Why this overheated invasion of L.A. looks so ugly and feels so personal
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I was driving while listening to the news Sunday when I heard House Speaker Mike Johnson justify President Trump’s move to send National Guard troops to Los Angeles.
“We have to maintain the rule of law,” Johnson said.
I almost swerved off the road.
Maintain the rule of law?
Steve Lopez
Steve Lopez is a California native who has been a Los Angeles Times columnist since 2001. He has won more than a dozen national journalism awards and is a four-time Pulitzer finalist.
Trump pardoned the hooligans who ransacked the Capitol because he lost the 2020 presidential election. They clashed with police, destroyed property and threatened the lives of public officials, and to Trump, they’re heroes.
Maintain the rule of law?
Trump is a 34-count felon who has defied judicial rulings, ignored laws that don’t serve his interests, and turned his current presidency into an unprecedented adventure in self-dealing and graft.
And then he sent an invading army to Los Angeles, creating a crisis where there was none. Arresting undocumented immigrants with criminal records is one thing, but is that what this was about? Or was it about putting on a show, occupying commercial and residential neighborhoods, raiding car washes and fashion warehouses, and arresting people who were looking for — or on their way to — work?
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that U.S. Marines were on high alert and ready to roll, and I wondered:
What next, the Air Force?
I’m not going to defend the vandalism and violence that followed ICE arrests in Los Angeles, though it’s worth noting that most protests were peaceful.
But I am going to defend Los Angeles and the way things work here.
For starters, undocumented immigration is not the threat to public safety or to the economy that Trump likes to bloviate about. It’s just that he knows he can score points on border bluster and on DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), so he’s been going full gasbag on both.
To hear the rhetoric, you’d think every other undocumented immigrant is a gang member and that trans athletes will soon dominate youth sports if someone doesn’t stand up to them.
I can already read the mail that hasn’t yet arrived, so let me say in advance that I do indeed understand that breaking immigration law means breaking the law, and I believe that President Biden didn’t do enough to control the border, although it was Republicans who killed a border security bill early last year.
I also acknowledge the cost of supporting undocumented immigrants is substantial when you factor in public education and, in California, medical care, which is running billions of dollars beyond original estimates.
But the economic contributions of immigrants — regardless of legal status — are undeniably numerous, affecting the price we pay for everything from groceries to healthcare to domestic services to construction to landscaping.
Last year, the Congressional Budget Office concluded that a surge in immigrants since 2021 — including refugees, asylum seekers and others, legal and illegal — had lifted the U.S. economy “by filling otherwise vacant jobs,” as The Times reported, and “pumping millions of tax dollars into state, local and federal coffers.”
According to a seminal 2011 study by the Public Policy Institute of California, “many illegal immigrants pay Social Security and other taxes but do not collect benefits, and they are not eligible for many government services.”
In addition, the report said: “Political controversies aside, when illegal immigrants come, many U.S. employers are ready to hire them. The vast majority work. Estimates suggest that at least 75 percent of adult illegal immigrants are in the workforce.”
Trump can rail against the lunatic radical left for the scourge of illegal immigration, but the statement that “employers are ready to hire them” couldn’t be more true. And those employers stand on both sides of the political aisle, as do lawmakers who for decades have allowed the steady flow of workers to industries that would suffer without them.
On Sunday, I had to pick up a couple of items at the Home Depot on San Fernando Road in Glendale, where dozens of day laborers often gather in search of work. But there were only a couple of men out there, given recent headlines.
A shopper in the garden section said federal troops marching on L.A. was “kind of ridiculous, right?” He said the characterization by Trump of “all these terrible people” and “gang members” on the loose was hard to square with the reality of day laborers all but begging for work.
I found one of them in a far corner of the Home Depot lot, behind a fence. He told me he was from Honduras and was afraid to risk arrest by looking for work at a time when battalions of masked troops were on the move, but he’s got a hungry family back home, including three kids. He said he was available for any kind of jobs, including painting, hauling and cleanup.
Two men in a pickup truck told me they were undocumented too and available for construction jobs of any type. They said they were from Puebla, Mexico, but there wasn’t enough work for them there.
I’ve been to Puebla, a city known for its roughly 300 churches. I was passing through about 20 years ago on my way to a small nearby town where almost everyone on the street was female.
Where were the men?
I was told by a city official that the local economy was all about corn, but local growers couldn’t compete with American farmers who had the benefit of federal subsidies. So the men had gone north for work.
Industries and individuals, including Trump supporters in agribusiness and elsewhere, knowingly hire undocumented workers, and that’s not the only way in which we’re complicit in a decades-long game of institutionalized hypocrisy.
Another reason people head north is to escape the violence wrought by cartels armed with American-made weapons, competing to serve the huge American appetite for drugs.
In these ways, and more, the flow of people across borders can be complicated. But generally speaking, it’s simply about survival. People move to escape poverty or danger. They move in search of something better for themselves, or to be more accurate about it, for their children.
The narratives of those journeys are woven into the fabric of Los Angeles. It’s part of what’s messy and splendid and complicated about this blended, imperfect corner of the world, where many of us know students or workers or families with temporary status, or none at all.
That’s why this overheated invasion looks so ugly and feels so personal.
We’re less suspicious of our neighbors and the people we encounter on our daily rounds than the hypocrites who would pardon insurrectionists, haul away members of our community, and yammer on about the rule of law.
steve.lopez@latimes.com
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