Those two ads, and the predictably weak response, met the legal requirement necessary to import foreign workers under the H-2B visa program from October 2017 until June 2018.
There was, perhaps, one positive in these foreign workers being hired at Mar-a-Lago to wait on Trump’s paying guests. Unlike Melania Knauss Trump, they wouldn’t be violating American law.
* * *
Trump often states as fact that illegal immigrants are a drag on the economy. He complains of “Americans losing their jobs to foreign workers.”
To stop that he supported the RAISE Act, for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. It would fundamentally change the rules on legal immigration, something Congress did in 1924 and again in 1965. Ostensibly the bill’s purpose is to “establish a skills-based immigration points system, to focus family-sponsored immigration on spouses and minor children, to eliminate the Diversity Visa Program, to set a limit on the number of refugees admitted annually to the United States.”
That would mean that more people with job skills could enter the country, which in general will tend to depress wages for people with similar skills, but which may also help grow the economy. The focus on spouses and minor children means that grandparents, grandchildren, and cousins are out and the age of minors would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen.
The bill was analyzed at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, the school Trump claims he attended when he went only to its undergraduate program in real-estate economics.
The analysis found that the bill would make wages grow briefly in the short term but that as the years rolled by the new policy would destroy American jobs, resulting in slower economic growth. That certainly is not what Trump claimed he would do with his slogans about America First and Make America Great Again.
The most interesting finding from the Penn Wharton budget model computer program was that simply doubling the number of immigrants from about 800,000 per year to 1.6 million would do the most to increase economic growth per person. The education level of the immigrants did not matter.
This larger influx would result in significantly more Gross Domestic Product per capita, which would reach $83,700 in 2050. Leaving the number of immigrants at 800,000, but requiring that 55 percent arrive with high job skills, would mean no more than $76,100 per capita of economic output. Thus, more immigrants regardless of job skills is better for Americans overall by 10 percent.
The most troubling finding of this study was that the RAISE Act favored by Trump “could shave two percentage points off GDP growth and cause a loss of more than four million jobs” by the year 2040.
Kent Smetters, the Wharton business professor who worked on the computer model, noted that immigrants of all kinds are a “net positive” because they “tend to work pretty hard, they tend to have a very high attachment rate to the labor force, they are less likely to be on unemployment insurance” because they come to America in the hopes of improving their and their family’s economics.
In addition, Smetters said, “as younger members of the workforce, immigrants also help pay for Social Security and Medicare for the elderly. That is a crucial benefit as the U.S.,” like many other countries with modern economies, faces an aging population with a shrinking ratio of workers to retirees.
The Wharton model is available without charge, allowing people to experiment with policy options at www.budgetmodel.wharton.upenn.edu/immigration/.
Jim Acosta, a network television correspondent whose parents fled Castro’s Cuba, asked at a White House press briefing about the RAISE Act, which favors English-speaking immigrants. His question drew a sharp, condescending response from the designated White House spokesman, Stephen Miller, a Steve Bannon associate who often sounds like a white nationalist.
Acosta brought up the poem in the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal and its famous last lines:
Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!
Acosta said the proposed immigration policy seemed to run counter to those ideals. Miller shot back that the poem was added to its pedestal later, while the statute is “a symbol of American liberty lighting the world.”
What Miller didn’t say, or didn’t know, or perhaps knew but didn’t want others to know, is that Lazarus’s 1883 poem was critical to the efforts to raise money for the pedestal on which the statue stands. The statue was not completed until three years later, making her words integral.
This might seem an odd subject for the White House spokesman of the day to raise, but it stems from an active discussion among the people that Bannon calls the alt-right and critics call racists and white supremacists to develop a narrative that most immigrants are unworthy of America.
A leading racist, Richard Spencer, who says he was Miller’s mentor, which Miller does not dispute, had denounced the Emma Lazarus poem three days before Trump became president.
“It’s offensive that such a beautiful, inspiring statue was ever associated with ugliness, weakness, and deformity,” Spencer tweeted. This theme was picked up a few days later by Rush Limbaugh, the right-wing radio talk show host. He told his audience that “the Statue of Liberty had absolutely nothing to do with immigration” and mused, “Why do people think that it does? Well, there was a socialist poet.”
David Duke, the former KKK leader, attacked the poem and Lazarus in “The Jewish Led Alien Invasion,” a chapter in one of his books filled with diatribes against Jews and others he hates.
In the fluid zone between white nationalists in the Trump White House and violent racists in Charlottesville, the Statute of Liberty has become a symbol of efforts to make America white again, although, of course, it never was all white.
An immigrant from Ireland, John Carney, took up the Acosta-Miller exchange. Carney is the economics editor at Breitbart, Bannon’s gathering place for the like-minded.
Carney tweeted that what Breitbart and Trump call the “opposition” news media were engaged in “the Weaponization of the Statue of Liberty.” He also pointed to political cartoons that used the statue and caricatures of Trump to argue visually that the president wants immigration restricted to white, English-speaking Christians.
Then Carney focused his attention on the September 2017 cover of Vogue. The fashion magazine featured an Annie Leibovitz photograph of actress Jennifer Lawrence in a low-cut, tight-fitting red satin dress. Lawrence was leaning against a metal railing as if on the prow of a ship, the statue behind her, surrounded by water and clouds in luscious shades of blue.
Breitbart’s Carney saw this as an attack on Trump’s Make America Great Again theme, connecting it to the Acosta-Miller exchange. “We’re going to have to create a full #MAGA shadow cultural industry because the Opposition Media can’t even do fashion without attacking us.”
But there was a problem with Carney insinuating that the Vogue cover was part of a journalistic cabal. Zara Rahim, the Vogue spokeswoman, informed Carney that the photo could not have anything to do with that August exchange in the White House press briefing room because “we shot this in June, buddy.”
* * *
Trump regards Brietbart as a reliable source of information, just as he has made statements that trace back to the Russian propaganda website Sputnik, the neo-Nazi Daily Stormer, and InfoWars, where host Alex Jones carries on about the “interdimensional beings” secretly controlling American elites. Trump has been an InfoWars guest.
None of these information sources that Trump relies on considers refugees to be a crisis worthy of American help. None writes favorably or evenhandedly about people of color, especially regarding immigration. None pays heed to humanitarian crises caused by wars, famine, and other disruptions, even though 66 million people, nearly one percent of earth’s population, were forced to live away from their homes in 20
16.
That estimate by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees counted a third of these people as refugees. More than a third came from two predominantly Muslim countries, Afghanistan and Syria, where American military actions played a major role in forcing people to flee. But the sources of information Trump relies on share with him a bias against Muslims and Islam.
Nearly 85,000 people entered America in 2016 as refugees, about one tenth of legal immigrants. Other countries, many of them desperately poor, like Chad, allowed in far more refugees. Sweden, with 10 million people, has about half as many refugees as America with its more than 320 million people. To Miller, Limbaugh, Bannon, Carney, Jones, and the others, those 85,000 refugees are about 84,999 too many.
These “information” sources also keep up a steady alarmist tone about the border with Mexico even though illegal crossings into the United States fell sharply with the Great Recession and have been flat since, according to federal government data and reports by private organizations. Of the estimated 9 to 11 million people living in the United States without authorization, two thirds came more than a decade earlier, the Pew Research Center found.
Those crossing the border in 2017 were more likely to come from Central America and Asia than Mexico, whose economy has improved since NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, was signed in 1993. But to the sources of information Trump relies on, all immigrants look alike and all are to be feared and kept out unless they look and talk like people on the alt-right. And to Trump, foreign workers are bad, unless they serve his Mar-a-Lago customers, earning cheap wages with no tips.
PART VIII
* * *
CONCLUSION
The Con Unravels
As these pages show, based on his own words and deeds, Donald Trump is manifestly unfit to hold any public office. That Donald Trump legitimately holds office under our Constitution is beyond question. That he is a clear and present danger to the whole world should be obvious by now.
Trump lacks the emotional stability, knowledge, critical-thinking skills, and judgment to be commander in chief. Emotionally he remains the thirteen-year-old troublemaker his father sent off to a military academy, where by his own account brutality was common. Being stuck in the awkward year between childhood and maturity for nearly six decades is a terrible fate, one that has twisted Trump’s personality and explains much of his narcissism, immature attitudes about women, disregard for others, and his imagined intellectual gifts shown by his frequent declaration that “I’m like a smart person.”
Even by the standards of the incurious George W. Bush, Trump is appallingly ignorant. Not knowing a Shia Muslim from a Sunni Muslim or why this division within Islam matters deeply to American foreign policy decisions, Trump spews bigotry against all Muslims. George W. Bush constantly reminded the world that our response to 9/11 was not a war on Islam, that the faith was not the issue, but rather the abuse of it by zealots. Bush participated in Muslim religious events to emphasize that point.
Trump not only inflames hatred of all Muslims, he also allows himself to be used by the Saudis. They support the most violent faction of the Islamic religion and finance terrorists while Trump praises Riyadh for fighting against terrorism, unaware of how out of touch his words are.
More surprising than Trump’s lack of knowledge of geopolitics is his ignorance of economics, the field in which he was given a bachelor’s degree by the University of Pennsylvania. Anyone who did the work to earn such a degree would know that imposing a tariff on imports from Mexico to pay for his wall means that American consumers would bear the cost, not Mexicans.
Worse is Trump’s faux patriotism.
That Trump’s loyalties are divided, that he owes something to Moscow, is obvious from his many words of praise for Vladimir Putin, his years of lucrative financial transactions, and his hiring of Paul Manafort to run his campaign. Whether Trump is merely a fool or a knowing Kremlin agent is unresolved at this writing. What we know for sure is that the Trump campaign eagerly solicited the Kremlin’s help to defeat Hillary Clinton, wanted to use Russian diplomatic links to secretly communicate with Moscow, and that Trump directly participated in lying and covering up that secret collaboration with a hostile foreign power.
That Trump has no regard for decency in politics is shown by his leading chants of “Lock her up” and asking people at rallies to pledge loyalty to him just as James Comey, the FBI director he fired, said he was asked to do in private. These are words and actions befitting a dictator, not an American president. But they also fit with Trump’s philosophy. Those who turn the other cheek as Jesus Christ taught in the Sermon on the Mount are fools, idiots, and losers, Trump has said many times. His philosophy is revenge and violence against others, decidedly anti-Christian attitudes that have not dissuaded many prominent television preachers from their enthusiastic endorsements of him as a “fine Christian family man.”
Trump maintains strong support among roughly a third of Americans. Many of them are old enough to have lived through all or part of the Cold War and yet some of them tell journalists, focus group leaders, and pollsters that, like Trump, they trust Putin’s regime more than American intelligence agencies. During the Cold War, for sure, Republican politicians loudly denounced anyone who espoused such views as useful idiots, fellow travelers, and traitors.
This core of support, almost entirely among Republicans, means that sitting members of the House and Senate cannot go up against Trump unless they are confident they can win the next primary election. John Danforth, the former Republican senator from Missouri, said he was speaking out against Trump specifically because congressional Republicans cannot. Their inaction may be profiles in cowardice, but it also shows how the system of checks and balances built into our Constitution is not working as intended.
Trump may be part of a larger global social force, a political tsunami of fear and rejection of the modern world and a nostalgic desire to go back to an imagined past of peace and simplicity. We see this force in the rise of fundamentalist Christians, Hindus, Jews, and Muslims as well as a new age of dictators from Putin to Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to nationalists like India’s Narendra Modi.
Great social waves, like tsunamis, cannot be stopped by holding up signs in protest. They must instead continue until their destructive energy dissipates. Our hope must be that the future will produce better leaders, not worse.
* * *
And then there are Trump’s many delusions.
Trump claims to know more about the jihadis who created the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL, than America’s generals. He claims to know how to deal with North Korea, an impoverished cult state, and yet until the president of China gave him a long history lesson by telephone, Trump admits he had no knowledge of the history of conflict between the Chinese and Korean peoples. He claims to be the world’s foremost expert on taxes. All that is nonsense, a con job that should have had people laughing at him, not voting for him.
For almost three decades I have been pointing out that Trump creates his own reality, a point on which his other leading biographers agree. What astonishes me is how many people blind themselves to his nonsense. Then again, denial is a powerful human emotion and this mass reaction is understandable among those beaten down by nearly four decades of government policies that stealthily take from the many to enrich the few.
Trump brilliantly tapped into the economic malaise that has afflicted much of the country after more than three decades of economic stagnation. It began to lift only in 2013. When the cries of people for help go unheeded, they will turn to anyone, even a demagogue, for relief.
Many of the economic changes in America and the world are beyond the control of a president or Congress. As we move from the industrial era into the still emerging digital era and, soon, the biological age, the world will be vastly richer, but many people may be worse off. For millions of Americans the harsh truth is that inefficiency created ind
ustrial jobs. As techniques to manufacture more and better products with less and less labor advance, those boring but good-paying factory jobs are only memories. Trump can claim he will change that, but he cannot. No president can.
The path to a better future is through investing in education, and especially science, as well as improving infrastructure. Trump’s budget shows he is hostile to all of these, particularly science. Other politicians also have cut investments in the future. College, once free or cheap in many parts of the country, has become costly even for community college students. Not funding basic research today means America will be less prosperous than it could be in the future.
For more than two decades I have warned that the frustrations caused by Washington and state capitals adopting stealth government policies favoring the rich would one day explode in ways that would be harmful, not beneficial, to our democracy. In bestselling books, hundreds of articles, columns, and speeches I have documented how policies hardly anyone knew about take from the many in subtle ways and concentrate money in the pockets of the 32,000 or so Americans at the apex of the economic pyramid.
Trump is among those beneficiaries of modern America’s silent plutocratic system of redistribution upward, a process that in Orwellian terms makes sure the pigs get the apples and milk because they claim they need them to help those animals who only get slop. That I explained these devices at great length in my books Perfectly Legal, Free Lunch, and The Fine Print shows that irony is not dead. Trump masterfully grasped the anxiety and fear among the economically oppressed who had been largely abandoned by the Democrats. His slogans showed his mastery of the art of persuasion.
It's Even Worse Than You Think Page 26
