“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.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.