Julia Preston’s piece in Foreign Affairs was a damning indictment of Trump’s migration rhetoric and a warning of what would come with his election. It was written in October as a plea to not underestimate the danger of a Trump presidency or to discount his nativist rhetoric. It’s a bit surreal reading it now, two weeks after he was elected. It feels like we’re marching towards an abyss of fear, chaos and uncertainty. How are we meant to be, as journalists and as people, in a society where truth seems to make no difference?

Preston’s piece was one of countless pieces outlining the blatant mistruths spread about migrants and about Kamala Harris’ record. “In a relentless barrage of mistruths, Trump insists that the influx of undocumented migrants under Biden is on the order of 21 million people, a wholly made-up figure,” Preston wrote. But none of it pierced through or seemed to make a difference. I admit to feeling pretty lost – how do we move forward if the truth doesn’t matter? What is the role of journalism if calling out blatant lies and hatred doesn’t seem to make a difference?

On a more tangible note, I thought that Preston made a concise and compelling explanation of how devastating mass deportations would be on every level. She spoke of individual trauma, family separation, community destabilization, and the incredible blow to the economy. She wrote of how Harris had planned to build legal pathways “for undocumented immigrants, especially the farm workers who make up nearly half of the nation’s agricultural labor force.” In research for my sociology class, I stumbled upon a staggering figure: one out of nineteen civilian workers in the United States are undocumented (Gleeson). “Trump’s plan to shrink the country’s labor force, Posen wrote, “‘is both broadly and deeply self-destructive,’” Preston wrote.

Another important part of Preston’s article was on the total dysfunction of the asylum system. The system was created in the 1980s, and was “never designed to handle large numbers of migrants,” Preston wrote. Before hearing Preston speak at the church in New York, I had no idea of the history of the asylum process. Speaking with her has emphasized how important it is to understand the history, intention, and practice of migration laws – a daunting task given the extreme vagueness and complexity of the system. “Since 2010,” Preston wrote, “changes in the populations that were migrating, and the failure of Congress to update the system with new legal channels for refugees and laborers, have made asylum the default access for migrants coming to the southwest border.” The border crisis is fostered and fed by dysfunctional and destructive immigration policies that were not designed to deal with migration as it is today.

The next four years under Trump are terrifying – I hope we finally start to take him seriously now that he’s been elected, for as David Graham wrote, “If personnel is policy, as the Ronald Reagan–era maxim states, then the president-elect is deadly serious.”