Trump's policies inflamed negative public opinion: Analyst

Many US businesses closed across the country on Thursday as thousands of protesters took to the streets to rally against President Donald Trump's immigration policies.

Bill Jones, an expert with Executive Intelligence Review, believes Trump’s policies have inflamed the existing negative public opinion about him, adding that his measure to try to restrict immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries goes far beyond anything that has been done in the United States.

“We have had previous experience with this. There was of course the well-known notorious Chinese Exclusion Act in the 1880s to exclude Chinese from coming in. We had also similarly the arrest of Japanese Americans during World War II allegedly to prevent espionage. These things have all been condemned by history and by the American population and yet the measures that President Trump was taking to secure our borders are so over the top that people have reacted,” the analyst told Press TV in an interview on Friday.  

He also said that the ongoing demonstrations in the United States will not stop because there is an open "conspiracy" which is being fomented largely by the Democrats in order to prevent Trump from really doing anything.  

“The Democrats have taken the attitude that they want Trump out, they do not like his policy, they do not want to change policy towards Russia, they want to consider [Russian President Vladimir] Putin an enemy, and the foreign policy elites are also opposed to what Trump is doing,” he said.

Jones further argued that the extreme measures Trump has taken on immigration “has fed into this campaign which has been fomented against him.”

Therefore, he said, Trump should learn to be a little bit more “tactful,” asserting that he really made a “wrong decision” on the immigration issue. 

Elsewhere in his remarks, the analyst stated that if Trump is really committed to trying to rebuild the US economy, he is going to need a lot of these immigrants "to work at that."

He also highlighted the fact that the United States is a nation of immigrants and “this is not going to change.”

“So we should treat our immigrants as citizens and not as people who can simply be turned away at any particular moment,” he added.  

Jones further noted that Trump should try to solve the problems that exist in Mexico rather than seeking to build a wall.  

He also maintained that the US cannot afford to have an “unending stream of immigrants.”

However, he said, seeking massive across-the-board restrictions for entire countries or ethnic groups is really “intolerable.”

“We have the same situation in Europe with the refugees coming from the Middle East. It cannot be solved by walls, it cannot be solved by letting them die in the Mediterranean, as it has been the case. You have got to deal with the issue of economic development and we need something like the Marshall Plan for the world and maybe that would at least put us on the right track of dealing with these tremendous problems that we are facing,” he said in conclusion.  

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