Trump Doesn't Just Dislike "Dreamers", But ALL Immigrants

(This caricature of Donald Trump is by DonkeyHotey.)

We must not forget, in the light of Trump's executive order removing protections for "Dreamers" by nullifying DACA, that it's not just the "Dreamers" that Trump opposes -- he dislikes all immigrants.

The following article (part of which is posted below) is by Matt Bai at Yahoo News. He reminds us of this, and asks whether Trump's view is supported by other Republicans (or whether they support the traditional view that immigrants help this country). Personally, I think the modern Republican Party has already answered that question -- by electing and supporting a xenophobic, bigoted, racist as their leader.

Mr. Bai writes:

You also have to look at Trump’s enthusiastic support, in a speech at the White House last month, for a plan that would slash legal immigration, overturning decades of bipartisan measures that made it easier for immigrants to bring their relatives to the country and that opened America’s borders to refugees from persecution.

We’re not talking about potential terrorists here, or drug mules tunneling under the desert in the dark of night. We’re talking about the kind of industrious, risk-taking immigrants without whom most of us wouldn’t be here to debate these things today. . . .

Trump is not a guy who resents illegal immigration because it’s unsafe for the country and unfair to the hardworking, law-abiding immigrants who embrace our laws and ideals and who give up everything they’ve known for their children’s future.

Trump is a guy who resents immigrants, period. He is a neo-nativist. His “America first” actually means “Americans only.”

His story about combating furtive outsiders who steal jobs and menace communities is a simplistic story meant to arouse age-old passions and prejudices. His aim isn’t to restore order and lawfulness, but to incite disorder and fear — to harvest cheap adoration from those who fear the unfamiliar.

This is why, long before he ever ran for president, Trump made a crusade of falsely attacking Obama’s lineage. It wasn’t only because he was trying to fuel his own political ambitions. It was because when you fundamentally believe that outsiders are the cause of economic and social disruption, it stands to reason that the president you disdain must be an outsider, too.

This is a worldview, not incidentally, that puts Trump outside the mainstream of his Republican predecessors. Ronald Reagan signed legislation extending amnesty to millions of undocumented immigrants. George H.W. Bush expanded legal immigration. George W. Bush made outreach to immigrants a centerpiece of his “compassionate conservatism.”

The intellectual argument for cultural conservatism, with its rejection of identity politics and diversity-by-quota, idealizes our tradition of assimilating immigrants. It holds that we are still the melting pot society, accepting anyone who will adopt our national customs and credos, assuring equality of opportunity but not equality of outcomes.

That’s not where Trump is. He seeks to restore the Buchananite faction of the party. (Pat, not Daisy.) He doesn’t believe there’s room for a melting pot in a world where factories relocate or shutter, where terrorists loom in the darkness and where most of the immigrants aren’t white.

These aren’t simple issues. Immigration is a harder sell in an imperiled empire than in a thriving incubator of the middle class. It’s not coincidence that Trump’s moment coincides with the rise of other nationalist movements in the world, where workers feel threatened by declining industries and porous borders.

But Republicans, in particular, have a choice to make. They can hold firm to the traditional conservative argument, or they can allow their party to be transformed by Trumpism. They can stand up for our essential identity as a nation of immigrants, or they can blame outsiders for all that ails the society.

What you can’t do, anymore, is tell me that somehow this president does both.