Is President Trump Abandoning His ‘America First’ Reforms? ‘We Need’ More Immigration to Grow Business Profits

Ahead of the 2020 presidential election, President Trump is abandoning his prior “America First” legal immigration reforms to support increases of legal immigration levels in order to expand profits for businesses and corporations.

For the fourth time in about a month, Trump suggested increasing legal immigration levels. With Apple CEO Tim Cook sitting next to him at the White House on Wednesday, Trump said he not only wanted more legal immigration but that companies needed an expansion of new arrivals to grow their business.

“We’re going to have a lot of people coming into the country. We want a lot of people coming in. And we need it,” Trump said:

It’s not a question of do we want [more immigration], these folks are going to have to sort of not expand too much. And if we tell them … these are very ambitious people around this table. They don’t like the concept of not expanding. We want to have the companies grow and the only way they’re going to grow is if we give them the workers and the only way we’re going to have the workers is to do exactly what we’re doing. [Emphasis added]

The comments are a direct rebuttal of the president’s commitments in 2015, 2016, and 2017, where he vowed to reduce overall legal immigration levels to boost the wages of U.S. workers and reduce the displacement of America’s working and middle class.

In 2017, for instance, Trump touted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) and Sen. David Perdue’s (R-GA) RAISE Act legislation, which would have cut legal immigration down to about 500,000 arrivals a year rather than the current admission of more than one million legal immigrants annually who compete against working-class Americans for jobs.

Trump, at the time, said legal immigration levels needed to be trimmed to “reduce poverty, increase wages, and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars,” arguing that the current importation of more than a million legal immigrants every year “has placed substantial pressure on American workers, taxpayers, and community resources.”

“Among those hit the hardest in recent years have been immigrants, and very importantly, minority workers competing for jobs against brand new arrivals,” Trump said in 2017 of current legal immigration levels. “And it has not been fair to our people, to our citizens, to our workers.”

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