NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
August 4, 2016
You can’t make this stuff up: Donald Trump may be married to a woman who was an illegal immigrant.
Evidence uncovered by the media raises serious questions about the circumstances under which Melania Trump entered the country in the mid-1990s.
On Thursday, declaring she had “at all times been in full compliance with the immigration laws,” Mrs. Trump tweeted that “there has been alot of inaccurate reporting and misinformation concerning my immigration status back in 1996.”
Not good enough.
As a candidate who has tapped into resentment toward undocumented immigrants and committed to deport everyone without proper papers, Mr. Trump owes the voters a documented history of his wife’s status in the U.S. — including her employment.
Next, Mrs. Trump’s statement must be read closely. By referring only to her status as of 1996, she dodges on her presence here before that in 1995.
Born in Slovenia when it was part of Yugoslavia, Melania Trump arrived in the U.S. in the 1990s as an aspiring model.
In interviews, she has said that, complying with the law, she returned to home every few months to get her visa renewed.
“I never thought to stay here without papers,” she told MSNBC in February. “I had visa. I travel every few months back to the country to Slovenia to stamp the visa. I came back.”
Making frequent trips to Europe to have papers stamped is consistent with someone who arrived in America on a temporary business visitor or tourist visa.
Those visas do not permit work. Entering the U.S. with the intention of working without authorization is against the law.
A roommate from the time has said the future Mrs. Trump was in the country in 1995. A book released this year reports that she “began moving to New York in 1995” and took modeling jobs.
One of the authors told Politico “he learned of these first jobs in America” in Trump’s early years “from two fashion agents, one in Italy and the other in Vienna, and that such trips abroad were common for Eastern European models but not ‘technically’ legal.”
Photos from a 1995 nude shoot in New York further confirm Mrs. Trump modeled that year — although not whether she was paid. The former editors of the magazine that ran the photos told the Washington Post Mrs. Trump was not compensated.
The evidence of Mrs. Trump’s presence in the U.S. in 1995 conflicts with the official biography distributed at the Republican Convention, as well as with a bio that had been posted on the Trump Organization website until the revelation she had falsely claimed to have earned a college degree at a Slovenian university.
In any case, the former head of a modeling agency told the Washington Post that in 1996 he sponsored Mrs. Trump for H-1B work, which would allow a foreign model to work in America if she could show “distinguished merit or ability.” Typically, an H-1B visa holder would not have to fly back and forth to her home country.
Mr. and Mrs. Trump have explaining to do. What year did she arrive in America? What visas allowed her entry and when were they issued? If she entered on a tourist visa, was she compensated for modeling in the form of fees or the costs of travel and lodging?
The Trump campaign has refused to answer questions, including to disclose how Mrs. Trump legally qualified for obtaining permanent resident status.
Voters need the facts not to persecute a foreigner who got tangled in America’s irrational immigration system but to shine a light on how her story may clash with the policies championed by a husband who would break up families by deporting millions who came here to work.
If Mrs. Trump worked under an H-1B, she benefited from work permission — intended for highly skilled foreign talent — that her husband has said is “very, very bad for” American workers.
After espousing conflicting positions on H-1B visas, Mr. Trump said of the program in mid-March that “we should end it.”
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