Cynthia Farrar is the co-founder and CEO of Purple States.

Donald Trump launched his campaign with immigration—“it’s got to stop, and it’s got to stop fast,” he said within the first three minutes of announcing his candidacy last year—and immigration has fueled it ever since. According to Trump, the American dream of upward mobility is dead, and immigrants and foreign workers are largely to blame. He vows he’ll bring back the dream “bigger and better than ever” by shielding American workers from global competition. He’ll build a huge wall to seal off the entire southern border, expel unauthorized immigrants, drastically restrict legal immigration, and oblige employers to recruit and hire Americans.

America has always been a nation of immigrants. Yet Trump argues that we now face a trade-off: We have to shelve the dreams of today’s immigrants in order to restore the dreams of people descended from immigrants.


Is Trump right that a more restrictive immigration policy can help restore the American dream for the country’s forgotten workers? This question goes to the heart of his promise to make America great again. And one way to answer it is through Trump’s own story, as the descendant of a German immigrant, and as a businessman who employs foreign workers.

In researching this video, above, we traced the trajectory of Trump’s German grandfather, Friedrich Trump, who laid the groundwork for his grandson’s success. Drawing on the work of notable Trump-watchers Gwenda Blair and David Cay Johnston, and with the help of a genealogy expert, we were able to piece together Friedrich’s story. He was born in 1869, in Kallstadt, a village in the wine-growing region of the Rhineland. As his family, deeply in debt, struggled to maintain its vineyards, Friedrich trained as a barber. But in hard-pressed rural Germany there was no future in shaving cheeks and cutting hair. “I thought I could make a lot more money in the U.S.,” Friedrich later wrote. So in 1885, he boarded a steamer for the land of opportunity.

America’s borders were open in those days. With the economy booming and the nation expanding rapidly to the West, the United States admitted and naturalized practically everyone who wanted to come (except the Chinese). Friedrich’s limited skills and education were no bar to entry. In the late 19th century, driven by waves of immigration from Germany and other parts of Europe, the foreign-born percentage of the U.S. population hit its all-time high of 14.8 percent (compared with 14 percent today).

With hard work and an entrepreneurial flair that would one day define the Trump brand, Friedrich rose from New York barber to flamboyant frontier restaurateur to Queens real estate investor. When he died of the flu in 1918, just shy of 50 years old, he left his wife and son a real estate business that they and his grandson Donald would turn into an empire. The Trump family’s trajectory is a characteristically larger-than-life embodiment of the American dream.

The American dream Trump invokes on the campaign trail hasn’t changed much in the 131 years since his grandfather set sail from Germany for America. This is the dream Trump promises to revive for low-skill Americans by denying it to foreign workers not unlike Friedrich. What Trump fails to acknowledge, however, is that even though the dream hasn’t changed, the economy has. And now as in Friedrich’s time, it’s the economy that determines who comes to America, and who prospers.

Both his family story and Trump’s actions as a businessman suggest that in today’s economy, his campaign promises may be difficult to achieve—regardless of what he does about immigration. Comparing Friedrich’s world to his grandson’s reveals that the opportunity Friedrich enjoyed is now largely blocked—for immigrants and native-born alike. Today’s tech-driven global economy tilts against upward mobility. Global competition creates jobs at the bottom of the ladder, rewards the highly skilled at the top, and squeezes out opportunities for less skilled workers to move up, whether they’re immigrants or citizens.

Trump’s own business practices reflect this economic reality. Businesses that compete in a global marketplace, including Trump's, seek out cheap labor and people already equipped with education and skills, wherever they may be.

In Friedrich’s time, someone with limited education and skills could hope to move up in the world through drive, resourcefulness and a willingness to work hard. Today, that’s not enough. There is no frontier open to Friedrich or to Americans like him. Today’s frontier is tech—open only to highly skilled and educated workers. (And as Trump himself has often observed, the growth of the American economy depends on access to these skills, whether homegrown or imported.)

In other words, excluding the Friedrichs of this world won’t give low-skill Americans better access to living-wage jobs or opportunities to pursue a promising career. A comprehensive recent study of the economic and fiscal consequences of immigration found that—with very few exceptions—immigrants aren’t taking American jobs. And in any case it’s the economy—not immigration—that is dimming hope for a more prosperous future. Contrary to Trump’s talking points, immigration policy won’t help restore the American dream.

Though Trump’s proposed solution is distracting and irrelevant, his question is urgent. What can be done to jump-start opportunity for American workers whose horizons are shrinking? Is it possible to preserve the beneficial effects of globalization, while limiting its tendency to cause economic insecurity and to deepen and entrench unequal opportunity? Ideas are emerging from various points on the political spectrum, and range from employer initiatives to “upskill” workers and sponsor apprenticeships, to government initiatives like investing in infrastructure or broadening the Earned Income Tax Credit. Others think the solution lies in supplying a universal basic income or rebuilding the strength of unions.

As a businessman, it could be argued, Trump is in a particularly strong position to analyze and mitigate the impact of globalization. Instead of proposing realistic solutions, however, Trump chose to tap into the fears of his constituents with proposals that are largely irrelevant to their concerns. For her part, Clinton downplays these fears, which deepens opposition to her immigration reform agenda and skepticism about her vow to create good jobs. Her own family’s immigrant history, told in a parallel video here, vividly illustrates why Trump’s message resonates so powerfully, and will likely continue to do so, whoever wins the election.

Perhaps these video stories can help refocus the debate on both sides, away from this endless and unproductive dispute about immigration to the underlying issue: how the global economy works (or doesn’t) for our businesses and citizens, and what if anything government can or should do about it.

