Candidate Donald Trump had his fellow Republicans in Congress kill a comprehensive bipartisan immigration deal a year ago that they helped write to deprive President Biden of a legislative success. So where is President Trump’s bill to reform a badly in need of reforming immigration system?
Instead of a wholesale repair of the leaky structure, the White House is rolling out ineffective piecemeal measures that won’t achieve anything.
One example is leaning on a post-WWII law to say that all undocumented immigrants who did not enter the U.S. with a visa — about 60% of the current undocumented population — and are over 14 should register with the government or face potential criminal penalties.
When these immigrants call their bluff — and it is a bluff, given the administration’s ultimate inability to force compliance with its current capacity and demonstrated incompetence — then we’re just back where we started, but now with an undocumented population more fearful than before, which is of course a big part of the objective.
Trump and his aides like Stephen Miller and Tom Homan know they can neither politically nor logistically go and round up immigrants around the country, so they’re relying on the strategy of making life unlivable in an attempt to convince them to leave of their own accord, and stop new folks from coming.
All, of course, except rich foreign oligarchs and other very wealthy people, who can provide what Trump has always valued most: money. This week, Trump sat in the Oval Office and described something “like a green card, but at a higher level of sophistication,” that he would call a “gold card,” presumably because he thought he couldn’t quite get away with calling it something like the “Trump Gold Select Residency.”
The program seems like it’d be a revamp of the long-standing EB-5 visa program, already used by Trump’s own family for years to advance their personal business interests. Now, Trump appears to want to drop the pretense of investing in needy projects altogether and just put up a pay-to-play sign on the United States
The oligarch thing wasn’t hyperbole; asked if the program would be open to Russian oligarchs, Trump said “yeah.” So here’s what the administration’s immigration vision has come down to: a moat around a country that was made a global superpower by waves of unrestricted immigration, essentially killing the goose that has for 200 years laid the golden eggs, but leaving just a narrow path for rich global elites to buy their way in. How was their wealth created? Not our business, MAGAworld says, as long as the checks clear.
Of course, this visa is a thought experiment or at best a proposal for now, because as much as Trump’s administration has taken control of the immigration system, the visa structure is something only Congress can change.
Last year, after months of negotiations, the Senate came to a bipartisan agreement on immigration reform legislation. We thought it wasn’t a perfect bill for a variety of reasons, but at least it was Congress taking a stab at moving on legislation that would make some changes to the underlying immigration system, something it has barely attempted in recent decades.
We’re still operating under the same basic framework that was created by the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act signed by Lyndon Johnson 60 years ago. It’s long past time for Congress to tune out the ravings of the MAGA political movement and redraw an immigration system that acknowledges the enormous boon that immigration has been and provides a path to citizenship for those who’ve since followed the rules and made this country their home.