Trump Seeks Dramatic Limits on Legal Immigration
News reports on Presidential candidate Donald Trump’s recent immigration speech in Arizona focused on his extreme plan to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible in as short a time as possible. Ronald Brownstein in an interesting article in The Atlantic directs attention at Trump’s proposal to dramatically restrict legal immigration.
In his campaign policy paper, Trump calls for “a pause” in all legal immigration. But in public Trump rarely discussed that idea. Instead, he usually softened his grim warnings about undocumented, or illegal, immigration by praising the legal kind: “I want people coming into our country, but they have to come in legally.”
Trump’s Arizona speech clarified this contradiction. “Though largely overshadowed by his hard-edged proposals on undocumented immigrants, Trump proposed the most significant restriction on legal immigration since Congress slashed it after World War I. Projections by the non-partisan Pew Research Center suggest that, compared to current law, Trump’s plan would reduce legal immigration through 2065 by tens of millions.” “The actual number of people who might not come to the United States would be at least 30 million, possibly more,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, Pew’s director of Hispanic research.
KJ