ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- America, make up your mind! When it comes to immigrants, your contradictions are big and loud and hard to square.

Let's start with the big one: America is the land of immigrants, and yet it has never liked immigrants.

Then there is this one: We insist that immigrants speak English, but companies market to them in Spanish.

And this one: Restrictionists claim that immigrants use social services like welfare, but they arrest them while laboring at worksites.

Or this one: Immigrants are depicted as violent criminals, and yet Americans welcome them into their homes as housekeepers and nannies.

America's contradictory views about immigrants have been in play for years, but the year 2025 really put them into focus.

On the one hand, it's the year of the great white nationalist purge.

It's when entitled white Americans -- tired of feeling displaced and marginalized by things like affirmative action, DEI and multiculturalism -- resolved that what this country needed was a good bleaching. We have to Make America White Again, even if it has to happen by force.

It's when the Trump administration turned Immigration and Customs Enforcement from a legitimate law enforcement agency that was created after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorists attacks to what it is now: a rogue street gang of poorly-trained masked thugs who, under internal pressure to meet a daily quota of 3,000 arrests, use racial profiling to roust and round up brown-skinned people in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington DC.

And it's when -- after decades of conservatives pretending, for the sake of public relations, that they only want to keep out illegal immigrants -- Vice President JD Vance accidentally told the truth. While speaking at the University of Mississippi at an event organized by Turning Point USA, Vance called for a reduction in legal immigration. While he said that the optimal number of legal immigrants is "far less than what we've been accepting," he could not provide the perfect number. He only said: "We have to get the overall numbers way, way down."

What worries Vance is the fear that America "needs to cohere a little bit, to build a sense of common identity, for all the newcomers -- the ones who are going to stay -- to assimilate into American culture."

Americans who favor immigration restrictionists like to frame the issue in terms of law and order. Nonsense. In a country that is nearly 250 years old, the concept of "illegal" immigration only goes back about 100 years to the Immigration Act of 1924, which set up per-country quotas of how many immigrants could be admitted to the United States. The immigration debate is about what it has always been about: culture, language, race, ethnicity and national identity.

Somehow, I doubt that Vance's edict against legal immigration applies to major league baseball players.

After all, this is also the year that the Los Angeles Dodgers won their second Major League Baseball championship in a row, this time with an assist from the Land of the Rising Sun. Signing three Japanese players -- Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Roki Sasaki -- cost the Dodgers more than $1 billion. The trio was worth every penny, especially given that the team's owners recouped much of the investment by selling the broadcast rights to Dodgers games to Japanese television networks.

Take a minute and try to get your head around what is appearing on this split screen.

One minute, Americans -- or at least some of them -- are cheering the brutal arrests and forced removal of what the administration claims is more than 600,000 people, many of whom had pending applications for legal status that the administration simply voided.

The next, Americans -- tens of thousands of them -- are cramming into Dodger Stadium to cheer on a baseball team that learned to stop fearing the foreigner, leaned into globalization and found itself laughing all the way to the winner's circle.

Even though the Dodgers are positioning themselves as a global franchise, here in the United States, much of the fan base of Los Doyers is Latino.

Ohtani -- an ace pitcher and powerful slugger whose $700 million contract over 10 years is the largest in sports history -- gets it. He knows who pays his salary. So he remembers to pay his respects.

Taking the microphone at the team's celebration at Dodger Stadium, the superstar greeted the crowd with a big smile and hearty: "Buenos dias!"

Bad news, MAGA. The bleach isn't working.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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