Trump’s plan puts focus on restricting 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, moves that some experts estimate could cut legal immigration nearly in half.
The plan would protect some 700,000 young immigrants from deportation and provide a path to citizenship, an offer the White House described as a concession to Democrats. But it also represented a victory for immigration hawks and a 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.
“It’s an enormous change in rhetoric and position,” said Alex Nowrasteh of the conservative Cato Institute. “Forever, people have talked about illegal immigration, and now this anti-legal immigration position is standard for much of the Republican Party.”
The Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer of New York, dismissed the plan Friday. 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 hard-liners have advocated for years.”
Democrats forced a government shutdown last weekend to expedite negotiations over the Dreamers, who are set to lose protection from deportation in March.
Trump accused Schumer of complicating the talks Friday. “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 tweeted.
By including curbs to legal immigration in his proposal, Trump elevated ideas that have been advocated by hard-liners for decades, although with little momentum in Washington. Trump has framed the proposals as prioritizing 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.
The plan would eliminate hundreds of thousands of family-related visas. Immigrants would be allowed to sponsor only their spouses and underage children to join them in the U.S., and not their parents, adult children or siblings.
The remaining slots would be applied to the backlog of immigrants waiting for a U.S. visa. Then, when that backlog is ended, the slots would be eliminated.