In a recent speech, President Donald Trump delivered a tirade filled with grievances and self-congratulations, echoing his long-standing rhetoric on immigration. His claims, such as the assertion that “hundreds of thousands of illegal crossings a month” bring in “murderers, drug dealers, gang members, and people from mental institutions,” continue to stoke fear and resentment among his supporters.
Yet, as Jacob Stowell, an associate professor of criminology, points out, the data tells a different story. Crime rates have not surged; in fact, they have continued to decline even as immigration has grown.
This persistent scapegoating of immigrants is a classic tactic from the totalitarian playbook, reminiscent of historical examples like Hitler’s targeting of Jews or Duterte’s vilification of drug addicts. By uniting his base against a common enemy, Trump diverts attention from deeper, systemic issues. But in doing so, he barks up the wrong tree. The real threat to America is not immigration – it’s the erosion of the work ethic that once defined the nation.
Decades ago, Chuck Colson and Jack Eckerd warned of this decline in their book Why America Doesn’t Work. They described a new generation of workers characterized by a get-away-with-what-you-can attitude and a lack of commitment to quality and hard work. This cultural shift, they cautioned, would plague future employers and undermine the nation’s economic foundation.
Fast forward to today, and their warning rings true. The decline in work ethic has become a pressing issue, overshadowed by misplaced blame on immigrants. To understand the distinction between these two narratives, consider the story of Rafael Santos, a Filipino immigrant whose journey exemplifies the resilience and contributions of migrants to America portrayed in the book The Other Americans: How Immigrants Renew Our Country, Our Economy, And Our Values by Joel Millman.
Santos grew up in poverty in La Paz de Tarlac, Philippines. At eighteen, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy, facing both opportunities and discrimination. He explains,
“Because I wasn’t a citizen I had limited security clearance. Now it’s different, you do your basic training, you can do anything: seaman’s apprentice, yeoman, corpsman. But not in my case. I did what the Filipinos and black Americans did: serve food and cook.”
Half of Santos’s fellow recruits at the Navy Steward School were like him, young “Flips” from the islands. After basic training, he was assigned to the Naval Air Station in Jacksonville, Florida. That was in 1961. Traveling by bus to his new duty station, he saw something he never could have imagined back home. He says,
“I thought America was heaven on earth. But by the time I passed Texas, the bathrooms were separate. The black people wanted me to go to the white bathroom, but I am not white! The white people said to use the black one. That is the joke for Filipinos: we are white and black at the same time.”
Santos spent twenty years in the military, mostly cleaning officers’ rooms and serving meals on ships and bases. From Jacksonville, he went to Bremerton, Washington, then to Hawaii and back to California. Along the way, he managed officers’ clubs and an enlisted men’s mess. Everywhere he worked, “Flips” like Santos could expect to be, if not exactly scorned, then not exactly accepted, either. He reveals,
“You were there, but you entered through the service entrance. You don’t use the front door.”
By 1974, he had become a desk job, clerk in the Navy’s human resources division in Alameda. Ironically, his assignment was conducting surveys on military race relations. After retiring, Santos took a job with the postal service, availing himself of the veteran’s preference in civil service hires. It’s the same way hundreds of Filipino stewards and their families lifted themselves from greasy kitchens into California’s burgeoning Asian middle class.
Santos spent five years with the post office and launched a catering business. He settled outside Vallejo, where Rafael’s Steak House and Bar became a popular nightspot for Filipino Americans, as well as for the servicemen at nearby Mare Island Naval Shipyard.
He also bought two homes, and put four children through college, where they learned to use words, like “paradigm,” that mean nothing to him after a lifetime in a kitchen. He says,
”Because we are not citizens, we are brought to do the jobs that citizens don’t like. For me, it was a blessing in disguise. I learned my trade and prospered.”
Indeed, it was a blessing in disguise. Santos referred to “it” as his job as a migrant. Unknowingly, in essence, “it” refers to him as a migrant – together with the millions of other migrants – as a “blessing in disguise” to America.
Nonwhite immigrants are not a threat to American culture for it does not have a definable ethnicity. Millman asserts,
“America has been Latin, absorbing half of Mexico before 1850. America became Asian later in that same century, bringing Hawaii (and for several decades, the Philippines) into its territory. In short, years before the mass of migrants began arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe, America already had millions of citizens who traced their roots to Africa, Mesoamerica, and the Far East. Many had been here for generations.”
Instead of being a threat, migrants should have been understood and recognized as a “wake-up call” – the phrase Trump declared when the Chinese start-up DeepSeek had shocked the world with an AI breakthrough.
Instead of vilifying immigrants, we should look to them, not as a “replacement,” but as models for revitalizing the American work ethic. As Michael Hammer writes in his book Beyond Reengineering:
“The wages of work can be paid in a variety of currencies… But there is another reward that we reap all too rarely today. We need our work to have transcendent meaning…It should make us feel that we are contributing to the world, that we are helping to make it a better place where we are somehow leaving a legacy.
“Work should help us focus not on ourselves but on others, the beneficiaries of our work, and, in so doing, free us from the relentless focus on our concerns that eventually leaves the taste of ashes in our mouths.”
What a befitting conclusion in light of the celebration of the Ash Wednesday tradition.
Content & editing put together in collaboration with Microsoft Bing AI-powered Co-pilot
Head collage photos courtesy of Pinterest, Shutterstock, & Canva
Still photos courtesy of AP News, Inkl, Shutterstock, Internet Archive, & Adobe Stock
