Trump’s Own Goals: His immigration policies are baked in MAGA’s racism

US President Donald Trump is gearing up for the Congressional midterm elections in November in exactly the wrong way. The US Supreme Court and district courts across the country have handed Trump one defeat after another. The apex court recently struck down Trump’s executive order banning voting by mail. Over 30 per cent of all votes in the US are cast by mail. Trump wanted that stopped because he says illegal immigrants without identity proof vote en masse for Democrats.

Meanwhile, Trump’s approval rating continues to fall. Republican candidates standing for election in the November 3 midterms don’t want him to campaign for them. The 435-member House of Representatives is almost certain to fall to the Democrats. The 100-member Senate remains on a knife edge.

The Iran war has stoked inflation in the US with gasoline prices rising steadily. In a country built for cars, that is a sensitive issue. America has the West’s most rudimentary railway network—no major high-speed trains and a railway system that’s almost completely run on diesel. In India, by contrast, 99 per cent of the railway network is electric.

Trump’s threat to take over Iran’s oil assets as the US has done in Venezuela is not just neo-colonial, but neo-comical. The CIA and Britain’s MI6 had colluded to do exactly that in Iran 73 years ago. They engineered a coup to overthrow the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, in 1953. Since 1901, British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company had profited from Iran’s oil wealth. Mosaddegh nationalised the company in 1951, triggering the coup two years later. Iran’s new leader, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, working under American and British orders, gave control of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1954 to a consortium of British and US oil companies.

Trump’s immigration policies will cause harm to the US in the long term. America’s strength has been its immigrants. They have contributed to US innovation, wealth and diversity. Trump is trying to dismantle that diversity. The world’s richest man Elon Musk is a South African immigrant. The founder of leading AI firm Anthropic, Dario Amodei, has Italian heritage. His father, a leather craftsman, migrated to the US from Tuscany in the 1970s. Google cofounder Sergey Brin is an immigrant from Russia. Nvidia founder Jensen Huang is a migrant from Taiwan.

According to News18, a report by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) noted: “A sustained reduction in immigration could significantly shrink the US labour force. It estimated a potential loss of about 19 million worker-years by 2028 and 102 million by 2035. The resulting impact on economic output could reach $1.9 trillion between 2025 and 2028 and $12.1 trillion by 2035—equivalent to $34,369 per person. The analysis also projected that the policies could cut the pace of economic growth by nearly one-third and add substantially to federal debt. The answer is beginning to show up in America’s labour market, businesses and population numbers. Net migration, which exceeded 2 million a year in 2022-24, fell to roughly zero or even negative in 2025.”

Unless Trump’s immigration policies are completely overturned by future administrations—institutionally difficult—the US will no longer be a magnet for the world’s most talented. That is an own goal America could live to regret. Immigration has kept the US a young nation with a median age of 39 years compared to Japan’s 50 years and Germany’s 47 years. It has also kept it in the forefront of global innovation. Trump is destroying the foundations of a country in which his own mother, Mary MacLeod, was an immigrant from Scotland.

Trump has cut funding for Ivy League universities like Harvard because they have strong diversity policies. The world’s most dynamic educational ecosystem is under attack by an administration catering to its MAGA base. This base is America’s underbelly: poorly educated and poorly paid. They resent immigrants who are better educated, wealthier, and take the best jobs.

Trump’s immigration policies are baked in MAGA’s racism. Trump, for example, has ordered the Smithsonian Institute to remove exhibits that describe America’s history of slavery and genocide of Native Americans. By the end of the century, the UN estimates that the world’s white population will fall from 36 per cent in 1900 to 3 per cent in 2100. Trump’s neo-colonial policies will not halt that decline.