EDITORIALS

Editorial: President's words show ignorance

Staff Writer
Savannah Morning News

Americans of all political persuasions should be extremely disappointed and outraged by the news that President Donald Trump called into question immigrant entry from what he called “s---hole countries” in a meeting with senators in the Oval Office on Thursday.

The president was meeting with a group of senators proposing an accord that would have ended months of wrangling over how to protect the DACA program — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — or the Dream Act as some might call it.

There are currently more than 800,000 immigrants living in the country who arrived here as children. The DACA program, created by President Obama under executive order, gave immigrants protection against immediate deportation and allowed for an application of deferral for two years, with the ability to renew.

In September 2017, President Trump’s administration announced the end of DACA, with the program no longer taking new applications and calling into question the outcome for hundreds of thousands immigrants protected under the program.

In his decision to end the program, Trump asked Congress to promulgate a new law and the administration deferred any action until later this spring in the hopes that Congress could come up with a solution.

According to reporting from the Associated Press on Thursday’s meeting, the president specifically questioned why the United States would admit more people from Haiti and Africa and other “s---hole countries” and suggested there should more entrants from countries like Norway.

His comments go well away from the diplomacy we expect from our nation’s leader and will encourage divisiveness and repugnant racist attitudes across our country.

The comments contribute nothing to the ongoing debate on how to best handle the DACA issue and have erased the goodwill generated by a meeting with lawmakers earlier in the week. It certainly appeared then that the president and lawmakers were working together to find the best solutions to solve the DACA issue and other immigration policy issues. All words have meaning and, in the eyes of the world, a U.S. president’s every word carries the weight of all Americans. They should be constructive at all times.

Now, the focus is on Trump’s comments and allies across the world, especially in Africa and Haiti, are questioning their relationships with our country and why they have been singled out in the immigration debate.

The Haitian ambassador to the United States condemned the comments and asked for an explanation, the spokesperson for the African Union Commission said the group was “alarmed” at being referred to in “such contemptuous terms,” and South Africa’s African National Congress hit back at the comments.

Lawmakers spent Friday blasting the president in an escalating war of words. Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill) called the remarks “vile and racist.” Senator Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) called the remarks “abhorrent and repulsive.” Mia Love, a Republication representative from Utah and a Haitian-American, said the comments were “unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation’s values.”

All of these characterizations of the president’s comments are correct based on accounts from the meeting. And, they are unnecessary and do not represent the foundation and values of our country.

The immigration debate in America has been difficult. The president’s comments do nothing to advance solutions and the reform of our immigration system.

President Trump took the country’s dialogue backwards and his comments were egregious– no matter your political persuasion.