TRUMP’S WORDS BEAM POLICY

US president’s statements with coded words that mean ‘fewer brown, black, yellow’ highlight immigration policy

For years, a movement to limit the number of migrants into the US and end a system that favors family members of legal residents has had to fend off criticism that it’s as a poorly veiled attempt to produce a whiter America.

Then its most prominent supporter told members of Congress in the Oval Office this week that the US needs fewer immigrants from Haiti and Africa and more from places like Norway.

President Donald Trump’s use of a vulgar term to describe African countries triggered widespread condemnation, and left the small cluster of immigration hard-line groups whose agenda Trump has embraced scrambling to distance themselves from the president.

“They say it’s about numbers, merit, security and control,” Frank Sharry of the immigrant rights group America’s Voice said of organizations that share Trump’s desire to reduce both illegal and legal immigration to the US “All of those are coded words that mean fewer brown, black and yellow immigrants into a white nation.”

Hard-line immigration activists, who prefer the term “restrictionists,” argue that the system they espouse—fewer overall migrants, an end to the family-based system that favors relatives of people already legally in the US and a greater emphasis on picking immigrants with skills—is not racially motivated. They note, for example, that immigrants from some African countries have higher rates of education that the US-born population and may benefit from a more skill-based approach.

“People who suggest merit-based may inherently favor white, northern Europeans—that is inherently racist,” said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“Immigration is not tied to Donald Trump. This preceded Donald Trump,” he added, dismissing the president as some- one “whose tweets cause people to cringe.”

Groups such as Mehlman’s helped torpedo immigration overhauls in 2006 and 2013, but they have few overt supporters in Washington. Before Trump, the most prominent one was Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who became Trump’s attorney general and whose former aide, Stephen Miller, is a top White House adviser to the president on immigration.

Sessions is a longtime critic of the country’s system that allows people with relatives in the United States a chance to apply for visas. “Almost no one coming from the Dominican Republic to the United States is coming here because they have a proven skill that will benefit us and would indicate their likely success in our society,” he said on the Senate floor in 2006. “They come here because some other family member of a qualifying relation is here.” /