The Betrayal of Legal Immigrants Who Followed the Rules
For the dozen years that I have been covering immigration politics and policy, the vast majority of Republicans I’ve interviewed in California, Washington, D.C., Colorado, Arizona, and New York have always avowed that they support legal immigration. In fact, many righteously insisted that they oppose illegal immigration because it is unfair to the people who “waited their turn” and “followed the rules.”
Where did those Republicans go?
On Friday, the Trump administration signed an executive order that betrayed hundreds of thousands of legal immigrants. All waited their turn, diligently applying for a Permanent Resident Card, which the U.S. gives “to individuals granted authorization to live and work in the United States on a permanent basis.” All followed the rules, paid the fees, and were granted their “green card,” which says this at the top:
Then Donald Trump issued an executive order that threatens to bar entry to as many as 500,000 of those people––the ones from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia,
