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RAISE Act Seeks to Cut Legal Immigration in Half; Part of Alt-Right White Supremacy Agenda
While almost immediately under investigration upon taking office, Trump and team have sought to quickly inflict as much pain as possible upon our nation with varying levels of success. Our Resistance will play a significant role in how far they get in their agenda. After failing to take away healthcare from millions of Americans, the Bannon-led White House has turned back to his dream agenda: white supremacy.
White resentment put Donald Trump in the White House. If there is one consistent thread through Mr. Trump’s political career, it is his overt connection to white resentment and white nationalism....no amount of scandal or evidence of incompetence will undermine his followers’ belief that he and he alone could Make America White Again [through] executive orders, laws and agency directives that undermine and punish minority achievement and aspiration.
So it is no surprise, yet still disgusting and worthy of immediate reaction and Smart Dissent, that Trump and his Republican accomplices are seeking to drastically decrease legal immigration to the U.S. through something called the RAISE Act.
Trump on Wednesday endorsed a new bill in the Senate aimed at slashing legal immigration levels in half over a decade, a potentially profound change to policies that have been in place for more than half a century. The legislation seeks to reduce the annual distribution of green cards awarding permanent legal residence to just over 500,000 from more than 1 million.
According to the Washington Post, the country must again rely on the Republican-controlled Senate to stop this absurd legislation.
The bill faces dim prospects in the Senate, where Republicans hold a narrow majority and would have difficulty reaching 60 votes to fend off a filibuster.
Opposition has been immediate and strong. Most importantly, those against it are providing something known as FACTS to counteract the xenophobic bill.
Trump promised on the campaign trail to take a harder line on immigration, arguing that the growth in new arrivals had harmed job opportunities for American workers.
[However....] in an analysis for ProPublica, Adam Ozimek and Mark Zandi at Moody’s Analytics, an independent economics firm, estimated that for every 1 percent increase in U.S. population made of immigrants, GDP rises 1.15 percent.
“Immigration is a great economic policy opportunity and it’s important to document the impact of that,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, an economist who served on the President’s Council of Economic Advisers in both Bush administrations. He agreed with the basic conclusions of Moody’s analysis, and said that 1.15 percent was a reasonable estimate of the effect of immigration on GDP.
“You can’t just flip a switch and make the U.S. a richer place,” said Ozimek, the economist at Moody’s Analytics who worked on the analysis. “But with immigration, you can flip a switch and massively grow the size of the country.” And while other policy changes may have subtle, indirect effects on the economy, there is a very straightforward relationship between growing the size of the country and growing the GDP...
Additional opposition:
The legislation was quickly denounced by congressional Democrats, including the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, and immigrant rights groups. It is also likely to face resistance from some business leaders and moderate Republicans in states with large immigrant populations.
Opponents of the bill said that immigrants help boost the economy and that studies have shown they commit crimes at lower levels than do native-born Americans.
ACTION: Sign the ADL petition below as well as others against the Raise Act.
http://action.adl.org/raise-act/
Sources:
https://projects.propublica.org/graphics/gdp
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/05/opinion/sunday/white-resentment-affirmative-action.html