Why is Trump against legal immigration

Donald Trump is taking the corona pandemic as an opportunity to close the US borders to legal immigrants. The US president announced on Twitter late Monday evening that he would "temporarily" suspend immigration. Trump wrote on Twitter that he would sign a decree to protect American workers from the "invisible enemy attack" - by which he meant the coronavirus. The White House wants to specify in the coming days which immigrants will be affected by the stop, how long it will last and how it is to be implemented. In the evening it was said that there should be exceptions for people who play a role in the fight against the epidemic. This included agricultural workers and others who kept the United States supplied with food. A senior member of the government told Reuters news agency on Tuesday.

The move comes at a time when the US is recording far more coronavirus infections than any other country. Most recently there were a good 800,000 positive cases. More than 43,000 people have already died. The crisis has also hit the US hard economically. 22 million people have registered as unemployed. Conservative circles had been pushing Trump to impose an immigration freeze for some time. "Let's help these people get back into work before we import more immigrants who are stealing their jobs," tweeted Republican Senator Tom Cotton.

Immigrants are important to health care. A quarter of doctors were born abroad

In fact, immigration to the United States dropped massively weeks ago. People from China, the Schengen states and other countries severely affected by the coronavirus are not allowed to enter. The US authorities have barely issued any new visas since mid-March, and it is not clear when the embassies and consulates will resume normal operations. The country is currently no longer accepting refugees, and even naturalization ceremonies are suspended.

Immigrants play an important role in agriculture and US health care. More than a quarter of all doctors were born abroad. It is also unclear what Trump's announcement means for the many thousands of Mexicans who cross the border every day to legally work in the United States. So far, people with work visas were still allowed to travel to the United States. Many Mexicans also have informal jobs, such as gardeners or nannies. It has been difficult for her to get to work since the end of March. The announcement allows President Trump to link one of his campaign topics to the pandemic. "This is not about politics at all, it is about the message that the president wants to send," tweeted Ali Noorani, head of the National Immigration Forum, an organization that campaigns for the rights of immigrants: "He turns people against each other. " Several civil rights organizations have already announced that they will challenge the announced decree in court.

The Democrats also criticize Trump's immigration ban. The president wanted to divert attention from his poor response to the pandemic and blame the immigrants, said MP Jerry Nadler, one of the leading Democrats in the House of Representatives. The move is a "xenophobically motivated search for scapegoats," tweeted MP Don Beyer. According to recent opinion polls, a majority of Americans are negative about Trump's handling of the pandemic. So it is possible that the immigration stop will help Trump to at least mobilize his supporters - even if the measure remains symbolic in view of the already closed borders. In contrast, the consequences that migrants from Central America in particular are already facing are very real. The government has not dealt with your asylum applications since the end of March. That means thousands of them are stuck in Mexican border towns like Matamoros and Ciudad Juarez.

For weeks it has been feared that the virus outbreak could have devastating consequences there. The people in the camps live cramped, there is little drinking water and sanitary facilities. In desperation, some migrants have already sent their children off alone to seek asylum from the US border authorities. In the past, unaccompanied minors were admitted. In the meantime, however, the children have also been turned away - on the grounds that they could transmit the virus.