12/30/2017
If President Donald Trump stops illegal immigration entirely, it won’t make much of a difference in the long run. "Chain migration" continues to drive record immigration into the United States.Long-standing “chain migration” policies that encourage legal immigrants to bring dozens of family members into the U.S. led to an explosion of entries in 2016, 53 percent higher than in 2011, according to a new analysis of Census Bureau data.This form of migration also poses a national security threat.With an estimated addition of 1.8 million legal and illegal immigrants, 2016 is tied with 1999 for seeing the most enter, about 600,000 more than at the height of the great migration through New York’s Ellis Island in the 1900s.
['Chain migration' choking US, record 1.8 million immigrants in 2016, 14 million since 2006, by Paul Bedard, Washington Examiner, December 28, 2017]
Recently, immigrants brought into the U.S. by their legal family members have been linked to crime and terrorism, notably last week’s shooting rampage in Harrisburg, Pa. and the arrest of a Pakistani on terror charges.President Trump has announced his determination to end chain migration.
Most green cards in the United States are awarded based on an antiquated system of family ties, not skill or merit. This system of Chain Migration — whereby one immigrant can bring in their entire extended families, who can bring in their families and so on — de-skills the labor force, puts downward pressure on wages, and increases the deficit. Chain Migration also undermines national security, by failing to establish merit-based criteria for evaluating entrants into the United States — instead, familial relations are all that is required to obtain a green card and, in turn, become a voting U.S. Citizen within a short period of time, with access to Federal welfare and government benefits.Naturally, the way the Left is pushing back against the effort to end chain migration is by pathologizing the term itself, making debate impossible.[It’s Time To End Chain Migration, December 15, 2017]
In response to the White House push to end chain migration, immigration expansionists and the media are doing their best to taint the phrase. Google “so-called chain migration” and you get hits from CNN, The Hill, the New York Daily News, Politico, and plenty of others. The New York Times has labeled the term “pejorative,” while the Wall Street Journal reports (in a news story, just to be clear) that “Mr. Trump and his allies have begun derisively using the term ‘chain migration.’” The Associated Press refers to “what critics and the White House refer to as ‘chain migration,’” while the Washington Post writes about “a practice that critics call ‘chain migration.’”This is how the Left always operates. Instead of having a discussion on the merits, it decrees the debate is offensive.Immigration expansionists who aren’t reporters, on both the right and left, have also weighed in. Technology immigration lobbyist Stuart Anderson, for instance, writes on “the myth of chain migration,” claiming that it’s “a contrived term that seeks to put a negative light on a phenomenon that has taken place throughout the history of the country.” His allies at People for the American Way call it “the anti-immigration movement’s term for policies that allow immediate families to stay together,” while Media Matters derides the term as “a misleading nativist buzzword.”
Of course, until ten minutes ago, “chain migration” was just the regular term for earlier immigrants’ sponsoring future immigrants.
[Just Don’t Call It 'Chain Migration!'by Mark Krikorian, National Review, December 21, 2017]
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