News Outlets Catching Up With Immprofs: Trump Has Radically Changed Immigration

Both Vox and the NYT this week covered an issue that immprofs have been paying attention to for nearly 4 years: Trump has had a dramatic and terrible effect on immigration.

The Vox hook was this: immigration didn’t come up in the first presidential debate nor the VP debate. But the article goes deeper, noting “if elected, it will be a challenge for [Biden] to reverse the restrictionist immigration policies that Trump has implemented over the last four years, despite lawsuits from activists who have challenged those policies at nearly every turn, because of the scale and scope of the president’s policies.” Vox highlighted restricting asylum, expanding detention, MPP, and slowing legal migration.

The NYT piece is an opinion penned by the paper’s Editorial Board. The paper noted the dramatic decline in migration to the US and, how although Trump “promised a crackdown on illegal immigration during his presidency, he has also eagerly pursued reductions in authorized immigration.” The paper also quotes MPI’s policy analyst Sarah Pierce: “There’s so much change that has happened in the last four years, there’s no way a new administration could reverse things in four or even eight years.”

It may be hard, but let’s give a new administration the chance!

-KitJ