Donald Trump on DACA: We’re Going to Take Care of ‘Dreamers’

President Donald Trump dodged a town hall question about the roughly 700,000 young illegal migrants protected by the 2012 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) amnesty, saying, “We’re going to take care of Dreamers.”

“We’re going to take care of Dreamers. It’s working right now. We’re negotiating different aspects of immigration and immigration law,” he said at the October 15 NBC town hall meeting.

The “Dreamers” comment refers to President Barack Obama’s 2020 decision to give work permits to hundreds of thousands of younger illegal aliens amid mass unemployment of Americans during the slow recovery from the great recession.

Trump couched his answer in the context of political negotiations over blue-collar migration from Mexico and other nations:

We’ve built now over 400 miles of border wall on the southern border. Mexico is working very closely with us. We have the strongest border we’ve ever had. We want people to come into our country. They have to come in legally, but we are working very hard on the DACA program. And you will be — I think — very happy over the course of the next year because I feel the same way as you do.

NBC host Savannah Guthrie intervened to ask a question about Trump’s decision to shorten the three-year work permit given to the younger migrants after the Supreme Court blocked Trump’s 2017 cancellation decision. Trump dodged her question, saying:

Well, what happened is, because of the pandemic, much changed on the immigration front. Mexico is heavily infected, as you know, and we’ve made it very, very difficult to come in because of the pandemic and other reasons, and crime. But we have a very strong border right now, and we have to keep it that way … What happened is because of the pandemic; we have to be extra cautious.

…

The fact is we got rid of catch and release [at the border], which is a disaster. You know, if you catch somebody — they could be a murderer, they could be a rapist — I was forced to release them into our country. These are the laws that I inherited. We ended that program.

Guthrie did not question Trump about his stated support for more immigration of white-collar migrants, which he dubs “merit” immigration:

But we want people to come into our country. But they have to come through a merit system, and they have to come in legally, and people are very, very happy with it. You haven’t heard any complaints about that.

During the back-and-forth, Guthrie and Trump did not mention the impact of legal and illegal migration on Americans’ jobs and wages.

Trump’s 2020 plan offers broadly popular restrictions on immigration and visa workers, including H-1B workers.

Joe Biden’s 2020 plan promises to let companies import more visa workers, to let mayors import temporary workers, to accelerate the inflow of chain-migration migrants, to end migration enforcement against illegal aliens unless they commit a felony, and to dramatically accelerate the inflow of poor refugees to at least 125,000 per year.

Open-ended legal migration is praised by business lobbies and progressives partly because the arrival of migrants helps to transfer wealth from wage-earners to stockholders.

Migration moves money from employees to employers, from families to investors, from young to old, from homebuyers to real estate investors, and from the central states to the coastal states.

Migration also allows investors and CEOs to skimp on labor-saving technology, sideline U.S. minorities, ignore disabled people, exploit stoop labor in the fields, short-change labor in the cities, impose tight control on American professionals, centralize technological innovation, and undermine labor rights.