We might be fighting about cats and dogs, but we’re not having the debate this country needs on immigration.

Immigration is essential to America’s economy, and always has been. Right now, the debate is missing the point.

I have a beloved friend who is an immigrant to the U.S. He used to always joke about inviting my cats to dinner — saying they would make a tasty snack. 

My friend, Mohamed El-Hodiri, is also a retired professor of economics at the University of Kansas, who spent his life studying global economies and western civilizations. 

After President Trump accused (unfounded) Haitian migrants of eating cats and dogs, the internet lit up with memes. While the jokes were plenty, I couldn’t help but think of Mohamed.  Both for his jokes, now 20 years ago, about having my cats for dinner — but also because we have always talked about immigration and its importance to the United States’ vibrant economy. 

“America’s history is immigration,” Mohamed says. “There would never be an America in the modern sense if not for immigration.” 

*** 

The debate over immigration is the one place where the Republicans and Democrats have the starkest differences in terms of their party platforms that each party blessed at their own Conventions.  

Republicans promise (all caps included) to “SEAL THE BORDER… CARRY OUT THE LARGEST DEPORTATION OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY…DEPORT PRO-HAMAS RADICALS AND MAKE OUR COLLEGE CAMPUSES SAFE AND PATRIOTIC AGAIN (without any mention of immigration status)… (and) keep foreign Christian-hating Communists, Marxists and Socialists out of America.”  

Democrats promise to maintain America as “A beacon of hope and opportunity… consistent with our values as a nation… secure the border, reform the asylum system, expand legal immigration and keep families together by supporting a pathway for long-term undocumented individuals…punish human smugglers (and) modernize legal immigration.” 

Who should have the right to come to America — and how we decide who stays in America — is foundationally important to our country.  And yet the way we’re debating it is fundamentally unserious, sensationalized and lacks historical context. 

*** 

“People would like to forget that there’s only one native group; that’s whose country it is,” Mohamed tells me. “Everybody else is settlers, guests or conquerors, whatever you want to call it.” 

Mohamed was among 300 Arab students first invited to the US in 1959, part of a diplomatic effort of the US to win favor with Egypt’s then President Nasser who was leading a non-aligned coalition refusing to take the side of either Russia or the US during the Cold War.  

The US saw an advantage to bringing this group to America to place them in graduate schools, to drive our economy in the long-run, and because it can present leverage when you want leverage diplomatically.  

As we talk about the Cold War era — Mohamed traveling first to Moscow, before being recalled after a dispute between Nasser and Khrushchev, then being welcomed to America — I can’t help getting the feeling he was a pawn in world leaders’ games.  

Yes, we were pawns, he agrees.  But he also notes that all but approximately 40 of those students remain in America to this day, and they have added significantly to the economy and research capacity.  If they were pawns, in this instance America won. 

In 1939 foreign-born physicists like Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt that Nazi Germany could be using nuclear fission for weapons development.  

Foreign born scientists would then lead the Manhattan Project, ensuring that the United States was the first nation with the atomic bomb. The U.S. invested heavily in their recruitment and this ultimately proved decisive in winning World War II.

Immigration has literally created America’s superpower. 

*** 

If you listen to political rhetoric about immigration you would have no idea what immigration has done for our country’s history. 

Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance talks most about illegal immigration.

He highlights tragic stories of crimes, highlighting the few at the hands of undocumented immigrants. Listening to him speak, what’s absent is notable: Any positive talk about immigrants and their contributions. In Vance’s home state of Ohio immigrants make up about 5% of the state’s population — and nearly 25% of the state’s physicians.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ family immigrated to America, and while she often speaks of the benefits of immigration, the conversation also turns to the darker sides of immigration — she talks about prosecuting drug cartels and gangs and securing the border. 

What’s missing is the larger economic argument for immigration.  

“How significant was immigration to the development of America?” Mohamed asks as a professor often does. “It’s a rhetorical question, because there would be no America without legal and illegal immigration.”  

In the history of America when Ellis Island was processing people to get into this country all you needed was money to get to America.  Once you got here, if you were healthy, you got in.  

Clearly, now with the developments worldwide, there should be a processing system.  But our immigration laws haven’t been reformed in 30 years, my entire adult life, despite valiant efforts to do so.  

Right now a Hawkish Compromise exists that President Biden negotiated with Republican Senators but the House refuses to take it up. What does this mean?  We have millions of people in this country in limbo, some who fought alongside our forces in conflict, and are here awaiting the resolution of their asylum cases. 

*** 

Even though it would make sense in our country if we followed facts and data, political arguments are often not won on facts.  They’re won on a feeling, that’s based on perceptions.  

The perception that immigration and the economy are two separate issues is wrong.  They are intertwined and should require constant Congressional attention, updating laws and processes to best welcome and enhance the contribution of immigrants to our economy.  

What’s happening in Ohio is tragic.  A community is turning against each other when their prosperity could grow together.  

That is the American success story: Our prosperity and freedoms growing together.   And if we want to continue success we have to have that debate — not one about cats and dogs, even if people enjoy the memes and I enjoyed Mohamed’s joke.  

Mohamed reassures me all these years later, he would never actually eat my pet cat.