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Trump's remarks during European trip illuminate actions at home

donaldjtrump.com

Commentary: President Trump let his blustery, undiplomatic best rip this week in England, making highly revealing comments about immigration in Europe in a wide-ranging interview with The Sun.

“So I think allowing millions and millions of people to come into Europe is very, very sad.

“I think you are losing your culture. Look around. You go through certain areas that didn’t exist 10 or 15 years ago.”

Trump’s criticisms of immigration and resulting policies in the United States are generally given as economic and safety concerns. But one has to wonder in light of his comments this week, about largely immigrants of color flowing into Europe, if his focus onreducing immigration has more to do with losing his own culture.
Three years ago the U.S. Censusprojected by the time the 2020 census is conducted “more than half of the nation’s children are expected to be part of a minority race or ethnic group” and that the U.S. population as a whole in following decades would follow “a similar trend.” By 2044, the government agency wrote, the country as a whole would become majority-minority.

The “Two or More Races” population is expected to grow fastest, followed by Asians and Hispanics, according to the Census report. (You can find that info on Page 9). Hispanics, which accounted for around 17 percent of the U.S. population in 2014, are projected to account for 29 percent of the population by 2060.  

That same year, the minority population is projected to represent 56 percent of the U.S. total, compared with 38 percent in 2014, the authors of the report wrote.

Some see the fight over immigration as a front in a large, decades-long war over how quickly the demographics of the U.S. population change through the 21st century.

And it comes as debate on what helped Trump win has ensued over the past year and a half, with researchers and scholars discussing in part whether it was economic anxiety — understood largely as people in areas left behind economically voting for him — or something deeper in the cultural bedrock, such as whites threatened by losing status in a changing nation.

Trump’s hard line on immigration has serious consequences for those seeking jobs and security in the United States.

For instance, his remarks in England come in the wake of a disastrous and subsequently reversed policy of separating children from parents after they crossed the southern border, in some cases even parents seeking asylum. Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy of detaining immigrants rather than releasing them while they wait for a judicial hearing separated more than 2,000 children from their parents before Trump reversed course in June.

While national news outlets are no longer providing wall-to-wall coverage, ongoing reporting continues by The Texas Tribune. Along the way, the outlet has provided some remarkable explanatory reporting, including a piece New Mexico In Depth published this weekdescribing how Trump’s administration is making it more difficult for people fleeing violence to seek asylum.

Pointing to high numbers of asylum seekers, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions says the system is being “gamed” by those who simply want to enter the country illegally. But immigration advocates interviewed by the Texas Tribune counter that an increased pool of asylum seekers simply means the system is working as it should.

“If the numbers get too big … they start saying, ‘Well, this isn’t legitimate. These aren’t real asylum-seekers,’” said Michelle Brané, director of the migrant rights and justice program for the Women’s Refugee Commission, a national advocacy group. “Anytime you have an actual serious conflict or crisis, the numbers are going to be high. Those high numbers are exactly what that process was created to address.”
 

 

Immigration in the news

  • Alison Jimena Valencia Madrid’s plaintive cries for a phone call made the child separations real and visceral for Americans. ProPublica was there when Jimena was reunited with her mom and their case gives an insight into the process of other family reunifications.
  • Turns our detaining children is a good business. It’s worth about $1 billion a year, a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.
  • Then there’s this evocative read from the New York Times' Simon Romero about a group called Águilas del Desierto, or Eagles of the Desert, who go out into remote areas to find the bodies of immigrants who died from exposure to extreme heat or drowned in irrigation canals. At least 412 migrants were found dead in 2017, up from 398 the previous year, despite a decline in the number of border crossings throughout the Southwest.