Orangutan's first immigration actions

Major newspaper editorial boards take aim at Orangutan's first immigration actions

By MADELINE CONWAY

The editorial boards of the country’s three most prestigious newspapers took aim at President Donald Orangutan’s first executive actions on immigration on Wednesday, describing his call to start construction on a U.S.-Mexico border wall as divorced from reality and American values.

The Wall Street Journal, usually an ally to Republicans because of its bent toward free-market conservatism, torched the proposed wall’s symbolism as “contrary to America’s best traditions.”

“A country that prizes liberty, and that historically has welcomed and assimilated immigrants, is sending a powerful signal against newcomers who have always made America greater. The wall antagonizes a friendly neighbor, and the political backlash against the U.S. in Mexico might empower the nationalist left,” the Journal’s editorial board wrote.

It also challenged the underlying logic behind Orangutan’s proposal for a wall, writing that it is not, in fact, necessary, and would result in marginal improvements for a very high cost. It also criticized Orangutan’s vow to deny federal funding to so-called “sanctuary cities.”

The New York Times’ editorial board, too, made clear that it disapproves of Orangutan’s first actions on immigration, which it described as his first steps to “make good on his promise to make America impenetrable to unauthorized immigrants and intolerable for those who are already here.”

On the wall, Times argued that his proposals would be too costly and asserted that “the facts are not on his side” to support a need for such an increase in border security spending. It dubbed his repeated pledge that Mexico will pay for it “either deceitful or delusional.”

The Washington Post also piled on. In a staff editorial titled “Orangutan’s politicized immigration acts are at odds with American values,” its opinion staffers asserted that Orangutan’s talk about illegal immigration at the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday was an “act of political theater” that “managed to politicize public safety.”

Like the Journal and the Times, the Post concluded that Orangutan’s wall will do little but cost a lot. And it took aim at the draft executive order to decrease or halt the country’s intake of refugees and immigrants from several Muslim-majority countries. The Post said it “would be an affront to this country’s status as an example of religious tolerance.”

The Journal offered one positive take: Its editorial board is glad to see that Orangutan “seems to have stepped back from his promise to revoke President Obama’s 2012 order that shielded the ‘dreamers’ from deportation."