*President Donald Trump doesn’t like brown people. His persistent fight with congress to fund the wall (that he promised Mexico would pay for), his fake national emergency designed to take the money under false pretenses and his attempts to illegally turn Latinos away at the border by telling them, “We just don’t have anymore room” when they legally are seeking asylum are examples of his obvious disdain.
But you already know that! Here’s something you might not know: Since he can’t have his way with brown people at the southern border, Trump has turned his attention to the black people from those ‘shit hole countries’ – his words, not mine – who legally enter America through the State Department’s visa program.
He wants to start charging an immigration admissions bond on visa holders. Not all of the visa holders. Just some of the visa holders. Trump finally accepts the fact that most illegal immigration doesn’t come from people sneaking across the Mexican border, rather most illegal immigration occurs when people don’t leave after their visas expire and they go off the grid and get lost in the system.
To address this, number 45 wants to include a monetary fee, known as an immigration bond, as a requirement to enter the visa program. This upfront bond will be held like a security deposit by the State Department. If the visa holder follows the rules and leaves the United States when his visa expires then his immigration bond will be returned. But if he illegally over stays his visa the bond money will be forfeited.
While it sounds like a good way to address the issue, planned implementation of the program is biased. Here’s why: The only people who would be required to pay the immigration admissions bond are those from countries that have higher than a ten percent visa violation rate.
Based on Trump’s ten percent rule, most of the visa offenders are from third-world countries, including Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Liberia, the Solomon Islands, Benin and Burkina Faso. Yes, African countries. But the biggest visa offender, Canada, isn’t on that ten percent hit list. That’s because even though more than 90,000 Canadians over stayed their visas in 2017 (the last available numbers available) that number is under the ten percent threshold Trump wants to target. More than 9 million Canadians were granted visas that year. Those third-world country visa holders amounted to less than 30,000 altogether the same year. So all it would take for them to get on Trump’s ten percent hit list would be a few thousand offenders. Canada, the biggest offender, gets overlooked. How convenient! Just like the electoral college, percentages work better for Trump than using simple math.
If qualifying for a visa isn’t hard enough with all the paperwork and fees and interviews associated with getting approved, now Trump wants to add another hurdle to the process. Not for everybody, just for those people who already have to sacrifice to come up with the money to participate in the legal process to begin with. Most of them come here for short-term study or work programs. Now they could be forced to forgo the opportunity altogether if Trump has his way.
Not the rich white people. Mostly just the poor black people. I know all Canadians aren’t rich white people and all Africans aren’t poor black people, but for a president who doesn’t like black or brown people, it’s simply a matter of black and white.
Since Trump’s 2018 travel ban didn’t gain the traction he had hoped, now he’s turning his attention to the visa program as a way to show his supporters he’s still tough on immigration leading up to the 2020 election. He’s looking for a win any place he can get it.
Steffanie is a free-lance journalist living in the Dallas-Ft. Worth metroplex. For questions, comments and speaking inquiries email her at [email protected].
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