Of all places, it’s the New York Times right now that has the most thoughtful take on the absolute hell both Democrats and Republicans have wrought by allowing millions of destitute foreigners into this country.
On Monday’s episode of the Times’ The Daily podcast, 53-year-old Massachusetts resident John Polina, an ambivalent Trump voter who explained why immigration was one of the most important policy issues to him personally. “I’m a laborer at the very root of what I do,” he said. “I move things. I pick things up. I put things down. And that kind of work has been compromised by illegal immigration greatly.”
Polina went on to say he started working in construction at a young age several decades ago and that as time went on, his wages were driven down by illegal aliens who were entering the same line of work, but at a lower cost to employers. “And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them,” he said. “That bothered me. And then when I became a mason, and I started building, I found that I was competing with companies that did that practice. … But people are getting away with it, and I’m competing against them.”
There are infinite reasons to oppose importing an endless flood of foreigners to the U.S. Watching them crush your standard of living is as good as any. They come from broken places where working for even just $1 per hour is a luxury to them. Why wouldn’t business owners take advantage of that opportunity when it presents itself here? They do. Americans like Polina suffer for it.
He said that running his own construction business now is getting hard as he ages because he has to perform the manual labor himself, unable to afford to pay someone else to do it at a fair price, since he refuses to employ illegal aliens on principle. “I can’t hire a laborer, because I don’t feel that I can give them a living wage,” he said. “So it’s just me doing the work, which is — it’s beating me up quite a bit. But I try to stay in shape, and I keep going.”
It’s heartbreaking, and Polina, just like millions of other Americans, feels betrayed, because he was. “[N]one of them, Democrat or Republican, did anything about it,” he said. “And the fact that it could have been done so quickly, as we have seen [at the southern border], is a little alarming to me. It makes me feel like I’m forgotten as an American worker, as a working-class person. They talk about the working class in this country. They talk about the business owners in this country being the backbone of the country. But politicians don’t believe that, or they don’t act on that.”
Polina supports what the Trump administration is doing in Minneapolis and across the country, even as he expressed regret that it’s necessary. “I don’t know if he’s doing enough, and I fear that if he did more, accidents like we’ve seen that’s happened, will happen, which is horrible, horrible,” he said. “But we have to step back and say, why did that happen? Why is there an ICE agent in Minnesota? There shouldn’t be an ICE agent in Minnesota. We just shut the border down. The ICE agents in Minnesota are [there] because of 40 years of illegal immigration.”
It’s a wonder that the Times didn’t stop the interview right there and throw the interview recording into the middle of the Atlantic, but it got even better. Most of Polina’s conversation with the reporter took place before the death of Alex Pretti, the anti-ICE activist who was shot last month while interfering with immigration law enforcement in Minneapolis. But the reporter called Polina back afterward to see if the incident had changed his opinion at all about how the administration was approaching deportations.
“I know that a person died, and that’s wrong,” said Polina. “And I know officers felt threatened, and that’s wrong. However, what bothered me most about the whole thing is that, in 2025, there were people that died by the hands of illegal immigrants.”
He went on to say he searched for any articles specifically in the Times about individuals who were victims of illegal alien criminals in the U.S., and he compared it to the coverage of Pretti. “[O]n this man that got shot by the Border Patrol, there’s 18 [news articles]. I stopped counting at 18,” he said. “But there was a boy that got killed by an illegal immigrant when he was helping his mother or stopping her from getting raped, just [in] 2025. No report from the New York Times.”
That should embarrass the Times but it surely won’t. Virtually every institution of the dying old news media and in political Washington has championed the policies that have served to destroy Polina’s livelihood. And what’s most remarkable of all is that he has every reason to be fuming with white hot hatred for them all, but there was no trace of that kind of anger in his voice in the interview. He only sounded defeated and maybe even resigned.
That’s what our leaders have done with their immigration policies and it’s why reasonable people like Polina continue to support what the current president is doing to change it.
