President Trump has called for a merit-based immigration system that selects immigrants who will benefit the economy and American workers, rather than imposing costs.
His critics argue this focuses too much on race or nationality.
“And when I said, you know, Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,” Trump said. “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
Trump said the migrants, specifically Latin American gang members, “make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people.”
“They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight,” he said.
However, experts like Jon Feere say the U.S. should prioritize highly skilled immigrants who increase wealth, rather than unskilled migrants who strain social services.
“If you’re looking at immigration policy as an economic policy, then you would want that policy to result in higher per capita wealth amongst the U.S. population … Does it lift up our poverty-level population? Does it make the middle class wealthier?” asked Feere, a former top aide in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
“America needs to select immigrants for the type of immigrants that we actually need, which in this economy would be individuals who are highly skilled and actually bring something to the table … Those individuals who meet that definition are few and far between. And by definition, it means we need fewer immigrants than the number that are coming in right now … regardless of their nationality, or country of origin.”
Biden has embraced a less restrictive approach, but polls show the large influx of less educated migrants under his leadership is unpopular and shifting views negatively on immigration.
Even the New York Times editor says immigration can and should be used to promote political goals by changing a country’s demographics and moving away from its European roots.
“We can write laws that say, ‘Oh, you know, we want more of this kind of person, we don’t want this kind of person,” editor Jia Lynn Yang said.
“Go back to the beginning of the Trump presidency in 2017, and he was passing the Muslim travel ban, and people were saying ‘You can’t do that, it’s not American, it’s not what we do.'”
“[But] if you look at the history, you’ve learned this is what we’ve done before … [and what] the Trump administration has done is not somehow inherently unAmerican … It’s up to us in democracy to figure out ‘What do we want our immigration system to look like?'”
“For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years [since 1965] as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong,” Yang wrote.
Since the 1990s, mass immigration driven by business interests has hurt Americans’ wages, jobs and innovation while subsidizing coastal investors, with disproportionate impacts on heartland states.
The policy extracts resources from other nations and inflicts domestic economic and social costs while benefiting some political and economic elites.
