Melania Trump's Parents Got Citizenship in a Way Donald Trump Opposes (For Other People)

Melania Trump’s parents are now United States citizens. Good! Too bad her husband is trying to prevent other would-be citizens from doing what they did.

On Thursday, immigration attorney Michael Wildes announced that the First Lady’s parents, the Slovenian-born Viktor and Amalija Knavs, had been granted citizenship. “We just thank everybody for their attention to this very important dialogue that we’re having on immigration,” Wildes told reporters, according to the New York Times. “This is a very important example of it going right.”

How exactly did it go “right?” Per the Times:

In a phone call after the ceremony, Mr. Wildes described the process by which the first lady’s parents had become U.S. citizens. “They had gotten sponsored by their daughter and then once they had the green card, they then applied for citizenship when they were eligible,” he said.

[…]

Asked if the Knavses had obtained citizenship through family-based immigration, sometimes called “chain migration,” their lawyer said, “I suppose. It’s a dirty — a dirtier word.” He went on: “It stands for a bedrock of our immigration process when it comes to family reunification.”

I wonder what sets people from Slovenia, or say, Norway, seeking citizenship apart from, I dunno, people from Haiti, El Salvador, and countries in Africa. It’s a mystery.

As Politico noted back in January, the ancestors 0f Trump and many of his immigration hardliner allies wouldn’t have been welcome if his crackdown had been enacted at the time they migrated to America. Regardless, here’s how Trump feels about family-based migration:

It’s almost like the president is a racist fuck-ass scumbag and the only plausible explanation for his views and actions on immigration is the desire to rid the country of people who are not white.