Nancy Pelosi Was For Merit-Based Immigration Before She Was Against It

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Issues & Insights

On Thursday, Nancy Pelosi slammed President Trump for proposing immigration reforms that would shift the country toward a more merit-based system. 

“I want to just say something about the word that they use, ‘merit.’ It is really a condescending word,” she said at her press briefing.

“Are they saying most of the people that come to the United States in the history of our country are without merit because they don’t have an engineering degree,” she scoffed, dismissing the president’s idea as “non-merit — it means merit in the eyes of Donald Trump.”

Pelosi is entitled to her own views on immigration reform. But it wasn’t long ago that she was offering fulsome praise for a another immigration bill that also would have implemented a merit-based system for immigration.

In fact, when the Senate passed that bill in 2013 — with every single Democratic senator voting aye — she said the bill would “reaffirm our values, advance our ideals, and honor our history as a nation of immigrants,” and that “the Senate moved our country one step closer to achieving commonsense reform that reflects our heritage and makes America more American.”