In a twist nobody saw coming, the New York Times managed to interview a normal, working-class American about immigration — and didn’t immediately pretend he didn’t exist.
On Monday’s episode of The Daily podcast, the Times featured 53-year-old Massachusetts resident John Polina, an ambivalent Trump voter who explained why immigration is personal to him. “I’m a laborer at the very root of what I do,” Polina said. “I move things. I pick things up. I put things down. And that kind of work has been compromised by illegal immigration greatly.”
Polina said he started working in construction decades ago, and over time his wages dropped as illegal aliens entered the same line of work at lower cost to employers. “And I was getting paid less and less, because I was competing against people who were hired because it cost less to hire them or employ them,” he said. “That bothered me.” As a mason, he said he faced competition from companies using that same practice, leaving him stuck competing against businesses that cut costs by hiring illegal labor.
There are many reasons to oppose an endless flow of illegal immigration, but watching it destroy your standard of living is about as real as it gets. Polina described how people from broken countries will work for wages Americans can’t survive on — and employers take advantage of that. Americans like him pay the price.
Now running his own construction business, Polina said aging has made the work harder because he cannot afford to hire help at a fair wage and refuses to hire illegal aliens on principle. “I can’t hire a laborer, because I don’t feel that I can give them a living wage,” he said. “So it’s just me doing the work, which is — it’s beating me up quite a bit. But I try to stay in shape, and I keep going.”
Polina said he feels betrayed by both political parties. “[N]one of them, Democrat or Republican, did anything about it,” he said. He added that seeing how quickly border enforcement changed recently made him feel forgotten. “It makes me feel like I’m forgotten as an American worker, as a working-class person. They talk about the working class in this country. They talk about the business owners in this country being the backbone of the country. But politicians don’t believe that, or they don’t act on that.”
Despite regretting that enforcement is necessary, Polina supports what the Trump administration is doing in Minneapolis and across the country. “I don’t know if he’s doing enough,” he said, adding that stronger action could risk more tragic incidents. Still, he questioned why ICE agents are now spread throughout the country. “Why is there an ICE agent in Minnesota? There shouldn’t be an ICE agent in Minnesota. We just shut the border down. The ICE agents in Minnesota are [there] because of 40 years of illegal immigration.”
Most of Polina’s interview happened before the death of Alex Pretti, an anti-ICE activist shot last month while interfering with law enforcement in Minneapolis. The reporter later asked if that incident changed his view.
“I know that a person died, and that’s wrong,” Polina said. “And I know officers felt threatened, and that’s wrong.” But he said what troubled him more was that people in 2025 had been killed by illegal immigrants.
Polina said he searched the Times for stories about Americans killed by illegal alien criminals and compared them to coverage of Pretti. “[O]n this man that got shot by the Border Patrol, there’s 18 [news articles],” he said. “But there was a boy that got killed by an illegal immigrant when he was helping his mother or stopping her from getting raped, just [in] 2025. No report from the New York Times.”
It should embarrass the Times, but it likely won’t. For years, major media and political institutions have pushed the policies that hollowed out Polina’s livelihood. What stands out most is that Polina wasn’t angry — he sounded worn down and resigned.
That’s what decades of failed immigration policy have done to working Americans. And it’s why people like Polina continue to support what President Trump is doing now: not out of hatred, but out of common sense — and a belief that the country can still choose to protect its workers and its future.
