Gov. Ron DeSantis continues to outline the immigration policy he would pursue if elected U.S. President, namechecking two new countries as illustrative examples.
“The way I view immigration is, you know, if you’re in Poland or Brazil or wherever, you don’t have a right to come to this country,” DeSantis said. “People come because the American people think it’s in our interest to have people coming.”
DeSantis offered the comments during a pre-taped interview that ran Monday on Manchester, New Hampshire’s WGIR.
The Governor went on to explain how he wanted a skills-based system like other countries in the Anglosphere.
“We’re going to have a system more like Canada or Australia. It’s focusing on skills, not focusing on things like chain migration,” DeSantis said.
The Governor said he had issues with extended families being brought in under the cover of legal immigration.
“An American citizen should bring (their) foreign spouse or kids 100%. But to bring these cousins and stuff, that’s not the way,” DeSantis added. “A diversity lottery where you pull a country out of a hat and then just bring people in from there, we’re going to get rid of that and focusing more on the needs of Americans.”
He then distanced himself from an approach embraced by former President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s.
“And we’re not going to do an immigration amnesty. Reagan tried that. It didn’t work. We’re going to make sure we have a rule of law, I think.”
Interestingly, there is variance between Poland and Brazil in terms of their countries’ relative propensity to drive up America’s immigration numbers.
Per the Balkan Insight website, Poland is actually a “destination country” for migrants.
“Even before the war in Ukraine began in February 2022, Poland was the EU country that in 2021 issued the highest number of first residence permits related to employment, according to Eurostat data. The majority of permits were issued to Ukrainian citizens, but natives of Belarus as well as Central Asian and Asian countries were well represented too,” the report notes.
Since Russia invaded Ukraine in what DeSantis has called a “territorial dispute,” at least 1.5 million more Ukrainians have emigrated to Poland.
Poles have emigrated to the territory that eventually became the U.S. since the early 17th century, when craftsmen arrived at the Jamestown Colony (though with fewer rights than English-speaking arrivals). However, immigration tapered off after the early 20th century, and Polish emigres have actually started to return to the country in recent years in greater numbers than those departing.
Brazilian emigration to the United States appears to be a different matter, however. As of 2019, the United States had the largest population of Brazilian immigrants in the world, with over 502,000 according to the Migration Policy website.
Florida is home to 22% of those immigrants, with Broward, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Palm Beach Counties being their preferred destinations.
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