President Trump Says He Wants More Legal Immigration Than Ever

When I heard President Trump say he wanted immigrants “in the largest numbers ever” to come to the United States during the State of the Union address, I initially assumed he had just flubbed one of his scripted lines or was babbling as he tends to do:

“President Trump on Wednesday said he wants to increase the number of people who legally migrate to the U.S. “because our unemployment numbers are so low.”

Trump, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office, said there is an influx of companies “coming back into our country,” and that people legally coming into the U.S. are needed to fill those positions.

“We have seven car companies coming back in right now and there’s going to be a lot more,” Trump said. “We’ve done really well with this, and we need people.”

Trump’s remarks came after he made a surprising push for immigration during his second State of the Union address on Tuesday night.

“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” the president said, before ad-libbing that he wants people to enter the U.S. “in the largest numbers ever.”

When asked by a reporter with Louisiana’s The Advocate newspaper if he was officially changing his immigration policy, Trump said: “I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.” …

He later clarified that he really was changing his position.

In his view, unemployment is down and wages are rising, so now we need to increase legal immigration to offset the limited gains that the working class has made during his presidency. Trump has been saying something to this effect to Big Ag for a while now, but it was still startling that he put it in the State of the Union Address. He is ditching his “Hire American” policy.

“Trump’s statement also gives a green light to the panel of GOP and Democratic appropriators in Congress who are trying to overcome the partisan gridlock over the border wall and border security, Krikorian added. The legislators are expected to draft a compromise by February 15 that can expand several migration-related programs which allow employers to import cheap, temporary “visa workers” instead of hiring Americans at market rates, he said.

Trump “is not only making it easier for appropriators to approve this guest-worker increase, it seems to be that he’s telegraphing to them that’s what they should do,” Krikorian said.

One of the draft visa-worker expansions is dubbed “country caps.” It would remove diversity provisions in immigration law to allow employers to offer citizenship to roughly 100,000 Indian outsourcing workers each year if they agree to cheaply replace the American graduates who are now working in well-paid software, accounting, design, engineering, medicine, and education careers. The panel is expected to draft their plan by February 15.

The “country caps” bill may be approved this month without any hearings to gauge the impact on the American middle-class. …”

– No border wall

– No change in illegal immigration

– No E-Verify

– No change in sanctuary cities

President Trump can’t point to any big victories on immigration during his presidency. And yet, he wants to take a marginal uptick in working class wages and an improvement in the job market – one of the few brights spots of the last two years – and erase it by caving to business lobbyists.