As the Wuhan pandemic carved a destructive pathway across the United States in early 2020, it created clear proof that President Trump had been right about so many things: we must tighten our control of immigration, get tough on China, harden our borders to stop illegal entries, and assert the right to shut out any persons we see as a danger or an enemy and stop them from moving to our country.
Yet the crazy and obstructionist Never Trumpers lambasted every move the president made to get out in front of the Wuhan emergency and cut off the entry of potentially infected foreigners who were trying to enter the United States.
On January 31, President Trump issued an executive order prohibiting entry into the United States for all foreign nationals who had visited China within the previous two weeks. On February 3, he cited security concerns and added Sudan, Tanzania, Eritrea, and Nigeria, all in Africa, Myanmar in Southeast Asia, and Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia.
Trump foes saw the new order as another attack on civil liberties, immigrants, fill in the blank. The ranks of the woke instantly reviled him for it, especially on Twitter. On February 3, the New York Times published an op-ed by Jamelle Bouie, a staff columnist who had joined the paper in 2019, with the headline “The Racism at the Heart of Trump’s ‘Travel Ban’: Adding Nigeria to the expanded list of excluded countries just makes it more obvious.”
Then, on April 20, the president issued a new order temporarily banning all immigration while the government scrambled to contain the coronavirus and its aftermath. Cue same old, same old. Democrats raced to grab a piece of the tweet stream and were almost foaming at the mouth.
Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the House Democratic Caucus chairman, called Trump “Xenophobe. In. Chief.” Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas called the new order an authoritarian-like move to take advantage of a crisis. Congressman Bill Pascrell of New Jersey called it a “poisonous distraction” to divert blame for the administration’s failures. Kamala Harris, a senator from California and failed candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, said Trump was politicizing the pandemic to double down on his supposedly anti-immigrant agenda.
By then, for President Trump, that was all in a day’s work.
We used to speak of a politician’s “playing the race card.” Today for the Democrats, the race card amounts to the entire deck: everything is racist in some way, especially when it regards President Trump and the Republicans. From the start, the president’s immigration policy has been based on common sense as part of an overall strategy to create more jobs, spur higher wage growth, and ensure the security and safety of the American people.
The premise of the Trump doctrine in immigration is simple, clear, and defiantly self-centered: America first. We cannot afford to take in all of the millions of impoverished, unskilled refugees who would come to our shores if they could, fleeing socialism, dictatorships, political repression, terrorism, drug cartels, and natural disasters. We must pick and choose. Who gets in should be based on who will best serve our needs.
Polls show that more than 150 million foreigners would move to the United States if they could. Once you agree that it is a bad idea to let in everyone who would like to come here, you have found common ground with Donald Trump. Now it is a matter of debating the limits and deciding where to set them.
It reminds me of the well-known story about Winston Churchill’s asking a matronly woman if she would ever sleep with a man who agreed to pay her a million dollars. When she said yes, he asked whether she would accept ten dollars. When she got offended, he is said to have told her that they had already agreed she was for sale; now it was a matter of price. Churchill never actually said it, but the joke got a lot more leg out of the rumor that he had.
First, some big numbers: the foreign-born population in the United States quadrupled in forty years to 40 million immigrants from 1970 to 2010. An additional 4.4 million have arrived in the ensuing seven years, according to the Pew Research Center. That is a rate of almost 630,000 new arrivals annually. This increased the percentage of foreign-born residents from 13 percent to 16 percent of the US population.
In 2015 an estimated 12 million illegal aliens resided in America, up half a million in a year, based on Department of Homeland Security figures. Roughly 1.7 million had been here less than five years, while 80 percent (9.6 million) had been here longer than ten years and 6 percent for five to ten years.
From 2000 to 2007, almost half a million illegals resettled in the United States every year; then the economic crisis intervened. In the years 2010 to 2015, the rate dropped to 70,000 per year. Apprehensions at the US-Mexico border in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration, totaled 415,517. They jumped by 25 percent the next year to eclipse half a million—and then soared by 87 percent in 2019.
A key reason US wage growth was so stunted for so long, especially in entry-level jobs, was the ample supply of immigrant workers residing in the United States both legally and illegally. Illegals, especially, are willing to work under the table for below-market cash pay, which is tax free for both parties.
Various economic studies say that for every 10 percent rise in the migrant population in the United States, US wages fall by an average of 2 percent. Some people argue that it makes no difference. Others, such as the Harvard University economist George Borjas, maintain that a 10 percent increase in immigration could cause up to a 4 percent reduction. The Borjas numbers would be cited by the Trump administration in support of its aims.
The president’s opponents refuse to believe that his intent on immigration is related to jobs and wage growth. They see only one thing, every time: a racist.
It began from the moment he announced his run for the presidency on June 16, 2015, which feels like a hundred years ago. He and his wife, Melania, a former fashion model, glided down the golden escalator of Trump Tower and into the ornate marble-and-brass lobby packed with press and cheering supporters. Some people were writing off the idea as a publicity stunt in his search for an encore to The Apprentice, which had ended its eleven-year run on NBC a few months earlier.
Trump announced his candidacy in front of a raucous crowd in a blunt, unvarnished lexicon that was foreign to US politics. Out were the clichés of the past, the lofty language concealing underhanded schemes to boost donors’ fortunes. Out, too, were the phrases carefully sculpted by insights from focus groups to appeal to special interests while offending no one. In a frank conversation confronting the economic crisis of our country in our time, he put immigration and trade front and center.
Instead of delivering a sterling, rehearsed pronouncement and hewing to the script, the new candidate winged some of it:
Our country is in serious trouble. We don’t have victories anymore. We used to have victories, but we don’t have them. When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. . . .
When do we beat Mexico at the border? They’re laughing at us, at our stupidity. And now they are beating us economically. They are not our friend, believe me. But they’re killing us economically.
The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.
The lobby of Trump Tower crackled with applause and cheers. Just a minute or so into the speech, Trump had already demonstrated that he was a very different kind of candidate. He was a break from the past. He was going to stand up for the American people. But even as the onlookers cheered, they had no idea what was coming next. He continued:
When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.
He then declared that US political and corporate leaders had failed. They were “losers” and “people who don’t have it”:
We have people who are morally corrupt. We have people that are selling this country down the drain.
That was the first time in a generation that Americans heard a candidate for president speak directly and without fear or hesitation. To many people present that day, he sounded like a free man should sound, almost a figure out of the mythical past of colonists, pioneers, and cowboys in the Wild West. He was running because there was no one else who could get the job done. His language, shocking to liberals, was no big deal to his supporters; he talked like they did, and some of them thought it was funny.
The media and political elites of both parties failed to see it. They had grown too accustomed to looking for gaffes. They had long ago abandoned reporting what candidates said, or planned to do, in favor of covering anything off message or mistaken.
They declared that Trump had called all Mexicans rapists, though he hadn’t. Anyone following news about Mexico had read about gang members and thugs who cross into the United States illegally, such as those loyal to MS-13, a notorious Salvadoran immigrant gang formed in Los Angeles and with 10,000 members in LA, New York, Boston, and other cities. More than 100,000 illegal immigrants are in US prisons, as well as more than 50,000 legal immigrants—and almost 2 million native-born Americans.
From the New York Times to CNN to the Washington Post, the left-wing corporate media assured themselves and their audience that Trump’s presidential bid was dead on arrival, having committed suicide by political incorrectness. New York City’s Daily News cover line was “Clown Runs for Prez.”
It would become a familiar pattern. Trump would say something brutally frank or just a little too vague, and it would scandalize the radical Dems, the mainstream media, and even the GOP establishment. They were becoming indistinguishable from one another in their fight against all things Trump. Eventually they melded into the irrational and destructive resistance that has persisted throughout the Trump years. With each new offense, they would declare that his campaign—and later his presidency—was finished.
But Trump’s refusal to back down struck many other Americans as a healthy rejection of the timidity and rank cowardliness they had grown accustomed to sensing in political leaders. Politicians, particularly Republicans, were hindered by taboos against strong opinions stated in plain language. President Trump was unbowed and unafraid to offend. He was positively gleeful when attacking the sacred objects of the establishment of his own party, the media, and the radical Left.
The liberal media portrayed President Trump as appealing to the inner darkness of America. That itself is an insult to the American people, and it presumes they had hatred in their hearts that needed to be overcome by voting for Democrats. That may have been a hangover from President Obama, who after a terror attack or a police confrontation would warn us against having a knee-jerk racist reaction.
The growing number of Trump supporters saw something else: an outsider who spoke freely and didn’t care if his words melted the snowflakes who were taking offense. The totalitarian Left had been training Americans to accept and demand that our politicians tread carefully and bow to anyone who took exception to almost anything: the wrong pronoun, the wrong Halloween costume, the wrong expression of faith.
President Trump refused to play this game. He pushed aside the provocations and prevarications of the libs to pursue redeeming US politics and restoring our prosperity, freedom, and unity. He realized that political discourse in the United States had broken down so totally that the country was failing to address fundamental challenges. The strictures against frank debate had left us unable even to recognize the problems we faced. In a media world where everyone demands apologies for everything, Trump apologized for nothing.
As soon as he took office, President Trump erred on the side of taking decisive action. Seven days into his first term, on January 27, 2017, he set off bitter outrage with a simple executive order on immigration. It was temporary, set to last ninety days. The reverberations and recriminations of it would extend for a lot longer.
President Trump signed an order banning entry by citizens from seven Muslim-majority countries: Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen. Ninety days. That’s it. The lib media and the Left instantaneously branded it a Muslim travel ban. Fifty nations around the world have Muslim-majority populations, says the Pew Research Center. Not seven.
The move sparked protests at airports in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, and more cities, as well as protests overseas. Two thousand people marched on John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, snarling traffic, disrupting airport operations, and thwarting the travel plans of thousands of Americans. A few days later, 1,200 employees of Comcast, the owner of the liberal MSNBC and CNBC networks, walked off the job in Washington, Philadelphia, Sunnyvale, and Portland, Oregon. A few days more, and there were street marches in London, Paris, New York, and Washington.
On January 30, former President Obama put out a statement, though he had been out of office only ten days and historically US presidents have avoided second-guessing their successors. It said that he “fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion.” So does everyone, but President Obama had just implied that President Trump was doing just that.
Obama was revered in the Fake News liberal outlets for his moralizing stance. Yet he was, in reality, firing a pious and sanctimonious jab at the man who had just destroyed Obama’s plans for handing off his legacy to another Democrat, Hillary Clinton. He was trying to further damage Donald Trump, just weeks after instructing FBI director James Comey, in a joint meeting with other officials, to keep him apprised of developments in the Russiagate investigation of President-elect Trump.
What a fraud and a liar President Obama had turned out to be, hailed as so noble and yet driven by such dark, mean-spirited, unconstitutional tendencies.
That was a lot of anguished outcry over an order that was set to last three months and cover a handful of countries. The new administration wanted a pause to investigate the vetting process for admitting visitors and immigrants to have a way of identifying risks. For the protests, many of them orchestrated by NGOs and community groups, as always, the real purpose was to vent outrage at the election of Donald Trump.
It was the beginning of the Left’s new strategy of conflating attacks on the failing or corrupt leadership of a country with the citizens of that country. Now if you criticize any country in Latin America, Africa, Asia, or the Middle East, it must be because you are racist. Express outrage at China’s feckless efforts to contain the Wuhan virus, and you are anti-Asian.
Let’s do a fast-forward zip through the inevitable court battle, as it shows the classic cycle of Trump action, followed by outraged reaction, back to Trump action, ping-ponging back and forth:
In the ruling, split 5–4 with all five Republican appointees in favor of Trump and all four Democratic appointees voting against, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion for the majority: “The Proclamation [of the travel ban] is expressly premised on legitimate purposes: preventing entry of nationals who cannot be vetted and inducing other nations to improve their practices.” In other words, it was “well within executive authority.”
President Trump. Right again.
It was a satisfying vindication for the administration, albeit Mr. Chief Justice added a dig, noting that the justices “express no view on the soundness of the policy.” Who asked him?
Justice Sotomayor wrote a vociferous dissent, joined by Justice Ginsburg. She attacked the court majority as much as the Trump ban, writing that the ruling was “all the more troubling” because of supposed parallels to Korematsu v. United States. That was the scandalous ruling the high court made during World War II upholding Franklin D. Roosevelt’s authority to order the forced relocation and resettlement of 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.
Translation: in a way, Justice Sotomayor had just implied that what President Trump wanted to do to Muslims now was akin to what FDR had done to the Japanese back then. It was ridiculous, and the libs loved it. The other two liberals on SCOTUS declined to join that overheated dissent, and Chief Justice Roberts took exception to it, noting that it was “wholly inapt to liken that morally repugnant order” in the World War II case to what had happened in this one.
All along, the resistance and the far Left had said that the president had violated the Constitution and was guilty of racist and fascist acts in issuing the temporary travel ban. All along, the president and his supporters had said this fell within his executive authority. He had argued that the United States should stop entries, temporarily, from a handful of nations racked by strife and terrorism until it could develop a more secure vetting process.
Now the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that President Trump was right. A torrent of criticism erupted. Democratic National Committee chairman Tom Perez said, “Discrimination is not a national security strategy, and prejudice is not patriotism. Let’s call this ban for what it is: an outright attack on the Muslim community that violates our nation’s commitment to liberty and justice for all.”
Even one of the lead attorneys arguing against the Trump travel order, Neal Katyal, refused to bow to the high court’s reasoning, saying “We continue to believe, as do four dissenting justices, that the travel ban is unconstitutional, unprecedented, unnecessary, and un-American.” The majority had ruled otherwise. Had conservatives reacted so brazenly defiant after a Supreme Court ruling, the media would have decried it.
President Trump had prevailed once more. In addition to strengthening national security at the borders, the other angle to his immigration policy had to do with protecting jobs and wages from the ravages of unfair competition.
It is a safe bet that every single person who tells you there is a labor shortage is a supporter of higher levels of immigration and lower levels of border security. The complaints are disguised demands for the US government to provide more cheap workers by importing them into our country or by stepping back from tariffs on imports from China. There is no US labor shortage. (See chapter 8.)
The official unemployment rate was very low, but it counts only Americans who were actively looking for work. More than 90 million able-bodied Americans lack a job and aren’t looking for one. Even when you take into account retirees and college students, workforce participation is low. Just 82.6 percent of Americans ages twenty-five to fifty-four were in the labor force in September 2019, according to figures from the Department of Labor. That is one full percentage point lower than it was in the late 1990s.
Given this abundance of casualties from the creative destruction that is so championed by experts in business, US employers should have plenty of people to hire. Yet some of the United States’ largest companies say the people on the sidelines of the economy are a mismatch with the skills set that companies now require.
Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, revered in corporate and woke circles, falls into this camp. From his point of view, Apple is unlikely to find workers with the right skills among Americans now out of the workforce. Then again, Apple could hire workers away from other firms and train them. That would create openings in the jobs those workers left behind, and so on, eventually creating jobs for those out of the workforce.
Foreign workers will take less pay, not just because they might be from a country with less opportunity but because living in the United States is valuable in itself. Visas to work in the United States are a form of corporate welfare that enables businesses to pay workers less than they would have to pay a citizen to do the same job. The promise of a job that allows you to move to the United States is much more valuable to a foreign worker, no matter what the pay. And the size of the subsidy is enormous.
If foreign workers bear children while they are in the United States, the kids are considered to be US citizens, and eventually, they will be able to sponsor their parents for permanent US residence and citizenship.
Getting to live in the United States is part of the compensation foreign workers receive for accepting employment from a US company. Americans want to be compensated in dollars or benefits—forms of compensation that subtract from a company’s bottom line. Immigration keeps labor costs down and improves the bottom line.
No wonder that, in the opening months of the Trump administration, the American Workforce Policy Advisory Board told him we have a worker shortage and urged him to abandon his policy of hiring Americans first. The panel includes fifteen CEOs and only one representative of the private workforce.
President Trump knows better. This is driven by their desire for cheaper imported talent overseas. Yet he, too, has been open at times to corporate chieftains’ lobbying for looser rules and higher quotas on imported talent.
Two years into the new administration, a foundational view of the Trump Century started shifting. The argument that too much immigration of cheaper labor from overseas hurts US jobs and wages looked as if it might be softening. That would cause another uproar, this time on the right.
On December 20, 2018, on my show Lou Dobbs Tonight, I went on a bit of a rant that would rile the lib critics at the Mediaite website. Though I must say, they got it right, and it is what I have believed for thirty years. As reported by Newsweek:
Speaking on the Lou Dobbs Tonight show on December 20 [2018], the host lamented how the U.S. has known about Chinese attempts to steal secret information for decades, noting how there are allegedly 3,500 companies in China whose sole purpose is cyberespionage, but “neither a Republican nor a Democratic presidential administration has done a damn thing about it,” reports Mediate. “Until now.” . . .
“Hell, I can’t understand why we wouldn’t go to war over this kind of monstrous theft,” Dobbs said. . . .
“Frankly, I don’t understand this,” Dobbs responds. “Absent casualties and that is killed and wounded, this is no different than Pearl Harbor. I mean, we are watching the destruction of hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions and billions of dollars every year.”
What I said.
In early 2019, President Trump was under siege by a daunting lineup of controversies: Russiagate, the Mueller investigation, the feckless attorney general, Jeff Sessions, the firing of FBI director “Lyin’” James Comey, China trade, tariffs, immigration, “kids in cages,” the Fed fight, Fake News, clashes with CNN. Are we exhausted yet?
All of these forces were swirling around the president at once. In the BT (Before Trump) era, presidents made news a few times a week. This president makes news a few times per day, almost every day, and often on his favorite megaphone for shouting down the Fake News media and end-running to get his message directly to his 80 million followers: Twitter. Meanwhile, the president’s advisors were working through the details of immigration policy, and proponents of the same old trade policies were much in attendance at the White House sessions.
On February 5, 2019, President Trump gave his third State of the Union address to Congress. He made a departure from the speech’s script that was telling. The original words were supposed to be “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally.” Instead of saying that, he said this: “Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” (Italics added.)
John Binder, a journalist at Breitbart, the icon of conservative websites, would note three weeks later, “Spokespeople for the Chamber of Commerce, LULAC, George W. Bush Center, and Koch Industries dominate the immigration talks in the White House currently.” LULAC is the League of United Latin American Citizens. Koch Industries, though it is demonized by the ultra-Left for climate change sins, opposes job immigration restrictions.
On March 2, President Trump appeared at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) at the Gaylord National Resort & Convention Center in National Harbor, Maryland, and spent two hours onstage talking about many things. The archconservative CPAC crowd is a favorite foil of the president. CPAC hosted one of the first political speeches he ever gave before running for president. Eighteen minutes in, he revealed a hallmark of the Trump presidency:
I don’t know, maybe you know. You know I’m totally off-script, right? . . .
And this is how I got elected, by being off script. [Applause.] And if we don’t go off-script, our country is in big trouble, folks. Because we have to get it back.
Twenty minutes later, he cited by name a Washington Post reporter who had shown up at a Trump rally four hours early, taken a photograph of the empty arena, and “put out a note [on Twitter]—something to the effect, ‘Not very good crowd size, Mr. President.’ And I never saw it because I don’t follow the guy.” In fact, thousands of people had attended the rally, and 25,000 fans of the president had thronged outside the venue.
“From the day we came down the escalator, I really don’t believe we’ve had an empty seat,” the president told the crowd, warming things up.
Forty-three minutes into the one-man show, the president prepared to get serious and back onto the teleprompter: “All right, now let’s get back to what I’m here for.”
Then, fifty minutes in, he dropped a trade bombshell. He did it in his imitable elliptical style, so that, if anyone in the crowd spotted the startling flip-flop and shouted an objection, it was drowned out by chants of “USA! USA! USA!” As if CPAC were an Olympic event. Here is what the president said:
There will be some people in the room that don’t like this. We’re down to 3.7 percent unemployment—the lowest number in a long time. But think of this: I got all these companies moving in. They need workers. We have to bring people into our country to work these great plants. . . . This was not necessarily what I was saying during the campaign because I never knew we would be as successful as we’ve been. Companies are roaring back into our country, and now we want people to come in. We need workers to come in, but they’ve got to come in legally, and they’ve got to come in through merit, merit, merit!
The last line sent the crowd into a CPAC version of a frenzy.
Breitbart caught the sudden shift in Trump terminology and posted a story online with the headline “Trump Touts Legal Immigration System for ‘Our Corporations’ at Expense of American Workers.”
Four days later, on March 6, Apple CEO Tim Cook made an appearance at the White House for an economic event. As the president and the Apple leader sat together for a press conference at the White House, suddenly the president was on board: foreigners were urged to apply. As cameras clicked away, he said, “We’re going to have a lot of people coming into the country. We want a lot of people coming in. And we need it.” That was exactly what Cook and other CEOs of huge companies wanted to hear. The president added, “We want to have the companies grow, and the only way they’re going to grow is if we give them the workers, and the only way we’re going to have the workers is to do exactly what we’re doing.”
Breitbart went apoplectic. The headline was ugly, both typographically and otherwise:
TRUMP ABANDONS ‘AMERICA FIRST’
REFORMS: ‘WE NEED’ MORE IMMIGRATION TO
GROW BUSINESS PROFITS
Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump is abandoning his prior “America First” legal immigration reforms to support increases of legal immigration levels in order to expand profits for businesses and corporations.
For the fourth time in about a month, Trump suggested increasing legal immigration levels. With Apple CEO Tim Cook sitting next to him at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he not only wanted more legal immigration but that companies needed an expansion of new arrivals to grow their business. . . .
The comments are a direct rebuttal of the president’s commitments in 2015, 2016, and 2017, where he vowed to reduce overall legal immigration levels to boost the wages of U.S. workers and reduce the displacement of America’s working and middle class.
The Breitbart broadside triggered more than ten thousand comments on the story online, most of them expressing outrage. It reported that in 2017 the president had said that legal immigration levels must be cut back to “reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars.” He had backed a bill aimed at cutting one class of immigration by 50 percent, to half a million entrants per year. Now this.
Meanwhile, the mess at the Mexican border was getting worse. Caravans of thousands of immigrants streamed toward the border, swamping Customs agents. By late March, the situation was dire, something had to be said. On March 28, my show opened with my calling on President Trump to fire Kirstjen Nielsen, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, for her department’s shabby handling of the ongoing border crisis.
As the PoliticalDog101 lib site put it later, “Dobbs later blasted Nielsen for her ‘ignorance’ and called the leadership of the US Border Patrol ‘absolute morons.’” Quite accurate. I cited our border agents, awaiting orders on what to do yet no one was helping them:
They are sitting there waiting for orders, waiting for somebody to hand them a solution? If this is what we have come to, if the quality of people in leadership in DHS from the secretary of the department on down I mean lets, you know, just literally put out welcome wagons. Pile them high because we’re just going to consign tens of thousands perhaps millions of Americans to their deaths.
The DHS secretary would resign a month later. That evening, I had also urged the president to shut down the border until we quelled this crisis. At 11:23 the next morning, he threatened to do just that, telling his 77 million fans on Twitter:
The DEMOCRATS have given us the weakest immigration laws anywhere in the World. Mexico has the strongest, & they make more than $100 Billion a year on the U.S. Therefore, CONGRESS MUST CHANGE OUR WEAK IMMIGRATION LAWS NOW, & Mexico must stop illegals from entering the U.S. . . .
With a continuation at 11:37 a.m.:
. . . . through their country and our Southern Border. Mexico has for many years made a fortune off of the U.S., far greater than Border Costs. If Mexico doesn’t immediately stop ALL illegal immigration coming into the United States throug [sic] our Southern Border, I will be CLOSING. . . .
And another continuation at 11:43 a.m.:
. . . . the Border, or large sections of the Border, next week. This would be so easy for Mexico to do, but they just take our money and “talk.” Besides, we lose so much money with them, especially when you add in drug trafficking etc.), that the Border closing would be a good thing!
This president responds when the right viewpoint comes to his attention. Four nights later, on my show, I heaped praise on the president for his early order restricting travel into the United States by aliens who had been in China within two weeks of their intended entry. It came on the evening of April 1, 2020, and it was entirely serious.
I said he had put the China order into place against the advice of many of his top public health experts who advise him every day. He had saved thousands of lives as a result and bought us time to marshal a response. Yet he had been met by condemnation from the Left because he wanted to keep a stay-at-home order in place. I declared that night that President Trump wanted to be certain that we were saving American lives. He has been proven right at every point. Yet there is no acknowledgment of that from the Left, nor from our public health experts.
That brought a quick rebuke from Media Matters for America, a lefty site that trolls conservatives for a living: “Lou Dobbs Attacks Health Experts for Not Praising Donald Trump’s ‘Leadership.’” Note the quotes around “Leadership,” a snide snub.
Just five nights later, though, it was time to get the president’s attention again, this time regarding his softening resolve on immigration and the damage it does to US workers. This has long been a hallmark of his most basic beliefs. On April 6, I posted a tweet to the president:
Protect American Workers: Lou urges @realDonaldTrump to stop importing foreign workers as millions of Americans are losing their jobs and going without a paycheck.
The president always manages a comeback somehow. A few weeks later he took the bold step of imposing a temporary ban on all immigration to the United States during the Wuhan pandemic, spawning new gales of outrage—although the reaction to it was less maniacally out of kilter than it had been at the start of his presidency, when his ninety-day travel ban sparked waves of anguish and agonizing; then again, the nationwide lockdown blocked much chance of organizing protestors to march against him.
On April 29, I tweeted this:
Protecting America: @PressSec says @POTUS is putting the American worker first after deciding to put a temporary pause on immigration into the U.S. during this pandemic.
Conflicting agendas were confronting President Trump. He wanted to secure the borders to stop illegal immigration and tighten legal immigration into the United States. He also wanted to protect workers and wage growth, yet he would fare better with the help of big business. He may have been trying to balance and intermingle those interests.
Buried in a Breitbart story was a possible clue as to why the president had just seemed to shift his position, saying he had “mentioned he wanted to end the process known as ‘chain migration,’ where newly naturalized citizens can bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the country, and the Diversity Visa Lottery, which admits 55,000 random foreign nationals from around the globe to the U.S. every year.”
In the Reagan days, that would have been called “linkage.” President Trump had just rallied support for an immigration crackdown, which the ultralibs would revile. Ending chain migration and the diversity lottery would tilt the flow of immigration toward better-educated and better-qualified people. Democrats pushed back, but not that hard, as long as Trump didn’t stem the supply of future voters for the Dems.
It may be that President Trump used the optics of the Tim Cook photo opp for a twofer: woo big business with the let-’em-in sentiment, and distract media attention from his aim to end chain migration. Maybe he was asking corporate America to help him move forward. For conservatives upset by his turnabout on immigration, he could cite his effort to end chain migration.
The sides are so polarized in the immigration and jobs debate, and the views are so polemical, that facts get lost in the fray. It is a bizarre oddity of these ridiculous times that when debating immigration, we aren’t even allowed to explore and discuss the real numbers. Do we really know for sure how many immigrants are here, both legally and illegally, how many are arriving each year, how many is too many in terms of the economy and in terms of diluting or obliterating American culture?
In the April 2019 issue of The Atlantic, beloved Never Trumper David Frum penned an article entitled, “How Much Immigration Is Too Much?” Woke Twitter exploded with people saying it was racist simply to ask that question. The Atlantic retitled the piece “If Liberals Won’t Enforce Borders, Fascists Will.”
Today in the liberal hotbeds of New York and New Jersey, an immigrant living there illegally can get a driver’s license—but a worker at an election voting precinct dare not ask for it if the “undocumented resident” wants to vote, against the law. In the Trump Century, the immigration debate will be inescapable, and the terms of the debate have been set: fewer, more productive immigrants or ever more random immigrants?
Even the US Census, the once-every-decade attempt to make a record of every living person in the United States, has become divisive. It might be good to know solid, specific numbers for how many of us were born in the United States, how many immigrants loved our country enough to undergo the arduous process and long wait to become a US citizen, and how many of us are noncitizen immigrants. And how many “undocumented residents” are living among us.
In these fractious times, a Trump administration official can be hanged in the public square simply for asking questions like that. In March 2018, the administration unveiled plans to add a simple question to the US Census form: “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” It would spark another fight fraught with more charges of racism and xenophobia, this time more of the latter.
In fact, the effort would lead to another Trump controversy rapidly making its way all the way up to the Supreme Court, which would decide the matter in another bitterly divided ruling. That case is up next.