President Donald Trump signaled a willingness to offer illegal immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors a pathway to citizenship and re-join the Trans-Pacific Partnership in a single 24-hour period.
Trump told reporters Wednesday he would introduce a legislative framework Monday that will allow DACA recipients “to morph into” citizens in the future. “Over a period of 10-12 years, somebody does a great job, they’ve worked hard, it gives incentive to do a great job. ….If they do a great job, I think it’s a nice thing to have the incentive of, after a period of years, being able to become a citizen,” he explained.
The acceptance of a citizenship path for DACA recipients is a significant departure from the president’s rhetoric during the 2016 presidential campaign. “There will be no amnesty,” he declared flatly in September 2016, adding of illegal immigrants “day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone.”
After Trump’s impromptu press conference he traveled to Davos for the World Economic Forum where he again surprised the world by expressing a willingness to consider joining the Trans-Pacific Partnership if it was a “substantially better deal.”
BREAKING: President Trump to CNBC: I would consider TPP with a ‘substantially better deal’ https://t.co/cR1aNSmqyq pic.twitter.com/cpIFxDYQgY
— CNBC Now (@CNBCnow) January 25, 2018
“I’m only saying this, I will do TPP if we were able to make a substantially better deal. The deal was terrible. the way it was structured was terrible. If we did a substantially better deal, I would be open to TPP,” the president told CNBC at Davos. The interview was Trump’s first overture to possibly joining TPP, which he at one point during the campaign called “a continuing rape of our country.”