To hear the left tell it, President Trump is against immigration.

Actual immigrants, though -- the kind who contribute, refuse welfare, and come legally, can tell a different story.

Here's the latest from the Trump administration that just strips the Democrats of their canards:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is raising the cap on H-2B visas by 35,000 and pledged to add extra security provisions for the guest worker system. DHS announced Thursday it’s raising the cap on H-2B visas — which applies to seasonal guest workers — by 35,000 in 2020. While the move placates concerns by the business community, which has lobbied to raise the cap in order to fill vacant jobs, the announcement will irk those who oppose more cheap foreign labor entering the U.S. market.

The whole thing makes sense, sense enough to call smart immigration policy. Trump has come up with a sensible guest worker policy that will reward legal immigration over the illegal immigration that Democrats champion. Democrats could have had this, claiming as they do to be champions of "the immigrant" but they just let Trump snatch it, leaving themselves now with only illegal immigration as their golden cause.

The Daily Caller hints that Trump's policy is a measure to flood the country with cheap foreign labor, but that's nonsense. The U.S. now has a 3% or 4% unemployment rate in the tightest job market in U.S. history and you can bet the jobs at the bottom of the food chain have the most openings, the most difficulty finding workers, because poor American workers are all moving up. Workers who really do do the lowest-paid jobs - in positions such as gardener or maid - will have now decent opportunities here as legal guest workers. They can work here where their services are needed, send money home, and come and go as they please, relieved of having to pay sleazy human smugglers and cartels. It's a smartly designed policy to reward those who refuse to break U.S. immigration law and keep off welfare. When immigrants come here here legally they are perfectly welcome.

It also makes sense on the foreign policy front. Central American nations such as Guatemala and El Salvador have been very helpful and cooperative in putting a stop to the organized migrant caravans to el norte, not just stopping the cartel-NGO industrial complex, which benefits from caravan crossings, but also for serving as first country of asylum for asylum seekers, ratting out those who are really looking for free stuff over those who are looking for any port in a storm. Someone's put a stop to that nonsense, illegal migrant crossings are now severely down. President Trump says it was them. Why shouldn't they get rewarded for this with extra legal visas for their nationals? Rewarding good behavior is exactly the way to get more of it, encouraging legal immigration as a preferred alternative to illegal.

Raising legal immigration in key areas such as low-paid services also serves a secondary purpose in that it strips away "business" from cartel human smugglers. Nobody's going to pay $6,000 to a human smuggler when he or she has a legal visa to work, a decent income, and free and dignified in-and-out privileges.

A solution like this is so elegant in that it solves so many problems it raises questions as to why the Democrats, their open-borders advocate buddies, and the pious churchmen who speak out about "immigrants" (refusing to distinguish legal from illegal) haven't thought of it first.

The Democrat-led House can raise immigration quotas, currently around 1 million a year, any time it likes. Trump's move to extend this category of workers (likely from other categories such as chain migration, I am going to guess) does the same job they won't do.

What this does then is leave Democrats championing solely unvetted, undocumented, very illegal immigration. Trump has carved a path for legal immigrants. Democrats are left with just illegal, a stupid thing because they could have had 'legal' in their column, too, something that would probably be quite popular with Latino and other voters with an interest in this.

Now all they are left with is their championship of illegal immigration. Trump has decisively snatched the torch of legal immigration right out from under them with the long neglected topic of guest workers, right when they weren't looking. Illegal immigration benefits cartels. Legal immigration benefits U.S. rule of law and provides value to America itself.

Democrats could have had this issue, but they chose to champion illegality instead. Now Trump has just punked them in a place where they weren't looking.

Image credit: Gage Skidmore, via Flickr // CC BY-SA 2.0