President Trump has shown himself in his campaign and in office to be reflexively averse to dealing with the details of policy or legislation, but he appears to have a good grasp of what he wants to do on immigration. Sadly, the president's plans for what he calls immigration reform are based on outright falsehoods about current policy and on menacing appeals to the worst elements of his political base.
Trump made a pretense of offering a bipartisan compromise to pro-immigration Democrats as part of his State of the Union address [Jan. 29]. He is proposing a path to citizenship not only for the estimated 800,000 "Dreamers" brought to the United States as minors but also for their families: an estimated 1.8 million non-status immigrants in all. Trump combined that carrot, however, with a package of sticks rightly rejected by the other side: sharp cuts in legal immigration and a reckless increase in border enforcement staffing.
Begin with Trump's two overarching falsehoods on current immigration policy. Trump and his supporters are simply wrong in his attack on so-called "chain migration" to depict current family unification policies as allowing immigrants to sponsor an unlimited number of family members. The proposed remedy is heartless to the max. The White House "framework" on immigration proposes to "promote nuclear family migration" by limiting sponsorships to spouses and minor children: siblings and parents need not apply.
Trump is also wrong in saying that the current diversity visa lottery system "selects individuals at random to come into the United States without consideration of skills, merit or public safety" (emphasis added). In fact, eligibility for the lottery — with merely 50,000 slots per year — requires proof of education and employment and a security background check.
Unsurprisingly, black and Hispanic immigrants would be roughly twice as likely to be affected by the administration's proposals than white immigrants, according to an analysis by economist Michael Clemens,a fellow with the Center for Global Development, Clemens, who is affiliated with the avowedly conservative Hoover Institution, used 2016 figures for immigrants admitted through the lottery to estimate that the changes would reduce the number of black immigrants by 64 percent and the number of Hispanics by 58 percent while the number of white immigrants would be cut by roughly one-third.
Were there any doubt, the analysis underscores the inherent racism in Trump's proposals. Yet pro-immigration advocates emphasize that seeking to curtail legal immigration is the very opposite of making America "great" again. The foreign-born living in the United States have risen over the past 25 years to reach 13.7 percent in 2015, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, but that percentage is below the historic high in this "nation of immigrants" of 14.8 percent in the 1890s.
Trump openly appealed in his campaign to the nativist element in the U.S. population with his anti-immigrant rhetoric. With his rhetoric now embodied in legislative proposals, Trump is drawing opposition not only from liberal pro-immigration groups but also from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and such mainstream conservatives as columnists David Brooks and Michael Gerson.
Writing on the business lobby's blog in advance of Trump's State of the Union address, Chamber president Tom Donohue called for legalizing the status of the 1 million immigrants already in the country and also for continuing to welcome legal immigration for the economy's sake. "Without qualified workers," Donohue wrote, "American businesses and the U.S. economy can’t grow."
David Brooks added his voice to the pro-immigration argument the same day in his scheduled column in The New York Times. "[T]he evidence for restricting immigration . . . is pathetically weak," Brooks said. Far from hurting the country, immigrants are providing the "antidote" to an overall loss of "dynamism," socially and economically.
Gerson, a speechwriter alumnus of the compassionate conservatism of the George W. Bush White House, similarly discounted the factual evidence for Trump's arguments "as uniformly exaggerated or wrong" in a critique of the State of the Union published in The Washington Post on Friday [Feb. 2]. "There is little evidence that migrants take jobs from middle-class Americans," Gerson wrote. He debunks the fear of immigrant crime as well. "There is no evidence that immigrants have higher rates of crime," he writes. "The opposite is true."
Trump is once again factually wrong to claim an increase in illegal border crossings when the numbers appear to be falling. Yet to combat the non-existent menace, Trump wants a $25 billion trust fund for his "beautiful" wall and a 50 percent increase in border enforcement resources for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Environmental experts view the supposed wall as a threat to wildlife and endangered species. Immigration advocates warn of the risks of adding so many ICE agents without effective safeguards against corruption and abuse.
Anti-immigrant hysteria has been part of American history time and time again through the years, but never before has a U.S. president made it such a central part of his campaign or his presidency. As with some of his other policies, the only way for Trump to make America great is to change his policies and his rhetoric. As president, he should be trying to bring Americans together instead of continuing to divide the country by race, ethnicity, and national origin.
No comments:
Post a Comment