Immigration hard-liners defend stances
‘Restrictionists’ say ideas preceded Trump policy
DENVER — For years, a movement to limit the number of migrants into the U.S. and end a system that favors family members of legal residents has had to fend off criticism that it’s an attempt to produce a whiter America.
Then its most prominent supporter told members of Congress in the Oval Office this week that the U.S. needs fewer immigrants from Haiti and Africa and more from places like Norway.
President Donald Trump’s remarks left immigration hard-line groups scrambling to distance themselves from the president.
The 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 U.S. and a greater emphasis on picking immigrants with skills — is not racially motivated. They note that immigrants from some African countries have higher rates of education that the U.s.-born population and might 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 someone “whose tweets cause people to cringe.”
Groups such as Mehlman’s helped torpedo immigration overhauls in 2006 and 2013, but they have few supporters in Washington. Before Trump, the most prominent one was Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, who became Trump’s attorney general.
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.”
Trump has embraced Sessions’ cause of trying to end “chain migration,” a term opponents have applied to the family-based system but one that got little attention until the president tweeted it in capital letters as he demanded its end amid immigration talks in September.