Can We Remake a Broken Immigration System?

The great pandemic of our age will bring us, as Arundhati Roy has written, through a portal. In the United States, what lies on the other side will depend, foremost, on the outcome of the presidential election.If Donald Trump is reelected, we face the likelihood of a full-blown authoritarian state. For immigrants—legal and undocumented, already here or trying to come, asylum seekers and refugees—life will be more miserable, more vulnerable, and more frightening. The immigrant rights movement will remain on the defensive. And because the Trump agenda calls for drastically reducing legal immigration as well as rounding up the undocumented for deportation, one wonders how the "essential" work of the nation (agriculture, food processing, dishwashing, construction, domestic work, healthcare) will be done.