Shutting off legal immigration

President Trump may not have built much of “his famous wall,” said Catherine Rampell, but he’s put up a “barrier of paperwork” that’s very effectively shut the door on legal immigrants. Over four years, Trump has cut the number of legal immigrants admitted to the U.S. by 50 percent, instituting “hundreds of administrative changes” that have quietly “choked the flow of newcomers,” including badly needed doctors, scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs. Criteria for legal immigrants have been rigged so that “virtually no one qualifies.” Under the leadership of nativist White House senior aide Stephen Miller, green-card application forms have ballooned to 20 pages and been “booby-trapped” so that a single mistake—like not filling a line for a middle name—can result in rejection. Immigrants “who have lived and worked here for years,” contributing to our economy, have been deported over technicalities in documents. The Trump-Miller policies took years to implement and will take years to undo; getting people back into the legal pipeline won’t happen overnight. A major overhaul of a broken system will be required. The U.S. relies on immigrants to “power our economy” and “keep the country competitive.”