My email has been filling up other the past few days as I have been bombarded with subject lines like “Is Trump selling out American workers?”
During the 2016 campaign Trump brought great hope that he would drain the immigration swamp, in particular he promised he would address the H-1B mess.
Americans who had been replaced by foreign workers on H-1B visas at Disney spoke at Trump campaign rallies. Trump generated the expectation that he would be the one to finally do something for working Americans, rather than the billionaire class at the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama administrations had.
So Trump got elected and what got done?
Very little.
The only things Trump did on H-1B of significance were (1) nothing got worse; and (2) he blocked the TVA from replacing Americans with H-1B workers. While that put Trump ahead of his predecessors, it was very disappointing compared to what Trump promised during the campaign.
People working on the issue the White House in the Trump administration privately placed the blame for inaction on Trump’s son-in-law. They claimed he blocked all major reforms to immigration. There again, you have to blame Trump for putting his son-in-law in a position where he could do such damage to his administration.
The son-in-law’s absence in 2020 brought some hope of improvement in a second Trump administration.
Then came June 20, 2024.
In a stab to the back to his middle-class supporters, Donald Trump announced that he would support stapling a green card to degrees of foreign students. Donald Trump now sounds exactly like Mitt Romney.
Rather than step back and rethink, the Trump campaign doubled down. Responding to the outrage Trump’s betrayal has generated, his campaign put out a statement that the green card giveaway would only apply to "the most thoroughly vetted."
So now the Trump campaign sounds like the Joe Biden administration on immigration.
It sure looks like the mono-party has taken over the Trump campaign.
Maybe this was all a campaign mistake. If so, Trump urgently needs to take steps to contain the damage. Clearly, Trump needs to bring into his campaign an advisor on immigration who knows the issues that affect ordinary Americans and who has access to Trump to teach him about those issues. Then the Trump campaign needs to put out a consistent message on immigration policy.