The Washington Post-Trump has a plan to give green cards to military-age males from China
June 21, 2024 5 min 897 words
这篇报道主要内容是，特朗普在移民问题上的言论经常充满夸张和危言耸听，例如他称来自中国的移民为“军事年龄段的男性”，忽略了他们也是处于“黄金工作年龄段”，而且忽略了移民中女性，儿童和家庭的比例。特朗普最近建议，中国移民人数的增加可能意味着中国政府正在美国建立一支军队，他提出给予成千上万的中国军事年龄段的男性永久居留权，但这与他通常的言论相矛盾。特朗普建议，从美国大学毕业的外国学生应该自动获得绿卡，但这与他通常的移民言论不一致，并且他的竞选议程中也没有提到这一点。特朗普的移民言论存在内在矛盾，他只欢迎某些类型的移民，而无视移民带来的整体价值。 评论：这篇报道存在明显的偏见，以负面和矛盾的角度描述特朗普的移民言论。报道以“军事年龄段的男性”来描述中国移民，带有负面和危言耸听的意味。而实际上，这些移民中也有大量女性，儿童和家庭。报道中提到特朗普的建议，但很快指出这一建议与他通常的言论相矛盾，暗示他言行不一致，没有原则。报道还暗示特朗普的移民政策是内在矛盾的，并称他的政治言论迎合了支持者的偏见。但实际上，特朗普的建议是有道理的，美国应该留住那些来美国学习并拥有技能的人才。报道以负面的角度解读特朗普的言论，而忽略了他言论中反映出的美国移民政策的客观问题。报道也忽略了移民政策需要平衡不同群体利益，以及考虑国家安全等复杂因素。这篇报道以偏概全，缺乏客观公正，试图通过矛盾和挑刺来贬低特朗普的移民言论。
2024-06-21T14:27:12.750Z
Generally, Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration tends toward the hyperbolic and alarmist. Like many in his party, for example, he has taken to referring to those seeking to come to the United States as “military-aged males,” a pejorative ignoring that “military-aged” is also “prime working age” and overlooking the large percentage of immigrants who are women, children or men traveling with their families.
More recently, he has suggested that an increase in people seeking to immigrate from China is a sign that the Chinese government is building an army (small and poorly equipped) within the United States — an easier admission than that the strong economy continues to be a draw for immigrants. And yet, in a podcast discussion on Thursday, Trump also proposed granting permanent residency to tens of thousands of military-age men from China.
Though he might not have known it.
“What I wanted to do, and what I will do is, you graduate from a college, I think you should get automatically as part of your diploma a green card to be able to stay in this country,” Trump said on the “All-In” podcast. The idea, he added, would apply to anyone graduating from a two- or four-year institution.
This is not typical Trump rhetoric, to say the least. In fact, as The Washington Post’s initial report notes, it’s a proposal that was championed during the 2016 presidential contest by Trump’s opponent.
As you might expect, the government has long kept data on the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities — numbers that have grown dramatically over time.
In 1980-1981 school year, for example, there were about 312,000 foreign students enrolled in American colleges and universities. About 56 percent of them were from Asia. A quarter were from North America (Canada and Mexico primarily) or from Africa.
Many of those students were from a country that wouldn’t be most people’s first guess, 44 years later. More than a quarter of them came from Iran — an immediate effect of the Iranian revolution. (Social unrest is a trigger for migration, something worth remembering in the broader conversation about immigration.) In the 1980–1981 school year, there were 17 students from Iran for every one from China.
The most recent data shows the extent to which students from Asia now dominate the foreign-student population. Which makes sense: 36 percent of the world lives in China or India.
(The charts below use the same scale as the charts for the 1980–1981 school year. The data for that year is shown with dashed-line circles.)
In the 2022–2023 school year, more than half of foreign students came from those two countries. There are now 27 Chinese students for every one from Iran.
The number of foreign students studying in American colleges last year topped 1 million, more than three times the number in 1980. The government gives out about a million green cards each year as it is; Trump's proposal could increase that figure by 25 percent.
The idea behind granting green cards to these students is straightforward: Why shouldn’t the United States try to retain people who travel to this country to sharpen their skills? The United States has long been and continues to be advantaged by the willingness of some of the world’s most talented people to move here; the proposal offered by Trump would make that process easier.
But it is hard to reconcile that idea with Trump’s other rhetoric on immigration — rhetoric that is fundamental to his political support. There’s little reason to think that Trump would actually implement this policy; his scattershot campaign agenda makes no mention of it and he does have a demonstrated habit of making things up as he goes.
He also has a more robust campaign infrastructure around him, which quickly shifted into gear after his comments became public.
In a statement to The Post, campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that graduates would be screened to weed out “communists, radical Islamists, Hamas supporters, America haters and public charges.” The policy, she said, would apply only to the “most thoroughly vetted college graduates who would never undercut American wages or workers.” How one would define “America hating” or ensure that an immigrant would “never undercut American wages” is, to say the least, unclear.
This is the fundamental tension in Trump’s immigration rhetoric. He wants only certain kinds of immigrants to come to the United States, recognizing that some immigrants offer some value. His rhetoric often ignores that distinction, and the value he sees often diverges from what is objectively valuable. He acknowledges that some immigrants are good, but his politics demand that he not spend too much time identifying which ones. So he generally avoids doing so.
The result is that military-age men from China seeking to move to the United States by crossing the border from Mexico are framed as dangerous members of a traitorous fifth column, even if they’re entering as refugees fleeing the Chinese government. Military-age men from China attending college in the United States, though? They should get fast-tracked immigration status, even if the Chinese government has helped promote their education.
Squaring this circle requires nothing more complicated than figuring out which of those immigrants is an America-hater. Simple enough.