Avi Chomsky: Trump is using immigration policy as an attack on free speech

We spoke with historian and activist Avi Chomsky, daughter of philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky, about Trump’s immigration policies, the criminalization of immigrants, and America’s prison industrial complex.

Your research and work have long been concerned with the topic of immigration. What led you to become interested in this topic?

My first experience understanding immigration came when I worked for the United Farmworkers in 1976. After my first year of college, I took a year off and volunteered for the farmworkers in California. This experience exposed me to California agriculture and immigrant workers, mostly Mexican. It was like having a veil pulled from my eyes. Growing up in New England, I had never considered where food came from before the supermarket.

This experience led me to think about Latin America and U.S. relations with Latin America. I did my dissertation on West Indian migrant workers in Costa Rica, working for the United Fruit Company. After living in California for many years, I moved back to New England. I realized how much it had changed, with a large Latino immigrant population even in northern New England.

You argue that undocumented status is an invented concept. Can you summarize your perspective and provide examples of how this concept is weaponized through policies?

To understand the history of U.S. immigration, we must consider the United States as a settler-colonial country, like Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In settler colonialism, the colonizers‘ goal is not to rule over the native population but to displace, dispossess, and eliminate them.

In settler-colonial societies, immigration is important, but only a certain kind – colonizers‘ immigration. Citizenship is generally restricted to members of the colonizer group. In the United States, up until the Civil War, citizenship was explicitly restricted to white persons.

It wasn’t until after World War II that citizenship was fully opened to people of all races. After the Civil War, we started seeing racial restrictions on immigration to prevent non-white people from becoming citizens. These restrictions weren’t removed until the civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s.

Mexican immigrants have always been treated differently, not as potential citizens but as temporary workers. The creation of „undocumentedness“ came about when racial restrictions on immigration were removed, and the Bracero program ended. A tiny numerical restriction was put on Mexican immigration, creating a situation where Mexicans still needed to work in the U.S., but couldn’t do so legally. Undocumentedness was essentially created to justify the exploitation of Mexican workers.

Do you think something is changing in the official immigration doctrine now in 2025?

I see many similarities between Obama, Biden, and Trump, going back to Clinton, with the doctrine of criminalizing immigrants. Both Biden and Obama subscribed to the notion of associating immigrants with criminality, focusing on deporting „criminal immigrants.“ However, they tried to distinguish between „good immigrants“ and „criminal immigrants,“ whereas Trump was against all immigrants.

Trump attempted to overturn many programs that allowed people into the country legally, including asylum, refugee, and parole programs. Another similarity among these administrations is the focus on the border, even though only about half of the people who are in the country undocumented entered without inspection across the U.S.-Mexico border.

Many people who are in the country without legal status originally entered with legal status but subsequently lost it. The vast majority lost their status not by committing serious crimes, but by overstaying their visas or violating other terms of their visa. For example, if you are in the U.S. on a student visa and drop a class, thereby no longer taking a full load of classes, it doesn’t count as a crime; rather, it is a violation of the terms of your visa, resulting in the loss of that particular legal status.

How does the Trump Administration’s immigration policy reflect historical patterns of criminalizing immigrant labor? Is Trump’s reshaping of immigration policy drastically different from historical trajectories?

I don’t think it’s drastically different. Although Trump talks about deporting 11 million undocumented people, many economic sectors he’s beholden to rely on immigrant labor. Interestingly, many of Trump’s policies involve removing status from people who already have it.

Trump seems to be weaponizing immigration policy for different reasons. One is to appeal to his base with the idea of ending illegal immigration. However, the actual number of deportations and detentions has not increased since Trump took office; it’s just become more newsworthy.

Trump is also using immigration policy to attack freedom of speech and higher education, imposing his agenda beyond immigration issues. He’s targeting people with legal status, like Mahmoud Khalil, a legal permanent resident with a green card, to achieve these broader political goals.

Most Venezuelans who have been deported, including those sent to El Salvador or deported to Venezuela, as well as others in detention, entered the U.S. with a legal status. They are individuals who waited in Mexico, registered for Biden’s CBP App, and were granted parole in the United States. However, they become easy targets because they are in the system. Almost everyone Trump targets in his efforts to increase immigration rates consists of these easy victims. By being in the system and maintaining legal status, these individuals are vulnerable, so he effectively renders them illegal by removing their status.

Trump is also using immigration policy to target individuals with different types of work visas for political reasons. For instance, a doctor from Rhode Island was denied reentry to the United States after visiting her home in Lebanon. In these cases, people are not being accused of any specific crime. Instead, Trump is invoking outdated laws, such as the Alien Enemies Act from 1798, to justify his actions.

The administration uses vague concepts like „threat to national security“ to justify deportations and entry denials. Under these laws, the Secretary of State can make such determinations without concrete evidence. For example, the Alien Enemies Act allows for the arrest of nationals from countries that have invaded the United States. However, this is being applied to countries like Venezuela, which have not invaded the U.S., raising questions about the legal validity of these actions.

This approach represents a significant shift in the criminalization of immigrants. While the actual number of deportations and detentions hasn’t increased, Trump is weaponizing immigration policy to achieve broader political goals, often targeting individuals who are in the country legally. These actions are likely to face legal challenges, but they demonstrate a new and aggressive use of immigration policy to advance a political agenda.

Would you explain the manipulation of temporary worker programs over time? How does this relate to Trump’s attempts to limit H-1B visas and other legal immigration pathways?

The H-1B visa is one example of a temporary worker visa. In theory, a temporary worker visa could work fairly for all parties involved. However, in practice, the vast majority of temporary worker programs in the United States have been set up to make workers extremely vulnerable and dependent on their employers, creating conditions ripe for exploitation.

There are some temporary programs, especially for graduate students who earn degrees in the U.S., that are not designed for exploitation. For instance, the Optional Practical Training (OPT) program allows graduates to work in their field of study for a year after graduation without being tied to a specific employer.

However, most guest worker programs, dating back to the first Bracero program with Mexico in 1917, are specifically designed to increase employer power over workers and maintain workers in subordinate positions. One could imagine guest worker programs that benefit both sides. Many workers in Latin America would like to come to the United States and work temporarily, but not under regimes of fear and exploitation.

How did immigration status replace overt racial discrimination? And how do you evaluate the recent deportations and attempts to deport immigrants who express support for Palestinian human rights?

The removal of racial restrictions on immigration came about during the civil rights era, in conjunction with other civil rights legislation prohibiting discrimination based on race. The 1965 immigration law supposedly eliminated discrimination and opened immigration equally to all countries of the world, granting each country an equal quota of migrants.

However, this system created new problems. Some countries are very small, with populations of a million or less, while others have over a billion people. Interestingly, it’s mostly the white countries that are small – European countries like Belgium, the Netherlands, and Denmark. In contrast, countries with non-white populations like China, India, Indonesia, and the Philippines have much larger populations.

The 1965 law put a uniform quota of 20,000 immigrants per year for each country. This drastically reduced legal immigration from Mexico, which previously had no numerical restrictions. About 400,000 Mexicans were entering every year to work in agriculture, and suddenly it was limited to 20,000 a year. The guest worker program was eliminated, but instead of being replaced with a just system, it was replaced with this numerical restriction. This enabled the continued exploitation of Mexican workers, who were now constructed as „illegal“ rather than guest workers.

What we’re seeing now is the weaponization of anti-immigrant sentiment for various political causes. There’s been an attack on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives, which have tried to open doors of opportunity for historically excluded groups. Simultaneously, we’re seeing a sudden focus on anti-semitism, particularly in relation to criticism of Israeli policies.

This shift seems to be about colonialism and the identification of Israel as a proxy state of the United States. There’s an underlying idea that people of color are threatening hordes that white settler countries must eliminate. As a result, any expression of free speech opposing Israeli actions is tagged as anti-semitism and is being used to justify the deportation of people who challenge right-wing agendas.

Your work critiques the prison industrial complex in relation to immigration. Can you explain the connection? Do you see economic interests in the Trump administration’s declared interest in increased detention and deportations?

Absolutely. The Trump administration has been contracting with private prison companies, especially the GEO Group, to construct new detention centers. The private prison industry has been a major factor in promoting mass incarceration and is part of ALEC (American Legislative Exchange Council), which writes legislation and then lobbies for it in Congress.

The private prison industry has profited especially from immigrant detention because immigrants are some of the cheapest people to detain. They tend to be young and healthy, not long-term detainees, and generally don’t suffer from many of the issues that other incarcerated people do, such as mental health problems, drug addiction, or violent tendencies. This means immigrant detention centers require less investment to keep running.

There are definitely economic interests at stake in increasing immigration detention. Starting with the Obama administration, the government put quotas on its own agencies, saying, „We have 30,000 beds, so you have to keep those beds filled every night.“ The Trump administration has been pressing the Department of Homeland Security to increase detentions because of promises made, and now there are more detention beds, with more planned for the future.

Given your analysis of how U.S. economic policies drive migration, how do you view Trump’s attempts to cut aid to Central American countries and pressure Mexico to block migrants?

When I wrote my book in 2014, there was a significant increase in Central American migration. Central Americans and Mexicans accounted for the vast majority of migrants. However, this panorama has changed somewhat in recent years. We’re now seeing, especially after COVID and during the Biden administration, big increases in migrants from other parts of the world. There’s been a fragmentation of migration sources, with more migrants coming from Central Asia, China, India, and different parts of Latin America.

U.S. foreign aid is just one piece of the puzzle in U.S. relations with these countries. If you look at the statistics on how much money goes to a country in foreign aid versus how much profit comes back to the United States through investments, tax policies, and trade policies, you’ll see that the flow of resources is out of almost all countries receiving aid. The two major exceptions are Israel and Egypt, the largest recipients of U.S. foreign aid, which were excluded from recent cuts.

While foreign aid is a small part of the picture of U.S. economic relations with countries like those in Central America, it has funded some very important programs that have improved people’s livelihoods, especially in areas like healthcare and water sanitation. The cutting of U.S. foreign aid, while seeming like a drop in the bucket globally, can have devastating consequences for individuals in particular places.

U.S. economic policies towards Central America remain a major driver of migration. Many of these policies could be described as structural adjustment or neoliberal policies that force Central American governments to prioritize the interests of foreign investors and U.S. corporations over the interests of their own populations. Foreign aid often acts as a band-aid covering up some of the negative effects of these broader economic policies.

From your value system vantage point, what does a humanistic migration policy look like on the world stage? How should political elites approach this issue through collaboration or other means?

A truly humane migration policy would prioritize human rights, recognizing the right to mobility as a fundamental right that has historically been reserved for white Europeans. When I received my U.S. passport, it came with a flyer saying, „With your U.S. passport, the world belongs to you,“ highlighting the stark inequality in global mobility rights.

Both the right to stay home and the right to move are essential human rights, yet current policies violate these rights. The right to stay home requires a significant overhaul of the global economy to address the historical outflow of resources that has enriched the United States and Europe at the expense of colonized regions.

The current 500-year-old colonial system has created a state of global apartheid maintained in part by the border regime, which was largely drawn by Europeans. This system concentrates wealth and privilege in certain areas, preventing others from accessing them.

A world free of borders where everyone is welcome and has the right to stay home is unlikely in our lifetimes. However, we can take practical steps towards this goal. Changing the national narrative around immigration and addressing economic despair are crucial. Many people who voted for Trump are not inherently anti-immigrant but feel economically squeezed and disillusioned with the Democrats.

To make progress, we need to reverse recent policy changes, such as restoring refugee programs and temporary protected status for various groups. These steps won’t create a fully just immigration policy but are moves in the right direction. Ultimately, rethinking our national narrative and addressing socioeconomic factors driving anti-immigrant sentiments are long-term goals we can start working towards now.

The Democrats tried to change the narrative without addressing economic despair, which only made people angrier. Election statistics show that Trump didn’t increase his votes significantly from 2020 to 2024; instead, many Democrats stayed home, reflecting disillusionment with the party. Addressing these issues is key to creating a more inclusive and equitable immigration policy.

Avi Chomsky is a historian, author, and activist who teaches history at Salem State University in Massachusetts, where she is also the Coordinator of Latin American and Caribbean Studies. She is the author of several publications, including Is Science Enough?: Forty Critical Questions About Climate Justice, Central America’s Forgotten History: Revolution, Violence, and the Roots of Migration, and Undocumented: How Immigration Became Illegal.

The interviewer is the founder of the Catch Fire Movement, a political consultant, and a former Flagstaff City Councilmember.