IT'S ABOUT RACE, NOT LEGALITY:

In what way would we be better off as a nation to deny legal residents who are living, working and paying taxes in this country a path to citizenship? Immigration restrictionists have long used the argument that this generation of immigrants didn't truly want to become American, a canard that defies the actual evidence of assimilation taking place. But now, it seems, the restrictionists are showing their true colors. They don't want immigrants to become Americans.

The sheer hypocrisy of Trump's anti-immigrant crusade is striking. Trump is the son and grandson of immigrants. His mother, Mary MacLeod, came to the United States from a poor fishing village in Scotland as a 17-year-old to join her sisters. MacLeod listed her profession as "maid" or "domestic" on the ship manifests and 1930 census. Trump's grandfather Friedrich Trump came from Germany when he was 16 years old with nothing more than a suitcase and a small amount of formal education. He didn't even speak English. Yet Trump would like to shut the door on similarly situated immigrants today.

"Chain migration" has been the backbone of immigration policy for generations. It didn't begin in 1965, when immigration law changed to lift quotas imposed in the anti-immigrant 1920s, but extends back to the beginnings of this nation. The flood of Scots, Germans, Irish, Italians and other immigrants who came in earlier eras often started with one enterprising pioneer in a family who set off alone. Once established, that immigrant sent for his brothers, sisters and parents. That first generation often remained poor, but the children of those immigrants usually moved up the economic ladder, and some even ended up, like Donald Trump, rich and successful. But don't try to convince Donald Trump that this is the genius of America.

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