Trump is waging a silent war on legal immigration

Key points

• When the member states of the United Nations reviewed their Global Compact on Migration earlier this month, one country was conspicuously absent from the discussions: the United States.
• In a post on X explaining its reasoning, the State Department said it objects to global “efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies.” A subsequent post clarified that President Donald Trump’s administration supports “remigration — but not replacement migration.” If “replacement migration” sounds like a dogwhistle, that’s because it’s one the administration’s loudest ones yet.
• Such allusions to the “great replacement” — a far-right conspiracy theory that a cabal of global elites is importing people of color to the US as a means of demographic warfare — and support of remigration, the notion that immigrants and their descendants should be returned to their countries of origin regardless of citizenship voluntarily or otherwise, were once limited to...