Duplicitous and Galling: Ivanka Trump Claims Her Dad Wants to Help Immigrants. (The Woman Next to Her Looks Rather Dismayed.)
January 9th 2020
Ivanka Trump Answers Questions (World Bank Photo Collection)
By Oliver Willis
Ivanka Trump told attendees of the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas that her father Donald Trump was pro-immigrant, ignoring his administration’s consistent advocacy of anti-immigrant policies and his use of demagogic language against migrants more broadly.
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Trump’s comments in support of her father come little more than a week after she evaded answering questions about his policy of separating migrant families during an interview with CBS News. At that time, she claimed that immigration was “not part of my portfolio.”
Trump was participating in a question and answer session on Tuesday at the Consumer Technology Association Keynote event with Gary Shapiro, CTA’s president and CEO when she made her most recent remarks.
“The president said that he thinks that it’s absolutely insane that we educate immigrants from across the world and as they’re about to start their business, open their business, become employers, we throw them out of our country,” she said.
“It doesn’t make sense. Our immigration system is totally flawed.”
Trump currently serves as a senior adviser to the her father’s administration, which has put in place policies intended to force out immigrants both legal and undocumented.
Earlier in his tenure, Donald Trump tried to cut down on H1B visas, which often go to immigrant employees with degrees in science, tech, engineering, and other related high skill fields. CEOs from major companies like Apple, American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Visa, and IBM banded together to protest the changes, citing the negative impact it would have on their thousands of employees.
Changes to the visa process implemented by the elder Trump, which introduced additional requirements one immigration attorney called a “nightmare,” have also cut down on the number of student and work visas. Lawyers in the sector said that many of those applicants have instead chosen to go to Canada rather than the United States.
The elder Trump has been openly hostile to immigrants in general throughout his presidency, echoing terrorists by calling migrants part of an “invasion” and indulging in conspiracy theories about “caravans” of migrants purportedly headed to the United States to commit crimes.
He has famously pushed for a border wall to prevent immigration and deployed the military to the U.S.-Mexico border to address what he claimed was a “national emergency” but was in fact part of a larger attempt to siphon congressionally approved funding from military projects for his long-promised wall project.
One week prior to her appearance at CES, Ivanka Trump was interviewed on CBS’ “Face the Nation” and tried to sidestep the thorny issue.
“Immigration is not part of my portfolio, obviously,” she told host Margaret Brennan, when asked whether she sympathized with migrant families who’d been forcibly separated at the border under her father’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy.
“I think everyone should be engaged, and the full force of the U.S. government is committed to this effort to border security — to protecting the most vulnerable,” she continued. “That includes those being trafficked across our border, which this president has committed to countering and combating human trafficking in an incredibly comprehensive, aggressive way. So the full United States government has been focused on this issue, starting with the president.”
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