I have a few thoughts on this story about @realDonaldTrump & his immigration policies... mobile.nytimes.com/2017/12/23/us/…
1. It's a very peculiar view of American democracy to say the elected president is "defying" the unelected bureaucracy. I suspect @nytimes would never run that headline about, say, President Obama.
2. It's not a "nativist view" to say immigration policy should be crafted to benefit American citizens, not foreigners. Slandering "white working-class Americans" with that term is an example of the closed thinking that helped Trump win.
3. Likewise, I did not use, nor would I use, the phrase "anti-immigrant conservatives." Again, you can thank this kind of thinking for Trump's victory, Brexit, Merkel being unable to form a government ... I could go on.
4. The State Department does not set annual refugee numbers under the law. That responsibility belongs to @POTUS alone. State can advise; he decides.
5. Plus, President Obama only increased refugee quota to 110k in final years of his tenure, partly as a result of his disastrous Syria policy. Average actual refugee admissions (not paper quota) is close to where @realDonaldTrump set it this year.
6. And it's plainly better & cheaper to keep refugees in their region than to remove them. I've been to a Syrian refugee camp. They wanted to go home, not go to Europe or US. Besides, we can't possibly resettle every potential refugee out of their region.
7. The way to solve a refugee crisis is not immigration policy, but wise foreign policy. Eight years of feckless foreign policy under President Obama is one reason the world faces so many refugee crises.
8. The "humanitarian program" for Haitians is TPS, or Temporary Protected Status. That's right, the T stands for temporary. TPS covers things like natural disasters, as Haiti suffered in 2010. It doesn't cover living standards lower than US.
9. @realDonaldTrump is right when he calls things like the diversity lottery & chain migration "a joke." That's the exact kind of bipartisan, conventional orthodoxy that he defied in 2016, which contributed in no small part to his victory.
10. And if mass amnesty without real reform, eg, the DREAM Act, were so popular, Dems would've shut down government over it. But it's not, they know it, & that's why they folded & passed a funding bill without amnesty. THE END.
