Cesar was in a hurry, clasping his newborn son, Cesar Jr, tightly. He was trying to cross the bridge from El Paso to Juárez, Mexico, before sunset to visit relatives.



According to many Americans I met during my two-week drive from New York to the US-Mexico border, Cesar, a Mexican immigrant, is “everything wrong with this country”. Since Donald Trump’s entry into politics, the country has been infused with his harsh language on immigration.

Trump’s popularity initially confused experts; rightwing talk radio hosts, however, wasted no time. They long understood and thrived on their listeners’ distaste for immigration. They saw in Trump a politician who was voicing the public’s concerns and took the ball and ran, amplifying his harshness, turning to constant and scathing rhetoric on the wrongs of immigration and the alleged deviance of immigrants.

I heard the same from people I spent a month interviewing across the country.

My first conversation was with a mechanic in Utica, a small New York town that once had factories, but now only boasts of a river hand-stocked with fish.

“What do I think is the American dream? There is no dream for anyone who isn’t a lawyer or banker,” he said. “Everyone else, we are getting a raw deal. Immigrants taking all our jobs. Only jobs we get is keeping the rich happy: we release fish downstream for work, they catch them upstream for fun.”

The answers continued to spin negative for weeks – 200 local variations on a national theme of disappointment. These opinions were voiced far from Washington and New York, in towns stripped of high-paying manufacturing jobs and, from the timbre of the answers, also stripped of hope.

Green Bay, Wisconsin: ‘American dream? Died a long time ago. We got less jobs and everything cost more. We getting squeezed.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade

Everyone spoke of the same problem: not enough jobs and not enough money. Immigration garnered the nastier language, but equally loathed was free trade: “American Dream? What about having a job where I can still buy things made in America?”

By the time I met Cesar, the August night of the first Republican presidential debate, he wasn’t just an American father going to visit relatives. He, his son, his wife and all the immigrants I met along my trip symbolized, in the words of a metal worker in Alabama, “everything that was wrong with this country” – unwelcome agents of change competing with him for the same jobs.

I would argue that, instead, Cesar is a political scapegoat for a set of policies, including immigration, that has failed much of working America.

The anger directed at immigrants like Cesar is the result of Americans’ perception of our borders. In the last 30 years the political establishment, supported by the business community, has selectively opened its borders for people, and almost fully opened borders for trade.

Rightly or wrongly, many Americans are unhappy with that – and every election cycle exposes this gap. In each prior instance the establishment has won, and a core of frustrated voters sulk off to vent on radio and await the next election.

It now threatens, in Trump, to upend the balance.

This frustration is a symptom of a larger economic anxiety, which I heard about from almost every person I spoke with across the country. I heard it from a road worker in Nebraska (“The American Dream? Ha. It is dead, long dead, piled under a stack of bills”), all the way to a truck driver in Wisconsin (“Ain’t nobody who works with their hands hasn’t lost a job to a Mexican.” )

The disappointment, although often wrapped in anger over immigration, is at its core about diminished opportunity. It is consistent with the economic reality that has persisted over the last three decades: except for the very rich, Americans haven’t seen their wealth increase. The people I talked to are not entirely wrong; their particular job prospects and their particular wealth have been harmed.

‘The angry are mostly people who work with their hands.’ Photograph: Chris Arnade

The angry are mostly people who work with their hands, who feel stuck in a vise tightening from two sides: there is a greater number of people looking for the same jobs and there are fewer jobs available, since many of these jobs having moved overseas.

Coupled with a pro-deregulation environment that has stripped labor unions of the ability to negotiate and protect its workers, it has left many American workers feeling screwed.

The drop in jobs has been swift, with manufacturing employment falling from 18 million in the late 1980s to 12 million now. It is a drop that some blame on free trade, but others, including many economists, attribute to technological changes – independent of our borders policies.



It is a subtlety lost on the angry, for whom the changes are personal and visceral.

They see closed factories daily, which sit rusted and tangled in a corner of almost every US town beyond Washington and Manhattan. They see immigrants working jobs they might have once had (although some experts say immigrants are only taking unwanted jobs). What they don’t see are the robots and computers who are also taking their jobs, certainly not drinking next to them in bars.

Politicians of both parties in power, economists in thinktanks, bankers on Wall Street, CEOs of successful companies – all love immigration and free trade because they love numbers, and the numbers say that opening up your country to both competition and immigration is a winner.

They are right. Opening up your borders is a positive, because the winners win more than the losers lose. Yet, unless the winners share some of the winnings with the losers, it is only a positive for a select few. Winners rarely spread their wealth just to be good people, and forced sharing – via higher taxation or more regulatory power for labor – is anathema in today’s politics.

The 1% claim they already do share because of a trickle-down effect: the CEO’s company will grow and will hire more people, providing more jobs. They are right, but only if the winners gain so much they will eventually drag along the losers – unless they keep devaluing labor rights even more.

Trump’s appeal has exposed the huge economic and opportunity gulf that exists between those who make policy, and those who have to live with it. It is a gulf that has created an microcosm perfect for demagoguery, especially one steeped in racism.

A young Mexican American couple. Photograph: Chris Arnade

In this environment, immigrants – folks who want a better life and are willing to work hard for it – have become scapegoats for an economic situation they had no say in making.

After I photographed Cesar, I stopped at a spot popular for watching the sunset over El Paso and the sister city in Mexico, Juárez. A young Mexican American couple was holding hands. I took their picture and asked them about their American dream. The woman, Elizabeth, answered: “To work hard and be free and to build a better life than my parents had in Mexico.”



As I was walking to my car, she approached me again: “Please, please make sure you remember to write that I said work hard. People right now are pretty mad and saying we are lazy. We are not, we just want what every American wants: a good job.”

