Trump walls off U.S. and runs on results
Refugee admissions, border crossings continue to decline as travel restrictions expand
As he rallies support for his reelection in November, President Donald Trump is closer than ever to delivering on his promise for a United States with taller walls, tighter immigration laws and fewer foreigners entering the country.
In the past three years, the president has hardened the nation’s immigration system into an obstacle course of physical and bureaucratic barriers, causing illegal border crossings to plummet and legal immigration to slump.
The number of refugee admissions to the United States fell to the lowest level on record last year, and this year the administration set the refugee cap lower, reserving 18,000 spots for people who are fleeing persecution around the globe. The Trump administration also is blocking asylum-seekers at the southern border and flying them instead to Guatemala or sending them back to Mexico.
Other visitors are being turned back or staying away entirely: Foreign students and tourists are coming in fewer numbers, according to the latest State Department data, and green cards issued abroad since 2016 have dropped 25 percent. The Trump administration also just added six names to a growing list of travel-restricted countries: Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and four African nations, including Nigeria, the continent’s most populous.
“It’s no secret that the administration is consciously trying to close America to immigrants,” Lucas Guttentag, an immigration law professor at Stanford University’s law school, said in an email. “Trump policies and practices have attacked virtually every facet of the immigration system: effectively dismantling asylum protections at our southern border, imposing wealth restrictions on immigrants who are spouses and family members of citizens, burdening businesses that legitimately depend on skilled immigrant workers and threatening mass deportations regardless of how long or deep a person’s ties to country and community are.”
Not since the “openly racist” policies of the United States in the 1920s, Guttentag said, has the nation “experienced such a fundamental shift in immigration policy fueled by such aggressive and unashamed appeals to hatred.”
As the president continues to fulfill his promise to build hundreds of miles of steel border barriers, critics say he is retreating from former President Ronald Reagan’s vision of America as a welcoming “city upon a hill” whose doors should be “open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”
In the president’s view, the city on the hill was too permissive and vulnerable; welcoming foreigners opens the doors to an existential threat. Trump promised his supporters to wall it off, and he has stuck to that vision. His “Make America Great Again” message conjured a time before the rapid economic and demographic changes of globalization. He is leaning heavily on that message again to win in November, depicting Democrats as radical extremists who want “open borders” and those who encourage sanctuary for immigrants as enabling violence and murder.
“Border control is necessary to save our citizens’ schools, hospitals, jobs and very lives — and to keep criminals out of our communities,” said White House spokesman Hogan Gidley. “President Trump’s policies are restoring the rule of law, saving lives and raising wages for African American and Hispanic American workers who have been completely forgotten and betrayed by the Democratic Party.”
On Monday, Trump’s White House released a 2021 budget proposal that would increase the frequency of deportations by adding thousands of new immigration agents and expanding jail capacity. Hours later, Attorney General William Barr announced Justice Department lawsuits against “sanctuary” jurisdictions that eschew cooperation with federal immigration enforcement. And at an evening rally in New Hampshire ahead of the state’s Democratic primary, the president dusted off one of his vintage campaign routines, reciting a dark allegory he calls “The Snake” about a serpent that turns on its generous host, injecting fatal venom. “This is about immigration,” he told the crowd, to raucous cheers.
“Gotta come in legally and through merit!” the president shouted. “Under my administration, we’re fully taking care of our own citizens first.”
During his State of the Union address last week, Trump spoke of immigrants almost exclusively in negative terms, railing against “sanctuary jurisdictions” and highlighting the lurid killing of a 92-year-old woman in New York last month.
While his predecessors in the Republican Party often balanced calls for tighter border controls with a reaffirmation of the country’s immigrant identity, Trump has largely dispensed with those phrases to depict newcomers as criminals, competitors and a welfare burden.