President Donald Trump only ever campaigned on curtailing illegal immigration, but that hasn’t stopped his critics from pretending otherwise.
The surge in illegal aliens at the border, especially those coming with children (a challenge we haven’t faced in this quantity before), has allowed the left to seize on a narrative of cruelty inflicted on immigrants in Trump’s America. Indeed, it was those who politicized Trump’s “cruel” treatment the most (the so-called “squad” of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib) who voted against a Democrat led bill to provide a $4.5 billion aid package described as a “total surrender by Republicans” to help relieve the situation at the border, and improve living standards for illegals and their children as they await trial. I guess they’d rather not see conditions improve so long as they can continue making “concentration camp” analogies? Who knows.
Despite the “anti-immigrant” narrative, we do know for a fact that legal immigration has shown no signs of slowing down despite claims to the contrary. The New York Times has bemoaned that the time aspiring Americans must wait to be naturalized has doubled under the Trump administration – but it’s only doubled to a mere 10 month wait. One has to wait less time to become a naturalized citizen than a veteran needs to wait to receive care from the VA!
According to the Washington Examiner, the figures back up exactly what Trump presented his ideology on immigration as. Legal immigration and is up, with the number of people approved for citizenship hitting a five year high in 2018.
Homeland Security reached a five-year high in approvals of citizenship applications last year and swore in more people as naturalized citizens as well, according to the new statistical report.
The percent of applications approved is basically statistically identical under Obama vs Trump (peaking at 90.7% under Obama, and hitting a low of 89.1% under Trump), and that slight decline in the number of applications approved is overshadowed by more applications approved overall.
And contrary to media narrative, there has been an increase in asylum-seeker petitions processed by the government. The only form of migration being restricted under the Trump administration has been refugee admissions, which Trump campaigned on reducing.
Those numbers contradict the criticisms of congressional Democrats who had complained about backlogs building at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security branch that handles legal immigration.
The new report also suggests that far from a crackdown, the government is processing more asylum-seeker petitions than any of the last four years. That included a 61 percent increase from 2017 to 2018 in affirmative asylum applications — though refugee interviews are down from more than 125,000 in 2016, the last year under President Barack Obama, to just 26,400 in fiscal year 2018 under President Trump.
Little has changed in the past couple of years when it comes to America’s process relating to the detention of illegals. The only thing that changed was the presidency, and with that, the media’s narrative on the issue.
