President Trump confirmed this month that he really did call certain nations “shithole countries” back in 2018, and he’s still asking the same blunt question today: why not take more immigrants from Denmark instead of Somalia?
Quick Take
- Trump recently confirmed he used the phrase “shithole countries” in a 2018 meeting about immigration from Africa, Haiti, and El Salvador.
- He has repeated the contrast in new remarks, naming Somalia specifically and claiming large numbers of Somali immigrants don’t work, a figure not backed by any released data.
- Federal law already bars picking immigrants based on nationality, which creates a real legal hurdle for any country-ranking policy.
- Republican and Democrat lawmakers alike condemned the original 2018 comments as divisive, even as some in the administration now defend the renewed rhetoric.
What Trump Actually Said, Then And Now
During a 2018 immigration meeting, Trump reportedly asked why the United States kept accepting people from countries he called “shithouse” or “shithole” places, naming Haiti, African nations, and El Salvador. He suggested the country take more people from Norway instead. Nearly eight years later, Trump confirmed he said it, and resurfaced the comparison again, this time asking pointedly why the United States doesn’t pull more immigrants from Denmark.
In newer remarks, Trump zeroed in on Somalia by name, calling it a “disaster” tied to crime and claiming that 98 percent of Somalis living in the United States don’t work and “contribute nothing”. No dataset, government report, or named study backs that number. It’s a striking claim with zero paper trail behind it, which matters a great deal when a sitting president uses it to argue for rewriting who gets to come to America.
The Law Already Has An Answer For This
Federal statute already addresses whether the government can rank immigrants by where they’re from. Title 8 of the U.S. Code flatly states no one can get preference or face discrimination in receiving an immigrant visa because of nationality or place of birth. That means a blanket “wealthy countries first” rule isn’t something a president can simply announce. It would take an act of Congress, not a press conference line, to legally sort immigrants by country wealth.
America also already runs a program built around geographic fairness, not wealth. The Diversity Visa lottery hands out roughly 50,000 visas a year specifically to applicants from countries that send fewer immigrants overall, including many African and Caribbean nations. Employment-based and family-based visas run on entirely separate tracks with their own rules. Somalia and Denmark aren’t competing in the same lane to begin with, which makes the country-versus-country framing simpler to say out loud than to actually turn into policy.
Bipartisan Pushback Followed The Original Remarks
When the comments first surfaced in 2018, criticism came from both parties. Republican Representative Mia Love called them “unkind, divisive, elitist” and said they clashed with American values. Fellow Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen said that kind of language didn’t belong in the White House. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal went further, calling it racism dressed up as immigration policy. Civil rights groups argued no president should write off entire countries, and the people in them, with one ugly word.
“Why not Denmark?” Trump revives controversial immigration debate over global origin preferences#Trump #Immigration #US #Politics #USPolitics #BreakingNews #WorldNews pic.twitter.com/D82yU6XLqJ
— M World (@themworldnews) October 25, 2026
That reaction cuts both ways for conservatives weighing this debate honestly. Concerns about unchecked migration, vetting failures, and strained public resources are legitimate policy conversations worth having seriously. But reducing an entire nation’s people to a slur, then backing it with an unverified statistic, hands critics an easy target and lets them dodge the actual policy debate over vetting, skills, and assimilation standards.
America Has Tried Country-Ranking Before
This isn’t new territory. From 1924 to 1965, the United States ran an immigration system built entirely on national origin, reserving the overwhelming majority of visas for Northern and Western Europe while locking out Southern and Eastern Europeans and nearly all of Asia. Congress scrapped that system in 1965 precisely because ranking human beings by birthplace proved both unworkable and morally indefensible, replacing it with family ties, job skills, and country-neutral caps. Trump’s framing revives a debate the country already settled once, and lawmakers weighing any new version of it will have to reckon with why that earlier system failed and got repealed in the first place.
Sources:
mediaite.com, yahoo.com, transcripts.cnn.com, bj.usembassy.gov, congress.gov, govinfo.gov, en.wikipedia.org, uscis.gov
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