Editors at National Review place President Trump‘s latest controversial comments in context.

The latest all-consuming Trump controversy is over his remarks in an Oval Office meeting that he doesn’t want people coming here from “sh**hole” countries (although he may have really said “sh**house” countries, for those who are sticklers for accuracy when it comes to presidential vulgarity).

There are many reasons a president shouldn’t say such a thing. It is disparaging to people in the United States who are from these countries. It is insulting to the leaders of those countries, for no good reason. And, inevitably, it will serve to make it even harder to pass a serious restrictionist agenda.

Of course, many of the countries that Trump was talking about — the accounts are fuzzy, but reports suggest he was talking about sub-Saharan nations, and perhaps Haiti — really are basket-cases. One argument from the left for not sending back beneficiaries of so-called Temporary Protected Status to Haiti and El Salvador is that those nations are so terribly dysfunctional and violent.

Trump’s statement came in the context of a discussion of the fate of the visa lottery in a proposed DACA deal. The lottery is one of our worst immigration programs, randomly selecting people to come here who have no connection to the country and then opening up a continuing stream of immigrants behind them through chain migration. The program should simply be abolished. The Gang of Six’s idea, to the contrary, is to re-allocate visas to keep beneficiaries of TPS here and to sprinkle visas among various Third World countries.

This is what set Trump off. He wondered why we instead can’t bring in immigrants from a place like Norway, presumably having that country on his mind after the visit this week by the country’s prime minister. This has been taken as Trump’s admission that he wants white immigrants instead of dark-skinned ones. What he was almost certainly trying to get at, in his typically confused way, is that we’d be better off with immigrants with higher skills.