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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.

Martin Paredes

Martín Paredes is a Mexican immigrant who built his business on the U.S.-Mexican border. As an immigrant, Martín brings the perspective of someone who sees México as a native through the experience...

4 replies on “Merit Based Immigration Would Exclude First Lady Immigrant and Her In-laws”

  1. The dynamics are different. In the early 1900s, the government didn’t help immigrants and the majority of jobs available involved manual labor. In short, we needed folks like Trumpf and Macleod. Today, unskilled immigrants that chain migrate may or may not be employable long term. Countries like the US are a magnet to these immigrants because being poor in America is much better than being poor in the third world. We are pretty much the only developed country that doesn’t have a merit based immigration system because other developed nations recognize what a burden on taxpayers chain migration has become. Those countries do have visa systems for financial immigrants in low skilled jobs who are needed for specific jobs that their citizens no longer want to take. In some cases there are citizenship paths for those visa holders once they have a proven track record of supporting themselves and in a few cases those countries give employers tax credits if they educate and improve the skills of those visa holders. Will models like Melania make the cut? Possibly because the arts and entertainment industry is good at justifying the special skills of its participants. But if not, who cares.

  2. Abstract

    The monarch’s father (Old Man Trump) is one of those despised ‘anchor babies’ and his mother an ‘illegal’. The draft-dodging in the trumpas family’s DNA has been traced to the grandfather on the paternal side.

    Two of his three wives have been foreigners who would not be allowed in our Great Nation if immigration laws were enforced.

    Thus the author (of abstract) concludes that the monarch and his two ‘illegals’ should self-deport.

  3. Pati you are just pissed Trump can afford good immigration lawyers! Your a Fascist leftist idiot as usual!

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