EDITORIAL: Trump’s new immigration rule just another way to say ‘Send them back’

Give us your PhD’s, your sports stars, your supermodels yearning to be free. The privileged of your teeming shore. Send these, the well-heeled, the tempest-tossed yacht owners. I lift my Tiffany lamp beside the golden Mar-a-Lago door!

— A Trump administration rewrite of the words on the Statue of Liberty

Pretty much everybody who is an American, with the exception of the indigenous peoples, arrived in this country dirt poor or is descended from somebody who arrived here dirt poor or in chains. Whether from Ireland, Italy, Somalia or Vietnam, we are a proud nation of the tired and the poor — the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — who started from nothing and built good lives.

This has never gone down well with President Donald Trump, who has attempted to run the country the way he and his father ran their apartment rental business — by turning away people of color.

Trump famously despises immigrants from Mexico and Central America who are here illegally. He calls them rapists and killers and would like to see them rounded up like cattle. Last week, federal agents raided several food processing plants in Mississippi and hauled off 680 men and women who had been working — not lolling about on welfare, but working — without proper documentation. Maybe you saw their children crying on TV.

Trump is equally well known for his dislike of immigrants who are Muslim. Early in his presidency, he imposed a travel ban barring most people from several majority-Muslim countries from entering the United States. He has singled out for scorn Muslim members of Congress.

And now, on Monday, the Trump administration unveiled a rule that could deny visas and permanent residency to hundreds of thousands of other immigrants for the sole crime of being poor.

The rule, scheduled to take effect on Oct. 15, says applicants for green cards and visas can be turned down if they have low incomes or little education or have used — or might be expected to use — benefits such as Medicaid, food stamps and housing vouchers.

The point, says the Trump administration, is to encourage “self-reliance and self-sufficiency” among new immigrants, which seems fair enough. But our nation has always expected new immigrants to quickly stand on their own two feet. And it has always provided short-term assistance — public and private — to help them do so.

Until, apparently, now.

The obvious true intent of the new rule is to make it harder for low-income immigrants — who skew toward people of color — to come to the United States at all. In April, Trump declared that “our country is full” and he meant it.

What galls us, from the perspective of an editorial board in one of America’s great immigrant cities, is what an insult Trump’s new rule is to the generations of immigrants who built this country. The Irish dug the canals. The Italians filled the factories. The Poles worked the stockyards. The Chinese built the railroads. The Mexicans picked the fields, and still do.

They had nothing, but they worked and moved up and sent their kids to college, and if they got a handout along the way — a little something from the local welfare office or the parish church or the synagogue — it proved to be a terrific investment.

It happened 150 years ago, lucky for Chicago, and it’s happening now. On Argyle Street and Devon. Along 71st Street and in Pilsen. Up Milwaukee Avenue and down Cottage Grove.

Forty-three percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children, and many of them were poor.

Trump is up to nothing new. Immigrant-bashing is as old as the country. The English had a problem with the Scots, who had a problem with the Irish, who had a problem with the Italians, who had a problem with the Poles, who had a problem with the Jews.

It was tribalism, with religious differences baked in. The new crowd never seemed quite “American” enough to the old crowd, even when the old crowd still had an accent.

What’s driving this latest assault on immigration looks to us like pure white nationalism. This is a president who has always had a particular problem seeing people of color — whether a Mexican American judge, the Pakistan American parents of a slain soldier or a Puerto Rican member of Congress from New York — as fully committed Americans.

Monday’s new rule, designed to limit immigration by poor people, is an 837-page legal document in the service of a three-word rallying cry: “Send them back.”

The Statue of Liberty might want to retire.

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