Donald J. Trump has signed an executive order temporarily halting all immigration to the U.S. during the Wuhan virus pandemic.
Despite hesitancy regarding immigration since his election in 2016 President Trump demonstrated this week the executive authority vested in his office by summarily halting all immigration.
His stated reason was to protect American citizens from the covid-19 virus, making this a public health measure, but also, he said, to give U.S. citizens the first chance at much-needed jobs when the U.S. economy reboots.
That is a welcome message, given that the United States now stands at 20% unemployment, just weeks after having the best economy and lowest jobless numbers in the nation’s history.
And while any immigration relief is welcome to most native-born Americans, more reform is needed.
The President’s top advisor on the subject of immigration, Stephen Miller, seeks a longer term vision for what is being billed as Trump’s ‘temporary’ immigration order.
In fact, Miller revealed to one of our correspondents that subsequent measures are already under consideration that would “restrict guest worker programs” and added “the most important thing is to turn off the faucet of new immigrant labor.”
This is a critical step as the United States has been flooded with dozens of immigrants stemming from a single entrant due to what is known as ‘chain migration’, a policy that allows entire family networks to follow the first migrant to the nation and seek citizenship as well.
“As a numerical proposition,” Miller said, “when you suspend the entry of a new immigrant from abroad, you’re also reducing immigration further because the chains of follow-on migration that are disrupted.”
Most Americans would now agree with Mr. Miller that enough is enough it seems, and stopping that first entrant has future benefits, or as Miller himself said, “The benefit to American workers compounds with time.”
America’s government very wisely shut off immigration once before in 1924, excluding all Asians and placing strict limits on Europeans, to give the nation time to absorb and assimilate those already within its borders—a policy which held until being eased by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, then further relaxed in 1965.
This year’s presidential election may be decided on this very topic—open borders, as proposed by the Democrat Party, or limited immigration based on merit as proposed by President Donald Trump and his team.
Howell Woltz
