President-elect Donald Trump said in an interview with Fox News that his administration will work towards a legal immigration system where new immigrants are chosen based on their skills rather than the current system that heavily favors extended family members. Trump said his administration would release the details of a plan that could possibly include protections for the roughly 1 million illegal aliens who benefited from Pres. Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
Under existing law, nearly two-thirds of all new green cards issued each year are selected by the new immigrants themselves through family Chain Migration categories regardless of the individuals skills or education. Ending Chain Migration was a recommendation of the last bipartisan commission on immigration reform chaired by the late Civil Rights icon Barbara Jordan.
How Trump would restructure legal immigration remains to be seen. During the Fox interview, he floated the idea of a merit-based system similar to the one used in Canada.
“We're going to have great people and people of great talent coming into our country,” Trump said. “And if you can think of this, some of the Silicon Valley companies want to build up in Canada, because in Canada, they're able to get the people that they need and they can't get them in this country because we don't allow them in this country.”
When asked about Dreamers in the interview, Trump responded saying he believes his plan would make them happy. “It's a plan that's going to be very firm, but it's going to be a lot of heart. And we're going to be looking into that situation,” Trump told Earhardt. “That's a very tough situation, but I think they're going to end up being very happy. We're going to have great people coming into our country, people that love our country,” he said.
This echoes what he told Time Magazine last month. "We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” Trump told the magazine. “They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”
DACA was one of President Obama’s executive amnesties that granted any illegal alien 30 years or younger who can prove they came to the U.S. at a young age protection from deportation. The executive action has granted around 600,000 “Dreamers” amnesty and allows some of the illegal aliens to gain work permits.
Read more on this story at Politico.com.
