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Pete Hegseth's Holy War
The US now finds itself in a long-term war waged by an angry, fanatical Fox journalist, not a competent secretary of defense.
Mar 20, 2026
Pete Hegseth is carrying out a Holy War at the Pentagon and abroad. He has rightly come under fire for incompetent leadership and mediocre management of the Iran war. The war was a mistake in the first place, both because Iran did not pose an immediate threat to US interests, and because President Donald Trump assumed a rapid victory and regime change would secure oil for the US and its allies for decades to come. But motivated by Christian Nationalism, fueled by angry masculinity, and blinded by ideological certainty, Hegseth’s crusade was doomed to failure from the start. Within the Pentagon, the battle against “woke” ideas and diversity has shaken leadership and hurt morale.
On the international front, Hegseth’s religious conviction about the immorality of Iran’s Islamic leadership led him to the conclusion that his god would protect the US in any war. Yet devoid of real goals and plans, motivated by ignorance about Iranian society, and discarding the intelligence community’s dire warnings about the chances of failure, Hegseth pushed on. The US now finds itself in a long-term war waged by an angry Fox journalist, not a competent secretary of defense.
The Crusader
Hegseth’s worldview is steeped in mistaken views of the 11th century Crusades, infused with white male privilege, and seasoned with ideology rather than intelligence briefings. Hegseth developed his views at Princeton University where he studied politics. He became a frequent contributor to and publisher of the Princeton Tory, the school’s conservative newspaper. In his writings he “strived to defend the pillars of Western civilization against the distractions of diversity.” He attacked the university for encouraging and supporting “pre-marital sex, homosexuality, abortion, and a general hostility toward faith and religion.” He declared that “the homosexual lifestyle is abnormal and immoral.” He rankled at the buzzwords of diversity, tolerance, sexual liberation, and multiculturalism which he took to be anti-Western. He concluded that the university “has abandoned almost all its moral/truth-seeking guidance to undergraduates.”
Hegseth took advantage of Reserve Officers' Training Corps funding for his education at Princeton, seeking to overcome the dangers of multiculturalism by becoming a soldier of god. After graduation he joined the Army National Guard, becoming a major, and was deployed three times abroad earning two Bronze Stars. Hegseth’s tattoos carry his Christian nationalism for all to see: a Jerusalem cross on his chest, a Christogram here, a “Deus Vult” (“God Wills It,” a Crusader battle cry) there, an American flag here, crossed muskets there, and other grotesque inkings common in violent far-right communities.
Hegseth failed to understand that technology alone does not win a war, nor does his insistence on the elimination of “wokeness” in the Pentagon.
Hegseth’s holier than thou attitude about the need to wage war on “wokeness,” Islam, and other evils was hardly tempered by a whistleblower report on his tenure as the president of Concerned Veterans for America (CVA), from 2013 until 2016, which describes him as being repeatedly intoxicated; sexually pursuing CVA female staffers; creating a hostile workplace; and drunkenly chanting in public, “Kill All Muslims! Kill All Muslims!” A history of alcohol and sexual abuse suggests an individual unfit to lead the Department of Defense (DOD), and in fact Hegseth was forced out as chief executive of CVA amid allegations of financial mismanagement, sexual impropriety, and personal misconduct.
Hegseth’s certainty that white males must control society seems confirmed by a string of abusive acts. His former sister-in-law claims that his second wife feared for her personal safety during their marriage, and often hid in a closet. She herself experienced an angry, intoxicated Hegseth screaming in her face. Claims of rape against Hegseth in 2017 did not result in charges against him, but did result in the future DOD secretary paying the woman in question a $50,000 settlement. His own mother, Penelope, sent him an email that said: “You are an abuser of women—that is the ugly truth and I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around, and uses women for his own power and ego.” Married three times and fathering a child out of wedlock, Hegseth said, "I have failed in things in my life, and thankfully, I'm redeemed by my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.” Ultimately, Hegseth found salvation in the narcissism of Donald Trump. In 2017 Hegseth became co-host of "Fox & Friends Weekend." He ingratiated himself to the president by incessantly promoting the lie that vot
er fraud had led to Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.
Purifying the Pentagon
Appointed secretary of defense by Trump, Hegseth announced, “We became ‘the woke department’… Not any more. We’re done with that shit.” He set out to purge the Pentagon of woke, gay, and transgender personnel that he believed weakened the US military. He said, “For too long, we’ve promoted too many uniform leaders for the wrong reasons—based on their race, based on gender quotas, based on historic so-called firsts.” Yet there were questions from the start about his own minimal “qualifications” as a Fox News host and Trump sycophant. In March 2025, only months into his Pentagon appointment, he risked the lives of US soldiers by proudly sharing classified war plans in unsecured communications with a journalist. Loyal to Trump, he kept his job.
Trump, who has no military experience, but four draft deferments and a FIFA soccer peace prize, began his second term by firing a distinguished F-16 fighter pilot, General Charles Q. Brown, Jr., as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Hegseth followed along, carrying the president’s racist water by ending diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs in the Pentagon, and by purging defense department libraries and websites that addressed anti-racism and sexism. His racism carried so far as an order to stop classifying nooses and swastikas as hate symbols (this effort to permit Nazi symbols among the Coast Guard was abandoned). But his white Christian chest-thumping intensifying, Hegseth ordered the renaming of Navy ships that honored African Americans; the purging by Pentagon archivists of the biography of Jackie Robinson; and the removal of a picture of the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima in 1945, the Enola Gay, because “gay” is forbidden.
Hegseth’s goal, he said, was to eliminate the “social justice, politically correct, and toxic ideological garbage that had infected our department.” There would be “no more identity months, DEI offices, dudes in dresses. No more climate change worship, no more division, distraction or, gender delusions, no more debris.” There would be no more fat soldiers, but only fit ones. And there would be no beards, “no more beardos,” only the paramount clean-shaven look of individual expression. Calling for Aryan purity, he said, “We don’t have a military full of Nordic pagans, but unfortunately, we have had leaders who either refuse to call BS and enforce standards or leaders who felt like they were not allowed to enforce standards.” Women could serve only if they could kill as effectively as Hegseth’s warriors. To mold these warriors, Hegseth determined to permit bullying and hazing “to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”
Why his anger at “beardos”? Hegseth said that anyone who needs a shaving exemption for more than a year would be forced out of the service. This ended a policy created mainly for Black and brown troops with pseudofolliculitis barbae, a skin condition that makes daily shaving lead to cuts, sores, and scarring. For Hegseth, “grooming standards” were commensurate with the “warrior ethos.” In the name of the warrior mindset, Hegseth extended his purge to women, gays, and transgender individuals. Hegseth eliminated the Women, Peace, and Security program at the DOD as “woke” and “divisive” although it is codified in a 2017 law that Congress passed unanimously and was signed by Trump. Hegseth’s Pentagon is now forcing transgender service members to leave in the name of military preparedness. (Hitler, too, despised homosexuality. He had Ernst Röhm and other gay SA members murdered in 1934 because of their "degeneracy"; the Nazi regime made the persecution of homosexuals a priority. Perhaps Hegseth studied the Wehrmacht at Princeton?)
White Christian Officer Training
US Ivy League schools, MIT, CalTech, Chicago and other universities were crucial to the US to wage the Cold War, strategize the arms race, and build radars and other weapons. But the anti-intellectual Hegseth decided to end officer training, fellowships, and graduate-level education programs at Ivy League and other top-tier universities starting in the 2026-2027 academic year because of their allegedly “woke ideology” and anti-American sentiment. He claimed the need to refocus “the US military on maximum lethality, warfighting, and accountability; prioritizing combat effectiveness, merit-based standards, and a direct, combative culture over political correctness.” He insisted that the DOD needs “more troops, more munitions, more drones, more Patriots, more submarines, more B-21 bombers… more innovation, more AI… more space, more speed.” And he believes he can achieve these goals by shifting programs to conservative schools that stress Christian nationalist thinking.
Toward those ends, Hegseth announced the elimination of several senior service college fellowship programs for the 2026-2027 academic year and beyond. He desired “strategic thinkers through education grounded in the founding principles and documents of the republic, embracing peace through strength and American ideals, and focused on our national strategies and grounded in realism.”
The failure of the Trump-Hegseth Holy War against Iran underlines the need to divorce religious beliefs from declarations of war.
What he meant by this was doctrine steeped in the ideas of limited government, free enterprise, constitutional originalism, and Christian morality. The new partner institutions included such conservative beacons of white Christianity as Liberty University (whose past president resigned in the midst of a sex scandal); Baylor University (whose past president ignored a campus rape scandal, helped Jeff Epstein avoid prosecution, and who investigated Bill Clinton over real estate deals and Oval Office oral sex at a cost of $52 million); Regent University (that has long pushed the Christian orientation of its founder, Pat Robertson, who called for letting LGBTQ advocates and Muslims kill themselves); Hillsdale College (whose president at the time of the Clinton infidelity was allegedly having a long affair with his daughter-in-law who then committed suicide); and Pepperdine University (which was long embroiled in a lawsuit over sexual orientation of students). The trainees will be ready for religious wars, if morally ambivalent.
War Crimes and Holy War
The failure of the Trump-Hegseth Holy War against Iran underlines the need to divorce religious beliefs from declarations of war. While the medieval Crusades had largely political-military significance for control of the Holy Land, such Christian nationalists as Hegseth have recast that history as a holy war against Moslem infidels. In the ongoing war that the US launched on the Islamic Republic, Hegseth emphasizes that the Christian god is on his side. He said: “Our capabilities are better. Our will is better. Our troops are better. The providence of our almighty God is there protecting those troops, and we’re committed to this mission.” He asserted that the Trump administration was carrying out hold battle against “religious fanatics who seek a nuclear capability in order for some religious Armageddon.”
Hegseth’s reliance on religious justifications—and his certainty that Trump expected a quick victory to distract Americans from the Epstein scandal—hurried the US into its attack. But there was no justification: Iran was not within days of deploying ICBMs or nuclear weapons, and was hardly prepared to attack the US. Indeed, negotiators on both sides were close to a US-Iran agreement to forestall nuclear weapons development—and recreate the agreement that Trump abrogated in 2018 in the first place.
The great danger, now realized, was that Hegseth confused personal religious and ideological imperatives with military need. The Nazis conflated Bolshevism, Judaism, and Slavic racial inferiority, hurried into a war with the USSR that Hitler expected to win within days or weeks, yet plunged the world into war. So, too, Hegseth mixes hatred of Islam, Iran in particular, with religio-spiritual embrace of the Christian Bible, Western civilization, and a sacred mission for Israel, in the end transforming a war against the Islamic Republic of Iran into a religious crusade.
Hegseth: Waging War with No Plans
Hegseth ignored real time challenges that, after initial “victories,” have left the DOD in a bind as to how to move forward. In the first two days of the attack, the US spent $5.6 billion in munitions: More than 2,000 munitions were rained down on nearly 2,000 Iranian targets. But the armaments are hardly in an unlimited supply, must be replaced, and it will take months to do so, especially for precision, smart weapons. This will leave the US vulnerable elsewhere in the world. Hegseth failed to understand that technology alone does not win a war, nor does his insistence on the elimination of “wokeness” in the Pentagon. Hegseth assumed that initial firepower would bring Iran to its knees, but he has only strengthened the resolve of Iran’s leaders to stand up to the US, and has even brought its oppressed people into some agreement with the theocracy.
Hegseth has worried so much about beards, DEI, and Holy Wars that he attacked Iran without minesweepers that the DOD decommissioned in the autumn. These might have opened the Strait of Hormuz to the world’s oil traffic, one-third of which passes through the Strait. And without allies—Trump’s odious behavior and policies have turned away even England, France, and Canada—the US is isolated in this war. It has little recourse to their stockpiles, let alone their minesweepers. How long will Hegseth—and his witless president—wait to ask Congress to replenish the Pentagon budget and secure more munitions to continue “the most intense strikes”? And how can Hegseth justify the fact that, when planning for his Holy War, he ordered the Pentagon to buy up tens of millions of dollars of steak and crustaceans in order to spend its budget authorization before the end of the fiscal year?
For Hegseth, who embraces quick, empty responses and has forgotten any analytical tools he may have learned in college, any negative comment is “fake news.”
The troubling subservience to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s war aims in Ukraine has handicapped the Hegeth and Trump Iran fiasco as well. Trump has both refused to condemn Putin’s support for Iran through intelligence sharing, military cooperation, and providing drone components and satellite imagery all of which are likely harming US soldiers. Russia is generally prolonging a war in the Middle East that benefits its closest Middle Eastern partner in the fight against the US and Israel. Trump has eased sanctions on Russian oil, which is permitting Putin to earn millions of dollars in oil revenues to fund his four-year-old invasion of Ukraine. Recall that in his first month as defense secretary, Hegseth endorsed Russia’s territorial occupation of Ukraine. At the very least, Hegseth is uninterested in Russian support for Iran.
Hegseth still promises in this war “intense strikes,” “the most fighters, the most bombers, the most strikes; intelligence more refined and better than ever.” He ridicules the Iranians as “desperate and scrambling.” Likely to justify the US murder of 180 children, he announced, “Like the terrorist cowards they are, they fire missiles from schools and hospitals... deliberately targeting innocents." The missile hit midmorning when children would certainly be present. Where is the Christian morality? Committed to a different Jesus than the one in the Bible, Hegseth told US soldiers to ignore legal advice about when they were permitted to kill enemy combatants under their rules of engagement. Hegseth smirked in couplets, “Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct.”
What Has the War Department Wrought?
Hegseth, the former Fox News host, knows how to manipulate the messages to confuse the public. He uses press conferences to attack the media for their reporting on his and Trump’s war—from its initial justifications, to his overconfidence, to miscalculations regarding closure of the Strait of Hormuz, to faltering world oil supply, and to the massive unpopularity of the war as US deaths and costs accumulate. He might as well say to the American people, “Let them eat lobster.”
Into the third week, the Iran war has led to the deaths of at least 13 US service members and has burned through more than $11.3 billion worth of taxpayer dollars. The Persian Gulf has been plunged into chaos as Iran mounts retaliatory strikes against military bases and oil refineries in the region. But for Hegseth, who embraces quick, empty responses and has forgotten any analytical tools he may have learned in college, any negative comment is “fake news.”
The secretary of military propaganda admonished the press to learn the craft of Fox: “Allow me to make a few suggestions… I used to be in that business, and I know that everything is written intentionally, for example, a banner or a headline.” He called for right-wing takeover of CNN and other media. Pete needs one more tattoo: “What, me worry?”
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Trump's Environmental Massacre
The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up.
Mar 14, 2026
Last March, I interviewed staffers at the Environmental Protection Agency’s Region 5 headquarters in Chicago who were horrified by the Trump administration’s staff and funding cuts, which notably included eliminating environmental justice and diversity, equity, and inclusion programs.
The threat of those cuts was so severe that Brian Kelly, an on-site emergency coordinator based in Michigan, predicted: “People will die. There will be additional deaths if we roll back these protections.”
How many additional deaths? The Trump EPA will not say. As part of President Donald Trump’s crusade to destroy federal science and roll back environmental safeguards, his EPA announced recently that it will no longer consider the monetary value of saving lives by regulating fine particulate matter, commonly called soot, smaller than 2.5 micrometers in diameter (PM 2.5) and ozone smog from vehicles, fossil-fuel-burning power plants, and other polluting industries.
In other words, the agency intends to conduct cost-benefit analyses by only considering the cost.
We Need Stronger Pollution Regs
The data documenting soot’s deadly damage even with environmental rules in place is voluminous, much coming from the federal government itself, suggesting that we need stronger regulations, not weaker ones.
A 1997 EPA report found the first 20 years of the 1970 Clean Air Act were so effective that 205,000 premature deaths were avoided from all air pollution sources in 1990. The same report concluded that the 1990 amendments to the law would save more than 230,000 lives a year by 2020 and prevent 2.4 million asthma attacks.
By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal.
Even so, air pollution remains mortally high in a nation that is now the world’s biggest producer of oil and gas and stubbornly prioritizes individually owned vehicles over public transportation. A 2021 study funded by the EPA and published in the journal Science Advances found that PM 2.5 alone still accounts for 85,000 to 200,000 excess deaths a year.
The conclusions of nongovernmental studies echo the EPA’s own findings. A 2022 University of Wisconsin study, for example, estimated that if the United States eliminated all fine particulate, sulfur dioxide, and nitrogen oxide emissions from electricity generation, vehicles, factories, and buildings, 53,200 premature deaths a year could be prevented, providing $600 billion in health benefits from avoided illness and mortality.
Drill Baby Drill’s Collateral Damage
The Trump EPA’s recent announcement is just another of a string of nonsensical—and dangerous—moves by the agency. They include abandoning the Paris Climate Accord and killing the agency’s 2009 “endangerment finding” determining that carbon pollution threatens human health, which the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) estimates will cut short the lives of as many as 58,000 people over the next 30 years due to additional pollution.
Taken together, the Trump administration’s assault on public health has the potential of triggering an environmental massacre, particularly among the most vulnerable Americans.
Because of our nation’s history of housing discrimination, communities of color, regardless of income, face more than twice the risk of exposure to PM 2.5 than white communities. According to the 2021 Sciences Advances study, this “phenomenon is systemic, holding for nearly all major sectors, as well as across states and urban and rural areas, income levels, and exposure levels…. Targeting locally important sources for mitigation could be one way to counter this persistence.”
By disbanding DEI and environmental justice programs, the Trump administration is ensuring that communities of color are collateral damage in sucking the Earth dry of oil and gas and mining for the last lump of coal. An August 2025 Science Advances study found that the life cycle of oil and gas extraction, storage, transporting, refining, and combustion results in 91,000 annual premature deaths due to exposure to PM 2.5, nitrogen dioxide, and ozone. It found that, with rare exception, “Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American groups experience the worst exposures and burdens for all life-cycle stages and pollutants.” A 2023 New England Journal of Medicine study, meanwhile, concluded that reducing PM 2.5 pollution alone would disproportionately benefit Blacks at all income levels as well as low-income whites.
EPA Now Stands for Every Polluter’s Ally
Without a single fact to back up its claim, the Trump EPA—led by the fossil fuel industry-friendly Lee Zeldin—stated it did away with calculating lives saved because prior estimates were done with “false precision and confidence.” In fact, the agency is now simply repeating the talking points of the oil and gas industry and the US Chamber of Commerce, which has a long history of lobbying Congress to resist climate legislation and filing endless amicus briefs on behalf of polluters to counter environmental lawsuits.
In 2018, during the first the Trump administration, the chamber asserted—also with no evidence—that previous to the Trump EPA, the agency “historically misinformed and misled the public by using inconsistent and opaque analytical and communication methods regarding costs and benefits.”
That same year, the Trump EPA offered a revealing nugget of information that was hardly opaque. It admitted that its effort to kill the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan, which would have reined in power plant carbon pollution, would result in in as many as 1,400 premature deaths a year by 2030, and thousands more annual cases of respiratory diseases. At the time, Trump was also trying to roll back Obama-era clean air vehicle standards that were projected to save nearly 40,000 lives a year by 2030.
In its last year in office, the Biden administration proposed tightening PM 2.5 standards, estimating that it could prevent as many as 4,500 premature deaths in 2032 and lead to $46 billion in health benefits in 2032.
There is not a single word about protecting lives or lowering healthcare costs in the EPA’s February 12 press release announcing its repeal of the endangerment finding nor in its February 20 press release hailing the repeal of tighter mercury and air toxics standards enacted by the Biden administration. Instead, Zeldin claimed—without proof—that the air pollution rules would have “destroyed reliable American energy” and revoking the endangerment finding would save Americans more than $1.3 trillion, including an average cost savings of more than $2,400 on a new vehicle.
While Zeldin is trying to use the greater availability of cheaper, gas-guzzling cars as a lure to seduce the public to look the other way on environmental regulations, the pollution they emit will smoke the nation. EDF estimates that higher-polluting vehicles could, by 2055:
- Cost US drivers as much as $1.4 trillion in increased fuel costs;
- Emit carbon pollution that will intensify climate change-related extreme weather events, costing $1.5 trillion to $4.2 trillion; and
- Increase respiratory and heart disease, as well as the number of premature deaths, costing $170 billion to $500 billion.
None of that mattered to the first Trump administration, which admitted its regulatory rollbacks could kill people. When the second Trump administration barreled into office with its cutbacks and deep-sixing of environmental justice and DEI programs, staffers in the EPA Chicago Region 5 office feared the worst. They included Kayla Butler, a Superfund community involvement coordinator. The stories her team collects in the field of people living with toxic horrors are precisely the stories she said the Trump administration is “trying to erase.”
The EPA’s decision to erase the value of lives lost or saved by regulations is a horror beyond the pale. It opens the door for government-sanctioned death with a baked-in cover-up. With the death toll from air pollution still so high, the Trump EPA is burying the data with the bodies, so we will never know the cause.
This article first appeared at the Money Trail blog and is reposted here at Common Dreams with permission.
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The Other Side of Opportunity: What Immigrants Contribute to US Institutions
We often talk about immigrants as beneficiaries of American opportunity. But in higher education, healthcare, research and beyond, immigrants are also architects of institutional improvement.
Feb 27, 2026
The US Department of Education recently withdrew its unlawful directive that would have restricted diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts in schools and universities nationwide. The guidance was framed as an attempt to enforce “neutrality” in education. In practice, it would have narrowed how institutions identify and address inequity, discouraging efforts to create learning environments that reflect the realities of an increasingly global student population.
That national debate can feel abstract, just another skirmish in a broader culture war over higher education. But equity is not abstract. It lives in the quiet mechanics of institutions: who gets seen, who gets filtered out, and which barriers are treated as incidental rather than structural. I am reminded of this not by a court ruling or federal directive, but in the ordinary work of teaching and mentoring students from around the world as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It shows up during office hours, committee meetings, and the quiet moments when institutional rules do their work.
Americans are fluent in a familiar story about immigration: Immigrants come to the United States for opportunity—better education, better jobs, better lives. That story is not wrong. But it is incomplete. What is talked about far less is how immigrants improve the institutions they enter, often by exposing the limits of systems that were never designed with them in mind.
Case in point: Like many graduate programs, ours used procedures that filtered out applicants who had not paid an application fee before faculty review. When they failed to pay, I was never supposed to see their application. The fee, common by US standards, was prohibitively expensive in some local currencies. Until I learned about that procedure, I hadn’t fully appreciated how many judgments about who “belongs” in graduate school happen long before any evaluation of research potential or intellectual fit. Once I understood the implications of that policy, I advocated to have it amended, and a student I would never have otherwise met was later admitted and enrolled.
The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.
That experience crystallized something for me. The student’s presence highlighted how even well-intentioned programs can struggle to value ways of thinking they were never designed to account for. The student, meanwhile, navigated those gaps with a practicality that exposed where the system itself needed adjustment.
The same design logic operates across American institutions that confuse neutrality with fairness. Even institutions that are equity forward, including my own, must navigate a shifting and often constraining federal landscape, making progress real, but necessarily incomplete.
This kind of exclusion is not unique to admissions policies. Across higher education, international students routinely navigate US systems calibrated to financial, cultural, and administrative norms that quietly penalize difference. More than 1 million international students are enrolled in US colleges and universities, and an analysis from the Association of American Universities estimates that international students contribute nearly $44 billion to the US economy annually. Yet research consistently shows that international students experience higher levels of social isolation than their domestic peers.
From a public health perspective, these barriers are not incidental—they are risk factors that function as chronic stressors. Uncertainty around visas, financial precarity, cultural dislocation, and exclusionary policies shape mental health and academic persistence long before a student ever sets foot on campus. Research shows that rates of anxiety, depression, and suicidality among international students have risen sharply over the past decade, even as access to culturally responsive mental health services remains uneven.
In public health, we name these design failures plainly: policy choices—not personal deficits. Improving the experience of international students is less about individual support than about whether institutions are willing to change the conditions they create.
What struck me most, though, was not my student’s resilience in the face of these barriers, but what institutions gain when those barriers are confronted. They were adept at finding workarounds where institutions offered only walls—and unapologetic about pointing out the walls. That resourcefulness did not just help them navigate the system; it revealed where the system itself needed to change.
The real work of equity is not expanding opportunity within unchanged systems but interrogating the systems themselves—especially when those systems quietly reward conformity.
We often talk about immigrants as beneficiaries of American opportunity. But in higher education, healthcare, research and beyond, immigrants are also architects of institutional improvement. They expose inefficiencies, challenge inherited assumptions, and force clarity around what we actually mean by merit.
Immigrants make up a disproportionate share of the US healthcare workforce, including physicians, researchers, and direct-care providers—roles that are essential as the country grapples with workforce shortages and widening health inequities.
Opportunity is not a one-way transaction. Institutions that welcome immigrants while resisting the changes their presence demands are not neutral—they are extractive.
Some people change institutions not by asking for permission, but by refusing explanations that don’t make sense. The question isn’t whether immigrants benefit from coming to the United States—the evidence is clear. The more uncomfortable and more important question is whether institutions are willing to reckon with how much they benefit from immigrants, and whether they are prepared to change to welcome them.
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