Again, how much authority does The Duce have in this area?

Immigration per se is governed by immigration law, and his job is to see that the laws are faithfully executed.

He does not make laws.

So how much ability does the president have to "reverse" American immigration policy?

A Trump outburst on immigration

The usual media are right now beating him up for making racist remarks in a meeting on the topic.

It does not seem he actually did that, though his remarks were certainly angrily derogatory and there is not much doubt of his personal unflattering view of the world's darker hued folks.

Not the first time he and the GOP have been given a bum rap regarding words.

In June, reading a document by Buchananite Miller aloud at a meeting on immigration, he made these specific remarks about Haitians and Nigerians, to which his enemies have responded with their usual tired outrage.

According to six officials who attended or were briefed about the meeting, Mr. Trump then began reading aloud from the document, which his domestic policy adviser, Stephen Miller, had given him just before the meeting. 

The document listed how many immigrants had received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

More than 2,500 were from Afghanistan, a terrorist haven, the president complained.

Haiti had sent 15,000 people. 

They “all have AIDS,” he grumbled, according to one person who attended the meeting and another person who was briefed about it by a different person who was there.

Forty thousand had come from Nigeria, Mr. Trump added. 

Once they had seen the United States, they would never “go back to their huts” in Africa, recalled the two officials, who asked for anonymity to discuss a sensitive conversation in the Oval Office.

How ya gonna keep 'em
down on the farm,
after they've seen Pareeee?

How you gonna keep 'em
away from Broadway,
jazzin' aroun', paintin' the town?

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied on Saturday morning that Mr. Trump had made derogatory statements about immigrants during the meeting.

“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims,” she said, referring to the current White House chief of staff, the national security adviser and the secretaries of state and homeland security. 
.. “It’s both sad and telling The New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway.”

While the White House did not deny the overall description of the meeting, officials strenuously insisted that Mr. Trump never used the words “AIDS” or “huts” to describe people from any country. 

Several participants in the meeting told Times reporters that they did not recall the president using those words and did not think he had, but the two officials who described the comments found them so noteworthy that they related them to others at the time.

. . . .

But while Mr. Trump has been repeatedly frustrated by the limits of his power, his efforts to remake decades of immigration policy have gained increasing momentum as the White House became more disciplined and adept at either ignoring or undercutting the entrenched opposition of many parts of the government. 

The resulting changes have had far-reaching consequences, not only for the immigrants who have sought to make a new home in this country, but also for the United States’ image in the world.

“We have taken a giant steamliner barreling full speed,” Mr. Miller said in a recent interview. “Slowed it, stopped it, begun to turn it around and started sailing in the other direction.”

It is an assessment shared ruefully by Mr. Trump’s harshest critics, who see a darker view of the past year. 

Frank Sharry, the executive director of America’s Voice, a pro-immigration group, argues that the president’s immigration agenda is motivated by racism.


“He’s basically saying, ‘You people of color coming to America seeking the American dream are a threat to the white people,’” said Mr. Sharry, an outspoken critic of the president. 

“He’s come into office with an aggressive strategy of trying to reverse the demographic changes underway in America.”

Granted that his intentions are exactly as Sharry says, again, how far can he go without the congress itself making suitable changes in the law?

Part of the GOP congress would almost certainly support him in such an effort, but part would oppose him and all Democrats would.

Too, the current law does not seem geared either to keeping America white or to stopping it being so.

Changes to the law that prioritized keeping America white would certainly be challenged in the federal courts on the grounds that the US constitution forbids racial discrimination in immigration law, a view no court has yet espoused but which might get endorsed by the Supremes, push come to shove.

Likely all the Democrats would espouse that view, so if even one Republican joined them it would become the new constitutional normal.

And that would annoy the living hell out of Pat Buchanan, eh?

In any case, so far as I know, lawful immigration is not making all that big a contribution to "the browning of America."

Most of it is due to illegal immigration from Latin America, no?

A form of immigration that is down to a trickle and that Bozo nevertheless wants to address with the ridiculous and uselessly expensive project of his "big, beautiful wall."

Too, it appears that the priorities written into legal immigration make it a source of economic strength, allowing entry to people who are highly productive rather than any sort of drag.

It is illegal immigration that comprises mostly the unskilled, the uneducated, and criminals - the sorts who have an adverse impact on low-end wage levels.