It was never about the law
The issue of illegal immigration, however legitimate, provides a convenient hiding place for bigotry. But the Trump administration is not hiding.
The White House’s next reported move to prevent lawful immigrants from becoming permanent residents or citizens is another strike in its escalating war on immigration regardless of legality. In targeting the immigrants who are least likely to be wealthy or white, these policies dispense entirely with any pretense that President Trump’s anti-immigration agenda is about law, order or anything other than xenophobia.
The proposal at hand would make it more difficult for immigrants who have used any of a range of public services, including the Affordable Care Act, the Children’s Health Insurance Program, and nutritional assistance, to obtain a green card or citizenship, NBC News reported. Attributed to the Mephistophelian White House adviser Stephen Miller, a glowering anti-immigration zealot associated with the administration’s inhumane family separations, the proposal would target law-abiding immigrants of modest means.
Potentially affecting tens of millions of legal immigrants, this would be among the more ambitious but far from the first of the administration’s efforts to reverse the United States’ fundamental embrace of immigration.
In June, for instance, the administration announced that it would hire dozens of lawyers and immigration officers in an accelerated effort to “denaturalize” citizens who obtained their status improperly. While officials claimed that the initiative would have a narrow focus, it sent a troubling signal that even naturalized citizens, traditionally thought to have acquired all the rights of other Americans, are newly vulnerable.
The administration has also sought to discourage and alter legal immigration by reducing the overall allotment of green cards by half; favoring better-educated, Englishspeaking immigrants; eliminating an immigration lottery for those from underrepresented nations, known infamously to the president as “shithole countries”; curtailing legal residents’ ability to sponsor the immigration of close relatives, the family reunification policy that Trump has rechristened “chain migration”; limiting refugee admissions, particularly from Muslimmajority countries; and adding a question about citizenship status to the 2020 census.
Trump’s response to illegal immigration, from caging children to constructing neo-medieval fortifications, has never been justified by the problem it supposedly addresses. Unlawful border crossings were at their lowest ebb in decades when he was sworn in, and the U.S. employment he claims to be protecting is close to an 18-year high. A Government Accountability Office report this week questioned the wisdom of Trump’s beloved border wall project, citing a lack of information and analysis that increases the risk it “will cost more than projected, take longer than planned, or not fully perform as expected.”
The administration’s broader immigration crackdown reveals that such rational concerns are beside the point. This is a sustained appeal to the irrational forces of fear and hatred.