Ten Things The Media Needs To Know About Immigration — Before Spouting Off About It

Navarrette Nation Substack — A Journo’s Journal 6/18/25

Critical Thinking At A Critical Time

Every Wednesday
698 words; 8 min

It’s baaaaaack. In the United States, immigration is the issue that won’t go away. I’m tempted to say that Americans have been having a never-ending argument over who should come, who should stay, who should go and who should be kept out in the first place for the last 35 years.

Most of the people who study the immigration debate say it began in 1990, in the lead up to the North American Free Trade Agreement. The trade deal was a game changer. Once Nebraska corn farmers were able to sell their heavily-subsidized corn to Mexicans, it was only a matter of time before Mexican corn farmers were put out of business. Once that happened, some of those farmers would, in order to support their families, do something desperate like migrate to the United States.

It’s Macroeconomics 101. More trade with Mexico = more immigrants from Mexico, and more immigrants from Mexico = more racism, more anxiety and more acrimony among Americans.

But, as a student of American history, I can’t swallow the “35 year” figure. The truth is, the U.S. immigration debate has been going on for nearly 350 years. The starting pistol went off in 1683. That is when a group of Quakers and Mennonites from the Krefeld region of the Rhineland area of Germany founded the city of Germantown, Penn., the first recorded German settlement in the English colonies.

As the decades pass, the immigration debate flares up, dies down, and flares up again. There is always another group of immigrants to pick on because people who got here six months earlier consider them dirty, dumb, dangerous, defective and deficient in some way.

Today, we find ourselves in the modern-day equivalent of the Dark Ages. In Los Angeles, the Trump administration has kicked off the start of hunting season on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans — or even regular ol’ generic Americans who step up to defend one of the first two when they’re being snatched off the street by fake ICE agents.

And so, predictably, my media colleagues are once again talking a lot about immigration. I just wish more of them knew what the hell they were talking about.