Mick Hartley

I wasn't aware of this. Michael Totten:

One of Barack Obama’s last acts as president was a total jerk move, and Donald Trump approves of it.

Our outgoing president ended two long-standing policies that helped Cuban refugees flee the oppressive Castro regime and find safe harbor and the opportunity to live free and productive lives in the United States.

First, the “wet feet, dry feet” policy, a modified version of the Cuban Adjustment Act passed in 1966, granted political asylum to Cuban citizens who managed to reach American soil. Obama killed it with a stroke of his pen. Any would-be Cuban refugee who arrives on American shores will now be deported back to Castro’s police state.

Obama also ended the Cuban Medical Professional Parole Program, passed in 2006 during the Bush Administration, which allowed Cuban doctors to defect to the United States through any American Embassy in the world.

The Castro regime hated these policies. Granting asylum to Cubans lucky enough to reach the United States undermined the legitimacy of the dictatorship and put the lie to its propaganda. Any government that drives its own citizens into the ocean to escape has failed catastrophically.

It was, no doubt, all part of Obama's policy of breaking with the old-style US hostility towards unpleasant regimes, in the fond hope that they'd melt under the warmth of his smile. Like Iran, for instance.

Yes, Obama deep-sixed these policies, not Trump, but Trump won’t reverse anything. Last year in an interview with the Tampa Bay Times, our new president said America’s Cuban refugee policies are unfair. “I don’t think that’s fair. I mean why would that be a fair thing? I don’t think it would be fair. You know we have a system now for bringing people into the country, and what we should be doing is we should be bringing people who are terrific people who have terrific records of achievement, accomplishment…. You have people that have been in the system for years [waiting to immigrate to America], and it’s very unfair when people who just walk across the border, and you have other people that do it legally.”

So that’s it, then. Obama slammed the door on Cuban refugees, and Trump is not going to open it. That hardly counts as a bipartisan consensus, but it certainly fits with America First.