President Donald Trump wants immigrants from “nice countries,” but not from countries “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place,” according to the New York Times.
Trump made the comments at an April 6 major fund-raising dinner in Palm Beach, Florida, according to the report:
“And when I said, you know, Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,” Mr. Trump said at the dinner, to chuckles from the crowd. “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”
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At the dinner, Mr. Trump also lamented the surge of migrants, particularly from Latin America, saying that gang members “make the Hells Angels look like extremely nice people.”
“They’ve been shipped in, brought in, deposited in our country, and they’re with us tonight,” Mr. Trump said.
The New York Times report was restrained — but it made sure to remind readers of the Democrats’ display of outrage in 2018 when Trump described Haiti and some African nations as “shithole countries.” The 2018 comment came amid negotiations over immigration policy and was leaked by Democrats to direct media outrage against Trump.
Trump’s critics are eager to see Trump’s immigration views as built on race, not as a plan for middle-class wealth or national power. For example, Steve Benen at MSNBC declared:
Let’s just go ahead and state the obvious: There was nothing subtle about the Republican’s use of the word “nice,” followed by his reference to countries with overwhelmingly white populations. Trump’s history of racism is not new, though it’s a record that continues to grow.
However, the Democrats’ heated criticism of Trump diverts attention from their own reluctance to distinguish between the many migrants who impose an economic burden on Americans, and the few who help raise Americans’ standard of living, said Jon Feere, who worked as a top aide in Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Feere told Breitbart News:
If you’re looking at immigration policy as an economic policy, then you would want that policy to result in higher per capita wealth amongst the U.S. population … Does it lift up our poverty-level population? Does it make the middle class wealthier?
He continued:
America needs to select immigrants for the type of immigrants that we actually need, which in this economy would be individuals who are highly skilled and actually bring something to the table … Those individuals who meet that definition are few and far between. And by definition, it means we need fewer immigrants than the number that are coming in right now … regardless of their nationality, or country of origin.
Trump has repeatedly called for higher-skilled migration. In 2019, for example, he declared in a national speech:
Our plan achieves two critical goals. First, it stops illegal immigration and fully secures the border. And, second, it establishes a new legal immigration system that protects American wages, promotes American values, and attracts the best and brightest from all around the world.
… our current [legal] immigration system works at cross-purposes, placing downward pressure on wages for the working class, which is what we don’t want to do.
President Joe Biden’s unpopular policy — with its progressive opposition to U.S. borders — is welcoming a vast number of unskilled and poor migrants into the United States who impose huge costs on ordinary Americans. The New York Post reported on March 31:
Of adult immigrants who said they came to America in the past two years, 41% had at least a bachelor’s degree, down from 55% of new arrivals as recently as 2018. The share with no more than a high-school education increased from 29% in 2018 to 44% in 2024.
The politics and culture of the arriving migrants also matter to Americans.
For example, voters in New York drastically shifted their view of immigration from September to October, partly because of migrant-fueled protests against Israel’s war with Hamas. Breitbart News reported that many more New Yorkers described immigration as a burden rather than a benefit:
In October, those [September] “burden” numbers spiked 12 points among Catholics, up to 62 percent; by 5 points among Protestants, up to 64 percent; and by 4 points among the Jewish community, up to 52 percent. The “benefit” shares slipped to 27 percent, 22 percent, and 28 percent.
Among people in the Jewish community, there was a seven-point drop in “benefit” and a four-point gain in “burden.” Two out of three members of the group view migration as a “burden” rather than a benefit, according to the Siena poll, and 12 percent say they see migration as a “mixed’ factor: The community comprises almost 9 percent of the New York state’s population.
Moreover, the top national news editor at the New York Times says the government can and should use immigration to promote a political agenda.
“We can write laws that say, ‘Oh, you know, we want more of this kind of person, we don’t want this kind of person,” editor Jia Lynn Yang told an interviewer in 2020. She continued:
Go back to the beginning of the Trump presidency in 2017, and he was passing the Muslim travel ban, and people were saying “You can’t do that, it’s not American, it’s not what we do.” [But] if you look at the history, you’ve learned this is what we’ve done before … [and what] the Trump administration has done is not somehow inherently unAmerican … It’s up to us in democracy to figure out “What do we want our immigration system to look like?”
Yang’s favored immigration policy would distance the United States from its European roots, she wrote in her 2020 pro-migration book, titled “One Mighty and Irresistible Tide”:
For those Americans who want ethnic pluralism to be a foundation value of their nation, there is unfinished work. The current generation of immigrants and children of immigrants — like those who came before us — must articulate a new vision for the current era, one that embraces rather than elides how far America has drifted from its European roots. If [immigrants] do not, their opponents can simply point out to the America of the last fifty years [since 1965] as a demographic aberration, and they would not be wrong.
Extraction Migration
Since 1990, the federal government has relied on Extraction Migration to grow the consumer economy after it helped investors move the high-wage manufacturing sector to lower-wage countries.
The migration policy extracts vast amounts of human resources from needy countries. The additional workers, consumers, and renters push up stock values by shrinking Americans’ wages, subsidizing low-productivity companies, boosting rents, and spiking real estate prices.
The policy is backed by many progressives who favor “equity” over borders, by government officials who gain revenue and influence.
The economic policy has pushed many native-born Americans out of careers in a wide variety of business sectors, reduced Americans’ productivity and political clout, slowed high-tech innovation, shrunk trade, crippled civic solidarity, and incentivized government officials and progressives to ignore the rising death rate of discarded Americans.
The policy also sucks jobs and wealth from heartland states by subsidizing coastal investors and government agencies with a flood of low-wage workers, high-occupancy renters, and government-aided consumers. Similar policies have damaged citizens in Canada and the United Kingdom.
The colonialism-like policy has damaged small countries and has killed hundreds of Americans and thousands of migrants, including many on the taxpayer-funded jungle trail through the Darien Gap in Panama.
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