American journalist Julia Ioffe slammed the Trump administration’s plan to curb legal immigration calling it “very restrictive” and part of a formula that would “provide the right kind of demographic engineering,” for his base.
Ioffe said first lady Melania Trump initially came to America on an H-1B visa, one of the visas the government is now working to restrict.
“When you ask Trump supporters, they don’t care because she’s a different — she’s the right kind of immigrant.”
“She is a beautiful white woman from Europe, and we like those. Even though she doesn’t have a college degree. You know, I don’t know how she would have done under this point system,” Ioffe told CNN’s Fareed Zakaria.
The Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment (RAISE) Act, announced earlier this week, aims to reduce the number of low-skilled immigrants who are allotted green cards by 50% and would replace the current employment-based system with a merit-based system grading possible immigrants according to specifics such as education, English-language ability, high-paying job offers, and age.
An immigrant herself, Ioffe came to the United States from Russia with her family in 1990. She was 7 years old. She made headlines earlier this week when she tweeted: “I didn’t speak English when I immigrated to the United States. Now, I get paid to write in it.”
Now a staff writer at The Atlantic magazine, Ioffe said she thinks most people could pick up English in a few months. She further criticized the Trump administration’s numerous attempts to drastically reduce the number of refugees calling it “immoral and cruel.”
“Especially if you’re pursuing a kind of isolationist foreign policy and you’re not going out into the world and trying to help these countries fix the situations they’re in so that they’re not creating these massive refugees flows,” she said.
