After he single-handedly ushered in Middle East peace thanks to some books he picked up at Barnes & Noble, NPR reports that first son-in-law and White House adviser to the president Jared Kushner is “quietly trying to resurrect” immigration reform talks, “multiple people familiar with the conversations” have told the outlet.
Not this fucking nonsense again.
It’s like white nationalist Groundhog Day, because it was just last year that that boy wonder released his previous merit-based immigration dud, complete with a four-page Microsoft Paint-looking pamphlet that he really expected all of us to take seriously as a policy plan. “To say this is dead on arrival is an overstatement,” Daily Kos’ Joan McCarter said about some of the details. Immigrant rights advocate Frank Sharry said he expects more of the same this time around.
“Well, we’ll reiterate our position: to say Kushner’s immigration plan is dead on arrival would be generous,” Sharry, the executive director of the advocacy organization America’s Voice, said in a statement. “Let’s peek behind the gauzy language of ‘merit-based immigration based on a points system.’ Kushner is pushing a proposal that embodies Trump’s core belief: that America should admit a small number of white immigrants with lots of education and keep out dark-skinned and working class immigrants with lots of grit.”
Sharry went on: “Assuming, as we do, that this proposal will be a tweaked version of previous Kushner-authored duds, the supposed shift to so-called merit-based immigration comes at the expense of the few virtues of our current legal immigration system. For one, it would eviscerate family reunification, the cornerstone of our current system. For another, it would replace an employer-based immigration—in which employers sponsor particular individuals who have skills that meet particular jobs for which there is no qualified American—with a bureaucratically-driven points system. And finally, it would eliminate the Diversity Visa program, one of the only avenues by which we admit a small number of educated and skilled African immigrants.”
Not to mention that an immigration overhaul that doesn’t address the legalization of millions of undocumented immigrants; the restoration of our obliterated asylum system; full accountability for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection; the dismantling of private immigration detention; the unwinding of cruel and chaotic deportation; and an end to the unprecedented deaths of migrant children in federal immigration custody, just for starters, is no immigration overhaul at all.
There are so many problems in leaving this complex task to Ivanka’s husband that even NPR’s report telling us about his immigration sequel is problematic, because NPR quotes not one, but two anti-immigrant, extremist Tanton groups as if they’re legitimate organizations. This hasn’t been an isolated problem: A Define American and MIT Center for Civic Media report last year found that mainstream outlets keep quoting anti-immigrant hate groups such as the Center for Immigration Studies and the Federation of American Immigration Reform, as NPR did in its report.
“At a time when we are jailing children, when white supremacists are killing Americans because they think they might be immigrants, and when hate crimes are at an all-time high, journalists must do better,” Define American said. They must do better—and we can all do better than Jared, thank you very much.