Nancy Pelosi: Donald Trump’s Immigration Principles Are ‘Trash’

House Minority leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi today described Donald Trump’s popular immigration principles as “trash” and as “brutal” towards illegal immigrants, despite repeated election results showing that voters want migration policies to be fair to ordinary Americans.

Pelosi spoke Wednesday, saying Trump’s immigration principles are unacceptable to illegal immigrants, which she dubbed ‘dreamers’:

They call them principles — unprinciples! —  they are not principles, they are trash — are unacceptable to the dreamers and those of us who fight for them.

Democratic legislators at the Capitol Hill event insisted they would not compromise on their opposition to the principles, released October 8.

“We stand against these immigration principles — from the wall to not supporting refugees [or the] immigration principles already standard in this country,” said the chairwoman of the Hispanic Caucus, New Mexico Rep. Michelle Lujan Grisham. “We reject them all — they are not part of any negotiations.”

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The press event spotlighted the Democrats’ high-low coalition of financial elites and government-dependent people, and it excluded any mention of middle-class Americans’ worries about getting displaced or outsourced by the federal government’s high-immigration, low-wage economic strategy.

For example, the event was organized by a lobbying group for Venture Capitalists, FWD.us, and it featured several illegal immigrants, including one Spanish-speaking illegal who spoke in broken English, even though she has been in the United States since 2000.

Pelosi’s repeated declarations of concern for illegal immigrants was not matched by any statement of support for Americans, either as young students, as job seekers, employees, parents, or as taxpayers. She argued Trump’s pro-American plans are unpopular, even though numerous polls and elections show that Americans do not want other Americans to be sidelined by cheap-labor immigration. 

Polls show that Trump’s policies are popular because they try to balance Americans’ concerns about mass-immigration with Americans’ generous offer of citizenship to foreign immigrants. Those fairness policies are particularly supported in the Midwest — which flipped from Democratic to Trump in November 2016 — but are opposed by business groups which gain from additional lower-wage workers and welfare-aided consumers.

The political power of Trump’s immigration fairness argument was noted by veteran Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg.“Progressives will only get an audience with these voters if they listen to them and understand why they were desperate for sweeping changes, why they voted for Trump and what message they were sending to the elites about putting ‘us’ and America first,” said his March 2017 autopsy report.

In 2016, former President Barack Obama pushed a pro-immigration policy, even as the federal government invited another 1 million foreigners to immigrate into the United States, just as four million young Americans began looking for decent jobs. 

Regardless of Greenberg’s analysis, Pelosi repeated her claim that immigrants — not Americans’ children — are keeping the nation invigorated: 

Every Republican president for the past four decades has recognized the [immigrants’] constant reinvigoration of America. Look at Ronald Reagan … and George Herbert Walker Bush … George W.  Bush tried so hard.

In 2013, Pelosi declared that immigrants are more American than Americans, saying: “In coming here with those American traits, all of the immigrants make America more American.”

 On Wednesday, Pelosi argued that mass immigration cannot be reduced without destroying the nature of America, saying Trump’s principles: 

are anathema to our national values. Together, these brutal proposals – each one of them is horrible – but the cumulative effect of them would destroy a fundamental part of the American character – a free nation proud of an immigrant heritage. It abandons — their proposal abandons the fundamental respect for family at the heart of our faith, at the heart of who we are as Americans. Protecting our dreamers and respecting our immigrant families unites us, and unites the three Bs – business, badges — our law enforcement friends — and bibles — our religious voters.

Pelosi’s concern for illegal immigrants, rather than for Americans, was shared by other speakers at the Capitol Hill event.

Trump’s immigration principles are “literally a love letter to white supremacists,” said Democratic Rep. Pramila Jayapal, an immigrant from Indian immigrant and a former activist lauded by Obama’s White House.  The goal of the principles “is really to end our deep history of immigration,” she said, even though Trump’s principles only call for a reduction in the variety of relatives that can be brought into the United States via chain-migration.

Deporting the illegal-immigrant parents of young illegal immigrants “is outrageous and unacceptable,” she said, before declaring that mass immigration is essential to the identity of ordinary Americans. “Immigration has never been just about immigration — immigration always been about who we are a country, and what we are willing to stand up for.”

Grisham also said the border wall is a symbolic effort to distinguish the United States from other countries;

the wall is bad for trade, bad for the economy, bad for the environment, bad for species migration, it is bad, and it is completely wasteful and it is part of a — in my opinion, my statement — hateful rhetoric intended to divide this country and to divide us from other nations.

She insisted that immigration “is good for our economy, it is good for our schools, it is good for our neighborhoods … [and amnesty] is the right thing to do for these young men and women who have done so much for their families, neighborhoods and this country.”

The young illegals seeking amnesty are “800,00 young people who are engineers and doctors or studying to be doctors and lawyers, or who do military service or law enforcement,” she said, without mentioning the many illegals who lack even a high-school education, and without mentioning the 4 million young American men and women who enter the workforce each year. 

The House and the Senate are “working very hard to do right by dreamers and right by the American economy, both,” Grisham said, without mentioning the economic hopes of ordinary Americans.

Democrats, said Pelosi, want “a victory for dreamers in a way that does not harm any other immigrants in our country.”

Four million Americans turn 18 each year and begin looking for good jobs in the free market.

But business groups have used their political power to tilt the labor market in their favor,  via the federal policy of importing 1 million consumers and workers each year. The government also hands out almost 3 million short-term work permits to foreign workers. These permits include roughly 330,000 one-year OPT permits for foreign graduates of U.S. colleges, roughly 200,000 three-year H-1B visas for foreign white-collar professionals, and 400,000 two-year permits to DACA illegals. Universities employ roughly 100,000 foreign guest workers.

That Washington-imposed economic policy of mass-immigration floods the market with foreign labor, spikes profits and Wall Street values by cutting salaries for manual and skilled labor offered by blue-collar and white-collar employees. It also drives up real estate prices, widens wealth-gaps, reduces high-tech investment, increases state and local tax burdens, hurts kids’ schools and college education, pushes Americans away from high-tech careers, and sidelines at least 5 million marginalized Americans and their families, including many who are now struggling with opioid addictions.

The cheap-labor policy has also reduced investment and job creation in many interior states because the coastal cities have a surplus of imported labor. For example, almost 27 percent of zip codes in Missouri had fewer jobs or businesses in 2015 than in 2000, according to a new report by the Economic Innovation Group. In Kansas, almost 29 percent of zip codes had fewer jobs and businesses in 2015 compared to 2000, which was a two-decade period of massive cheap-labor immigration.

Americans tell pollsters that they strongly oppose amnesties and cheap-labor immigration, even as most Americans also want to favor legal immigrants, and many sympathize with illegals.

Because of the successful cheap-labor strategy, wages for men have remained flat since 1973, and a growing percentage of the nation’s annual income is shifting to investors and away from employees. The business-funded Hamilton Project suggests that the shift is transferring $1 trillion per year from 160 million employees to the nation’s investors.