In the last week the Trump Administration has made a set of moves on immigration that truly and absolutely show that they honestly don’t understand what America truly is and what it’s about. Apparently, they think America is a some form of country club with an entrance fee and rope line to keep the riffraff from getting into the secret Kool Kids Klub behind the velvet curtain. The people from the “shithole” countries are welcome to come in, but only through the back door servant entrance because dishes need to be washed, floors need to be scrubbed, and sometimes somebody needs a happy ending.
They don’t get the idea that people aren’t supposed to bring things to America to make it economically stronger, their very presence and the addition of their efforts are what makes America vibrant, dynamic, and strong. It’s frankly very much Ayn Randian bullshit that they’re selling. In Rand’s world the wealthy and the self-defined worthy are extremely put out that the measly worker people are so demand-y, and want rights and stuff, and the government is obviously in cahoots with these lowlifes putting all kinds of rules and limits on their wonderful creativity and also awesomeness.
Yeah, that is until all the rape and mass murder starts happening; case in point, The Fountainhead.
When Donald Trump was running for the GOP nomination, he told USA Today’s Kirsten Powers that Ayn Rand’s raped-girl-decides-she-likes-it novel, The Fountainhead, was his favorite book. [...]
Powers added, “He [Trump] identified with Howard Roark, the novel’s idealistic protagonist who designs skyscrapers and rages against the establishment.” Roark raged so much in the novel that he blew up a public housing project with dynamite just to get his way. [...]
Rand was quite clear about the characteristics she wrote into her heroes, and in particular Howard Roark. In her Journals, she writes of the theme of the book, “One puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one’s way to get the best for oneself. Fine!”
On Howard Roark, she writes that he “has learned long ago, with his first consciousness, two things which dominate his entire attitude toward life: his own superiority and the utter worthlessness of the world. He knows what he wants and what he thinks. He needs no other reasons, standards or considerations. His complete selfishness is as natural to him as breathing.”
Howard Roark stands alone. He is awesome. He’s a rapist terrorist shithead, but he’s great—in his own head. And he’s Donald Trump’s personal hero. Some of the rest of us like Luke Skywalker, or maybe Indiana Jones, or possibly James Bond or Jason Bourne. Trump likes Howard Freaking Roark. Yeah.
When you put that in context it all makes slightly more sense how Trump pretty much doesn’t give a shit about the blue color “little guy.” Enter into this tableau former Virginia attorney general, Acting head of USCIS and walking, talking Howdy Doody doll Ken Cuccinelli who predictably wouldn’t say if Trump’s massive ICE raids in Mississippi would separate families, again, then dodged questions about punishing companies that hire undocumented workers. He also denied that Trump’s tweets were racist while claiming he didn't see them, except that Jake Tapper had read them to him 24 hours previously.
“So what? So what?” he snapped. “I told you I haven’t been on Twitter in 24 hours. I’m not in there doing the Twitter war.”
He later passionlessly announced that the Trump administration was now changing the rules for legal immigration—repeat, legal immigration—to exclude any person from gaining a green card or citizenship if they had ever used public services such as Medicaid, TANF, or housing assistance.
In defending that policy change Cuccinelli decided to rewrite the Emma Lazarus poem which is etched into base of the Statue of Liberty to “Give me your tired and your poor who can stand on their own two feet. And who will not become a public charge.”
In 2017 when Jim Acosta asked Stephen Miller about the Lazarus poem which clearly seemed to contrast with his policy positions he stated:
“The poem that you’re referring to was added later (and) is not actually part of the original Statue of Liberty,” Miller responded.
Neither Cuccinelli nor Miller, as well as clearly Trump himself, seem to understand the intention of the poem, the statue, or the purpose of Ellis Island. Lazarus wrote her poem after meeting with Eastern European jews who were escaping persecution in their home nations by coming to America. They were absolutely considered “wretched refuse” in their home, and the point was that that was specifically the reason that they were being welcomed into America. Because people are starting off from the lowest point have the greatest potential for improvement. People who start off with nothing have the greatest possibilities for achievement, the greatest possible desire to reach their goals, and the greatest level of appreciation of America itself for allowing for that possibility.
There’s also the likelihood that Trump’s own German immigrant grandfather who was kicked out of his home country for draft dodging and whose only skill was being trained as a barber or his Scottish immigrant mother who had been a maid might not have been allowed to stay in the U.S. under these kinds of rules.
Later on, Cuccinelli again tried to defend his rewrite by claiming that the poem was “meant for Europeans who had different ‘class status’” when talking to Erin Burnett on CNN, but then immigration lawyer Michael Wildes—who had handled the immigration case for Melania Trump’s parents who came through what Trump called “chain migration”—opposed that view.
During his interview with CNN’s Don Lemon, Wildes stated that he was the grandson of Holocaust survivors, and that his grandfather would tell him:
My grandfather told my father, “You’re a citizen by chance, I’m a citizen by choice. People work harder when they come to this country and they travel through historic discrimination and challenges. A person that talks like [Cuccinelli] writes off history.”
Trump and his ilk don’t understand this. They have no clue about any of this. x Neither does Fox News or its base. Brian Kilmeade insists that calling southern immigration an “invasion” isn’t anti-hispanic racism which makes sense for him to say since The New York Times documents that there are hundreds of examples of Fox News using the same “invasion” rhetoric as the El Paso shooter. Cuccinelli himself has been part of a group that claimed undocumented immigrants are “invaders” responsible for “serious infectious diseases, drug running, gang violence, human trafficking, [and] terrorism.”
All of this is part of their “scare the white people” strategy by suggesting that the nation is being overrun by a flood of dirty scummy criminal brown people. It’s certainly racist, but it’s also classist and elistist as Nicole Wallace recently stated in a rant against Cuccinelli.
“That famous saying on the Statue of Liberty — a shining a welcome message to all those seeking a better life in America — getting an update from Acting US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Ken Cuccinelli, in the wake of a new Trump administration rule targeting immigrants who have come here legally, which says those applying for a green card for US citizenship will be penalized if they used public assistance programs like food stamps,” she explained.
“Meaning those being let into the country will be, wait for it, wealthier and whiter,” she added.
“I worry Donald Trump has moved the goalposts around unacceptable language so much, someone like Ken Cuccinelli — who at one time was welcome in polite Republican circles — can stand up and tout an extremely racist elitist policy,” Wallace concluded.
The elitism is a key factor in all this and as a strategy it does appear to be working well with Trump’s base of supporters, as noted by Amanda Maricotte at Salon.
Illegal immigration at the U.S.-Mexico border appeared much more substantial precisely because the Trump administration had choked off access to legal ports of entry for many migrants seeking legal access. This was likely a clear strategic move by White House adviser Stephen Miller, deliberately turning otherwise would-be legal asylum seekers into lawbreakers. This campaign worked and activists were left to protest that asylum is a right recognized by international law while children were separated from their parents and shepherded into cages. Trump supporters, meanwhile, grew more obstinate in their opposition to immigrants.
Trump has repeated this strategy over and over again.
The president and his supporters insist that they aren’t against immigration — only, you know, the illegal kind — yet they have systemically hacked away at an already byzantine legal process, making it dramatically more difficult to access legal entry into the U.S. By stripping away at the last remnants of functional immigration policy, the Trump administration makes clear that this was never about the law and only about good old-fashioned xenophobia. Calls for immigrants to come into the U.S. “the right way” or “the legal way” have always been a deflection tactic, used so immigration foes don't have to show their hand.
Trump and his people constantly argue that people should “enter the right” way, but as Marcotte points out his administration has been deliberately and systematically closing off the pathways to the “right way” with some rather quasi-legal strategies.
When Trump made his comments last year about “shithole countries” and “why can’t we have more people coming from Norway” it’s important to note that that discussion happened in the context of discussing people who had legally immigrated and had been granted TPS (Temporary Protective Status) as a result of natural disasters and tragedies in their home country.
Last Friday, in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, the first hearing was held for a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status for over 200,000 foreign nationals from four countries who currently live in the United States. The lawsuit alleges that Trump’s rhetoric demonstrates that his administration’s cancellation of TPS was motivated by bigotry, rather than policy concerns.
“The Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for people from these countries was motivated by its racism against non-white, non-European immigrants,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and co-counsel for the plaintiffs. “That racist motivation was obvious from a number of statements that this president and others in the administration made, including about TPS holders specifically.”
Created by Congress in 1990, TPS designations are extended to countries that have suffered from war, natural disasters, or other humanitarian emergencies that make it unsafe for their citizens abroad to return home. Expatriates of TPS countries in the U.S. are shielded from deportation for as long as their country’s designation remains in place.
Norway has not suffered from a devastating earthquake like Haiti. It hasn’t gone through the same problems that have affected El Salvador or some of the African nations which have been granted TPS status. It makes absolutely no sense for Norway to enter this discussion unless you’re suggesting that that nation be made to suffer some type of war or national disaster forcing their people to flee in desperation. Or you just (heart) white people.
The lawsuit is attempting to block Trump from sending hundreds of thousands of TPS recipients, even when their countries still remain damaged and dangerous, back to their home nations after some of them have been here for as long as 17 years and now have made families here including native-born children. So if they parents suddenly have to leave, what happens to the kids who are U.S. citizens?
The nation has been up in arms that Trump separated about 2,000 immigrants from their kids. Imagine if we’re soon talking about 200,000 child separations? All that’s on top of the fact that it’s fully and completely legal to enter the U.S. in order to request asylum if you have a legitimate credible threat against your life.
(1) In general
There is a natural conflict between this and general immigration law, which had been resolved to the benefit of the asylum seeker who would be prosecuted, sued, or held by the U.S. government until after their asylum proceedings. Trump has reversed this policy and instead treated any person caught crossing the border under the most extreme criminal violations available under immigration law while essentially ignoring asylum law altogether. This is why we now have a “border crisis”; Because Trump has been treating the legal process for seeking asylum as if it were a crime. It’s not.
While it’s fair to ask why asylum seekers don’t use other means to legally enter it comes down largely to the fact that there are strict limits and costs on gaining access to legal visas that simply place such an option completely out of their reach. Specifically most people who are coming to the U.S. to work and build a new life as a economic migrant the price tag starts at $4,500 for a company to submit a request for the visa to bring a foreign worker to the U.S. By comparison, most other visas only cost about $160.
Petition-based visas are those that require an employer or someone from the US to petition for the applicant who wants to temporarily live and work in the US. Before the applicant can submit their Form DS-160, the employer must first submit a petition to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), the US Department of State, or the US Homeland Department. The petitioner must also pay a fee for the petition, which can vary depending on the visa. [...]
For petitioners for H visas, there is a fee of 4,500.00 USD for petitioning to the US institutions to bring a foreign temporary worker to the US.
There is no process for someone to immigrate to the U.S. and legally work unless they go through this petitioning process with a U.S. company. The immigrant can not offer to pay the $4,500 on their own. Everything is based on the company’s request. If you immigrate through other means, with a couple exceptions, you can only be here temporarily as a student or a vacationer but you can’t legally work here. You can’t buy a home, you can’t raise a family, you can’t start a new life.
Also there are specific limits and caps on the number of these types of visas which can be petitioned by the companies. Sixty-five thousand highly skilled workers per year are allowed in using H1-B visas while 66,080 non-agriculture H2-B Visas are available for blue color temporary workers per year. (Although the Trump administration has raised this second cap by another 30,000 per year.) Not counting the H1-A visa for agricultural workers which has no cap, this means that U.S. companies can only bring in 161,080 workers in per year using the current legal process. These visas last for two years so all together there are slots for about 322,000 legal migrants workers in the U.S. And that’s it.
This quite simply does not meet the demand for workers that many U.S. companies have for blue-collar workers especially on grueling, difficult, and dangerous jobs such as the Koch Foods chicken factory in Mississippi which was recently raided by ICE.
If Koch Foods had petitioned for a legal visa for each of the 680 undocumented workers that they were employing, it would have cost them over $3 million, so you can guess why they might have an incentive to turn a blind eye to the fact that some of these workers were undocumented and even to possibly help provide them fraudulent documentation the way that Trump’s Golf Clubs apparently did with their own set of undocumented workers.
Supervisors at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, provided fake green cards and Social Security numbers to undocumented employees, according to a report in the Washington Post. Anibal Romero, a lawyer representing five immigrants who were undocumented while working at the Trump property, told the newspaper that he turned the fraudulent documents over to the FBI.
“I’m confident that federal and state authorities will conduct a complete and thorough investigation,” Romero told the New York Daily News in an interview. Romero first contacted Robert Mueller, the special prosecutor investigating the president, but Mueller told him it was not within his jurisdiction. A few weeks later, though, an FBI agent contacted Romero.
This is consistent with Trump’s questionable immigration shenanigans with his modeling agency.
But the mogul’s New York modeling agency, Trump Model Management, has profited from using foreign models who came to the United States on tourist visas that did not permit them to work here, according to three former Trump models, all noncitizens, who shared their stories with Mother Jones. Financial and immigration records included in a recent lawsuit filed by a fourth former Trump model show that she, too, worked for Trump’s agency in the United States without a proper visa.
Foreigners who visit the United States as tourists are generally not permitted to engage in any sort of employment unless they obtain a special visa, a process that typically entails an employer applying for approval on behalf of a prospective employee. Employers risk fines and possible criminal charges for using undocumented labor. [...]
According to three immigration lawyers consulted by Mother Jones, even unpaid employment is against the law for foreign nationals who do not have a work visa. “If the US company is benefiting from that person, that’s work,” explained Anastasia Tonello, global head of the US immigration team at Laura Devine Attorneys in New York. These rules for immigrants are in place to “protect them from being exploited,” she said. “That US company shouldn’t be making money off you.”
Two of the former Trump models said Trump’s agency encouraged them to deceive customs officials about why they were visiting the United States and told them to lie on customs forms about where they intended to live. Anna said she received a specific instruction from a Trump agency representative: “If they ask you any questions, you’re just here for meetings.”
The reason that the worker visa caps are so low, and the cost for them so high, is so that companies have an incentive to hire workers outside the system and instead to use undocumented workers—some who may have come using a legal visa but aren’t allowed to work, or without any visa—in order to answer their workforce needs.
The point is maintaining an endless supply of cheap labor. But more importantly, an endless supply of cheap, compliant labor that won’t become too uppity since the threat of being revealed and deported is always there to keep them in line.
In the case of Koch Foods, perhaps the reason none of the company executives have been prosecuted yet for having hired so many undocumented employees could be the possibility that the ICE raid did them a favor by solving labor, discrimination, and sexual harassment issue they were having.
Wednesday’s raid by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which led to nearly 700 workers being detained, targeted seven Koch Foods Inc. poultry plants in Morton, Mississippi. As it happens, last year, Koch Foods settled a $3.75 million lawsuit for racial discrimination, national origin discrimination, and sexual harassment against its Latinx workers in that very same Morton facility.
According to the suit brought by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), supervisors, “touched and/or made sexually suggestive comments to female Hispanic employees, hit Hispanic employees, and charged many of them money for normal everyday work activities.” Many workers were reportedly either discharged or subjected to other forms of retaliation when they complained.
As part of the settlement, Koch Foods not only paid out a massive sum to the victims, but also agreed to implement training for employees and set up a 24-hour hotline for reporting discrimination complaints in both English and Spanish. The settlement lasted three years, which means Koch Foods is still under supervision to continue efforts to reduce discrimination in its work place.
America by design, is supposed to be a safe haven for people fleeing danger, discrimination, and persecution and for those who wish to start their life over anew with greater possibilities and potential. But people like Trump don't see it that way. They see immigrants as resources for use by companies, as fodder for corporate exploitation and profit or otherwise a threat. He talks about immigration based on “merit” but he defines those merits as being good, obedient, and compliant workers who will do what they’re told and stay in their place.
He doesn’t consider that America is a gift, that it shouldn’t come with a high cost of entry so that only the “good not shithole people” get in. The promise and the potential of America is that it is intended to provide freedom to the people, not that the people are expected to provide easy accessible labor to its oligarch class as Ayn Rand would imagine.
Demonizing immigrants in order to pander to the economic, racial, and cultural anxiety of his base is a ploy that Trump has used quite effectively, but other than the fact he’s a bigot he doesn’t really mean it. He doesn’t really intend to help the blue collar workers in the Rust Belt because from his perspective, they’re shithole people too.
Just imagine if you worked your entire life then suddenly came down with a chronic illness, the company you worked with never granted you more than 39 hours so you don't have health coverage, and as a result you find you have to go onto Medicaid because the costs of the emergency room bills are too much. You remain injured and you can’t go back to work so you lose your job, then you lose your house because you can’t pay the mortgage. (And I’m not making this up. I have a cousin who recently suffered a stroke and all of this just happened to her.) Now a guy who received six bankruptcies is telling you that you’re a “freeloader” and that if you happen to be a immigrant—you no longer deserve to stay?
As has been repeatedly noted, the states that take the most money in federal dollars compared to what they generate are not necessarily the so-called blue states.
People in these states are often the people who are the closest to poverty and in the most need of aide, but that doesn't make them weak or “unable to fend for themselves”—it happens. Sometimes people need a handout and a hand up because that’s part of life. If people in those states and situations were trying to get into the country as an immigrant under these new rules they likely wouldn’t make the cut.
These new rules don’t consider the “can do” spirit of the heartland, it doesn’t consider that people don’t come to the U.S. to lounge around on the government largess. The rate crime by immigrants is lower that native citizens, and the rate of welfare use by immigrants is lower than native-born citizens.
With very few exceptions (such as access to medical care for victims of human trafficking), undocumented immigrants are not eligible for federal public benefits such as Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare and food stamps. In addition, most immigrants with lawful status are not entitled to these benefits until they have been in the country for five years or longer. This means that Social Security is often being deducted from immigrants’ paychecks but they cannot access those benefits. According to a 2018 study by the CATO Institute, eligible immigrants use 27% fewer benefits relative to U.S. natives of similar incomes and ages.
These stereotypes are all bogus. Becoming an American isn’t in your skin, it’s not in where you came from, it’s in your desire to improve your life, to provide a better life for your family. It may not happen quickly, it may not happen for a generation or two, but the point is the pursuit of happiness, and benefiting from the prosperity of liberty.
America is an idea. It’s an ideal, a value system. They don’t get even the tiniest bit of what America truly is, and what it stands for. They never will.