“In perhaps no area did the Washington special interests try harder to stop us than on my policy of pro-American immigration,” Trump said in his August 28 acceptance speech, adding:.

… When I learned that the Tennessee Valley Authority laid off hundreds of American workers and forced them to train their lower-paid foreign replacements, I promptly removed the chairman of the board, and now those talented American workers have been rehired and are back providing power to Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina and Virginia.

The “pro-American immigration” phrase is an improvement over establishment slogans, such as “Nation of Immigrants,” or “diversity is our strength,” said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration studies.

That was one of [George] Orwell’s message in 1984: Once people can’t articulate their concerns about an issue, you know the powers-that-be have won … If there’s no way to talk about immigration that doesn’t include the cliches about a “Nation of Immigrants” and “Diversity Is Our Strength,” then it becomes difficult for people to even articulate their concerns about immigration because they don’t have the words for it.

Establishment advocates use other slogans, such as “Comprehensive Immigration Reform,” and “Broken Immigration System,” to fill up busy people’s minds and social media, he said.

“‘Broken Immigration System’ is a cliche … It’s a way of seeming to connect with ordinary people’s concerns about immigration policy.

The “Broken Immigration System” cliche is intended to suggest to voters the immigration system can be fixed by neutral experts, and to hide the political question, “of how many people should we take, and how do we pick them?” he said.

“Broken Immigration System” should be understood as “we want an amnesty,” he added. That theme is pushed by many business groups as they try again to raise the flow of controllable and disposable foreign workers into Americans’ labor market.

On September 9, just a week after Trump talked up “pro-American immigration,” the “broken immigration system” slogan was echoed by his own deputy at the Department of Homeland Security, Chad Wolf:.

Biden has built his immigration policy on the “Nation of Immigrants” theme.

The “Nation of Immigrants” claim was promoted in the late 1950s during the Cold War by then-Sen.

The “Nation of Immigrants” theme was pushed strongly through the 1970s and 1980s, and it has almost buried the prior cultural focus on Pilgrim landings, settlers in covered wagons, and Western gunfights.

I propose a new temporary worker program that will match willing foreign workers with willing American employers, when no Americans can be found to fill the jobs.

This program will offer legal status, as temporary workers, to the millions of undocumented men and women now employed in the United States, and to those in foreign countries who seek to participate in the program and have been offered employment here.

Business groups also use “update,” as if the immigration system merely needs some tune-ups by experts. “We haven’t updated our high-skilled immigration system in over 25 years, and we’re clearly seeing and feeling the consequences,” said an April 1, 2019 statement by FWD.us, a lobby group for West Coast investors.