WASHINGTON —Project 2025, the real Republican platform crafted by the Heritage Foundation at the behest of party presidential nominee Donald Trump, contains a high content of immigrant-bashing, going far beyond Trump’s signature racist Mexican Wall along the nation’s Southern border.
But through the first two days of the GOP convention in Milwaukee, you heard barely a word of the party’s plans for repression of the estimated 10-11 million undocumented people estimated to be in the U.S., or of its real hatred of people of color, documented or undocumented.
That’s because public opinion polls show a large majority of the U.S. people favor some sort of path that keeps migrants here, and not what Trump himself has proposed: rounding all of them up, putting them in detention camps, then sending them back to Mexico and beyond.
Unions and union leaders, especially in the building trades and at Unite HERE, favor migration and legalization of migrants already living in the U.S. They’ve backed legislation to reform the U.S.’s migration system. Republican opposition, including from Trump, has stopped it.
“For far too long, U.S. immigration policy has been broken,” North America’s Building Trades Unions says. “Unscrupulous employers manipulate this broken system to exploit immigrant workers and drive down labor standards and wages in the construction industry. U.S. immigration policy must be overhauled and realistically realigned with future economic and workforce needs.”
In 1999, “Our union led the labor movement to reverse its isolationist position on immigration,” Unite HERE proclaims on its website. John Wilhelm, then the union president, led that campaign.
Since the reversal, Unite HERE’s actions included “demanding bold immigration reform in the face of post-9/11 anti-immigrant bigotry and xenophobia” and leading the voter revolt in Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona, “to kick the most racist sheriff in America, Joe Arpaio, out of office.” Arpaio, a Republican, later ran for the party’s U.S. Senate nomination and lost.
The white minority who hate Spanish speakers is concentrated in the Republican Party, as a video of the convention floor revealed. And that’s the constituency the GOP is playing to.
Migrants, most of them Spanish-speaking, now constitute the largest non-white population in the U.S., data show. Those who are undocumented are also a large part of the “underground economy,” in jobs such as construction, fast food, building services, hotels, and warehouses.
Being undocumented, they’re also vulnerable to corporate exploitation and deportation threats. Vicious bosses threaten Spanish speakers, including natives, with arrest and deportation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents—especially when the workers of color campaign to unionize. Roundups in Mississippi food production plants became notorious.
Project 2025 writers want Trump to unleash the agents, restrict or end visas, and complete the wall.
The Republican agenda should “create a merit-based immigration system that rewards high-skilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family-based and luck-of-the-draw immigration,” the Trump-backed and right-wing-created project says.
“Family-based immigration” is a GOP code word for anti-Hispanic bias: That one family member gets over the border, settles here, and then brings others in, legally. That has been a historic pattern for migrants stretching all the way back for two centuries. Irish, Germans, and English migrants followed that pattern. So, later, did Italians, Eastern Europeans, Russians, and Jews.
Project 2025 wants that pattern to stop, just as nativists and white racists did when they got a Republican-run Congress to slam the migration door starting in January 1924.
“To that end, the diversity visa lottery should be repealed, chain migration should be ended while focusing on the nuclear family, and the existing employment visa program should be replaced with a system to award visas only to the ‘best and brightest,’” Project 2025’s authors write.
That “best and brightest” phrase echoes Trump’s prejudices. He calls current migrants unskilled, murderers, and rapists while praising only white Northern European migrants.
“Internal efforts to limit employment authorization should be matched by congressional action to narrow statutory eligibility to work in the United States and mitigate unfair employment competition for U.S. citizens,” it continues. And they want to “ban immigration benefits to unaccompanied minors.”
“The oft-abused H-1B [visa] program should be transformed into an elite program through which employers are vying to bring in only the top foreign workers at the highest wages so as not to depress American opportunities.”
Project 2025 would also end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, designed to protect migrants fleeing wars, internal conflicts, criminal gangs, and natural disasters.
Most TPS migrants have lived in the U.S. for decades, buying homes, establishing businesses, and working—and paying TPS visa renewal money every few years. Most are also people of color, from Latin America and North Africa, with some from the Middle East.
Project 2025 declares that “given the Obama and Biden Administrations’ lack of will” to stop migration, “fees should be increased to keep in step with inflation and the true cost of the adjudications” of TPS and other migrant visas. The hike would be at least 10%.
“Aside from an increase in all fees, the rule should drastically limit the availability for fee waivers and should implement a fee for asylum applications,” adds Project 2025, the real Republican platform and government plan.
To block migrants from decent jobs—including jobs union contracts cover—Project 2025 would “permanently authorize and make mandatory E-Verify,” a system the feds want employers to use to verify a worker is a legal resident.
The nonpartisan Government Accountability Office reports E-verify is rife with mistakes. But its prospect also forces workers to remain in the underground economy.
There’s an anti-union component to Project 2025’s anti-migrant schemes, too. It says border agents should be reclassified “as essential to national security,” and banned from unionizing.
That’s even though the sector of the Government Employees representing those Border Patrol and ICE officers withdrew from AFGE—after supporting Trump and his immigrant-bashing, his wall, and his roundup plans four years ago.
The Customs and Immigration Service, which includes those two groups, “should be classified as a national security–sensitive agency, and all of its employees should be classified as holding national security–sensitive positions,” Project 2025, the real Republican platform, says.
“Leaks must be investigated and punished as they would be in a national security agency, and the union should be decertified. Any employees who cannot accept that change and cannot conform their behavior to the standards required by such an agency should be separated,” a polite term for being fired.
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