Donald Trump’s white nationalist White House—led by 32-year old anti-immigrant zealot Stephen Miller—just released a new proposal holding hostage Dreamers in exchange for slashing legal family immigration and supplying billions of taxpayer dollars to build Trump’s despicable wall and dramatically increase deportations.
All this is part of a scheme to exploit a crisis Trump and Miller themselves incited by ending the DACA program last September, placing some 800,000 young Dreamers at risk of deportation. Now this cynical pair seeks to use the crisis they fabricated to extort Congress and the American people in adopting the agenda of the bigoted anti-immigrant nativists they represent.
The farm worker movement will never surrender to such intolerance and neither will the American people, 87 percent of whom support a real solution for the Dreamers.
Here is what the Trump-Miller White House is proposing:
- Slashing legal immigration by 50 percent, which would be the biggest such reduction in nearly 100 years.
- Demolishing the foundation of America’s immigration history by erasing five of the seven family immigration categories.
- Ending the diversity visa program that admits immigrants from nations Trump termed “shitholes” last week.
- Gutting U.S. asylum laws so Central Americans seeking safety in this country, including unaccompanied minors, would be deported back to the oppression and violence from which they escaped.
- Dramatically accelerate Trump’s plan to deport many more hard-working, law-abiding, tax-paying immigrants by adding thousands of agents to his Deportation Force.
- Spending billions to build a huge, dumb and ineffective border wall paid for by American taxpayers and not by Mexico so Trump and his cultist followers can feel good by insulting all of Latin America and Africa—you know, all those shithole countries.
The only fair and equitable answer—that the great majority of Americans already support—is the narrow, bipartisan compromise that would combine smart border security measures with enactment of the clean Dream Act.
We won’t let Trump and Miller use the vulnerability of Dreamers to railroad America into betraying who we are as a nation and as people.