Trump is banning green card eligibility for any LEGAL immigrant who uses a social safety net program—or who can’t convince a consul that they‘ll never use one.
The potential impact is immense. If you can’t get a green card, you can never become a citizen.
wsj.com/articles/trump…
It means immigration to the US will increasingly shift toward those wealthy enough to have a buffer against disaster, who‘ll disproportionately be from white non-“shith*le” countries.
That’s Trump’s goal, because he’s a racist for whom wealth is a proxy for human value.
But anyone who thinks this will stop poorer, browner immigrants from coming is deluded. For all that Trump has degraded America, it’s still an aspiration for poverty-stricken, oppressed and at risk people around the world.
They’ll come—only to be permanently disenfranchised.
Immigrants will live in terror of taking government support, sending rates of child poverty, disease and hunger soaring. Or they might take Medicaid out of desperation, only to be stricken from green card eligibility, and then be unable to work legally or travel out of the US.
We have millions living in the US in a shadow world, fearful of discovery and deportation even with citizen family, productive jobs (at, say, Trump resorts) and deep roots in their communities.
But this stretches the shadow to the legal immigrants that the GOP claims to support.
Not only is this a horrific betrayal of those who’ve properly “waited in line” to come to America, it amounts to confiscatory taxation, the GOP’s hobbyhorse.
Legal residents pay all taxes citizens do—but would now be ineligible for the social safety net that they’re paying into.
And even if there were moral merit to this move, which there is not, in practical terms it turns America from a land of opportunity where new entrepreneurs can hustle to success, to a catchbasin for the already affluent.
We‘re trading hungry innovators for fat dividend cashiers.
There are too many billionaires and not enough millionaires or thousandaires in America.
But even Trump, obsessed with the billionaire status he’s never achieved himself, should be aware that dozens of prominent people have been on public assistance at some time in their lives.
That includes WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, Flipboard founder Mike McCue, wealthy GOP donor Phil Drake and Trump HUD head Ben Carson.
Being poor isn’t a bar to success. But a man who inherited his wealth and nearly lost it all many times wouldn’t get that.
m.huffpost.com/us/entry/us_48…
America is just the beginning. This is a global conservative anti-immigrant conspiracy, reinforcing rising attitudes of nationalism and xenophobia.
Similar sh*t, different country.
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