President Donald Trump got away from his populist roots with his support of the deeply unpopular Obamacare repeal bill. But while the president continues to push that legislation despite its crash landing in the Senate, he is also returning to aa core campaign issue: immigration.
Trump held a joint press conference Wednesday with Sen. Tom Cotton and Sen. David Perdue to announce a major immigration reform package aimed at curtailing immigration quotas and privileging immigrants who are equipped to contribute to America’s economy.
Cotton and Perdue first introduced the Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act back in February, and it has languished in committee ever since. But Trump hadn’t thrown his weight behind the bill then.
“For decades, the United States has operated a very low-skilled immigration system, issuing record numbers of green cards to low-wage immigrants,” Trump said at the announcement. “This policy has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers, and community resources. Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been immigrants and, very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against brand-new arrivals.”
Trump went on: “This competitive application process will favor applicants who can speak English, financially support themselves and their families, and demonstrate skills that will contribute to our economy. The RAISE act prevents new migrants and new immigrants from collecting welfare, and protects U.S. workers from being displaced.”
The proposed legislation would rework America’s current immigration system, which prioritizes allowing the entry of whole families, into a points-based system in which high-skilled immigrants, those who will easily integrate into American culture, and immigrants with job offers will received preferential treatment. It would also reduce our quota for legal immigration by half over the next decade, from 1 million green cards a year to 500,000.
The proposal is music to the ears of those in Trump’s base who voted for him largely on the strength of his immigration promises and who have grown frustrated with the lack of focus on those pledges since, such as the president’s failure to include funding for a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border in his May budget proposal.
“The president implied that he would fight to ensure that adequate funding [for the wall] was included in the FY 2018 budget,” Dan Stein of the hardline Federation for American Immigration Reform groused then. “Nothing in this budget proposal suggests that he is fighting very hard.”
Stein sang a different tune today: “The RAISE Act helps realize President Trump’s vision of making America great again by making immigration great again as well.”
When senior policy adviser Stephen Miller pitched the bill to reporters Wednesday, he hit all the same populist notes that Trump hit on the campaign trail, emphasizing the economic burden faced by the working class as a result of plentiful immigration of low-skilled workers.
“It’s a policy that’s actually exacerbated wealth inequality in the country in a pretty significant way,” Miller said. “So you’ve seen over time, as a result of this historic flow of unskilled immigration, a shift in wealth from the working class to wealthier corporations and businesses.”
He added: “It’s pro-American immigration reform that the American people want, that the American people deserve, and that puts the needs of the working class ahead of the investor class.”
Miller also seemed to take a swipe at the secrecy of the Senate’s Obamacare repeal bill, which was widely panned for what was seen as an attempt to rush deeply unpopular changes through before public opinion could sink them.
“It’s been my experience in the legislative process that there’s two kinds of proposals,” Miller said. “There’s proposals that can only succeed in the dead of night and proposals that can only succeed in the light of day. This is the latter of those two. The more that we as a country have a national conversation about what kind of immigration system we want and to whom we want to give green cards, the more unstoppable the momentum for something like this becomes.”
“Public support is so immense on this, if you just look at the polling data in many key battleground states across the nation, that over time you’re going to see massive public push for this kind of legislation.”
The bill will face an uphill climb in the Senate, where Democrats voiced immediate opposition. Minority Whip Dick Durbin panned the bill as “nothing more than a partisan ploy appealing to the racist and xenophobic instincts Trump encouraged during campaign.”
Durbin also expressed skepticism that American workers would be willing to do the hard, dirty jobs in fields that employ many immigrants.
“The biggest flaw in this proposal is the notion that there are long lines of Americans waiting to pick fruit and to work in hospitals and hotels and restaurants and meat-processing plants,” Durbin told reporters Wednesday. “Exactly the opposite is true. These are hard, dirty, sweaty jobs that many immigrants go to because that’s what immigrants do. They take the toughest jobs with the lowest pay.”
The White House contends, however, that those jobs would pay more in the absence of abundant low-skill immigrant labor.
“All of a sudden, you’re putting upward pressure on wages instead of downward pressure,” Miller said, “and you’re making it very hard to use immigrant labor to substitute for American workers, because by prioritizing higher-paid workers, you basically end the practice, more or less, of being able to seek out permanent residents to come in at lower pay.”
It’s uncertain whether Republicans can cobble together a winning coalition on the bill Lindsey Graham and Ron Johnson have already voiced opposition specifically to the reduction of total green cards issued.
“I’m all for merit-based and skills-based immigration, and a legal immigration system,” Johnson said Wednesday, “but we need to make sure we have an immigration system that allows enough people into this country to make sure that we can staff manufacturers and dairy farms and all of our organizations that grow our economy.”
But Senate leadership seems willing to throw their weight behind some version of the bill.
“I think it bears serious consideration,” Majority Whip John Cornyn told reporters. “We’ve long talked about a merit-based system for immigration rather than just strictly a family relationship system. Canada and Australia as I understand it have one that focuses more on merit: what the immigrant has to offer our country, as opposed to what we have to offer them.”
Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley also expressed his support for the bill’s contents, although he said bringing it before his committee would be difficult without amendments bloating it into something resembling comprehensive immigration reform.
“If I can get this bill up, just based upon the merits of the bill and amendments directly to that point, and from the left I don’t get amendments that we ought to give everybody citizenship everyday, and the right I don’t get—let’s just say we’ve got people in the Congress that think we shouldn’t have any immigration,” Grassley said. “If we do that, Cotton and Perdue aren’t going to get what they want anyway.”
