How "Human Kind First" Profits the U.S.

When I was in high school working on the newspaper, there were two young men in my school who represented a large portion of our community in El Cajon at the time - one student was Chaldean, the other was Latino. They had this vision of a world in which their cultures were represented, in which they could have their parents take part in a very simple ritual - the reading of the school newspaper. These two students took it upon themselves to translate the articles that we wrote from English into Spanish and Chaldean Neo-Aramaic (I believe, it’s been awhile) and for that senior year, many parents had access to our school news for the first time. I loved this for all of us. They saw a need and they filled it. They were the change they wanted to see in the world.

Unfortunately, I didn’t fully understand then, how complicated this one small act was, how revolutionary. I thought of these two high schoolers when I went on a college visit to Tijuana to a temporary shelter for immigrants hoping to come to the United States. I remember at 18 asking the very innocent and naive question - if where you come from is so bad, why don’t you change it? Instead of leaving, why don’t you fix the problem? At 18, I hadn’t seen much of the world, didn’t understand politics and fear and having children to feed. I thought every problem was as easy to solve as printing a newspaper in your mother tongue. My question, of course, made the migrant workers angry. I did not understand. How could they make me understand?

So here we are in 2026, just as we were in 2020, and it feels like the world is burning, but worse, even worse. There has been nothing subtle about Project 2025. Factions of America with the President as their strong arm have made it clear their intentions to make America white again and to reshape America into a place built for the already prosperous few, rather than the multicultural many - by eliminating immigration both legal and illegal, by oppressing freedom of the press and freedom of speech, by changing the rules faster than Napoleon in Animal Farm.  As Trump’s chosen advisors bend over backwards to twist the truth, I am also reminded of Ngugui Wa Thiongo’s Wizard of the Crow a political satire in which the ministers surgically enlarge different body parts in the name of serving the Ruler - larger ears to better hear dissent, larger lips to better praise him and speak his doctrine. They will say anything to support their agenda. 

As an American, I feel myself faced with the question I asked those migrants 28 years ago, why don’t I change it? I am deeply troubled by this America that we are living in and every time that Trump takes to the international stage - to kidnap the Venezuelan president, to bomb boats in the Caribbean, to send people from third countries to the Sudan, to threaten to take Greenland, a judiciary that is at the whim of the Executive Branch  -  I want to shout from the rooftop - this is not the America that I want! 

It is the America of our past, however. U.S. colonialism isn’t new, the U.S. deciding the leadership of other countries is at least a century old. Those of us that know enough, don’t want to return to that global order. That global order lead to the Vietnam War, to Kent State, to the Cuban and Iranian revolutions and to 9/11. I don’t want us to be that part of America. Unfortunately, millions of Americans voted for Trump. Millions of Americans signed up for this America. America is not Trump. America is all of us. Is this the America we want to be? And if it isn’t - who do we want to be?

One of the things that MAGA Republicans did so well in the last election was controlling the narrative, they had a vision for the America they wanted as outlined in Project 2025 and we are all now living in that world they mapped out. We need a new map - and this new map can't just be a list of things we don't like. We need to fully take a look, not at what values we are against, but what values we possess and share as a collective, then we need to translate these values into a vision and a plan to build the America we want to live in.

I believe that most of human kind is inherently good or at least trying and I believe that Americans as a whole share a core set of values and desires, but that we disagree on how to go about preserving those values.

Living on the U.S. Mexico border in San Diego, immigration has long been on my mind. Personally, I find that immigration has benefited my community and my life. My children and I live in a bilingual, bicultural world with extensive exposure to the diverse Latino culture. We benefit from learning to navigate a world that is not homogenous and to respect cultures different from our own. It makes us better people - more empathetic, more knowledgeable, more open-minded. It puts life in perspective. Many of these families have been in my area long before I have and many of my son’s friends’ parents came to the area in their youth from hard lives. What we have in common is gratitude for the abundance of the U.S. and the opportunities provided, but also the struggle of having to work hard from paycheck to paycheck. I think one of my biggest take aways from my community is fully understanding how familial interdependency enriches the lives of everyone in the family. Human experience wasn’t designed for the nuclear family to depend on itself, it takes a village. Wealthy people know this. Donald Trump knows how he benefited from his father and his children benefit off of him and his connections. 

That said most people don’t want to leave their homes, communities, and their cultures. Living in a different culture is challenging. I know because I’ve lived in five different countries - I’ve struggled with finding friends, emotional support, communicating and navigating different systems of schooling, healthcare, and banking. To understand the influx of immigration into the United States we have to understand the push and pull factors and if reducing immigration is our goal, (which in itself is another debate,) we have to look at the underlying causes. Trump understands this to the extent that he sees poor leadership as the cause in Venezuela, so he kidnaps the President and hopes this will solve the problem, but we know that is overly simplistic.

As I said, I am a believer in the good of immigration, but I understand the need for national security. However, any national security that purports to be designed to protect Americans while killing innocent people in the street is not the kind of national security I want for our nation. So how do we address immigration?

We need to come at this question not with a philosophy of America First, but Human Kind First. If the U.S. can spend billions on hard diplomacy - building walls, securing borders, hiring thousands of more border patrol agents, building ICE into a paramilitary force, deploying the National Guard, flying jets to Somalia to drop off immigrants from third countries, occupying Greenland, bombing boats in the Caribbean, kidnapping another country’s president, subsidizing oil companies to drill in Venezuela to justify kidnapping their President - we can certainly afford soft diplomacy to not just disappear the symptoms, but to address the underlying diseases. 

We understood this when we implemented the Marshall Plan in Europe after World War II. What we need now is a Marshall Plan for Latin America. People are struggling. How can we help them and in doing so help ourselves? 

It’s been awhile since I read Ayn Rand’s “Art of Selfishness” and I don’t share many of her political philosophies, but I remember an aspect of her book that surprised me - essentially treating people with kindness and generosity IS a selfish act, because when we give to others and build community, we in turn benefit from that community. You help a neighbor move, they will help you move. You make cookies and share them, they share their tamales. To put America First and help reduce the alleged strain of immigration on our social fabric - let’s pretend like this premise is true for a second, though from what I’ve read, not all data supports it. Even if more realistically the real problem many America First people have with immigration is the influence it has on their local cultures and the fact that they aren’t used to, and therefore have trouble living with, the discomfort of not being able to understand other languages. The incursion of the outside world upon their own monocultures. working in real estate, I've had people verrbalize this. The aspects of multiculturalism I love -- the challenge, the beauty, the opening of my world, and of course, the food - I recognize that other people hate. So if that is your premise - that you don’t want the outside world incurring upon your world - the solution is the same. If we help people where they are - then they aren’t pushed from their countries and forced to seek refuge in a faraway land. 

Every country has different needs, different push and pull factors. I’m not the expert on each one, but the local people are. The local NGOs, the church organizations, the helpers, the small businesses. They can tell you. One of the things I learned as a Peace Corps volunteer was that the first step towards creating community solutions was listening to the community. Where we saw muddy roads as the issue, they saw lack of access to education in their mother tongue, which meant girls were dropping out of school in eighth grade, because their parents didn’t feel safe sending them like their brothers to boarding school three hours away. Poverty, gangs, political violence - these are some of the issues that are too big for one family to fight, but they shouldn’t be too big for the global community, a country as prosperous as the U.S despite our assertions that we are some underdog in the global community. All people all over the world want the same basic things - to keep up with the Kardashians. Just kidding. We want access to food, housing, healthcare, education, and job opportunities in a safe environment. Humans want to work. Humans find meaning in contributing to their societies. Immigrants will cross the world for that. So they can have the dignity that comes with working to put food on the table for their children and help their kids to grow up to have an even better life and more opportunities than they had.  

The U.S. is the wealthiest nation in the world when measured by GDP, and in the top ten when measured by GDP per capita. The U.S. whining about being stiffed in economic trade deals is like my 11-year-old who was gifted an electric bike clamoring to have a better, faster more expensive electric bike, while I’m over here looking at my bank account trying to figure out how to make the $20 I have for groceries stretch out until my next paycheck. It’s me with the problem of having an extra mattress I don’t know what to do with while my neighbor is sleeping on the floor. So, I could put this mattress in my living room and then get angry when the neighbors come sleep on it, or I could give them my mattress and they can sleep on it in their own home. Sure, this is a metaphor and an oversimplification, but if all those people who are insisting we spend money to keep brown people out of our country, or are tied up in the rule-following legality issues of immigration while ignoring the legality of due process - really want to have their White European Colonial America First (let’s call it what it is), they can achieve this by being Human Kind First.

Mexicans, Colombians, El Salvadorians, Venezuelans, Afghanis, Somalians - most of them want to live most of their in their own countries - and the MAGA Republicans want them to as well. So to achieve these goals let’s put Human Kind First. How can we use our desire for wealth and new customers and our capitalistic greed to benefit others in order to benefit ourselves? Instead of tariffs that make it harder to exchange goods throughout the world, instead of insisting on bringing industries back to the U.S. that are more profitable for American companies elsewhere, instead of building cars or clothing factories or shoe factories or drilling oil or building gigantic data centers here and then having to ship goods elsewhere - we can continue to work in partnership with other countries to raise the prosperity for everyone to mutual benefit. Stable governments are born from prosperous nations in which all people are represented and have a voice that counts. A government that appears stable only because of the fear that it instills in the people is only a dormant volcano. Eventually it will erupt.

The only reason that the U.S. has any stability in this moment of time is because most Americans, even the ones who absolutely detest what is going on in the U.S. right now, believe that we can vote our way back to stability. We do not agree with those who voted Trump into office, but we respect their freedom to do so and we respect the outcome of the elections. Though we see a government voted in that does not hide its corruption, its greed, its classism, its racism and its inhumaneness, we believe in democracy and humanity. We believe in the great American experiment to prevail, no matter how hard this administration has corroded it and weakened it, we believe in the strength of the people to show up when the time comes to vote their unhappiness at the ballot box. Half the U.S. chose to be this America and as a democratic republic we have to let that other half of the U.S. see what happens when they choose this - FOR NOW. I believe that many will choose differently in the future. I believe if people see there is another way for everyone to get what they want, they will vote differently.

I believe that to really benefit America and for America to be a great nation, we put Human Kind First. We use our prosperity to spread prosperity throughout our nation and to all countries in our hemisphere and out. Not through force and kidnapping, but by negotiating for the benefit of all of our people. Not all for our oligarchies, but I believe they can benefit too.

One of the major challenges that countries face that leads to so much emigration is internal violence and fear – whether it be Al Qaeda, the Taliban, drug cartels or corrupt governments. The only way to “fight” these entities is to give citizens an alternative path to prosperity. We build businesses and schools, we train military to defend the people NOT attack the people. The cartel gets its power from its wealth and the ability of that money to buy people and instill fear. To empower people to stay out of the cartel and to stand up against such corruption,  to diminish their numbers - people need alternatives - stable jobs, education, business opportunities, infrastructure, security. If we funnel money from funding ICE to funding small business loans or tech scholarships, if we build factories or upgrade equipment - put products closer to their customers, create jobs, create opportunities - we can reduce the push factors that drive people out of their towns. Instead of subsidizing U.S. companies to bring their factories back to the U.S., we subsidize opportunities for U.S. companies to make money across borders, money that is then spent and put back in those communities. There is no greater enemy to cartels and political extremists than prosperity. 

I’m thinking about Togo, Ivory Coast and Trinidad and Tobago for instance, because these are some of the countries I have lived in and seen the opportunities first hand. Places I’ve lived that had limited access to everyday goods that I took for granted in the U.S. In Togo alone, the cost of even a used car was astronomical due to tariffs. If U.S. could negotiate the building of factories in places like West Africa and sell cars locally drawing from the continent’s wealth of resources, creating jobs, generating more prosperity as a result of these jobs, and then creating even more customers for which these products are possible to own. Even recycling – I couldn’t believe the number of aluminum cans that would wash up on the beach – a dual government subsidized recycling program that could then be used to manufacture new cans or better yet, cars, encouraging more beautiful beaches, bettering our planet, and reducing the need for more resources. We need governments who can see these problems and find paths to creative solutions that build a better planet, not simply a government that sees an issue and wants to solve it with a smash and grab.

The counter-argument to my Human Kind First philosophy is that all of our human jobs are then outsourced to other countries. However, if the issue of immigration is that people are coming to the U.S. to take away American jobs, then it would follow that if these people stayed in their own countries to work, than those that are here in the U.S. would have less competition and more access to those jobs that are here. Additionally, prosperity follows prosperity. By opening up a factory in Belize for example, that doesn’t have to replace a factory in the U.S., rather it opens up a new market for your product. When people in other countries are more prosperous, they become more fervent consumers. When people stop worrying about survival, they start trying to find ways to keep up with the Kardashians. 

Our next democratic leaders need to be able to explain how U.S. generosity in the world benefits the U.S., how Human Kind First comes back to reward us with more prosperity, whereas America First and American imperialism, creates Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Robert Mugabe, Osama Bin Laden. Enough with America First, a great America, a safer America, puts Human Kind First. Great humans put Human Kind First!