The Republicans, with the help of the Orwellian Frank Luntz, are fond of renaming things their rich donors dislike to make them sound bad enough for their poorer voters to oppose. So, the estate tax became the death tax, though the orphan tax would have been even better. Healthcare reform became a government takeover, and now bringing your family with you when you move is chain migration.

President Trump, who never met a lie he wouldn’t tell, denounced chain migration in his State of the Union, saying “a single migrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives. Under our plan, we focus on the immediate family by limiting sponsorship to spouses and minor children.”

The “unlimited” claim is a complete falsehood, and what “our plan” would dictate is essentially what current law permits, though we do presently allow the spouses of married children to be considered as well as fiancées of citizens.

Then there’s the issue of restricting immigrants to people who score 30 more on a proposed point system which takes into account 1: Age (26-30 preferred, and worth ten points, over 50, zero), 2: English language proficiency, 3: Education (13 points for a Ph.D. in STEM fields, college graduate, 6), 4: Income (maximum pts. 13, for 300% of median income or more ), 5: Extraordinary achievement (25 pts. for a Nobel Prize, 15 pts. Olympic Medal), and 6: Investment (12 pts. for investing $1.8 million in American enterprises for three or more years).

So, if you are an under thirty, English-speaking, millionaire, PH.D. winner of the Nobel Prize whose income is 3 times $53,000 or $159,000, come on down. Ruth Marcus has wittily pointed out that Trump himself would have trouble passing this test, as would many of his voters. Surely, Frank Luntz’s chain-migrating grandfather would have failed, as would Trump’s grandfather Friedrich Drumpf. He emigrated illegally at 16, dodging the German draft, and made the beginnings of his fortune in the Alaska gold rush where he appears to have run a restaurant/hotel/brothel.

Trump’s system would allow more H2B visas to be issued for “seasonal, non-agricultural work in the US,” perhaps because his properties like Mar-A-Lago employ such persons who can be paid less than Americans and given no benefits. Whereas, the H1B visas that Silicon Valley relies on for person with specialized skills might not be treated so favorably. As usual, the kind of immigrants you want to admit are the kind you need in your business. The kind you don’t want are the kind who might do your job for less. Or vote for the other party.

Chain migration is nothing new, of course. James Boswell tells of relatives of 18th century Scots weeping and wailing as they watched their kin sail away to America, but a year or two later they waved good-bye to the next boatload without batting an eye since it seemed likely they would soon follow and be reunited on the other side of the Atlantic.

When the English passed laws discriminating against sects other than the Church of England, whole congregations and their ministers emigrated together. Many were Scotch-Irish Presbyterians whose skills, according to one of them, James Webb, were “fight, drink, sing, pray.” This would not have earned them 30 points on the Trump test, but it didn’t stop them from winning the Revolution in the South at battles like King’s Mountain, Cowpens and Guilford Courthouse.

Today, of course, it makes sense to impose limits on the numbers admitted each year and to require a slightly different skillset than a century ago, education especially. But Trump’s plan calls for cutting legal immigrants a year in half. Surely our aging population and low birth rate suggests more skilled taxpayers would be an economically useful import.

Finally, we forget our roots at our peril. Restrictions on immigration in the past have focused less on numbers than on undesirables – first the Scotch-Irish, then the Germans, the Irish, Jews, Catholics, swarthy persons from southern Europe, and Asian were all found inferior. Trump seems to be following in this unfortunate tradition of racial and ethnic bias with his antipathy for Hispanics and Muslims, his recent love of Norwegians.

Once the Republican Party was the party of business and entrepreneurial zeal. If it still wants to claim that distinction, it ought to also be the party of immigration. A study by the Center for Entrepreneurship found that 216 of the Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. Du Pont, Bell, Carnegie, Proctor and Gamble were immigrants. Walt Disney, Ford and Edison were the sons of immigrants.

You may say that was then, this is now. But Elon Musk, Sergey Brin of Google, and Jerry Yang of Yahoo are immigrants as was Intel’s Andy Grove. Amazon and Apple’s founders are children of immigrants. The men who made the companies that make American great, came not only from Trump’s preferred northern European countries, but from Syria, Cuba, Russia, Iran, South Africa, Brazil, Poland, Greece, Zambia, Turkey, Hong Kong, Taiwan and so on.

It is worth recalling that those willing to dare migrating are often not running to something better, but fleeing from something worse. And when they came here seeking a better life for themselves, they often helped make a better life for all of us. If we start turning strivers away, they will migrate elsewhere for opportunity, and make our competitors great. This doesn’t seem like a hard choice. For most of American history, it wasn’t. The lady in the harbor, “mother of exiles,” lifted her light by the golden door. And it made us what we became.

But the Republicans seem intent on pleasing their isolationist, nativist base. That may win some votes, but it also risks turning the GOP into a 21st Century version of the anti-Catholic Know Nothing Party. It’s narrow vision of America was rejected in favor of admitting the men and women who, by the sweat of their brows, fire of their ambition and power of their brains, turned the 19th century into the Gilded Age, and America into the largest economy on earth.