Philip Kretsedemas is a public intellectual, researcher, and policy analyst who has spent over two decades examining the intersections of immigration law, social policy, and the complex realities of race and national identity. Born in Toronto, Canada, to a Greek father and a Jamaican mother, Philip’s early life was a mosaic of cultures and migrations—spanning the Bahamas, England, and eventually settling in the United States in the late 1970s. Growing up in South Florida, he witnessed firsthand the diverse narratives of migration that would later define his career.
Philip holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and has served in various academic and nonprofit roles, including a professorship at UMass-Boston and his current position as Managing Director of Research, Evaluation, and Data Analytics at the Acacia Center for Justice. His extensive body of work has been published in prestigious journals and by notable academic presses, with a particular focus on the black migrant experience and the impact of post-9/11 immigration policies.
Now based in the Boston area, Philip’s research delves into the challenges of multiculturalism, the ethics of immigration enforcement, and the evolving security frameworks that shape these policies. In this in-depth conversation, he offers candid reflections on the state of the U.S. immigration policy debate, the cultural and cognitive enablers of terrorist violence, and about how the narratives we habitually use to make sense of immigration and borders look very different when you view them through the lens of the historic black experience.
What first drew you to study immigration law and policy?
My interest in immigration law was sparked by personal experiences and observations growing up. As a kid in South Florida, I was surrounded by immigrant communities—Caribbean, Latin American, and beyond. My own family’s story had also made me aware, early on, of how policy could shape lives.
For example, my grandfather on the Greek side of my family immigrated to the US in the early 1920s, right before the National Origin restrictions were ratified by the Congress. He had the classic American immigrant experience. He migrated by boat to Ellis Island and waited in line with all the other newcomers to get inspected and vetted by the authorities before receiving his green card. He ended up moving to the South and became a successful small business owner and also became a naturalized citizen. But after a few more years, he decided he wanted to return to Greece to marry and have children.
So my dad was born in Greece. My dad also lived through the austerities of WWII. His village in the Southern Peloponnese was actually occupied by German troops at one point (they took over our family house for a period of time and fed their troops with our livestock). Even after Greece was liberated from Nazi occupation it was still a shambles. By that time my dad’s father had already died, but because he had become a US citizen, it was possible for my grandmother to immigrate to the US with my dad and his three brothers, and file for derivative citizenship on the basis of my grandfather’s citizenship. If it wasn’t for that policy on derivative citizenship, my dad and his family would have had tough it out in Greece during the period of post war destabilization.
My mother on the other hand, wouldn’t have met my father if it wasn’t for a policy that allowed Caribbean women to migrate to Canada to perform specific kinds of labor. Basically, it was a temporary worker policy, which also happened to be the only avenue for Caribbean migration to Canada in the late 1960s. So, my parents met in Toronto, Canada. My dad had his MBA by that time and was stationed in Canada, working for a British-owned corporation; and that’s where I was born. In many ways, I’m a product of the intersecting effects of US and Canadian immigration policies. So, I understand that policy matters!
Immigration policies, in particular, are connected to so many other critical policy concerns–like economic growth, national security, international diplomacy, refugee resettlement, as well as the collateral effects of military operations, and the list goes on. I don’t think I’m overstating things if I say that the entire history of the modern world can be told through the lens of migration and immigration policy. But this is also why we need to step back, especially in these times, and take a closer look at the kinds of societies we’re creating with our immigration policies. We shouldn’t be making policy decisions that are responding, only, to the exigencies of the present moment. If we only react to what’s in front of us, we run the risk of replicating the problematic patterns of the past.
You’ve written a lot about the black migrant experience in the U.S. Why is that focus so important to you?
I actually need to reframe this question a bit. It’s true that I’ve conducted research on the experience of black immigrants in the US–and mainly Haitian immigrant communities–but it’s worth noting that I haven’t examined their migration experience. My focus has been on what happens to people after they arrive and settle down here. Plus, most of my immigration-themed research is focused on immigration enforcement and the effects its had on all immigrants. One of the defining themes of this research–which I’ve signaled in my writing–is that it doesn’t revolve around the “right to enter” so much as the “right to stay.”
So, I’m not really approaching immigration policy or immigration enforcement from an “open borders” perspective. I’m actually not a big fan of open borders arguments. That said, I think that there are forms of border regulation that are just not very effective and which impose restrictions on people’s mobility that don’t really enhance national security or the economic well-being of the US population. Nevertheless, there’s a tendency in the immigration policy debate–on both sides of the aisle–to put undue emphasis on borders, and people on the left side of the political spectrum are just as guilty of doing this as people on the right.
Making borders “more open” doesn’t address the kinds of problems faced by people who have become deportable. I’ve also shown that there’s a statistical relationship between the continued escalation of immigration and the continued expansion of immigration enforcement. Basically, for the past several decades, immigration enforcement has been used to police an expanding migration flow; not to restrict this flow.
Media coverage on immigration tends to focus on controversies around the restriction of particular groups, but these stories don’t tell you that the absolute number of foreign-born people being admitted to the US is as large as its ever-been, especially if you account for the exponential growth of people that the government categorizes as “nonimmigrants”; these are all the people who are admitted with a temporary legal status. When you add nonimmigrants to the mix–which amounts to ten to twenty million people a year, by air travel alone, not counting legal, land-border entries which typically exceed 100 million events per year–there’s simply no comparison to any prior era of US immigration.
Of course, the vast majority of these people are not admitted as “immigrants”–that is, with the right to become permanent settlers–but the fact is that this massive population of non-immigrants is driving the growth of the immigrant population. Whether or not they become long term residents, these people get enmeshed in the social and economic life of the US.
I realize I’m framing this all in a way that is counter to the way people, especially in the pro-immigrant camp, think about the problem of immigration policy. The overarching argument, on the pro-immigrant side of things, is that our policies are “too restrictive”; and this is true, if you properly contextualize the parameters of these restrictions. But it’s also true that, despite all of these restrictions–and despite, even, all of the unprecedented crack downs on immigration that are currently being rolled out by the Trump administration–that the scale of mass migration to the US today is larger than its ever been.
I’ve also pointed out that immigrants can end up being victims of this policy agenda which has been described by other researchers as a kind of bulimia–ingesting massive quantities of people and vomiting them out again. In other words, many immigrants are recruited as disposable people; who are useful for a time and can be “discarded” when no longer needed.
Again, the challenge for these people is not the “right to enter” but the “right to stay”; and this is because we don’t have an immigration policy that is guided by a holistic vision of what it takes to build sustainable communities. Instead, we have a policy that has been fashioned in response to a divergent set of short to medium term interests, which enable lots of people to be admitted to the US, mostly under a temporary status–at which point they enter into a neo-Darwinian survival-of-the-fittest type of struggle to figure out how to stay or be deported. You could also describe this as a reality TV plotline, where the goal is to avoid being “voted off the island.”.
And there’s another side to the “right to stay” which is the right not-to-be-displaced. The journalist and researcher David Bacon sums this up nicely with this concept of the right to stay home (which is where I got the idea for the “right to stay” from). But whereas I’ve researched the struggles of immigrants who are trying to stay “here” in the US, Bacon focuses on the struggles of communities in Latin America who are trying to resist all of the pressures they face to migrate north. This is a key part of the social reality of modern migration that usually gets left out of the US immigration debate.
Most people who end up migrating don’t actually want to migrate. They would prefer to stay put, in the culture and communities that they know, rather than try to make a new life in a new land where people are going to look down on them as an “unwanted strangers,” “job stealers” and etc. (or just as someone who “doesn’t really belong here” no matter how law abiding and hardworking they may be).
This is one of the reasons why my Greek grandfather moved back to Greece to settle down, after living in the US for as long as he did. He wanted to spend his golden years in a place where he felt he belonged. And it bears emphasizing that he had the classic American immigrant story. From what I learned from my dad, he was a patriotic American citizen, as are all of my Greek relatives who are living out in Arizona today. But the main point is that, even under the best of circumstances, when people migrate–it is usually out of duress; and this is even more true today than it was a hundred years ago.
So, getting around to the black experience. You probably thought I forgot all about this! As I explained at the beginning of this response, I’ve never really studied the way that black people immigrate. I’ve actually been more focused on the antagonistic relationship between the black experience and the concept of the “immigrant.” I take a deep dive into this antagonistic relationship in my most recent book, which looks at black migration through the lens of the transatlantic slave trade.
In a nutshell, the black experience turns the volume up–to the maximum level–on everything I’ve just shared about migrants being recruited as disposable people and about the right to stay being more important than the right to enter. Since I have the book with me, I’ll read a quick excerpt that makes this point. This is from page 11 of the opening chapter of Modern Migrations, Black Interrogations. “The enslaved Africans’ main problem wasn’t that the borders of the Western world were not sufficiently ‘open’ to them. Their problem is that they were ripped out of their home cultures and forcibly transported to another world, where they were incorporated into the total institution of chattel slavery.” And it goes on, but I hope you can see the connections between this problem and the issues I’ve been discussing throughout this response.
I’m not saying that migration is slavery, by the way. The antebellum-era slave was both legally and categorically distinguished from the immigrant. But when it became possible for black people to enter the ranks of an immigrant population that had been historically “white” –which started to happen in the late 1800s, and also notwithstanding exceptions that had been made for some Indo and East Asian immigrants–then the lines begin to blur, and we end up in the situation we’re in today. Today migration is increasingly not a matter of free choice, but a response to extreme coercion and persecution–which bears a family resemblance to the traumatic displacements of the antebellum era black experience, even though it doesn’t take exactly the same form as this antebellum experience.
This is one reason why so many people who are apprehended by US border patrol today aren’t even trying to enter the US without inspection, as did most of the undocumented migrants of the early 2000s. They’re looking to turn themselves into the border patrol so they can get their Notice to Appear at immigration court and file for asylum. Some security policy analysts have speculated that this could be a change in strategic tact, for people who are just looking to find a way into the US. But even if there is something to this analysis, you have to be pretty desperate to pursue a strategy like this–because it means you end up sitting in detention for weeks or months while you’re waiting for your case to be heard, with a high chance of getting deported at the end of it all anyway. It’s also well-documented that the unstable and persecutory conditions that people are fleeing are very real; and once again, the history of black migration, both forced and free, foreshadows all of this.
So I’ll leave it at that, because I think I’ve said plenty; but that’s how I use the black experience to diagnose the immigration issues of the present day.
How has post-9/11 national security policy reshaped U.S. immigration law?
The post-9/11 era transformed immigration policy into a subset of national security strategy. We saw the rapid expansion of programs like Secure Communities and 287(g), which effectively deputized local law enforcement to act as immigration agents and this is all set to resume in the years ahead.
Border apprehensions have dropped to historic lows since the Trump administration took office, which also opens the door for interior enforcement to play a more prominent role in apprehensions. It also bears noting that, although national security was the guiding framework for the post 9/11 overhaul of the US immigration system (which continues to this day), that the number of migrants who are actually detained and removed for national security reasons has always been very small, amounting to a tiny fraction of 1 percent of the total number of people removed each year.
It’s also important to keep in mind, as I explained in my response for the last question, that immigration enforcement continues to function as a means of policing migration flows that are of unprecedented size, rather than as a means of restricting these flows. This is especially true of controls that are imposed under the auspices of anti-terrorism. These controls have undoubtedly targeted particular segments of the immigrant population. For example, admissions of Arab-Muslim immigrants dropped precipitously after 9/11, but without effecting the overarching “policing model” of immigration enforcement. I discuss this in more depth in chapter two of a book I wrote many years ago for Columbia University Press, titled The Immigration Crucible.
But I also think that people who are want to explore better alternatives to our current national security agenda are doing themselves a disservice by dismissing the threat of terrorism as a non-issue. I’ve been critical of the over-reaching use of national security polices, but I never fell into the camp of people who see national security, only, as a gambit for the untrammeled expansion of state power. Terrorism is also a very real social problem though it doesn’t always take the form of acts of political violence carried out by foreign operatives. There is a deeper problem of people with grievances feeling entitled to use acts of terror to intimidate and control others; or just to make a point. My eyes were opened wider, about this problem, by my teaching experience in the Spring semester of 2013.
The rampage attack that killed all of those children at Sandy Hook elementary school had happened just before the Spring 2013 semester was set to begin. In the aftermath of Sandy Hook, I decided that I had to focus my teaching on the problem of extreme violence. Without disclosing the details, I’ll just say that I knew from my years of teaching that were was an undercurrent of opinion in my classes, that wasn’t always vocally shared, but it was definitely there–of students who were critical of government power, structural racism, and etc. who were willing to rationalize any kind of attack on the “powers that be” as being a necessary thing for the liberation of oppressed people.
We’re seeing these same elements, today, rallying around that young man, Luigi Mangione, who killed, Brian Thompson, that health care CEO, in cold blood. It’s also bears emphasizing that Thompson had nothing directly to do with the poor treatment that Mangione or anyone he knew allegedly received from the health care system. Thompson was murdered simply because he was a symbol, in Mangione’s mind, of everything that was wrong with the health care system. This is what I call “categorical culpability,” it’s a very typical rationale for terrorist violence, and yes, I consider Mangione to be a terrorist.
The young man who used his mother’s automatic rifle to murder all of those school children at Sandy Hook elementary didn’t have a sophisticated terrorist ideology, but he was imitating a kind of violence that is organized around this concept of categorical culpability, that comes straight out of the terrorist playbook. You feel entitled to take the lives of people who are symbols of your grievances, even though they didn’t perpetuate any of the bad treatment you believe you’ve endured. In the case of Sandy Hook this sensibility was used, by the killer, to rationalize his attacks on elementary school kids that he targeted to get back at his mother, who was a teacher at the school.
Anyhow, there are many things I learned from teaching these classes on extreme violence to college students who are just one or two years out of high school. On one hand, these students identify with the victims of this kind of violence, because many of the victims are young people, just like themselves. But on the other hand, the murderers also tend to be young people, just like themselves, who are acting on frustrations that are also shared by many school-aged youth. And all of these sentiments are bubbling there in the classroom along side the sentiments of sympathy for the victims; and these divergent sentiments can also be bubbling around in the same person.
I have to admit that, at times, I was very worried about my students, you could even say I was intimidated. I wasn’t personally fearful of anything anyone would do to me, but I could sense how deep these currents ran and was intimidated by the enormity of the challenge that I was up against, trying to teach people, who were inclined to think a certain way, to see things differently. I made this topic the focus of my teaching for almost a decade, and I got burned out after awhile, which is one reason why I had to step back from academia.
But right after the Sandy Hook rampage happened, I felt the urgent need to do something. I felt obligated to speak to this issue and give students an ethical, theoretical and research-informed introduction to the problem of extreme violence, so they could learn to think more critically about all of the problematic sentiments I’ve just described. I also know that the vast majority of people who have these sentiments never act on them. Even so, if they don’t interrogate these sentiments, they are going to be ill-equipped to respond effectively if they encounter someone who could be on the edge of doing something like this; and I’ve have had students tell me many stories, which I won’t repeat here…
Anyhow, so I start teaching this class on violence in the Spring semester of 2013, and I’m teaching it at UMass-Boston, the only public university in Boston. I also have a typically diverse UMass-Boston class, composed of students from all kinds of immigrant and ethnic backgrounds, as well as native-born students who are proud to tell you their family lines go back to the Mayflower, and community activists, and students aspiring to go into law enforcement, including a couple of students who were active-duty in the national guard at the time; one was an immigrant and one native-born, by the way.
And this is the semester when the Boston Marathon bombings happened. Our class was shut down for several days by the state of emergency that was called by the governor while the man hunt for the perpetrators was underway. The two students in my class who were in the national guard were patrolling the streets during that time.
So that was an experience. The class was focused on exactly the kind violence that interrupted our weekly lesson plan; and after the state of emergency was over, we resumed class to process what happened. I’ll just say that this is one of those experiences where I learned as much from my students as they learned from our course materials–and I think we also learned a huge amount just from sharing together.
And on top of all of this, a few days after the attacks happened, I learned that one of the bombing victims was a UMass-Boston student who had actually taken one of my classes a few years before. I also learned that one of the marathon bombers had been a student at one of our sister university’s in the UMass-system, and had probably attended a class, just like ours, that examined the issues of the day.
I don’t think I can wrap up everything I’ve shared with a tidy bow, except to say that I think we are all missing the mark if we think terrorism is not a real problem. But the problem of terrorism is actually broader than the way that we are narrowly trained to think about it; as something that is unique to radicalized, foreign born people.
So I’d say that our national security policies don’t have a good diagnosis of the culturally-corrosive ideations that embolden terrorists to do what they do, as well as other people who emulate terrorist violence. Campaigns for gun violence don’t have a good diagnosis either, by the way; also considering that the Boston Marathon bombers didn’t use guns.. National security and gun control solutions (as well as mental health solutions) are all hampered by a tunnel vision that impedes our ability to see the bigger picture. As I move forward with my writing and analysis, I’m plan on using the concept of cultural security to present a better diagnosis of–and solution for–the underlying problem.
I realize I’ve probably gone far afield from the original focus of this question; but this is where my priorities are right now, when it comes to the issue of terrorism and national security. I also don’t think it’s possible to talk about equity, justice and rights if we’re not making efforts to counter-act ideations like categorical culpability that hold other people accountable, on pain of death, for problems that they have become symbolically associated with. It’s important to keep in mind that the Boston Marathon bombers were basically holding the entire US resident population categorically culpable for the “sins” of US foreign policy. Anyone, who has hanging around near the finish line of the Boston Marathon was a legitimate victim as far as they were concerned, and this included a native-born college student, who had been in a my class, a very young boy, a foreign born college student.
These categorical justifications for extreme violence are hugely problematic whether or not they manifest as acts of terrorist violence; and they’re really no different from the ways of seeing that enabled people to carry out acts of racist violence. But for some reason, some people in the left–I won’t say all people, but some–don’t see these connections when the targets of this violence are people they don’t happen to like, or if they feel some connection to the grievances of the attackers–even if the attacks ended up murdering people just like themselves. Of course, people on the right are prone to doing this as well. My point is that we all have to stop doing this if we are serious about trying to create a society that respects the dignity and rights of the individual along with a commitment to justice and equity.
You’ve been critical of the economic arguments often used to justify restrictive immigration policies. What’s your take on this?
I think it’s true that economic arguments often mask other concerns that aren’t just about economics. There’s plenty of research showing that people who are prone to be critical of immigration–who are responsive to these kinds of economic complaints–also tend to disapprove of immigrants on the grounds of race and culture.
There’s also evidence that immigrants–even many people who are undocumented–pay their fair share of taxes. For example, many undocumented migrants enroll for these special tax identification numbers that allow them to pay taxes to the federal government even though they don’t have social security numbers.
But it’s also true that use of publicly funded services, by some low income immigrant populations, exceeds what they pay into the public coffers; though this tendency is not unique to immigrants, it’s true of all low income people. But it’s less true of new immigrants because they tend to be healthier than the typical US resident and less likely to use publicly funded health services, at least.
Fiscal deficit arguments also ignore the fact that, what’s also happening, is that tax payers are subsidizing the employers of immigrants who are benefiting from their low wage labor, while local governments absorb the cost for tending to their social service needs. There are similar nuances we need to entangle when it comes to the argument that immigrants take jobs.
Native-born people who only have a high school level education, or less, and don’t have a strong attachment to the labor market are most at risk of being displaced by immigrant labor, but this problem is felt, mostly within the immigrant population itself, with new arrivals competing with and lowering wages for other co-ethnics in the same ethnically segmented employment sector. Because the pace of educational achievement for the native-born population has been increasing over the past few decades, including for low income people–and including for things like trades certifications and other kinds of professional certifications that don’t require a college degree–there’s not as much direct competition with immigrants. But there is the overarching problem of disposability that I discussed at the beginning of this interview.
Native-born people experience disposability too, and there have been some pretty ugly examples of this happening in segments of the tech sector, involving H1-B visa holders, though H1-B visa holders are also exploited by these practices. Overall though, there’s a tendency to hold immigrants responsible for homegrown problems–coercive and exploitative tendencies–that have always been a feature of how US labor markets have worked, that we have to get better at addressing.
Given your background, how do you reconcile the tension between national sovereignty and human rights in immigration policy?
This is one of the toughest questions in immigration law. National sovereignty is often cited as the reason why states have the right to control their borders, but that argument can’t be a blank check to violate human rights. From a legal perspective, international human rights treaties to which the U.S. is a signatory do impose some constraints—though these are often ignored in practice.
Ethically, I think we need to view sovereignty through a more nuanced lens: it’s about protecting the rights and welfare of the citizenry and, really, all people who are residing in the US. A rights-based approach to immigration would prioritize due process, family unity, and protection for those fleeing violence, and these principles should govern the way that we decide to extend rights to people who are petitioning for legal status under US law. But if we want to cultivate a political culture that is better able to make these kinds of decisions we also need to work on our own issues–which is what I was getting at with my answer to your question about national security in the aftermath of 9/11.
I think it’s a mistake to assume that we have this wonderfully egalitarian commitment to human and legal rights that we can extend to immigrants and asylum-seekers, when we also have these currents in our culture, on all sides of the political spectrum, that are prepared to endorse, or at least tolerate, acts of terrorist violence against other US citizens who we politically disagree with, or who we’ve defined as the enemy in some way.
We have to start connecting the dots between all of these issues and getting aligned about what our priorities really are. For example, I know that there are people on the left who support human rights for asylum-seekers, and don’t see the cold blooded murder of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson as an egregious human rights violation. In other words, these are pro-immigrant, pro-Mangione people. My opinion is that if you don’t understand why the murder of Thompson is a travesty for human rights then you don’t understand what a human right is, and you have no business, frankly, advocating for anybody’s rights.
Put another way, if you only believe that people deserve to have rights if you agree with them or sympathize with them, then you’re not really making a rights-based argument; you’re heading down an entirely different path. Speaking now, to people who are inclined to be sympathetic to Mangione: I don’t think there’s any sound justification for why the murder of Brian Thompson is somehow, understandable, but the Boston Marathon bombings are not (unless you’re actually willing to sympathize with both of these acts of terrorism, which is a whole other problem). In my view, both incidents were enabled by a categorical morality that is dangerously corrosive of the cultural foundations of a democratic society that is supposed to respect the rights and dignity of the individual. The fact that there is a sizeable minority of educated people in the US today who don’t seem to understand this–or who only seem to understand it when it’s politically convenient for them to do so–is very concerning. And if we are confused about this, then how do you advocate, in good faith and a clear conscience for the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers? What kind of society, exactly, are we expecting these people to integrate into?
In your view, what’s the most urgent reform needed in U.S. immigration law?
I’d like to say we should end the use of detention as a default response to immigration violations, or at least scale down its use. It’s a very expensive practice, it’s needlessly traumatizing for people–also considering that we are still detaining families and kids, and this was already happening under Obama and Biden; it’s not unique to the Trump era. Plus, there used to be a time, not that long ago, when detention was rarely used, except for people who were deemed a serious risk to public safety. The practice of mandatory detention dates to the early 1980s and didn’t evolve into the system we have today until the 1990s.
But I also see that US immigration policy is probably going to rely even more heavily on detention as a regulatory mechanism in the years ahead. As things stand now, most of the laws and enforcement practices that are driving this detention-first agenda forward have broad bi-partisan support.
I also don’t think that the problem of mass detention can be tackled as an isolated issue. The US government’s investment in detention, as a regulatory and growth strategy, that has both corporate sector and public support, isn’t too different from the combination of forces that drove the expansion of the US prison system from the 1980s to the present. It’s a good thing, at least, that the pace of mass incarceration has finally slowed down, but it seems that the continued expansion of the detention industry is taking up the slack.
The bigger issue, as I see it though, is that these carceral systems are being used to warehouse and process a flow–or really, an overflow–of “unwanted” people that is being generated by population management strategies–including immigration policies, labor policies and others besides–that are premised on there being this constant mass-scale supply of new bodies who are available to do whatever’s required, at least for a period of time. Ultimately I don’t see this as just being a problem of toxic growth (i.e. profiting from incarceration) or state power, but the manifestation of a culture of disposability that we’re all invested in, in ways that may not seem immediately apparent. We need to commit to supporting a person-centered paradigm of economic growth and also take the time to explore and understand what “person-centered” really means.
What advice would you give to young scholars interested in immigration law and policy?
Stay connected to the communities you’re studying. It’s easy to get lost in the data and theory, but the real-world implications of immigration policy are what matter most. Also, try to balance critique with solutions. It’s not enough to point out what’s wrong—we need concrete proposals that can build consensus, even if they’re not perfect.
Final thoughts on the future of immigration policy?
We’re at a crossroads. Immigration policy can either move towards a more humane, rights-based approach or slide further into a model that criminalizes and excludes. We also have to be prepared to look at our own complicity in the problems we are trying to solve, and this applies to people on all sides of the political divide. The direction we take will depend a lot on how effectively we can change the narrative—not just about who gets to come here, but about what kind of society we want to be. I’m cautiously optimistic that if we keep pushing, we can build a system that balances security with justice.