As the White House and the press whirl with the revelations surrounding Donald Trump Jr’s meeting with a gift-bearing Kremlin-linked lawyer, Donald Trump, along with aides Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon, is working with two GOP senators to scale back legal immigration to the U.S. Yes, legal immigration.
As POLITICO reports, Trump is planning to lend his support to an upcoming bill written by Tom Cotton (R-AR) and David Perdue (R-GA) which will slash in half the number of legal immigrants coming here by 2027, from 1 million annually to 500,000.
Especially focused on the legislation is White House aide Stephen Miller, whose anti-immigrant views are well known. The Washington Post recounted how his high school days in the mostly liberal Southern California city of Santa Monica were spent speaking out against multiculturalism. Steve Bannon, whose nationalistic views are documented as well, is also helping to guide the bill.
“Sen. Cotton knows that being more deliberate about who we let into our country will raise working-class wages, which is why an overwhelming majority of Americans support it. He and Sen. Perdue are working with President Trump to fix our immigration system so that instead of undercutting American workers, it will support them and their livelihoods,” a Cotton spokesperson said according to POLITICO.
Lawmakers like Cotton, who has inherited the hard-line mantle long held by Miller’s former boss, Jeff Sessions, now the attorney general, argue that low-skilled immigrants decrease job opportunity and suppress wages for native-born workers — particularly those on the lower-end of the income scale. Graham and his allies say that the overall economy benefits from the ready availability of cheaper labor.
As a candidate, Trump promised to shift immigration to a merit-based system and this new piece of legislation aims to contribute to that promise.
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