Tucker Carlson argued that President Donald Trump’s executive order seeking to block green card applications failed to “protect American jobs,” but the Fox News host refrained from criticizing the commander-in-chief in his latest Tucker Carlson Tonight monologue, saying that he believed Trump was still “worried about preserving American jobs,” Newsweek reported.
Instead, Carlson accused people in the President’s “orbit” of being more concerned about “making donors happy” than curbing immigration during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Whatever you think of our uniquely generous immigration policy, and maybe you support it, it’s pretty clear that right now is literally the last moment that unemployed Americans should have to be undercut by foreign nationals as they look for desperately needed jobs,” Carlson said last night.
The Fox News host then noted that President Trump wrote on Twitter Monday that he would “temporarily suspend immigration into the United States” without a caveat after an IPSOS poll found that almost eight-in-ten Americans supported a temporary halt to migration.
After noting that President Trump’s executive order only put a block on people seeking permanent residency and not guest workers, the Fox News host added: “That’s an awful lot of exceptions. Every year our government hands out 80,000 non-agricultural guest worker visas, as well as 85,000 H1B visas and hundreds of thousands of agriculture worker visas. These visas do not improve society in any way. We have no moral obligation to give them, there is no mention of guest workers on the Statue of Liberty. There’s only one point in handing out hundreds of thousands of these visas to foreign nationals, and it’s to placate big business.”
Carlson went on to argue that employers used the visas to undercut the pay of American workers, and were continuing to do so amid spike unemployment.
“If this point of this executive order was to protect American jobs, maybe there was another point, but if it was to protect American jobs, it failed,” Carlson said.
Questioning how the executive order came to be watered down, he added: “The president is worried about preserving American jobs. He says that frequently to people around him, he clearly means it. He ran on that issue in 2016 and of course he won on it. Unfortunately, and this seems to be the key, some in his orbit are not as concerned. Their main worry is making donors happy.”
“Some of the people with influence hanging around the White House have more profound things to worry about now than the fate of America’s dying middle class,” he added. “They’re worried about whether their friends will approve of the president’s executive order.”
Newsweek has contacted the White House for comment and will update this article with any response.
President Trump unveiled his immigration executive order on Tuesday, which blocks applications for green cards and permanent residency for 60 days. The commander-in-chief added that there was a possibility of the order being extended after an evaluation “based on economic conditions at the time.”
The order was still being drafted by lawyers on Tuesday but is expected to be ready for the President’s signature today.
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