Since Christmas is a time for giving, forgiving, and being forgiven for not giving or forgiving (pardon the pun), this corner deems it gracious, in the spirit of the holiday season, to give due recognition to some of President-elect Donald Trump’s immigration ideas that make sense.
For starters, and to quote from the man himself: “Dreamers are going to come later, and we have to do something about the Dreamers, because these are the people that had been brought here at a very young age, and many of them are middle-aged people now; they don’t even speak the language of their country; and yes, we’re going to do something about them.”
Yes, that was Trump’s surprise response when asked during a recent NBC interview about his plans for the undocumented people brought to the US as children, specifically on whether this group would be included in his planned mass deportation next year.
Called “Dreamers,” these individuals are beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), an Obama-era executive action that shielded some 800,000 undocumented young people from deportation and allowed them to work legally in the US, albeit on a temporary basis.
Unfortunately, a proposed bill that offered a legal pathway for US permanent residency and citizenship, The Dream Act, stalled in the US Congress after years of fierce lobbying by the Dreamers, mainly due to the stubborn resistance from conservative legislators.
And yet, should Trump’s spoken words translate into action, it would be a miraculous about-face for the enigmatic President-elect, whose most generous DACA stance to date has been a limited proposal to extend the program’s validity for three years in exchange for congressional funding of his famed border wall.
Still, one other Trump idea that is comparably rational, albeit a tad brutal, is his proposal to abolish US birthright citizenship. If done under very limited circumstances, however, and for the right reasons, it could very well garner popular support among the American people.
Birth tourism, for instance, is an abhorrent immigration practice that borders on visa fraud, taking advantage of an outdated system set in place during a time when global travel was reserved for a privileged few.
Nowadays, many foreigners, mostly from certain countries, brazenly game the system with help from some unscrupulous travel agencies and birthing clinics in the US.
Of course, spending $30,000 or less for the privilege of obtaining automatic US citizenship for one’s newborn is a no-brainer to many foreigners — especially those coming from politically constrictive nations.
Contrast this with the fate of those who must endure years and even decades of waiting or investing at least a million dollars to become US citizens, and the callousness is mind-boggling.
Still, another group that welcomes American birthright citizenship with manifest ardor is the multitude of people who cross the border on a daily basis without permission.
By giving birth on American soil, their offspring become US citizens by operation of law, spawning a societal dilemma called anchor migration. Having originated mostly from impoverished nations, the jus soli birth of their “anchor” babies becomes their golden ticket out of extreme poverty.
This brings to the fore Trump’s most popular idea — clamping down on illegal border migration while turning back the new arrivals.
Since most people play by the rules and wait in line for years and even decades for their lawful turn to migrate to the US, this idea deserves some serious contemplation regardless of one’s political affiliation, to go along with one’s holiday aspiration for — a very Merry Christmas to all.