Korean Americans and the hidden threats embedded in Project 2025 | By Mark Hagland (Summer 2024)
There are a huge number of issues that Korean Americans should consider in relation to the current presidential election and its potential outcomes. Let’s be clear: A second Donald Trump administration would be the most virulently anti-immigrant administration in history.
One doesn’t have to rely only on the former President Trump’s near-constant maligning of immigrants in his speeches, interviews, and social media posts. Despite the fact that Trump has perceived widespread voter rejection of many of the plans set forth in Project 2025, even disavowing knowledge of or links to the writers of Project 2025, in fact, some of his closest advisers are deeply involved in Project 2025. If enacted, the plan is designed to immediately enact sweeping changes in how the federal government works.
There are a lot of elements in the nearly 1,000-page document addressing how federal power would be concentrated in the presidency by increasing the control by the executive branch and reducing the independence and power of the judicial and legislative branches. In addition to the general immigration and diversity topics discussed below, the plan also calls for: Curtailing the civil rights of LGBTQ-plus and transgender people; ending protection of reproductive freedoms; instituting the firing of 50,000 professional civil service employees and replacing them with individuals chosen for their loyalty to the extreme right-wing agenda; and radically changing other federal services, such as international diplomacy, to emphasize fealty to a certain right-wing agenda and de-emphasize professionalism and independence in federal policy endeavors.
Many who have investigated the Project 2025 process warn that there are related secret documents that have not been made public. Obviously, one can only rely, for the moment, on what is in the publicly-released document and on what has been said by Trump, his running mate Sen. J.D. Vance, and others who support Project 2025.
But, as immigrants (and people with immigrant family members), we should understand that the document represents extreme anti-immigrant positions, many of which would be slated to be enacted on Trump’s Inauguration Day, with no public oversight whatsoever.
Here’s one example: Beginning on page 143, the writers take aim at the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) agency, which manages application processes for immigration.
Among other things, it states that:
Since January 2021, USCIS’s priorities have been misaligned, and this has transformed it into an open-borders agency, ignoring the critical role that it plays in national security, public safety, and safeguarding the integrity of our immigration system. USCIS should be returned to operating as a screening and vetting agency. Regulatory efforts have focused on easing asylum eligibility in a manner that is guaranteed to exacerbate asylum fraud as people surge at the border. Emphasis also has been placed on removing legal barriers to immigration, such as the use of public benefits. These actions violate statutes, erode congressional intent, and provide a significant magnet for continued illegal immigration. Additionally, USCIS resources have been misappropriated to focus more on creating and expanding large-scale parole and temporary status programs that violate the law and are otherwise contrary to congressional intent instead of focusing on a more secure and efficient process for those who are seeking benefits. The ever-increasing number of applications filed has made it difficult to vet applications adequately for eligibility, fraud, and specific national security and public safety problems.
Further down, on page 145, the document states:
The incoming Administration should spearhead an immigration legislative agenda focused on creating a merit-based immigration system that rewards high-skilled aliens instead of the current system that favors extended family–based and luck-of-the-draw immigration. To that end, the diversity visa lottery should be repealed, chain migration should be ended while focusing on the nuclear family, and the existing employment visa program should be replaced with a system to award visas only to the ‘best and brightest.’ Internal efforts to limit employment authorization should be matched by congressional action to narrow statutory eligibility to work in the United States and mitigate unfair employment competition for U.S. citizens. The oft-abused H-1B program should be transformed into an elite program through which employers are vying to bring in only the top foreign workers at the highest wages so as not to depress American opportunities. Additionally, Congress should: improve the integrity of the temporary work visa programs; Repeal Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations; permanently authorize and make mandatory E-Verify; and end parole abuse by legislating specific parole standards.
Carefully hidden inside those paragraphs is a clear subtext: The incoming Trump administration would strangle the current immigration system and use the levers of power to end immigration into the U.S. for individuals not favored by Trump and his cronies. While in the White House, Trump made it clear that he would prefer limiting immigration to white people of European origin; and the complete revamping of immigration processes to be under the close control of handpicked administrators would virtually guarantee that racial discrimination and discrimination based on national origin would become the new norm.
Another area of concern is around the determination on the part of the document’s authors to end and reverse all diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts in government, business and the workplace, educational institutions, and across American society. For example, beginning on page 561, it states:
Even though numerous federal laws prohibit discrimination based on notable immutable characteristics such as race and sex, the Biden Administration — through the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and other federal entities — has enshrined affirmative discrimination in all aspects of its operations under the guise of ‘equity.’ Federal agencies and their components have established so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices that have become the vehicles for this unlawful discrimination, and all departments and agencies have created “equity” plans to carry out these invidious schemes. To reverse this trend, the next conservative Administration should: ensure that the DOJ spearheads an initiative demonstrating the federal government’s commitment to nondiscrimination.
The document further states:
The department should also lead a whole-of-government recommitment to nondiscrimination and should be working with all other federal agencies, boards, and commissions to ensure that they are both complying with constitutional and legal requirements and using their authorities and funding to prevent discrimination not only internally, but also at the state, local, and private-sector levels. This will require particularly close coordination with several key agencies, including such obvious candidates as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission; the Departments of Defense, Education, and Housing and Urban Development; and the Securities and Exchange Commission. It will also require enforcing contractual requirements that prohibit discrimination on federal contractors. Reorganize and refocus the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division to serve as the vanguard for this return to lawfulness…
It goes on in this vein, based on the completely wrong assumption that DEI programs have harmed individuals rather than helping them.
When we look at the history of anti-Asian discrimination in this country, it is clear that such discrimination continues into the present day, and that unless efforts are redoubled to end all discrimination against all people of color, the same discrimination will continue into the future.
Those two examples from Project 2025 concerning immigration policies and discrimination against marginalized groups are just the tip of the iceberg. All of us should be deeply concerned and even alarmed, by the fact that the Republican nominee for president in 2024 has embraced and would empower a process of anti-democratization that could be implemented on Day One of a second Trump presidency.
Combined with Trump’s and top Republicans’ constant racist diatribes against immigrants and people of color, it is clear that Trump’s candidacy represents a grave danger to Asian Americans, as well as to all people of color in this country. The gains that we have made under the Obama and Biden-Harris administrations have been very significant; we cannot afford to go back.
As an immigrant of color and an Asian American, I am deeply concerned by what I am seeing and hearing. I urge every voter to read and learn on their own and to draw their own conclusions about all of this; I’ve already drawn my own.
Author’s note: The Project 2025 document is at this link. There is a one-page summary fact sheet about Project 2025, compiled by the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, at this link.
