Comment: Trump's curbs on immigration threat to Social Security [View all]
By Ronald Brownstein / Bloomberg Opinion
President Donald Trump’s renewed crusade against legal immigration poses a direct threat to the long-term financial interests of the older white Americans who remain his core supporters.
Since the tragic shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., last week by a man from Afghanistan, Trump has directed a fusillade of invective not only at undocumented immigrants, refugees and foreigners seeking asylum, but at all of the nation’s foreign-born population; nearly 52 million people. He has pledged to retrench multiple avenues for legal immigration and to remove an untold number of immigrants already in the U.S. through a process of “reverse migration,” a phrase associated with far-right European parties.
Trump’s call for such restrictions has a powerful appeal to his base voters’ cultural anxieties about a changing America. (Majorities of Republicans and Trump voters tell pollsters they believe the large number of immigrants admitted to the U.S. in recent years threatens the nation’s traditional values and customs.) But seriously reducing, much less reversing, immigration to the U.S. directly threatens the economic interests of those same voters.
If Trump succeeds in slashing legal immigration over the long term, he will virtually guarantee future cuts in Social Security and Medicare, the social safety net programs for the elderly that are funded by payroll taxes on workers.
https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-trumps-curbs-on-immigration-threat-to-social-security/
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