Beyond the Immigration Myth
What Twenty-Five Years Living on the Border Has Taught Me
When you live fifteen minutes from the San Ysidro port of entry, the busiest land border crossing on the planet, immigration isn't an abstraction. It's the chatter over the counter at Target or the conversations in the pickup line outside the high school. For the last twenty-five years I've made a life in Chula Vista, a city on the southern side of San Diego that serves as the hinge between two nations. In that span, I've watched pundits on both coasts conjure breathless images of shadowy migrants storming the desert at midnight. The reality is less cinematic and far more complicated.
The Myth of the Rolling Surge
The anti-immigration echo chamber's most durable illusion is that unauthorized immigrants represent a rolling surge of newcomers pouring across the borders as we speak. Pull back the curtain and you find something very different: a demographic curve locked in place. The best estimates agree that roughly 11 million people live in the United States without legal status today; about the same number that were here when George W. Bush left office and fewer than at the 2007 peak.
This population is not being replenished by daily caravans streaming across the scrub. It is aging in place. Two-thirds of those 11 million have lived here more than ten years, and the median arrival year is now 2011. In my zip code, that looks like the barber who cuts your hair and shows you graduation photos of his daughter, who entered the country with him when she was three. She is twenty-five now and has known nothing other than America.
Why the disconnect between perception and reality? Because cable news camera lenses stick to border fences the way moths chase porch lights. A "got-away" fleeing through night-vision goggles is television gold; a middle-aged construction foreman paying payroll taxes under a borrowed Social Security number is not.
The Data Behind the Drama
The deeper truth lies in the Department of Homeland Security's own accounting: since 2007, visa overstays have outnumbered illegal border crossings as the main source of new unauthorized residents. Last year, about seven in ten people who slipped into unlawful status did so the boring way; by boarding a jet with a valid visa and failing to leave when the calendar said so.
What the data tells me is exactly what I see every day. This reality makes the sweeping "show me your papers" fantasy of immigration policy collapse on contact with local life. Enforcement requires a brand of moral callousness most Americans reserve for Netflix period pieces, and it collides head-on with another stubborn fact: about 5.5 million of the unauthorized belong to mixed-status families where at least one child is a U.S. citizen. Deport mom and you are not "sending her home"—you are wrenching a birthright American away from hers. This is also why things like drivers licenses, medicare and other tax payer funded entitlements get wrapped up in immigration. It’s nearly impossible to pull the population apart.
When Numbers Meet Ethics
Here is where mathematics collides with morality. To remove 11 million people, you would have to detain and deport a population equal to the state of Ohio. Hunting embedded communities is not a scalpel operation; it is carpet bombing the mundane. It means raid teams waiting outside churches because they know which Sunday Mass draws the undocumented choir. It means teachers testifying against their students' parents in immigration court.
This recalls the moral trap of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a law that failed not solely because abolitionists were loud, but because enforcing it required converting northern towns into surveillance networks targeting neighbors they had lived alongside for years. The moral corrosion was self-evident, and the implementation collapsed under its own indecency. It forced people to stare directly into the humanity of the problem.
A blanket deportation drive aimed at long-settled immigrants courts the same collapse. The abandonment of due process is by design. And the cruelty is not incidental; it’s the engine that makes the policy go.
A Path Forward
So what do we do? The answer clearly isn't to simply not enforce immigration policy. Approaches like sanctuary cities provide the fever dream fuel that gave the current administration the platform to send National Guard troops to L.A. this weekend. A sober answer starts by naming things as they are.
First, the border is not open. It’s exhaustively walled, droned, and staffed. What remains porous is the paper system that tucks long-time residents into perpetual limbo.
Second, "comprehensive" enforcement that ignores decades-long settlement is the civic equivalent of chemotherapy for a cold: it obliterates more healthy tissue than the ailment it's meant to cure.
Third, the only durable fix is legislation that recognizes the de-facto Americans already here—Dreamers, mixed-status parents, and the silent strivers who fill the overstayer column—and builds a visa regime consistent with economic demand rather than political nostalgia.
The Case for Pragmatic Amnesty
Critics will cry amnesty, as though leniency were an abdication. But amnesty is exactly what the law dispenses in other arenas when relentless policing becomes a greater wrong than the offense. We parole veterans who commit non-violent crimes into treatment programs because their service buys restitution. We forgive tax penalties because perfection in record-keeping is impossible. In immigration, the calculus is sharper: either fold the long-time unauthorized into the nation they have sustained, or commit to a level of state coercion that will make the worst chapters of our history blush.
A nation secure in its identity can acknowledge this fact without fear. It can tighten the front door while refusing to yank out the families already seated at the table. What we cannot do, without shredding the civic fabric, is pretend the guests are invisible until the moment we choose to drag them into the street.
That pretense has a historical name: fugitive. We abandoned that model once, not because it was inefficient, but because it was incompatible with the republic we aspired to be. The border debate is just the latest arena where we decide whether aspiration still outranks fear. Becoming a society that both absorbs gross cruelty and abandons due process with ease comes with a cost.