The establishment media has truly scraped the bottom of the barrel in this election, in their desperate search for mud to throw at their arch-enemy Donald Trump.
From the wailing and gnashing of teeth that followed when Trump’s half-billion-dollar bail was reduced to $175 million by the New York appeals court, to the pearl-clutching on the stubborn misunderstanding of the “bloodbath” metaphor of Trump, the establishment media has engaged in an effort to smear Trump’s name.
And now, the Washington Post has increased its contribution to this embarrassing enterprise by trying to create conflict between Trump and his wife Melania.
The Post began the effort with its headline, which stated that “Trump’s mother-in-law arrived in the country through a process he derided.”
What exactly did the Post mean with this headline?
Based on an analysis of immigration documents published Monday, The Post was able to reconstruct the steps through which Trump’s mother-in-law, Amalija Knavs, who died in January at age 78, entered the country.
The Post reported that Knavs was able to enter the country and eventually become citizens through the family-based immigration process that, the Post noted, Trump has spoken out against publicly and sought to overhaul over the course of his presidency.
This means that, as the Post explained, under US law dating back to 1965, citizens can request their parents or minor children to enter the country without a long waiting period for a visa.
According to recently released documents, Melania Trump did just that for her parents in 1997, and then again when her parents applied for green cards in 2008. Legal permanent residency was granted on March 16, 2010. Knavs and her husband , Viktor, they didn’t. they did not become US citizens until August 9, 2018.
Clearly, then, what the Post tried to imply is that, had Trump been president in the late 1990s or early 2000s, his in-laws would never have been able to become citizens and, therefore, Mr. and Mrs. Trump cannot be in harmony with accordingly.
What the Post failed to note, however, is that Trump has never had anything against immigration in and of itself.
For one thing, if Trump and his wife had ever clashed over these issues, they presumably would have addressed them and subsequently walked away from them years ago.
On the other hand, what Trump opposed, as president and as a presidential candidate, were illegal immigration methods and the disruption of a process that once worked but has now been abused by bad actors to enable unacceptable levels of chain migration.
Trump, through the RAISE Act, wanted to limit this family sponsorship to spouses and minor children, removing parents from the sponsorship fast track and establishing a system that would give priority to qualified workers.
As the Federalist explained at the time, if this law were passed, it would reform U.S. immigration to follow similar systems that had been standard for years in countries like Canada and Australia.
The purpose of the bill was not to eliminate US immigration processes, but to reform them.
What the Post failed to understand is that Trump, and, indeed, conservatives in general, were actually pro-immigration.
Instead, the Conservative position on immigration has been to prioritize those immigrants who would be materially positive for the United States and which would actively benefit American society.
Of course, legitimate asylum claims did not fall under that clause, but overall, this is what differentiates the conservative position on immigration from that of the left.
Those on the left have actively supported admitting immigrants who are actively harmful to American society, as the tragic series of murders and assaults of American citizens has sadly demonstrated.
And that’s what the Post failed to understand in its feeble attempt to pit Trump and his wife against each other.
Conservatives have never hated immigration.
What Trump and conservatives hated was illegal immigration.
This article originally appeared in The Western Journal.