AMERICA’S GOLDEN DOOR IS SLAMMING SHUT

THERE HAS OFTEN been a chasm between the lofty rhetoric of U.S. presidents and their actual policies. When it comes to immigration, Donald Trump does not have that problem. His rhetoric and policies are remarkably aligned. He is saying and doing things that no one—not even the most hardline restrictionists—thought imaginable a few years ago.

In 2015, Trump kicked off his election campaign with an infamous speech claiming that Mexico was sending “rapists and criminals” to America—never mind that immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, commit crimes at far lower rates than the native-born, according to numerous studies by academics, think tanks, and the government itself. Any hope that he would dial back such dehumanizing comments once he got to the White House was quickly dashed. The president has denigrated people from “shithole countries” and resurrected long discarded blood-and-soil tropes, claiming, for example, that Central Americans fleeing organized crime and desperate poverty want to “infest” the United States. This is eerily similar to the language