Chilling effect of immigration rules will blight an American generation

“I’ve been told since fifth grade that college makes you a better person,” said the young woman. Her mother, an immigrant from Mexico, had always dreamed of going to college, but never got the chance. So, as she started her senior year at KIPP University Prep, a charter school in San Antonio, she buckled down and filled out applications to more than a dozen schools.

But then, suddenly, things went sideways. Her mother was in the process of becoming a US citizen this fall, and she was afraid that the financial aid application might derail the process. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the young woman asked me not to use her real name. I’ll call her Mariela.

Back in September, the Trump administration announced a long-rumored proposal to deter immigrants seeking long-term legal residency from using public health, nutrition and housing programs. The result would be that immigrants who use these programs would have a lower chance of receiving long-term legal residency in the United States. While this so-called “public charge” rule does not apply to federal financial aid programs, Mariela’s mother still worried. Advocates for immigrant families call this “the chilling effect” of the administration’s approach to immigration.

Mariela’s story shows how, stunning as it sounds, the symbolism of the administration’s immigration agenda may matter even more than the substance.

Sure, the substance of the administration’s agenda is amply cruel. It has left hundreds of thousands of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) recipients uncertain about their legal status. It has ripped thousands of vulnerable children from asylum-seeking families at the border. Nearly 200,000 US-citizen children stand to lose their immigrant parents to the administration’s sunsetting of their legal right to stay in the country. The public charge proposal alone would affect the long-term legal status of nearly 400,000 immigrants each year.

The underlying message – the symbolism – is clear. In each of these cases, the administration presents immigrants as dangerous. It targets them as others, as not-fully-human, as competitors that undermine the values, pocketbooks and opportunities of native-born Americans. It demeans immigrants and divides them from native-born Americans.

Think about the ugly messages President Trump’s immigration agenda reinforces for native-born Americans. It suggests that, whenever possible, immigrants should be dissuaded from coming to the United States – even if that requires threatening and/or harming children. Further, it suggests that legal immigrants working and paying taxes in the United States should be discouraged from using public programs that would help them and their families live healthier, more productive lives.

It seems almost quaint to insist on this in 2019, when the facts of so many matters have been so thoroughly damned so many times, but still: almost none of this thinking is even remotely tethered to the real world. There are reams of research showing how immigrants make communities – and the country – richer, safer and better.

Mariela’s ears are open too. Think about how she hears these messages emboldening many native-born Americans’ prejudices. In the past two years, Mariela says that she’s repeatedly been abused by white strangers. They taunt her – “you’re gonna get deported” – and that, she says, “makes me feel like I’m illegal here”.

Her mother’s mistrust of an antagonistic, fickle US government could leave a citizen like Mariela without a path through college. It would scramble her precarious, carefully laid plans. She’s done everything right – she’s worked hard and built a foundation for her future. She wants to believe in this country, in its meritocratic promises – work hard, get a degree, do better than your parents. But, in 2019, it’s not entirely clear to her that her country believes in or has a place for her.

There are millions of others like Mariela – children with at least one immigrant parent are a growing segment of the US student body today, and will be a large share of the US workforce in the future. What happens if the Trump administration’s agenda blocks their ambitions and dashes their hopes? Deterring these children from college will make them less educated, and less productive, but it’s hard to see how it makes the country better.

The administration’s immigration agenda also divides immigrant families from native-born American families (many of whom, we should note, are just immigrant families of a marginally less recent vintage). It’s undermining how these families see one another. And for what? Short-term political gains fueled by anxious American revanchism?

One of Mariela’s classmates, who I’ll call Gustavo, ran into similar difficulties this fall. As he approached college and financial aid applications, his parents balked. “[They] told me not to fill mine out. They were scared that something might happen to my mom,” he said. She’s in the country on a visa, and Gustavo said the family worried that applying for financial aid to support his education could cost her the right to stay with her husband and son, both of whom are native-born US citizens. Money’s tight in Gustavo’s family – he says he works after school to help pay the bills. He can’t see a path to college without financial aid.

Asked if he feels American, Gustavo hesitates, mulling his long life in the country, reflecting on his deferred dreams. Maybe someday, he says, when he and “every Hispanic person can feel safe going out and not have any type of racial slurs”. He sighs. “The United States is not what I’d call a free country, because we’re still in the shadows, hiding.”

His situation more or less sums up the problem with the administration’s immigration agenda. Most of it is substantively ineffective, more likely to inflict cruelty on vulnerable families than to achieve any meaningful improvements to the United States. And yet, all of it further stigmatizes immigrant families, and that detaches them from the country’s social life and public institutions. Through a strange and selfish alchemy, it converts basic pieces of upward mobility – access to food, healthcare and education – into supposed luxuries that immigrants and their children should not be able to access.

Like Mariela, Gustavo says he’s trying to believe in the rules, trying to make his family proud. “Most Hispanic parents … want something bigger. They always pushed me to go to college.” Without the resources to pursue his college dream, afraid that his government would penalize or target his family if he applied for financial aid, frustrated and marginalized by his country’s leadership, Gustavo needed another door to opportunity and the American Dream.

So he’s trying another way of proving to his birth country that he belongs, that he should have a shot: he’s offering up his body. He’s joining the military.

• Conor P Williams is a fellow at The Century Foundation