House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said yesterday that President Trump’s new immigration plan is “dead on arrival” and “not a remotely serious proposal.”
Her criticisms come shortly after the president unveiled the plan to shift the country toward a “merit-based” system that would favor highly skilled workers over migrants with family members residing in the country. The California Democrat called for bipartisan comprehensive immigration reforms and said Trump’s proposal mirrored the conservative-backed policies that were previously rejected by Congress.
“The White House has repackaged the worst of its past failed immigration plans: greenlighting the Administration’s barbaric family detention policies, reviving the President’s ineffective and wasteful wall, completely abandoning our patriotic and determined DREAMers and gutting our asylum and refugee protections,” she said in a statement. “To say that this plan’s application criteria are ‘merit-based’ is the height of condescension.”
House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) echoed Pelosi’s sentiments, saying that the president is peddling “xenophobic and false stereotypes about immigrants from certain parts of the world.” “With this announcement, we also see this President’s continued disrespect for the principle of keeping families together.”
“We saw it when he ended the DACA, creating a crisis that this proposal ignores. We saw it with the horrific and inhumane family separation policy last year at the border, which tore crying children from their parents’ arms without any plan to reunite them,” he said. Top Democrats have called for any immigration plan to include protections for DREAMers and a pathway to citizenship.
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