Migrants should wave foreign flags at the protests against President Donald Trump’s enforcement of the nation’s border laws, says Gustavo Arellano, a columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
“Waving a foreign flag at protests is good trouble — a sign for the brave to rally together and stand tall against a commander in chief who understands nothing but chaos,” said Arrellano.
“I think immigrant rights protesters should wave the American flag — not just because they live here and are fighting for immigrants to be able to stay here.”
Thousands of people march on the streets with Mexican flags protesting recent deportation activities by ICE, following executive orders issued by President Trump in the past two weeks in downtown San Diego, United States, on February 2nd, 2025. (Michael Ho Wai Lee/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Polls show record support for the pro-American enforcement policies that will help ordinary Americans earn decent wages and afford decent housing.
Immigration enforcement will also force political leaders and employers to focus on the critical civic and economic problems they have tried to cover up with masses of imported workers, renters, and consumers since 1990.
Yet Arrellanano defends the foreign flags by saying they supercharge migrants’ political power in Americans’ society:
The moderates have always feared that Latinos waving the flags of Mexico, El Salvador, Venezuela and other ancestral countries is political suicide — that it taps into the part of the American psyche that believes Latinos will never assimilate and are sleeper agents scheming to overthrow this country. They’ve fretted especially about the Mexican flag, which is radioactive to conservatives — it’s the banner of our southern neighbor that we’ve been at war with, officially and not, for 175-plus years.
The flag wavers are the bold ones, the ones a good team offense needs. The public opinion battle might be lost in the short term, goes such logic, but these folks will push the immigration debate toward better places.
This week’s street protests include many Mexican flags — but very few American flags.
The Californian-born son of illegal migrants from Mexico, Arrellano is a representative of those commingled migrant and ethnic politics. He chooses to downplay the vast economic and pocketbook damage to ordinary Americans, even as his wife operates a restaurant that gains from cheap labor and additional consumers.
Polls, however, show that most Americans, many legal migrants — and some illegal migrants — sympathize with Americans over distant migrants and their pro-migration allies in business. ‘
In August 2022, for example, a majority of Americans say President Joe Biden is allowing a southern border invasion, according to a poll commissioned by the left-of-center, taxpayer-supported National Public Radio. The 54 percent “Invasion” majority includes 76 percent of Republicans, 46 percent of independents, and even 40 percent of Democrats. Just 19 percent of all respondents — or one in five — said the “invasion” term is completely false.
Migration is deeply unpopular among Americans because it damages ordinary Americans’ career opportunities, cuts their wages, and raises their rents, It also curbs their productivity, worsens inflation, shrinks their political clout, widens regional wealth gaps, and wrecks their democratic, equality-promoting civic culture.
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The foreign protests now happening on Americans’ streets even as Mexico’s government steps up its coordination and cooperation with the huge 5.5 million-strong Mexican population living in the United States. In December, for example, Mexico’s foreign minister visited Mexicans in Dallas, saying: “I am here to send a very clear message to the entire community of Mexicans in the United States: you are not alone. Our network of consular services is prepared to support and protect you under any circumstances.”
The growing national divide may also help President Donald Trump win judicial support for his enforcement policies as he describes the inflow of migrants and drugs as an invasion.
“The invasion point comes in here because the most basic and longstanding purpose to having a military is to stop people from invading your country,” Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of Homeland Security in Trump’s first term told CNN. “That’s what’s happening at the southern border … [and] The president doesn’t need anything beyond his commander in chief authority to block people from crossing the border illegally.”
CNN added:
“We are not there yet,” said Steve Vladeck, a CNN Supreme Court analyst and Georgetown University Law Center professor, but, “we may well be in for a very, very big, pitched legal battle over whether there really is an invasion along the southern border and what the legal consequences are of that are.”