Donald Trump is facing down the establishment pressure that has already prompted Jeb Bush and Marco Rubio to announce they would provide residency to some of Muslim refugees or economic migrants now fleeing Islamic wars in the Middle East.
“Look, from a humanitarian standpoint, I’d love to help. But we have our own problems. We have so many problems that we have to solve,” Trump declared on Wednesday night’s broadcast of Hannity.
“We are the only country in the world whose immigration system puts the needs of other nations ahead of our own. That must change,” Trump wrote in his August migration policy paper that has supercharged his 2016 campaign.
On Sept. 10, a White House spokesman said President Barack Obama would grant residence to 10,000 additional Syrians in 2016, along with the routine inflow of 70,000 refugees and 1 million new immigrants.
Bush says the United States should accept more Middle East refugees: “We should accept — we’re a country that has a noble tradition of accepting refugees. We need to make sure that they’re not part of ISIS or something like that,” Bush told Fox and Friends.
Marco Rubio echoed Bush.
“I would be open to that if it can be done in a way that allows us to ensure that among them are not people who are part of a terrorist organization who are using this crisis,” Rubio told Boston Herald Radio on September 8th. This proposal could result in the admittance of a many refugees. “The vast and overwhelming majority of people who are seeking refuge are not terrorists, of course, but you always are concerned about that,” Rubio said.
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, who is forced to zig-zag between populist voters and the business donors that profit from greater immigration, is now signaling opposition to a refugee welcome. “No, we shouldn’t be taking on any more Syrian refugees right now,” Walker told reporters on Wednesday in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “American has…received almost 70,000 refugees, of which nearly 2,000 are from Syria. We’ve spent something like $4 billion in humanitarian relief,” Walker explained.
Trump’s pro-America stance on the issue of immigration echoes that of the late-Democratic Congresswoman and Civil Rights champion Barbara Jordan– who in pushing for immigration reductions– famously said: “The national interest comes first, last, and always.”
As Trump has narrowed his focus on a populist immigration platform, he has seen his poll numbers soar with key voting groups, including women and black Americans, who have been most negatively impacted by the federal government’s intertwined immigration and cheap-labor policies.
New reports show wages for American working families continue to decline under a decades-long flood of mass immigration; real average hourly wages are lower today than they were in 1973 shortly after our nation’s green card gusher began; since the recession began, all employment gains amongst women went to foreign-workers; the number of struggling Americans reduced to relying on welfare has reached a record high– a substantive number of whom are immigrants; and black Americans– who have been among those most disproportionately harmed by mass immigration– are unemployed at twice the rate of white Americans.
Trump explained that Muslim countries should be willing to take in some of the Muslim migrants: “The Gulf states [are] tremendously wealthy. You have five groups of people, six groups, they’re not taking anybody. Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bahrain, these are tremendously wealthy and powerful from the standpoint of money. They — they’re not taking anybody. Russia’s not taking. Nobody’s taking. [But we’re] supposed to take — we have to straighten out our own problems,” Trump said.
Indeed, as The Washington Post has reported, “The Arab world’s wealthiest nations are doing next to nothing for Syria’s refugees.” In 2013, the United States sent approximately $13.5 billion in foreign aid to Middle Eastern nations.
Rubio and Bush’s plan to receive migrants– so long as they are not terrorists– may prove difficult to implement based on previous statements from immigration officials. Former president of the Citizenship and Immigration Services Council– which represents 12,000 United States Citizenship Immigration Service Officers– has said that his agency is already too overburdened to properly screen all of the visa applications– a problem which would be greatly exacerbated if Rubio or Bush’s mass migration plan were implemented:
It is essential to warn the public about the threat that ISIS will exploit our loose and lax visa policies to gain entry to the United States… Many millions come legally to the U.S. through our wide open immigration policy every year—whether as temporary visitors, lifetime immigrants, refugees, asylum-seekers, foreign students, or recipients of our “visa waiver program”… Our government cannot effectively track these foreign visitors and immigrants… Applications for entry are rubber-stamped… We’ve become the visa clearinghouse for the world.
This is not the first time immigration expansionists have ignored the warnings of immigration officials. The president of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement union, Chris Crane, wrote in 2013 as the Schumer-Rubio bill was being pushed through the Senate: “Senator Rubio left unchanged legislation that he himself admitted to us in private was detrimentally flawed and must be changed.”
“Senator Rubio, who promised ICE officers and Sheriffs that he would take steps to repair the bill’s provisions that gut interior enforcement, has abandoned that commitment. He directly misled law enforcement officers,” Crane declared.
Rubio and Bush’s position on the migrant crisis is even more anti-borders than Democratic Senator Tim Kaine, who according to The Washington Post, has “called for creating a safe zone in Syria so refugees can stay.”
“Why not create that safe zone in Syria so people don’t have to leave their country,” Kaine said. “They would rather stay there if we can guarantee safety and basic comforts of food, shelter and medical care… If we can create that, then people will come back.”
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