Today's Migrants Are Just like Your Immigrant Great-Grandparents

"Sometimes I dream that I'm back there, crossing that river or back in the jungle. All those things haunt me," recalls Giranny Colmenares of her journey to the United States.

She and her three children fled chaos and hunger in Venezuela—a nation destroyed by the socialist strongman Hugo Chávez. When her mother died from a brain tumor and couldn't get treatment, she decided she needed to leave before the next calamity. 

In New York City, Colmenares finally found a semblance of security, and she received support from the non-profit Una Carta Salva Una Vida. "At least [in the U.S.], you can go out somewhere and find something to eat. In Venezuela, no. If you didn't have anything, you had nothing. You couldn't ask a neighbor, a cousin—no one. No one was going to help you," says Colmenares.

New York City was once known as the "Golden Door" because of its long history of welcoming immigrants like Colmenares. Nearly 40 percent of Americans have at least one ancestor who entered the U.S. through the city. However, today's migrants may be shut out and deported, a humanitarian tragedy that would profoundly damage the U.S. economy. 

Since taking office, President Donald Trump has been signing executive orders to close the door to new immigrants, fulfilling his campaign promise to conduct the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Trump has indefinitely suspended the refugee resettlement program, canceling thousands of flights and leaving 22,000 approved refugees stranded. He ordered the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), potentially affecting the legal status of over 1.2 million people. He also ended the CHNV Parole Program, which allowed over 530,000 migrants from dangerous countries to legally travel and work in the United States. And he shut down the CBP One app, which allowed migrants to schedule asylum screening interviews at U.S. ports of entry. 

Trump has also expanded expedited removal, enabling faster deportations of undocumented immigrants unable to prove two years of residency. And he issued an executive order attempting to end birthright citizenship for children born after February 19, 2025, which a federal judge blocked with a nationwide injunction. 

"The difference [with past immigration waves] is essentially that we no longer have the rule of law," Simon Hankinson, a senior research fellow in the Border Security and Immigration Center at the right-wing Heritage Foundation told Reason."We had very few restrictions on immigration in the 18th century, but they were always decisions made by the host country….Countries have a right to determine who comes into the country and what we've what's changed is that in the past few years, the rule of law no longer applies at the border."

Hankinson compared crossing a national border without documentation to walking into someone's living room uninvited. 

This is a bad analogy. The government doesn't own the country. The bedrock of liberalism is that the state doesn't have a moral right to interfere with voluntary transactions between consenting adults that don't harm anyone else. Immigrants are desperate to work for American companies, and American companies are desperate to hire them.

"The most important reason for illegal immigration is the fact that the legal immigration system is so constrained," says David J. Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute. "For most people who are trying to come to the United States, the legal immigration system is effectively closed off to them."

Juan Pio, executive director of Plan País, a nonprofit that supports Venezuelan immigrants, says that most migrants he has encountered aren't looking for handouts—they want jobs.

Most Venezuelans entering the U.S. seek asylum, a special protection given to individuals fleeing persecution or human rights abuses. However, asylum seekers can't apply for work permits until six months after entering the country. Even then, the federal government often takes longer to issue permits, effectively prohibiting migrants from supporting themselves legally. "I'm looking for a job, but since we don't have work permits, I can't get a job," one migrant told Reason.

Many migrants instead turn to illegal employment, risking the rejection of their asylum applications if caught.

If Trump gets his way by deporting all of the unauthorized immigrants currently in the U.S., it would be economically devastating. "There would be a huge downshift in the labor market," Bier told Reason." You'd see Americans currently working at the front of the restaurant start moving to the back. A lot of restaurants would close, of course. There would be a huge contraction in the economy as those changes happen."

Immigrants are also more likely to start a business, regardless of their legal status. Legal immigrants use 27 percent fewer welfare benefits than native-born Americans, and even undocumented immigrants pay nearly $23 billion dollars to Social Security and nearly $6 billion dollars to Medicare every year.

The controversy in New York City has centered on a policy that allows migrants to stay for free for one to two months in city hotels. Bier opposes this policy, citing the incentives it creates by encouraging migrants to come to one of the most expensive housing markets in the U.S.

Hankinson cites immigrant crime as a reason to seal the border. 

"In the last week, I've seen a case of an illegal immigrant from Venezuela murdering a college student. Yesterday, I read about an immigrant from, I think, El Salvador, who murdered a two-year-old," he told Reason. "We see cases of confirmed crime committed by people who were admitted into the United States outside the law."

Restrictionists like Hankinson point to cases such as the murder of Jocelyn Nungaray by two Venezuelan migrants and the killing of nursing student Laken Riley at the University of Georgia by a Venezuelan migrant. When asked about violent crimes committed by migrants at a recent public event hosted by Reason, Alex Nowrasteh, the Cato Institute's vice president for economic and social policy studies, argued that "you should punish the people who commit the crimes. You should not punish people with the same legal status who didn't commit the crimes."

Nowrasteh also pointed to the empirical data. There's no evidence of a broader migrant-driven crime wave. Violent crime is trending down, even as migration has surged. "When we saw crime spike—[it] spiked in 2020 when immigration was totally bottomed out and hardly anyone was showing up at the border in the summer of 2020, that was driven by mainly native-born residents," says Bier. 

A Cato Institute study suggests that illegal migrants are less likely to be convicted of crimes than native-born Americans. In Texas, the only state that records criminal convictions and arrests by migrant status, illegal immigrants were convicted of 27 percent fewer homicides than native-born residents. 

Census surveys show immigrants are about half as likely to end up behind bars than native-born residents. Migrants desperately want to be in the U.S., Bier says, so they "avoid law enforcement because they think that law enforcement could get them removed from this country."

Immigration could allow the U.S. to avoid population collapse. Because of falling birthrates, the global population is expected to start shrinking by the end of the century, and everyone from Vice President J.D. Vance to Russian President Vladimir Putin is calling for the so-called "childless cat ladies" to start having kids. Instead of pushing people to procreate, the U.S. could just let in more immigrants who want to raise families here.

"At the end of the day, these are human stories," says Pio. "I maintain that liberty and migration are the exemplary part of our history."

When their stay at the hotel in Brooklyn ran out, Giranny and her family moved to Chicago to live with a friend. Many recent immigrants are making the same decision, moving to places where it is cheaper to live and easier to achieve the American dream.

Allowing people to freely migrate to the U.S. was the policy for most of American history. Then came the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the racist quotas of the Immigration Act of 1924, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Is that the America that Trump wants to bring back?

Today, about 40 percent of Americans can trace their ancestry to Ellis Island. That's what made the U.S. so prosperous. And we need a lot more immigration if it's going to stay that way.

It was once a radical idea to suggest that black people, gay people, or women should have the freedom to live and work anywhere. Someday, I hope we can take for granted that someone born in Haiti, Venezuela, Mexico, or any other country should have all the same freedoms as a native-born American.

• Producer: César Báez
• Audio Production: Ian Keyser
• Color Correction: Cody Huff
• Camera: Jim Epstein