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Interesting Times with Ross Douthat
Trump Turned My Immigrant Identity Into a ‘Chronic Condition.’
00:15:40
We are off for Thanksgiving. But we have a special treat for you from “The Opinions,” a fellow New York Times Opinion podcast. After our own Carlos Lozada immigrated to the U.S. from Peru as a child, he never felt being an immigrant was his overriding identity. But after years of hearing Donald Trump talk about immigration, his feelings have changed.
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- [00:00]
US Bank Representative
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- [00:29]
Michelle Cottle
Happy Thanksgiving. Matter of Opinion Family Michelle Cottle here. My beloved co hosts and I are off this week for the holiday. But in case you're like me and craving a distraction from all the family drama, we have a special treat for you from our very own Carlos Lozada. Okay, now faithful moobsters know that Carlos loves to talk books, especially political memoirs. But he does not usually talk much about himself, which is what makes today's episode so special. In this audio essay, Carlos shares his experience as an immigrant from Peru and how that's affected his view of Donald Trump's talk about immigrants. It's pretty powerful stuff, which is basically what you'd expect from Carlos. So take a listen for a little bit of real Carlos.
- [01:22]
Carlos Lozada
I'm Carlos Lozada. I am a columnist for New York Times Opinion and a co host of the Matter of Opinion podcast. I'm always a little skeptical of pieces or of arguments that begin with as a, you know, like as a Christian conservative, as a person of color, as a progressive, as a fill in the blank. I feel there's a sort of assumed authority there that has been granted. And I think people are more complicated than the single overriding identity. So I said, I'm a columnist, I'm a podcast host. Those aren't my identities, right? I mean, is that really me? I mean, sometimes it is. I'm a father, I'm a son, I'm a husband, I'm a journalist, I'm a reader, I'm a fan of Notre Dame football. I'm also an immigrant.
- [02:17]
Political Commentator
Well, immigration remains a thorny and top issue with voters. This election year.
- [02:21]
Donald Trump
We're going to seal up the border because right now we have an invasion. We have an invasion. What they have done to our country by allowing these millions and millions of people to come into our country and look at what's happening.
- [02:35]
Carlos Lozada
I've never considered the label immigrant to be my calling card, even though it's one I've always carried with me. I landed here as a three year old kid in the mid-1970s and I settled with my family in Northern California in a town where the trees were so thick and lush that you could see the branches meeting and mingling high over the roads. My mom would introduce us around the neighborhood, not just as the new family in town, but as a Peruvian family. She always signed her cards from your Peruvian friends. After some back and forth between Lima and California during my childhood, I've made my home in the United States for decades now. I went to college and graduate school, I passed the citizenship test, I married a native born American, and we even watched our children born in the nation's capital. I'm an immigrant, but over the years that label has moved lower on my dropdown menu. Is immigration something you do or something you are? Is it a step on the way to becoming something else, or does the passage itself forever define you? The longer I'm here, the more it's become a memory, an evocation of some long ago that I share with my children. In recent years, though, the distance has narrowed between memory and identity, between immigration as a once upon a time versus a here and now. In our politics, the presence of immigrants in the United States is again a contested campaign issue. But it's one thing to ponder and debate issues as I do in my work. It's another to be an issue. During the presidential debate last month, when Donald Trump said that immigrants were, quote, unquote, eating the dogs in Springfield, they're eating the dogs.
- [04:29]
Donald Trump
The people that came in, they're eating the cats, they're eating the pets of the people that live there.
- [04:36]
Carlos Lozada
I was hit by this overwhelming sadness. Sadness at the cruelty of the unfounded accusation and at the damage it would inflict on the people in this one town, but also at this relentless diminishing of an American aspiration, an aspiration that I still refuse to dismiss as naive. Ronald Reagan invoked America's immigrant tradition in his farewell address in 1989, when he reminded the world that if his shining city needed walls, the walls had doors.
- [05:08]
Donald Trump
And the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.
- [05:13]
Carlos Lozada
When Trump rejects this parallel heritage, promising bigger walls and locked doors, his words strike at the hopes and insecurities that I always bear. Even when Trump's words are false, their aim is so. I've long seen Trump as a challenge for America, for democratic institutions, for honesty, for the immigrant tradition here. But his cacophony of xenophobia, which is built so relentlessly over this past decade, now feels overpowering. And it also feels directed at me, at who I am, at the choices that I've made. It would be wildly Ahistorical to say that Trump, on his own, has eroded the ideal of America as a nation of immigrants. For all of Trump's particular efforts, the wall, the travel ban, the family separations, now this pledge of mass deportations, he is part of a long tradition of suspicion and repudiation of outsiders. And I have no doubt that Trump's various statements attacking immigrants strike different people, including other newcomers, in different ways. To me, they show that the man who accuses immigrants of poisoning the blood of America is administering his own brand of venom, one whose cumulative effect is to disfigure a nation, not to exalt it. When Trump announced he was running for President in June 2015, he said, when.
- [06:41]
Donald Trump
Mexico sends its people, they're not sending their best. They're not sending you, they're not sending you.
- [06:48]
Carlos Lozada
He went on to brand immigrants as drug traffickers, as rapists. Then he added the most casually dismissive of caveats, saying, and some I assume.
- [06:58]
Donald Trump
Are good people, but I speak to border.
- [07:00]
Carlos Lozada
That assumption of criminality became the first of many transgressions that, while seemingly disqualifying, simply anticipated core elements of Trump's appeal. Yet those words were not the ones that struck me hardest from that statement. To me, Trump's starkest message in that moment was the passivity he implied with one word. They're not sending their best, he said. Sending. Nobody sent me. No government shipped me, my parents, or my sisters to lax, our official port of entry. We chose to leave. We chose this place. My father was obsessed with our education, and he believed his children would receive better schooling in the United States, that we would learn to speak English well. Sending reflects not just how Trump views immigration, but how he sees the world. All powerful leaders making decisions, unquestioned and unreviewable over people's lives. But sending robs me of agency over my own fate. After seven years in California, we moved back to Lima, and I lived there for another seven years until I finished high school. Then I decided to return to the United States for college to make this my home. These were choices, not orders. Sending renders the immigrant not just unwanted, but submissive. Whether I am the best or worst of immigrants is a matter of opinion. That I chose to come here is not. In 2019, Trump told four members of Congress to, quote, go back to the countries, quote, from which they came. The President posted this on social media. So interesting to see progressive Democrat congresswomen who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe, now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United states, the greatest and most powerful nation on earth, how our government is to be run. Why don't they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came? Trump's post suggests that you're lucky to be here. So make no demands and remember, whatever conditions prompted you or your ancestors to leave the old place will forever be held against you in the new one. The irony is that I've often thought about going back. Not about returning to live in Peru right now, necessarily, but about going back to the moment that my family decided to leave. What alternate life could I have lived? What pains and joys and regrets would I have known if that choice had been different? I'm jealous of those Americans who claim one hometown, a place whose rhythms they instantly recognize, a singular setting that anchors their memory. When I visit Lima, I feel out of place. My cultural references are dated, my mental maps are fragmented. I don't quite get the jokes. My longing is for a place that no longer exists, just like that other person that I might have been six years before Trump and his running mate, J.D. vance began spreading rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Trump complained in an Oval Office meeting about the immigrants he didn't like. These were from Haiti, from El Salvador, or from African countries. He asked, why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here? And he said this as he rejected a bipartisan immigration proposal. With little subtlety, he said he'd rather draw from Norway. Why do we need more Haitians? He emphasized. Take them out. Why does Trump think people leave their homelands, often at such risk and uncertainty? Some quarter of a billion people live in countries other than those they were born in, and many more wish to join the exile. The burdens of political turmoil, repression and foreign intervention have not made Haiti a shithole. They've made it a tragedy. My parents enjoyed a comfortable life in Peru, but that life was not enough. My father's American dream was less for himself than for me and my sisters, and we came here to find it. Later, I chose to return to the United States for college because the Peru of my youth was mired in hyperinflation and terrorism, because I missed the sisters who had made that choice already, and because the taste I'd had of America even as a child was hard to forget. That does not make the departure simple. Hoping that the new home will be better than the old one doesn't diminish the pain of truncating the life you've known, leaving a hole so gaping that even a land of opportunity has trouble filling it. If they were shitholes, they'd be easy to leave. At a rally last December, Trump said.
- [11:44]
Donald Trump
They'Re poisoning the blood of our country. That's what they've done. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world. Not just in South America, not just the three or four countries that we think about, but all over the world. They're coming into our country from Africa.
- [12:00]
Carlos Lozada
From Should Trump win the election next month, I'll no longer wonder if America regards immigration as something I've done or something I am. He's given us the answer. Immigration is a chronic condition, and the only cure, he tells us, is a bloody story of mass deportation in 2016. The wall he called for was supposed to protect America. Now deportations are supposed to purify it. But there is no American race or blood that outsiders can pollute. How can immigrants poison the blood of the nation when we have always been its lifeblood? The pretenses are growing less tenable. Politicians can say they're pro child or pro family, but when I form a family, I'm befouling the nation. They can say immigrants should not take advantage of social services, but if I work, then I'm stealing someone's job. They say that home ownership is the key to the American dream, but if I dare secure a home, then I'm distorting housing prices for the native born. The argument is not just about keeping immigrants out or kicking them out, but about denying the full American experience, even to the ones who remain. Almost exactly 10 years ago, I stood up in a Baltimore federal building with dozens of other immigrants and swore the oath of U.S. citizenship. So not only did I renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state or sovereignty, I also had to give up my green card. Now this is a document that, in different iterations, I've had since I was three. It's a wallet sized golden ticket that protected me and justified my presence here. I was always terrified of losing it, so I rarely carried it with me. But I did keep a copy in my wallet just in case I ever had to prove, as it declares on the back, that quote, person identified by this card is entitled to reside permanently and work in the United States. I remember its laminated feel in my hand, and I can still recite the alien registration number on the card. So when I just had to hand it to an official sitting at a desk that day and he tossed it in a box behind him with a bunch of others, I panicked. Without this card, how would I ever prove that I belonged here? When you become a citizen, there's no red, white and blue card to replace the green one. You're just supposed to know. I guess you're just supposed to start walking through the world with this land of the free swagger. I think my temporary panic was a reminder. It reminded me that there's a difference between lawful and included, between needed and welcomed, between tolerated and truly accepted. If Trump's attacks make me that much more of an immigrant in the eyes of this nation, I'll take that outcome. I'll embrace it. So much of who I am flows from that status, and the pang of living in between is a classic American condition, one that both enriches and complicates this place. I am so grateful to live that life here and to have the same opportunity as anyone else to help perfect this union. I don't have to go home to do that. I'm already here.
- [15:56]
Michelle Cottle
To find more audio essays like this one. Search for the opinions Wherever you get your podcasts, be sure to subscribe. And while you're at it, leave a review.
- [16:08]
Political Commentator
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