José, 28, who did not give his last name for fear of retribution from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE, said he was leaving his house in rural southwestern Colorado recently “when two federal SUVs pulled out, blocking my path in both directions.”

Jose is not a criminal, though 10 years ago he crossed the border into the United States from Mexico without legal documentation. Since then, he’s worked as a painter and a chef, has always paid federal and state taxes, and has never been in trouble with the law.  

That morning, though, he was a target: “It was the migra, and they pulled me out of the driver’s seat, forced me into one of their cars and asked me for identification.”

Because the ICE agents were looking for someone else that day, and because rural Colorado has limited jail space to hold detained migrants, they let José go. But they told him he had to show up for an interview at an ICE substation.

Jose didn’t go to his interview. “I don’t want them to find me,” he told me. “I’m always looking over my shoulder. My life is here, but I’ve moved and have to start over again.”

Jose’s experience is not unique. Scores of people with darker skin—including Native Americans—have fallen prey to the new administration’s trawl-net approach to immigration enforcement.

During his campaign, President Trump repeatedly said, “I will launch the largest deportation program of criminals in the history of America.” His stated goal is to deport 1 million immigrants before 2026.

During the first 50 days of Trump’s second term, ICE arrested nearly 33,000 people—but only half of them were convicted criminals. ICE also detained foreign students for voicing their political opinions, arrested at least one legal U.S. resident, and wrongfully held foreign visitors for weeks, including a woman from Canada who was legally in the United States.

Created as part of the Department of Homeland Security, ICE was charged with policing immigration in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Before 2003, immigration enforcement was primarily handled by other federal agencies operating within a far less militarized framework. Two decades later, ICE has ballooned into a federal behemoth. 

ICE says its work is essential for national security, but its more than 20,000 employees operate with extraordinary freedom. Local and county police usually know and understand the community they work in, and in case of misconduct, they can be held accountable for their actions. But not ICE.

Under Trump, ICE has become increasingly aggressive in its tactics while appearing to focus on non-criminals and activists. In recent months, ICE has concentrated on apprehending people far above the U.S.-Mexico border; used military planes as a tool of deportation; outsourced detention to third parties, including private prisons and sovereign nations like El Salvador; and enlisted wartime law to bypass due process.

For the first time, ICE is also employing data from the Internal Revenue Service to identify some undocumented residents—a move that could also have devastating consequences for legal residents and citizens who get swept up with the undocumented.

Nayda Benitez, a director for the Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition, oversees a state hotline where people can report ICE activity in their community. “We’ve seen a huge increase in reports,” she said. In one Colorado town, she said, ICE showed up at a trailer park, “and they put a woman into handcuffs who was a U.S. citizen.”

As a legal advocate for immigrants in southwestern Colorado, I see the contributions of migrants everywhere. Children of immigrants attend local schools, and their parents work in every sector of the economy, including restaurants, transportation, construction, farming and ranching, hotels, resorts and hospitals. I also see the fear that immigrants are forced to endure, and the countless ways in which ICE agents disregard our nation’s most cherished rights, including freedom of speech, due process, protection from government excess, and cruel and unusual punishment.

“If you look at authoritarian leaders throughout history,” Benitez said, “our nation is repeating some key patterns like academic censorship and the marginalization, criminalization and dehumanization of specific social groups.”

It’s time to take a stand against federal overreach, and ICE is the right place to start.

Benjamin James Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about the West. He writes in Colorado.

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None of this is happening.

After a few short weeks, inflation is rising, potentially crushing economic growth. In January 2025, inflation expectations were 3.3%. February’s reading was a shock, with expectations rising to 4.3%, according to Barron’s Business Journal. A jump of this magnitude has happened only five times in 14 years.

Though he tabled early Mexico and Canada tariffs, China’s are in place. To make matters worse, on February 10, Trump unveiled tariffs on steel and aluminum. The next day, the European Union, home to 450 million people, vowed retaliatory tariffs.

Meanwhile at home, so-called “egg-flation” is on the rise in the United States. It is most pronounced in the state of Colorado after a law passed in 2020 mandates that all eggs sold in the state must now come from “cage free” hens, meaning that they get to spread their wings and roam a bit each day.

The law went into effect last month, and combined with avian flu, Coloradoans now pay up to a $1 per egg. In recent years it was $2 per dozen. Labor shortages from frightened undocumented workers staying home are also hurting egg prices.

Although deporting undocumented workers apparently pleases many supporters of the president, the government’s roundups could have an inflationary impact on basic living costs. Migrant workers do our toughest jobs, whether it’s picking fruit, processing proteins like eggs and meat or building Tesla’s Gigafactory.

Fake news narratives paint undocumented workers as a drag on America. The facts show that they pay into our retirement system and Treasury to the tune of $76 billion annually, according to the Council on Foreign Relations. These workers receive no benefits in return.

We are at 4.1% unemployment—a tight labor market. If we lose millions of these workers we will see a dramatic rise in labor costs, and a lessening of productivity.

Combined with tariffs, these actions are stagflationary, contributing to cost increases while slowing growth.

Vulnerable Americans, those who rent and who live paycheck to paycheck, have few options when goods rise rapidly in cost. We import over 80% of our aluminum: Are we prepared for soaring prices on automobiles, electronics and packaged food products?

President Trump won the presidency in part on his promise to fix what he labeled a horrible economy. But thanks to his unnecessary tariffs, the only way to achieve lower prices here at home now is through a recession.

Recessionary periods are hard on people. Job losses, home foreclosures and drug use typically spike during tough times. A recession combined with a trade war hark back to the 1970s, a time when high prices and high unemployment—plus two energy shocks— battered Americans’ wallets and psyches.

Americans were so frustrated during that time that they elected Ronald Reagan, who cut taxes for the rich, emptied our mental institutions and gutted protections for labor. He also ushered in the billionaire class that today includes Donald Trump and many in his cabinet.

Yet there was a time of hope instead of empty promises at the start of Donald Trump’s first presidency. Steve Bannon, a conservative media executive, initially served as chief strategist to the president. His advice to Trump: Shake things up by raising taxes on billionaires and cutting taxes for working people.

Bannon was fired seven months later as Trump passed broad tax cuts, up for renewal soon, for the wealthy. His policies continue to favor the richest in America.

Running for office for the second time, Donald Trump singled out the migrant community for persecution, demonizing them for exaggerated ills in the economy. What never got communicated clearly was that our economy was on a steady keel, with prices steadying along with interest rate declines. Now we’re primed for an inflationary spiral.

Who will do the jobs that migrants do? Where will we source necessary foreign-made goods? How will we build needed housing? Undocumented workers make up 20% of the construction force.

And what is government efficiency when Trump allows people without security clearances to fight fraud by eviscerating federal agencies mandated by Congress?

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring conversation about Western issues. He lives in Durango, Colorado.

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As it became clear that enthusiasm for Kamala Harris was waning leading up to the election, bond markets were already going down. That’s important, because the bond market is a predictor of the future.

For contrast, the stock market went up 3% the morning after the election, as Donald Trump promised dramatic tax breaks and lenient environmental regulations for corporations. That explains why so many billionaires supported Trump.

Our bond market, perhaps not as well understood as stocks, is the biggest in the world, and though the Federal Reserve sets a “target” interest rate and regulates short-term interest rates.

The nation’s $28 trillion treasury market sets the final interest rate through an auction.

Here’s what an auction determines: When prices of bonds drop, yields for investors go up. But this also drives up mortgage rates, interest rates on car loans, credit cards and so forth. Foreign countries and investors also trade bonds based on expectations for future borrowing. If our government needs to sell more bonds, lower prices and higher rates of return to investors usually follow.

America is piling up huge annual deficits, and when buyers of our bonds grow concerned about the credit worthiness of the United States, they typically start selling. This creates a knock-on effect of higher deficits, as the nation pays higher interest rates on its massive borrowing.

Never downplay the impact a falling bond markets can have. Bond traders have toppled governments—Great Britain in 2022 is a prime example, reinforcing bond traders nickname “bond vigilantes.”

After Donald Trump was elected, the bond market, which had already declined significantly in anticipation of his win, fell 3% the next morning. That is considered a very bad day for the bond market. Investors began predicting that two of Donald Trump’s election promises would lead to higher prices for consumers.

His first promise was to deport millions of undocumented workers even though our country is at full employment.  Deporting workers will cause a labor shortage and drive up the cost of American made goods, especially the cost of vegetables, meat and housing, industries that rely heavily on manual labor.

His second promise, using presidential power to impose tariffs on goods from other countries, is another way a president can raise costs for consumers. The president-elect has talked up tariffs repeatedly, calling them “beautiful” and promising that other countries will pay for them.

That is not how tariffs work.

If we want foreign goods from China and Mexico, we must pay the going rate. If we want to substitute an American good, we should be sure it’s available and that there is labor to produce it.

During his last presidency, Trump levied tariffs on China. It retaliated by levying tariffs on our farm products, which erased profits for midwestern farmers.

Trump quickly reallocated $12 billion via the U.S. Agriculture Department to support those farmers. That is called a bailout, or welfare.

Moreover, if he raises tariffs across the board on goods from other countries, there will be widespread “revenge- tariffs”—just as happened last time. Unless we borrow even more money in the bond market for various welfare schemes, the tariffs will harm the smallest American companies, while international corporations, with operations overseas, will be less impacted.

Once again farmers will be hurt. We are mostly a nation of consumers, not producers, and 68% of our economy is buying goods. That is why so many suffered during the inflationary spike under Joe Biden, causing the necessary goods in life to become shockingly pricey.

When Donald Trump takes charge next year—and if he fulfills his promises—tariffs and labor shortages are bound to dramatically raise prices and interest rates for American consumers. Once an economy contracts, recession follows.

Somehow, we missed thoroughly debunking Donald Trump’s wrongheaded assumptions about what makes our economy work. Now, we face an uncertain future with a leader whose policies benefit the rich while harming working people.

Dave Marston is the publisher of Writers on the Range, Writersontherange.org. A nonprofit dedicated to lively discussion about the West. He worked in finance in New York City and now lives in Durango, Colorado.

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A young woman I’ll call Jhovid, who came here from Venezuela, has asked me to listen to her answer, so that I and others may understand.

Her hair is neatly ponytailed, her clothes tidy, she looks composed — but her food is uneaten and tears streak her face. She tells me that people are starving to death in Venezuela. She looks at me to make sure I understand. Starving.

We know about the dire conditions generally, and we know that our Colorado town of Fort Collins, like many, has absorbed large numbers of newly arrived immigrants who fled for their safety. But she hopes someone will bear witness to her particular journey, and so we gather with my friend, bilingual author Laura Resau, who has collaborated with other South American women to help them share their stories.

Jhovid is one of the many Venezuelan refugees who climbed off a bus months ago with no coat, food, shelter or contacts. She’s 32, she tells us, and graduated from college with a degree in business administration, but Venezuela was sinking economically as she was growing up. Jobs were scarce and gangs were everywhere.

She traveled with her sister to Colombia, where they worked for five years in a tennis shoe factory. But economic conditions soured there too, so the women went to Chile, traveling 23 days by foot and bus.

“We were crossing a banana plantation on the Ecuador-Peru border and men approached, asked for valuables, but we didn’t have any, so they said, ‘You’ll have to pay with something else, then.’”

I wince, predicting what is to come, but she offers a small smile. “I gave them my cheap cell phone and they left.”

Luck, kindness and perseverance seem to be the themes of her story, where, time after time, good people—in law enforcement, nonprofits, people living in poverty themselves—offered help.

Like the time that immigration officials in Chile “gave us medical help and food, and we got jobs in fruit processing.” She liked the factory, the country, and sending money to her family.

Pero después. But then. Her father, a retired police officer, who had been kidnapped and rescued, developed Parkinson’s disease. Her family was desperate for help. Jhovid knew that if she could make it to the U.S.-Mexico border where there was a “Very Famous Hole” through the border wall, she could get to America and find work that paid more.

For the next three months, the sisters traveled north, walking and hitchhiking through three countries. In Panama, they foraged for food in the jungle with los animales. Worst of all, her sister became very “sick from the river, because the river was contaminated from dead people.”

But then her eyes light up: A kind person gave them food, medicine, tickets to Costa Rica. Then it was on to Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico. They hid under cars at a mechanic shop to avoid the Mexican Mafia. Caught twice by immigration patrols in southern Mexico, they were sent to towns near the Guatemalan border.

By the third time, she knew how to avoid la migra, and after making it through the Very Famous Hole, they arrived in El Paso. Finally, she and others were bused to Denver, where a stranger directed them to a homeless shelter, and later, a bus to Fort Collins.

Various groups stepped up with lightning speed, including churches and the nonprofits Fuerza Latina and Alianza NORCO. She’s grateful for all the hold but is happy to have found a full-time job.

As Jhovid wraps up her story, I breathe out a sigh. This woman walked thousands of miles through country after country because she had to. Determination and the kindness of strangers helped her succeed. But as I listen, I think of a family member’s response to immigrants—one echoed by many in this country: “They’re ruining the country, why would you want to help them?”

My answer: Why wouldn’t you respect their desperate quest for a decent life?

Laura Pritchett is a contributor to Writers on the Range, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. She has two novels coming out this year from Torrey House Press and Ballantine; for more, see laurapritchett.com.

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A few days before Christmas, Westside residents received notice that the land under their homes was for sale for $5.5 million. The message was in English, and Alejandra Chavez and her neighbors, who mostly speak Spanish and work in service jobs, were devastated.

Alejandra was 13 when she left her native Mexico in 2005 to join her family in Durango. Her parents, Juanita and Alejandro, chose Westside because it was close to town, and they could get to and from work without a vehicle.

They bought their current home in 2010 for $10,000, and since then have invested another $15,000 in remodels. Their home is their largest asset.

“Honestly, my parents would lose everything,” Alejandra told me. “If we wanted to move their trailer, it would break apart.”

Trailer parks like Westside are always vulnerable to speculation. As land prices skyrocketed in the West, trailer parks have attracted the interest of large corporations and equity funds. The trend is so strong that two real estate tycoons launched a website called Mobile Home University to teach investors how to get in “on the ground floor.”

But now, thanks to a new Colorado law, residents like Chavez and her parents can fight back because owners of trailer parks must provide residents with 90-day notice of their intent to sell. Before the law, trailer parks could exchange owners without residents knowing the park was ever up for sale. Resident now have the chance to form a cooperative, secure financing and even make an offer of their own. The residents of Westside jumped at the opportunity.

In early January, Westside residents formed the Westside Cooperative, which Chavez co-chairs. Their deadline is March 20 to secure financing and submit a purchase offer.

Westside residents have a successful model. In 2021, the residents of Animas View Mobile Home, north of Durango, successfully purchased their community for $14 million. Seeing a similar situation at Westside, Animas View resident Dan Hunt offered to help out by walking door to spread the word about resident-owned trailer parks.

“Our goal was for everyone to be able to afford it,” Hunt told me. “Those with the lowest incomes are at risk of being displaced, which is a terrible scenario. Now that we have control, we have plans to stabilize rents and invest in our park.”

“We want to follow in their footsteps,” Chavez says. 

At first, Westside families were wary, as many wondered who would finance the purchase. The price of $5.5 million for sounded like a huge amount of money.

Organizations—and public officials—offered advice, but Elevation Community Land Trust, a nonprofit dedicated to making homeownership more affordable for Colorado residents, stepped up to offer financial support. Elevation CEO Stefka Fanchi said the trust’s goal is to help places like Westside leverage the community trust model so housing remains stable for the foreseeable future. 

La Plata County officials helped Westside put together a competitive purchase offer. Then things started moving fast over the last weekend, the owner rejected their first purchase offer, requesting a cash offer, and a quicker timeline. Westside has established a GoFundMe page and now has until March 27 to raise $500,000.

The big question is whether the owner, Neal Kurzner, will accept their offer. Kurzner is a New York investor who owns apartment buildings and trailer parks across the nation.

“To me it’s going to come down to economics,” Kurzner told me over the phone.“ And timing. That’s really how we’ll be making our decision.”

Kurzner has already been negotiating to sell Westside to Harmony Communities, a company based in California that operates 33 trailer parks in the Southwest. Harmony has a history of purchasing parks in Colorado, then immediately hiking rents by as much as 50 percent.

Residents think their offer will be attractive to Kurzner: “We don’t want anyone to gift us anything,” Alejandra’s mother, Juanita, told me during a recent visit to Westside. “We just want an opportunity to get ahead. And why not?”

Benjamin Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is an associate professor at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado. He has written extensively about the immigrant experience in the American West.

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What I found is that volunteers here are the unsung, unseen heroes doing the real work of humanitarian aid — and who, by the very nature of what they do, often prefer to remain silent. 

We hiked in a remote region of southern Arizona on Bureau of Land Management land, all of us weighted down with backpacks filled with water, and equally weighted with the sorrow of the reality here. More people die in this region than in any other place along the border. The UN agency International Organization for Migration reported that 650 deaths occurred border-wide in 2021, making it the deadliest year they’ve ever recorded. Nothing indicates that 2022 is going to be any better.

We placed gallon jugs of water under a plastic tub held down with rocks, and when I stood up, feeling lighter, I still felt weighted by the contradictions of this place. Sure, I know: Living in contradiction and the ability to hold opposing thoughts and emotions simultaneously is a hallmark of maturity, but still, sometimes the contradictions are so extreme that the brain shorts out. Cases in point:

Nearby, there’s the hyper-ugly Barry M Goldwater Range, used for bombing practice, and the hyper-beauty of the nearby Organ Pipe National Monument. There’s the beauty and silence of the desert, despite the roar of military fighter jets above.

There’s the nearby artsy, colorful town of Ajo, flanked by an enormous open pit copper mine, tailings pile looming alongside. There are the beautiful skeletons of saguaros in the desert, and the very-not-beautiful skeletons of humans.

An area of such diverse life. An area of such death. And perhaps the most surreal contradiction of all: The assault on basic human kindness. How did we get to a place where offering shelter or a ride is a crime? A federal crime, with a prison sentence no less?

A friend told a story in which she came across a young man on foot on a borderlands back road, and could not drive him to a medical facility, despite his request for her to do so, because she knew she could be arrested for transporting an illegal immigrant. She was already on the Border Patrol’s radar. She could give him water and food and a blanket—legal—but could not give him the ride he asked for—illegal.

“You can’t imagine what that’s like,” she said. “To look into another human’s eyes and say, ‘No, I can’t help you.’”

There were tears in her eyes—she had, perhaps, left this man to die, but if she had allowed him in her car, she could have ended up in prison and jeopardized her other work helping migrants, which might result in other lost lives.

My head hurt. My heart hurt. This place felt overwhelming. 

So are the related questions: Was I providing humanitarian aid? Or littering? Should I spend my time doing this small physical act? Or working to elect better politicians? Should I focus on this place so far from my home, or stay local?

Why is this crisis on the border so ignored? Why do North Americans seem willing to support refugees from other countries—which I applaud—yet seem so resistant to helping those closest to us, who are also fleeing serious violence, political persecution, drought and hurricanes?

Then there are the related issues: aquifers drained near the border wall, wildlife migrations interrupted, the Tohono O’odham peoples split apart, with relatives on the U.S. side not easily able to visit relatives in Mexico as they have since time immemorial. Such a clearly bad situation on so many levels.

As I walked back to an old Subaru, my pack much lighter now, my shoulders still felt the weight. I wondered if anyone was watching me—waiting for me to be gone. Waiting for a simple, clear, uncomplicated moment to continue a journey.

Laura Pritchett is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to airing Western issues. Her novel Red Lightning is based on human rights issues at the border. She directs a master’s program in nature writing at Western Colorado University. www.laurapritchett.com

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“The last time I crossed into the U.S., we had to walk for seven days under constant rain,” Alfredo told me. “I’m glad I never have to do that again.”

We were hiking a trail near his home in central Mexico, where rain had turned the land green, with maturing cornfields flanked by rows of beans and squash. 

For years, Alfredo, 37, worked as a landscaper and also as a roofer in the American Southwest. These days, though, he stays home. “My land is full of life. I only left my country like everyone else because I had to. I was poor and back then it was a violent place.”

Alfredo lives in the state of Guanajuato, which is among the top migrant-sending states in Mexico. Now, roughly 10.9 million Mexican-born residents live in America, and the majority came from small towns like the one I was walking through.

I thought of my parents, who left Iowa and Arkansas in the 1970s to head West. In their case they were fleeing segregation, but like Alfredo, they were in search of opportunity. In 1974, they moved to Telluride, Colorado, then a busted mining town aspiring to become another Aspen. That first winter they lived in the back of a van while they remodeled an old mining shack, which they purchased for $20,000. Neither had a college education, but in those days a degree wasn’t required to aspire to a middle-class life.

My father worked construction and my mom waited tables. Money was tight, but the first ski lift had just gone in, and the future looked promising. These days, both continue to work, but they are financially stable in large part because of the equity in a house they owned decades ago.

Today, opportunities in the West are harder to come by. My childhood home in Telluride, although no longer in the family, recently appraised for just over $5 million, representing a 24,900% increase since my parents first purchased it. Wages, in turn, have been stuck in neutral for decades. And while wandering hippies may still show up in vans, few are able to purchase property of their own unless they’re packing a trust fund. As the middle-class fades away, what’s left seems to narrow down to property owners and workers.

If he’d been born a few decades earlier, Alfredo said, he might have tried to stay in the United States. “But all I did in the U.S. was work from sunup to sundown, and for what? At least here I have my home and my cornfields, I get to see my family every day, and I’m connected to the land.”

Alfredo’s not alone. Today, more migrants are returning to Mexico than are leaving. The outflow back to Mexico is affecting Western states particularly hard, because most of the Mexicans who do migrate to this country are settling in southern states like Arkansas, North Carolina and Georgia. Similar trends are evident within smaller sending countries like El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras and Guatemala.

According to my research, the migrants returning to Mexico tend to leave states such as Arizona, California, Colorado and Texas. These demographic shifts have contributed to an acute labor shortage.

For generations, Mexican migrants subsidized the expansion of the West by providing cheap workers. Men like Alfredo worked alongside newcomers like my parents, and together, they helped build now-legendary towns like Telluride. Now, just as Mexican migration rates reverse, the cost of construction, housing, and basic services in the West are all on the rise.

As we settled into the trail toward Alfredo’s hometown of San Martin de Terreros, I asked Alfredo if he planned to come back to the U.S. one day. “No, señor,” he responded without hesitation. “I have everything I need right here.”

Benjamin Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

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In my town of Durango, Colorado, labor shortages have deeply affected the entire community. One business owner is Juvenal Corona, originally from Mexico, who co-owns Nayarit, one of Durango’s most popular Mexican restaurants. Since Covid restrictions lifted in the spring, he’s been short-staffed and says he’s never worked harder in his 20 years in the restaurant business.

The main reason he cites: The red-hot real estate market, along with historically high rents that have made it difficult to recruit employees.  

“In my 10 years with Nayarit, we’ve never closed due to a lack of workers,” Corona explained. “But recently we were forced to close each of our locations one day a week.” He and his staff are doing their best; all he asks is that customers “show a little more compassion when it comes to waiting for their orders.” 

Like many restaurants, Nayarit depends on a combination of native-born workers and immigrants to function. In recent months, though, neither group has been showing up.

Besides lack of housing, another factor is low wages in the hospitality sector. Still, Michael French, who heads La Plata County’s Economic Development Alliance, isn’t convinced the shortage is limited to the service industry: “What’s going on is pervasive across all industries and wage categories,” he says. “I believe we’re just now beginning to comprehend the challenges that labor shortages present. I think we’re in a workforce transition.”

Part of that transition — in Durango and elsewhere in the country — involves our nation’s shifting demographics.

The United States is aging. At the beginning of the 20th century, the nation’s typical resident was 23. The average citizen today is 38. And for white Americans, who make up 86% of Durango’s population, the median age is now 58

In addition, fertility rates are in free fall. At 1.6 children per woman, birthrates are now at their lowest levels since 1979. Thanks to the pandemic, birthrates have dropped even further.

Not so long ago, steady flows of young migrants helped the U.S. economy compensate for aging workers and low birth rates. But immigration to this country peaked long ago in 1910, when nearly 15% of the population was foreign-born.

It wasn’t until after World War II that government-sponsored initiatives like the Bracero program started a new wave of immigration. By 2010, immigrants once again made up just over 14% of the country’s population.

However, today, instead of putting migrants to work, the U.S. government works to keep them out. We’ve stepped up enforcement at the border and under the last administration, launched deportation campaigns against undocumented immigrants.

Moreover, in 2020, the number of immigrant and non-immigrant visas issued was down 54% from the previous year. In turn, temporary and permanent worker visas fell by 44%. And as surprising as it might sound, more Mexicans are going home today than are coming to the United States.

I believe the solution to our labor crisis is literally knocking on our southern door. In 2019, at the height of the migrant caravans from Central America, I made several trips across the border to Tijuana to interview migrants. Many of the individuals I talked to were staying at Casa del Migrante, which has been housing migrants for more than three decades.

I met hundreds of willing workers hoping to achieve the American dream of working hard and getting ahead. One man, Carlos, summed up the chaos that so many were fleeing. Originally from Honduras, Carlos was accompanied by his 3-year-old son.

“The gangs killed my brother and sister. And they threatened my son and tortured me,” Carlos said, revealing multiple scars across his chest. “I hope to get asylum and find enough work to buy a little house for my son,” Carlos said. “What more could one want?”

As our nation continues to age, the need for workers like Carlos, who has varied job experience, and others like him, becomes more and more evident. Through a guest-worker program, migrants like Carlos could help fix our country’s demand for additional workers. They would also boost Social Security’s assets and renew America’s commitment to providing refugees a safe haven. The workers are close, waiting to prove themselves.

The question is whether or not we’re willing to open the door.  Ben Waddell is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, a nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West. He is an associate professor of sociology at Fort Lewis College in Durango, Colorado.

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