An economist at the University of Maryland says President Trump’s recently released list of immigration priorities “would foster” a “less-divided America.”
This week, the Trump Administration released a slew of demands that it is asking Congress to endorse. Those priorities include:
- Construction of a border wall;
- Deporting unaccompanied alien children who are not at-risk in their native country;
- Preventing criminal illegal aliens and gang members from receiving immigration benefits;
- Mandating E-Verify, which weeds out illegal aliens from taking U.S. jobs;
- Eliminating the diversity visa lottery;
- Classifying overstaying a visa as a ‘misdemeanor’;
- Restricting certain federal grants to sanctuary cities, which refuse to detain criminal illegal aliens;
- Ending family-based chain migration; and
- Enacting a merit-based legal immigration where only qualified immigrants can enter the U.S.
Economist Peter Morici is breaking with some peers to support Trump’s overhaul agenda, saying it would give much-needed relief to America’s working-class, which has been “alienated by the ethnic diversity and libertine values of larger cities.”
“Immigration stresses social cohesion, especially among the working class,” Morici wrote in a column for the Baltimore Sun. “New arrivals compete for jobs and often eat different foods, practice different religions and have different family and community traditions.”
“Folks in small towns and rural counties, riveted by the loss of factories and consolidation in agriculture, increasingly rely on those very things to cope,” Morici continued. “And they feel alienated by the ethnic diversity and libertine values of larger cities. Those are important reasons why they don’t leave for educational and employment opportunities in diverse urban settings and have abandoned the Democratic Party.”
Though the working and middle-classes of America have been burdened with rapidly disintegrated communities because of illegal and legal immigration, Morici says, the elites of major U.S. cities like New York, New York and Los Angeles, California have been spared from nearly all of immigration’s social impacts:
Liberals in big cities — especially in the media and universities who shape public perceptions — dismiss middle-American ambivalence as ill-informed, xenophobic and racist.
After all, the urban elite work harmoniously in Manhattan office buildings, California technology centers and the like where cultural affinities that bring together professional groups tend to overwhelm ethnic differences among highly educated adults — if nothing else, professional schools like mine socialize students to common metropolis values and behavior.
What works for Ivy League and elite state university graduates does not rhyme well for ordinary working folks in America’s interior.
Morici says that with Trump’s victory in the 2016 presidential election, “the will of the common folks should be served” on immigration.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart Texas. Follow him on Twitter at @JxhnBinder.