On Friday, New York Times reporter Michael Shear explained that anti-immigration groups and the right feel betrayed by President Donald Trump over his shifting stance on immigration.
Trump has notably railed against immigration and used fear-mongering tactics to portray a fake crisis at the US-Mexico border. However, at the same time, Trump has been promising to increase the workforce through immigration.
"Comments like those from the president have ignited furious criticism from his hard-line, anti-immigrant supporters who accuse him of caving to demands for cheap foreign labor from corporations, establishment Republicans and big donors while abandoning his election promise to protect his working-class supporters from the effects of globalism," Shear wrote.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies warned that Trump voters feel betrayed.
“This is clearly a betrayal of what immigration hawks hoped the Trump administration would be for,” Krikorian said.
Shear noted that Right-wing media sites have called out the president for backsliding on his campaign promises.
"Breitbart News, a conservative website that promotes anti-immigrant messaging, published on Thursday the latest in a series of articles attacking Mr. Trump for catering to big business at the expense of the Americans who put him in the Oval Office," he wrote.
Fox News host Lou Dobbs, even attacked Trump by saying that the “The White House has simply lost its way.”
Shear said that Trump "tailors" his immigration message depending on the audience.
"But that message runs counter to the hard-line immigration image that Mr. Trump has carefully nurtured — most recently by shutting the government down for 35 days in a failed attempt to pressure Congress to fund a wall on the Mexican border," he said.
"Mr. Trump won the White House in no small part by embracing anti-immigrant messaging that tapped into the economic fears of blue-collar workers upset about losing their jobs to foreign workers," he wrote. "Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, he attacked undocumented immigrants as 'rapists and murderers' and called for a 'big, beautiful wall” along the border with Mexico."
He added, "But even so, some of the nation’s most hard-line anti-immigration activists have become increasingly nervous that Mr. Trump might waver on their primary concern."
Read the full article here.
