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The Immigrant Myth Is Crumbling [1]

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Date: 2025-07-14

Peeling Back the Onion of Anti-Immigrant Rhetoric: How One Post Reveals the Crumbling Logic of the MAGA Right

A meme has been making the rounds lately on social media — the kind of thing that tries to sound profound while reinforcing a deeply flawed and exclusionary worldview. It reads:

"America is not a nation built by immigrants. America was built by settlers. There’s a difference… Settlers planted the trees. The modern immigrant comes to eat the fruits."

This post — simplistic, smug, and ahistorical — sparked a conversation in my social media feed that revealed far more than its author may have intended. With each layer of back-and-forth, I found myself peeling back the onion of a worldview that has been carefully constructed by the MAGA right — a worldview fed by misinformation, fear, and a deep desire to gatekeep the American dream.

At first, the claim seemed to be a simple historical distinction between "settlers" and "immigrants." But as the conversation deepened, it quickly became clear that this wasn't about semantics — it was about exclusion. About defining who belongs and who doesn’t. About asserting that only certain people (read: white Europeans) truly built America — and that others are merely here to consume what has already been built.

But this distinction ignores both fact and reality. Immigrants — past and present — have built, expanded, and transformed this country. They were the laborers who constructed the railroads, the miners who fueled our industry, the farmers who fed a growing population, and the caregivers, teachers, and entrepreneurs who sustain our economy today. They are not arriving to “eat the fruits.” They are planting new trees — every single day.

As the conversation unfolded, the rhetoric began to shift. The post’s defender (and many like him) started invoking metaphors of cultural “authorship” — claiming that because today’s immigrants didn’t draft the Constitution or establish the legal order, they are merely tenants in a house they didn’t build. Only those who “inherit” the system, he argued, have the right to decide who else belongs. Everyone else is just a guest — or worse, a threat.

It was an elegant-sounding justification for a deeply undemocratic idea: that heritage should determine legitimacy. That a certain kind of “American” has a proprietary claim on the country’s values, culture, and future — and that newcomers must simply adapt or be cast out.

But here’s the problem with that logic: the very structure of the Constitution was built to evolve — to adapt, expand, and grow with the changing needs and values of its people. It wasn’t a finished product, and the Founders knew it. That’s why they included amendments, checks, and a process for change. The truth is, each generation of Americans has helped author the nation we live in today. That includes immigrants, descendants of slaves, Indigenous leaders, and countless others whose voices were never present at the founding — but who shaped America nonetheless.

And here’s where the conversation really broke open: when I pushed back on the idea that immigrants are “takers,” the response was to double down on the myth of the “criminal immigrant.” This is one of the most insidious tactics of the anti-immigrant movement — and one that’s been relentlessly pushed by Trump and right-wing media.

They’ve painted immigrants — particularly undocumented ones — as violent, lawless, and dangerous. They’ve used fear to shift the conversation away from contributions and toward enforcement. But as recent polling points out, the lie is starting to unravel.

The reality is that most immigrants — including undocumented ones — are overwhelmingly law-abiding. They work hard. They pay taxes (even into systems like Social Security and Medicare that they cannot access). They start businesses. They serve in the military. They raise families, build communities, and contribute far more than they take.

And Americans are beginning to notice.

A wave of new polls shows that support for immigration is rising — even amid Trump’s harshest crackdowns. According to Gallup and other sources, a majority of Americans now support pathways to citizenship, oppose mass deportation, and disapprove of Trump’s immigration policies. In fact, people are twice as likely to favor legalizing undocumented immigrants than they are to support deporting them.

Why? Because people are waking up to the reality that the cruelty is the point — and that those being targeted aren’t violent criminals but farm workers, day laborers, nannies, and neighbors. The more Trump and his allies militarize immigration enforcement — staging heavily armed raids in public parks and neighborhoods — the more they inadvertently humanize immigrants in the eyes of ordinary Americans. When people see the fear, the families torn apart, the absurdity of rounding up nonviolent workers in Home Depot parking lots, they begin to ask: Is this really who we are?

Make no mistake: I absolutely support getting dangerous criminals off the streets — regardless of immigration status. Public safety matters. But what we’re seeing from the far right isn’t about safety — it’s about control. It’s about reshaping national identity through fear and exclusion.

And here’s the thing: it’s not working.

The very people the MAGA movement tried to dehumanize are being seen, more and more, as our neighbors, co-workers, classmates, and fellow Americans — even if they don’t yet have the paperwork to prove it.

This doesn’t mean the fight is over. But it does mean the tide may be turning. Americans, it seems, still have the capacity for empathy — and the willingness to reject the politics of fear.

So the next time someone posts a meme that tries to divide us with tidy metaphors about fruit trees and settlers, remember: it’s not about trees. It’s about who we see as worthy of belonging. And in this country, belonging should be earned by contribution, not ancestry. That’s the America worth defending.

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