samples (1950–2020) to construct the first nationally representative series of incarceration rates for immigrants and the US-born between 1870 and the present day. From 1870 to 1950, immigrants’ incarceration rate was only slightly lower than that of US-born men. However, starting in 1960, immigrants have become significantly less likely to be incarcerated than the US-born, even though as a group immigrants now are relatively younger, more likely to be non-white, have lower incomes, and are less educated – characteristics often associated with involvement in the criminal justice system. Today, immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated than all US-born men, and 30% less likely to be incarcerated relative to white US-born men. The similar incarceration rates between immigrants and the US-born in the past and the lower incarceration rates of immigrants today are broadly consistent with prior studies documenting immigrant-US-born incarceration gaps for specific states and time periods (Moehling and Piehl 2009, 2014; Butcher and Piehl 1998b, 2007).
With access to large samples, including the full-population Census before 1950, we are also able to provide the first investigation of incarceration rates by country of origin spanning 1870 to 2020. We find a substantial decline in incarceration rates relative to the US-born among immigrants from all major sending regions. European immigrants historically had slightly lower incarceration rates to US-born men, but recently experience far lower incarceration rates. Chinese immigrants had similar incarceration rates to the US-born before 1960, but today have significantly lower incarceration rates. Mexican and Central American immigrants had particularly high incarceration rates in the past but have had lower incarceration rates than the US-born since 1960. From 2005 on, Mexican and Central American immigrants have been more likely to be incarcerated than white US-born men, although we note that a large portion of the increase in Mexican and Central American incarceration after 2005 is driven by detentions in federal immigration facilities, often for immigration-related offenses; when we drop areas home to the largest Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facilities, the gap relative to US-born white men moderates or disappears in most years.
[Emphasis added.]
The authors highlight a particularly interesting finding relevant to what is happening today with ICE:
We conclude the paper by showing that lower-educated immigrants and US-born men (the group that accounts for the vast majority of incarcerated individuals) not only diverged in their incarceration propensities in recent decades, but also diverged at a similar moment along other dimensions, including their labor force participation and likelihood of marriage. One potential explanation for this broad pattern of divergence is that less-educated immigrants might have remained relatively shielded from structural changes in the economy – such as globalization and skill-biased technological change – that negatively affected less-educated US-born men in recent decades. Immigrants are concentrated in manual tasks and service occupations (rather than routine occupations), which did not experience large wage or employment declines in recent decades. (Autor et al. 2006; Peri and Sparber 2009). Furthermore, immigrants may be more resilient to shocks, given that they are a self-selected group of individuals possessing traits such as a greater willingness to move long distances (Cadena and Kovak 2016), less risk aversion (Jaeger et al. 2010), higher adaptability and cognitive ability (Bütikofer and Peri 2021), and higher levels of entrepreneurship (Azoulay et al. 2022).
[Emphasis added.]
In fact, the very traits that distinguished the immigrants of the past (the grandparents of so many Americans)—their bravery and commitment to hard work, the determination to be free, and willingness to endure hardship to learn a new language and to adapt to a new reality—seem to characterize these new immigrants. And ironically, ICE has taken advantage of their willingness to work manual labor and as service employees to round them up: at farms and construction sites and at building supply stores like Home Depot and restaurants.
So, if it is not really crime, could it be old-fashioned racism?
It is not like Donald Trump hadn’t warned us—multiple times, at rally after rally, at this fundraising affair in April 2024:
The Times writes:
At rallies, Donald Trump frequently laments migrants from a list of countries from Africa, Asia and the Middle East as he stokes fears around the surge at the border … Former President Donald J. Trump, speaking at a multimillion-dollar fund-raiser on Saturday night, lamented that people were not immigrating to the United States from ‘nice’ countries ‘like Denmark’ and suggested that his well-heeled dinner companions were temporarily safe from undocumented immigrants nearby, according to an attendee.
Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, made the comments during a roughly 45-minute presentation at a dinner at a mansion owned by the billionaire financier John Paulson in Palm Beach, Fla., a rarefied island community.
Guests were seated outdoors at white-clothed tables under a white tent, looking out on the waterway that divides the moneyed town from the more diverse West Palm Beach, a mainland city, according to the attendee, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the private event but provided an extensive readout of Mr. Trump’s remarks.
Dozens of wealthy donors helped write checks that the Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee claim totaled more than $50 million, an amount that would set a record but had not been verified. Campaign finance reports encompassing the date of the event won’t be available for months.
Some of Mr. Trump’s comments were standard fare from his stump speeches, while other parts of the speech were tailored to his wealthy audience. About midway through his remarks, the attendee said, Mr. Trump began an extensive rant about migrants entering the United States, at a time when President Biden has been struggling with an intensified crisis at the Southern border.
‘These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster,’ Mr. Trump told his guests, according to the attendee. The former president has made a similar claim the heart of his campaign speeches.
He then appeared to refer to an episode during his presidency when he drew significant criticism after an Oval Office meeting with federal lawmakers about immigration during which he described Haiti and some nations in Africa as ‘shithole countries,’ compared with places like Norway. ‘And when I said, you know, Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,’ Mr. Trump said at the dinner, to chuckles from the crowd. ‘Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?’
He continued, ‘And you know, they took that as a very terrible comment, but I felt it was fine.’
Mr. Trump went on to say that there were people coming from Yemen, ‘where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.’ During his rallies, Mr. Trump frequently laments migrants from a list of countries from Africa, Asia and the Middle East as he stokes fears around the surge at the border, which he blames for a spike in crime, blame that has not been supported by available data.
At the dinner, Mr. Trump also lamented the surge of migrants, particularly from Latin America, saying that gang members ‘make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people … They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight,’ Mr. Trump said.
‘In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm,’ Mr. Trump said, gesturing across the water, according to the attendee. ‘Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here.’
Not surprisingly, now that he has the opportunity, he is doing everything he can to get rid of as many of those people he does not like as he can:
NPR reports:
The Department of Homeland Security is further clamping down on processing immigration applications after two National Guard members were shot by an Afghan national. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS, in a memo on Tuesday said it would pause reviewing all pending applications for green cards, citizenship, or asylum from immigrants from 19 countries listed in a previous travel ban …
The citizenship and immigration agency also plans to re-review and re-interview immigrants from these countries, potentially going as far back as 2021, amid sharper scrutiny of those who have followed the legal steps to seek permanent status in the U.S.
‘The Trump Administration is making every effort to ensure individuals becoming citizens are the best of the best. Citizenship is a privilege, not a right,’ a DHS spokesperson told NPR in a statement. ‘We will take no chances when the future of our nation is at stake. The Trump Administration is reviewing all immigration benefits granted by the Biden administration to aliens from Countries of Concern.’
NPR continues:
The travel ban applies to citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen and added restricted access applied to people from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Migrants from all 19 countries are impacted by the pauses of pending applications and review of previously approved ones.
Prior restrictions on refugees
Last month, USCIS, a branch of DHS, had previously announced that it would re-review the status of everyone who had been admitted into the U.S. as a refugee under the Biden administration, essentially reopening those cases.
[Emphasis added.]
When it comes to the best of the best, it helps to be white.
Supposedly it was about crime. And, to make that perfectly clear, Donald Trump and his minions declared that anyone in the country without clear proof of citizenship was a criminal and that pausing applications for green cards, asylum, and citizenship was presumably just to give e the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services enough time to weed out the criminals. But somehow that is not really the case anymore.
The Trump administration is determined to get rid of folks who did everything right and played by the rules, immigrants who, in fact, are now legal:
NPR explains:
More than 1.6 million immigrants have lost their legal status in the first 11 months of President Trump’s presidency. The staggering number includes people who applied for and were accepted to come to the country on a wide variety of immigration parole, visa, asylum and temporary protected status programs. That number exceeds Philadelphia’s entire population.
This is the largest effort to take away deportation protections for migrants who are in the country legally. Immigration advocates say it’s very likely an undercount. ‘These were legal pathways. People did the thing the government asked them to do, and this government went and preemptively revoked that status,’ said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigration advocacy organization that has been tracking the efforts to delegalize immigrants.
‘There’s nothing close to this. Like there’s no president of either party who has said, “Central to my effort is revoking the work authorization and legal status for millions of people.”‘
Many of the immigrants who lost legal status have been in the country for years. Now, they fear what could happen should their immigration cases not process quickly enough. The administration has encouraged immigrants to leave the country as it gets rid of their legal authorization. ‘The American taxpayer will no longer bear the financial burden of unlawfully present aliens,’ U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesperson Matthew Tragesser said, in response to a request for comment about concerns that the administration is making more people deportable.
In another effort to eliminate existing legal pathways, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced last week that the Trump administration would be pausing the diversity visa lottery program. In a post on X, she said the man accused of carrying out a deadly shooting at Brown University — and of killing an MIT professor — came to the U.S. through the program in 2017 and was granted a green card. While the cancellation doesn’t impact those already in the country, the lottery program faces an uncertain future going forward.
The White House says scrapping prior legal pathways and protections is part of its goal. ‘The Trump administration has done more to limit migration, both illegal and legal, than any administration in history,’ Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said during a press conference this fall. She touted all the ways the administration has cut off these avenues, including by pausing and revoking visas.
Yes, she said, “illegal and legal.”
And now, for me, a blast from the past. I can remember it as if it were yesterday: I was in my first year at City College, and it was five years after my father had left the Communist Party. He and so many other party members were disgusted to see Russian tanks rolling down the streets of Budapest. This, ironically, was not that far from where his parents had been born. I had actually opened our apartment door to the FBI and their subpoena. No longer a communist, he was forced to answer to a bunch of conservative congressmen, all of whom were proud to serve on the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He was lucky that Joseph Rauh agreed to represent him and Rauh had negotiated an unprecedented deal: My father would answer any question about what he had thought and done, but he refused to testify about anyone else. My father was the first to have refused to answer a bunch of questions and not be indicted for contempt of Congress.
I have always regarded the First Amendment as critical to what makes/made America significantly different. But like all else in our Constitution, the Trump administration is determined to extinguish those extraordinary protections. Now to all the other crimes they unfairly assign to immigrants, you can add speaking one’s mind:
The Washington Post reports:
The administration’s efforts to curtail legal migration have accelerated in a way that immigrant rights advocates say is chilling public discourse … The Trump administration is widening efforts to screen visa applicants for online speech considered dangerous and ‘anti-American’ as the government moves to restrict legal migration and remove people from places the president has called ‘garbage.’
The Post continues:
The State Department earlier this month expanded new regulations requiring foreign students and people on academic and cultural exchange programs to disclose five years of their social media histories and make all of their posts public. All applicants for H-1B employment visas and their dependents will now also be subject to the more rigorous online review.
‘A U.S. visa is a privilege, not a right,’ officials said in announcing the expansion.
The administration is also considering a similar rule for visitors from countries whose citizens are allowed to enter the United States for up to 90 days without a visa, including France, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.
Can you imagine being screened for what you might have said or written online before you are allowed the chance to see the Mona Lisa or to watch Arsenal play Liverpool or eat some fish and chips? What must the world think of us?
Half Italian American and half Hungarian American, part Jew and part Catholic and mostly agnostic, I am a less proud American these days. I ask myself, and I ask you: Who are we?
