Immigrants and American Anxiety
Tune out the demagogues and look instead for the deeper economic and cultural sources of our unease.
IN FEBRUARY, REPUBLICANS TORPEDOED a tough, comprehensive bill that would have brought serious and much-needed reform to our southern border. This might have seemed a surprising move for the immigration-fixated party of Donald Trump that spent years trying to ‘build the wall,’ but Republicans made a clear political calculus. They decided they could not win the 2024 election if the border was not visibly chaotic. Today’s iteration of the Republican party, dominated by Trump, offers one central explanation for the source of Americans’ problems: immigrants.
The country would be better off if we had been able to pass the bipartisan border bill—and not only because it would have strengthened our border security. It would also have left the Trumpian narrative in tatters. Without tens of thousands of immigrants streaming into the country, Republicans would be forced to deal with the complicated reality of why Americans feel more alone and unhappy than ever before. Because it turns out that impoverished people making a desperate play for a better life are not the true source of our angst, and so even if the border were brought under control, our spiritual crisis would have remained.
Trump’s diagnosis of what ails America is fraudulent and dangerous. But it is true that most Americans chafe at tens of thousands of people crossing the border illegally each month, viewing them as illegitimate competitors for resources in a culture of growing scarcity and go-it-alone individualism. It is a doomed strategy to attempt to convince Americans that the economy is better than they feel it to be; what is needed is an honest conversation about why so many Americans feel so scared and alone that they view a relatively nonthreatening crowd—desperate, low-skilled non-English-speaking migrants—as such an existential menace.
Last summer, we took a trip to Boone, North Carolina, located in one of the state’s most overwhelmingly Republican congressional districts. Average household income in Boone ($28,200) is far below the state and national levels, and more than 55 percent of the population lives in poverty. We wanted to hear from people about how the economic policies of the last few decades and the opioid epidemic had affected their lives and their community, and what they were doing about it.
We heard the same point over and over: People here feel abandoned. Locals told us how good, dignified jobs had left the region, gone in search of cheaper forms of labor, and how pharmaceutical companies had added to the suffering by aggressively plowing addictive, life-wrecking opioids into the region. Many people we spoke with had been directly affected by these problems, and everyone knew of someone who had been affected. Meanwhile, important community institutions, like hospitals and mom-and-pop stores, have withered. Local business owners told us they feel constantly in danger of being squashed by monopolistic corporate behemoths. And ever present in the background was the sense that the government had failed to prevent any of it.
We asked for specifics: Whom exactly did they feel abandoned by? Why? The answer we heard is that people feel abandoned by society as a whole.
This answer may seem frustratingly vague—but in fact it is incredibly instructive about the spiritual and economic realities of American life, including the reasons why so many Americans are susceptible to the siren song of immigrant scapegoating and us-vs.-them tribalism.
Any American community subjected to the sequence of events described above would understandably feel abandoned. And most would struggle to identify exactly who was at fault. This ambiguity makes sense because America has cultivated the myth of the self-sufficient individual and the idea that all is fair in the realm of buying and selling.
In this picture of society the sole goal of business is to make as much money as possible. Full stop. No company owes anyone dignified employment. Job offerings are deployed into the labor market, and jobseekers are free to accept or turn them down as they see fit. If a company no longer desires the service of an individual or group, it owes the individual or community nothing more.
If business owners feel no duty of care to their employees, apart from what the law explicitly compels, they also owe no duty of care to their customers. The seller is not responsible for whether the pill or soft drink or payday loan is good for the buyer. The job of a company is to sell things to people who want to buy them. If you buy badly, if the things you purchase make you miserable, addicted, lonely, or unhealthy, that is your mistake. The company did nothing wrong by offering you these options.
Meanwhile, the protections of government are reduced to a bare minimum and the consolations of community are allowed to drain away.
We’re painting with a broad brush here, of course, and the particularities vary from community to community. But for millions of Americans, these conditions contribute to a sense of growing unease, even if they can’t readily articulate why.
HUMAN BEINGS ARE SOLIDARISTIC, mutually dependent creatures. In all times and places where you find humans, you find the voluntary pooling of risk and reward, caring for the sick, and protecting the weak. Few of us, even as full-grown adults, would survive a week without the help of other people, nor should we wish to. Solidarity is in our nature.
But America has self-mythologized an overwrought narrative of individualism. From roughly the end of the Second World War until the 1980s, America performed a precarious balancing act between rugged individualism and respect for the necessity of a healthy collective. But in the last forty years, our sense of obligation to each other has eroded as wealth and personal success have been lionized at the expense of temperance and the common good. Today the sense that each of us is rightly responsible to fend for ourselves in the world sits uncomfortably with an older, deeper sense that we shouldn’t have to face exploitation, deprivation, humiliation, or loneliness. Americans want to stand on their own two feet, but we need to know that there are some limits to competition and greed, and that those around us will defend us, befriend us, or pick us up when we stumble, which we all do.
Donald Trump figured out long ago that people are feeling anxious, angry, and alone. Regrettably, he preyed upon this sense of betrayal with a message of scapegoating and division. He instructed his followers to scuttle an important piece of legislation to fix our broken border because he cannot win in November if Americans don’t believe the false narrative that their anxiety is caused by immigrants.
It falls to us to rebuild a sense of obligation to each other—a new American solidarity. We will need to build concrete policies that prevent excesses and cruelties now permitted in the name of profit. But we will also need to rebuild a culture that prioritizes the common good—the idea that we owe more to each other than just whatever the market will allow us to get away with. The threads that connect us have frayed or been cut. Our work, in this election year and beyond, is more than just shaming the demagogues; we must repair our badly damaged tapestry of common concern.
Chris Murphy is a United States senator from Connecticut. He is the author of The Violence Inside Us: A Brief History of an Ongoing American Tragedy (Random House, 2020). Ian Marcus Corbin is the codirector of the Human Network Initiative at Harvard Medical School and a senior fellow at the think tank Capita.
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