Jair Bolsonaro Quotes
We cannot allow the indiscriminate entry of all those who come here only because they wanted to come.
Bolsonaro, Jair. Presidential Campaign Speech. 2018, Brazil.
When he became a national candidate, he flip flopped and modified this position to accommodate the strong anti-immigration preference of most of the Republican right wing base.
The United States policies at the time encouraged tens of thousands of foreigners to study in America—especially mathematics, science and engineering. Then after they graduate we expel them despite the fact that we have a great labor shortage of these technical skill areas. The result is that the American economy lags in one of its most important areas, high technology for lack of qualified people to fill the jobs. Larger American companies then set up operations overseas and hire many of the people who we kicked out, so they do not pay any taxes to America. The best and most ambitious of these American trained foreigners, then start their own businesses abroad, create many jobs that never benefit Americans and then sell to America competing with American firms. New York City alone had tens of thousands of open jobs at very high salaries for which there were no Americans to fill while the New York schools had trained enough foreigners to fill the jobs, but our national policies forced the best and the brightest to leave and compete with us.
Ironically, where national quotas have been used in American immigration policy, it has rarely been used to keep nationals of countries with which we were having difficulty, out. In almost all cases, the national quotas have been used to discriminate against racial and religious minorities in America. Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Catholics, Mormons and Jews have been the most frequent groups targeted. Even when we were in the midst of the Cold War, American policy was to accept immigrants from the Soviet Union and Cuba enthusiastically.
Jair Messias Bolsonaro is a Brazilian politician and retired military officer who is the 38th president of Brazil. Elected in 2018 as a member of the conservative Social Liberal Party before cutting ties with them, he has been in office since 1 January 2019. From 1991 to 2018 he served in Brazil's Chamber of Deputies, representing the state of Rio de Janeiro.
