Immigrants are good for this country. They work critical jobs, pay taxes, build businesses and introduce many of our favorite foods and cultural innovations (donuts, anyone?). But for decades, powerful players have chosen the self-serving politics of division over sensible immigration policies.

The immigrant experience is essential to the American story. Our communities comprise those who came here to seek safety, work, study and join their families. They make the United States the strong, diverse nation that it is.

Immigrants were more likely to be essential workers during the pandemic, and there’s no shortage of crucial roles for them in the future. As the population ages, more of us will need things like home healthcare — a workforce that’s one-fourth immigrant and needs to grow fast to meet the need.

We should embrace the vitality and diversity that immigration can bring [and]0 refuse to be divided by those who want to scare us...

In fact, experts say that limiting immigration could cost our country $7 trillion in the years to come. That’s the projected economic benefit of recent arrivals over the next decade, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

We need immigration. And many of us know this, with 68 percent of Americans saying immigration is good for the country. Yet, over the last few decades, our government has made it much harder and more punitive for immigrants to claim their rights to a dignified future.

Detention centers, deportations and walls are deadly, and inhumane, and tear families apart. We spend untold billions on these cruelties — more than double what we spent 20 years ago. And they don’t make it any less likely that some people will need to leave their home countries for freedom, safety or opportunity.

Yet, we continue responding to the “problem” of people seeking refuge here by doubling down on these false solutions. All of us — new immigrants and descendants of old ones — are stuck in this policy limbo because of powerful people who benefit from dividing us and preventing real solutions.

From politicians who win office with anti-immigrant campaigns to White supremacists who peddle racist conspiracy theories and corporations that rely on undocumented workers to keep wages low and deny........

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