Trump wants to make immigration white again
On Monday, Emma Lazarus wept.
Lazarus, of course, was the poet who celebrated that the United States welcomes the tired, the poor, the huddled masses of other lands. But on Monday, the Trump administration unveiled a new immigration policy that upends that tradition. The poor are no longer welcome. Instead, the immigrants with the best chances at getting past the gatekeepers and settling in America going forward will be rich, credentialed, and white.
Under the new policy, federal authorities will use "aggressive" wealth tests to reject residency or citizenship for an immigrant "because he or she is likely at any time to become a public charge" — receiving food stamps or other taxpayer-funded welfare state benefits. And officials can make that determination by considering the migrant's "age; health; family status; assets, resources, and financial status; and education and skills."
In other words, the best way to avoid deportation under this new policy is to not be poor. This is a betrayal of America's historic promise: The immigrants who arrived at Ellis Island a century ago did not, for the most part, come here on private yachts or in first-class berths. They came here to build new lives for themselves, and in the process, helped build their new country.
In practice, the new rule almost certainly means that more European migrants will go to the front of the line, and people of color will go to the back. According to the Pew Research Center, Mexicans comprise the largest group of migrants to the United States, but they are the group that most often arrives without a high school education. Migrants from Europe are the least likely to do so. And the Social Security Administration has found that first-generation immigrants from Europe and Japan "have initial earnings approaching or exceeding" other groups, including their U.S.-born counterparts. That's the kind of information immigration officials will use to determine who is economically viable — and thus ostensibly worthy of residency in the United States — and who is not.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-wants-to-make-immigration-white-again/ar-AAFK5AT?li=BBnb7Kz
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