An Apron & An Admission

 

There was something about the United States I once found extraordinary: the sense that the country was not reinvented every time someone new took possession of the White House.

Administrations changed, majorities shifted, and laws were rewritten, but underneath them remained something like a continuous manifesto, an imperfect and permanently editable playbook. The country seemed to understand itself not as property belonging to whoever happened to control it at the moment, but as an inherited civic project.

You received the Constitution, the institutions, the debts, the victories, the atrocities, the promises, the precedents, and the people already there. You could amend the project and fight bitterly over what it meant, but you could not plausibly wake up one morning and declare yourself the new owner of an empty house.

Immigration tests that idea.

A country has the right to control its borders, establish rules for admission and residence, and expect those rules to mean something. A government cannot maintain a credible immigration system if every restriction simply dissolves once enough time has passed.

But that is not quite the situation the United States created.

For decades, millions of people lived in the country without permanent lawful status while participating extensively in its economy. In 2023, an estimated 9.7 million unauthorized immigrants were in the U.S. workforce, about 5.6 percent of all workers. Unauthorized workers have represented between 4.4 and 5.6 percent of the workforce since 2003.

They were not invisible. They built houses, harvested food, cleaned hotel rooms, cooked meals, landscaped yards, raised children, paid rent, bought groceries, and, in many cases, paid payroll and other taxes. The Social Security Administration has long documented the peculiar fiscal consequence of this arrangement: unauthorized workers may contribute to the system through taxable earnings without necessarily receiving benefits tied to all of those earnings. For 2010 alone, SSA estimated that taxes associated with unauthorized workers exceeded benefits paid on their earnings by about $12 billion.

They were not, in the legal sense, invited guests. But once they were inside, America handed them an apron.

Imagine a dinner party with a door officially marked CLOSED. People nevertheless come through it. The hosts object periodically, argue among themselves about what to do, occasionally escort some people out, and then continue handing aprons to the rest. They put them to work, accept what they contribute, and go on living with their presence year after year. Their children grow up there. What they are never handed is a place card.

Then, years later, a new group of proprietors arrives and surveys the room as though it had stumbled upon a situation no one had noticed before. Who are these people?

Suddenly the apron counts for nothing. Neither do the rent paid, the taxes collected, the crops picked, the roofs framed, the children educated, or the years during which everyone knew perfectly well that the arrangement existed.

The new proprietors simply point toward the door.

There is a familiar refrain that appears whenever the human cost becomes difficult to look at: their parents should have thought about that before coming here.

It is usually offered as if it settles the matter. The parents made the decision; therefore whatever happens to the children is unfortunate, perhaps, but ultimately theirs to bear. Conversation over.

That sentence deserves more attention than it usually receives.

Thought about what, exactly?

That crossing a border or overstaying a visa might someday have consequences? Certainly. But what, exactly, were they supposed to predict after ten or fifteen years in a country where employers continued to hire them, governments continued to collect taxes from their labor, and their children went to American schools, spoke English, made friends, memorized state capitals, and grew up believing that the place outside their bedroom window was simply home?

Were they supposed to understand that all of those years were real enough to work through, pay through, and raise children through, but could later be treated as though they had accumulated no moral weight at all?

There is another uncomfortable aspect to that arrangement. Immigration status can make a worker unusually vulnerable. Federal labor agencies themselves have warned that employers may exploit immigration status to discourage workers from asserting workplace rights, and that workers can fear retaliation or immigration consequences for complaining about wages or conditions. Federal law protects many such workers regardless of status precisely because that vulnerability exists.

The apron becomes even more useful when the person wearing it is reluctant to challenge the host.

None of this means that every employer exploited undocumented labor, that every immigrant was mistreated, or that the United States secretly designed unauthorized immigration as an economic conspiracy. History is rarely that organized. The point is less cinematic and more uncomfortable: a dysfunctional system can persist when enough institutions learn how to function around its dysfunction.

Then come the children.

In September 2026, CNN reported from an immigration courtroom in Harlingen, Texas, where 25 migrant children appeared before a judge. A six-year-old pretended to fly an airplane. A three-year-old played with a microphone. Some children appeared without attorneys. Among them was Angel, a 13-year-old Honduran boy.

Angel told the judge that his mother and almost his entire family were in the United States and that he believed it was too dangerous to return to Honduras. The judge concluded that his answers did not establish eligibility for asylum and presented him with the legal alternatives: voluntary departure or a removal order.

Angel answered, “I don’t know.”

Then he cried. Later he said, “I have no one. I have nothing.”

There is something grotesquely clarifying about the scene: a child young enough to need the accommodations of childhood is nevertheless expected to sit inside the machinery of immigration law while adults determine which country he may call home.

This is where “their parents should have thought about it” begins to sound less like an argument about immigration enforcement and more like something considerably older.

What makes the argument feel Hammurabian is not the severity of the consequence but the inheritance of blame. The parent committed the wrong; the child absorbs the consequence. Modern immigration law may treat the child as having an immigration status of their own, but the social defense of the outcome often rests on something older: their parents should have known better.

We consider inherited punishment primitive in almost every other context. We do not imprison children because their fathers committed fraud, nor do we seize a child's future because her mother violated a contract.

Indeed, the Supreme Court confronted a remarkably similar argument more than forty years ago in Plyler v. Doe, when Texas attempted to deny public education to undocumented children. The Court emphasized that children could control neither their parents' conduct nor their own immigration status and rejected placing the burden of parental misconduct on them as inconsistent with “fundamental conceptions of justice.”

This precedent does not establish a right for every undocumented child to remain in the United States; it addressed education, not removal. But the moral principle behind it survives that distinction: the child did not choose the border, the visa, or whether the family should remain after it expired. A toddler did not evaluate asylum doctrine. And a child brought somewhere young enough may eventually possess a passport from one country and memories almost entirely from another.

Law can preserve a status for thirteen years. Life cannot.

This is why the contemporary immigration debate feels strangely ahistorical.

One side of the ledger remains remarkably legible: the illegal entry, the overstay, the missed hearing, the unsuccessful application, the parent’s decisions. The system remembers them all. But the obligations accumulated by the society that employed the worker, taxed the paycheck, educated the child, and benefited from the labor are somehow reset to zero, and the rest of us are expected to forget they ever existed.

The child inherits the parents' mistake. The nation inherits nothing.

That is a peculiar conception of national continuity. We are quick to say we when the country gets something right. We inherit the victories, the inventions, the constitutional breakthroughs, the wars won, the moon landing, the cultural achievements. But when the inheritance is a failure, the pronoun suddenly changes. Then it becomes they: past administrations, past Congresses, previous generations, the immigrants themselves.

A nation is not a landlord who purchased an occupied building last Tuesday. It does not acquire only the assets it likes. If America is a continuous civic project, then today's country inherits yesterday's border, certainly, but it also inherits yesterday's wars, treaties, debts, laws, and constitutional obligations. National pride is collective; strangely, national responsibility is often outsourced.

Why should it alone be permitted to disclaim the human arrangements produced by yesterday's policies?

There is a legitimate answer from the other side: allowing long residence to create an automatic right to remain can reward unlawful entry and undermine immigration law. Enforcement postponed indefinitely can become indistinguishable from abandoning the rule itself.

That objection deserves to be taken seriously. But taking it seriously does not require pretending that ten years equal zero.

Time may not automatically create a legal right, but it can still create a moral claim.

That distinction becomes hardest to ignore when the person absorbing the consequence is a child.

An adult made the decision to migrate. Other adults wrote the immigration laws, decided how vigorously to enforce them, hired the labor, collected the taxes, and spent decades failing to agree on what to do with millions of people living somewhere between economic inclusion and political exclusion.

Eventually, another adult, this one in a black robe, looks down at Angel, thirteen years old, and asks whether he wants voluntary departure or a removal order.

He says, I don't know.

Perhaps that is the most rational answer anyone has given to the American immigration system, because he did not create the contradiction.

He merely inherited it.

A Nation with a Tired Playbook

 

On national identity, threat, and how deep the blade went under the skin

When I first moved to the United States, one of the things that struck me most was the country’s humor and vernacular optimism. Americans seemed trained to turn discomfort into jokes and uncertainty into possibility. Coming from a society with a different emotional weather, that was not a small difference. It felt structural.

For years, liberal comedy did this especially well. It made absurdity breathable. It took hypocrisy, bureaucracy, corruption, bad faith, moral panic, and institutional stupidity and turned them into oxygen. The joke did not erase the danger, but it created enough space to survive recognizing it.

That is why I do not observe the thinning of that humor as a minor cultural detail. In my view, humor and optimism were part of the American operating system. When a society that once metabolized absurdity through jokes begins preserving dread at full strength, something has changed.

The problem is not that Americans, or liberals in particular, suddenly became less funny. The problem is that politics became too compelling, too consequential, and too deranged to remain safely comic.

Every day delivers a fresh spectacle: courts, billionaires, executive orders, corruption, cruelty, constitutional dread. The material arrives pre-satirized. You do not even need to get creative. Reality keeps walking onstage wearing the costume.

That sounds like a gift to comedians, but it is not. Comedy needs absurdity with a little room around it. It needs enough distance for the body to say: this is insane, but I can breathe around it. When the absurdity has legal force, police force, market force, or institutional consequence, the laugh does not fully release. The body knows the joke can still hurt you.

So the tone changes. The comedian becomes a witness. The satirist becomes an archivist. The late-night monologue becomes less a release valve than a nightly inventory of damage. What used to make absurdity breathable now often preserves danger at full strength.

This is not a failure of intelligence. It is a failure of distance. You cannot live every evening inside “their finest hour.” A nervous system cannot afford a daily version of Churchill announcing Britain’s entrance into World War II, even when some of the alarms are real.

America is not merely polarized. It is trying to regulate itself on a dancing landscape.

Everything that should provide ground has begun to move: parties, courts, platforms, media, prices, borders, identity, work, truth, expertise, even the weather. The result is not just disagreement. It is a national nervous system running threat detection at high volume.

The American model is legacy software running on that dancing landscape. It was built for another era, when the United States reigned more confidently, industry occupied more of the social imagination, and adulthood could still be narrated as a sequence: job, house, savings, retirement, inheritance. That world was never as fair or universal as nostalgia claims, but it was stable enough to make the model believable.

Now the ground moves, but the script remains. Households are still told to optimize, invest, hustle, insure, retrain, borrow, and believe in the future, while ordinary life becomes a sequence of cliffs: rent, medical bills, childcare, debt, layoffs, insurance, groceries, one missed paycheck, one broken car.

This is where the stock market becomes offensive.

Not because a rising market is bad in itself, but because of what it is asked to symbolize. Survey after survey says roughly a third of Americans lack even a few hundred dollars of emergency cushion; many could not cover a $400 or $500 shock without borrowing, selling something, or moving closer to the red line. And yet the Dow, the Nasdaq, and the S&P keep smiling from their evergreen all-time-high peak, as if the dashboard were proof that the machine is healthy.

The split screen is obscene.

The chart says abundance.
The household says threat.
The index says historic high.
The kitchen table says one more bill.

This is not simply inequality. It is a crisis of interpretation. The country is told to read market highs as national health, while millions of households experience the same economy as fragility, exposure, and triage.

Automation sharpens the contradiction. If the old model depended on labor scarcity being solved by more labor, the new model is less clear. Machines, software, and AI do not eliminate the need for workers everywhere, but they do change the social imagination of work. Stable labor positions begin to feel less abundant, less durable, less able to absorb everyone.

In that environment, the cons of immigration become easier to dramatize than the pros. The immigrant may still be economically useful, even necessary, in whole sectors of the economy. But politically, the figure begins to look less like labor and more like pressure.

 A society under that much contradiction needs an explanation it can touch. So it turns toward the immigrant.

This is not an accident. Immigrant labor has long been useful to the economy alive: in fields, kitchens, construction sites, care work, cleaning, delivery, meatpacking, warehouses, hotels, and all the places where the official economy prefers not to look directly at its own dependencies. The immigrant body has been used as infrastructure: underpaid, overworked, politically exposed, socially deniable.

But at a certain point, the value changes.

The economy once needed the immigrant hidden in the kitchen, field, warehouse, or care home. Now power can use that same body as evidence, warning, spectacle, and offering. The worker who helped keep the machine running becomes proof that the machine was invaded.

This is the sacrificial logic. The legacy model is failing, but the failure is too large, too distributed, too abstract, too implicated in everyone’s arrangements. Financialization cannot be shouted at from a rally stage with the same visceral satisfaction. Asset inflation does not have a face. Deindustrialization is too historical. Healthcare is too bureaucratic. Housing scarcity is too local and too national at once. The dancing landscape has too many causes.

The immigrant simplifies the landscape.

Here is a body.
Here is a border.
Here is a story.
Here is the thing that crossed.
Here is the reason you are afraid.

The cruelty is that both legal and illegal immigrants can be absorbed into the same ritual. Legality matters administratively, but politically the category can be blurred whenever the machinery needs a larger offering. The point is not accuracy. The point is conversion: anxiety into anger, precarity into blame, structural failure into a human target.

The immigrant is made to carry a contradiction the society cannot metabolize. A country that depended on the labor now performs outrage at the presence. A market that benefited from the worker now lets politics treat the body as contamination. The person who helped keep the machine running becomes evidence that the machine was invaded.

That is why the sacrifice is propitiatory. It does not solve the crisis. It gives the crisis a victim.

The old model cannot admit that the ground has changed. So it asks for a body.

There. That is why the gods are angry.

The armor failed, but the forge is not gone

What worries me most is not any single item on this list. Not the market, not the media, not the border, not even the politics of blame. It is the possibility that all of it has gone under the skin.

A country can survive bad policy, bad markets, bad leaders, bad news cycles. What is harder to survive is a change in temperament: when humor stops functioning as oxygen, when optimism becomes performance, when precarity becomes identity, when politics becomes weather, when sacrifice becomes explanation.

That is why noticing the change matters. Noticing is not enough, but it is not nothing. A society cannot repair what it keeps misnaming. If dread has replaced humor, if spectacle has replaced explanation, if scapegoating has replaced diagnosis, then the first constructive act may be to say so clearly.

The point is not to recover a naive optimism. The old optimism belonged to an older landscape. But there may be another kind: not the optimism of denial, but the optimism of refusing the sacrifice. The optimism of insisting that the dancing ground is real, that the model is old, that the anger has causes, and that no body should be asked to carry them all.