LESS LEGAL U.S. IMMIGRATION
While President Donald Trump highlights the construction of a border wall to stress his war on illegal immigration, legal immigration has fallen more than 11%, and a steeper drop is looming.
President Donald Trump’s immigration policies — such as travel bans and visa restrictions or refugee caps and asylum changes — have begun to deliver on a long-standing goal: Legal immigration has fallen more than 11% and a steeper drop is looming.
While Trump highlights the construction of a border wall to stress his war on illegal immigration, it is through policy changes, not physical barriers, that his administration has been able to seal the United States. Two more measures took effect Friday and Monday — an expansion of his travel ban and strict wealth tests on green card applicants.
“He’s really ticking off all the boxes. It’s kind of amazing,” said Sarah Pierce, a policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group. “In an administration that’s been perceived to be haphazard, on immigration they’ve been extremely consistent and barreling forward.”
The number of people who obtained lawful permanent residence, besides refugees who entered the United States in previous years, declined to 940,877 in the 2018 fiscal year from 1,063,289 in the 2016 fiscal year, according to an analysis of government data by the National Foundation for American Policy. Four years ago, legal immigration was at its highest level since 2006, when 1,266,129 people obtained lawful permanent residence in the United States.
Although the data provides only a glimpse of the effect of Trump’s agenda, immigration experts said they are first sign and that coming policies will amplify them. A report released Monday projected a 30% decline in legal immigration by 2021 and a 35% dip in average annual growth of the U.S. labor force.
The numbers reflect the breadth of the Trump administration’s restrictionism, and they come as record low unemployment has even the president’s acting chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, confiding to a gathering in Britain that “we are desperate, desperate for more people.”
But the doors have been blocked in multiple ways.
Those fleeing violence or persecution have found asylum rules tightened and have been forced to wait in squalid camps in Mexico or sent to countries such as Guatemala as their cases are adjudicated.
People who have languished in displaced persons camps for years face an almost impossible refugee cap of 18,000 this year, down from the 110,000 that President Barack Obama set in 2016.
Family members hoping to travel legally from Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Somalia were blocked by the president’s travel ban.
Increased vetting and additional in-person interviews have further winnowed foreign travelers. The number of visas issued to foreigners abroad looking to immigrate to the United States has declined by about 25%, to 462,422 in the 2019 fiscal year from 617,752 in 2016.
The expansion of Trump’s travel ban to six additional countries, including Africa’s most populous, Nigeria, began Friday, and the public charge rule, which effectively sets a wealth test for would-be immigrants, started Monday. Those will reshape immigration in the years to come, according to experts.
The travel and visa bans, soon to cover 13 countries, are almost sure to be reflected in immigration numbers in the near future. Of the average of more than 537,000 people abroad granted permanent residency from 2014 to 2016, including through a diversity lottery system, nearly 28,000, or 5%, would be blocked under the administration’s newly expanded travel restrictions, according to an analysis of State Department data.
But the public charge rule may prove the most consequential change yet. Around two-thirds of the immigrants who obtained permanent legal status from 2012 to 2016 could be blocked from doing so under the new rule, which denies green cards to those who are likely to need public assistance, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute.