Trump publicly dry-humps the US flag for the third time since 2015, so we’ve reached peak cray-cray.
After days of insisting, falsely, that the separations were the result of some Democratic-passed law, the president has partially shifted gears, defending the policy in a series of tweets. The most shocking is this one, with its description of unauthorized immigrants as an “infestation”:
“Infest” is the essential, and new, word here. (Also popping up in the tweets is the older coded word “thugs.”) It drives full-throttle toward the dehumanization of immigrants, setting aside legality in favor of a division between a human us and a less-human them. What are infestations? They are takeovers by vermin, rodents, insects. The word is almost exclusively used in this context. What does one do with an infestation? Why, one exterminates it, of course.
If those apprehended are less than human, then Trump can shrug the problem off as “only” 2,000 children separated from their parents, though the Washington Examiner reported Monday that 30,000 children could be held by August. Since Trump has previously said he didn’t like separations, it’s unclear how many children separated from their parents he considers an acceptable number.
The Third Wave of Immigration (2013)
When the opportunities for legal migration and legal entry were suddenly eliminated, the flows did not stop. The conditions on the ground had not changed: there was still a demand for workers. Hundreds of thousands of Mexicans were connected to employers in the United States. And so, over the next five to ten years, the flow simply resumed – only now it was undocumented. By 1977, roughly 500,000 Mexicans were again entering the United States every year. Now, however, 80 percent of them were undocumented.
The rise of undocumented migration created a chain reaction of migration policies in response. We put more and more restrictions on immigration, more and more emphasis on border control, more and more emphasis on enforcement, and all of the efforts simply backfired, producing the worst of all possible worlds.
[...]
Within ten years, what had once been a circular flow of male workers going to three states – California, Texas, and Illinois – became a national population of settled families. We doubled the net rate of undocumented population growth and created a settled population.
This is the origin of today’s 11 million undocumented people. Basically, we trapped Mexican workers who before had been circulating back and forth across the border on the U.S. side of the line. As they stayed longer, they brought their families. As they brought their wives, they had kids. They were not coming across to have anchor babies. They were coming across to reunite, and people in their twenties end up having kids. Things ballooned out of control, leading to our current predicament.
[...]
For over a century the tradeoff has been between legal and illegal, not between immigration and nonimmigration. Our two countries – our societies, our economies – are far too intensely and closely linked, and have been for such a long time, that immigration – higher skilled, lower skilled, higher wage, lower wage – is going to go on regardless. Whether through California or through Arizona or through the Rio Grande Valley (or, as we call it, the Rio Bravo Valley) and Tamaulipas, immigration is going to continue.
The issue is whether we want it to be legal or illegal. The best way to eliminate illegal flows in the future is to make them legal
Should FLOTUS be deported because she was found in 2016 to be "infesting" the country. (We’re just helping Trump get wife #4, maybe he’ll buy American this time.)
(2016) The Associated Press has found documentation showing that Melania Trump broke immigration law when she first came to the US in 1996 — by entering the country on a tourist visa and then working as a professional model.
According to the AP, Melania Knauss (her maiden name) first came to the US in August 1996 on a B1/B2 “tourist visa.” Tourist visas allow someone to stay in the US for six months, but they can’t seek employment in the US during that time.
Then on October 18, 1996, the AP found, she got an H-1B visa for “skilled workers” allowing her to work legally in the US as a model.
The problem is that the AP’s documentation shows that Melania was “paid for 10 modeling assignments between September 10 and October 15” — while she was still on the tourist visa. In other words, she was working on a visa that didn’t legally permit her to work — and thus was violating the terms by which she’d been allowed to come to the US.