By Howard Foster -
I am relieved that Donald Trump continues to run his campaign based on repudiation of the open immigration policies of the last several decades.
Yesterday was a key day in this campaign. He went to Mexico and had a civil meeting with the President and then delivered a detailed, point-by-point plan laying out how immigration will change if he wins. There will be big changes. We will once again treat people in this country illegally as criminals and not as Democrats in waiting.
The wall would need congressional approval, and it might not happen if Trump wins. But every other step he outlined in his speech can be accomplished by executive action. The President has tremendous power in this area and can, in a few days, can turn around the whole apparatus of how the Department of Homeland Security operates.
Speculation was rife that Trump would backtrack on immigration in his Phoenix speech. He didn’t. The only change was he acknowledged that we cannot deport all illegals in one fell swoop. He said it would be prioritized and that eventually, when every other step in his plan has been carried out, and the border is secure (which I doubt will ever happen), he would consider how to deal with the remaining illegals still living here.
Every immigration hardliner I know of agrees with that approach. The final step would then be legalization for them in exchange for deep and permanent cuts in legal immigration.
We now have about a million legal immigrants per year, an absurdly high number especially with 95 million Americans out of the labor force. We should have no more than 200,000 legal immigrants per year, and they should have labor market skills adequate to be gainfully employed in our economy. Unskilled and uneducated immigrants should never be allowed to enter the country again. Trump acknowledged this in his long immigration speech. He used the word skills over and over again.
Rather than go to Mexico, I would prefer that he go to the Statue of Liberty and demand Emma Lazarus’s phrase “Give us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” be removed. It wasn’t there when France gave us the statue in 1876, and it no longer represents what we want our country’s immigration laws to be. We don’t want or need the world’s poor. We need to take care of our own underemployed and troubled masses who can’t make it in America, often because immigrants are taking jobs from them or driving down the wages to ridiculously low levels.
Trump speaks to these Americans in a way no Republican ever has. He has many faults of character and style which cannot be ignored. But he is completely right on the number one domestic issue.
Howard Foster is a Chicago immigration attorney.
