They Say They Support “Legal Immigration.” They Don’t.

Pro-immigrant banner at Mets game. Photo: Rise and Resist

The evening of September 7 protesters from Rise and Resist dropped a banner at a Mets game reading: “Immigrants Make Baseball Great.” When they tweeted out a video of the action, the usual suspects responded with tweets about “legal immigrants.”

This is a standard response from the right wing. The irony is that for the past two and a half years the Trump administration’s focus has been on cutting legal immigration. The travel ban was about excluding legal immigrants who were Muslim. The measures against asylum seekers target people exercising their legal right to apply for asylum (which they have even if they “entered without inspection”). The “sh--hole countries” remark was about legal immigrants from African countries. So it’s blatantly dishonest for the right to bring up legality when the goal is really just to exclude certain people.

We need to keep exposing this hypocrisy every time we encounter it.

But is this really worth the effort? Many people simply use the term “illegal” as a code word to disguise their racism; they give themselves away when they say someone “looks illegal.” But some are actually confused and think they are upholding an idea of the United States as a “nation of laws,” and it’s important to keep the issue clear: the right wing’s agenda is limiting all immigration—legal or otherwise—by poor people of color.

Note: John Oliver has provided an informative guide to the Byzantine process for getting legal immigration status.