Ep. 82: Open borders for America is not a Jewish religious principle
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The blizzard of executive orders and policy changes enacted by President Donald Trump in his first 10 days of the second administration have, as a New York Times headline put it, left many liberals and Democrats dazed and on the defensive. But when it comes to the issue the president campaigned the hardest for, enforcing the law to stop illegal immigrants and to deport those who have no right to stay in the United States,

The Jewish left isn't simply rolling over and taking it. On immigration, left-wing Jewish groups, and in particular the liberal religious denominations, seem ready to head to the barricades to oppose the administration's stance. That means not merely opposing in principle Trump's efforts to secure what became an open southern border for much of the Biden administration.

It involves bitter opposition to the efforts of Trump's border czar, Tom Homan, the former head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to deport illegal immigrants. Homan hit the ground running in his first week of the new administration as ICE agents began a series of raids to round up those who fit into the top priority for the deportation program, illegal immigrants who have committed crimes in individuals with active orders mandating their expulsion.

This has produced a series of reactions from people on the left that can only be described as hysteria, with the most prominent being a since-deleted Instagram post of singer-actress Selena Gomez, who has been active in the cause of obtaining amnesty for all illegal immigrants.

Weeping about the deportations, she said how so sorry she was that she was unable to stop Trump and Hohmann from unapologetically enforcing the law. And while not garnering as much attention as Gomez, a broad coalition of liberal Jewish entities shares her views.

A letter to this effect was signed by 87 Jewish organizations, including the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, the National Council of Jewish Women, Jewish Women International, Bend the Ark Jewish Action, HIAS, the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet, the Israel-bashing J Street Lobby, and most importantly, groups that represent the Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements of Judaism.

Their broadside denounced Trump's policy as persecution and accused the president of spreading fear and tearing communities apart. It did so while claiming to speak in the name of Jewish values. They also drew a direct parallel between the tens of millions of economic migrants who have streamed into the United States in recent years

and the history in which Jews have been, quote, forced to flee, denied access to safety, scapegoated, detained, and exploited, unquote. In particular, the groups condemned any federal actions in which law enforcement officers might enter houses of worship to apprehend those with active warrants on them.

They reference the broader sanctuary movement in which many municipalities and states dominated by Democrats have declared themselves unwilling to cooperate with federal authorities with respect to the issue of illegal immigration. But they seem to be asserting that churches, synagogues, mosques, and any other religious institution should have legal impunity to host illegals

no matter what crimes they've committed, as if they were conjuring up a scene from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. This is familiar territory for those particular groups, but especially for those who espouse liberal Judaism. For decades, they have been repeating the same mantra about Jews being a community of immigrants, and the religious law commands the Jewish people to love and help the stranger because they themselves were once strangers in a strange land.

Indeed, for the overwhelming majority of American Jews who think of themselves as political liberals, this issue has become one of the keystones of their faith, both politically and religiously. Their devotion to assisting migrants and lowering legal barriers to immigration, not to mention turning a blind eye to those who do not immigrate legally, is in large measure a vestige of the Jewish experience in America during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

During that period, as the country filled its open spaces and sought workers for labor-intensive industries that were growing at unprecedented rates, mass immigration was allowed. Even then, immigrants were expected to do so with the permission of federal authorities and could not enter while suffering from some serious diseases or without some means or guarantees that they could support themselves.

Still, the notion of support for liberal immigration laws, which were repealed by Congress a century ago, became imprinted on the Jewish community as somehow integral to their identity.

That was reinforced when anti-immigrant sentiment mixed with the politics of Second World War isolationism and anti-Semitism caused the administration of President Franklin Roosevelt to largely close the gates of the country to Jews seeking to evade the death sentence that hung over them in Nazi-occupied Europe.

But as with much else about American Jewish liberal politics in the 21st century, these historical memories do more to distort our understanding of contemporary problems than enlighten them.

Contrary to actress Natalie Portman and former President Joe Biden, these illegals currently hiding from authorities because they are in danger of deportation for also being violent criminals should never be compared to Anne Frank or other Jews slaughtered by the Germans and their collaborators.

I don't doubt that liberal Jews who are outraged by Trump's immigration policies genuinely believe that their positions are rooted in Judaism as well as being intrinsically moral. But they're wrong on both counts. The Torah may enjoin Jews to treat the stranger fairly and with compassion. It does not, however, compel biblical Israel to have open borders any more than it should be understood as an argument for the same policy for the United States in 2025.

For every verse about being welcoming to those not in their home countries, others enjoin the community to protect itself against lawbreakers. Obeying the laws of the nation where they reside is also a Jewish principle.

And that is not invalidated by absurd comparisons, be they implicit or directly stated, between the plight of illegal immigrants currently in America, who overwhelmingly come for economic reasons, and Jews fleeing for their lives from the Nazis in the 1930s and 40s.

Whether or not liberal Jews who oppose his policies are comparing Trump to Hitler, calling him an authoritarian or fascist, the assumption that their stand has anything to do with social justice, which is supposedly the cause they care most about, is equally off-base. No other issue is a better illustration of the class divide in 21st century America than that of attitudes towards illegal immigration.

In the last two decades, the Democratic Party has become an institution that treats opposing enforcement of immigration laws as one of its guiding principles. It has done so at a time when its adherents have increasingly come from the country's credentialed elites, while shedding many, if not most, of the working class voters who were once its core constituency.

It is therefore unsurprising that Jews, a slice of demographics that is among the country's most educated population, are among the sectors of voters who are also most loyal to Democrats.

While Jewish liberals think they are defending the values of their faith and identifying with the plight of their antecedents, they seem unaware or indifferent to the fact that the position they are now endorsing is antithetical to the interests of contemporary working class and poor Americans. To the consternation of Democrats and their corporate media cheerleaders, public opinion has shifted in Trump's direction on a host of issues.

On illegal immigration, the numbers are staggering across the board. Polls conducted by ABC News, CBS News, Marquette University, and New York Times-Ipsos show that respondents favored deporting all illegal immigrants by decisive majorities ranging from 55% to 64%. That contrasts with the numbers from eight years ago that showed only 36% to 42% were in favor.

it amounts to a national consensus in favor of enforcing the law and gives Trump and Homan a mandate. Democrats can read the poll numbers and sense the confidence with which the new GOP administration is carrying out the will of the voters. What's lacking from them is any real understanding of why Trump's policies are so popular. That's very much the case with illegal immigration, since the credentialed elites who vote for the Democrats assume that the rest of the country felt the same way as they did.

Biden's open border policies had a lot to do with this. The former president's non-enforcement rules, which he attempted to reverse in 2024 as the election began slipping away from the Democrats, allowed as many as 10 million illegals to enter the country. That consisted of approximately 8 million encounters with those entering without permission, tabulated by the government, and perhaps as many as 2 million so-called gotaways who evaded apprehension.

This has led to a situation where the number of illegals currently in the country is far higher than the 11 million figure used by the left-wing media for the past decade. It could be as high as 30 million if one considers that an authoritative Yale University study estimated that in 2018 there were at least 22 million illegals in the United States. But the building of a consensus about the need to deport illegals is more than a function of non-enforcement.

The flood of migrants into the United States has had a devastating impact on working-class Americans. Starting in the 1990s, globalist economic policies meant more competition for U.S.-made goods and depressed wages for employees of companies that had to compete against cheap foreign labor. The NAFTA trade agreement also wiped out an estimated 700,000 American manufacturing jobs. The entry of China into the World Trade Organization

further accelerated the decline of American manufacturing and wages. That was the context with the impact of the massive surge in illegal immigration that has taken place in the last two decades and culminated under Biden. The presence of so many people working, willing to work for little money and no benefits, delighted corporate America, but also further drove down wages and contributed to rising costs in health care, housing, and education.

The left still labors under the delusion that the working poor are their natural constituency. But the fact that real wages for the working class dropped at least 5% over the last four decades, while the highest earners got richer, created a constituency for Trump that now crosses racial and ethnic lines.

outrage about the Democrats' erasure of the border has grown, along with the understanding that this virtual invasion has come at a high cost to many working people. They suffer disproportionately from the impact of the opioid epidemic, made possible by the spread of fentanyl in the United States by drug cartels operating at the southern border, which largely run the business of smuggling illegals.

The situation has also impacted border communities and then even northern cities, where many of the illegals wound up, which had been forced to deal with the needs of so many migrants. Contrary to the assumptions of the left, those who support deportation orders for illegals are not racist, as even most Hispanics favor enforcement of the law. That explained why Trump received nearly half their votes last November. Nor are they xenophobic.

is that an open border policy is a gift to the credentialed elites and large corporations wanting a steady supply of migrant serfs to work for them at near-slave labor wages that Americans won't tolerate. The assumption spread by the open borders lobby that without illegal immigrants, American agriculture couldn't operate is also a myth. Nearly 90% of farm laborers are not illegals.

and a similar percentage of all illegal workers are not in agriculture. The largest sector for illegals working in the United States is construction, not picking crops. When highly educated liberal Jews, who also number among the wealthiest sectors of the population, cry crocodile tears for illegals, they also assert that no one will do the jobs that illegals will take.

But that often just means that they want to continue to hire what they inaccurately call undocumented immigrants to clean their houses, mow their lawns, or watch their children for cut-rate wages. They also like the fact that restaurants, including high-end ones, can use busboys and dishwashers who are illegal, therefore lowering the costs of fine dining. Corporations feel the same way about the illegals who work in their industries.

All this makes it harder for American workers to get decent wages when so many illegals are available to undercut them. The hunger for cheap labor is understandable from an economic point of view, but it has nothing to do with social justice or tikkun olam. And it's time Jewish liberals stopped pretending that they did. It's long past time for the most educated and wealthy Americans to stop pretending that enforcing immigration rules is Trumpian tyranny.

and that refraining from doing so helps the poor or working-class Americans. They also need to give up characterizing the arrest and deportation of the large number of violent criminals who benefited from non-enforcement policies as a tragedy worth lamenting. What amounts to open borders is antithetical to the rule of law, as well as hurts those struggling to make a living.

Invoking the immigrant past of most Jewish families or citing biblical precepts that should not be confused with 21st century party platforms doesn't change that. Thanks for listening. Please remember to tune in every day for Jonathan Tobin Daily Edition and every week for Think Twice, my full-length JNS-TV program.

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