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In an interview with pro-globalist Economist magazine, Trump was asked: Do you want to curb legal immigration? Trump responded by saying he prefers merit-based immigration of skilled people. The interviewer pressed him again on the scale of legal immigration, asking [are you] not looking to reduce the numbers?

No, no, no, no, we want people coming in legally. No, very strongly, Trump replied, as two of his economic advisors sat beside him top economic staffer Gary Cohn, and Steve Mnuchin, the Secretary of the Treasury.

Trump also backed proposals to keep importing temporary contract workers for the agricultural sector, even though the cheap labor will retard farmers emerging interest in buying new machinery,such as robot apple-pickers and robot cow-milkers.Trump told the Economist:

We also want farm workers to be able to come in. You know, were going to have work visas for the farm workers. If you look, you know we have a lot of people coming through the border, theyre great people and they work on the farms and then they go back home. We like those people a lot and we want them to continue to come in.

Immigration reform advocates are not surprised at Trumps back-sliding, but they are confident that Trumpsdependence on his blue-collar base in the 2020 election is pressuring him to stick with his campaign promises, amid constant elite pressure for more legal immigration.

The president was unambiguous in his [2016] campaign one of the things he said was that he would support reductions in immigration, said Ira Mehlman, communications director at the Federation for American Immigration Reform. If he is backing off, we will fight to remind him that he did make this commitment during the campaign and we intended to hold him to it, he told Breitbart.

Anyone following Trumps primary campaign could have predicted this he repeatedly justified guestworker visas of various kinds and stressed the big beautiful door that would be built into his wall, wrote Mark Krikorian, the director of the Center for Immigration Studies. Both the anti-borders crowd and some starry-eyed immigration hawks mistook Trumps commitment to enforcement (which seems genuine) to mean he was also skeptical of the overall level of immigration, he said, adding that the next generation of populist GOP leaders such as Sen. Tom Cotton understandsthe many harms caused by mass immigration.

But Trumps backsliding isnt a done deal. Former President Barack Obama also backed off many of his promises, even while he was urging his supporters to publiccly protest his actions and to push back the lobbies that were blocking his agenda. Obama also adopted a gradualist stop-and-go political strategy which helped the GOP establishment ignore his gradual progress towards his big-government goals, and he achieved many goals for his supporters via little-noticed court decisions and agency regulations by allied appointees.

With constant pressure by Trumps supporters, Trump will be more willing and better able to ignore or overcome establishment opposition and gradually get his agenda implemented stage-by-stage.

In August 2015, Trump issued his very popular immigration planto raise wages by reducing legal and illegal immigration:

The influx of foreign workers holds down salaries, keeps unemployment high, andmakes it difficult for poor and working class Americans including immigrantsthemselves and their children to earn a middle class wage Every year, we voluntarily admitanother [1] million new immigrants, [plus 1 million] guest workers, refugees, and dependents,growing our existing all-time historic record population of 42 millionimmigrants. We need to control the admission of new low-earning workers inorder to: help wages grow, get teenagers back to work, aid minorities rise into themiddle class, help schools and communities falling behind, and to ensure ourimmigrant members of the national family become part of the American dream.

Requirement to hire American workers first. Too many [contract worker] visas, like the H-1B, have no such requirement. In the year 2015, with 92 million Americansoutside the workforce and incomes collapsing, we need companies to hire from thedomestic pool of unemployed. Petitions for workers should be mailed to theunemployment office, not USCIS.

Immigration moderation. Before any new green cards are issued to foreignworkers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from thedomestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers. This will helpreverse womens plummeting workplace participation rate, grow wages, and allowrecord immigration levels to subside to more moderate historical averages.

Trump repeated those commitments in many subsequent speeches. For example, in March 2016,Trump called for a two-year pause in legal immigration, saying I think for a period of a year to two years we have to look back and we have to see, just to answer the second part of your question, where we are, where we stand, whats going on Id say a minimum of one year, maybe two years.

In his January 2017 inauguration speech, he described the theme of his administration as Buy American, Hire American.

Some polls showthat promise is extremely popular. For example, a November 2016 poll by Ipsos showed that only 12 percent of respondents strongly opposed plans to change the legal immigration system to limit legal immigration. Four times as many, or 57 percent, back reductions in legal immigration, while 13 percent did not take a position.

To a large extent, Trump has followed through on those promises. He has revived enforcement of immigration law, slashed the inflow of illegal immigrants, and he is pushing a popular merit-based reform that would likely reduce the inflow of unskilled legal immigrants. Trumps merit-based reform is also backed by some GOP legislators who want to increase Americans productivity, not just the number of American consumers.

But Trump is under constant pressure from business leaders including some of his advisors who have a huge incentive to boost legal immigration, no matter the cost to ordinary Americans.

In strictly economic terms, legal immigration is far more important than over-the-border illegal immigration, because it is far larger and has far greater impact on employees, companies, and investors, wages, housing prices, profits and stock prices. In fact, multiple economists including economists at Goldman Sachs say government should try to boost the size of the economy by importing more consumers and workers.

Federal immigration policy adds roughly 1 millionlegal people, workers, consumers and renters per year to the economy. This annual inflow is further expanded by the immigrants children, which now combine to create a population of roughly 63 millionconsumers and workers not counting roughly 21 million illegals and their U.S. children.

That means roughly one-quarter of the nations consumers have been imported into the 330 million-strong economy via legal or illegal immigration.

This legal inflow includes some very skilled workers and some people who become very successful entrepreneurs, but it also dumps a lot of unskilled workers into the country just as a new generation of technology is expected to eliminate many types of jobs. It also annuallyshifts $500 billion from employees to employers and Wall Street, and it forces state and local government to provide $60 billionin taxes to businesses via routine aid for immigrants, and it pushes millions of marginal U.S. workers out of the labor force andinto poverty, crime andopioid addiction.

High immigration also reduces employers need to recruit disengaged Americans, to build new facilities in high-unemployment areas, or tobuy productivity-boosting machineryor to demand that local schools rebuild high school vocational training departments for the millions of youth who dont gain much from four-year colleges.

The resulting poverty and civic conflicts increase ballot-box support for Democrats, ensuring that more states especially high-immigration California are dominated by the Democratic Partys big-government policies.

Under Obama, the annual inflow of legal immigrants was roughly twice the inflow of illegals. Roughly 550,000 illegals arrived in 2016, but fewer are expected in 2017, according to the Center for Immigration Studies.

Whenever the inflow of extra immigrant customers is threatened by public opposition, business groups say their companies and investors will be damaged.

For example, in July 2016, a Wall Street firm tried to help Hillary Clinton by declaring that Trumps opposition to illegal immigration would hurt companies and investors by forcing them to pay higher wages, and by reducing the cost of housing.

As the immigrants leave, the already tight labor market will get tighter, pushing up labor costs as employers struggle to fill the open job positions, the report declared. Mr. Trumps immigration policies will thus result in potentially severe labor shortages, and higher labor costs, the critical report promised.The formal unemployment rate would immediately drop by a third, from 5 percent in 2016 to 3.5 percent in 2017, the report predicts. Housing prices would drop by almost 4 percent in 2018 and 2019, says the Moodys report, which did not admit that higher wages and lower housing prices are popular throughout America.

Reduced immigration would result in slower labor force growth and therefore slower growth in potential GDP, or annual economic activity, according to a 2017 report by Goldman Sachs.

Similarly,Jamie Dimon, thechairman and CEO of JPMorgan Chase, recently called for an amnesty for illegals and a potentially huge increase in white-collar immigration to help stimulate the economy. I hope eventually we have proper immigration. Good people who have paid their taxes and havent broken the law, get them into citizenship at the back of the line [and] if people get educated here, and theyre foreign nationals, get them a green card, he said.

In the same interview, Dimon portrayed himself as concerned about the economic condition of ordinary Americans, saying:

Middle-class wages havent gone up. One is, lower-class wages havent gone up enough to create a living wage. One is, people losing jobs, more to automation than anything else. Theres some more terrible numbers men, age 25 to 55, the labor-force participation rate is down 10%. Thats unbelievable. There are 35,000 dying of opioids every year. Seventy percent of kids age 17 to 24 cant get into the US military because of health or education. Obesity, diabetes, reading and writing. Is that the society we wanted? No. We should be working on these things, acknowledge the flaws we have, and come up with solutions. Not Democrat. Not Republican. Not knee-jerk.

But the 2016 election showed that Trump and centrist Americans recognize that higher immigration means reduced wages, more unemployment, more drug addition, higher housing prices and longer commutes. That is how Trump won the 2016 election in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, and why his on-again, off-again, pro-American immigration policy is at the core of his impending 2020 race.

Follow Neil Munro on Twitter @NeilMunroDC or email the author at NMunro@Breitbart.com

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Donald Trump Backslides on Campaign Promise To Curb Legal Immigration - Breitbart News

Beware the unintended consequence. Thats the lesson unfolding in the upstate agriculture industry as farmers deal with the collateral damage of the Trump administrations crackdown on illegal immigration.

Legal immigrants perform critical labor on farms around the country, including upstate and Western New York. They pick apples, plant crops, tend animals. But they are worried even though they are here legally about being questioned, misclassified or harassed by law enforcement. That worries their employers, who value the labor of their workers, and it hurts local merchants when potential patrons fear traveling away from their farms.

Unless Americans want to pay more for their food and does anyone think they do? the problem cannot be allowed to fester. Congress needs to improve the guest worker program that makes farming possible and, more fundamentally, agree to an immigration reform plan that relieves this issue permanently.

The national meltdown over immigration legal and illegal is the root of the problem on upstate farms. Suspicion follows even legal workers laboring here under the authority of the governments H-2A visa program, which authorizes guest workers. Those people typically do hard, physical, low-paid work from which many Americans recoil.

But the backlash against immigrants is complicating life for farmers, who worry they wont be able to keep their help or, worse, wont be able to find it at all, as the national mood drives down the number of people willing to work in fear.

The first solution to this problem is to streamline the H-2A program, making it easier for immigrants to make use of it, ensuring that compliance rules are simple and taking steps to protect visa holders from legal threats. Its not just the right thing to do for workers that we need, but for farmers who hire them and shoppers who consume the goods they plant and pick.

Even more important, though, is for the country to get past its stalemate over illegal immigration. Its a real issue, of course, and needs to be attended to, but its not the most important matter on the national agenda. Whats more, it is one that can be resolved by people of good will in both parties who are willing to focus on facts.

First is that the country simply isnt going to deport millions of illegal immigrants. Americans will not stand by as good people are abused and families are torn apart. We need a better answer, very much like the one that the Senate approved in 2013. Give illegal immigrants a path to legal status or citizenship that requires payment of back taxes, possibly a fine and getting in line behind those who are here legally. Thats not unreasonable.

Some wont hear of that, insisting that all who are here illegally must be sent packing for the sake of a legal purity that is rarely applied in other contexts. At some point, though, reality must intrude. That doesnt mean no one can be deported. Illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes should certainly be ejected, for example. And modern technology sensors, drones and so on can be used to protect the borders, far more effectively than a wall ever could. Acknowledging the fact of illegal immigrants doesnt obviate the need for sensible and effective border security.

Finding a resolution that most Americans can accept is the only way to puncture this boil on our civic life. The extremists need to be politely turned away so that people with common sense and good hearts can attend to a problem that is dragging millions into its unnecessary vortex.

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Editorial: We need a better guest worker program, and immigration reform - Buffalo News

Jim Bogart Published 7:00 p.m. PT May 10, 2017 | Updated 7:01 p.m. PT May 10, 2017

Jim Bogart Jim Bogart(Photo: The Salinas Californian)Buy Photo

As everyone knows, the need for significant and comprehensive immigration reform is long overdue. I personally have been going back to Washington D.C. for more than twenty years advocating for much-needed changes to our immigration laws. So have many of my colleagues in agriculture including, but not limited to: growers, shippers, processors, packers, harvesters, and fellow farm organization representatives.

A decade after the Immigration Reform and Control Act was passed and signed into law in 1986, we in agriculture realized major modifications and improvements were necessary to provide those who produce our nations fruits and vegetables access to a legal and stable workforce. Agriculture has been on the front lines of this fight since day one.

Yet, I continue to be amazed and disappointed when I read or hear: Where is ag on this issue? Why isnt ag doing more? Why isnt ag supporting its workers? Why isnt ag more visible and more engaged in this debate?

Let me set the record straight no one has worked longer or harder on immigration reform than those of us in agriculture. From the outset we have made clear that immigration reform must protect the workers already here by adjusting their legal status to allow them to stay here and be eligible to work here. Our members have not only communicated this message to the President (past and present) and Congress (past and present) but also to our workers.

Weve provided information and guidance to agricultural employers on what to do if U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shows up for an inspection or audit of 1-9 Forms.

More importantly, weve provided a written summary of legal rights and protections workers have should they be questioned or detained by ICE or other federal officials.

The ag industry has been instrumental in forming the National Council of Agricultural Employers, the Agricultural Coalition for Immigration Reform, and the Agricultural Workforce Coalition. These three organizations are focused on one thing achieving comprehensive immigration reform.

And we may finally be making some headway. Recent developments and statements have given me some cautious optimism. For example, an Executive Order issued April 25 promoting agriculture and rural prosperity specifically charges the task force created to guide this effort to ensure access to a reliable workforce and increase employment opportunities in agriculture-related and rural-focused businesses. Translation: give agriculture access to a legal, stable, and experienced workforce.

Just a few weeks ago, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated that ICE will not focus its efforts on illegal immigrants who have, other than entering the country illegally, abided by our nations laws. The Attorney Generals comments confirm what we in the agriculture industry have understood to be the Administrations interior enforcement policy: ICE activities will be directed toward deporting felons, not farm workers.

Just last week, the Agricultural Worker Program Act was introduced in the U.S. Senate. While any solution to fix our broken immigration system must be comprehensive, this legislation elevates an issue often overlooked in the debate: Retention of the existing agricultural workforce.

If this bill can lead to a broader discussion that acknowledges the contributions and value of current farm workers while creating a workable program to enable the future flow of labor to American farms, I believe we are well on our way to an effective and, hopefully, bipartisan solution to this decades-long problem.

These comments and recent developments are a direct result of efforts made by agriculture. Yet, for some reason, this goes unnoticed, unreported, and overlooked despite repeated attempts by those of us in the industry to communicate these facts to elected officials, the media, and the community. My fear is that this is because ags message doesnt advance a particular narrative or square with a particular ideological agenda. Be that as it may, it will not prevent us from continuing to fight the good fight to protect our agricultural workforce. Its a battle that weve been waging and leading for a long time, but its well worth it.

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Ag leading fight for immigration reform - The Salinas Californian

In the wee hours of the morning on May 1, 2017, Congress passed a $1.1 trillion spending bill to fund the federal government through September 2017. However, while the pundits on Capitol Hill hailed this as a wonderful bipartisan bill that proves both parties can work together, further examination of the bill shows that illegal aliens win and American citizens loose again!

President Trump has signed 90 executive actions since he took office in January 2017 six of which dealt specifically with immigration. But most of the changes the president has tried to implement regarding immigration and refugee intake have been temporarily thwarted by activist judges, ignored by state and local government officials in sanctuary jurisdictions or shot down by Congress.

With President Trump in office, its supposed to be time to cut-off incentives for illegal immigration, beef up enforcement at the border and the interior of the country, and increase the threat of deportation for illegal aliens especially those who have committed heinous crimes against American citizens. It should also be high time to clean up the immigration mess left by the Obama administration. The spending bill was supposed to be part of that process but the Republican leadership in Congress gave up without a fight. So did the administration, although the president later hinted in a Tweet that he will be prepared to do so as the FY 2018 budget is negotiated. But that remains to be seen.

President Trump asked for money to build a wall in the spending bill. He also wanted to cutoff certain federal funding to sanctuary cities. The president has tried to deliver on some of his campaign promises through the use of executive action, but other much needed reforms require Congress to act.

American citizens must continue to keep the pressure on Congress and stand behind President Trumpto make sure hekeeps his promiseson immigration reform.

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Congress Has Failed Again | Immigration Reform Blog - ImmigrationReform.com (blog)

Farah Larrieux feels like she's about to be forced out after living and working in the U.S. for more than a decade. Immigration privileges granted to her and many other Haitians after the 2010 earthquake could soon be revoked.

President Donald Trump's appointees must announce by May 23 whether to continue "temporary protected status" for about 50,000 Haitians legally living and working in the U.S. Without this status, they could suddenly face deportation.

A top immigration official has argued that Haiti is stable enough for its citizens to no longer need protection from deportation. According to emails obtained by The Associated Press , Trump appointees are looking for evidence that Haitian immigrants have committed crimes before announcing the decision.

As President Barack Obama's administration repeatedly extended the benefits for Haitians, Florida came to feel like a permanent home to Larrieux.

"I am planning my life, settling down. I can tell you that I am financially getting stable but now I don't know what's going to happen in the next three months," she said.

Four years after Larrieux arrived in Florida in 2005, she had been divorced and depressed. Her visa had expired, and her green card application was rejected. The post-quake benefits gave her a lifeline: She got a Florida driver's license, returned to school and built a company promoting Haitian entertainers from her home in Miramar.

"It was a rebirth," she said.

According to James McCament, President Donald Trump's acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Haiti's poverty, political instability, infrastructure problems and cholera outbreak no longer qualify its citizens for a program responding to countries in crisis.

"Those myriad problems remaining in Haiti are longstanding problems which have existed for many years before the 2010 disaster," McCament wrote in an April 10 memo first reported by USA Today. His recommendation: end the status once current benefits expire July 22, and give the Haitians until January to leave voluntarily.

The AP obtained emails sent from April 7 to May 1 showing a USCIS policy chief repeatedly asking staff how often Haitians with temporary status were convicted of crimes and how many took advantage of public benefits. Her employees replied that such data weren't available or difficult to find in government records.

USCIS spokeswoman Sharon Scheidhauer said the agency doesn't discuss "pre-decision documents." She said Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly hadn't made a decision regarding Haiti.

A criminal history disqualifies an applicant for temporary protected status, and recipients aren't eligible for public benefits, so Trump is "not going to be able to find the evidence he's looking for, and if he does, it's fake news," Cheryl Little of Americans for Immigrant Justice said Tuesday.

Haitian-American leaders and Haitian Minister of Foreign Affairs Antonio Rodrigue said deporting established property owners, entrepreneurs, students, taxpayers and the parents of U.S.-born children could cut off their remittances, financially crippling a country where the quake killed up to 300,000, cholera has killed least 9,500 since 2010 and Hurricane Matthew's landfall killed 546 in October.

Immigrant rights advocates say the U.S. economy also would suffer. Deporting the affected Haitians could cost $469 million, and $428 million in contributions to Social Security and Medicare would be lost over the next decade, according to estimates by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

"These people are working. They are contributing. They have lives here," said Marleine Bastien, of Haitian Women of Miami. "This is one of the gravest crises we've been facing since the earthquake."

Temporary protected status allows immigrants from countries experiencing armed conflict or environmental disasters to legally live and work here. To be eligible, Haitians had to live in the U.S. before Jan. 12, 2011. Residency and employment authorizations were renewed every 18 months.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors strict immigration policies, said Haitians never should have expected permanent privileges.

"There is always going to be something happening in Haiti," Mehlman said. "Unless things are absolutely perfect, which they never were and they will never be, we would have to allow people to remain here indefinitely."

Haitian government officials said Wednesday they're ill-equipped to welcome back tens of thousands of people.

"Their return would be detrimental to us," said Dave Fils-Aime, a political and economic affairs specialist for Haiti's embassy in Washington.

The same benefits currently extend to citizens of a dozen other countries. It's unclear if USCIS also inquired about their criminal histories.

McCament's memo didn't address the expiration of benefits next year for nearly 355,000 immigrants from Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, who have had "temporary protected status" for nearly 20 years. Immigrants from the other countries arrived more recently and in fewer numbers.

Trump wooed Haitian-Americans as the Republican nominee, despite wide support for Democrats in their community, which makes up 1.8 percent of Florida voters.

"The Haitian people deserve better, as I intend to give them," Trump said in Miami's Little Haiti in September. "I will be your champion."

In the USCIS emails, Larrieux hears echoes of the prejudice Haitians suffered in the 1980s when U.S. doctors wrongly identified them as a risk factor for AIDS.

"Now they're going to put a tag on us that we are criminals and we're abusing the system? This is discrimination," Larrieux said. "Does that mean that white people don't do crimes? That there's no American born in the U.S., or people with green cards, or people who get their citizenship who commit crimes? If that's their argument, they're wrong."

Associated Press writer David McFadden in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, contributed to this report.

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Haitians fear wrenching end to US immigration protection - ABC News