Just hours after Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris, Douglas Massey, a Sociology professor at Princeton, sent a gloomy email to his friends. "Most voters seem to accept the grim message of a nation in decline, with its false narrative of a crisis economy, rising crime, and predatory minorities, and the existential threat of left-wing radicals. Trump's campaign was openly racist, xenophobic, and authoritarian, and his supporters seem willing to abandon democracy in support of an autocratic demagogue who promises to 'fix everything' while fueling their anger, resentment, and prejudices," he wrote. "Once in power, with a Congress and a judiciary controlled by Republicans, Trump will rule despotically as a populist, relying on his uninformed and increasingly delusional understanding of the nation and its challenges, wreaking havoc on the American political economy and global political order."
Seven months have passed since that message, and only four and a half since Trump sat in the Oval Office, but Massey's analysis-prophecy, the new Princess of Social Sciences, has become a reality point by point. The rhetoric is much darker than in Trump's first term, the methods are more aggressive, and the goals, unthinkable in 2017. The president's supporters applaud his measures, no matter how harsh or cruel they may be, and forgive him for any threat, outburst, or paid pardon. The international order born from the ashes of World War II is crumbling.
The "false narrative" is a constant, from the state of the economy, already in contraction, to the trade agreements he claims to sign with hundreds of countries. From the Rule of Law and threats to allies to the migration situation. Perhaps the most significant example is the fact that Trump talks every week about "millions of criminals" coming to the US with Joe Biden's complicity, from prisons and "mental institutions." At some point, years ago, Trump confused the meaning of the word asylum with its homonym referring to a mental institution. Since then, he believes that asylum seekers are mentally ill.
Massey, one of the world's leading migration experts and the main reference regarding the US southern border for half a century, despairs at what he sees, hears, and reads. It is not just Trump, inventing figures of an "invasion of over 21 million illegal immigrants," but the silence of his opposition, unable to question either the form or the substance of his discourse. "The Democrats have been complicit in the deployment of anti-immigrant policies for two decades. It has been a long time since a Democrat said, 'The United States is a country of immigrants, it always has been. Immigrants made the US great in the past and will do so in the future. We need more immigrants, not fewer. Nobody does that. On the contrary, progressives have accepted the Republicans' thesis. Clinton militarized the border, Obama deported a record number of people. If that is accepted, we lose. It is necessary to articulate a different narrative, something that the Democrats have not achieved since Kennedy," he says with regret.
For Massey, the problem is fundamental, very fundamental. There are conceptual errors in migrations, in the data, and therefore, public policies since the 1980s have lacked logic, proportionality, and future vision. "The United States does not have a migration crisis. It is a humanitarian crisis that has turned into a political crisis," he explains in a lengthy interview with PAPEL. "The humanitarian crisis arises because the traffic on the border between Mexico and the United States has changed drastically. What used to be a flow of Mexicans looking for work has become a flow of families fleeing threats in their country. Now, they cross the border and look for work, of course, so they become economic migrants. But the main motivation was to escape a threat. Trump has politicized migration by generating a level of hostility that we have not seen since the Chinese Exclusion Act, when Americans feared the racial poisoning of Asian foreigners," he says.
The migration issue is the main vector in the politics of half the planet. It decides elections, topples governments, boosts radical forces, and unites messages on the left and the right. "Rejection is part of a broad rebellion against globalization. It may happen that hardline policies, repression, militarization, and mass deportations temporarily achieve their goal, but the outlook will not be encouraging, it will be bad for everyone. Think about the last time globalization failed, from 1900 to 1920. All countries withdrew into themselves, implemented anti-immigration policies, and became autocratic and violent. The result was a global depression and World War II. It was not until the post-war period, when a new framework was established and multilateral organizations built a global economy based on trade and the movement of people, that we began to progress again. But now that system is collapsing. And when such systems collapse, no one wins."
Clinton militarized the border, Obama deported a record number of people. If that is accepted, we lose
Massey speaks slowly and calmly but does not hide his frustration. He was a pioneer in his field with the method of ethnosurveys. He and his team identified a series of communities in northern Mexico and meticulously tracked them over decades, allowing them to precisely understand migration patterns: the determinants of departure and return and the impact of changes in US policy on emigration rates from Mexico. His work, slow, specific, and expensive, has made him a celebrity in his world, the figure everyone wants to work with and sign their articles.
Massey despairs when talking about the past and the present. "Almost all migration measures that the United States has implemented have been counterproductive, cruel, or harmful," he says. "In 1965, Congress wanted to eradicate racism from the US immigration system, which in practice discriminated against many communities from southern or eastern Europe and Asia to 'preserve homogeneity.' So it implemented a new quota policy that limited the number of workers per hemisphere and the number of people entering. It canceled the Bracero Program, which had been in operation for 22 years. No one thought about what would happen to those who were yet to come, so migration continued, but as it was undocumented, it became a political problem that led to the militarization of the border. And the militarization of the border was counterproductive because it did not prevent people from coming to work. It did make everything more difficult and meant that people no longer returned to their home country because this increased costs and risks. People no longer wanted to move back and forth. They simply stayed," he says.
In 2008, with the Great Recession, Mexican migration turned negative for 10 years. From 2008 to 2018, there was an outflow of Mexicans from the United States, and the undocumented population decreased by approximately 1.5 million people. "Ironically, that was when Trump appeared and announced his wall."
Since then, there has been another completely different phenomenon. Mexicans are no longer the dominant flow because they have been replaced by Central Americans. "We have exchanged workers for refugees and asylum seekers. People who will not stop because their lives are at stake. That is the case of Venezuela as well," he warns.
While in the past migration "was stable and relatively easy to manage, today it is increasingly chaotic and unpredictable and poses greater challenges to governments," he continues. "Migration is no longer just about seeking opportunities, better wages, better jobs. Increasingly, it is due to global warming, the rise of autocracy in the world, civil and military violence, and economic dislocations. These factors will not disappear soon. On the contrary, they will worsen. There will be more forced migrants and displaced persons."
Massey knows that there are no magic solutions, but he emphasizes that the problem is political, sociological, and often psychological, rather than demographic. "We need immigrants. Europe needs immigrants. If we look at the age distribution, fertility, the disintegration of the most industrialized global economy... That is the underlying issue of what I am talking about, and closing borders, deporting, and demonizing will not solve anything."
The professor does not believe that the situation is going to change, much less improve. He dreams of the day when a "counter-narrative" will emerge against the current pessimism, hatred, and rejection towards migrants. But he does not see it happening soon. He explains that according to surveys, the majority of Americans "still support some kind of immigration reform to solve the problems." However, he fears that the economic damage caused by Donald Trump's policies will have the opposite effect, exacerbating the search for scapegoats among the most vulnerable. "All the policies that Trump is adopting to fuel an anti-globalization sentiment are destroying the global economy and the U.S. economy. It's one thing for an autocrat to control the political economy of Italy, but it's very different for him to control the United States, which is the core of the global economy, and have no idea what he's doing or how he's destroying it. It's a full-blown attack on science, universities; any center of power or independent information. Science is essential for economic advancement in a post-industrial economy, and he wants to destroy it. And when the economy deteriorates, people look for scapegoats to explain even worse treatment of immigrants."