Haitians and other TPS holders followed the rules. The average TPS recipient has been in the US for 17.5 years. They work, pay taxes, take care of their families both here and abroad through remittances. They have filled holes in industries with major shortages of workers, and have made America better.

They were punished for a political game. They were punished for a vision of America that is far from what is good.

Today, is the last day of TPS for Haitians unless some miracle happens with another court delay or action from Congress; tomorrow ICE will begin mass roundups of people. It is utterly cruel and indefensible.

I should write more constrained, but it is my Substack, and I am not a professional writer, so you are going to get my feelings served up on a plate to you today.

I am angry. Lies, cruel lies, are what led us to today. Two years ago, Vance, Trump, and many others unleashed repeated dehumanizing lies about Haitians being illegal and eating people’s pets. It got an entire community in my state of Ohio death threats and harassment for months. The threats were so bad and serious that some people I know left town for periods of time. Haitians were lawfully in the U.S. for years, and the lies about their legal status have led to revoking their legal status. Now the end of this political charade will be more brutality as ICE sweeps people into detention and deportation, upends lives and separates families.

I feel such deep grief and deep shame that this is what we find acceptable behavior from leaders in our country.

Today I texted a few Haitian friends in Springfield that I was praying for them. It felt so deficient an offer. But they are Christians like myself. We believe God hears our prayers and uses them. But today I wanted to argue with God like Jacob or Job or David… We worked for so long to undo this, to tell the truth, to see justice brought to our friends…

Why did the bad guys get to win? Why did they get rewarded for their lies? Why did they get to carry out this evil deed? Why did so many people believe and support their lies and dehumanizing words? Grief. Such grief. How long, Lord?

I love journalists but could never be one because I cannot seem to get my act together to write promptly. I have started six posts since January and they all sit in my drafts folder, unfinished. Whoops.

Welcome to all the new folks who have kindly followed me despite the lack of writing! (And shout out to and , whose followers have been jumping over to follow my Substack in droves!)

I am going to make a mid-year resolution to get my writing act together.

Let’s talk about money. And why we are all experiencing tighter wallets due to immigration policies. It’s going to get worse.

Our policy team at the National Immigration Forum writes that in 2025, “For the first time since the Great Depression, more people left the United States than those who came in. This phenomenon is known as net negative migration.” Employment-based petitions fell by 26%, humanitarian by 69%, and F-1 student visas fell by 31%

Experts say the decline in legal migration could impact the U.S. economy. “Immigrants are not just workers; they also create jobs. That’s partly because they, like all of us, consume goods and services that create demand for jobs,” said Julia Gelatt of the Migration Policy Institute.

As you hit the kettle to make a cuppa to read the short paper from my colleagues, here are a few examples I can think of immediately while we wait for that water to boil.

How do current immigration policies make your life more expensive?

Food costs. Immigrants make up 70% of our agricultural workforce and 40-45% of those are estimated to be undocumented. Farmers have been asking for decades for more visas and reforms to the current visas they can access. They are a mess of a bureaucracy to navigate and we don’t have enough visas for the labor needs on our farms. We need more of them. We need to make them less complicated to access. We need labor that is beyond seasonal (though good recent move giving the dairy industry access to H2A seasonal visas). Arresting our immigrant workforce instead of passing reforms in Congress so our farms can access the labor they need will leave all of us in trouble and our food more expensive.

Housing crisis. It is complex, but one aspect of the problem: we don’t have enough new houses being built. Immigrants make up 26% of the labor force in the building industry. Losing them is not going to help us have the amount of housing built we desperately need.

Employers are losing years of investment and training in workers. This costs companies money and it ends up affecting the consumer.

Fwd.us estimates that Americans will spend an additional $2150 this year due to immigration policies impacting goods and service prices.

International student visas falling by 31%? Colleges take far more money from international student fees than they do from US, both in-state and out-of-state. That crushing blow will affect the cost of a US education and, in some cases, affect if universities can stay open at all.

One might think that humanitarian immigration dropping by 69% means more money for Americans, but in fact it doesn’t. Immigrants in those categories pay taxes; they fill jobs where there are vacancies, helping companies stay viable, and keeping the rest of those jobs paying Americans. In some communities, refugee admissions have been the main avenue by which population decline has been staved off (keeping taxes flowing into cities for goods and services we all benefit from.)

Last week the Supreme Court made a decision that the Trump Administration could rescind TPS for Haitians and Syrians. The cost of this will be dire for those populations of immigrants. Haiti has a level 4 travel warning on it from the State Department telling Americans it is not safe to visit. But it will also impact our wallets. Governor Mike DeWine had this to say about Springfield:

“Springfield Ohio, has been coming back, and one of the reasons it has been coming back is because Haitians were able to fill jobs that were not being filled at all. And that is what the employers will tell you, and that is what the Mayor will tell you. He issued another statement yesterday saying, ‘they are buying homes. They are building businesses. They are working. And they are trying to raise their family there and contributing to the community. This is a job killer for Ohio. This is a job killer for Springfield. This is bad for our state.”

NYTimes journalist Miriam Jordan has been visiting Springfield since before President Trump made it his campaign target in the fall of 2024. She wrote in her latest piece, “Haitians who arrived in Springfield, Ohio, by the thousands in recent years revived a city that had been in decline for decades.

They worked in manufacturing, distribution and the service sector, easing labor shortages and fueling economic growth. Their children starred on athletic teams and played in school concerts.

Now, Springfield faces the prospect of losing the people that powered its resurgence.”

The US has a serious population decline and while that is happening we are deporting immigrants of all statuses, including those who have been here for decades lawfully paying taxes. We are making it less desirable for immigrants to move here and we are breaking our visa system even more, with significant delays to H1B and other visas. People equal production, buying power, growth, a larger economy, and the product of everyone’s contributions means we all thrive. Less people, equal we all make up the difference in lack of workers, a smaller tax base, buyers, and missing innovation we all have benefited from and not realized it.

The new DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullen said after the Supreme Court ruling, “Migrants in the US on temporary status should seek permanent status or leave,”

The tragedy of all of this is we have Members in Congress and people leading in our Federal government like Secretary Mullen who do not realize that TPS never came with access to a green card. There was no way to become permanent. Which is why we have had folks here 2, 10, and even 30 years, working, contributing, benefitting Americans with their buying power, work contributions, and taxes, with no way to turn their status into anything permanent.

What we need is to desperately change course from policies that are ejecting the people we need that matter so much to our country, and Congress needs to create reforms so that folks on TPS can stay.

TPS holders, along with all of the other broken parts of our immigration system, will continue to harm Americans in the wallet and plague all of our moral consciences until Congress changes something.

Who is my Neighbor? A Summit on Springfield, Immigration and the Church was beautiful. Over 450 people signed up to join us online or in person, and while Ohio was the audience I invited, people drove and flew in from half a dozen other states. We heard sermons and ran tangible workshops on resources we thought people might need in 2025. They ranged from starting low-cost immigrant legal services, to learning from immigrant pastors as they walk with their communities through immigration fears, to advocacy.

Two days later, we had a new President and while we knew much grief was coming, even I was not prepared for how bad it would be. Refugee resettlement, our nearly 50 year successful State Department program, was suspended on the first day. A year later, we are allowing zero persecuted Christians in, and those who came lawfully in the last 5 years have real fears their promised security is in jeopardy with the Administration freezing all access to citizenship for dozens of countries and promising to readjudicate hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants. Immigrants married to US citizens have been arrested at green card appointments, we have broken the law on due process, we have punished all Afghan allies and people from 20+ other countries for one man’s crime in November, even Afrikaners, the only ethnic group allowed in under the new abysmal refugee ceiling of 7500 (a group that does not fit the definition of a refugee) have a man languishing in US detention who believed the President and has spent months in a cell for it.

In a few weeks, a little over a year after our focus on Springfield and immigration, the anti-immigrant policies will come for them. They experienced so much pain in 2024 including death threats, loss of business, and fear because of falsehoods told by the Vice President, President, other politicians, and political hacks. Haitians who came to the US lawfully will lose their TPS and be deportable in February. One of our Senate offices has warned the community that the intention is that ICE will begin arresting people immediately.

It is a gloomy first post for 2026. A year ago, we were asking, “What now?”

That question still matters.

There has been pressure to close lawful channels of immigration for the last year. There have been moves to strip lawful immigrants of their immigration status and render them deportable. We have watched legal channels for immigration close. Ideas like “restitution,” a long-backed policy of Christian organizations in the Evangelical Immigration Table that would have offered a pathway to legal status and to pay a restitution for the 10 million undocumented immigrants that reside in the U.S. aren’t even approachable conversations right now. Instead, it is “how do we stop the rescission of TPS so that the lawful Haitian immigrants in Springfield Ohio don’t lose status next month?” We are redirecting members of law enforcement across the country to carry out immigration enforcement on the group of people who have the lowest crime records in the US. How will we be safer if we allocate those resources away from solving serious crimes in our country? (Immigrants, including undocumented, have long been charted as committing the least amount of crime.) How do we stop ICE from running rampant in our cities as a rogue, undertrained, masked set of bandits, arresting immigrants indiscriminately? We can’t get to immigration reform or find solutions for long, complicated subjects like our undocumented population when there is chaos and little being done to focus on solutions that serve the labor force and the values needs of the U.S. It’s hard to focus on solutions when every day we are seeing immigrants treated without dignity in such heart-wrenching ways.

I woke Sunday morning to a phone filled with messages from Christian leaders and pastors in MN talking about the terror that immigrants are experiencing in their city. Today I heard that lawful refugees who had come in the last year were arrested by ICE in their homes. These are folks who came the right way and are eligible for a green card by the end of their first year. We are in a dangerous place as a nation where the rule of law and restraint, just government and just policies are all experiencing a pressure and an overturning like never before. My close friend whose parents emigrated to the US in the 1970s, said his parents are fearful their citizenship will be taken away. They are afraid of their family being targeted. They have been Americans for decades. They built great lives here and raised American kids. Immigrants who have contributed greatly to the fabric of our communities are feeling a fear they should never have to feel.

What do we do?

We keep calling. We make noise about it to our members of Congress, to the White House.

We write and tell the truth.

We are kind to those who voted for the President but are starting to get second thoughts about this. “This feels too far.” Don’t lecture them. Welcome them to raise their voice and join you. If that is you reading this, welcome.

We look for ways in our own communities to tell immigrants they are welcome and to serve in the myriad of gaps that now exist. My church started a fund for refugees who had SNAP benefits taken away in November and are inviting other churches to contribute to it.

In the primaries and this autumn, vote. Look at candidates’ statements on immigrants. Do they support this? Did they join in lying about Haitians eating cats and dogs for political points? Don’t vote for them. Vote for people who tell the truth and treat humans with dignity not political pawns.

It’s going to be a long year. Find ways to create beauty. Dine with people and stay off your phone. Laugh. Look for ways to be silly and creative. Get out in nature. But then, don’t check out, serve, make those phone calls, lean in. Even run for office. We need you to help turn this ship around.

We are an idea of self rule of the people and by the people, a country that is not defined by race, religion, or even language, but by shared values about freedom, equality, and democracy—ideals that people from anywhere can aspire to and participate in.

More often than not, we are often competing ideas of the ideals of what we want to be and what we do in practice. America is an idea that at times has been the beacon and hope of many around the world, other times has been resented abroad for our hypocrisy, and other moments, our biggest nemesis is ourselves, our own people driving us apart with competing ideas of who we should be that is far from what is spoken of in our founding documents. Becoming U.S. is about that tension of who we want to be and who we are and the working out our identity together.

Becoming U.S. is also about the motto our nation developed in 1776.

“E Pluribus Unum,” “Out of Many, One.”

Becoming U.S is about becoming “us"… a nation made up of peoples from strange languages and food and customs and religions and cultures, and striving to be one people. It is what makes America an incredible country. It is also one of our greatest difficulties. Immigrant children become American. They lose their families language very often. They meld into the strong rugged individualism that has made up this country for two centuries. But each new wave of immigrants is a struggle. Language and cultural differences are confusing and bring suspicion from older groups of more established Americans. Who can really be American is a question as old as this nation. Benjamin Franklin thought Germans too swarthy of a skin tone to possibly be American. The Irish, Jews, Italians, Poles, Chinese, Mexicans, Arabs, and more have been the focus of suspicion in different eras and then, suddenly a generation later… they are rooted deeply and sometimes the bringers of suspicion to the next group of immigrants.

We can do it though. This difficult pluralistic experiment in democracy and freedom with rights deeply enshrined in the Constitution and amendments is an experiment and an idea worth holding on to and fighting for the next generation. I will continue exploring the “how” to become US more in the posts ahead this autumn.

Quite a few different types of labor crisis actually.

We are a shrinking population and not replacing ourselves which leads to deep concerns about replacing workers in the marketplace as people retire. The U.S. birthrate is 1.66 births per woman as of 2022. I wanted 3-4 kids but dating has been dire and disappointing so I have added to this shrinking population.

This means a smaller tax base, not enough people to take jobs, start companies. But even more pragmatically, there is a large generation of Baby Boomers in retirement years, needing more health care, living longer, needing more care from nurses and doctors and nursing home staff, and home health aides and we do not have a big enough workforce in those areas to cover all of the people who need care. As they take out pensions for longer (praise God for longevity and longer life expectancy) there are fewer people joining the workforce to pay in.

Then there are other types of labor crises that have been here for decades but most of us are oblivious to them. How much do you pay for milk? How much are you willing to pay for milk? Dairy cows are milked 2-3 times a day with twelve hour intervals between milkings. Humans need to hook up the cows to the milking machines. Dairy cows need milked year around. Americans of my generation and younger have largely not stayed on the family farm to carry on this work. It has been carried about by faithful immigrants. Farmers have not had enough or adequate work visas for decades (“seasonal” is not the right descriptor for a lot of work that is needed year around so seasonal visas fall short.) About half of our farmworkers are unauthorized.

The U.S. Agricultural Secretary Brooke Rollins made the absurd declaration that we would have a “100% American workforce” and suggested that “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program” could fill farmworker roles quickly. Apart from the deeply alarming Statist worldview she’s espousing, I have been to Cuba and seen the bread lines, no thanks. I am thinking of my two friends on Medicaid with highly special needs dependent children who need full time care who both have lost husbands to death and divorce. They aren’t going to be pulling wheel chairs and feeding tubes through the corn fields. The absurdity of it all.

A solutions focused plan would be to legalize our farm workforce. There have been ideas like Restitution Based Immigration Reform the coalition of the Evangelical Immigration Table has espoused for well over a decade. The Farm Workforce Modernization Act would do much to address the needs of farmers.

Republican Representative Maria Salazar will be reintroducing a new version of the Dignity Act that includes farm workforce improvements. I am looking forward to reading her new bill when it drops.

All of this is solutions focused. We could go across industries that need workers and modernize and update our visa system so we have the visas available for the workforce we need. It is much better than some version of Big Government Control that Brook Rollins is promoting with such absurdity. Medicaid participants are not a replacement for trained skilled farmworkers who are working a laborious backbreaking job. The government should not be assigning people jobs anyways. That should be left to the Marxists and Communists, not the United States.

We should honor those who have put food on our tables for decades with pathways to permanent status and not masked ICE agents showing up and arresting them.

The U.S. has two pathways ahead: First is shrink our workforce and economy, driving prices up and ripping apart hard working families. Second is Congress could pass one or more immigration reform bills that expand visas, fill gaps where none exist, create restitution and pathways for earned citizenship for those who qualify, it will keep farms open, companies competitive, Americans and immigrants paying good prices for goods because supply chains don’t shrink, and we will be a country of solutions instead of destruction. I choose the second. What about you?

However, I am going to bed rather than tell you more about the border, or finish one of the 12 posts I have started. But I did want to drop you a quick note to say, register and attend this zoom webinar tomorrow at 2pm ET. It will be well worth your time. The last of our Security & series at the National Immigration Forum.

REGISTER HERE

As deportations are on the rise, we must talk about due process and why it fundamental to our Constitution and rights the founders enshrined. We have been doing a series at the National Immigration Forum called “Security and..” I do hope you’ll join us for the second webinar in the series this Monday, May 19, at 2pm ET. You can register here for Security and the Rule of Law where we discuss how we can uphold security while fostering community partnerships and preserving the constitutional right to due process.

After a tumultuous few years displaced, Laila and the kids recently were deported back to Afghanistan from Pakistan and are staying with her brother. She can't leave the house really. Pakistan has been kicking out Afghans who are undocumented as well as those with visas. They charge them cruel prices. The police demand bribes. They can't work. They can't get any permanent status there. H, the husband has been working nonstop for a week to try to secure them new visas to bring them back to Pakistan. They've been illegal a number of times on visa overstays because being displaced for years with no permanent way to work is difficult in every way imaginable. He worked with our military and had 40 high security contracts. They were in hiding before the Taliban took over with significant security threats. We left them behind when they should have been evacuated. I got involved in their story a few months before the fall of Kabul and I don't get involved in cases because there are so few lawful possibilities to immigrate here. They had a story I couldn’t look away from even though it wasn’t my job to get involved. They had a real shot and a case (most don't and I tell those people that) and it was only our messed up bureaucracy why they weren't here and it was because of their work with us they were in acute danger. Friends and I pushed through on their SIV case in our personal time.

Afghanistan won't let women be heard in public. They are back to donning burqas in a mandatory way (the blue and black entire coverings where not even their eyes are visible.) Women have been banned from universities and school. They can't work. Laila is a doctor. H has a masters degree. He was VP of a company. They speak four languages and are fluent in English.

They were weeks from a decision that would have given them permanent resettlement in the US through Welcome Corps (part of the refugee resettlement program). We privately raised all of the funds necessary to cover their first few months here and were prepared to help them find jobs and get registered with schools. We were looking for apartments and small houses for them in Stow, Akron, Cuyahoga Falls and Monroe Falls when the travel ban on refugees happened on Jan. 20th. It was supposed to be a 90 day suspension. That day passed on April 20th and there has been no review, no reinstatement. Nothing to restart this 40 + year old program that has safely resettled 3 million vetted refugees to the US and integrated them into American communities. It has kept families safe from the Taliban, from religious persecution like Iranian Christians and the Karen from Burma, from statelessness and ethnic persecution like the Bhutanese Nepalese, from war like Sudan, and it has protected our allies like the Kurds of Iraq or Afghans.

The US government has closed down every possible humanitarian option to find safety here since January 20th.

They are ALL closed.

Asylum. Refugee resettlement. Temporary Protected Status. Humanitarian Parole.

On April 22, friends of mine had to go back to the dictatorship of Nicaragua when their legal status was suspended three weeks earlier. The husband was an assistant pastor a few counties south. A church sponsored them to come. He also worked in a local company and they desperately wanted him to stay. They were shocked. International Christian Concern has documented the increasing religious persecution of Nicaraguans as the government has kicked out Baptist and other evangelical organizations and declared the Catholic Church a terror threat and launched false accusations at missionaries to deport them. They have jailed journalists and closed 9 universities, going after any independent thought. But we revoked their humanitarian parole status and told them they had less than a month to leave or risk ICE detention.

But the Trump Administration has focused on bringing one people group here as refugees. Only one. Afrikaners. They want white South Africans to come. I know some amazing Afrikaners and other English background South Africans. There have been challenging experiences for farmers. But to say they fit the definition of a refugee and should come through refugee resettlement is egregious. Some of the trouble they are facing now is a product of the decades of Apartheid they themselves levelled on the country with egregious levels of discrimination and violence towards anyone who wasn't white. South Africa is a prosperous country. It is not at war. No group like the Taliban are ruling. It's a travesty of justice and the truth to say they are persecuted and deserve our shelter while we turn our backs on Afghan Muslims who endangered their lives to work with the US military because they believed in America and in Democracy, and we revoke the lawful TPS status of Afghan Christians, who have no religious freedom under the Taliban and both groups only have death to face. It is a sin that we seek them out for resettlement while we close our doors to everyone else.

There was a worship service at the White House recently. All I could think when I saw it was both the lyrics of Jon Foreman as he sang the words of Amos 5:21-24

“I hate, I despise your religious festivals;

your assemblies are a stench to me.

Even though you bring me burnt offerings and grain offerings,

I will not accept them.

Though you bring choice fellowship offerings,

I will have no regard for them.

Away with the noise of your songs!

I will not listen to the music of your harps.

But let justice roll on like a river,

righteousness like a never-failing stream!

We Christians call ourselves persecuted in America while we close the doors to the real persecuted. We have sought power for ourselves while we have turned our backs on the mothers and fathers and children in need of safety and a chance for their kids to go to school. We offer a group that has not been displaced by government sourced genocide or focused religious or ethnic cleansing, refuge, and claim we are doing the work of God. When I see the noisy songs at the White House, I think with Jon Foreman,

"I hate all your show and pretense

The hypocrisy of your praise

The hypocrisy of your festivals

I hate all your show"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/apr/06/white-afrikaner-donald-trump-america-us-administration

https://www.persecution.org/2024/05/27/christian-persecution-deepens-in-nicaragua/

https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/

https://reason.com/2025/04/24/washingtons-broken-promises-leave-afghan-allies-in-limbo/

We hope you can join us at our first webinar this Thursday at 2:00 p.m. ET. Register today!

A week ago UNHCR updated the number of globally displaced people worldwide to 117.3 million. In 2015, when I started working with resettled refugees in Ohio, the number was 59 million.

Candidates can campaign on the border. Will the candidates speak about what has driven people to the border? Do the candidates for President speak about the leadership role in the world the U.S. should take in addressing the desperate reasons so many people are leaving their countries to seek safety in another?

I was on the phone with a pastor in rural Amish country Ohio. He is mobilizing his small church and communicating with area businesses that employ immigrants to start an English program for the largely Guatemalan community around them.

I spoke at an immigration event run by the Medina County Economic Development Corporation a few months ago and speakers spoke of the economic contributions that immigrants are bringing to the country, how difficult it was for immigrants to come to the U.S. through varying ways, and what solutions could be found to our broken immigration system. It was an incredible event an an honor to lead a panel and be part of it.

Do the candidates for President tonight or any other office speak of solutions? We all know our immigration system is broken. Or is rhetoric used simply for partisan talking points. The American people need solutions. Those affected by displacement who have fled their countries need solution. Our businesses need solutions to the shrinking workforce through demographic decline. Tonight, listen for solutions.

Dignity. Look for words that bring dignity. America, at it’s best is a country that is full of hope. We are scrappy. We are innovative. We believe in a promise and a dream that drew many of our ancestors here. Does the rhetoric tonight around immigration reflect America at it’s most hopeful and dignified, giving dignity to those who are struggling. Or does it showcase our worst sides?

Americans want solutions. We want border and immigration solutions that value security, compassion, and order. We can do all three.

The National Immigration Forum has a corporate roundtable made of Fortune 500 companies who are with us on needing immigration reform as well as programs to help develop immigrant workers to reach their fullest potential. From banks to small businesses and farms, I had a great time with the folks of Holmes county who are leaning in to their need for more workers and asking questions about what is broken. One farmer, passionate about seeing more just policies and legal statuses available for the people who make their farm go, had a lot to say. She said that their farmworkers were “like family.” (Join me for calling for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act and a Restitution pathway for those who are here undocumented. So many people who bring us food to our tables desperately need these kinds of bills to pass. Our gratitude for food is a good motivation to call your Congress members today.) 

Yesterday the Senate voted down a bill that had been hard wrought. It was what the House asked for in exchange for Ukraine support. It was bipartisan. Senator James Lankford helped craft a bill that offered mostly conservative asks, including the toughest rework of our asylum system and border security in decades and then …. A declaration of “dead on arrival” by House Speaker Johnson over the weekend, before he had read the bill, pulled back a bunch of votes in the Senate. Yesterday it didn’t pass. The end. It was maddening to watch. 

While Congress is not being productive, their constituents are. We know the border is a mess. Yet I hear from evangelical pastors in Indiana asking how their church can host the migrants being shipped to Chicago. I am working with a group of Hispanic pastors in Cleveland to put on an Immigration Response event so that churches and Chambers of Commerce around Northeast Ohio can wrap their arms in welcome around these newcomers to our community. If you would like to help us figure out an emergency response network for the arrival of newcomers, we would love to have you. You’re also welcome to come learn a bit about why so many people are coming to our border, how they are ending up in Ohio and what some of the churches have been doing so far to welcome folks. 

"No matter what happens with this bill, it cannot be the end of Republicans’ and Democrats’ courageous work together," Forum President Jennie said this week. "Americans need, and want, more." 

The bill died. But we still need Congress to act and to compromise. It’s what they were elected to do. 

Based on the actions of midwesterners, their welcome and problem solving I see in small towns, cities, and suburbs around the midwest, I couldn’t agree more. Americans want more. We also aren’t waiting for Congress to show up and be the kind of country we know we should be. We are little associations of people showing up. 

A few months ago I was telling you stories about why asylum was important and mattered. I got completely derailed and took too long of a break from this new Substack. 

I am going to continue that story and more with my next post and try to make these more often in 2024. 

What would you like to hear about in the world of immigration?

“When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone studies it and applies it.”

Alexis de Tocqueville

Thank you to all of your kind engagement with my first substack of Becoming U.S. I was hoping it would be useful as we think of that wonderful and tricky work of “E Pluribus Unum,” that quintessentially American motto, “out of many one” that would engage the immigration and cultural and related faith questions of our time. I was not prepared for how many of you would read and subscribe so quickly. Thank you. The next few weeks I am going to talk about asylum and the U.S./Mexico border. It’s such a confusing subject. But first, let’s talk about Henry Ford. 

Yes, the car guy. 

My family has a lot for which to thank Henry Ford. Founder of Ford Motor Company, Ford’s invention of the assembly line, and his subsequent company changed a lot for my family's futures. Family Staats’ opportunities changed drastically because of him. 

My grandfather had an 8th grade education because he had to quit school to work the family farm in the Depression much to his forever shame. My father got a skilled trade right out of high school and worked at Ford Motor Company for 40 years as a millwright. My family had a comfortable middle class life in a generation. Overtime pay at Ford and my dad’s hard work ethic paid for a good majority of my college degree leaving me a rare millennial who has no college debt right now. 

I learned to drive on a manual Ford Ranger truck in high school thanks to my dad’s insistence (and stress as I rolled down hills backwards in Northeast Ohio while he yanked the parking brake and shouted, “STOP!!”). Learning stick shift immediately on entering the driving world made me fall in love with how a car can move. It was a great skill to have for my years abroad where automatic cars are less common. I will someday only drive 50 year old cars because I refuse to drive an automatic. You can keep your silly push button cars. Give me a manual thank you very much. 

The Ford truck looked like a bit like this: 

While we experienced a changed family trajectory because of Henry Ford, Henry was not all roses. 

Henry Ford was deeply anti-semitic. Deeply. 

His hatred for Jewish people was so virulent he peddled his prejudice and conspiracy theories around the country in ads taken out in papers nationwide. He bought the Dearborn Independent newspaper and had 91 stories published that peddled prejudice, lies, and conspiracy theories about the recent Jewish immigrants that had come to the US in the late 19th and early 20th century as well as Jewish people abroad. Every Ford Motor company dealership was required to carry the paper. Ford’s hatred was exported around the country. 

Anti-immigrant sentiments were high a century ago. The Ellis island days that we wax nostalgically for angered the country back then and old fashioned influencers like Henry Ford had a lot to say. The Jews, Italians, Polish people and other eastern european immigrants “would never become American,” according to popular anxieties. They would “dirty our bloodlines.” They would “bring disease.”  They would be a “competition for jobs.” They were a danger to the country with their foreign religions (remember Catholics were hated for a looonnnng time as well as Jewish people). 

And in Henry Ford’s mind, all problems could be blamed on Jewish people. These lies have not gone away as you can hear in the Sharon McMahon Here’s Where It Gets Interesting podcast I heard this week (after I started writing this). 

In 1924 an anti immigrant piece of legislation passed called the Reed-Johnson Amendment. Its goal was to stop this “terrible” flow of migration and so they said only 2% of every ethnicity present could immigrate to the US (excluding anyone African and Asian- the Chinese Exclusion Act was still having effects.)  One more thing. The 2%? They dialed back the date on this 30 years. The 1890 census. Only 2% of the ethnicities in the country in 1890 would be allowed in. Now the crafters of the amendment could purify the country and stop those Italians, Jewish, and Polish people from invading us. 

It worked. And it had seriously terrible consequences.

U.S. Immigration basically halted for forty years. But it wasn’t that it just slowed immigration to a grind. It was that when people desperately needed to flee danger they couldn’t. Post World War II we rejected many people fleeing the Soviets with fears they would be Communist and referenced our 1924 nationality quotas. 

The worst story that has always stuck in my mind though was in 1939. The St. Louis, a German ocean liner, fled to Cuba and then our shores from Hamburg Germany with over 900 people on board, most of them Jewish. Cuba and the U.S. both refused them entry. We referenced our immigration nationality quotas and turned the ship around back to Europe because they didn’t have visas. The visas were hard to come by because of our 1924 law and this was a dire emergency with Hitler in power. 254 of those passengers died in the Holocaust. 

So why did I go on this long history lesson about good old Henry? I told you this would be a substack about complicating the narrative. Henry Ford significantly helped my family with his auto company. Yet his anti semitism and influence cost our nation and peoples lives by the public campaign of fear and its consequences on our public policies. 

Understanding what is happening at our border and what we need to do to fix it must be taken in the context of what has happened the last 100 years.  

The U.S. eventually, in a redemptive move after 1924, helped craft the world’s definitions of refugees and eventually asylum laws on the international scene and for the U.S. 

“The core principle of the 1951 (Refugee) Convention is non-refoulement, which asserts that a refugee should not be returned to a country where they face serious threats to their life or freedom.”

Asylum is only able to be pursued by crossing an international border. 

World War II produced loads of people displaced from their countries. While we did not dial back the quota system or open more doors for immigration until 1965, we began to see the displacement of people as something that needed to be addressed in 1951 for Europeans, and then later creating a humanitarian parole program to bring displaced Hungarians to the U.S.

“Following the rapid and violent 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet Union, thousands of Hungarians fled their homeland and sought refuge in Austria, which soon became overwhelmed by the influx of refugees. As a result, 36 nations, including the U.S., offered to help resettle the displaced Hungarians. The U.S. admitted 6,130 Hungarian refugees under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953.

Additionally, over 30,000 Hungarians entered the U.S. under the attorney general’s parole authority (section 212[d][5] of the INA). INS officers examined these applicants in Austria and again when they arrived in the U.S., where they were temporarily held at Camp Kilmer, New Jersey.

Two years later, on July 25, 1958, Congress passed a law allowing Hungarian parolees to become lawful permanent residents of the United States.

This program set the precedent for using the attorney general’s parole authority to admit refugees to the U.S. and for Congress to later pass special legislation allowing the parolees to become lawful permanent residents. This process would be repeated on several occasions during the following decades.”

So what does this all mean about our southern border? Next time I will look at the complications of who is coming? Can they stay? We can’t take everyone so what now? Are people being deported? What’s broken about our asylum system and what could fix it?  

But a few final thoughts as I land today.

• We once refused refugees and sent them to their deaths because asylum wasn’t a possibility.. 

• We have always been both a proud nation of immigrants and a nation that has anxieties about the new immigrants that arrive.

• The U.S. was the leader developing global refugee and asylum laws and definitions in 1951, 1967, 1980 etc. 

• Asylum is only accessed by crossing an international border. 

• Not everyone who asks for asylum is granted it. 

I got this amazing text about a week ago from an Afghan friend. She was evacuated in 2021 and was given the temporary humanitarian parole with the rest of the evacuees. Parole has no clear pathway towards green cards so they have to navigate our backlogged asylum system to be granted to stay (unless Congress acts and allocates them a pathway to permanent status.) Husna has been working to support her family, studying full time, and hopes to go to medical school. She’s in her early twenties and has a lot of weight on her shoulders. I am so grateful for her asylum claim going through. However, it would be much easier for her and all of our other allies if Congress would pass an Afghan Adjustment Act much like Hungarian Americans were given a pathway to permanency in the 50s. The AAA means our allies don’t have to navigate our complex asylum system but can have a clear pathway to green cards. Rejoice with me over Husna’s good news and if you would, send your elected officials a message today asking them to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act. Our Afghan allies shouldn’t have to live in immigration uncertainty and legal limbo. 

This idea has been rattling around in my head as I watch politicians and pundits oversimplify immigration and as I find myself in churches, conferences, and civic spaces around the country answering questions of a very confused and frustrated public. Becoming U.S. (I am saying “us,” but being clever.) is my attempt to tell the complex stories of how we got here, these United States, this nation of immigrants. It is to tell the beautiful and complex and painful stories we have wrestled with as we have tried to become a “more perfect union” as the Framers wrote so long ago. 

I hope to lay down some ideas a few times a month, complicate the narrative, offer some solutions to our immigration struggles (they won’t be simple because immigration is not simple) and some ideas for both healing and hope in these divisive times. Some thoughts will be by looking back and some will be by looking forward. A lot of hope will be through the lens of the gospel that shapes me so. Thanks for hanging out for those who are not Christian or even very religious.  

America is a nation of immigrants and that is a really special part of our identity. We have trickled onto these shores in small batches and poured in larger batches and these complicated stories to how we all got here are worth telling. I hope maybe some of you will let me tell your stories here and I will tell you some of my own family immigration history. 

Who belongs in America? It’s a question as old as our nation and its tension has always carried both the anxiety of change as well as the joy of our unique “out of many one” story.. Ben Franklin at our founding famously lamented that Germans would never fit into English settled Pennsylvania. 

“Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion.”

Me, belly laughing at any perceived difference in pasty English and German complexions. A counterpoint to this anxiety is a couple hundred years later President Reagan boasted that one of the unique things about America is that anyone from any culture could become American in a way that people could immigrate to France but never truly become French. These two ideas about immigrants have tag-teamed forever in our history. Hope and anxiety.

“Who belongs,” often comes with the questions to the next batch of immigrants, “How did you get here?” “Was it legitimate?” “Will you be able to blend in with the rest of us?” “Will you change us?” Right now a lot of folks are coming to our border to seek asylum. It’s created a lot of questions and a lot of worry and a lot of politicking. I am going to wade into that conversation a bit over the next few weeks.

Yes, newcomers do change us. But we always remain American with a very strong culture. (Ask anyone in another country how strong our culture is. We have invaded everyone with our culture via television and music and film at the minimum.) Yes, immigrants will and do fit in with the rest of us (often to the fret of of the immigrant parents, the young of every culture learn English and are enthralled with American culture within such a short time that parents stress they will forget where they came from) I have had these conversations with new immigrants and Americans both more times than I can count.

It is also sometimes hard on receiving communities to navigate cultural differences, the already housing crisis in many parts of the country, struggles in communication, the pressure on teachers to teach children who don’t speak the language and more. 

Bad joke intermission. My grandparents were of Swedish heritage and missionaries to the Mexican border and at least my grandmother spoke three languages. My mother and her siblings only spoke English and Spanish and lost the Swedish of their parents and grandparents. While some of my cousins speak Spanish the rest of us abysmally only speak English so with our dropping a language per generation I was sure Gen Alpha in our family would all be mute. So far the kiddos are speaking.

Back to the border. Yes, a lot of folks are coming and seeking asylum. No, the border is not open. (I mean it’s open to commerce, open to the cross border travels of the locals, not open to everyone, open to asylum seekers sometimes, depending what month and what policies are in place.) No, not everyone qualifies for asylum who is asking for it. Yes, the people coming there in higher numbers add pressure and complexities to the job of Customs and Border Patrol officers. No, we are not at all time highs. Remember I said I’d complicate the narrative? Here are a few complications for us to chew on today. 

The record highs of people coming to the border were actually in 2000, 2001, not now despite the politicians emails. (It’s a good fundraiser for them). We are nearing those totals from twenty years ago and have hit very high numbers in the last few months. Why? I really like this chart from David Bier at the libertarian CATO institute. 

Our border crossings have gone up in correlation with the globally displaced refugee numbers because of war, famine, other kinds of violence, persecution and government collapse. 

As of this summer 2023 there were 108 million globally displaced people. When I started working with refugees in 2015 there were 59 million displaced people. There are a lot of people on the move because of terrible circumstances.

Folks are coming to our border from all over the world but some of the higher numbers are from Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti and Venezuela. The last decade or so, Central Americans were our highest numbers. The Bush Institute has a great piece on the Root Causes of Central American Migration: Towards a Holistic Approach. The whole piece is a “complicating the narrative” sort of approach but one line stood out to me. “It is important to acknowledge that a successful hemispheric collaboration targeting the root causes of migration will not result in zero migration. Rather, it will increase economic development and reduce forced displacement, allowing for normal, orderly migration.”

I’ll save my second post for a deeper look at asylum. Why do we have it? Who can access it? The circumstances that have hindered it from working well. But a couple things I will finish with today. There’s a really terrible bill called H.R. 2 that would fundamentally alter the right to asylum and make it almost impossible for people who are persecuted and really need it to access this legal right. I am hoping you’ll tell your Representatives no to H.R. 2. There’s a great story in the Baptist press talking about the Open Doors/World Relief report on this. 

Most of the folks coming across the border either have entered seeking asylum or have a humanitarian parole status (via a new dysfunctional app called CBPONE meant to alleviate border pressure and irregular crossings). They are legal. Asylum seekers have a court date in the future to prove their case. It’s really hard to prove your case and you need to fit the global definition of a refugee and also have proof that you fit this definition. A lot of folks lose their cases. There are people who cross unlawfully and don’t turn themselves in, but most these days are looking for border patrol to try to seek asylum. Asylum seekers who come to our border do not know US immigration law and whether or not they have a good case for asylum. Americans do not know US immigration law and what qualifies someone for asylum. There’s a lot of confusion out there. Criminal smugglers also spread disinformation to profit off peoples desperation.

We need more technology and manpower support for CBP. We need to know who is coming in and out of our borders. Colombia needs to uphold their end of the bargain to stem flows of people through the dangerous Darién Gap and not profit off of peoples’ desperation. 

Two other complicated factors to this? When politicians or pundits get on TV and say the borders are open (even if they do not want migrants to come to the border) they advertise for people to come. Ever think about that? People are facing really hard things and need a safe home to start life over and our unhelpful political fights can spread false information. Being poor doesn’t qualify you for asylum. But that person who heard the borders were open doesn’t know that (even when really strong restrictions would have prevented them from asking for asylum like certain periods the last few years). We need to ask our politicians to be more measured and precise in what they say. And as for solutions that could actually pass both the Republican House and Democratic Senate and get signed by the President? The Dignity Act is a great piece of bipartisan legislation that could amend our asylum system, increase funding for border security, pass needed immigration fixes including permanent status for our Dreamers.

Next time I am going to talk a little bit more about why asylum exists and the stories behind it and our desperate need to reform it for this moment in history while making  a case that we should not do away with it. If you are not bored, stick around. Thank you to those who subscribed with NO knowledge of what I would write. Gluttons for punishment. (Or just really awesome friends). To those I added because you have followed my news and prayer updates before, feel free to unsubscribe if this is not for you, but I think many of you might appreciate it. 

I will end with a story. I hope to tell a lot of these beautiful stories. I was in Urbana Ohio, a small town in Champaign, a county of around 35,000 people in western Ohio a few weeks ago. I sat with a group of pastors talking about immigration, questions about how people arrived, the border, what’s broken etc. We also talked about what Scripture said: Jesus’ call to welcome the stranger, built on the Old Testament commands to love the widow, the poor, the foreigner and the orphan. These Baptists, Nazarenes, Presbyterians, and Pentecostals asked great questions but less were about immigration and border technicalities and most were about how they could get involved in welcoming immigrants in a county that was mostly made up of 96% native born white people. The main immigrant population were farmworkers and none of them knew a farmworker. One of them said he knew a Hispanic pastor. Their decision was to make sure he was invited to the county gathering of pastors to partner and learn both from his immigrant heavy church as well as look at how their churches could welcome his folks better to their community. The spirit of welcome was alive in Champaign County Ohio. Thanks Urbana pastors for having me for such an encouraging conversation. Thanks for your posture of learning!

“We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people -- our strength -- from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.” - President Ronald Reagan