Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
President dismisses Daca deal
WASHINGTON: President Donald Trump has dismissed a bipartisan Senate immigration plan as “a big step backwards”, saying it would force the US to admit people from “high crime” countries, digging in on a position critics decried as racist.
Yesterday he defended his stance on the immigration deal reached by a group of six Republican and Democratic senators on Thursday and denied using a vulgar reference to immigrants that drew widespread condemnation.
“The so-called bipartisan Daca deal presented yesterday to myself and a group of Republican senators and congressmen was a big step backwards,” Trump said in a series of Twitter posts yesterday.
The Senate group has been working for months to craft legislation that would protect 700 000 illegal immigrants brought to the US as children under a programme known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca). The tentative deal also addresses border security, including a border wall, the diversity visa lottery and chain migration.
“Wall was not properly funded, Chain & Lottery were made worse and USA would be forced to take large numbers of people from high-crime countries which are doing badly,” Trump wrote.
The Republican president sought to walk back comments he reportedly made to senators on Thursday at a White House meeting, saying: “The language used by me at the Daca meeting was tough, but this was not the language used.”
At the meeting Trump questioned why the US would want to accept immigrants from Haiti and African nations, referring to some as “s***hole countries,” according to two sources.
Reports of his language that referred to people of colour from other countries created a firestorm of criticism from both major parties and critics abroad who said they could not be described as anything but racist.
The UN human rights office said the “racist” remarks would incite xenophobia.
“These are shocking and shameful comments from the President of the United States. There is no other word one can use but ‘racist,’” said UN human rights spokesperson Rupert Colville.
“You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘s***holes’, whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome,” he added.
Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, said the comments “smack of blatant racism, the most odious and insidious racism masquerading poorly as immigration policy”. – Reuters