President Trump Wants Increased Immigration: He fell for the legal-good/illegal-bad fallacy

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

Though I agree with the consensus that the president gave a good State of the Union address on Tuesday, as such things go, his comments on immigration seemed so unremarkable I didn’t think they were worth writing about. I dismissed the one notable thing he did say on the subject as just another example of what the reporter Dara Lind calls “superlativizing“: Instead of reading the sentence on the teleprompter that said “I want people to come into our country, but they have to come in legally,” Trump ad-libbed, “I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” (Emphasis added.)

My impression that this was just a Trumpian verbal tic was strengthened by the fact of his earlier support for the RAISE Act and the Goodlatte bill, both of which would have reduced overall immigration, albeit not as much as critics imagined.

But it turns out that this was more than mere superlativizing.

Trump was asked on Wednesday about the “largest numbers ever” comment, and he doubled down. Here’s the exchange:

REPORTER: Last night, you said in your SOTU address, “I want to come into this country in the largest numbers ever.” Is that a change in your policy?

TRUMP: Yes, because we need people in our country because our unemployment numbers are so low and we have massive numbers of companies coming back into our country — car companies, we have seven car companies coming back in right now and there’s going to be a lot more — we’ve done really well with this, and we need people.

TRUMP: I need people coming in because we need people to run the factories and plants and companies that are moving back in. We need people.

Read the rest from Mark Krikorian HERE.