Trump’s Assault on Authorized Migration
President Trump has embraced tough immigration enforcement policies targeting the undocumented. David Hernandez makes the important point that Trump also wants to reduce legal immigration as well in this piece on NACLA. “The Trump administration’s crackdown on unauthorized immigration obscures his larger effort: to prevent lawful forms of immigration for migrants and remake the racial composition of the country.”
Hernandez concludes the article:
“The scale of halting lawful channels of entry is punitive and plainly cruel—nothing out of the ordinary for the Trump administration. It also represents an effort to engineer the racial makeup of our country. Such racialized policies are not new, and in fact span four centuries—from racial prerequisites to naturalization and citizenship in the 18th century, Chinese exclusion in the 19th century, racist immigration quotas in the 20th century, through the enforcement era and into the Trump era. When such policies go from executive orders to become legislation—then they will hold consequences for generations to come.”
KJ