Merit Based Immigration Would Exclude First Lady Immigrant and Her In-laws

Proponents of the RAISE Act are trumping up the notion that reforming immigration through a merit based system would make America great again. It sounds like the perfect solution to the broken immigration system. After all, who can oppose a system that takes in the brightest and turns away those that drain the economy. Other than the fact that the proposed RAISE Act ignores the fundamental reality for the economic needs of the United States to make it great again, the proposed reform would have made it impossible for Melania Trump to come to the United States and would have made it impossible for Trump to be president.

You see, Donald Trump is the product of two immigrants. Friedr Trumpf, as his immigration documents name him, arrived in the United States in 1885. Trumpf, who later change his name to Friedrich Trump, arrived into the United States without a job. He moved in with his sister, who had emigrated to the United States two year earlier. Clearly it was chain migration for the Trumpf family. Listed as “none” for his occupation by U.S. authorities, Trumpf would not have been allowed into the country under any merit-based immigration system and certainly not under the proposed RAISE Act. It wasn’t until 1904, when Friedrich Trump applied for a U.S. passport. But the immigration travails for the eldest Trump continued. In 1904, Friedrich Trump was deported from Germany and his German citizenship was stripped from him. His crime? Being a draft dodger.

Donald Trump’s grandfather, Friedrich Trump, would not have been allowed into the country under any sort of merit-based immigration system. He was a criminal draft-dodger and had no form of bonified job prospects. His grandmother, Elizabeth Christ, also a German citizen, was forced to move to the United States because Friedrich Trump had been expelled from Germany for his crime.

The merit-based hypocrisy gets worse.

Mary Anne MacLeod is Donald Trump’s mother. MacLeod arrived in the United States with $50 in her pocket on May 11, 1930. Her job was listed as “domestic” by immigration officials. She worked as a maid. Clearly, Mary Anne MacLeod would also not have qualified for immigrating under the proposed RAISE Act.

Without immigrant grandparents or an immigrant mother who immigrated to the United States notwithstanding their inability to meet the standards of the RAISE Act, Donald Trump would not be president today.

But the merit-based hypocrisy continues.

First lady Melania Trump (Melania Knauss) is also an immigrant. She immigrated to the United States in 1996. Melania Trump does not hold a college degree and thus under the RAISE Act she would not have qualified to immigrate to the country.

Had the RAISE Act, or any derivative of it, been the law of the land for immigrants, Donald Trump would not be president today because he would not have been born in the United States.

Munch on that fact as you consider the RAISE Act as the answer to the immigration problems of the country.