A Day In A Life Without Immigrants

Anti-immigrant sentiment long predates Trump, and spreads far beyond the U.S.

- John Authers

In the 2004 movie Un Dia Sin Mexicanos (A Day Without a Mexican), Californians awake to discover that all the Latinos among them have mysteriously disappeared. The state swiftly descends into anarchy.

Streets are uncleaned, fruit rots on trees, while drug hustlers start peddling vegetables as they fall into short supply. Middle-class people who were bullying their Hispanic maids and janitors hours earlier buckle under the back-breaking work they now have to do. Schools close. Riots break out as baseball games are canceled (basketball continues as normal).

The directors laid on the satire with a sledgehammer, but the message wasn't particularly controversial. The relationship between California and its Mexicans had become symbiotic, not parasitic. At the time, the movie fed into a then-widespread notion that migrants' status should be resolved, and those who had spent most of their lives in the U.S. shouldn't live with the stigma of being illegal.

That was 20 years ago. On June 16, it will be exactly 10 years since Mr. Donald Trump descended the escalator to open his campaign for president by inveighing against Mexicans who are "rapists" and "bring disease."

The decade since has set California, and the rest of the nation, on a course to the current drama, in which the administration has sent troops to support aggressive efforts to round up migrant laborers at their places of work, while protesters wave Mexican flags atop burning cars.

Immigration is above all a cultural issue. But the clampdown could also have profound economic consequences. Unlike tariffs, Mr. Trump's other signature policy, it's already having a dramatic effect.