The tragic irony is that while President Trump has moved to ramp up deportations and use the military to secure the Southern border, he wants to offer a “gold card” and a pathway to citizenship to anyone who pays $5 million to the government and is willing to invest in the U.S.
According to Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick, the “gold card” dreamers will “have to go through vetting, of course, to make sure they are wonderful world class, global citizens.”
“They can come to America,” he said. “The president can give them a green card, and they can invest in America, and we can use that money to reduce our deficit.” It’s the art of the deal. The move, experts say, would require the approval of Congress, but who cares?
A foreigner can buy citizenship for far less than a condo in Trump Tower. Sounds good, but how many $5 million fees does Trump expect to collect? The amount won’t mean much when compared to a federal deficit of $1.8 trillion and a national debt of $36.2 trillion and rising.
What is galling is the hypocrisy of it all. And what about immigrants who don’t have the big bucks? They are condemned to a hard-knock life. In a move blatantly abridging Fifth Amendment rights, Trump wants to create a registry for immigrants in the U.S. to submit their personal information or face fines and prison time. Immigrants who fail to register could be fined up to $5,000 and sentenced to up to six months in prison.
An undocumented immigrant who may have lived, worked and paid taxes in America for decades is given a choice — either register and be deported or don’t register and risk being arrested, imprisoned and later deported. Is Immigration and Customs Enforcement so ineffectual that Trump needs to paint a target on the back of every migrant as the best means of enforcing immigration law? There are between 11 and 14 million undocumented immigrants in this country, and the $5 million price tag is far beyond the reach of most.
Trump is ignoring Congress, where he holds a razor-thin majority. The new registration requirement provides for federal criminal penalties by executive fiat. This is a form of criminal legislation which, as the Constitution makes clear, only Congress can do.
The move to criminalize illegal presence in the U.S. would enhance the Trump administration’s touted efforts to toughen immigration laws. Previously, immigrants here illegally were committing an administrative offense and could be detained and deported, but weren’t considered to have committed a crime.
“Aliens in this country illegally face a choice,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem stated. “They can return home and follow the legal process to come to the United States or they can deal with the consequences of continuing to violate our laws.” Some choice!
What happened to America’s heart? Have we forgotten that we are a nation of immigrants? What has become of “Give me your tired, your poor,” the Emma Lazarus paean to freedom emblazoned on the base of the Statue of Liberty?
Trump has revised the Lazarus poem to “Give me your oligarchs, your rich.”
The president ordered the government to set up the Hobson’s choice in a day-one executive order. The next day, the Justice Department ordered U.S. attorneys’ offices to give priority to prosecuting cases involving an immigrant’s failure to register.
Local prosecutors may end up resigning rather than wasting the formative years of their careers working on failure to register cases, rather than more challenging and higher profile cases, such as drugs, bank robbery and business fraud, as well as official corruption. But instead they are ordered to prioritize the pursuit of misdemeanants — the housekeepers, the workmen, the refuse collectors who have failed to register. When I was a federal prosecutor, we used to refer to such small-potatoes cases as bulls—, to be filed at the back of the cabinet.
When American was gearing up for war in 1940, Congress created an immigrant registry to catch suspected communists. For years, the government saturated the airwaves warning all immigrants, including permanent residents, to register annually at local post offices. The system fell into disuse by the 1960s, when the government decided it was too costly and provided little benefit. There is no report of a single communist who turned himself in. Trump plans to return to arcane provisions of immigration law that have proved impractical to enforce.
Trump’s revived registry requires anyone in the country illegally without government interface, such as an application for asylum or a work permit, to come take the fatal step forward. The administration has ginned up a registration form for the occasion and given people 30 days to complete it.
Immigrants who overstay their visas or are in deportation proceedings wouldn’t need to register, as the government already has their contact data, though they would be required to submit any changes of address. Migrants by inclination may prefer to move around more than citizens or permanent residents.
President George W. Bush created a similar immigration registry after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when he made men and boys from Muslim-majority countries submit photographs and fingerprints to the federal government. Tens of thousands of people, innocent of any involvement with terrorism, registered under that program, and were later arrested and deported. Do you think any dyed-in-the-wool terrorist would have come forward?
What is astonishing is not that Trump wants to do this; what is astonishing is that any rational agency of government is willing to follow his lead and implement such ill-conceived policies.
James D. Zirin, author and legal analyst, is a former federal prosecutor in New York’s Southern District. He is also the host of the public television talk show and podcast “Conversations with Jim Zirin.”
