President Trump on immigration
How complex are the ideas about immigration expressed in President Trump’s recent comments to congress?
On January 9th, 2018, President Trump spoke to members of Congress about immigration reform. In his comments, the President stressed the need for bipartisan immigration reform, and laid out three goals.
- secure our border with Mexico
- end chain migration
- close the visa lottery program
I have analyzed President Trump’s comments in detail, looking at each goal in turn. But first, his full comments were submitted to CLAS (an electronic developmental assessment system) for an analysis of their complexity level. The CLAS score was 1046. This score is in what we call level 10, and is a few points lower than the average score of 1053 awarded to President Trump’s arguments in our earlier research.
Here are some benchmarks for complexity scores:
- The average complexity score of American adults is in the upper end of level 10, somewhere in the range of 1050–1080.
- The average complexity score for senior leaders in large corporations or government institutions is in the upper end of level 11, in the range of 1150–1180.
- The average complexity score (reported in our National Leaders Study) for the three U. S. presidents that preceded President Trump was 1137.
- The difference between 1046 and 1137 represents a decade or more of sustained learning. (If you’re a new reader and don’t yet know what a complexity level is, check out the National Leaders Series introductory article.)
Border security
President Trump’s first goal was to increase border security.
Drugs are pouring into our country at a record pace and a lot of people are coming in that we can’t have… we have tremendous numbers of people and drugs pouring into our country. So, in order to secure it, we need a wall. We…have to close enforcement loopholes. Give immigration officers — and these are tremendous people, the border security agents, the ICE agents — we have to give them the equipment they need, we have to close loopholes, and this really does include a very strong amount of different things for border security.”
This is a good example of a level 10, if-then, linear argument. The gist of this argument is, “If we want to keep drugs and people we don’t want from coming across the border, then we need to build a wall and give border agents the equipment and other things they need to protect the border.”
As is also typical of level 10 arguments, this argument offers immediate concrete causes and solutions. The cause of our immigration problems is that bad people are getting into our country. The physical act of keeping people out of the country is a solution to this problem.
Individuals performing in level 11 would not be satisfied with this line of reasoning. They would want to consider underlying or root causes such as poverty, political upheaval, or trade imbalances — and would be likely to try to formulate solutions that addressed these more systemic causes.
Side note: It’s not clear exactly what President Trump means by loopholes. In the past, he has used this term to mean “a law that lets people do things that I don’t think they should be allowed to do.” The dictionary meaning of the term would be more like, “a law that unintentionally allows people to do things it was meant to keep them from doing.”
Chain migration
President Trump’s second goal was to end chain migration. According to Wikipedia, Chain migration (a.k.a., family reunification) is a social phenomenon in which immigrants from a particular family or town are followed by others from that family or town. In other words, family members and friends often join friends and loved ones who have immigrated to a new country. Like many U. S. Citizens, I’m a product of chain migration. The first of my relatives who arrived in this country in the 17th century, later helped other relatives to immigrate.
President Trump wants to end chain migration, because…
“Chain migration is bringing in many, many people with one, and often it doesn’t work out very well. Those many people are not doing us right.”
I believe that what the President is saying here is that chain migration is when one person immigrates to a new country and lots of other people known (or related to?) that person are allowed to immigrate too. He is concerned that the people who follow the first immigrant aren’t behaving properly.
To support this claim, President Trump provides an example of the harm caused by chain migration.
“…we have a recent case along the West Side Highway, having to do with chain migration, where a man ran over — killed eight people and many people injured badly. Loss of arms, loss of legs. Horrible thing happened, and then you look at the chain and all of the people that came in because of him. Terrible situation.”
The perpetrator — Sayfullo Saipov — of the attack Trump appears to be referring to, was a Diversity Visa immigrant. Among other things, this means he was not sponsored, so he cannot be a chain immigrant. On November 21, 2017, President Trump claimed that Saipov had been listed as the primary contact of 23 people who attempted to immigrate following his arrival in 2010, suggesting that Saipov was the first in a chain of immigrants. According to Buzzfeed, federal authorities have been unable to confirm this claim.
Like the border security example, Trump’s argument about chain migration is a good example of a level 10, if-then, linear argument. Here, the gist of his argument is that, If we don’t stop chain migration, then bad people like Sayfullo Saipov will come into the country and do horrible things to us. (I’m intentionally ignoring President Trump’s mistaken assertion that Saipov was a chain immigrant.)
Individuals performing in level 11 would not regard a single example of violent behavior as adequate evidence that chain immigration is a bad thing. Before deciding that eliminating chain migration was a wise decision, they they would want to know, for example, whether or not chain immigrants are more likely to behave violently (or become terrorists) than natural born citizens.
The visa lottery (Diversity Visa Program)
The visa lottery was created as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush. Application for this program is free, The only way to apply is to enter your data into a form on the State Department’s website. Individuals who win the lottery must undergo background checks and vetting before being admitted into the United States. (If you are interested in learning more, the Wikipedia article on this program is comprehensive and well-documented.)
President Trump wants to cancel the lottery program
“…countries come in and they put names in a hopper. They’re not giving you their best names; common sense means they’re not giving you their best names. They’re giving you people that they don’t want. And then we take them out of the lottery. And when they do it by hand — where they put the hand in a bowl — they’re probably — what’s in their hand are the worst of the worst.”
Here, President Trump seems to misunderstand the nature of the Diversity Visa Program. He claims that countries put forward names and that these are the names of people they do not want in their own countries. That is simply not the way the Diversity Visa Program works.
To support his anti-lottery position, Trump again appears to mention the case of Sayfullo Saipov (“that same person who came in through the lottery program).”
But they put people that they don’t want into a lottery and the United States takes those people. And again, they’re going back to that same person who came in through the lottery program. They went — they visited his neighborhood and the people in the neighborhood said, “oh my God, we suffered with this man — the rudeness, the horrible way he treated us right from the beginning.” So we don’t want the lottery system or the visa lottery system. We want it ended.”
I think that what President Trump is saying here is that Sayfullo Saipov was one of the outcasts put into our lottery program by a country that did not want him, and that his new neighbors in the U. S. had complained about his behavior from the start.
This is not a good example of a level 10 argument. This is not a good example of an argument. President Trump completely misrepresents the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, leaving him with no basis for a sensible argument.
Summing up
The results from this analysis of President Trump’s statements about immigration provides additional evidence that he tends to perform in the middle of level 10, and his arguments generally have a simple if, then structure. It also reveals some apparent misunderstanding of the law and other factual information.
It is a matter for concern when a President of the United States does not appear to understand a law he wants to change.
