Security clearance failure and presidential son-in-law Jared Kushner has "written" an immigration reform plan all by himself, according to The New York Times, which writes he has "spent months working" on it. It's a plan only a doting father-in-law could love, and no one around the Trump administration is bothering to try to argue otherwise. To say this is dead on arrival is an overstatement.
Though Kushner apparently worked on the plan with the input of immigration "expert" and white supremacist Stephen Miller, one White House official says Miller "is privately opposed to much of the plan," presumably because it is not harsh enough. Even Trump's best buddy in the Senate, Lindsey Graham, dismisses the proposal as "not designed to become law." Miller did go to the Senate with Kushner to brief lawmakers this week "in an effort to present a united front," but senators at the briefing came out of it saying Kushner appeared to have very little understanding of the proposal he supposedly wrote, wasn't able to answer questions, and Miller had to repeatedly jump in to explain the proposal for him. But one senior administration official tells the Post that Kushner's briefed Trump at least twice on his proposals and Trump told him he "loved" it.
What Trump loves, apparently, is that it contains at least a portion of his border wall, it restricts family-ties green cards, and "would distribute more than half of the green cards to immigrants under a point system in which applicants are ranked on such criteria as professional skills, education levels, age and English ability." It would also include a "patriotic assimilation" criteria, an example of which from an administration official is the requirement of passing an exam "based on a reading of George Washington’s farewell address or Thomas Jefferson’s letter to the Danbury Baptist Association." It'd be interesting to see Trump's own scores on this exam, or if he even knows the documents exist. Missing entirely is any proposal to help the 2 million Dreamers, the immigrants brought into the county as children.
Conservatives hate it, one pundit tweeting that it's a plan "Jared doesn’t seem to understand, that Steven Miller privately opposes, that the First Lady would not likely have qualified for, and most astonishingly, completely ignores DACA." Immigration reform advocate Frank Sharry is even more blunt. "To say this is dead on arrival would be generous," he told The New York Times. "This is worse than the proposal that got 39 votes in the Senate in 2018. This won't unite Republicans and will get zero Democratic support."