Well into his presidency, Donald Trump continues to define himself by his racism. He jumped at the opportunity to single out immigrants during a sit-down in the Oval Office this week with the far-right Breitbart News, insisting that he does not want to “have anyone coming in that’s on welfare.”
As he continued:
‘We have a problem, because we have politicians that are not strong, or they have bad intentions, or they want to get votes, because they think if they come in they’re going to vote Democrat, you know, for the most part… I don’t like the idea of people coming in and going on welfare for 50 years, and that’s what they want to be able to do.’
There are a whopping number of issues in just those few sentences worth of word salad.
Most importantly, undocumented immigrants do not themselves come in and start using the welfare system, which Trump has in the past suggested constitutes them taking benefits from Americans. It just doesn’t happen — because they’re not allowed to. Many “welfare” programs like food stamps, Medicaid, and money for child assistance aren’t even allowed to be accessed by legal immigrants until they’ve lived in the United States for five to seven years.
Breitbart’s editor-in-chief Alexander Marlow had cited a misleading statistic from the far-right Center for Immigration Studies to prompt the president’s above quoted remarks, sharing with him how in 2014, “63 percent of households headed by a non-citizen reported that they used at least one welfare program, compared to 35 percent of native-headed households.”
The reality is in the details. These immigrants’ households were utilizing benefits for American-born children who are American citizens — although notably, the Trump administration has proposed ending birthright citizenship in the past.
In the meantime, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that the difference between welfare usage among immigrant and non-immigrant households has to do with their income level and not some kind of nefarious plan for Democrats to take over the United States via an influx of undocumented immigrants. A similar disparity would likely emerge when comparing any particularly downtrodden minority group to more privileged native-born Americans.
For the record, despite Trump’s claims to the contrary, there is no evidence of undocumented immigrants actually voting, let alone boosting Democratic candidates to victory, like he claimed happened in the case of 2016’s presidential election’s popular vote, in which Hillary Clinton finished far ahead.
Trump defended his dismissal of the welfare of those in immigrant-led households by citing imaginary obligations to NATO, which Trump has claimed other countries weren’t paying their fair share to support despite sparse, if any evidence of countries actually breaking agreements actually in place.
Besides simply talking down on immigrants in the Oval Office, he has gone after them through very tangible means, just this week unveiling a budget proposal for the 2020 fiscal year that asks for over $8 billion for the construction of his long-sought border wall blocking off Mexico. That’s on top of billions he’s seeking to use via a national emergency declaration he recently signed.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
