Beyond the wall, Trump plan takes on legal immigration
The most contentious piece of President Donald Trump’s new proposal to protect the so-called Dreamers has nothing to do with them. It’s the plan’s potential impact on legal immigration that sparked fierce Democratic opposition Friday and appeared to sink chances for a bipartisan deal in Congress.
The proposal outlined Thursday by the White House would end much family-based immigration and the visa lottery program, moves that some experts estimate could cut legal immigration into the United States nearly in half.
The plan would protect some 700,000 young immigrants from deportation and provide a pathway to citizenship, an offer the White House described as a concession to Democrats. But it also represented a victory for immigration hawks and a seismic shift for immigration policy in the U.S., which has long centered on the question of how to stop illegal border crossings, not how to curb legal immigration.
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, dismissed the plan Friday as a “wish list” for hard-liners. He acknowledged the bipartisan common ground on protections for the immigrants now shielded by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. But he accused Trump of using them as “a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish list that anti-immigration hardliners have advocated for years.”
Democrats forced a government shutdown last weekend in attempt to expedite negotiations over the Dreamers, who are set to lose protection from deportation in March. Trump’s proposal was the first detailed public offer from the White House.
On Friday, the president accused Schumer of complicating the talks. “DACA has been made increasingly difficult by the fact that Cryin’ Chuck Schumer took such a beating over the shutdown that he is unable to act on immigration!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
By including curbs to legal immigration in his proposal, Trump elevated ideas that have been advocated by a slice of hardliners for decades, although with little momentum in Washington. Trump has framed the proposals as an attempt to prioritize immigrants with specific skills rather than family connections.
The U.S. takes in about 1 million legal immigrants annually, and nearly 13 percent of the country’s residents were born overseas, the highest share in nearly a century. Immigration hawks argue that the influx drives down native-born Americans’ wages and strains public resources.
Fearing betrayal on a signature campaign issue, President Donald Trump’s loyalists are lashing out against his proposal to create a path to citizenship for nearly 2 million “Dreamer” immigrants.
Trump-aligned candidates from Nevada and Virginia rejected the notion outright. A loyal media ally, Breitbart News, attacked him as “Amnesty Don.” And outside groups that cheered the hardline rhetoric that dominated Trump’s campaign warned of fierce backlash against the president’s party in November’s midterm elections.