The Trump Administration's Dark View of Immigrants

[dalton99a]

http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/what-motivates-the-immigration-ban

The Trump Administration’s Dark View of Immigrants
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells February 2, 2017


The Trump Administration’s approach to immigration does not seem to be about terrorism or jobs. In stages this week, a veil has dropped.

“I feel strongly about this,” Donald Trump said a year before his election, on Steve Bannon’s radio show. “When someone’s going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Penn, Stanford, all the greats, and they graduate, and not only graduate but do great, and we throw them out of the country and they can’t get back in, I think that’s terrible. We’ve got to be able to keep great people in the country. We’ve got to create job creators.”

Trump told a story he had heard, about a young man who went to Harvard and wanted to stay in the United States but couldn’t, so he returned to India, where he started a “very successful company.” Trump said, “He wanted to do that here. We have to be careful of that, Steve. We have to keep our talented people in this country.” The candidate seemed interested in how his interviewer would respond: “I think you agree with that. Do you agree with that, Steve?”

Bannon did not agree. He volunteered an invented fact—that two-thirds to three-quarters of Silicon Valley C.E.O.s are from “South Asia or from Asia.” (They are not.) “A country’s more than an economy. We’re a civic society,” Bannon said. There was a back-and-forth. “You gotta remember we’re Breitbart. We’re the know-nothing vulgarians, so we’re always going to be to the right of you on this,” Bannon reminded Trump.

This was an early exchange between the man who would become President of the United States and the one who would be named his chief strategist. Trump and Bannon were trying out their theories on each other; the candidate was measuring the nationalist right, which he knows only by intuition, and the know-nothing vulgarian was measuring the man who would be his champion. Many of Trump’s commitments were already plain: he was by far the most nationalist Republican in the race, the one who had built his candidacy on hostility to “illegal immigrants.” Even so, a real distance separated Trump’s position from Bannon’s. Trump described a person he considered a desirable immigrant, one the country needs—the young Indian-American entrepreneur who graduated from Harvard with a strong G.P.A. For Bannon, the question was not whether immigrants were making contributions but whether their presence altered “civic society.” Part of what is in question now, in the fallout from the travel ban, is whether the gap between their views still exists at all.