The touchstone of all Trump policy was a clear, immutable concept: America first. It drove everything President Trump did, and for a US leader the principle should be unassailable. It was difficult for him to get that message across to Americans above the constant drone of angry accusations from embittered foes, who argued his real agenda was driven by hidden intentions that were racist and xenophobic.
This constant suspicion cast a pall over even a sensible-sounding proposal when the issue involved immigration and how to limit or refine it. In August 2017, Trump senior advisor Stephen Miller held a press conference to discuss plans to reform immigration in ways that could make newcomers to the country a better fit.
By that time Miller was already a target of critics. He had played a pivotal role in crafting strategy for a hat trick of Trump outrages: the travel ban, a reduction in refugees, and the policy approach that Never Trumpers would come to call “kids in cages,” referring to the separation of children from their parents when families were apprehended crossing the border illegally.
On the initiative to cut back on refugee admissions, the Trump administration had made progress, though the libs would view it as more racism. In fiscal year 2018, total refugee admissions were reduced to 45,000, down more than half from the last year of the Obama administration, when 110,000 refugees had been allowed to settle in the United States. The plan was to reduce the number further to 30,000 in 2019 and to 18,000 in fiscal 2020. Prior to 2018, the US had resettled more refugees each year than all other nations combined. Combined!
Now Miller was briefing the media on new proposals that would give preference to immigrants who speak English and are highly educated or who possess high-tech skills that are in low supply in the United States.
The loose guidelines stopped short of blocking anyone from immigrating to the United States. They offered points in favor of some immigrants over others when deciding which of any two applicants should be admitted. That managed to offend CNN’s White House correspondent, Jim Acosta. Acosta was supposed to be a fair and objective reporter but long before had betrayed himself as a dim Dem partisan. The reality was that he hadn’t asked a question in years that made news about anything except Jim Acosta.
Acosta, sitting among the reporters at Miller’s briefing, began, “What you are proposing, what the president is proposing here does not sound like it’s in keeping with the American tradition when it comes to immigration.” Then he revved up a rhetorical run: “The Statue of Liberty says, ‘Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.’ It doesn’t say anything about speaking English or being able to be a computer programmer.”
Miller was ready for him. He countered that our immigration system already has an English-speaking requirement for those who apply for citizenship. He is right: they must pass a proficiency test of their ability to read, write, speak, and understand English, as well as a knowledge of US history and government, based on a civics test that many Americans would be unable to pass. Giving applicants for US residency an advantage for speaking English would only refine the system that was already in place before the Trump takeover.
Miller also told the reporters watching the faceoff that the Statue of Liberty, a gift from the French to the United States to celebrate our centennial in 1876, had arrived without the famous inscription. The inspiring line had been taken from the Emma Lazarus poem “The New Colossus,” composed in 1883 as part of the efforts to raise funds for the pedestal for the statute’s base on Liberty Island.
Miller told the crowd: “I don’t want to get off into a whole thing about history here”—a clear sign that he was about to do exactly that—“but the Statue of Liberty is a symbol of liberty and lighting the world. It’s a symbol of American liberty lighting the world.” That’s a Trump technique, repeating a key phrase twice. Okay? Twice. Yes, I meant to do that.
He went on, “The poem that you’re referring to, that was added later, is not actually a part of the original Statue of Liberty.”
Acosta replied, “That sounds like some National Park revisionism. . . . The Statue of Liberty has always been a beacon of hope to the world for people to send their people to this country.” He sounded a little angry or embarrassed. Or maybe he was grandstanding.
Miller’s cogent reply highlighted the ungrounded fanaticism of typical Left claims that a change in our laws or a reduction in immigration was a betrayal of America and the giant copper lady in New York Harbor. (Her pale green exterior is a patina from 150 years of standing as a “beacon of hope.”) Miller, in a rant of his own, called out Acosta by name:
In 1970, when we let in 300,000 people a year, was that violating or not violating the Statue of Liberty? . . . Tell me what years meet Jim Acosta’s definition of the Statue of Liberty home law of the land? So you’re saying a million a year is the Statue of Liberty number? 900,000 violates it? 800,000 violates it?
Acosta retreated into the last resort of the Left, or these days maybe it is the first resort: accusations of racism. “Are we just going to bring in people from Great Britain and Australia?” he asked. After a few more minutes of on-camera debate, Acosta again: “It sounds like you’re trying to engineer the racial and ethnic flow of people into this country.”
Acosta has abundant company in combining a lack of knowledge of immigration policy with maniacal adherence to an ideology with no basis in US history. He had just had the misfortune— or the pleasure, in his eyes—of reciting the catechism of open borders on live television.
Maybe Acosta’s remarks could have been called racist, too. The idea that only immigrants from Great Britain and Australia speak English is laughable. In recent years, the United States has accepted arrivals from more than twenty other countries where English is the official or dominant language.
This list includes Caribbean nations such as Barbados, the Bahamas, and Jamaica. We have accepted immigrants from English-speaking African countries such as Liberia and Zimbabwe. People all over the world speak English. In fact, two-thirds of immigrants to America speak English well, even under our system that gives no explicit preference for that skill. Less than 14 percent speak no English at all.
The demand that US policy be based upon a genuflection to the Statue of Liberty and the line from “The New Colossus” is a sure sign of immigration fanaticism. It is worth recalling that the basic symbols of the US political tradition—the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights—were adopted through democratic processes.
The representatives of the colonies at the Continental Congress debated, deliberated, and eventually approved the Declaration of Independence. The Constitution was approved at the famous convention in Philadelphia and had to be okayed by the states before it could become the law of the land. The first ten amendments to the Constitution that have come to be called the Bill of Rights were adopted by the House and Senate and then ratified by the states.
These are the true laws of the land—not “The New Colossus,” a socialist’s poem.
This reverence for the leftist reading of the Lazarus poem is a very recent invention. When it was attached to the Statue of Liberty, few would have argued that the United States had a moral obligation to take all comers. Few would have said that the immigration policy then in existence was inviolable. For many immigrants over the decades after the Statue of Liberty arrived in New York Harbor, Lady Liberty stood as a beacon of hope and a sign that they had succeeded in their efforts to arrive in the United States and win entry to this country. Legally.
An open-door policy was never the idea. Indeed, nearly all Americans then and now would say that the primary driver of immigration policy should be the needs of the American people. America first. Those two powerful words, a hallmark of Donald Trump’s strategy, invigorate and illuminate everything that is right.
In October 2019, Simon & Schuster, a longtime subsidiary of CBS, published a scathing book on the immigration controversies of President Trump, written by two reporters for the New York Times: Border Wars: Inside Trump’s Assault on Immigration. In passage after passage, the authors, Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear, exemplified the new fanaticism.
“Was it racism? Nativism? Xenophobia?” they asked, referring to the Trump administration’s border policies. “Trump and those who knew him best swore that it was not. But Trump’s instincts clearly tended toward bigotry—the belief that foreigners were a threat, and that native-born Americans were inherently more deserving.”
Imagine that. Any belief that some foreigners could pose a threat was evidence of bigotry in the minds of the Times reporters, at least when they were examining Trump. They viewed it as bigoted that the US president would regard the American people as inherently more deserving of the benefits of living in the United States.
When advocates of even more immigration to the United States depict as racist almost any effort at reform or stepped-up enforcement, it hinders the effort to find rational solutions that can work. This causes gridlock, neutralizing any crackdown, and then any effort to ease up on restrictions is an open invitation to immigrants to come on down.
The Obama administration discovered this effect in the last year of its eight-year run, when it attempted to initiate a policy for letting first-time illegal entrants slide without penalty and prosecuting only repeat offenders for felony charges. Others would be detained and possibly deported, but never criminally prosecuted. That would encourage a surge in first-time border crossers.
The result was a huge influx of asylum seekers at the southern border, and it caught the Obama administration off guard. Undocumented and inadmissible migrants started showing up in bigger numbers. Many believed—correctly—that they would receive more lenient treatment if they presented themselves as “families.” So migrants were increasingly showing up with children in tow. Sometimes the kids weren’t theirs.
The Obama administration responded by setting up new detention centers to hold immigration detainees in fenced-in areas for security purposes. Officials had hoped that the detention centers would deter future undocumented aliens from showing up at the border. Instead, they may have encouraged them. Having your family gathered together under US guard behind a security fence has to be preferable to being back at home in Central America dodging death squads.
Then waves of unaccompanied children began arriving at the border. Many in Latin America had come to believe that children would be released rather than being sent back home alone. The Obama administration began holding “unaccompanied minors,” an important term, in facilities separate from those of adults. This applied especially to children who had arrived with adults believed to be criminals, including child-sex traffickers.
In other words, the Obama administration was separating children from their families. It had adopted this policy first, not President Trump. Nor could the Obama people be faulted for doing so; they had been following the law. Detaining and processing kids separately from adults—even their parents—was required by a federal court order.
What about the fenced-in areas? Two years later, they would create the infamous “kids in cages” uproar and set off another mudslide of liberal outrage and race baiting. Left-wing immigration groups had complained about them in the Obama years, but the left-wing corporate media had mostly ignored the complaints. Perhaps they wanted to avoid making Obama look bad or avoid being called racist.
In 2016, a federal judge declared that neither accompanied nor unaccompanied minors could be detained. In fact, the district court held that their parents could not be detained, either. That last part was overturned on appeal by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which ruled that the government could hold the parents but had to release the children. The Obama administration decided it was unwilling to separate families in that way and, for the most part, stopped family detentions.
Instead of detention, Obama turned to a pilot program intended, as an NBC News story put it later, to “keep asylum seeking kin together, out of detention, and complying with immigration laws. It was praised by immigration advocates for both its high rate of compliance and its ability to help migrants thrive in a new country.”
The administration’s new approach was part of its Family Case Management Program. It should have been called “catch and release,” as President Trump and others would later nickname it. Apprehended parents and their children would be told to show up for a hearing that wouldn’t occur until months or even years later. Often they bailed on showing up at all. Finding out how often this happens can be like trying to unearth some state secret.
It was a recipe for unlimited open immigration. The law said that illegal border crossers and inadmissible asylum seekers should be returned home or prosecuted. The new Obama program did neither. A new policy aimed at helping illegals “thrive in a new country” was, in fact, facilitating more illegal immigration.
It was contrary to the spirit of our laws and to the interest of the American people. We have the right to control our borders and decide our immigration policy based on democratic deliberation, rather than just allowing those who show up on our doorstep, uninvited and unauthorized, to stay in this country indefinitely without penalty.
Because the federal courts had ruled that it was illegal for the government to hold children in the same place as adults, the kids had to be relocated in twenty days. Where to put them? The children were classified as “unaccompanied alien minors,” as they had been in the Obama era, and were transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) for care and custody, as the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service later reported.
Thus, even before President Trump took office, US government policy was to “separate children from their parents” and move them to another site; they were handed off to the custody and care of ORR, a part of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).
That was in keeping with the existing federal court order. Eventually, the children were to be reunited with Mom and Dad, and the family would be either returned home or allowed to establish legal residence in the United States. It also happens to be the policy of local police in the United States when they arrest, say, a father for drunk driving and his young kids are with him. The kids are placed in child services if a relative is unavailable to pick them up.
The Obama administration received little pressure from the adoring media for its policy of separating children from their parents when processing illegal immigrants. That changed hugely when the Trump administration inherited the policy and began fiddling with it to end “catch and release.”
President Trump had warned his closest advisors that the Obama “catch and release” program would lead to disaster. But apprehensions at the border fell by 25 percent in his first full year in office, to 300,000 from 400,000 in the last year of the Obama administration. Obama holdovers and career bureaucrats inside the Department of Homeland Security resisted the Trump crackdown. For more than a year, patriots in the Trump administration sought to put a new system into place but got nowhere. As the number of illegal crossers with children rose to the highest level of Trump’s presidency, it became clear that something more must be done.
Kirstjen Nielsen, the director of Homeland Security, resisted imposing the new policy for months. She had been tapped for her post in part because of her close relationship with the president’s chief of staff, General John F. Kelly. Finally, a full year after the zero-tolerance regime was announced, Director Nielsen signed on in May 2018.
On May 7, the US Department of Justice unveiled a new “zero-tolerance” policy on illegal border crossings, vowing to prosecute all adult aliens apprehended while crossing the border illegally—with no exceptions for even asylum seekers or those with young children. Asylum seekers could continue seeking legal entry into the United States.
Instead of catch and release, letting first-time illegal entrants pass without penalty as in the Obama era, the Trump administration would detain and prosecute all border crossers, first-time offenders and repeaters alike. The aim was to present a tough message to would-be immigrants: you will be arrested and held if you try to enter the United States illegally.
Indelicately, Trump officials said it directly. Attorney General Jeff Sessions declared, “If people don’t want to be separated from their children, they should not bring them with them. We’ve got to get this message out. You’re not given immunity.”
Chief of Staff Kelly told NPR that family separation “could be a tough deterrent,” instead of pointing out that federal law and a court order required the Trump administration to separate kids from their parents. It sounded punitive when it was, instead, necessary.
That fed the media frenzy already under way. The Trump administration had sought merely to enforce an existing law that had been cast aside in the Obama era, rather than seeking to revise an existing law or regulation. The nonpartisan Congressional Research Service pointed that out in a report in February 2019, adding, without judgment, that “Prior Administrations prosecuted illegal border crossings relatively infrequently.”
Thus, the family separations were the unintended consequence of the zero-tolerance policy rather than its explicit objective. The media never reported that. Covering the outraged statements and all the fury and flurry of the Left was story enough for them. “Kids in cages,” with its catchy alliteration and conjoining of innocence and the perverse, was too good to resist.
At one point, Twitter and the rest of social media lit up with a photo of a little Hispanic boy, his tiny hands gripping two thin bars of a cage, staring out off camera and sobbing. It was heartbreaking. It evoked millions of words in response online.
The photo went viral with a kicker: “Are you Trump fans really OK with this?” One of the earliest places it showed up was in the Twitter feed of a journalist/activist, Jose Antonio Vargas, who is also an illegal resident of the United States. He posted the photo on Twitter in a tweet that went out on June 11, 2018:
This is what happens when a government believes people are “illegal.”
Kids in cages.
Thousands of people shared it with their followers, including the liberal actor Ron Perlman and other Hollywood figures.
It was a fake. Maybe not intentionally, but it was. Later it turned out that the photo had been taken at a rally in Dallas, far from the US-Mexico border. Protestors had set up a mock cage at the site. The little boy in the photo was the son of someone at the event. The child had walked inside the mock cage and turned around, spotted his mommy far away, and started crying. Picture snapped.
That was later documented by FactCheck.org. The original poster said he had been unaware of the photo’s origins and had posted it to Twitter anyway—after which, of course, President Trump capitalized on the hoax on Twitter.
The media devoted so much effort to the “kids in cages” story that it felt as though tens of thousands of children were caught up in the system. In cages. A total of 4,337 immigrant children were held under the Trump zero-tolerance program from April 19 to May 5, 2018. They were spread among a hundred DHS sites, the CRS report stated. Several thousand more had been separated prior to the public announcement of the policy change.
Any child’s being removed from a parent is a sad thing. Still, this was an avalanche of hysterical coverage for 4,000 children, out of more than 1 million people crossing into the United States illegally each year.
After the fracas, President Trump issued an executive order on June 20, 2018, requiring DHS to hold aliens awaiting criminal trial or immigration proceedings. As a result, DHS and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) stopped referring most illegal crossers for criminal prosecution. A federal court judge then ordered that all children in the system must be reunited with their families. A second judge rejected DOJ’s request to modify existing rules to extend the twenty-day child detention guideline.
The same Democrats who condemned that flawed government program also argue that government is ready and able to take over the entire $3.5-trillion-a-year US health care system without a snag.
The Fake News media worked hand in hand with the Democrats on “kids in cages.” They are one and the same. Liberals talk about the right-wing media and point to Fox News, Breitbart, Rush Limbaugh, and Mark Levin, but they run out of much to say thereafter; lib media are everywhere. They all seem to speak with the same voice, as if it were orchestrated. In the past, in fact, it has been orchestrated.
A decade ago, reports exposed the existence of a secret, private Google chat circle called JournoList, where four hundred liberal journalists and commentators chatted online, out of view of any public scrutiny. Some of the members of that chat group remain leading members of the media today, ostensibly as objective journalists covering the Trump administration.
The posts from mid-2008, as Obama was running for a first term, reveal how much liberal journalists hate this country, and how much they despise conservatives as being beneath them. The list was organized by Ezra Klein, a writer for the Washington Post, who later cofounded the lib website Vox, where he is still editor at large. It included this post from a writer for a nonprofit website, Spencer Ackerman, who today is the national security correspondent for the Daily Beast: “What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window . . . to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear.” He suggested confronting conservatives “Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.”
A writer for The Nation, Katha Pollitt, spoke of how hard it had been to defend President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky flap: “Let me tell you it was no fun, as a feminist and a woman, waving aside as politically irrelevant and part of the vast rightwing conspiracy Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita.” Though she managed.
Ackerman empathized with her: “But what I like less is being governed by racists and warmongers and criminals.”
Also on JournoList was a Nation editor who is now an anchor on MSNBC, Chris Hayes. He urged colleagues to ignore the controversy over candidate Obama’s longtime ties to a black reverend with a record of giving anti-American and anti-Semitic sermons. After all, he pointed out, “Our country disappears people. It tortures people. It has the blood of as many as one million Iraqi civilians—men, women, children, the infirmed [sic]—on its hands.”
It has gotten worse now that this mob of radical-left journalists is covering President Trump. For any liberal critic of the president, slinging the racist tag is sufficient to make news, get quoted in the left-wing press, and make yourself a hero in the woke social media. They should send him a thank-you note.
Does it seem as though people in Hollywood have more opinions on politics than ever? Robert De Niro. Rob Reiner. Kathy Griffin (the redheaded “comedian” who posed for a photo shoot gripping a fake severed head resembling that of Trump). Chrissy Teigen. Alyssa Milano. Or is it that journalists have discovered that they can cover their opinions as news, sneaking into their articles the propaganda they could never express directly themselves?
When you choose to view everything through the lens of racism, you can find it anywhere you like. Wanting to tighten immigration standards to protect jobs is viewed as racist and antiforeigner. The same goes for reducing H-1B visas that let foreigners occupy US jobs on the cheap. Ordering a drone hit on a terrorist is equivalent to attacking a person of color. Pressing our allies in Europe to pay their fair share of NATO defense, after decades of welching, means that President Trump is a xenophobe who is naive about world affairs.
President Trump’s standing up to China on trade was aimed at stoking US growth and protecting jobs. The left depicted it as anti-Asian. The same goes for closing down entry to this country by people who had visited China recently, in the first weeks after the Wuhan virus started spreading—and weeks after that, his shutting down all immigration temporarily, while the government was cauterizing the virus crisis. Xenophobic!
Even the Wuhan virus was racist: people of color died more frequently. It doesn’t matter that minorities (has that term been banned?) are more likely to live in densely populated urban areas in multifamily housing and more likely to take crowded mass transit. That has nothing to do with color. Still, the president must be at fault somehow.
The Dems have used the racism cudgel for twenty years to fight reform efforts for immigration and even free trade.
In the meantime, the opposition fails to offer a plausible answer to a couple of questions I presented on the topic years ago. How can you have freedom and lawful immigration if you fail to control immigration? How can you control immigration if you fail to control our borders? Never has anyone on the left offered good answers to these questions.
My stance has been steadfast on trade and immigration for more than twenty years. President Trump and I walked separate paths toward the same beliefs. It starts with America first. That applies especially to free trade.
All along, disciples and shills for the free-trade movement have vilified me for these views, with one-tenth the intensity they would fire at President Trump. More than a decade ago, when I hosted a nightly news and opinion program on CNN, I published an op-ed on the network’s website, revealing some of this static.
My calls for a balanced US trade policy—to require our trading counterparts to buy as much from us as we buy from them—prompted a Financial Times editor to call me the “high priest of demotic sensationalism.” “Demotic” means “of the common man,” so perhaps that is what he meant to write; or was it “demonic”? An editorial in The Economist accused me of embarking on “a rabidly anti-trade editorial agenda” and “greeting every announcement of lost jobs as akin to a terrorist assault.” A Washington Post columnist and American Enterprise Institute fellow, James Glassman, accused me of being “a table-thumping protectionist.”
An opinions editor at the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Henninger, excoriated me in high style: “It’s as if whatever made Linda Blair’s head spin around in ‘The Exorcist’ had invaded the body of Lou Dobbs and left him with the brain of Dennis Kucinich.” Now, that was clever and quite funny. It was a quadruple toe quip: an attack on me (one) and my argument (two) with a great movie reference (three) and a totally gratuitous sideswipe against a Democrat (four). Dan, a fine gentleman, is still in place at the WSJ, still espousing the views of the free traders who still oppose the Trump agenda.
My column at CNN.com back then added a point that resonates more than ever as we embark on the next decade:
Those quotes are from some of the most respected news organizations, and there have been dozens of other articles critical of my view that outsourcing American jobs is neither sound, smart, humane, nor in the national interest.
I will tell you it does make a fellow think when attacked so energetically and so personally. But in none of the attacks on my position on outsourcing has a single columnist or news organization seen fit to deal with the facts.
This must be how President Trump feels today and has for much of his presidency. He had to wrangle with a far wider circle of enemies and on so many more policy fronts where he was trying to change the way things had operated forever.
As divisive as the debate has been in America, with sometimes bizarre moments in which victims real and fake are elevated into talking points, one wishes all could agree on President Trump’s central ethos: America first. It is a simple rule of survival. No nation ever should put the interests of another nation ahead of its own.
It harks back almost two hundred years to the concept of American exceptionalism, which drove the country’s sense of destiny and its ability to reach for greatness. Alexis de Tocqueville first cited it in his study of the United States written from 1835 to 1845, Democracy in America.
President Obama played down American exceptionalism in his opening apology tour across Europe after he was elected president. He told the world, “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism.” The difference was that America really is exceptional, and Mr. de Toqueville knew that. As does President Trump, as do I.
The immigration issue will be the most bitterly fought and overly fraught policy front of the Trump Century. Whether or not President Trump can make more fundamental changes, change will come. A vigilant and strong immigration policy is critical to national security and economic policy. All three elements rely on strong, well-regulated borders. Rather than debate these points, the president’s foes said they reflect a fear of foreigners and bigotry.
In the primary season for the next presidential election, all of the almost two dozen candidates for the Democratic nomination saw racism and hate lurking everywhere in the United States: in the economy, hiring, compensation, health care, insurance coverage, education, and justice. Systemic racism was endemic to our nation’s history and remains firmly in place, they argued.
As President Trump campaigned for reelection, that Dem strategy gained momentum in mid-2019. On July 27, a longtime advisor to the Clinton camp, Joe Lockhart, said this on Twitter:
Anyone who supports a racist or a racist strategy is a racist themselves. 2020 is a moment or [sic: of] reckoning for America. Vote for @realDonaldTrump and you are a racist. Don’t hide it like a coward. Wear that racist badge proudly and see how it feels.
In September 2019, that sentiment was seconded in the liberal Daily Beast. The banner headline was “Trump Is a Racist. If You Still Support Him, So Are You.”
To explicitly deny that you are a racist further entangles you in the wrong debate—on whether that charge is true—and distracts from the real issues. It gives the media more opportunities to mention your name in the tussle over how racist you may or may not be. God forbid that one straight, older, white male should have the temerity to defend another. We had our time on this earth, just like the dinosaurs; we’d best go quietly, with a whimper. Okay, boomer?
The difference this time around was that their target, Donald Trump, refuses to take anyone’s guff, to use a polite and old-fashioned term. He may be the closest thing we have today to the John Wayne of politics: a swaggering, combative, proud American willing to be the louder one when confronted by any adversary who crosses a line. His line. This swagger influences the administration from the cabinet on down.
For two decades or more, the Dems’ demonization fractured the debate on immigration reform and the need to fix unfair trade. They have kept the most urgent issues in American life off the table. Until President Trump.