Immigration policy, including illegal immigration to the United States, was a signature issue of Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign, and his proposed reforms and remarks about this issue generated much publicity. Trump has repeatedly said that illegal immigrants are criminals.
A hallmark promise of his campaign was to build a substantial wall on the United States–Mexico border and to force Mexico to pay for the wall. Trump has also expressed support for a variety of "limits on legal immigration and guest-worker visas",Sahil Kapur, "Reality Check: 4 Reasons Trump's Immigration Plans Are Impractical" , Bloomberg Politics (August 8, 2015). including a "pause" on granting green cards, which Trump says will "allow record immigration levels to subside to more moderate historical averages"."Trump says would raise visa fees to pay for Mexican border wall" , Reuters (August 16, 2015).Seung Min Kim, "Trump hits turbulence with immigration hard-liners" , Politico (March 14, 2016).Jeremy Diamond & Sara Murray, "Trump outlines immigration specifics" , CNN (August 17, 2015). Trump's proposals regarding H-1B visas frequently changed throughout his presidential campaign, but as of late July 2016, he appeared to oppose the H-1B visa program.
As president, on January 27, 2017, Trump issued an executive order banning the admission of travelers, immigrants, and refugees from seven Muslim-majority nations, which later expanded to thirteen in 2020. In response to legal challenges he revised the ban twice, with his third version being upheld by the Supreme Court in June 2018. He attempted to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, but a legal injunction has allowed the policy to continue while the matter is the subject of legal challenge. He imposed a "zero tolerance" policy to require the arrest of anyone caught illegally crossing the border. The "zero tolerance" policy was reversed in June 2018, but multiple media reports of continued family separations were published in the first half of 2019.
In his first State of the Union address on January 30, 2018, Trump outlined his administration's four pillars for immigration reform: (1) a path to citizenship for DREAMers; (2) increased border security funding; (3) ending the diversity visa lottery; and (4) restrictions on family-based immigration. In the August 2022 issue of The Atlantic, the cover story wrote that if the architects of the family separation return to power they "will likely seek to reinstate it."
Background in business practices
In March 2016, Trump addressed E-Verify, an online tool provided by the American government to detect if business employees are unauthorized aliens. Trump declared: "I'm using E-Verify on just about every job ... I'll tell you, it works." In December 2018, The Washington Times reported that in the 565 companies that President Trump had a financial stake in as disclosed in May 2018, only 5 companies (less than 1%) used E-Verify. In January 2019, Trump's son, Eric Trump, said that The Trump Organization was now "instituting E-Verify on all of our properties as soon as possible".
In August 2016, according to Time magazine, just-unsealed court documents from 1990 showed testimony and sworn depositions revealing that in 1979 and 1980, Trump had personally met with illegal Polish immigrant workers at their jobs, having beforehand instructed for them to be hired through a new company in order to employ them to demolish a building to make way for the Trump Tower in Manhattan. Trump had later toured the demolition site multiple times. The workers did 12-hour shifts, some worked 24-hour shifts, and all were paid between $4.00 and $5.00 per less than half the stipulated union wage at the time. The workers testified to the fact that most of them had not used safety equipment like hard hats. When a dispute over workers not being paid had occurred, Trump had personally met some of the workers and had agreed to pay them directly, according to testimony. Trump's payments had been inconsistent and had led to further disputes with the workers. Daniel Sullivan, a labor consultant, testified that Trump in June 1980 asked Sullivan for advice pertaining to the fact that "he had some illegal Polish employees on the job". Although not part of his official testimony, Sullivan later said that the Polish workers had been receiving "starvation wages". John Szabo, the lawyer for the Polish workers, testified that in August 1980 he had received a call from Trump's lawyer Irwin Durben, who had told him that Trump had been threatening to have the Polish workers deported. In 1998, after a 15-year legal battle over whether Trump had neglected to pay his due amount into a union fund for the Polish workers, Trump settled the case only when a jury trial pertaining to whether he was the legal employer of the Polish workers had become imminent. Between 1980 and 2016, Trump repeatedly denied that he had known that the Polish workers had been illegal immigrants.
In November 2017, more court documents regarding the above situation of the Polish workers were unsealed. They showed that a crew of 200 Polish workers had worked on the demolition, and that Trump had ultimately paid a settlement of $1.375 million, including $0.5 million to the union fund, after appealing a judge's ruling that he was indeed the legal employer of the Polish workers.
In July 2017, Trump's Mar-a-Lago Club applied for visas to hire foreign workers – 15 housekeepers, 20 cooks and 35 servers from October 2017 to May 2018. Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida did the same for 6 cooks.
In December 2018, The New York Times reported that two illegal immigrants had worked for the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey as housekeepers. Sandra Diaz, from Costa Rica, worked there from 2010 to 2013, and later became a legal American resident. Diaz said that she had washed and ironed Trump's clothes. Victorina Morales worked there from 2013, and said that she had personally made Trump's bed and cleaned his toilet, with an hourly wage from $10 to $13. Diaz recounted Trump personally tipping her $100, while Morales said Trump tipped her $50 after she told him she was from Guatemala. Diaz and Morales said that at least two of their supervisors knew that they were illegal immigrants, and that there were "many people without papers" who were hired. Anibal Romero, a lawyer for Morales, said that in November 2018, he was contacted by the New Jersey Attorney General's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, both of which were investigating the Trump National Golf Club's possible hiring of unauthorized immigrants with fraudulent documentation.
In January 2019, the Trump National Golf Club Westchester fired around a dozen employees for being unauthorized immigrants, some of whom had worked 14 years there, won employee awards there, or personally prepared meals for Trump. The Washington Post spoke to 16 former and current workers of the golf club, some of whom said that their employers had accepted their fraudulent documentation, and others who said that the thinking of the club was "Get the cheapest labor possible".
In May 2019, Univision published a report based on interviews with seven illegal immigrants who said that they worked for Trump Winery in Virginia, with long work hours and no overtime pay. They said that Trump's businesses either did not check for their immigration status or pretended not to know that they were illegal.
In the August 2022 cover story of The Atlantic, Caitlin Dickerson wrote that "the architects of the...[family separation] will likely seek to reinstate it, should they return to power."
Positions on immigration
After Mitt Romney lost the 2012 U.S. presidential election, Trump criticized Romney's immigration policy, saying, "He had a crazy policy of self-deportation which was maniacal. It sounded as bad as it was, and he lost all of the Latino vote. He lost the Asian vote. He lost everybody who is inspired to come into this country." At the 2014 Conservative Political Action Conference, Trump urged Republican politicians not to pass immigration reform, saying immigrants would vote for the Democratic Party and steal American jobs.
During his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump questioned official estimates of the number of illegal immigrants in the United States asserting that the number is actually between 30 and 34,000,000. PolitiFact ruled that his statement was "Pants on Fire", citing experts who noted that no evidence supported an estimate in that range. For example, the Pew Research Center reported in March 2015 that the number of illegal immigrants overall declined from 12.2 million in 2007 to 11.2 million in 2012. The number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. labor force ranged from 8.1 million to 8.3 million between 2007 and 2012, approximately 5% of the U.S. labor force.
During his 2016 campaign, his presidency, and afterwards, Trump has recited the lyrics of the song "The Snake" as a cautionary tale against immigration: a woman takes pity on a snake, which then fatally bites her, declaring, "You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in".
Birthright citizenship In 2015, prior to being elected to the presidency, Trump proposed rolling back birthright citizenship for U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants (referred to by some as "anchor babies"). Under the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, all persons born on U.S. soil and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens. The mainstream view of the Fourteenth Amendment among legal experts is that everyone born on U.S. soil, regardless of parents' citizenship, is automatically an American citizen, so long as the parents are not foreign diplomats, and the Supreme Court noted in its Plyler v. Doe ruling that "no plausible distinction with respect to Fourteenth Amendment 'jurisdiction' can be drawn between resident aliens whose entry into the United States was lawful, and resident aliens whose entry was unlawful." Trump said on October 30, 2018, that he intended to sign an executive order to remove the right of citizenship from people born in the U.S. to foreign nationals. As this would directly contradict the Fourteenth Amendment, it would have begun a legal battle. Includes video.
Between March 2020 and February 2021, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) sent at least 11 migrant women to be dropped off in Mexican border towns without birth certificates for their U.S. citizen newborns. A CBP spokesperson claimed, "Hospitals are responsible for providing birth certificates and CBP does not hinder individuals, regardless of immigrations status, from acquiring birth certificates for US citizen children."
Changes to legal immigration The Trump administration embraced the Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy (RAISE) Act in August 2017. The RAISE Act seeks to reduce levels of legal immigration to the United States by 50% by halving the number of green cards issued. The bill would also impose a cap of 50,000 refugee admissions a year and would end the visa diversity lottery. A study by Penn Wharton economists found that the legislation would by 2027 "reduce GDP by 0.7 percent relative to current law, and reduce jobs by 1.3 million. By 2040, GDP will be about 2 percent lower and jobs will fall by 4.6 million. Despite changes to population size, jobs and GDP, there is very little change to per capita GDP, increasing slightly in the short run and then eventually falling." the RAISE Act did not receive a vote in the Senate. A separate bill to restrict legal immigration, supported by Trump, Cotton, and Perdue, was defeated in the Senate by a 39–60 vote.