Pity Donald J. Trump, who as president of the United States is both the most powerful leader in the country, not to say the free world, and yet one who, being freely elected, tends to swing and sway with the slightest change in fickle American opinion.
Such is the nature of the democracy this republic has become over its short but remarkably continuous history. So now he's plugging for a change in the country's definition of family so it would be limited to spouses and children who haven't yet come of age. The result could cut legal immigration to this country in half--with all the consequences that change could leave in its wake.
In this year's State of the Union address, the president claimed the state of the country's immigration laws posed a clear and ever more present danger to the Union itself. He cited the case of an immigrant from Bangladesh who tried to set off a bomb in New York. He called it an example of "chain immigration," a term for what many of us know as family unification.
After all, restrictions to immigration in this country are already strict. Just ask Ricardo Magpantay, who's been trying to obtain visas for his wife and children to immigrate from the Philippines for decades. By the time a visa was granted, the kids had grown up. Time may fly, but not when you're waiting for your family to get here and join you.
When he reads that the president may further restrict the number of relations that an immigrant turned citizen can sponsor, he can only fret. "It is really frustrating and it is very dreadful for me because after a long wait, if this [new] bill will be passed, what will happen for them?" Mr. Magpantay asks. He's now 68 years old and a mechanical engineer in Murietta, Cal., a typical example of an American success story. As he says of his forever-waiting family back in the Philippines, "I won't be able to bring them forever."
The president has lobbyists like Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies behind him on this volatile question. President Trump, according to Director Krikorian, "has forced issues to the forefront that need to be debated." In other words, few people other than the narrow specialists at Mr. Krikorian's organization were interested in limiting family sponsorship for people who would like to immigrate to this country. Thanks to President Trump, it's become a subject of general interest. So now the centrality of family in society, once rightly taken for granted, is now a proposition subject to challenge.
"They're being disingenuous," says Anu Joshi of the New York Immigration Council. "This is just about cutting family, it's a family ban," when it comes to setting immigration quotas.
It wasn't an issue back in the Roaring Twenties, when the supply of immigrants to this country was at a high tide--and needed to be in order to meet the demand of a growing country for more workers, scientists, and immigrants of every description. They would do everything from digging ditches to building skyscrapers--and achieve remarkable success.
Back then the system, based on the national origin of many Americans, favored immigrants from northern and western Europe, and left those from southern and eastern Europe snubbed. They were soon pushing for equal access to this land of the free and home of the brave. And they got it. Along with immigrants from all over the globe, including China and India and the Philippines.
Ours isn't the only American generation to have its Dreamers--and may it always be so. Royce Murray, policy director for the American Immigration Council in Washington, says immigrants bringing family with them to this country can be vital in showing newcomers how to make it. "The idea someone came before us and wanted to work hard and bring their family," she points out, "is actually a very unifying value, a very bipartisan value. Wanting to reunify families should be common ground, and we're struggling against this hostile branding to make it something that it's not."
What it is, is not only fair but as American as apple pie.
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Paul Greenberg is the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer and columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Editorial on 02/28/2018