Reprinted with permission from AlterNet.
Yesterday, Melania Trump’s Slovenian-born parents, Viktor and Amalija Knavs, officially became naturalized U.S. citizens, using the exact same family-based immigration process that Trump himself has railed against as causing so-called “chain migration.”
One such person who noticed this contradiction was Michael Wildes, the former mayor of Englewood, NJ, and the attorney who represented the Knavses during the immigration process in the first place. And he is not happy about what Trump has been saying.
In an appearance on CNN’s “OutFront,” host Erin Burnett played clips of Trump condemning the practice of allowing immigrants to sponsor family members, including a speech in which he said, “The chain is like a disaster. You bring one person in, you end up with 32 people.”
Wildes immediately smacked that down.
“Well, tell us how you think, Mr. President. Let me take off one hat as the First Lady’s immigration lawyer and her family, and put on my own personal hat. It’s unconscionable to scare people into believing that. You cannot bring nephews. You cannot bring neices or uncles. You can’t bring 32 people here. And some of the quotas are backed up for 10 or 15 years from particular countries.”
“This whole notion of ‘chain migration’ is actually a beautiful bedrock of immigration law and policy, called family reunification,” he went on. “Imagine this. People will work harder and love more and do more for America, knowing that their loved ones, their immediate relatives, their parents, their children, to say you can bring one relative and not another relative, I can understand that some of them may be in jeopardy, and you may want to retool and ancient migration system … but chain migration is not family reunification.”
“This whole notion of chain migration is a beautiful notion called family reunification.” pic.twitter.com/3yalYERYWU
— AlterNet (@AlterNet) August 11, 2018
Matthew Chapman is a video game designer, science fiction author, and political reporter from Austin, TX. Follow him on Twitter @fawfulfan.
