No one seems to be pro-immigrant anymore.

At best, public figures insist that immigrants should be treated humanely, with dignity and respect. Those are important demands. They are also remarkably modest. That human beings should be treated humanely is a basic moral minimum, not a political vision. On rare occasions, a sign still appears reminding Americans that immigrants make the country “stronger” or “greater.”

Occasionally, academic articles surface emphasizing immigration’s economic benefits. But as a confident moral position, pro-immigrant multiculturalism has largely disappeared from public life.

Ideas showcases stories, opinion and analysis about Hawaiʻi, from the state’s sharpest thinkers, to stretch our collective thinking about a problem or an issue. Email news@civilbeat.org to submit an idea or an essay.

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Something has shifted. The debate is no longer about whether immigration is good for a society. It has narrowed to whether immigrants deserve basic decency. That narrowing matters. It is a failure of the political imagination.

I say this as an immigrant. I am the child and grandchild of immigrants from Europe and the Americas to Argentina. I was briefly an immigrant in Italy and, for more than three decades now, an immigrant in the United States. I was born in Buenos Aires, lived in Milan, New York City, Massachusetts, and now Honolulu.

I first met my wife in the Bronx, and when my wife first visited Buenos Aires and Milan, she made an observation that stayed with me. She said I had lived in different versions of the same city my entire life.

She was right. These were dense, heterogeneous places shaped by migration: overlapping languages, crowded sidewalks, unfamiliar foods, informal economies, and constant negotiation over shared space. I love that kind of city.

Later, our family lived in a Boston suburb. I wanted to call it home. Although the population was more “diverse” than in other parts of the country, the sameness of habits, experiences, and expectations felt suffocating.

Here is the harder truth: just as I found that homogeneity intolerable, many people experience the look, sound, and feel of diverse cities as intolerable. The idea that their communities might begin to resemble those places fills them with dread.

What rarely gets said out loud is that much of today’s opposition to immigration is aesthetic rather than economic or legal. Immigration changes how places look, sound, and feel. It alters the rhythm of streets, the languages overheard in line, the density of housing, the use of sidewalks and parks, and the visibility of religious and cultural differences.

For those who value heterogeneous cities, this feels like vitality. Density, noise, overlap, and negotiation are embraced as the ordinary conditions of shared life. Support for immigration, in this sense, is not only a policy preference. It is an orientation toward space that embraces friction and proximity without demanding control.

For others, these same changes feel like disorder or loss. They disrupt expectations about how a place is supposed to look and how people are supposed to behave, and, perhaps more importantly, they worry about who is entitled to manage and curate those spaces.

The word most often used to describe these negative reactions is “racism.” Sometimes that word fits. But it has become so overused that it often obscures more than it reveals.

In many cases, what is at work is not an articulated belief in racial hierarchy. It is something more immediate: an aesthetic judgment about how people look, sound, dress, worship, gather, eat, and move through space.

These judgments are shaped by deeply rooted ideas about order and belonging, about what feels in place and what feels out of place. Immigration intensifies visibility and density, and for some people that produces anxiety before it produces argument.

That discomfort is then translated into moral and political language. Concerns about noise become concerns about order. Unease becomes talk of safety. Irritation hardens into arguments about values.

This aesthetic discomfort is intensified by a deeper economic anxiety. For decades, many Americans have experienced stagnating wages, rising housing and health care costs, and declining job security. The promise that each generation would do better than the last has eroded.

These forces are structural and difficult to confront. Immigration, by contrast, is visible. It arrives embodied in people with different accents.

Density feels more threatening when housing is scarce. Noise feels more intrusive when work feels precarious. Immigration comes to symbolize a loss of ease and control, even when it is not the source of those pressures.

Hawai‘i offers a different starting point. Difference here is not an exception. It is the commonplace. The islands have long been shaped by layered migrations across the Pacific. Languages, foods, faiths, and histories overlap not as novelty but as inheritance. Shared life here has never depended on sameness.

This does not mean Hawai‘i is free of anxiety. Housing is scarce, land is finite, and economic pressures are real. But the dominant cultural grammar has emphasized coexistence and responsibility to place rather than exclusion. Localism, at its best, is not a demand for purity. It is a practice of care: knowing where you are, how you arrived, and what obligations follow from living here.

Life in Hawai‘i reminds us that pluralism is not fragile and not new. It is a way of life. The real question is not whether immigrants deserve humane treatment. It is whether we are willing to defend, without apology, the kind of shared life immigration makes possible.