President Donald Trump has been pushing steps to restrict migration to the United States for many years. Now he’s utilizing the coronavirus pandemic to justify a crackdown on immigration that puts vulnerable migrants– consisting of children– at threat and separates households, and might deepen the existing economic crisis.
Since stating a nationwide emergency situation over COVID-19 in March, Trump has actually halted refugee resettlement, deported unaccompanied kids fleeing violence and abuse, suspended some categories of legal immigration, closed the border to asylum-seekers and repeatedly pressed back court hearings for people awaiting them in Mexico. On Monday, he restricted legal migration even further via executive order.
Trump has declared these policies are essential to prevent the spread of COVID-19 from other countries and to protect American employees from competitors for tasks during the pandemic-related monetary crisis. However numerous of the migration policies rammed through in recent months have actually been on the president’s to-do list because his very first year in workplace. The pandemic didn’t develop a requirement for nativist immigration policies; it just supplied a reason for them.
That includes the Mexican border wall, an exceptionally costly project promise that Trump continues to push even during a financial decline. On Tuesday, Trump traveled to Arizona, where COVID-19 cases are increasing, to check out border wall building and falsely boast that his family pet job had safeguarded Americans from COVID-19 “I constructed the wall and it worked 100%,” Trump said. The border wall, the president wrongly claimed, “stopped COVID, it stopped everything, it stopped the whole deal.”
This isn’t true, however it does fit a pattern for the president, whose focus during the pandemic often relies on blaming other countries for it.
Throughout his very first address to the nation on COVID-19 in March, Trump made it clear that his main reaction to the coronavirus would be to blame other nations and shut off U.S. borders He repeatedly defined the coronavirus as a “foreign infection” and argued that prohibiting people from other nations was essential to consisting of the break out in the U.S.
Ever Since, the Trump administration has issued a minimum of 48 policy changes related to the U.S. migration system, according to a count by the National Migration Forum, consisting of a number of that have an indefinite timeline. At the same time, the U.S. has actually failed to reduce its number of day-to-day brand-new COVID-19 cases, as other nations hard-hit by the virus have managed to do.
Some of the most sweeping modifications came by means of executive order on Monday. The new order bans multiple type of brand-new work visas and will enter into effect this week, lasting through the end of the year. The policy stops the issuance of the H-1B visa for skilled workers– a long time target for immigration hard-liners– the H-2B visa for seasonal employees in industries like hospitality and food processin