Trump Proves It: GOP's Immigration Stance Was Never About the Rule of Law
"I love people who come in legally," Donald Trump told a conservative gathering during the campaign, pivoting from a series of horror stories about ruthless foreigners murdering innocent Americans in cold blood. At another campaign event, he said of those who migrated to the U.S. through legal channels, "we're going to take them in and we're going to cherish them."
year later, as part of what the Los Angeles Times described as a "renewed emphasis" on "appeal[ing] to the president's core supporters," Trump announced he's backing a proposal to "slash" the number of legal immigrants in the United States. This comes as immigration to the U.S. – both legal and otherwise – is already way down, at least in part because of the wave of xenophobic acts of hate Trump's campaign inspired and the message his ham-fisted travel ban sent to the rest of the world.
Trump has embraced a dumb, self-destructive policy that would likely cause a serious hit to the economy if enacted, but there's one upside to his regime's unorthodox attacks on legal immigration: We should thank this crew for making it clear that animosity toward immigrants is, and always has been, grounded in petty cultural resentments and largely unfounded fears of economic competition, rather than in some abstract reverence for the rule of law.
Because we fancy ourselves a nation of immigrants, immigration restrictionists take great pains to distinguish between legal and illegal immigration. Even if their own grandparents came here from the old country, they'll insist they were different because they came here legally. Every discussion of the topic features some yahoo asking, "What part of 'illegal' don't you understand?"
It's true that, for most of our history, we had no limits on immigration. It wasn't until the 1880s that the first restrictions were put in place with the Chinese Exclusion Act and laws barring entry to some contract workers. In 1917, the U.S. barred many Asians from entering the country and started requiring literacy tests for new arrivals. In the 1920s, the first widespread limits were put into place, with a quota system that was designed in large part to stem the influx of Eastern European Jews and Southern Italians.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/features/trump-shows-gop-immigration-stance-was-never-about-rule-of-law-w497036?utm_source=rsnewsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_content=daily&utm_campaign=081017_16
