WHAT KIND OF NATION IS THIS PRESIDENT OFFERING?

…Trump Adviser: Steven Miller, who heads up Trump’s scaling back of “legal” immigrants

Remember when Trump referred to some African nations as, “shithole countries.”

Okay, let’s look at what the Trump presidency has brought to America so far.

It gave us a president that loves authoritarian leaders over democracies.  It gave us a president that criticizes our friends around the globe, and that praises the head of the country that has gotten involved in the elections of other democratic countries as well as the United States' elections.

·       We have a president that considers himself as the “Emperor of the United States.”

·       We have a president that gets us out of any multilateral trade agreement, and that places tariffs on our friends that may eventually lead us into a deep recession.

·       We have a president that is purposely doing away with anything that the previous president achieved, regardless of whether it is good for average Americans or not.

·       We have a President that lies to all Americans on a regular basis.

·       We have a president that wants to change settled law such as over 50 years of legal abortion and the right for a woman to make their own decisions about their bodies.

·       We have a president that is making millions of dollar from his businesses just because he’s our president.

·       We have a president that takes the word of dictators without requiring anything more than a hand shake.  (i.e.: Putin and Kim Jong Un.)

·       We have a president that threatens to take the founding nation of NATO, out of NATO.

·       We have a president that has removed the US from the Iran Nuclear Deal, the Paris Climate Accord, TPP, and wants us out of most all previous and any future multilateral trade deals.

And finally, we have a president that is against legal as well as illegal immigration.  That’s kind of strange for nation that became great based on being “a nation of immigrants”.

As the national immigration debate swirls around the effort to discourage illegal immigration by separating families at the border, the Trump administration is making inroads into another longtime priority: that of reducing “legal immigration”.

The number of people receiving visas to move permanently to the United States is on pace to drop 12% in President Trump’s first two years in office.  This is according to a Washington Post analysis of State Department data.

Of course, the most affected are the Muslim-majority countries on the president’s travel ban list.  That list includes: Yemen, Syria, Iran, Libya and Somalia, where the number of new arrivals to the United States will be over an 80% drop by the end of this September.

On top of all that. the Supreme Court recently upheld Trump’s travel ban, paving the way for an even more dramatic decline in arrivals from those countries.

Legal immigration from all Muslim-majority countries is on track to fall by nearly a third.

For a nation that was founded as an immigrant nation, that could be the beginning of the end of our greatness.

The Trump administration has argued that its immigration policies are driven by national security concerns and an effort to preserve jobs for Americans. Not true.

“The history of immigration policy in the United States is one of ebbs and flows,” said a White House official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Yet in recent years, the U.S. has [had] record immigration without any consideration of this influx’s impact on American workers or wages.”

Public officials and immigration experts have raised concerns that the administration’s approach goes after certain nationalities, discriminating against those from poorer and nonwhite countries.  The Washington Post’s analysis also found immigration declines among nationalities not targeted by Trump’s travel ban, including nearly all of the countries that typically receive the largest number of immigrant visas from the United States.

The number of immigrant visas granted to people from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, China, India, Vietnam, Haiti, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Pakistan and Afghanistan has also declined. Among the top 10 countries that send the highest number of immigrants to the United States annually, only El Salvador is projected to receive more visas under Trump.  Their's would be an increase of 17% in his first two fiscal years.

The number of immigrant visas approved for Africans is on pace to fall by 15%.

Trump has said he wants additional limits on immigration in part because he believes new arrivals create undue competition for American workers.  Of course, there are no studies that support that concept.  In fact, there are many un-filled jobs because many Americans will not do some jobs that would eagerly be taken by a new immigrant coming into the US. 

Some of Trump’s critics have said  that his administration is seeking to slow the transition to a majority-minority US population, citing his disparaging remarks about Muslims and his characterization earlier this year of Haiti, El Salvador and African nations as “shithole countries.”

Of course, the administration denies that its immigration policies are discriminatory.  Yet Trump’s has a clear history of making offensive comments about nonwhite immigrants.

Trump’s bogus economic argument against immigration comes as the unemployment rate has fallen to 3.8 percent, the lowest level in nearly two decades. Some American businesses are clamoring for workers, and the slowing of legal immigration is further straining a job market in which a record 6.6 million positions are unfilled.

Federal data shows that applications for the H-1B visas have fallen for the first time in five years, according to a March report by immigration lawyers. The report cited a barrage of new and unprecedented immigrant application requirements, as well as reports of administration plans to further limit all visas.

With certain industries facing worker shortages, some economists argue that new limits on immigration could have unintended consequences for the nation’s economy.

“In general, the consensus of economists is that immigration on average has a strong positive effect on the American economy,” said Giovanni Peri, the chair of the economics department at the University of California at Davis. “The big picture really is that this cut in the number of all immigrants, high- and low-skill, is going to have an impact by slowing the economy.”

Scaling back legal immigrants has been a top priority of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and White House adviser Stephen Miller and some other administration officials.

But the Trump administration has managed to make significant changes in immigration without the help of the Congress that voted down some of Trump’s previous visa cuts.  They are able to do this in part by relying on the administrative guidance handed down to consular officials to change the way immigrant visas are considered and processed. The result is a shift in the legal immigration process which is in line with the vision of the White House’s Miller, the adviser who officials say sits at the helm of immigration policy decisions.

“Miller sees consular officers as the tip of the spear in his effort to control who is getting into the country,” said one high-ranking national security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “He sees it as a generational thing, like he has to retrain them.”

This “longer vetting process”  results in fewer approved applications per month.

“If you’re empowering people to spend more time vetting an application, and you’re not having a culture of getting to ‘yes’ but having a culture of making the right decision, it’s clear that you will not be able to process applications for immigration benefits at the same speed,” the official said.

The largest decline in approvals is occurring in the family-based visas that allow US citizens and legal residents to sponsor the immigration of relatives to the United States.  This is what Trump has labeled “chain migration.”

Trump has consistently emphasized his intention to transform the US immigration system into one based on “merit” rather than family ties, preferring those from European countries with desired skills and financial resources who also speak English.

In his State of the Union address, Trump said he planned to accomplish this in part by “eliminating a vast subset of family-based visas, along with the diversity visa lottery”, which provides about 50,000 immigrant visas to under-represented nationalities each year.

I am convinced that that when Trump is wearing his “Make America Great Again” hat, the hats and Trump's signs should instead be saying “Make America White Again”.

Copyright G.Ater  2018