Trump Says He'll Reform Immigration By Executive Order

When President Obama protected DACA individuals with an executive order, Republicans (including Trump) lost their minds. They filed suit in federal court, saying the president could not change immigration law with an executive order. But now Trump wants to do that. He wants to substantially reform immigration by issuing an executive order, and the primary goal he has is to institute a merit-based immigration. In a roundtable discussion in Florida on July 31st, he said:

"We’re also doing a full immigration plan. We’re going to take care of a lot things that, for 25 years, they’ve been trying to get an immigration plan. 

We’re going to be doing merit-based immigration. I’m sure you’d be happy to hear that. But it’s merit-based. It’s very powerfully merit-based."

I doubt he can legally reform immigration by executive order, but who knows with the current conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Anyway, it would be a terrible idea if he could.

One of the arguments against immigration that Trump (and his Republican cohorts) use is that immigration takes jobs away from American citizens.

 It's not true. Currently, many immigrants don't have the education or skills to take good and high-paying jobs away from citizens. Instead, they take the dirty, dangerous, and low-paying jobs that American citizens don't want. A merit-based immigration plan would change that. It would allow only immigrants to enter that had the education or skills to take the high-paying jobs now held by Americans.

The corporations would love it, because they could replace the highly-paid American workers with foreigners who would work for lower wages (just so they could get into the country). And any American worker that wanted to keep his job would have to agree to a lower wage, or be replaced by a foreign worker who'll take that lower wage.

The middle class in this country is already shrinking. Merit-based immigration will just shrink it further by putting Americans out-of-work and lowering wages.

Republicans only care about helping corporations squeeze a few more dollars out of abusing their workers. They care nothing about those workers. Merit-based immigration will help the corporations and hurt the workers. It is a terrible idea.