Authored by Jeffrey A. Tucker via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

With so much else going on, not enough writers have been able to focus on the complexities of immigration issues enough to comment competently on them, much less with a historical perspective.

Within my knowledge base, which is admittedly incomplete, I will attempt this here, recognizing the existence of many mitigating factors that I cannot possibly present in a small piece.

For most of the postwar period, the United States has had a wink-and-nudge approach to undocumented workers. So long as they don’t claim permanent residency, do jobs that Americans can’t or won’t do, and don’t burden the community with welfare and infrastructure demands, they are fine. They come and go through porous borders. Both parties celebrated immigration and wanted it liberalized.

This was true for a good part of my own life. I spent my early years in El Paso, Texas, where these complexities were obvious to all of us. That region had always been mixed in ethnicity and religion owing to its deeply contested national loyalties. Even so, a peace had been achieved. Many workers in town freely moved from the United States to Mexico and back again, as did travelers.

My family would go to Mexico often. The border consisted mostly of a hi and a wave of the hand. There were no fights, no rushes, no blockades, and not many worries. Everyone was aware of undocumented workers on all sides, but there was little enforcement provided everyone obeyed the unstated rules above: work hard, don’t stay, and don’t commit crimes.

I would never say there were no tensions. There were. But they revolved themselves in normal political ways. A national anti-immigrant movement did not exist on any large scale. Even Republicans courted the immigrant vote and wanted more inward migration.

That all changed after Sept. 11, 2001. The suicide attacks in New York City and at the Pentagon caused a new focus on closing borders. They were sealed and monitored in the name of policing for terrorism. For the first time, passports were required to travel to and from Mexico and Canada.

This caused a dramatic shift in incentives. Migrant workers and their families began a scramble to find ways to stay once here. The new path required acting as permanent residents, thus breaking the deal and antagonizing communities and inflaming U.S. politics.

After the many wars in the Middle East sent refugee populations on the run looking for new homes, the United States dealt with a wave of migration regardless, legal and illegal. The aspiration was always to stay. The implicit deal was that if they worked hard and long, eventually amnesty would arrive, just as it had in the past.

At home, however, it was all too much. As any serious historian will tell you, mass disturbance of national demographics, especially that which threatens to result in foundational political change, will cause populist uprising. They always have. No exceptions of which I’m aware.

The politician who broke the taboo on this topic was Donald Trump in 2015. His frank discussion of these issues contributed to his victory in 2016. New methods of border control were being constructed, and enforcement seemed to be working. The fix did not last, however.

The election of 2020 was in substantial part conducted without in-person voting, mostly by order of federal and state public-health agencies. Another thing everyone knows: Mail-in voting is the least secure form, which is why it is banned or highly regulated in most countries. It was inevitable that the results (Trump lost, despite a higher total number of votes than the previous election) would be questioned. Many observers said the numbers simply did not add up.

Further investigation revealed that whoever was in charge of immigration enforcement after 2020 embarked on emergency use of immigration demographics, massively liberalizing policies. The widespread perception was that an old strategy was in play. The purpose was to game electoral outcomes, bringing in as many people as possible in preparation for a repeat of the previous balloting fiasco.

The result was an uncountable number of new people migrating to the United States (maybe 9 million to 12 million, but no one knows for sure), giving them generous welfare benefits including hotels, phones, food, and more. It became so bad that the mayor of New York City protested what was happening to his city.

The use of immigration as a political weapon broke the deal and shattered everything. Even if it was exaggerated, and I’m not offering an opinion either way, it was deeply cynical and dark.

The result was another wave of political outrage that bolstered Trump’s reemergence in 2024, with the pledge to crack down on them. The reasons are economic but mainly pertain to an aspiration to renew the very idea of citizenship itself: A nation without clarity on this point has no meaning.

In short, we are not global citizens because there is no global plebiscite. If we take democracy seriously, and truly believe that the people are the final rulers of themselves, the problem of who is and is not a citizen must be clarified.

This is what the second Trump term has promised. Immigration authorities have been unleashed to do their jobs. But once the crackdown began, there was a problem. Most of the people shipped in under the previous administration were difficult to find, hiding in sanctuary cities and otherwise escaping notice from authorities.

Faced with political pressure to show high deportation numbers, authorities started raiding towns where they had never been and entering workplaces where they usually had never been active, thus targeting the very people whom the United States used to tolerate in the old system.

For Americans to have the feds raiding local businesses and civic institutions is in tension with the civic ethos of liberty and rights that Americans have traditionally expected, and this became a highly charged environment particularly among activists determined to resist what they call Trump’s authoritarianism. And now we have the National Guard in an American city, perhaps the first of many. It’s not a good look to see the military on the streets of American cities. No one would favor such a thing in absence of a perceived emergency.

My point is simply this: We cannot look at the present moment in isolation from all the previous missteps and abuses that have led to it, one step at a time. Yes, the trajectory is dangerous. Yes, it seems like a slippery slope to martial law. Is there any alternative and politically viable solution today? If there is an obvious one in the present moment, I’m not seeing it.

Long-term, we need a calm and reasoned discussion about a strict distinction between worker visas and voting rights, between residency permits and welfare benefits, between entitlements and earned privileges. It’s possible to have a welcoming country that is not simultaneously inflaming and abusing its citizens’ liberality and generosity. Sadly, the moment for that conversation is not now.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.