“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
The not-so-ethereal Wizard infamously demands this in the 1939 classic film The Wizard of Oz, directed by Victor Fleming and based on the 1900 novel by Frank Baum.
In this climactic cinema moment, Dorothy and her companions realize that the Wizard is not all that he seems when, despite the smoke, mirrors, giant floating green head, and pyrotechnics, Toto pulls back the green curtain with his teeth to expose a very regular human at a complex switchboard of gadgets.
Recently, this spectacle seems familiar.
Following promises of mass deportations of illegal immigrants by Immigration & Customs Enforcement, the White House apparently is flooding social media platforms with disinformation.
Recent media reports that the U.S. government has been falsely creating the appearance of current enhanced immigration enforcement with thousands of archived press releases about ICE arrests --some decades old-- were given new time stamps: January 24, 2025.
This algorithmic funny business sends them to the top of browsers when people Google “ICE raids,” leading to terror and disinformation in immigrant communities.
As a political scientist teaching a university course on U.S.-Mexico Border Politics, I understand that historically and currently, most efforts to “control” migration have contained elements of illusion and statistical sleight of hand.
The truth can still be illuminated by studying history, exploring non-partisan sources of data and facts, double-checking information, and refusing to spread disinformation and fear.
During the campaign for “Mexican Repatriation” during the Great Depression in the 1930s under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, due to economic desperation in the U.S., strong anti-Mexican sentiment existed among many Americans. Added to the labor needs in Mexico, the U.S. and Mexican governments agreed to a pressure campaign to “return” Mexicans living in the U.S. to Mexico.
While the U.S. government estimated the number of Mexicans removed to be in the millions and touted this number in the media, University of California-Los Angeles historian Kelly Lytle Hernandez argues the number is more accurately around 400,000 people. This means the vast majority of Mexicans resisted removal despite enormous pressure.
Decades later, “Operation Wetback” in 1954 (the official title itself a slur against Mexicans) was a mass deportation effort after the end of World War II when returning U.S. GIs created less of a demand for labor to sustain the U.S. food chain.
The U.S. government claimed to have removed over a million unauthorized Mexican workers. However, Hernandez estimates that the number was closer to 300,000. She observes that after the U.S. government declared the operation a success, they changed tactics by reducing border enforcers to two-man patrols to demonstrate a precipitous drop in apprehensions.
The numbers the U.S. government keeps about immigration enforcement in more recent decades reveal numbers that do not comport with the “invasion” narrative. Considering that some people cross the U.S.-Mexico border to move to Mexico, there was net zero immigration between the U.S. and Mexico between 2005-2010, and around 130,000 Mexican nationals living in the U.S. between 2009-2014, according to Pew Research Center.
Claiming “border chaos” does not always correspond with a chaotic border. When President Donald Trump first took office in 2017 after running on an explicitly anti-Mexican, anti-immigrant message, unauthorized border crossings were at a low point. Some argued this was precisely because of Trump’s tough rhetoric, but 2017 also appears to be part of a two-decade trend.
Reliable data are available, but they require attention to detail. In a thorough video breakdown, USA Facts describes how Customs and Border Patrol (CPB) collects and shares data related to authorized and unauthorized annual immigration.
“Unauthorized immigrants,” according to the government, include those who crossed into the U.S. illegally and were apprehended, visa overstayers but also people seeking asylum, those pre-approved for temporary protective status due to humanitarian crises, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients.
A portion of those in the “unauthorized” category have been or are being processed for legal residence --at least temporarily. Due to large refugee and asylum flows from places like Ukraine and Venezuela, people from places other than Mexico were the majority of unauthorized immigrants for many years over the last decade. Additionally, families traveling together tripled between 2020 and 2024.
Certainly, the problem is not just rhetorical disinformation. These tactics harm real people. Historically and today, the demand for foreign labor and the intense push factors that lead people to make the difficult decision to leave their homeland reproduce a situation of a large population living in the shadows without documentation or authorization.
Unauthorized immigrants are subject to unlivable wages, exploitation, blackmail, crime victimization, and poor health and safety. Deportation efforts, including workplace raids or neighborhood sweeps by ICE, terrorize immigrant communities. A Pew Research Center survey from 2022 shows that almost 40% percent of U.S. Latinos said they were worried a family member would be deported.
Detainees and deportees continue to face dehumanizing conditions at the hands of the state. Deportations crush dreams and tear families apart. Still, past efforts at mass deportation have never successfully removed this population. Despite many changes to policy, the Department of Homeland Security estimates of the total unauthorized immigrant population have remained flat since 2010.
While it is not possible for everyone to take a 15-week college course on U.S. immigration policy, it is advisable to seek primary and non-partisan sources of data, research immigration history, and double-check information before sharing it on social media to help anyone be better informed about immigration realities.
For those who are understandably scared, it is important for them to know their rights and learn the lessons of history. Everyone needs to resist the sensationalism of immigration optics and pay attention to the truth, not the man behind the curtain.
Isabel Skinner is an assistant professor in the School of Politics and International Affairs at the University of Illinois Springfield and a Public Voices Fellow with The OpEd Project.
Children watch a July Fourth Parade along the Walkway of Heroes and Independence Avenue on July 04, 2026 in Tappan, New York.
The Great American Grumpfest
Our nation’s 250th birthday party didn’t feel especially patriotic and wasn’t as much fun as the 200th anniversary was.
President Trump, who did his best to co-opt our holiday for his personal aggrandizement, was a major reason. The party he threw in Washington, D.C., was crankier than uplifting, and less about celebrating our shared past and a promising future than about reminding us how far we have strayed from our founders’ plan to create a republic that future Americans would keep in good working order.
Credit Trump this much. He has a singular gift for picking at scabs that other politicians would rather ignore and pushing us into reckonings we don’t need.
The thing is, Americans have seen all this before. Sometimes the makeover we were encouraged to undertake was more conservative, sometimes more liberal. Whatever direction we were pushing, however, the reckoning we had in mind this time had to be more forthright and the conclusion more definitive than it was the last time.
Our current discontents, the ones behind the reckoning President Trump has been trying to inspire, are not trivial. Included among them are immigration, birthright citizenship, exploding healthcare costs, election rigging, a gag-inducing national debt, how we educate our children, too many genders, racial differences we can’t move past, a lopsided economy that favors more well-off Americans, and historic levels of political corruption and graft. Add to these the several foreign adventures he has pushed us into or is anxious to undertake, and you have the makings of a national headache the likes of which we haven’t had in half a century.
All the elbow-throwing and overheated rhetoric we’re using today have begun to look almost normal in all the ways that bickering neighbors and feuding family members appear normal. But they have also made us look mean-spirited and have portrayed our differences as irreconcilable. To ourselves, of course, but also to many people outside the United States who might be forgiven for turning their heads and not looking at the national car wreck we Americans show no interest in avoiding.
The good news, as I suggested above, is that Americans have had a great deal of practice dealing with challenges and national car wrecks like these.
This essay begins to lay out the reasons why.
By way of illustration, we have our seemingly insatiable demand for more bad news about race in America.
Sixty years after being released from the legal constrictions that bedeviled both white and black Americans, many white people have come to believe the color that used to make them unassailable is now a sign of a moral inferiority born of a racial animus they can never wash off. Many black people, on the other hand, are insisting that America is as hopelessly stacked against them as the formerly unassailable white people’s ancestors used to tell their black ones.
The result is that many people today are buying into racist nightmares and mumbo jumbo that their black and white ancestors worked hard and effectively to put in each other’s heads.
This might be dismissed as crazy behavior if it weren’t so important to rituals Americans have long used to express their deepest fears about each other while figuring out what move they can make that won’t end with their world crashing down on everybody’s head.
Unfortunately, the kind of cultural sleight of hand we have used to ramp up our racial differences has been appropriated by people who have many other cultural fears and unresolved differences with each other. Their clumsy but culturally prescribed missteps are making all these other issues look as irremediable as our racial problems.
A good place to start an answer to how we back away from ledges is Alexis de Tocqueville’s writing on early-19th-century American democracy. He had an optimistic take on Americans’ unscripted displays of public bravado, recrimination, and payback.
For him, these were occasions when people tried to mitigate the effects of the unfair hand they were dealing someone else or had themselves been dealt by behaving in ways quite at odds with how they would otherwise be expected to act. These inversions of what Tocqueville called “the natural order of conscience” presented themselves as a loud but culturally muted challenge to the hypocrisies that people had built into the world they’d made together.
One of his favorite illustrations of early-American hypocrisy involved slave masters sleeping with their less-than-worthy slaves. To the best of my knowledge, he didn’t pick up on all the ways that slaves messed with their owners. Their well-chronicled and quiet resistance showed that even severely ill-treated people can exercise more control over their lives than outsiders appreciate.
Be that as it may, such inversions of a people’s “natural order of conscience” make a good public show of them wrestling with demons they can’t or may not want to shake off, but in any case, are nowhere close to figuring out how to cast out.
Implicit in these disruptions was the discomforting idea that people might flip the entire script and turn the world on its head in more permanent ways. That kind of flipping worked out better for us in our revolution against England than in our Civil War. These events taught us the value of stepping back from historically unprecedented ledges.
Americans of late have been giving loud expression to a long list of things they don’t like about each other and the last makeover they started but didn’t finish a half-century ago. The outcome of our fights today will be as revealing as they are embarrassing to everyone who imagined they could recast our country in a way that privileged their favorite kind of Americans.
Their disappointment with the accommodations they strike will be palpable, but the middling results they achieve with all their pushing and shoving won’t be anything they can’t live with.
Anthropologists who have written about such moments in other cultures less “advanced” than our own show that people find ways to work around their seemingly irreconcilable differences without ever fully resolving them. Indeed, the patches and repairs people make have the unheralded effect of reinforcing rather than undermining the legitimacy of the practices and values they thought were fundamentally flawed.
For example…
White guilt and black pessimism do more good than putting cash into the pockets of professional shamers and handwringers. They give the rest of us who don’t feel guilty or powerless more time to make the world less racially unequal. Good news.
Regarding illegal immigration, the entrance requirements for future immigrants will remain stringent. Americans will applaud the continued detention and deportation of the few illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes. Good news.
All the people who came to the United States without being legally vetted and were locked up for a time will be released in numbers small enough to avoid serious media attention. Along with the several million other good people who snuck in but avoided capture, the former detainees will go to school, find gainful employment, pay their taxes, and stay out of trouble. Many will eventually become citizens. Good news.
Investigations into election tampering and Donald Trump’s 2020 presidential loss will come to an unceremonious conclusion the day after his second term ends. Many Americans will grumble about this, but there will also be some quiet partying, too. Good and bad news.
Congressional hearings into all the grifting accomplished by people tied to the Trump administration will end without anyone having to pay a dime back to the American taxpayers. Bad news, we’ll learn to live with.
New laws and regulations will be created in the hope that the kind of corruption practiced by President Trump will not be repeated for another 250 years. Good news, I hope we’ll live long enough to enjoy.
Show trials for people who allegedly vandalized the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, if they happen, will get big television viewer ratings. Good news.
Trials for pardoned Capitol insurrectionists who committed serious crimes after their release should get more attention, but won’t. Bad news.
We will continue to hear nothing from most of the people who were pardoned for crimes they committed in the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. They will keep their mouths shut and their heads down for the rest of their life. Good news.
The gold-gilded ornaments that Donald Trump had plastered all over the White House will be shipped to Mar-a-Lago, where the former president will sell them on eBay. Fun news.
American taxpayers end up paying for most of the new East Wing, the removal of the miniature gladiatorial arena that was built behind the White House, and the restoration of the White House rose garden. Bad news.
The Triumphal Arch was never built. Good news.
Trad wives and gay couples raise perfectly lovely children. Good but unsurprising news.
Trans men and women learn that most Americans can’t figure out who they used to be. No one gives a second thought to their use of “family bathrooms” or “unisex bathrooms” in public settings, businesses, and schools. Communities will sponsor athletic teams that have trans boys and girls just to show they can. Good news.
Budget deficits will be kicked down the road for someone else’s children to pay down. Bad news.
Federal agencies that had their budgets and employee ranks slashed during President Trump’s second term are getting some of the money and lost positions back. Good news.
Elite universities will buy their way out of DEI purgatory by competing for conservative scholars whose inflated salaries dwarf those of their liberal colleagues, who will think about suing their institutions for reverse discrimination but won’t be able to figure out who would pay for it or care. More fun news.
Okay. I’ve probably missed some ways that Americans will step back from the ledges they have been making noises about leaping off. But to the extent that my predictions pan out, the best and most important moral of the stories about us stepping away is this: everything we lost and took back, or had returned to us, will have happened without our government collapsing, civic traditions crumbling, or our people beating each other up.
The reason why is that the differences Americans have with each other really weren’t as irreconcilable as we made them out to be. The empty-sounding bromide that Americans have more that unites us than divides us turns out to be true, not just metaphorically but in fact.
Now that is really something to celebrate.
Daniel J. Monti (danieljmonti.com) is Professor of Sociology at Saint Louis University and the author of American Democracy and Disconsent: Liberalism and Illiberalism in Ferguson, Charlottesville, Black Lives Matter, and the Capitol Insurrection.