Last week, the anti-immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—which has significant ties to President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team and incoming administration—announced that it would be presenting a wish list for Trump’s first months in office. FAIR released that proposal today, and it’s every bit as bad as you’d expect.
FAIR’s proposal starts out by citing a flawed Heritage Foundation study on the fiscal costs of immigration, which was cowritten by a man who had promoted crackpot theories about racial difference in intelligence. It goes on to lament the “social, cultural and political costs” as “we receive immigrants in numbers too large to be successfully incorporated into our way of life and assimilated into our communities.”
FAIR’s solutions are draconian—and many have already been embraced by Trump. They include:
- Eliminating for the children of undocumented immigrants the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship for children born in the United States. FAIR says that it’s a “misinterpretation” of the 14th Amendment to apply this constitutional protection to these children and that it serves as a “magnet for illegal immigration.”
- “[E]limination of nonemergency, nonessential public benefits and services to illegal aliens”—a key part of the so-called “self-deportation” agenda that seeks to drive immigrants into the shadows in order to force them to leave the country on their own. The group’s longer proposal makes it clear that this includes denying nonemergency medical care to undocumented immigrants. The proposal doesn’t mention if this would include cutting off public schools to undocumented kids, although FAIR has previously hinted at that idea.
- Ending the Obama administration's DACA and DAPA programs, which have provided temporary deportation relief to some undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children and some of their family members. FAIR says that in his first 100 days as president, Trump should “revoke all work, identity, and immigration status documents” issued to DACA and DAPA recipients.
- “Foreclose the possibility of amnesty for immigration law violaters”—that is, rule out any immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship.
- Pulling federal funds to sanctuary cities.
- Drastically reducing legal immigration.
That’s just scratching the surface. FAIR also has ideas about how to make it much harder to apply for refugee status or political asylum, and more.
FAIR, which was founded by proponent of white nationalism and eugenics, may very well now have the ear of the president-elect as it promotes its extreme anti-immigrant agenda.
