Heidi Stevens: Megyn Kelly threw a lot of 'we' and 'us' around in her unhinged rant about immigrants. But she doesn't speak for me

Heidi Stevens, Tribune News Service on Jul 2, 2026

Published in Lifestyles

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It’s tempting to ignore Megyn Kelly’s latest rant, given her long and storied history of inane rants.

From insisting back in 2013 that both Jesus and Santa are white (despite Jesus Christ being born in the Middle East and Santa being born in your imagination), to downplaying sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes because his victims were 15 and not “like, 8-year-olds,” (her words), Kelly has repeatedly reminded us not to take her seriously.

However.

After the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that allows the Department of Homeland Security to end temporary protected status for Haiti and Syria, Kelly took ranting to new levels of awful.

“We don’t want you,” she said on her podcast, "The Megyn Kelly Show." “We don’t care if you’re offended. Get out. Go home. Go back to (expletive) Haiti.”

Temporary protected status was created in 1990 to provide sanctuary for people fleeing war, natural disasters and “extraordinary and temporary” conditions. The 2010 earthquake in Haiti that killed more than 200,000 people qualified the nation and its people for the status, until last month. The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling could send 350,000 people back to Haiti.

“We know our country is better than yours,” Kelly said to her audience. (Which I guess she thinks includes Haitians tuning in for her takes?) “That’s because we filled it with our work ethic and our culture and our values. You being here only dilutes it for us, those who built it and live it.”

That’s a whole lot of we-ing and us-ing for someone who surrendered the moral and logical authority to speak for others a long, long time ago.

It’s also a whole lot of cherry picking history, given how profoundly our work ethic and culture and values are shaped by immigrants, including Haitians. Given that “those who built it and live it” are, and have been since the nation’s founding, immigrants. Given that everything from blue jeans to hamburgers to the theory of relativity were brought to us by immigrants.

Chicago was brought to us by immigrants — a Haitian immigrant, in fact. The city’s founding father, Jean-Baptiste Pointe DuSable, was born in present-day Haiti around 1745 and immigrated to the United States in the 1770s. He first arrived in New Orleans before heading up the Mississippi River and settling the city that now bears his imprint and, in so many spots, his name.

Without the contributions of immigrants, we wouldn’t have the Pulitzer Prizes. (Joseph Pulitzer arrived in the U.S from Hungary in 1864.) We wouldn’t have the public library system championed by Andrew Carnegie, who immigrated from Scotland. We wouldn’t have the vocabulary for understanding grief, provided by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, an immigrant from Switzerland. We wouldn’t have the science proving chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) destroy the ozone layer, discovered by Mexican-born chemist Mario Molina.

Our sports teams — college and professional — would be shells of their current selves. Our restaurants and bakeries and cafes and food trucks and cookbooks would be barren and bland. Our artwork, our music, our novels, our films, our poetry, our dances couldn’t begin to illuminate the human condition without the breadth and depth and beauty of immigrants’ contributions.

The degree to which immigrants have shaped American culture and values is so thorough that trying to quantify or qualify them is like trying to unswirl paint colors.

And why would you want to?

To prop up some ill-informed, maladjusted, fearful worldview? To turn down your own humanity so the world’s tragedies don’t harsh your mellow? To convince yourself that the privileges you enjoy are a birthright you’re entitled to, rather than an opportunity you’re squandering when you hoard them?

I don’t really want to get inside the head of Megyn Kelly. I’ll never understand what compels a person with a platform like hers to spread the kind of vitriol she spreads, nor do I hope to.

But I will say this. A whole lot of us reject her rhetoric. A whole lot of us have communities and friendships and families and workplaces and houses of worship and neighborhood gems and whole lives, really, made richer, brighter, smarter, kinder, healthier, more joyful, more illuminating, more worth savoring because of what people from all over the globe have brought to them.