The anti-immigration people won the elections. They campaigned successfully on the “mass deportation” of undocumented immigrants and they have every intention of fulfilling that threat. And, if the first Trump administration is any indication, they will also drastically shrink and slow down legal immigration in every way they can think of.

As they did in the past, they will flout American immigration law and will deny asylum-seekers the due process they are legally entitled to. ACLU and friends will sue the government. The Supreme Court will take up those cases and will sometimes outrage us and sometimes surprise us.

Throughout this bleak nativist period, it is important for those of us who are not on board with ultra-nationalism and the demonization of immigrants to clarify our own values, our own vision for an America that rises to the challenge of globalization and mass migration, not just economically but also ethically.

Here’s what that vision looks like, from my point of view:

1. We are pro-immigrant, not anti-immigrant. On a personal, emotional level, we understand and accept what historians, economists and political scientists have been telling us forever: that immigrants make America great, rather than threatening or diminishing it. Immigrants create wealth, commit fewer crimes than natives, and put the “exceptionalism” in “American exceptionalism.”

2. Undocumented immigration is not a good thing — but not because it endangers America (it doesn’t), but rather because it creates a class of people who are easily exploitable.

3. Undocumented immigration is not the result of faraway tragedies that are regrettable but have nothing to do with us. Undocumented immigration is a result of what Aviva Chomsky, author of “Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal” (2014) and “‘They Take Our Jobs!’: And 20 Other Myths About Immigration” (2007), calls “global apartheid.”

“The histories and economies of the United States and Guatemala and Haiti are so deeply intertwined that it’s almost a fiction to say that they’re separate countries. The United States has occupied and exploited the humans and the resources of those countries for so long,” Chomsky told me. “Granting the freedom of movement to some and restricting the freedom of movement of others entrenches a structure of global privilege.”

Whether it’s direct occupation, involvement in civil wars, economic extortion, the importation of drugs and the exportation of drug money and guns, or climate change caused by massive industrialization, the U.S. has had a heavy hand in the causes of mass migration.

4. We hold these truths to be really, really bad: That employers, big and small, who hire undocumented immigrants and then vilify “illegal aliens” are hypocritical. That an administration who hunts down undocumented workers but virtually never puts their employers in jail is hypocritical, cruel and unjust. That a political class that knows fully well that half of all undocumented immigrants overstayed their visas rather than cross the southern border illegally but rarely mentions these particular folks because they tend to come from visa-worthy countries like Canada and the U.K. and they “don’t stick out” is simply racist.

5. “A fundamental characteristic of what makes humans human is mobility, migrating, spreading to different places,” political geographer Reece Jones, author of “White Borders” (2021) and “Violent Borders” (2016), told me in a recent interview. “The thing that is ahistorical, that is abnormal is this idea of borders, of restricting the movement of other people to protect resources and land.”

You’d think that of all people it would be Americans, with their personal immigrationist histories, their libertarian ethos, and their love for relocating for jobs, schooling or retirement, who would best appreciate that migrating is a fundamental freedom.

6. Too, you’d think it would be Americans, with their noncontiguous 50 states, five inhabited territories, and hundreds of sovereign tribal lands, who would appreciate that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are best served by (con-)federations of autonomous administrative units with “soft” borders that allow free movement but also allow the locals to set the rules for living in their neighborhood.

The fiction of the “nation-state” is constantly trying to convince us that we’re radically different than our neighbors, says journalist John Washington, author of “The Case for Open Borders” (2024).

“This idea of nationhood has infected our basic way of thinking about the world, about each other, about community. If you’re able to undercut it, I don’t think people would notice it very much, actually. I think there would be more small-level cohesion,” Washington told me. “And we wouldn’t have to do away with states. I’m not actually arguing for no states or abolishing all borders. I think borders can exist. [But] I think they should be crossed.”

The continued integration of the U.S. with Canada and Mexico is a worthwhile project. But allowing only for the free circulation of products, services and capital and not the free circulation of workers is an economically and ethically bankrupt policy. We should aim to gradually increase people’s freedom, not shrink it. We should find ways to prevent, identify and punish transnational crime, from individual acts of violence to the trafficking of humans, drugs and guns, not use it as an excuse to enforce that “global apartheid” regime Aviva Chomsky spoke about.

To push back against Trump’s vicious anti-immigrant populism, and to ensure that the Democrats who might regain some measure of institutional power in two years or four years (or however many years it’ll take them to recover), we need to know what we believe in and envision the future demanded by our values.

Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of journalism at UMass Amherst. He has written a monthly column on immigration in the Gazette since September 2019. This is his last as a regular columnist.