Miller has vision for freezing immigration
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s senior policy adviser Stephen Miller told White House supporters in a private call this week that the new executive order curbing immigration will usher in the kind of broader long-term changes to American society he has advocated for years, even though the 60-day measures were publicly characterized as a “pause” during the coronavirus pandemic.
Miller, the chief architect of the president’s immigration agenda and one of his longest-serving and most trusted advisers, spoke to a group of Trump surrogates Thursday in an off-the-record call about the new executive order, which had been signed the night before.
Though the White House had seen the move as something that would resonate with Trump’s political base, the administration instead was facing criticism from immigration hard-liners who were disappointed that the order doesn’t apply to temporary foreigner workers despite Trump pitching it as helping protect jobs for Americans.
Miller told the group that subsequent measures were under consideration that would restrict guest worker programs, but the “the most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor,” he said, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Post.
Miller indicated that the strategy was part of a longterm vision and wasn’t seen only as a stopgap.
“As a numerical proposition, when you suspend the entry of a new immigrant from abroad, you’re also reducing immigration further because the chains of follow-on migration that are disrupted,” said Miller, one of the executive order’s main authors. “So the benefit to American workers compounds with time.”
Miller declined to comment Friday. A White House spokesperson didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Trump administration has been trying for years to scrap the familybased U.S. immigration model, which Miller and other restrictionists call “chain migration.” Instead, the White House favors a more restrictive system based on job skills and U.S. labor market demands.
Though Trump described his order this week as a temporary “pause,” he also said it’s an open-ended move that will remain in place until he decides the U.S. labor market has sufficiently improved once the coronavirus crisis subsides. He said he would re-evaluate after 60 days and could extend the immigration restrictions to help Americans find jobs when states reopen their economies.
Trump acknowledged the order was far less sweeping than the one he had teased on social media. It doesn’t apply to immigrants already living and working in the United States who are seeking permanent residency, nor does it apply to the spouses and children of U.S. citizens, among other exemptions.
But the measure, which took effect Thursday, does block the other immigrant visa categories Trump calls “chain migration,” namely the ability for U.S. citizens to sponsor their parents, adult children and siblings. Last year, the State Department issued about 460,000 immigrant visas, and more than half were in the categories the order halts.
Numerous advocates for immigrants said the order was far less restrictive than they had feared. Because the order has no bearing on farmworkers, medical professionals and other “nonimmigrant” visa categories, restrictionist groups panned the move.
Dan Stein, president of Federation for American Immigration Reform, a leading restrictionist group, sent a letter to Trump on Thursday
blasting the order for excluding temporary work visas.
“Under what craven notion of American equity would the United States continue a subordinated labor importation program at a time when American workers are in such distress?” Stein wrote. “The optics are devastating — we are becoming a two-class society, with a servant caste relegated to guest worker status continuing apace while Americans search desperately for employment.”
On the call, Miller sounded stung by the criticism.
“All around the country, Americans of every political stripe will rally behind an initiative to make sure that they, their children, their parents, their husbands, wives, sons, uncles, nephews, cousins can be the first to get a job when it opens up, to get her old job back when they rehire or to keep their job if they already have one,” he said.
“Those individuals have a right and an expectation to get their jobs back and not to be replaced by foreign workers. That’s the action the president took, it is historic. It is vital, it is necessary, it is patriotic and it deserves the full-throated support of everybody on this call.”