Politico
By Seung Min Kim
March 14, 2016
The business mogul's use of guest workers and contradictions on his trademark issue are causing consternation.
The
candidate of “build that wall” is suddenly having a hard time with one
constituency that was fully in his camp: immigration hard-liners.
Alarms
went off after Donald Trump openly declared at a GOP debate in Detroit
earlier this month that he was changing his position on high-skilled
foreign workers, seemingly undermining a
key plank of his restrictive immigration platform. Then came a stream
of news reports showing how Trump used the same guest-worker programs he
now criticizes.
Though
Trump recovered somewhat by calling last week for a “pause” in legal
immigration — an aggressive stance lauded by hard-liner groups — the GOP
front-runner is still coming under scrutiny
from tough-on-immigration types on an issue that launched his meteoric
rise in the Republican presidential race.
“He
hasn’t done a very good job of connecting what he’s been saying in both
debates and his other press appearances and in his pep rallies … versus
what he wrote in his immigration policy,”
Chris Chmielenski, director of content and activism for Numbers USA,
said in an interview on Monday. “I think for us, what is posted on his
website is very, very helpful. But the rhetoric hasn’t matched.”
Numbers
USA, a national grass-roots group that calls for limiting illegal and
legal immigration, had dinged Trump for his comments that seemed to
advocate for a boost in both high-skilled
and low-skilled immigrant workers at the March 3 debate. The group
lowered Trump to a B+ on its scorecard. But after the March 10 debate in
Miami, the organization raised his grade to his previous A- rating.
That’s
not to say the group still doesn’t have questions about Trump vis-à-vis
immigration. Chmielenski said, "Obviously, we don’t condone” Trump’s
use of a guest-worker program for foreign
students at his hotel in Chicago, the subject of an Associated Press
investigation published Monday.
Others who call for stricter immigration laws are also adopting an increasingly critical tone toward Trump.
“He
doesn’t know enough about the subject and won’t listen to his own
staffers to be able to distill a clear, coherent message,” added Mark
Krikorian, executive director of the Center for
Immigration Studies, a think tank that calls for more restrictive
immigration policies. “In other words, I’m not sure he’s so much
flip-flopping as just making this stuff off the top of his head.”
Trump
won sustained praise from immigration critics last summer when he
rolled out his policy proposal, which was crafted with input from Sen.
Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), a top Hill proponent
of restricting immigration who has since endorsed Trump for president.
Though
his proposal to build a wall along the Mexico-U.S. border gets the most
attention, Trump’s policy paper also delves into legal immigration,
calling for a requirement to hire U.S. citizens
over immigrants for various guest-worker programs and to boost the
prevailing wage for employees with an H-1B visa. That program is
intended to recruit highly skilled immigrant workers to the United
States but has come under increasing scrutiny by Trump and
other GOP presidential hopefuls following stories of alleged abuse of
the visa by major corporations such as Disney.
“His
comfort zone is the wall,” said Krikorian, who also writes for National
Review, a conservative publication that has declared itself anti-Trump.
“Anything outside his comfort zone, he’s
just winging it.”
“I
thought it was an excellent paper written by someone in Sessions’
office,” added Heather Mac Donald, a fellow at the conservative
Manhattan Institute. “And it’s apparent that he never
read it.”
A spokeswoman for the Trump campaign didn’t respond to a request seeking comment.
Another
U.S. immigration program criticized in the Trump plan — the J-1 visa
for foreign students — was the focus of the AP report Monday that found
Trump used the program to hire labor for
his Chicago property, primarily at the upscale establishment Terrace
Restaurant. The campaign acknowledged Trump’s use of the program to the
AP but said that he would reform it as president.
Meanwhile,
Bloomberg reported earlier this month that Trump made use of the EB-5
visa, a shortcut to a green card used by wealthy foreign investors, for a
Trump property in New Jersey. Following
the report, conservative commentator Michelle Malkin asked: How does
Trump respond to the debunking of the bogus job-creation math upon which
the entire cash-for-citizenship swindle rests? Have any other Trump
projects been subsidized by EB-5 China money?”
During
the Detroit debate, Trump’s rivals pressured the businessman over his
use of a guest-worker program for lower-skilled foreign labor at his
luxury club in Palm Beach, Florida — first
described in a February report by The New York Times.
“It’s
a few months, five months at the most. People don’t want a short-term
job,” Trump said in defending his use of foreign workers at Mar-a-Lago
during the Detroit debate. “We want to hire
as many Americans as we can, but they don’t want part-time, very short
part-time jobs.”
Those comments drew criticism from Numbers USA, which lowered its ratings partially based on those remarks.
But
Trump returned somewhat to their good graces with his performance in
Miami, when he entertained a one- or two-year pause in legal
immigration. He also acknowledged his use of the H-1B visa program, though he added: “I shouldn’t be allowed to use it. We
shouldn’t have it. Very, very bad for workers.”
Other immigration hard-liners are willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt.
“Everybody
knows that the policy framework that he has developed … was hatched in
part with the expertise of Jeff Sessions, and people align with Jeff
Sessions,” said Dan Stein, president
of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which also favors
stricter immigration policies. “Donald Trump is known for one thing, and
that is the ability to assemble a good team and get things done.”
Sessions,
who maintains a sterling reputation with groups that favor reducing
immigration, acknowledged in an interview last week that Trump’s
comments in Detroit initially “caused confusion,”
but he credited the campaign for quickly clarifying those remarks. And
following the Miami debate, Sessions praised Trump for his “clarity and
conviction” as he spoke about immigration.
“This
determination to protect American workers from reckless trade and
immigration policies will grow the Republican Party and position us to
win in November,” Sessions said Saturday in
a statement released by the Trump campaign.
It’s
premature to say whether Trump voters would turn on the businessman’s
muddled comments on immigration. Chmielenski, the Numbers USA official,
indicated that members of his group are
just as divided as Republican primary voters.
“People
who support Trump, they just kind of dismiss everything Trump says on
immigration or things that he has done in the past,” Chmielenski said.
Those against Trump, he added, “are very
critical and have been saying we need to highlight some of these
abuses.”
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