The Hill newspaper reports Obama’s remarks to a gathering of Asian-American students and leaders on May 4 in which he made a veiled reference to Trump as anti-immigrant. He said, “We’ve got to push back against anti-immigrant sentiment in all of its forms.”
This is, of course, a misdirection that Obama has practiced before, and one we may expect to hear increasingly from him and the Clinton campaign leading up to the election.
The obvious deception is the failure to distinguish between legal immigrants, who are invited to join our society following screening specified by the law, and those who dishonor our laws by bypassing the legal screening and illegally taking up residence.
The negative impacts and threat represented by illegal immigration is a subject that is a valid issue in the presidential debate because there are polar differences between the Trump and Clinton platforms on this issue. But, rather that address those differences, the remarks of the president foreshadow the likelihood that calls to enhance enforcement against illegal immigration will be met with an effort to shift the focus to legal immigration and to dismiss anyone questioning current immigration policies as ‘anti-immigrant’.