Can Trump really broker an immigration deal?

We can break the immigration impasse. Here's how.

President Trump
(Image credit: NICHOLAS KAMM/AFP/Getty Images)

President Trump's new immigration proposal — which would create a pathway to citizenship for up to 1.8 million people illegally brought to the United States as children in exchange for $25 billion for border security, the end of a diversity visa lottery system, and the scaling back of family-based immigration — already seems legislatively doomed. My colleague Peter Weber helpfully rounds up the criticism on the right and left:

On the right, Breitbart News called Trump "Amnesty Don," Heritage Action's Michael Needham said that "any proposal that expands the amnesty-eligible population risks opening Pandora's box" and "should be a nonstarter," and prominent immigration restrictionist Mark Krikorian said Trump "hasn't sold out his voters yet" but this proposal poses "a real potential for disaster." On the left, United We Dream's Greisa Martinez Rosas called the plan "a white supremacist ransom note" and the ACLU demised it as a "hateful, xenophobic immigration proposal that would slash legal immigration to levels not seen since the racial quotas of the 1920s.""Put simply: It's dead on arrival," says Jonathan Swan at Axios. [The Week]

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W. James Antle III

W. James Antle III is the politics editor of the Washington Examiner, the former editor of The American Conservative, and author of Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped?.