Michael Wildes, the lawyer for the first lady’s parents Viktor and Amalija Knavs, would not comment when reporters outside the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in New York City asked if the Slovenian couple had become American citizens that morning using chain migration.

But Wildes later told The New York Times, when asked whether that was their route to citizenship, said, “I suppose.”

“It’s a dirty—a dirtier word,” Wildes said of chain migration. “It stands for a bedrock of our immigration process when it comes to family reunification.”

Wildes said Melania Trump sponsored her parents so they could be granted green cards, and that the Knavs “then applied for citizenship when they were eligible.”

Video: Melania Trump's parents have been granted U.S. citizenship, according to their lawyer Michael Wildes @Newsweek pic.twitter.com/6sODPA0lzd

— Jessica Kwong (@JessicaGKwong) August 9, 2018

The first lady’s spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham declined to comment on the Knavs because they are not members of the Trump administration.

President Trump has repeatedly denounced and called for the termination of the very process that his in-laws used to become citizens.

Shortly after a terrorist attack on Halloween in New York City, allegedly committed by a driver from Uzbekistan, the president tweeted, “CHAIN MIGRATION must end now! Some people come in, and they bring their whole family with them, who can be truly evil. NOT ACCEPTABLE!”

Last September, the president tweeted that he would not accept an immigration bill that includes the process. “CHAIN MIGRATION cannot be allowed to be part of any legislation on Immigration!” he tweeted. And in his State of the Union address in January, the president claimed: “Under the current broken system, a single immigrant can bring in virtually unlimited numbers of distant relatives,” and said his administration was working on a plan that would limit such sponsorships.

Wildes had long refused to comment on how the Knavs became legal residents. Outside the federal building after the Knavs became citizens, Wildes said they had “applied on their own,” and responded to an inquiry by Newsweek on chain migration in the late afternoon with, “Cannot comment other than the award of citizenship.”

https://www.newsweek.com/melania-trump-parents-chain-migration-president-1067121

The infographic charts dramatic changes between boroughs and neighborhoods. Manhattan’s income gap between the richest 20 percent and poorest 20 percent was on par with countries like Sierra Leone, Namibia and Lesotho, The New Yorker reports. Other highlights include a highest median income of $205,192 at the Chambers Street, Park Place and World Trade Center stations, a lowest median income of $12,288 at the Sutter Avenue stop on Line L in Brooklyn and a largest range in median income of $191,442 on Line 2 .

The interactive got us wondering what further conclusions could be drawn about disparities within individual lines and the boroughs along the way – Brooklyn, the Bronx, Manhattan and the Queens. So we went ahead and found the average median household income for all 21 lines and came up with this chart displaying them from highest to lowest:

Line E had the highest average median income at $88,888, while Line D had the lowest at $48,203, an 84.4 percent deficit. All six lines with the highest incomes, all above $70,000, included stations in Manhattan. Only Line 1, which ranked second highest at $82,638, included stops in the Bronx. That got us curious about average median incomes per borough, so we created a separate chart, pulling out duplicate median income values because it is assumed they are in the same neighborhood.

Unsurprisingly, Manhattan came out on top with an average median income of $84,510 and the Bronx dead last at $33,676. What surprised us is how close the average medians for Brooklyn and Queens came out – $49,014 and $54,274, respectively. This just skims the surface of what could be a long analytical journey into other societal problems as they relate to income like ridership numbers and crime rates for each line or borough, or even a platform for comparison to this disillusioning map by Max Fisher of The Washington Post on how 35 countries compare on child poverty (the U.S. is ranked 34^th).

The takeaway from our analysis so far, though, is something you may or may not already know depending on your average median income. If you’re in the middle to low range, you’ve probably used the subway enough to see the disparities, whereas if you’re a resident at Park Place, your go-to transportation may not be the subway that exposes these gaps. But we could be wrong.

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