A President Trump-endorsed proposal to scale back legal immigration levels is a “self-destructive policy,” according to a Rolling Stone writer.
In a write-up for the famed music magazine, Joshua Holland claims Sens. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act, which would cut legal immigration levels in half to raise U.S. workers’ wages, has racist motives:
Trump has embraced a dumb, self-destructive policy that would likely cause a serious hit to the economy if enacted, but there’s one upside to his regime’s unorthodox attacks on legal immigration: We should thank this crew for making it clear that animosity toward immigrants is, and always has been, grounded in petty cultural resentments and largely unfounded fears of economic competition, rather than in some abstract reverence for the rule of law.
Holland goes on to claim that the effort to relieve Americans of the more than one million legal immigrants who are admitted to the U.S. every year – not including foreign refugees – is steeped in hostility towards foreign cultures:
It was only as explicit attacks on other cultures became unacceptable in polite circles that the rule of law took front-and-center in the debate, and the anti-immigration set started talking about anarchy on the border and the chaos that inevitably follows when people let “illegals” off easy.
This was always rather transparent cover for their hostility toward foreigners. In one breath, restrictionists would claim that, like Trump, they “cherish” those who jumped through the necessary hoops to come here legally, and in the next they’d rail against being told to press 2 for Spanish. And in most cases, we’re talking about extremely minor “crimes” – entering the country illegally is a misdemeanor, and being here without papers is just a civil code violation, like a traffic ticket.
But it was a smart way to deflect charges of racism or xenophobia. Now, thanks to Trump – and his creepy white nationalist advisers like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller – going after legal immigration, that facade has fallen away. The next time someone claims to be concerned first and foremost about upholding the rule of law, you can ask them what part of “legal immigration” they don’t understand.
Cotton and Perdue’s legislation promises to end the era of legal immigration policy that is not in the national interest of the American people.
The RAISE Act promises take the following steps in relieving Americans:
- Reduce the number of Green Cards given out every year from about one million to 500,000;
- Prioritize the immediate family households, thus ending extended family chain migration to the U.S.;
- Create a visa program for U.S. citizens to bring elderly parents to U.S. for caretaking purposes;
- Eliminate the diversity visa lottery, where 50,000 visas are “arbitrarily allocated” every year; and
- Cap permanent U.S. refugees resettlement to 50,000 migrants per year.
The Rolling Stone attack on the RAISE Act and reducing legal immigration comes after fellow mainstream media outlets like the New York Times and Washington Post rebuked the proposal, all while admitting that the current system of low-skilled immigration hurts Americans.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.