If you thought Donald’s immigration plan couldn’t get any more strict, think again.
Donald Trump used the March 10 GOP debate to make a dramatic call for a pause in legal immigration after 50 years of continuously rising legal immigration.
The call may shift the nation’s immigration debate away the emotional — but subsidiary — issue of illegal immigration.
“I’d say a minimum of one year, maybe two years,” Trump said during the debate in Miami, Fla.
“It is very significant that a major presidential candidate has called for a pause in legal immigration,” said Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “It’s a signal that he’s serious about dealing with high [rates of legal] immigration,” he said.
Legal immigration was sharply cut in 1924 amid political pressure from voters. But it restarted in 1965 during the height of the post-war economic boom when wages were rising, crime was lower and wealth was spread much more evenly.
Currently, the federal government allows 1 million foreign wage-cutting migrants to enter the United States each year, even though 4 million young Americans enter the weak job market each year.
The current population of illegals is roughly 14 million, and rising. But the population of legal immigrants and their children is roughly 45 million, according to a CIS study.
Before Trump’s call for a pause, the 2015 and 2016 immigration debate has been focused on the much smaller issue of illegal immigration, which adds a few hundred thousand workers a year to the current population of roughly 14 million illegal migrants.
Multiple polls show that almost all Americans wants businesses and schools to hire and teach Americans before migrants, and many polls show much stronger support for immigration reductions than support for increased immigration.
But many business groups want high immigration because it provides them with wage-cutting workers and welfare-funded customers. Progressives want also additional immigration, because it provides more government-dependent migrants who will likely vote Democratic after they get citizenship.
This plan no doubt seems controversial at first thought, but it really may not be. There is no preordained right to American immigration, it’s a privilege, and its a privilege that, for now, may be hurting our country’s economy and safety. Stopping the system might just be the easiest way to overhaul it altogether, and that’s something politicians on both sides of the isle agree must happen.
Source: Breitbart
Good, it’s taken long enough dammit!