The Daily - Friday, Jan. 12, 2018

Episode Date: January 12, 2018

President Trump has demanded to know why the United States should welcome immigrants from “shithole countries.” His words have alarmed lawmakers and threatened an immigration deal. But they have also raised a question about a certain American ideal: Who should be let in? Guest: Julie Hirschfeld Davis, who covers the White House for The Times. For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, the president demands to know why the U.S. should welcome immigrants from, quote, shithole countries. It's alarming lawmakers and threatening an immigration deal. But above all, it raises a question about a Central American idea. Who do we let in? It's Friday, January 12th. Julie, what's this meeting in the Oval Office on Thursday? So the president had hosted a meeting earlier in the week

and basically called on members of Congress, as he has before, to come to an agreement, a bipartisan deal, to protect the Dreamers, these undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children. Julie Davis covers the White House for The Times. And Dick Durbin, Democrat from Illinois, and Lindsey Graham, Republican from South Carolina,

who are the leaders of this effort, both separately called the president and told him, listen, we think we have something. And he invited them down to the White House to talk him through it, essentially. Okay. So a Democrat and a Republican, both senators, saying essentially, we think we have a deal for you on DACA that you might like. Let's talk it over. That's right. This is not a comprehensive deal, but the president has basically insisted all along that any DACA fix have within it certain things that Republicans want to see, and he in particular wants to see funding for the wall or for border security, an end to what he calls chain migration, or basically limiting the amount of family that immigrants can bring into the United States after they gain their own legal

status, and then ending the diversity visa lottery program, which is a State Department program that allocates about 50,000 visas a year to people from countries who don't send a lot of people otherwise to the United States. So what's under discussion here are the big issues that would be part of a DACA deal. Fixing DACA, border security, ending what the president calls chain migration or the prioritization of family migration and the visa lottery program. Right. And the senators, one of the reasons they thought they had a good deal here is because they had all four of those elements in their proposal. So what happens when Graham and Durbin get to the White House? So when they get to the White House, they think they're going to have essentially a three-way meeting with the president to walk him through this proposal. And they do sit down with the president in the cabinet room. But what happens next is that a door opens and a bunch of Republicans file in. Some of them are immigration hardliners who have been very skeptical of a DACA fix.

Immigration in the country should be founded on a couple of principles. One, that it is fair to American workers. One of whom is Bob Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who just released a DACA fix bill that was quite a bit to the right of even what the president had laid out, a DACA deal, it also added more, like cutting off sanctuary cities and other measures that are completely anathema to immigration advocacy groups, to Democrats. Those are basically things that would be poison pills in any potential deal. As is Tom Cotton, who has basically not only advocated against any sort of legal status for undocumented people, but also for cutting legal immigration levels. One of the most important of those areas is chain migration, the ability of American citizens and green card holders to bring in not just their spouses and their unmarried minor children, but their parents and their adult children and their siblings and so forth. That's the single biggest source of low-skilled and unskilled immigration in this country, the kind of immigration that puts downward pressure on the wages of blue-collar Americans. And he's made it clear in the past that he might consider a deal that would normalize the Dreamers, but it would have to come at a very high price in terms of the restrictions that he wants to see going forward on future

legal immigration. So presumably the president invited these hardline conservatives from Congress, or we don't really know, but they made their way to the White House somehow. We don't really know. One of the aides who was at the meeting was Stephen Miller, who has been very influential at the White House on immigration policy, was very influential in Trump's campaign on immigration. And he has done this in the past when the president has strayed into a potential deal or talking publicly about wanting to make a compromise with Chuck and Nancy.

Stephen Miller always finds a way to make sure that the concerns of immigration restrictionists are reinforced. And he always has, you know, sort of played that role in the Trump White House of pulling the president back to and reminding him of these principles that he ran on that are very much in conflict with the approach that he's seeming to pursue now of trying to find a common ground with Democrats. I feel having the Democrats in with us is absolutely vital because this should be a bipartisan bill. This should be a bill of love. Truly, it should be a bill of love, and we can do that.

So a bunch of senators with various and competing interests on immigration show up at the White House and are suddenly thrown together and are making their case to the president? What happens once all these lawmakers are together in one room? So it is a bunch of senators with divergent interests, but the meeting still begins the way that Durbin and Graham thought it would, in that they are basically laying out what the substance of their proposal is. Okay, here's what we've got for you. But instead of doing it just for Trump,

they're now doing it for all these other Republicans on his right flank who are sort of sitting at the table listening intently on what it is that they're going to be forced to swallow if the president decides to bless this thing. And what's the plan that Durbin and Graham lay out in this room? So it's a plan that they've been talking about to basically protect the DACA recipients, to address their parents' situation. It has a lot of elements in it. But one of the elements is that they're ending the diversity visa lottery program and essentially shifting those visas over to other populations, including some of them going to people who have had temporary protected status in this country, people from El Salvador, people from Haiti, other folks who have been here because their

countries have been in crisis. And President Trump has moved over the last several months to end that status. So the idea was to shift the diversity lottery visas in part over to those people. So they're talking about doing away with this lottery program, which the president has criticized. Diversity lottery sounds nice. It's not nice. It's not good.

It's not good. It hasn't been good. We've been against it. And has associated with terrorism on a number of occasions and using those visas instead to help people who are coming specifically from troubled spots around the world, which is what the Temporary Protected Status Program does. That's right. So this is the visa reform part of the proposal, and it gets really complicated. But the idea was that, you know, a lot of immigration is a numbers game. And if you're going to give up 50,000 visas that are being issued each year, they wanted to make sure that, you know, those visas in turn would be going to other immigrant populations that needed them. So Senator Durbin was describing

to President Trump how this would work, how the visa allocation would shift. And that's where they got into a discussion of specific countries. And he began to run down a list of who would be affected and how. And what are the countries that Durbin mentions to the president as suddenly benefiting if visas are shifted from a diversity lottery over to temporary protected status? So he mentions El Salvador, he mentions Honduras, and then he gets to Haiti. And the president stops him and says, why do we want people from Haiti? And then he adds, can we take them out? And that kind of fell like a brick in the room and seems like many people in there were very taken aback.

Nobody really knew what to say, but Senator Drummond actually continued this explanation of how this would work. Because again, it's about numbers, it's about specific countries, and it gets pretty complicated. And then he went on to explain how people from African nations

would be affected a little bit differently depending on where they were from. And this is when the president seemed to really become frustrated and angry and said, why are we taking these people from shithole countries? We should be taking more people from places like Norway. we should be taking more people from places like Norway. Julie, do we know how the people in the room, these lawmakers, reacted to that statement from the president? We don't. All of the lawmakers in that room declined to characterize a private conversation.

None of them would comment afterward about what was said. Senator Durbin did go back to the Hill looking ashen and dejected and say that he was expecting one thing at this meeting and he got something quite different, but no one would really say on the record what went on in that room. My understanding is there was some degree of pushback. There were folks in that room who made it clear that they didn't agree with what the president was saying. They were just shocked that the president had said what he said, and they weren't sure, frankly, where this left the rest of the negotiation, if there even is a negotiation left. if there even is a negotiation left.

We'll be right back. This strikes me, Julie, as a comment that could either be hugely meaningful in what it says in these negotiations or not at all, or just kind of a personal reaction from the president. Right. These comments were not unlike comments that President Trump has made before behind closed doors about immigration. We reported late last year that he was in a meeting in the Oval Office in June of 2017, getting really, really worked up and angry about the number of visas that had been issued to countries around the world. He was saying there's too many foreigners coming in, they're coming in from everywhere. But the countries he chose to single out were Haiti, where he said, oh, they all have AIDS, and Nigeria, where he said, well, there's no way all those people are going to come here,

see all of this, and then go back to their huts. And to him, these are not horrible things to say. They don't have huge significance. It's just a way of registering his frustration with a system he thinks is broken. And he wants to see an immigration system that brings in educated people and people who are going to be economically self-sufficient. And he is we want wealthy white people, not people from African nations, not people from Haiti, not essentially black people. in line with his views that America should have a merit-based immigration system in which only the best people, the most deserving, should be allowed in. That's right. But in this case, it's the language itself that became the story and that became the takeaway. I've never really had a night where it's very hard to cover what's going on in the news without saying stuff that it's really not OK to say on TV. That's correct. That's that you have to actually curse to quote the president of the United States. Yeah. Parents, if you're watching with children, you might want to mute for the next 35 seconds.

Quote, why are we having all these people from bleep countries come here? I hope I did that OK. countries come here. I hope I did that okay. Republican congressman from Utah said the following, the president's comments are unkind, divisive, elitist, and fly in the face of our nation's values. It's difficult to separate that from this broader question of what is he going to do about immigration in the United States? It certainly seems to cast a new light on the White House's recent decisions to end temporary protected status from countries like Haiti and just a few days ago from El Salvador. Temporary protected status is supposed to be ended because a country is doing better. It no longer needs those protections. But

this suggests that maybe the White House is ending those protections because they just don't want those people in the United States. Well, there was an irony here as well with that, actually, because in ending the temporary protected status for Salvadorans, the Department of Homeland Security actually argued that essentially El Salvador is no longer a shithole, that it's fine there now, and it's okay for people to go home. And so in addition to, as you said, shedding some new light on the reasons that they might want to end these programs, it completely contradicted the stated rationale for ending them. Just this week, the president was calling for a bipartisan immigration bill, what he called a bill of love. This seems to make it difficult for Democrats and maybe some moderate Republicans to participate in a deal when this is somehow part of the foundation of it, right?

That's right. I mean, it was always going to be a delicate negotiation. There were already Democrats who were very wary of negotiating with Trump on any of these issues. And there were always Republicans who were very wary of letting him get to a table with Democrats to talk about this because he does have a tendency to, in the moment, want to cut a deal. This just makes it much harder for

both sides. So it's going to be a while, I think, before either Republicans or Democrats can come back to the middle and try to hash out something that might work. Julie, you cover the White House, but you also cover immigration. So what do you make of the impact of what happened at the White House on Thursday? I think it really continues an interesting conversation about what immigration is about. President Trump has publicly acknowledged that he doesn't think of immigration as give me you're tired, you're poor. That he thinks of immigration as what is going to help American citizens and how we put America first. And it's not about helping people. It's not about expanding the richness of the country and furthering the American ideal. It's just about numbers and about how we compete. And it's quite a dissonance because you have members of Congress in both parties saying, you know, this is a misreading of what America is and what immigration means in America.

It's not about, you know, we pick and choose the countries that we like or don't like. It's not about taking people only from countries that are beautiful and that people don't think of as places that no one wants to go. So ironically, this kind of lowbrow comment has really pointed up a pretty profound change in the conversation. Right. So instead of it being about who needs us, immigration, according to President Trump, and illustrated, it seems, by this remark, is about who we as a country need.

And also, it's not about what we can do for immigrants and what immigration is doing for us as a country. It's about what immigration is doing to us. And that is really the way that the president sees it. It's not as a value add. It's what is it going to cost us as a nation to accept these people? And is the benefit that we're going to get from that worth the trade-off? Thank you, Julie. Thanks, Michael. Here's what else you need to know today. Gentlemen, it's the Bounce of His Time, a gentleman from California.

Thank you, Mr. Speaker. I yield myself as much time as I may consume. Gentlemen, it's recognized. to extend the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, which permits the government to collect the communications of foreigners from companies like Google and AT&T. Today, the FISA Amendments Reauthorization Act seeks to reauthorize the program while making changes to protect privacy interests. I've long advocated for reforms to surveillance authorities to balance the imperatives of national security and counterterrorism with the privacy rights and civil liberties of Americans. The vote rejects a bipartisan push to impose restrictions on the program when Americans' communications are swept up as part of the data collection. as part of the data collection.

The bill is also expected to pass the Senate, effectively ending a major debate over national security and privacy that started after Edward Snowden revealed the extent of the program's data collection four years ago. And the White House says it will now support states that want to force able-bodied adults to work in order to enroll in Medicaid. The decision fulfills a longtime conservative vision for the government's biggest health care program for the poor.

The Daily is produced by Theo Balcom, Lindsay Garrison, Rachel Quester, Annie Brown, Andy Mills, Christopher Wirth, Ike Srees-Kanlaraja, Claire Tenesketter, Paige Cowan, and Michael Simon-Johnson, with editing help from Larissa Anderson. Lisa Tobin is our executive producer. Samantha Hennig is our editorial director. Our technical manager is Brad Fisher, and our sound engineer is Peter Sale. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsberg of Wonderly. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. We'll see you on Tuesday, after the holiday.