Yesterday President Donald Trump announced his new immigration policy, which would restrict legal entry to the United States to highly-skilled, rich people who already speak English. If that policy had been in place in the past, Friedrich Trump, the president’s German-speaking grandfather, would never have landed in America, and his Scottish immigrant mother, a domestic servant, would have been denied entry. They were “legal” immigrants for the simple fact that they arrived at a time when there was no “illegal immigration” (for white people, anyway).
More recently, while Donald Trump’s two immigrant wives spoke some functional English when they arrived in the US, they were relatively unskilled, unless pouting and walking on a runway counts.
Even Trump policy advisor Stephen Miller, the anti-immigrant zealot and poetry-hating pest, is descended from low-skilled, impoverished immigrant great-grandparents fleeing anti-semitic violence in Belarus. They arrived in New York Harbor aboard the German ship S.S. Moltke in 1903, the same year the plaque bearing the Emma Lazarus poem describing their plight was installed on the base of the Statue of Liberty, which welcomed them to the United States.
