Part 3: Immigration Cruelty
Though Trump emphasized cracking down on illegal immigration during the 2016 campaign, in fact his deportation numbers pale in comparison to Barack Obama's. Instead, his "biggest contribution" has been restricting the legal variety, according to Cato Institute immigration policy analyst David Bier. "We're talking about just an incredible number of actions to reduce legal immigration," he says. Beginning, most ungenerously, with refugees.
Fueled by grisly wars in the Middle East and Africa, the global population of refugees doubled between 2012 and 2017, from 10 million to 20 million, a historically high level where it has remained ever since. The incoming president, having won on the most restrictionist platform since World War II–era Franklin Roosevelt, promptly slashed America's refugee intake to historic lows—22,000 in fiscal year 2018, down from 85,000 in 2016.
The last time worldwide refugees doubled in so short a span, in the late 1970s and early 1980s, presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan took lead roles in organizing the global response, and America welcomed into the country roughly 1 out of every 70 refugees—from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Soviet Union, Iran, Cuba, and so forth. Under Trump, the U.S. has withdrawn from anything like leadership of the free-world response, and its refugee intake is more like 1 out of every 900.
Though the Trump administration had already reduced just about every category of legal immigration, some of the most significant restrictions went into effect only this year. The new "public charge" rule, wherein applicants for visas are required to prove that they'll never go on welfare, will precipitate massive reductions in by far the most common type of immigration: the family-sponsored visa, which traditionally has accounted for six out of every seven legal immigrants to the United States.
"This rule basically makes it impossible to get around it if you're poor and you don't have a college degree," Bier says. "We're forcibly separating U.S. citizens from their spouses, from their parents….It is something [that], if it was imposed on any other U.S. citizen, would be considered an affront to liberty and an imposition that we wouldn't tolerate for a second if the spouse was born in the United States or a parent was born in the United States."
Trump has changed asylum rules so that even those with ironclad cases of being persecuted back home will be automatically returned there if they enter America via a third country. Asylum seekers who arrive at ports of entry to make their cases are now routinely turned away instead of processed. The number of foreign college students has been chopped down. And most shockingly, in numbers never before seen, the White House made a conscious policy to separate minor children from their asylum-seeking parents.
"This was an intentional effort by the Trump administration to target parents with children," Bier says. "And not based on any kind of risk factor or criminal history or prior crossings or anything. It was, 'If you're a parent and you are crossing with a kid, we're going to target you for prosecution specifically.'…The zero-tolerance justification was just a facade to justify what they wanted to do, which was terrify these asylum seekers into not coming, basically."
tl:dr version: Trump's actions against refugees fleeing dictatorships, wars, and starvation, to a land which traditionally saw itself as a home for those longing to be free, constitute deliberate cruelty. Trump's apologists often say, "we are not against immigration, we are against illegal immigration. If these people obeyed the law, there wouldn't be a problem." In fact, against illegal immigration Trump has done less than Obama. Most of his sanctions have been against legal immigrants. People who already qualified under the rules have suddenly found those rules capriciously changed to exclude them. People awaiting being reunited with their spouses or parents are being denied. People whose refugee cases are exhaustively well-documented are being turned away without even a hearing. And those children famously separated from their parents? Trump tries to create the image that these are illegal immigrants whose wrongdoing forces their separation. In fact, almost all of them are people strictly following the letter of the law in applying for refugee status. Separating the parents from the children is a tactic deliberately designed to create fear and discourage future refugees from even trying to apply.
