Restricting immigration to the US was one of Trump’s core campaign planks, so it’s not like he needs an excuse to hang out the NO VACANCY sign. Circumstances have nonetheless dropped a number of excellent excuses in his lap. With a pandemic still raging and twenty-two million Americans out of work, not stopping all immigration immediately would be downright insane.
MAGApedes were quick to pop the champagne on Twitter following the President’s announcement. After all, Trump’s base has earned the right to celebrate after three years of subsisting on scraps from the big donors’ table.
To be sure, shutting down immigration is ample cause to celebrate. Averting the Death Cult’s scheme to dissolve the American people and elect another is Trump’s number one electoral mandate. He’s been stymied by activist judges and backstabbing legislators–many from his own party–since day one. Leveraging the pandemic to enact a series of bold moves is exactly the right play. Trump even has the example of Viktor Orban to show him how it’s done.
After a rocky first term of fluctuating hopes and false starts, it looks as if Donald Trump is ready to become the President his base elected.
Now that you’ve had your long-awaited white pill, it’s time to wash it down with some sober analysis. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who hopes more that Trump follows through on the literal text of his tweet. But expectations should be set by past results more than words. This is not the first time the President has promised to curtail immigration via executive order. Remember the much-touted executive order to end birthright citizenship from back in 2018? So far, the administration’s only action on that front has been to tweak citizenship protocol for overseas military personnel–a policy change that will affect a whopping twenty-five people a year.
Then there’s the fact that as of this writing, the celebrated EO has yet to be drafted, let alone signed. Blue checks on the Beltway press beat are already buzzing about conjectural exceptions to the order.
Speaking of which, now is a good time to contact the White House and let them know we don’t need any more H1b, H2b, J, or student visas.
To bring the mood back up, it’s encouraging that we’re in the enviable position of having to remind the President which holes to plug in his forthcoming anti-immigration EO. What prompted him to finally get serious? Most pundits will credit Corona-chan with inciting the sense of urgency Trump needs to cut through the red tape that’s bound him. A more realistic take based on examining his past performance observes that Trump has built a career on making bombastic, even outrageous, claims which he then gradually walks back down to earth. Never forget that Trump is a boardroom negotiator, not a Jacksonian strongman.
What will we end up getting from Trump’s immigration order? It’s too early to say for sure, but we have enough accumulated data to hazard a guess. Expect what amounts to an expansion of the current virus travel bans, with exceptions for H1 and 2 bs, farm workers, and students. In short, the base will get half a loaf, but it beats getting left with crumbs.
Speaking of getting stuff from Trump, if you need a way to spend those TrumpBux that are burning a hole in your pocket, my white-knuckle mech thriller is a fun way to allocate one of them.
UPDATE: Called it. What Trump announced tonight amounts to a half-measure that puts a 60-day pause on accepting immigrants seeking permanent residency while exempting those on temporary visas.
It’s about what I expected, and it’s better than nothing, so on the whole I think this is a step in the right direction. We’ll have to keep an eye on the situation to see if further restrictions are added.
I'd say half a loaf is better than a scorpion or a stone. This is the point at which a mainstream politician actually said out loud that immigration was in and of itself a problem, rather than a panacea. Until now it has all been about "illegals".
That's a keen observation. If nothing else, Trump's presidency will have been worthwhile for having moved the Overton Window to the right for the first time in generations.
Even if Trump follows through, America is already brown. Can we expect to see a brown-person battle royale as all of America's brown people wrestle for control of the capitol? And if not, can we bait them into having one anyway?
OK, Fed.
Nerd.
Sorry dude, but he busted you. No one else who reads and responds on this blog talks like that. You are as they say, a troll.
"You don't talk exactly like we do. You're a troll!"
Smooth, Mr. Lopes—although I am an immigrant of sorts to Kairos. As you can see, I have yet to assimilate.
It's not about assimilation. If the the rest of us are not engaging in racist rhetoric, there is no reason for you to believe such things are welcome here. That you proceeded with it anyway suggests you are trying to bait people. You are quite transparent.
Are you serious? My racism has gotten me banned from neither Alexander Hellene's blog nor Rawle Nyanzi's (though I admit that the bulk of my racist comments are on Amatopia), and neither have accused me of trollery. I also guarantee you that I'm browner than you, because I was even born with the Mongolian birthmark.
When did Manhattan and LA County become a proxy for the entire nation, anywhere but in their own imaginations? I daresay that there are many cities and counties, if not whole states, that are, outside the cities, as white as the driven snow (or a Swedish Lutheran's backside in the dead of winter).
Second, skin color is not the determinant. Cult is. Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart, to paraphrase Samuel. A Mahometan Somali and an Ethiopian Coptic Christian are in no sense functionally equivalent, even with precisely the same skin tone. Likewise an Arab Christian or an Arab Islamist from the same region of the same country. To bring the point very close to home, a white pagan or a white socialist is a threat to the good order of our society in ways that the Arab Christian, the Ethiopian Copt, or a St Thomas Christian from Mumbai or Bangalore would not be.
Theologically, I have may have more in common with my eastern Christian bretheren than with pasty-white Protestants and atheists, but for now, I'd rather the Baptists continue to run my state.
I'm not sure how well that will work. The Baptists put a lot of stock in Freedom, in ways that might leave them unable to defend virtue coherently. I say this as a former Baptist. Some of my favorite people are still Baptist – specifically my parents. The progressives like to use against them the fact that Evangelicals were slow to join Catholics on the line in the battle for life. They have a point, in part, though it is obscured by their tendency to see everything as a zero sum power struggle. We should have seen the battle for what it was long ago
It won't—but my hardy Polish friend needs to rally more Zoomers to Catholicism before I surrender my state to the USCCB.
I think we should worry less about the College of Bishops and more about the College of Liberal Arts. We're being subverted by our academics, not conquered by our clerics, though seminaries that undermine the faith of their students rather than preparing them for faithful, fruitful ministry are arguably no small part of the problem.
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Trump continues to frustrate. One of the most frustrating parts about him is he does keep his promises (in part), and is more or less doing a good job. It's just that it is always half measures, some good, but not enough. If it was 10 or 20 years ago he'd be the perfect president. Now every single one of these measures he takes aren't enough.
As Brian has said, 'we aren't voting our way out of this', and we'd be in a bad position no matter who won.
Still I can appreciate what he has done, like the slow deregulation, the court packing, and the quiet behind the scenes war on underage sex trafficking that seems to be going on.
Your view is pretty representative of where most thinking people in Trump's base are at this point. It's been said before, but there's a lot of truth to the observation that Trump isn't a reformer. He's like a virus the establishment has no natural resistance to, but instead of causing death directly, the pathogen drives the victim insane. His greatest achievement is exposing the Deep State and the media as aloof, entitled, and incompetent tyrants who hate their own subjects.
When I think of the forces arrayed against President Trump, I think he is accomplishing the most he can. He’s far more successful than I expected. But pre-2016, I’ll admit, I was very pessimistic. I’m much more optimistic now considering the state of affairs.
He’s not perfect but he’s far better than I expected.
That's the right attitude. Even back in 2016 I gave Trump less than a 1% chance of successfully implementing his agenda. It's important that dissidents be both realistic and patient.