No, not even close. For the costs of CT spending to equal the benefits of the value of lives saved, it would have to have saved between 390,000 and 442,000 lives, or between 15,600 and 17,680 per year since 9/11. From September 12, 2001, through September 10, 2026, I estimate that 347 total people were murdered on US soil by all terrorists of all ideological motivations and locations of birth. That includes some victims in attacks since that analysis was published. Thus, all CT spending would have to have saved 1,124 to 1,274 times as many lives as were taken by terrorists in attacks on US soil for the benefits of CT spending to equal the costs in terms of lives saved. To put that in perspective, the number of lives that would have had to have been saved for CT just to break even, never mind producing a positive return, would have had to have been roughly equal to every murder committed on US soil since 9/11. That large number of lives was not saved by post-9/11 CT spending and foreign wars to stop terrorists.

This matters because scarce resources that funded CT could be used to save lives elsewhere, such as better road safety, improved policing, or the innumerable other ways that people make their lives safer when they’re richer. Much of the actual CT spending is worse than just the opportunity cost of diverted safety resources implies, because the actions that caused the spending directly or indirectly killed Americans. Around 7,000 Americans died in Iraq and Afghanistan, not including the hundreds of thousands of locals. The requirement to screen all checked baggage after 9/11 reduced flight passenger volume by about 6 percent, with some travelers opting for more dangerous road travel. Some of the marginal drivers were spooked by terrorism instead of the extra cost of security, and the authors cannot separate the two, so the extra cost of security explains some unmeasured share of the as many as 2,300 road deaths they attribute to the attacks.

Regardless of the high cost in lives of the US CT strategy after 9/11, which should make all Americans skeptical of the social utility of CT actions, let’s look at whether the spending and economic costs could plausibly have saved lives. The methods for estimating the costs herein include the fiscal costs and an economic estimate. They do not include the losses from diminished civil liberties, psychological costs, or state or local costs. The accounting of fiscal costs here follows the 2018 Stimson Center study’s definitions. It includes federal homeland security budgets, spending from the Department of Defense (DOD) emergency and overseas contingency operations (OCO), war-related Department of State and USAID, and spending on foreign CT operations. The OCO designation ended in FY2022 after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Thus, the FY2018–FY2026 flows are estimated from DOD enacted appropriations and the BBA 2019 targets and the State Department and USAID component comes from the $8 billion annually designated as OCO from FY2019. OMB’s government-wide homeland security report, the series Stimson used, was discontinued after FY2017, so the homeland security component for FY2018 onward scales the DHS gross discretionary budget authority to the last government-wide total. Nominal flows are deflated to constant July 2026 dollars using monthly CPI-U index levels from the BLS historical series and summed. Interest on war borrowing, war-attributable growth in the DOD base budget, and veterans’ medical and disability obligations are excluded merely because that would require more steps to avoid double-counting than a back-of-the-envelope calculation could justify.

Controversially, this analysis assumes that real GDP in 2026 is 0.1 percent below the counterfactual level of no increase in CT spending after 9/11, with the gap widening linearly from zero in FY2002. Because a permanent level shift generates a flow loss in every period, the annual output gaps are summed and deflated to the same base. Truncating the output-gap sum at FY2026 treats a permanent level effect as terminating, so the output term is a lower bound. It is unsound to think that wars, immigration restrictions, and the resulting regime uncertainty didn’t lower GDP by a conservative 0.1 percent.

The last and most important step is estimating the value of a statistical human life to compare with the cost of CT spending. This is an emotional and methodologically fraught way to measure human life. As a father and a husband, I understand this emotional reaction well. Still, the fact remains that if the government spends more to save a life through enhanced CT than it is worth, then that means that other people died because of neglected safety in other areas. As a necessary preamble, it’s necessary to state that the value of a human life is not infinite. You don’t even think that about your own life because, if you did, you wouldn’t do anything to increase the chance of dying, such as drive in an automobile when it’s not a life-or-death situation, because that increases your chance of dying. My method of avoiding this problem is to pick a high number, even though an error in that direction is just as dire as an underestimate.

As a hypothetical, suppose the value of a statistical life is $15 million. If the government spends $30 million to save one life, then at least one person died who otherwise would not have died if that money had been spent where it would save more lives. Thus, spending that amount of money to reduce risk results in more deaths than otherwise would have occurred. Although emotional and hard to calculate, estimating the statistical value of life can help policymakers save more lives. The death of human beings is the highest and most significant cost of terrorism, but not the only one, as other forms of destruction are also costly but relatively minor compared to death. For simplicity, I will focus on the cost in terms of human life and assume a $15 million value. You can substitute your own statistical value of life in the table below to recalculate.

Table 1 shows low- and high-end fiscal and economic cost estimates from CT policies after 9/11. The federal government’s CT costs are spread across many agencies, programs, and decades, so they must be estimated to some extent. Most economists who read this will think the $15 million value of statistical life is too high, and they would balk at the inefficiencies that would result from informing policy on that basis. However, non-economists will probably think that’s too low. Picking an outrageous number like $100 million per life doesn’t save the analysis, though, because that merely means CT spending would have to save 58,500 to 66,300 people to break even.

Table 1 doesn’t quite capture how disproportionate the costs of CT were compared to the possible benefits. Figure 1 shows how much higher the number of people killed in terrorist attacks after 9/11 would have had to be, relative to the number of people actually killed, to justify the level of CT spending. It’s calculated by multiplying the number of people murdered in such attacks by 1,124 each year, the minimum ratio of the deaths required to break even with CT costs to the actual number of deaths, spread proportionally over each year by the number of real victims. The number of actual murdered people in terrorist attacks is a flat line by comparison to this counterfactual that would justify the spending.

My colleague John Mueller and his coauthor, Mark G. Stewart, answered this question decisively over a decade ago, and I contributed modestly to answering it over the years. The cost numbers above are merely an update. Mueller and Stewart also looked for the attacks that CT spending averted and found almost none. My estimate of 347 people killed in terrorist attacks after 9/11 is likely high because it includes some victims of attacks that were likely not terrorists, out of an abundance of caution that is prejudiced in favor of security hawks, a bias that should be familiar to anyone who watched how CT money was spent after 9/11.

The 9/11 terrorist attacks were a crime of shocking proportions that deserved a proportionate response, but the costs of those attacks were multiplied by the government’s grossly disproportionate response. None of that matters to the people who were killed or their loved ones, nor should it. Some CT spending, increased law enforcement actions, and perhaps even military actions were justified after the attacks, but what the government actually did was wasteful and destructive to a degree that’s difficult to comprehend. There are several lessons from 9/11, but the biggest one is “don’t overreact.”

In November 2025, the Trump administration began rejecting some visa applicants based on health problems, asking if applicants and their children have “disabilities, chronic medical conditions, or other special needs.” On Tuesday this week, the State Department ordered a pause on all immigrant visa appointments worldwide to better train consular officers on more restrictive guidance, enforcing these rules as well as others intended to exclude immigrants likely to use public benefits.

Although some immigrants do become disabled, this analysis finds that immigrants, legal and illegal, were 24 percent less likely to be disabled than the US-born population in 2024, and were less likely to be disabled at nearly every age regardless of immigration status. Their lower disability rate led to significantly less use of disability benefits, but even disabled immigrants draw on those benefits less than disabled US-born citizens.

Regulations Regarding Immigrants’ Health

This concern about immigrants’ disability status has a long history. The first general immigration law of 1882 targeted people with (perceived) learning disabilities and mental illnesses, and the 1891 act created the first physical examinations of immigrant arrivals. As Prescott Hall, the notorious eugenicist leader of the Immigration Restriction League, said in 1907, the immigration law’s goal was to “protect the country from those who tend to lower the average of health and intelligence.”

Today, the law still requires physical exams for “diseases or mental or physical defects or disabilities,” though not all “defects” can lead to exclusion. By statute, immigrants can be excluded only for having a dangerous communicable disease, certain addictions, or a threatening “physical or mental disorder.” Having children who are “helpless from sickness, mental or physical disability, or infancy” can also trigger a denial.

However, the hook for the Trump administration’s new rules is the provision excluding those likely to become a “public charge”—or welfare dependent—because the statute requires accounting for an immigrant’s health. The new rules permit denials for a broad range of health concerns, including but not limited to obesity, cardiovascular diseases, respiratory diseases, cancers, diabetes, metabolic diseases, neurological diseases, and mental health conditions.

Immigrant Disability Rates

To estimate disability prevalence by immigration status, we analyzed the Census Bureau’s 2024 American Community Survey and 2025 Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC) 1‑year samples from IPUMS. The ASEC reports on the 2024 calendar year. Disability types include cognitive, ambulatory, vision, hearing, independent living, and self-care difficulties. These categories may not capture all health conditions, but they provide a broad sense of immigrant health status.

To identify likely illegal immigrants, we used a modified residual method developed by economist Christian Gunadi. In addition to several other proxies for legal status, our method includes carve-outs for state-specific Medicaid and CHIP eligibility changes throughout the last decade, as well as assumptions for certain occupations that require citizenship or licensing. We also employ a larger undercount population adjustment that decays the longer an immigrant has resided in the US. Legal immigrants identified by this method include those who hold non-immigrant work visas and immigrants who have become naturalized citizens.

Immigrants are less than 12 percent of the US disabled population, despite making up roughly 15 percent of the total US population. In 2024, 11.1 percent of immigrants, legal and illegal, were disabled. Illegal immigrants reported the lowest rate of any group—just 5.34 percent—compared to 13.0 percent among legal immigrants and 14.6 percent among US-born citizens.

These gaps have remained consistent over the past decade, even as public-charge rules, welfare eligibility restrictions, and enforcement priorities have shifted. This is not the result of any single administration’s policies, but rather the fact that undocumented immigrants report lower disability rates regardless of public-charge enforcement.

Figure 2 shows that this gap is not simply because immigrants are younger, as the gap persists even after accounting for age. US-born citizens have the highest disability rate at nearly all ages, and the gap widens through working age into retirement. This reflects the pattern that migration tends to self-select for healthier individuals who are already capable of undertaking both the physical and financial burdens of relocating.

Veterans

In 2024, veterans made up a modest share of both native-born and legal immigrant populations (roughly 15,000,000 native-born citizens and 782,000 legal immigrants). Disability rates among veterans are higher than those of the civilian population, due to both older average age and service-related conditions. However, the disability gap remains in this group: 26 percent of legal immigrant veterans are disabled, compared to 32.5 percent of US-born veterans.

Disability Income

Since they are less likely to be disabled, immigrants are also less likely to receive disability benefits. However, even among those who report having a disability, immigrants are still less likely to receive assistance in the forms of Social Security Disability Insurance (SSDI), Supplemental Security Income (SSI), or other disability income (DI).

We use the American Community Survey (ACS) to estimate disability rates by nativity because its larger annual sample size supports more precise estimates for small subgroups such as illegal immigrants. For the benefit receipt analysis, we switch to the Current Population Survey Annual Social and Economic Supplement (CPS ASEC), as it is the only major survey that allows us to isolate disability-related benefit receipts.

Our analyses include pretax disability income from SSDI, SSI, and DI. DI reflects sources such as workers’ compensation, US military retirement disability, and private disability insurance. We do not include payments from the Department of Veterans Affairs or income received on behalf of children in the following calculations, which would inflate the differences between immigrants and the US-born.

In 2024, immigrants were nearly half as likely to receive any disability income from the government. 2.61 percent of immigrants received disability income in any form, compared to 5.11 percent of US-born citizens.

Within each disability income source, immigrants are less likely to receive benefits, even among those who report having a disability. Among the disabled population, 21.4 percent of US-born citizens receive welfare income based on their disability. Immigrants were 26 percent less likely to receive disability income, legal immigrants 19 percent less likely, and illegal immigrants 98 percent less likely. This isn’t a story only about immigrants simply being healthier, but also one of immigrants being less costly even after becoming disabled.

A portion of this gap reflects law, as illegal immigrants are generally ineligible for SSI, SSDI, and other federal assistance. However, legal immigrants still receive disability benefits at lower rates than US-born citizens, which suggests that the gap is about more than just who is allowed to apply.

Disability Benefit Consumption

Immigrants consume less than half the disability benefits, in dollar terms, that US-born citizens do. In 2024, per capita disability income among immigrants totaled $411.42. Illegal immigrants accounted for almost none of this spending. Most cases in our dataset come from a small number of respondents concentrated in only a few states, such as California, Texas, New York, and Colorado.

The fact that immigrants are less likely to be disabled and receive less disability income should come as little surprise when considering other research showing that immigrants are generally much healthier overall than the US-born population. They report lower rates of chronic disease, obesity, substance use, and mental illness, and higher life expectancy overall. Even immigrants from countries with lower life expectancies demonstrate elevated health outcomes in the United States.

Given that immigrants and their children make up an increasing share of the US population, the immigrant health advantage carries significant economic effects. Immigrants put less strain on the health care systems and disability programs. Consequently, they also participate at higher rates in the labor force despite having less access to health care. While mechanisms behind the immigrant health advantage are debated, the evidence here is clear: Immigrants are far from burdensome to systems designed to help the disabled. This analysis suggests that the State Department’s public charge rules are an unwarranted addition to America’s immigration system.

This post was coauthored with Carol Xu for the Cato Institute.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) published a new proposed regulation today, requiring employers to pay a $103,265 fee—or more accurately, tax—merely for the right to file a petition requesting an H‑1B foreign worker. The H‑1B visa program is the most common way for employers to hire or retain high-skilled foreign workers in the United States because the green card caps are so low and the wait times are so prohibitively long.

It is not a fee because it is not a charge for a service. Rather, it is an attempt to reduce the hiring of H‑1B workers. The new fee-tax will crush the H‑1B program, resulting in the loss of hundreds of thousands of talented workers. This mass exodus will trigger a series of devastating effects for the US economy: disinvestment from the US economy, offshoring of US jobs, a decline in innovation and entrepreneurship, and an enormous blow to the US Treasury.

The New Fee-Tax Comes on Top of the Other Illegal $100K Fee-Tax

This fee comes on top of the $100,000 fee-tax that President Trump imposed via Presidential Proclamation 10973 on H‑1B employers last year. On its face, that fee-tax applied to any H‑1B worker who tried to enter the country—even if they were already approved and had temporarily traveled abroad. Ultimately, DHS limited the presidential proclamation to petitions for new H‑1B workers (set aside whether an agency can legally limit a presidential proclamation).

The new fee would apply to any cap-subject H‑1B visa petition whether on behalf of a worker inside or outside the United States. Cap-subject H‑1B petitions include all petitions except renewals and those by universities, affiliated nonprofits (such as hospitals), or research organizations at nonprofits or government positions. Here is a comparison of the two fees.

The First Circuit Court of Appeals has upheld a district court stay of the presidential proclamation on the grounds that it is an unconstitutional tax. Citing Skinner v. Mid-America Pipeline Co., the court said that Congress has to have “spoke[n] ‘clearly’ in conferring ‘discretionary authority to recover administrative costs not inuring directly to the benefit of regulated parties by imposing additional financial burdens, whether characterized as ‘fees’ or ‘taxes,’ on those parties.’” It found that Congress had not.

The New Fee-Tax Is Also Likely Illegal

Therefore, the first fee is not currently in effect. Nevertheless, DHS persists with a new legal basis. Presidential Proclamation 10973 used the president’s authority to limit entry of nonimmigrants to require the $100,000 payment for the worker to obtain entry. The new proposed $103,265 fee is instead based on a statute that states: “Fees for providing adjudication and naturalization services may be set at a level that will ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services.”

The fee has two legal deficiencies: It is neither intended “for adjudication and naturalization services” nor will it “ensure recovery of the full costs of providing all such services.” On the one hand, the rulemaking states that fee revenue will go toward Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s investigations and compliance activities, biometric screening at ports of entry, and actions of the immigration courts as well as components of the Department of Labor and State Department.

Equally fatal to the rule, however, is that DHS has already admitted in court that the first H‑1B fee under the presidential proclamation was “arguably prohibitive” and “does not raise revenue.” Indeed, its own analysis found that from September 21, 2025, to February 15, 2026, the H‑1B proclamation fee lost the US government $28 million in revenue after accounting for the revenue raised from the few employers that elected to pay the fee.

The New H‑1B Fee-Tax Would Nearly End the H‑1B Program

The decline in revenue occurred because the fee led to an approximately 87 percent decline in petitions subject to the fee. After the initial visa fee, despite the exemptions for H‑1B visa renewals, the total number of visa issuances to H‑1B workers and their families abroad fell by 77 percent.

This additional fee would be the death blow to the entire H‑1B visa program. Even if an employer is currently exempt, how can they trust the administration not to suddenly impose a new fee just like it is doing now?

The table below lists the different types of H‑1B visa fees, showing that the process was already extraordinarily expensive before the presidential proclamation and the new proposed rule. Fees often cost over $10,000 for a single employee even before hiring an attorney to file the petition. If both the presidential proclamation and the pending rule come into effect, some employers would owe over $214,000 to hire a single employee.

Why Employers Won’t Pay the New Fee-Tax

The administration’s argument for employers’ willingness to pay is preposterous. DHS relies on a paper by economist George Borjas to assert that employers will pay the fee because, as Borjas claims, employers underpay H‑1B workers, so they are saving so much money that they’d be willing to pay the fee. DHS is claiming that it will be raising revenue based on the systematic underpayment of H‑1B workers, which is bizarre. But the experiment with the first fee-tax has already disproven Borjas’ assertion of willingness to pay, so the only question to ask is: Why was he wrong?

Economists Michael Clemens and Adam Ozimek have already raised serious doubts about Borjas’ underlying calculations of underpayment. Most other analyses find no underpayment for temporary foreign workers in the United States, and as I’ve pointed out, any “underpayment” that exists comes from the way in which the visa system prevents H‑1B workers from entering the labor market as quickly as US workers—not exploitation.

But even if Borjas’ calculations are correct, both $100,000 fees only apply to initial H‑1B petitions. This means that DHS is claiming that employers are paying the fee-tax to hire H‑1B workers explicitly so that they can underpay them. But then H‑1B workers can immediately change jobs—as 1.1 million have over the last 20 years—to receive the market wage from any employer without paying the fee. It’s even worse with this new fee-tax because the first one at least offered a refund if the petition was denied. In this case, employers are paying $103,265 just for the chance to get a decision, not even an approval.

Conclusion

The H‑1B fee will undermine American innovation, competitiveness, fiscal security, and ultimately prosperity. H‑1B workers are among the highest-skilled workers in the US economy, earning wages in the top 10 percent of workers. According to my analysis of government budgets, skilled foreign workers have reduced the deficit by more than $11.7 trillion over the last 30 years. As my colleague Alex Nowrasteh noted when the first Trump administration enacted a temporary H‑1B ban, these workers have also contributed disproportionately to innovation and patenting.

Moreover, the H‑1B visa is the entry point for workers who go on to start businesses. Cato adjunct scholar Stuart Anderson found in a paper for the National Foundation for American Policy that 59 percent (455 of 775) of America’s billion-dollar start-ups were founded or cofounded by immigrants. He writes that 234 of these founders came as international students who likely stayed after “gaining H‑1B status and/​or an employment-based green card.” Without the H‑1B, hundreds of thousands of skilled workers will go to other countries where they will not only compete with Americans but also be less productive and less innovative, undermining the prosperity of not just America but the world.

If the courts fail to block this new draconian tax on innovation and competitiveness, Congress should intervene to ensure that America remains the most vibrant economy on Earth. Unfortunately, the administration is already moving forward with yet another $100,000 fee to hire international students after they graduate, so Congress should act now to send the message that America truly does want to stay competitive.

After the Supreme Court struck down his first order restricting birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara, President Trump signed a new order on August 6. At first blush, the new order seems like only a blatant attempt to ignore the Supreme Court. That might be true, but there’s an alternative reading that is more bizarre and potentially frightening: The president might believe he can unilaterally decide whether US law applies to any particular person or groups of people.

The entire order rests on the assertion that presidents can decide who is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and, therefore, US law. In a way, this is a far more dangerous claim. For instance, diplomats receive immunity not only from federal but also from state and local prosecution. If the president can suspend the laws—not just the enforcement of them but the laws themselves—the order would not only strip citizenship from many Americans, it would also create a massive new power for presidents to abuse.

The strange new order is already being challenged in court, but we still don’t know how the government will defend it.

Comparing the Two Orders

Here is a quick rundown of the order:

• Narrower: The order removes the children of illegal immigrants and temporary residents as explicit targets, and instead produces a new list of narrower parental categories (terrorists, foreign government employees, visa fraudsters, anyone traveling to the US for birth, and a few people in territories).

• Vaguer: The new list is less clearly defined, so there is greater uncertainty about some groups subject to it.

• Not exhaustive: The old order applied to two specific categories. The new order explicitly states that its list is representative, not “exhaustive.”

• Retroactive: The old order applied only to future births. This order has no such limit, potentially opening up the citizenship claims of current US citizens.

• Loss of citizenship: Strangely, the order requires denying any applicant for a citizenship document whose parent currently falls into an excluded category, regardless of their parent’s situation at birth (e.g., “parent is…a foreign government employee”). This is also unconstitutional.

• Applies to legal permanent residents: It denies citizenship for children of legal permanent residents if their parent fits into one of the categories.

• Applies to either parent: It covers children if either parent falls into the covered category, not just one, unless a parent is a citizen.

The New Legal Justification

The Fourteenth Amendment states that anyone born in the United States “and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” is a US citizen. The president’s first order asserted—without any supporting legal analysis—that immigrants without permanent lawful status in the United States were not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The Justice Department’s legal defense was that “jurisdiction” meant only political jurisdiction, meaning primary or sole “allegiance,” and allegiance was required only of citizens or individuals legally and permanently domiciled in the United States.

The Supreme Court rejected this interpretation. As Ilya Somin notes, the Court found that jurisdiction just refers to “the ‘[p]ower of governing or legislating.’” Under this rubric, the two groups today that could be exempt from US governance are foreign invaders that actually controlled territory, like “a castle or fort,” and “ambassadors (and their families), who were considered—by a fiction of extraterritoriality—to remain on foreign soil.” These groups are either not subject to US laws or outside of US control.

Given this determination, President Trump’s new order abandons its prior justification and explicitly ties its power to limit birthright citizenship to this latter phrase:

the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution extends the privilege of citizenship to children born to parents in the United States “for whom no extraterritorial fiction applie[s].” This order identifies, non-exhaustively, and prescribes action concerning certain categories of children of aliens who do not fall within the rule of birthright citizenship …

The extraterritorial fiction exists for diplomats because they and their children are not fully subject to US law—that is, they have immunity. The only way to extend the “extraterritorial fiction” that the administration now embraces would be to extend immunity—crucially, not just to the parents but also the children. As the Court stated:

Those children [in the certified class]…satisfy both elements of the Citizenship Clause: they are “born in the United States” and “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The Fourteenth Amendment’s jurisdictional requirement applies to children, not the parents. A parent can be subject to US jurisdiction but not the child (a noncitizen non-ambassador who has a child with an ambassador outside of their household), and a child can be subject to US jurisdiction but not the parent (an ambassador who has a child with a US citizen). Even in the case of an invading army, a foreign invading soldier could be not subject to US jurisdiction, but his child could be, depending on the circumstances at birth (e.g., if the other parent was a US citizen or in territory controlled by the United States). The Trump administration’s defense will have to wade through these issues.

The New Order’s New Targets

Trump’s second order purports to adopt the Barbara majority’s justification, but as Steve Vladeck notes, its “non-exhaustive” list of parents whose children will be deemed not subject to US jurisdiction doesn’t appear to align with its legal justification:

1. “is a foreign government employee”;

2. is “employed by an international organization that possesses international-organization immunity”;

3. “is…a member of a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization”;

4. “engaged in a commercial transaction to purchase or access birthright citizenship for the person”;

5. “engage in a commercial transaction to ensure that the person’s mother is present in the United States”;

6. “engaged in fraudulent activity to obtain citizenship”;

7. “engage in a commercial transaction with a surrogate present in the United States”;

8. “is born in a territory or territorial waters of the United States where citizenship is not conferred by Federal statute.”

Ambassadors already fall outside the Citizenship Clause, and embassy and consular staff from the handful of countries with bilateral enhancement agreements hold the same diplomatic agent-level immunity. Beyond that narrow set, none of these groups is exempt from US criminal or civil jurisdiction.

The first of these would seem to be the easiest case, as it seems most similar to an ambassador. The problem is that foreign government employees—excluding those related to an embassy or consulate—do not currently receive any diplomatic immunity. The US government would have to show a court that it has taken steps to grant them any immunity. So far, it has not, though the order gives the relevant agencies 30 days to “ensure their regulations and policies are consistent with this order” (section 3(a)).

Alongside the executive order, the administration did make some changes to its page for ambassadors. Though it so far maintains the same narrow list of immunized positions, the government’s changes ended reference to the “blue list” for accredited diplomats, so now, with no official list, only the State Department knows who is immunized. The regulation still defines a diplomatic officer as a person on the Blue List, so the situation is confusing.

Immunity in Current Law

Does the president have the unilateral power to expand the list of individuals with immunity? Diplomatic immunity is governed primarily by the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations (VCDR) of 1961, the Diplomatic Relations Act (DRA) of 1978, and the International Organizations Immunities Act (IOIA) of 1945. These statutes limit immunities and the president’s power. The DRA repealed broader “flat immunity” from a 1790 act and replaced it with narrower, graduated immunity tiers in the VCDR. Following Article 37 of the VCDR, the statute (22 U.S. Code § 254b) grants immunity to non-signatories’ “mission, the members of the mission, their families, and diplomatic couriers.”

Both VCDR and the DRA grant some level of immunity only to: members of a foreign mission—the head of mission and diplomatic staff, administrative and technical staff, and service staff—and, for the first two tiers only, to the members of their households who are not nationals (or, below the diplomatic-agent tier, not nationals or permanent residents) of the United States. Families of service staff receive no immunity at all. That means that their children get citizenship even if their parents are not fully subject to US jurisdiction in every respect. Administrative and technical staff and their families receive full diplomatic immunity for crimes (VCDR Art. 37), but under the 2024 regulation, their immunity is still deemed a lesser immunity unless there is a bilateral enhancement agreement that enhances their immunity. This means that their children receive citizenship.

Under the DRA, the president could grant immunity to the families of service staff of a mission or embassy, but only “on the basis of reciprocity.” Bilateral treaties have already raised all embassy staff and some consular staff to full diplomatic immunity for some countries in the case of criminal prosecutions. After consultation with Congress, the Secretary of State in concert with the Attorney General may similarly grant immunities for a consular post and their families—again, based only on reciprocity with the United States; that is, the other country would have to treat US consular officers in its territory the same way.

Foreign government employees who are not members of a diplomatic mission, consular post, or national mission to an international organization have no path to immunity, and neither do their families. As for international organizations, the president may only grant immunity to those employees notified to and accepted by the Secretary of State, and the immunity is only for official acts; the IOIA specifically states that this immunity does not constitute diplomatic immunity.

Inherent Presidential Authority?

President Trump might say that the president’s power under Article II of the Constitution to receive ambassadors implies the power to recognize immunities even absent a statute, and that who constitutes representatives of a foreign government is up to his discretion. The State Department’s regulation states that “the question of whether any particular person enjoys diplomatic agent-level immunity and is therefore not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States…is determined by the State Department.”

The preamble to the State Department’s 2024 regulation specifying who receives immunity states that immunity decisions are, in fact, based at least partly on “the President’s Article II authority to speak as the sole organ of the government with respect to agreements regarding diplomatic relations,” citing United States v. Belmont, 301 U.S. 324, 330 (1937).

In Belmont, President Roosevelt’s administration helped collect assets of a corporation that the Soviet Union had nationalized, despite no treaty and preempting a state law, and the Supreme Court permitted the collection, because the president has authority to make enforceable international agreements and no congressional statute blocked it. In Zivotofsky v. Kerry (2015), the Supreme Court “decline[d] to acknowledge” the “sole organ” view of Belmont as it was “unnecessary to the resolution of this case,” but nonetheless held that “the President alone determines what nations to formally recognize as legitimate” in part to identify “whether their officials will be immune.”

In Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812), Chief Justice John Marshall seems to endorse the idea that immunities exist based on the law of nations, not any statute, writing:

It is true that in some countries, and in this among others, a special law is enacted for the case. But the law obviously proceeds on the idea of prescribing the punishment of an act previously unlawful, not of granting to a foreign minister a privilege which he would not otherwise possess.

The Ninth Circuit in Moncada v. Rubio (2025) stated: “The Constitution confers on the President alone the legal duty to receive diplomats and thereby immunize those diplomats from the jurisdiction of the United States.” However, it also asserted authority to establish if immunity was, in fact, granted. The DC Circuit in Carrera v. Carrera (1949) found that “judicial inquiry into the propriety of [the administration’s] listing [as a diplomat] was not appropriate.”

The argument that the president has authority to decide who may receive immunity absent a statute may be wrong—Congress clearly thought it could constrain the president—but given the Court’s concessions, it may not be frivolous. The question may be partly how committed the Trump administration is to denying birthright citizenship to, well, someone. Is it willing to unilaterally expand immunity just to salvage some kind of win here? Are courts willing to permit President Trump to call someone a “diplomat” who clearly is not? I doubt it.

Lesser and Revoked Immunity?

Here’s another question possibly left open by Barbara: How much immunity is necessary to trigger a loss of “jurisdiction”? Even “full diplomatic immunity” has limits, including civil actions related to professional or commercial activity outside of official functions. Some immunized representatives of foreign governments receive immunity only for official acts taken on behalf of the foreign government. By regulation, officials with lesser immunity are currently deemed to be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for purposes of birthright citizenship. Native American tribes—who received citizenship via statute—were not fully exempt from US jurisdiction either.

Clearly, the analogue for excluding the children of foreign government employees is the ambassador exception, so it is very difficult to understand how the Trump administration could defend this expansion in court without referencing immunity. Could the Trump administration assert the authority to grant some lesser forms of immunity to avoid owning the full consequences of its attempt to undermine birthright citizenship? That would allow the president to have his cake and eat it too. In Moncada, the Ninth Circuit stated: “immunity only for official acts mean[s] that [the consul] and his family were subject to the jurisdiction of the United States.” But that was based on the practice and laws in effect at the time, so it’s unclear if it’s saying that it must be this way or just that it was this way.

Another issue arises when the parent and children enter and exit these new categories. Ambassadors and their families receive Office of Foreign Mission–issued accreditation ID cards as evidence of their status (though only certification verified by the State Department officially matters). Their immunity ends when the ambassador leaves or after being given a reasonable period to depart voluntarily after ceasing to be an ambassador. The children lose immunity when they leave the household, get married, or turn 21 (23 if attending university full-time, or indefinitely if disabled).

These rules could, I suppose, be applied to foreign government employees, but the executive order is not limited to children of “accredited” employees. In any case, what about the other categories? When does “membership in a foreign terrorist organization” begin and end for this purpose? When do a mother and her child lose their extraterritorial status after having committed fraud to obtain citizenship?

It is important to note that ambassadors’ immunity does not protect them for crimes committed while an ambassador unless they were official acts on behalf of the foreign state. Could President Trump simply assert that birth tourist mothers and their children had immunity when they gave birth but lost it when they left the United States or were later identified? Another have-his-cake-and-eat-it-too gimmick. It will be interesting to see if a defendant—a terrorist—uses this executive order in court as an assertion of immunity against prosecution, which could be one quick route to ending this debate.

The President Shouldn’t Succeed

The only alternative strategy to granting some kind of immunity—asserting the president can label someone metaphorically outside the United States with no real-world effect—is just a rerun of Barbara. The majority opinion foreclosed a purely metaphorical “outside of US jurisdiction,” based on vague ideas like “allegiance” or “domicile.” There must be a real-world way in which the child would be outside the jurisdiction of US law. Immunity metaphorical enough to allow someone to still be arrested or deported as a terrorist or visa fraudster certainly means that the person is subject to US jurisdiction, and gimmicks shouldn’t get the president around the implications of his actions.

The new executive order’s carve-outs targeting people traveling to give birth, surrogates, visa fraudsters, and foreign terrorist organization members are likely more important in scope. Nonetheless, it is worth pursuing the possibility and difficulties of redesignating foreign government employees because it is the category most likely to survive legal challenge and change current practice. Given the difficulties here, the other categories have almost no chance at all. Defending this order will require a high level of creativity, to say the least, and it seems unlikely to survive.

The Supreme Court in Barbara also acknowledged the exception for ambassadors, not solely because of the grant of immunity. Rather, the grant of immunity flowed from who they actually are. Ambassadors are—and Native Americans historically were—meaningfully under the jurisdiction of their home nation (“the United States had voluntarily ‘cede[d]…a part of its territorial jurisdiction’ to another sovereign (or quasi-sovereign)”). Unless the foreign country agreed to fully govern its employees or other nationals in the United States, the parallel breaks down. Indeed, in the key passage articulating its principle, the Court stated that “intersovereign concerns” drove the need for the immunity and exception to jurisdiction for ambassadors and (historically) Native Americans.

Moreover, diplomats under the Vienna Convention—and the Diplomatic Relations Act—must be “appointed” by the foreign state, which triggers the immunity. It is an inherently bilateral action. How many foreign governments will agree to immunize all US government employees in their countries and deal with the bilateral problems associated with immunizing all their employees in the United States? Not many, I suppose.

The Court also quoted Chief Justice John Marshall in Schooner Exchange v. McFaddon (1812), saying it would be “dangerous to society” if large numbers of “private individuals” were not “amenable to the jurisdiction of the country.” The exemption Marshall articulated in that case—for a military vessel at a US port—was based on “common usage and common opinion,” the law of nations, and dignity owed to other nations. There is no possible argument along these lines for the types of exceptions contemplated by the executive order.

This order would be an unprecedented departure from common practice in world history. Of course, ambassadors aren’t the only analogy available. The administration may attempt to liken foreign terrorist organization members to invaders, even though they do not control territory like a castle or fort and would be fully subject to arrest; by definition, terrorists are non-state actors, so there are no “intersovereign concerns.” The analogy for birth tourists isn’t clear to me, but the upshot is that unless Trump grants them immunity, whatever analogy he uses wouldn’t work.

The president’s effort to evade the Supreme Court’s order will likely not change the rules around birthright citizenship. The added danger of handing the president the authority to arbitrarily exempt certain groups from US laws makes this limited order as dangerous. In the best outcome for the president, this case could potentially tweak the rationale of the Supreme Court in such a way as to give Congress an opening to effect the birthright citizenship rule. Most likely, however, it will just generate new controversy around what should be a settled issue.

The Houston Chronicle published my op-ed on how Trump, Vance, and others' attempts to inflate the number of illegal immigrants undermine their arguments for mass deportation. Here’s a selection:

Subscribe now

…The math is simple. The more illegal immigrants, the more Americans would have to pay to deport them. The Department of Homeland Security estimates that a single deportation costs on average $18,245. This means that when Trump invents the presence of 10 million more immigrants, he’s adding a theoretical $182.4 billion to the price tag. 

And that’s just the cost of deportation. The cost to federal revenue is even starker. Illegal immigrants pay sales tax — and, often, Social Security tax, income tax and property tax. The more illegal immigrants we deport, the more the cost of funding government would shift to American citizens and legal residents. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that recent illegal immigrant arrivals would have cut deficits by nearly $1 trillion over 10 years, and  found that Trump’s crackdown in 2025 had already erased $500 billion of those savings. 

Illegal immigrants receive very few taxpayer benefits because they are ineligible for all the largest federal public benefit programs, and most states also restrict eligibility for smaller state programs. Since the benefits being paid are a known quantity, a larger illegal immigrant population suggests that the cost per immigrant is actually far lower than we think. 

But the taxpayer expenses are dwarfed by the broader economic impact: less stuff produced for the American people. The Peterson Institute for International Economics has estimated that just 8.3 million deportations would leave U.S. gross domestic product 7.4% lower than otherwise by 2028, the equivalent of about $2.5 trillion. Lower output means fewer goods and services — everything from food to childcare — for Americans.

If the Trump administration’s hyperinflated figures were true, it would also suggest that illegal immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than we thought. Using a far lower estimate of the number of illegal immigrants in the country, scholars had already calculated that, compared to native-born Americans, illegal immigrants  were far less likely to be incarcerated. But again, since we know who is in prison, if the free immigrant population were to grow, the immigrant incarceration rate would fall in turn. 

In other words, the Trump administration apparently believes that illegal immigrants are far less represented in the crime data than anyone else. Of course, the rate of crime — not the absolute number of crimes — is what matters, because the rate is how we estimate the likelihood that someone will become a victim of a crime. More immigrants would mean a much lower victimization rate — that the presence of illegal immigrants reduces the likelihood that Americans will be victimized. .

Finally, the more deportations required for mass deportation, the more the campaign will violently intrude into the lives of Americans. According to the best estimates, about 12 million Americans, including 1.2 million spouses, lived with illegal immigrants. If these estimates are actually low, then many more Americans will end up losing their families or be forced to leave the United States along with them.

Read the full piece here.

Subscribe now

On December 11, 2025, a Border Patrol agent killed a Mexican man in Starr County, Texas. On December 17, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued a statement, saying a 31-year-old Mexican man with others “attempted to abscond to Mexico” from the Texas side of the border. The agent “engaged in an active struggle with the man for two minutes and ultimately discharged his CBP-issued firearm,” hitting him three times.

Until now, no additional reporting had established who the agent was, why he felt he must shoot him, or any details about the deceased immigrant. A month ago, I obtained Starr County and Texas Department of Public Safety records, showing that Border Patrol agent Armando Flores was the shooter and that another agent, Jawuan Wallace, arrived at the Starr County Sheriff’s Office for fingerprinting at 11:25 pm on the night of the shooting. The agencies also stated that Texas DPS is still actively investigating the shooting seven months later, refusing to release body camera footage and audio from the scene.

Over the last month, I’ve worked with Texas Tribune reporter Lomi Kriel to build out the story. The Tribune published its story today, identifying Isaias Sanchez Barbosa as the victim.

• Sanchez Barbosa had no known criminal history

  • He has no record of any prior entry into the United States.

  • He apparently had no family in the United States.

  • He was from a largely rural and impoverished area in southern Mexico.

  • No weapons were found on his person or in the area.

• CBP refused to disclose any details about the employment of the agents, the shooter Armando Flores or Jawuan Wallace, who was fingerprinted.

  • Flores shot Sanchez Barbosa at “close range” three times, hitting his right forearm as well as his right and left chest, fracturing his left rib and shredding his lungs.

  • Law enforcement failed to file the search warrant with the court for 8 months until the Tribune requested it.

  • A grand jury declined to indict the Border Patrol agent, though we have no idea what evidence it reviewed.

CBP’s statement was entitled: “Border Patrol Agent defends himself in deadly struggle with illegal alien,” effectively exonerating the agent prior to the completion of the investigation. From the little information available, Border Patrol agent Armando Flores attempted to physically stop Sanchez Barbosa from returning to Mexico, and the agent shot him three times.

CBP’s statement itself does not explain why the shooting was justified. There is no statement to the effect that the agent feared death or serious bodily harm for himself or others—a prerequisite under DHS’s use of force policy. The policy explicitly states, “Deadly force shall not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing subject.” Sanchez Barbosa was fleeing back to Mexico, which presumably lessens any threat that he posed to the agent or others. The Tribune quotes me:

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank in Washington, D.C., said the details of the case sparked his interest after the fatal shooting of Renee Good, an American citizen and 37-year-old mother of three who immigrant agents killed after she was leaving a Minneapolis protest in her car earlier this year. Video footage calls into question the Department of Homeland Security’s accounts that Good tried to run over the agent.

“After months of having DHS tell clear falsehoods about shootings caught on video, I doubted its account here where no film had surfaced,” said Bier, who first obtained some records in Sanchez Barbosa’s death. “This case had all the hallmarks of those later cases: An apparently unarmed victim who was retreating, a quick DHS statement exonerating the agent and very few other details.” …

That so many questions remain months later is “stunning,” said Bier of the Cato Institute.

He questioned whether investigating authorities sought statements from other witnesses, including the migrants in the group with Sanchez Barbosa, and if law enforcement officials independently interviewed Flores, the agent who fired the shots. Bier noted that the initial statement CBP issued did not state that the officer used force to prevent serious injury, either to himself or the public.

“So why was it justified?” Bier asked. “An administration that has repeatedly lost the confidence of the public should be open and transparent about the evidence that it used to conclude that this shooting was justified.”

CBP’s pronouncement accepting the officer’s self-defense claim should carry little weight given the extensive record of DHS agents lying to their supervisors about assaults on them. The Wall Street Journal has documented that about half of the US citizens who DHS has publicly accused of assaulting its agents were never even charged, and the New York Times has reported that of the resolved cases, nearly half of the individuals charged with assaulting officers failed to result in convictions. CBP’s statement by itself presents little reason to believe the agent’s self-defense claim.

I requested body camera footage and any recorded audio from Texas DPS and Starr County Sheriff’s Office, in hopes that the early on-site statements would reveal more light on the situation. But both agencies refused those requests on the grounds that the shooting was still being investigated.

Read the Texas Tribune’s report here: A border agent killed a migrant who crossed into Starr County. Eight months later, it’s still under investigation.

Here’s the timeline with the link to the relevant source:

4:14 PM — Agents observe a group in camouflage walking north and approach, identifying themselves as agents (CBP).

4:18 PM — A struggle begins; the agent radios for help and, after roughly two minutes, fires his weapon. The man ultimately “sustained a total of three gunshot wounds” (CBP).

4:24:16 PM — Starr County dispatch logs the 911 call: “MCALLEN BP REQ EMS 83/MIDWAY INVOLVED IN A STRUGGLE AND SHOTS WERE FIRED” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

4:25 PM — Agents request EMS, apply chest seals, and begin CPR (CBP).

4:33 PM — Dispatch notes: “MUTIPLE BP UNITS AT LOC” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

4:36:40 PM — Dispatch logs: “123 ADV THERE ARE MULITPLE UNITS THAT ARE BLOCKING THE WAY FOR EMS” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

4:37 PM — Starr County EMS arrives and assumes care (CBP).

~4:41 PM — Dispatch logs EMS reporting the patient in cardiac arrest (“code blue”) (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

5:08 PM — The man is pronounced dead at Starr County Hospital (CBP; corroborated by CAD log entry “he is 10–7”).

5:35 PM — Texas Ranger Bryan Rodriguez arrives on scene (Starr County CAD Event Sheet / DPS Case File).

6:42 PM — Deputies are told “RANGER RODRIGUEZ WILL BE TAKING OVER THE CASE BODY CAM WILL BE TURNED OFF” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

9:50 PM — A search warrant for the scene is signed by Judge Jose Luis Garza (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

10:44–11:25 PM — USBP Agent Jawuan Wallace arrives “for Fingerprinting” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

11:27 PM–12:25 AM — The body is released to a funeral home for autopsy; the log notes “NO ID WAS RECOVERED” (Starr County CAD Event Sheet).

12/12, 10:50 AM — Ranger Rodriguez formally opens DPS case 2025–0057208, summarizing: “On 12-11-2025 at approximately 4:20 PM, I, Company ‘D’ Texas Ranger Bryan Rodriguez was contacted by the Texas Department of Public Safety Command Post who advised me about an Officer Involved Shooting” (DPS Case File).

12/17/2025 — CBP publicly releases its account, describing the incident as a “deadly struggle with illegal alien” and reporting the agent “defends himself,” six days after the shooting (CBP).

7/16/2026 — DPS states the records related to the incident “would interfere with the detection, investigation, or prosecution of an open or pending criminal matter” under Gov’t Code § 552.108(a)(1). (Ref. #P018562-070926) (DPS records request response).

7/17/2026 — Starr County Major Carlos Delgado responds: “This case is under investigation.” (Starr County records request).

1. “Under socialism, ‘You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right.’”

There are prices on housing, medicine, food, and energy because these goods are scarce and have alternative uses. Scarce means that there is not enough of them to satisfy all demand at a price of zero. Those goods must be produced by people who must be fed, trained, equipped, and persuaded to show up to work. In a free market economy, workers produce those goods because they are paid to, the owners of firms organize production efficiently because their profits depend on it, and the owners of capital sell it to the most profitable firms. All that activity is guided by the incentives and information provided by prices.

Similarly, there are many different uses for these goods. Prices provide a signal and incentive to producers to decide what to build and to consumers to decide what to buy. Abolishing prices abolishes neither the costs of production nor the choices of consumption. It destroys the information and incentives that tell producers what to make, in what quantity, where, and at what sacrifice of alternatives. No socialist economy has ever solved the problem of efficiently allocating those resources without prices set by market exchange. The Soviet Union rationed by queues and shortages rather than by price, a condition documented for decades by the economist Alec Nove. It also rationed by prices of a sort, but they were set by central authorities with no incentive to change them in response to changing supply or demand. A price of $0, or any price below that which would be set by the market, does not create abundance. It results in greater scarcity by failing to reward producers and lets consumers know that they can be wasteful. Everything still gets paid for, in taxes, in waiting, and in greater scarcity from the goods that never appear.

2. “Free markets are failing workers because, ‘The world is in chaos, but for the bosses, it’s all going according to plan.’”

About 43 percent of humanity was in extreme poverty in 1990 when communism was collapsing in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. By 2024, it had fallen to 10.4 percent, the largest improvement in living standards in recorded history. Roughly 800 million of those people were in China, where poverty collapsed after the Communist Party abandoned collectivized agriculture and shifted away from a planned socialist economy. Both endpoints use the World Bank’s new $3.00-a-day extreme poverty line (2021 prices), applied back in time so the comparison is consistent over the decades.

American workers share in the gains. Median household income reached a record $83,730 in 2024, and, measured with the correct deflator, real wages for typical production and nonsupervisory workers rose more than 40 percent since 1990. They are also working less. Annual working hours in rich countries fell from roughly 3,000 in 1870 to about 1,750 today, which means free markets already delivered a shorter workweek and threw in a doubling of life expectancy while at it. The sectors where American workers still face rising prices and stagnant quality (housing, health care, and education) are precisely the sectors where the government already restricts supply, controls a large share of production, and/or sets prices. The bosses did not plan economic problems; the people, most likely socialist central planners in today’s societies, unintentionally did (with a hearty assist from Baumol’s cost disease).

3. “As free market economies fail, they turn to right-wing authoritarianism, but ‘if we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty.’”

Economic freedom and political freedom are correlated. The Economic Freedom of the World report finds that the freest quartile of economies enjoys average incomes 6.2 times higher than the least free. Incomes for the poorest tenth are 7.8 times higher and life expectancy is 17 years longer. Denmark, the democratic socialists’ favorite exhibit, is nothing of the sort. It ranks ninth in the world for economic freedom, and its prime minister traveled to Harvard to say, “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” The regimes that actually abolished private ownership ran the authoritarian experiment themselves. More than two dozen socialist trials ran over the past century, and every one that collectivized its economy ended in one-party rule. Socialists will often deny that those countries were really socialist because they are selecting on outcomes, but there is a long history of Western socialists celebrating each new socialist government at the beginning of its reign, only to sour on it when the disaster strikes. The worst get on top, as Hayek warned, because socialism rewards the greediest, most power-hungry, and least restrained politicians.

The classless society fared no better on its other promises of peace and social harmony. Each trial produced a new ruling class of party officials with better apartments and worse manners than the bourgeoisie they replaced, peace among nations tracks commerce rather than collective ownership, and China invaded Vietnam four years after Vietnamese communists conquered the entire countries. Socialists couldn’t even stop fighting each other whether in World War II, in the Sino-Soviet border war of 1969, or after the Vietnam War. Authoritarianism follows the concentration of economic power in the state. That concentration is the DSA’s core proposal.

4. “Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals.”

“At no cost to individuals” doesn’t include the individuals who will pay for it. The Mercatus Center’s Charles Blahous estimated that Medicare for All would add $32.6 trillion in federal costs over 10 years under assumptions favorable to the plan, and the left-leaning Urban Institute put the figure at $34 trillion. That mostly shifts spending from premiums to higher taxes, but the new expanded tax bill would start near a tenth of GDP, grow from there, and exceed what doubling all projected federal individual and corporate income tax collections could cover. And presumably the entire point is to expand health care consumption that randomized experiments show does little to improve health, so these estimates understate the extra resources that such a scheme would require. Single-payer systems also pay with longer wait times, because a monopoly provider whose patients cannot take their business elsewhere doesn’t have an incentive to change. England’s National Health Service carried 7.3 million waiting cases as of this spring, and the median Canadian patient now waits 28.6 weeks between referral and treatment, triple the wait in 1993.

America’s own health care problems cannot be blamed on free markets because the United States does not have a free market health care system. The US government controls 84 percent of health spending through a complex system of tax rules, expenditures, and other mechanisms. That’s higher than in 27 out of 38 OECD countries. The share of the US health care sector under government control “is closer to communist Cuba (89%) than the average OECD nation (75%),” according to Michael Cannon of the Cato Institute. The specific portions of the national health care systems under direct government control and how they are controlled vary across countries. American health care is a largely government-run system.

5. “Housing is a human right. Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control, and guarantee right to counsel for all tenants.”

Government intervention tends to raise housing prices. Universal rent control would deepen the shortage it claims to address and is among the policies most widely critiqued by economists. A 2012 survey asked economists about whether rent control would have a positive impact on the quantity and quality of broadly affordable rental housing and 2 percent agreed that it would, about what you’d expect if they misread the question. Economist Nancy Stokey summarized the evidence well when she wrote, “The planets are lined up here: theory and evidence point in the same direction.”

San Francisco’s rent control expansion cut the supply of rental housing by 15 percent and likely raised citywide rents by about 5 percent. Publicly owned housing adds an agency problem on top of a shortage while making the government your landlord who cannot go broke, answers to politicians rather than to tenants, fills units by political allocation, and maintains buildings the way Pruitt-Igoe was maintained. If the goal is to increase the supply of housing to lower prices, abolish or reduce the burden of zoning and other land-use ordinances. We should do that anyway, and it would be far better and infinitely cheaper than a cross-country government construction project.

6. “Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”

Venezuela ran this exact program on its largest industry, oil, within living memory. The Chávez government fired about 20,000 employees of the state oil company for political disloyalty, packed it with loyalists, and eventually put a general in charge. Production fell from 3.2 million barrels per day in 1997 to 2.4 million by 2015, before Washington imposed any sanctions on the industry. Venezuelan GDP per capita, adjusted for inflation, fell 73 percent between 2012 and 2020, a decline that began years before US sanctions could have caused it. If free markets caused Venezuela’s poverty, cutting Venezuela off from global markets should have enriched it. These failures all began years before American socialists stopped praising Venezuela for its socialist policies.

The failure in Venezuela, as elsewhere, is a principal-agent problem, not a personnel or cultural problem. A private owner who wastes capital loses his own money, and a firm that wastes enough goes bankrupt. A political manager wastes other people’s money, cannot go bankrupt, and gets promoted for loyalty rather than output, while the nominal owners (the people) have no way to monitor him and no shares to sell. Democratic control of the Venezuelan state oil company just meant control by whoever controlled the state, which is what it has meant in every large-scale nationalization. The longer experiments agree. North Korea was richer than South Korea in 1970, and after five decades of public ownership on one side of the DMZ and private ownership on the other, South Korean incomes are about 29 times higher.

There is no superior class of American personnel in the Trump, Biden, or any likely future administration that will overcome those problems of socialist command and control. There is no good reason to expect the mass nationalization of American firms to succeed and every reason to expect it to fail. Let business owners and investors take the risks of running businesses, keeping the profits and eating the losses. There is no good reason for the state to take on those burdens.

7. “Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.”

The 400 richest Americans are worth $6.6 trillion and the federal government spent $7 trillion in fiscal year 2025. Confiscating every asset of Forbes 400 wealth, once, assuming no fall in value, would run the federal government for about 11 months. An annual wealth tax is a very high income tax in disguise. A 3 percent levy on wealth earning an 8 percent return takes the equivalent of a 38 percent income tax before the actual income tax arrives. At the 5 percent rate proposed on California’s November ballot, any asset yielding less than 5 percent faces an effective rate above 100 percent.

The number of OECD countries with net wealth taxes fell from 12 in 1990 to 4 today. Norway raised its rate in 2022 and its own finance ministry counted $14.1 billion in deferred income leaving with the emigrants, exit tax notwithstanding. France’s tax raised about €3.5 billion a year and cost roughly €7 billion a year in other revenue, as an estimated €200 billion in capital went abroad. Seventy-three percent of American billionaires are self-made, and they owners are among the most mobile people in the world. If taxed, they will just move and take their capital and economic productivity with them.

The DSA seems to think that wealth is hoarded treasure when much of it is capital. Capital is just a fancy economics term for the stuff that people use to produce other things, like machines, tools, buildings, and equipment, as opposed to the other inputs, like land and raw materials, the people doing the work, and the ideas that bring it all together. Homes and personal assets account for just 2.7 percent of billionaire wealth. They own the wealth because they built the firms that created it. The incidence of a wealth tax is a separate question. In theory, a tax that follows the owner’s residence rather than the capital itself could leave workers untouched, since foreign investors would buy the taxed assets and keep the machines running. In practice much of that wealth sits in closely held businesses that foreign capital will not buy, so taxing it shrinks the tools that make labor productive, reducing the marginal value product of workers and their pay. Modeling of the Warren tax found 63 cents of every revenue dollar falling on workers as lost earnings.

8. “Establish ‘a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage . . . [and] a federal jobs guarantee.’”

The jobs guarantee’s own advocates at the Levy Economics Institute estimate direct spending of $409 to $543 billion per year, and outside reviewers found even that figure understated by roughly a third. The cost is the smaller objection. An employer that cannot fire anyone, cannot go broke, and answers to elected officials becomes a patronage machine. Fifteen million guaranteed jobs would make the federal government the largest political employer in American history, with every incentive to expand the rolls before each election. If people are forced to work less, who is going to supply the goods and services that the DSA wants to redistribute?

The Congressional Budget Office estimated a $15 federal minimum wage would lift 900,000 people out of poverty while eliminating 1.4 million jobs, with losses concentrated among the least-skilled workers the policy claims to help. This pattern has already been confirmed across the literature, where 79 percent of published employment estimates are negative. France tested the mandated short week twice. The 1982 cut from 40 hours to 39 raised affected workers’ probability of losing their jobs by 2 to 4 percentage points, and the 35-hour law failed to raise employment at all. A 32-hour week at 40 hours of pay is a 25 percent labor-cost increase, and employers will economize on the newly expensive input by replacing it with capital, outsourcing, or just making less. Shorter workweeks were purchased by productivity growth, not by government decree.

9. “Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt.”

Canceling all student debt is a regressive transfer from working-class Americans to higher-income college graduates. Universal forgiveness delivers about five times more money to the top income decile than to the bottom, $6,267 against $1,276 in present value, with the top 30 percent of earners collecting 40 percent of the dollars. The majority of American adults hold no bachelor’s degree. They would be taxed to relieve the minority whose degrees already earn them a large wage premium. That’s because education is not a public good, it’s rivalrous and excludable. There may be some positive externalities from education (and plenty of negative ones too), but the people who pay to attend school capture most of the benefits in the form of higher wages. They don’t need a taxpayer-subsidized deal any more than a business making an investment to increase profits.

10. “Fully abolish ‘the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.’”

American criminal law reaches too far into American life. Legalizing drugs and eliminating other victimless offenses would reduce encounters between citizens and police. Yale Law School Professor Stephen Carter argues that legislatures shouldn’t pass laws they aren’t willing to kill to enforce because every law the police enforce is ultimately enforced at gunpoint. Police officers respond to rotten incentives because the doctrine of qualified immunity prevents anyone from suing them when they break the law. Worsening that problem, the Trump administration is not going to prosecute ICE agents for committing crimes when there are illegal immigrants to deport for civil violations of immigration law. Immigration enforcement is a recent exhibit, with dozens dead in custody since 2025 mostly for the offense of selling their labor in the US without government permission. Still, police are essential for protecting life, liberty, and private property. Yes, they would do that better if they faced better incentives and didn’t enforce so many plainly silly victimless crimes.

Socialism, as law professor Ilya Somin observes of its century-long record, has always required coercion to make people surrender their property to the state. An extensive police force is the one government agency the rest of the DSA platform cannot do without. Abolishing the police would undo the rest of the DSA platform. I don’t favor abolishing police, but doing so would be the only way to obviate the rest of this platform if the DSA ever takes power. In such a case, they would not take this final step.

The DSA platform saves its most revealing demand for the end. It would place the entire coercive and economic apparatus of the state under a single chamber of government with no institutional checks. It would be a strongman soon enough if they ever got power. No court could prevent that body from violating individual rights at a whim. A government that owns the largest corporations, employs every worker who wants a job, sets every rent, and faces no court it does not control would be just another socialist principal-agent problem waiting for economic forces to destroy it. The DSA platform is not a serious work of political horse-trading, but a wish list that is unusually unspecific and thoughtless about the economic challenges. We don’t have to learn that lesson again.

Subscribe now

Why State-Sponsored Visas Make Sense

A state-sponsored visa is a fantastic idea. If the State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act had existed, there would have been very little illegal immigration since 1986, the last major guest worker reform. American employers would have had a legal way to hire foreign workers, and foreign workers would have had a legal way to come and work. A legal workforce also benefits American workers by creating more opportunities for them in complementary roles as managers and supervisors.

As I detailed in a Cato policy brief in 2017, a state-sponsored approach is better than a purely federal monopoly on setting the rules.

In 1986, illegal immigration was primarily a problem in the seasonal agricultural sector. Now, after four decades of the government muddling up the complex process, the H‑2A seasonal agricultural visa solved the problem for seasonal agriculture. In the meantime, farm labor has shrunk in importance, and illegal immigration has moved on to every other industry. If states had been constantly updating their systems piecemeal over the last 30 years, the illegal immigration problem would not have ballooned into the crisis we have today.

Every state has different labor needs and labor rules; there is no reason why a federal monopoly makes sense here. There are vast differences in both the amounts and types of labor demanded. Under the federal system, states already sponsor immigrants in their roles as employers and universities. The only difference in this proposed process is that states could sponsor them for any economically related reason they wanted. Canada has a similar, successful, and popular program for provinces.

How the Bill Works

States opt in to the program, and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) must approve any application for a state-sponsored program that is adopted by the state legislature and meets a few other minimal requirements, including annual reports on where the sponsored workers live. The foreign workers would receive a status valid for 3 years, renewable, contingent on continuous residence in the sponsoring state.

There is a cap of 500,000: 5,000 per state and DC, plus a share of a pool of 245,000 based on the state’s population share. The state’s program would expand at a 10 percent rate if fewer than 3 percent of workers fail to comply with the rules, and would be cut by 50 percent otherwise. States could sponsor immigrants who were physically present in the United States as of December 31, 2016, even if they are now in the country illegally.

The latest version introduces some new labor-protectionist rules that could gum up the program for employers, but given that states would have discretion over how to implement those rules, it is still a very flexible program overall.

The State-Sponsored Visa Pilot Program Act is a rare thing in immigration policy: a genuinely federalist reform that lets Washington’s one-size-fits-all approach give way to 50 different answers to 50 different labor markets. This legal channel for the workers that America’s economy already demands is better than the illegal one it has settled for. Nearly a decade after Ron Johnson and John McCain first proposed this idea, Congress has another chance to let states lead where Washington has failed to.

The gap in quality between the book described by reviewers above and the actual book Melting Pot or Civil War? is wider than in any other book that I can remember reading. Descriptions of “calm” and “reasonable” are the most perplexing. True, he appeals to Americans “who are willing to meet others halfway” to solve the problems that he’s identified. On the other hand, he also argues that we need to follow his policy recommendations or face a racialized civil war. That is the very opposite of a “calm” or “reasonable” argument. A better description would be “hysterical” or “paranoid.”

Salam’s book argues that lower-skilled immigrants since 1968 are creating a permanent racialized underclass whose descendants will not rise to the middle or upper classes. He claims that the melting pot model of American immigrant assimilation is broken. Salam blames the breaking of the melting pot on many culprits: automation that will destroy jobs, American elites who don’t insist on assimilation anymore, and new low-skilled immigrants who drive down the wages of longer-settled low-skilled immigrants.

This broken melting pot will result in a racialized underclass that will then be culturally, economically, and ethnically distinct from successful Americans. That could morph into “social unrest,” “political turmoil,” and an “even more dangerously divided society” that could soon “rise to the level of respectable people saying they want their political rivals dead.” Although America has avoided those problems so far, Salam finds it “hard to shake the feelings that our luck might soon run out” and we’d have a civil war on our hands caused by an immigration policy with which he disagrees. Thus, Salam argues that the United States should greatly reduce the flow of low-skilled immigrants and replace them with skilled immigrants, add lots of welfare for the poor immigrants or their children who remain to help them assimilate, and legalize illegal immigrants.

Salam’s worries about the assimilation and economic mobility of the second generation (those born to immigrants) drive his support for more welfare and cuts to low-skilled immigration. Recognizing that emigration is the one nearly guaranteed way for the poor of the developing world to dramatically improve their incomes and livelihood, Salam proposes to offset that loss with a massive increase in U.S. foreign aid and a concerted U.S. effort to create charter cities in poor countries. He also suggests that elderly Americans should retire in Mexico to create jobs there.

Salam’s great sins are his use of cherry-picked half-truths, frequently contradictory evidence, and shifting his own goal posts. He tries to have both sides of every argument and presents every fact as evidence in his favor. For example, Salam disagrees with himself over whether the goal of immigration policy should be to increase wages and employment for low-skilled immigrants and their descendants, or per capita productivity growth in small sectors of the economy. He rightly claims that immigration barely affects wages in the United States, but then argues that a major benefit of stopping low-skilled immigration is higher wages for native-born and immigrant dropouts. Salam correctly points out that low-skilled immigrants today compete mostly against other low-skilled immigrants, so he wants to help low-skilled immigrants here by stopping more from immigrating in the first place.

A groundbreaking paper by economists Michael Clemens, Ethan Lewis, and Hannah Postel found that farm wages rose more slowly after the U.S. government canceled the bracero guest-worker visa program for low-skilled Mexican farm workers in 1964. The main political justification for canceled bracero was to raise the wages of low-skilled American workers, but Clemens et al. found that wages rose more slowly after bracero was canceled relative to before. Salam dismisses that paper by moving his own goal posts to focus on agricultural productivity rather than wages for low-skilled workers. Remember, Salam is also worried that automation will take jobs in the future, but not in empirically inconvenient real-world examples such as the end of bracero which resulted in workers being replaced by mechanized pickers. In the same chapter, Salam praises Singapore because it selects immigrants based on purely economic criteria. But Singapore’s massive foreign-born population of 47 percent has low productivity growth because of such high levels of low-skilled immigration.

In case you can’t follow Salam’s contradictory argument here, he argues that low-skilled immigrants barely affect wages, but that small effect is to lower wages, so we should cut immigration to help the immigrants. He then argues that reducing wage growth for low-skilled workers is also good because the workers who remain will be more productive as in Singapore, even though Singapore’s immigration lowers per capita productivity while boosting national output.

The self-contradictions don’t stop there.

Forgetting everything that he wrote about labor markets, Salam praises a science fiction-esque scenario of “virtual immigration” where workers would work remotely by operating robots in the United States from their home countries — even though the labor market effects of that would at best be economically identical to allowing them to immigrate and work here. Salam argues that “virtual immigration will do more good than harm for U.S. workers, provided we have the right safeguards in place [emphasis added].” Salam does not explain what those safeguards are, how they would prevent competition in labor markets, and why the government couldn’t just apply those same safeguards to prevent labor market competition between low-skilled immigrants and low-skilled natives.

Salam cites research that Mexican immigrant assimilation stops at the second generation when educational attainment peaks at 12.6 years and then flattens in subsequent generations to argue that Hispanics will form a racialized uneducated underclass. Salam later mentions a phenomenon called “ethnic attrition,” whereby the more educated descendants of immigrants stop identifying with their ancestors’ ethnicity or country of origin. The same chapter of the same source that Salam cites discusses adjusting measures of education attainments to account for ethnic attrition and finds that Mexican Americans continue to become more educated into the second and third generations. Salam should have evaluated all Mexican immigrants and their descendants to predict their future integration, not a shrinking subset who are exceptions. At a minimum, he should have made clear that those in subsequent generations who self-identify as Hispanic and who are poorly educated shrink due to ethnic attrition.

Salam fails to draw additional connections between wages and education. He worries about low levels of educational attainment among the descendants of immigrants but also favors restricting low-skilled immigration to raise the wages of high school dropouts. He does not explain how raising the wages for dropouts relative to other educational cohorts will incentivize workers to spend more time in school (hint: it won’t). Salam is worried that automation will destroy lots of jobs, so he wants to stop low-skilled immigration to raise wages for low-skilled Americans and immigrants already here, which will just make it more likely that their jobs will be automated.

Salam worries that new immigrants consume more in welfare benefits than they pay in taxes, so he wants to greatly reduce low-skilled immigration. However, he also supports increased welfare payments to poor immigrants already here, to help them and their children escape poverty. He is using the existence of our welfare state to argue against low-skilled immigration rather than the easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed strategy of further limiting new immigrant access to welfare benefits. Part of Salam’s justification for blocking low-skilled workers from immigrating to the United States, rather than limiting their access to welfare once here, is that it is morally unacceptable to treat low-skilled immigrants as second-class citizens. But, his solution of treating would-be low-skilled immigrants as non-entities and locking them in a life of poverty and despair in their countries of origin has even worse moral implications.

Salam’s exaggerated claims about the failure of the melting pot are familiar. He goes completely off the rails by arguing that it will lead to civil war. He presents no evidence that our society is fracturing or that we’re on the verge of social chaos, let alone a civil war. If crime, domestic terrorism, race riots, and urban decay are evidence of social fracturing or a looming civil war, then we’re doing great. Crime has fallen dramatically as immigration has risen — the number of domestic terror attacks is a minor concern relative to the heyday of the Weather Underground. Race riots are rare and urban decay has reversed in just about every city. In fact, the last time this country had serious social problems from a combination of rising crime, race riots, domestic terrorism, and escalating urban blight was in the late 1960s and early 1970s — the tail-end of a restrictive immigration law.

To his credit, Salam does admit that there is no private political violence in American today that is comparable to the chaos before the Civil War, but that “it is hard to shake the feeling that our luck might soon run out.” Civil war is a deadly serious topic, and perhaps this reviewer is being too nitpicky, but I require more than Salam’s difficulty in “shaking a feeling” to take his worry seriously. He should have done more to show that the choice is really between his “melting pot” or a “civil war.”

Salam believes that the United States is a country with an economy and not the other way around, and he is not alone when he writes about how immigration diminishes social cohesion, reduces solidarity, produces fractionalization, racializes society, tears us apart as a nation, and a lot of other imprecise social criticisms that are impossible to refute. When I was young, communists and socialists were the ones who threw around vague social criticisms on how “the corporations” were tearing apart “our communities” in ill-defined ways. It’s disheartening to see so many conservatives take up the same style of left-wing rhetoric, except they blame “the immigrants and their children” instead of “the corporations.”

Salam mentions the enormous economic cost to those foreigners who would be locked out of the United States under his preferred immigration policy. He proposes a package of U.S. foreign aid to bribe foreign governments to establish charter cities so that low-skilled immigrants can go there instead of the United States. Oddly, he predicts those charter cities will become “fonts of entrepreneurship and public policy solutions” and that excellent new ideas developed there will enrich America. If low-skilled immigrants are entrepreneurs who will create fantastic new ideas in these charter cities that will eventually make it to America, why not just let them come here in the first place? Why spill so much ink supporting a utopian scheme of charter cities as a solution to global poverty when immigration is a tried and true method?

Salam supports charter cities because developing countries have bad institutions that stifle economic growth. Like him, I wish the governments of poor countries would respect free markets, private property, and free trade, as well as liberalize capital markets and adopt representative government. Doing so would lift billions of people out of poverty. But the failure of IMF and World Bank Structural Adjustment Loans (SALs) to bribe lagging governments to adopt better institutions should dampen anybody’s enthusiasm for aid-funded charter cities as a viable way to increase global prosperity, especially when immigration works so well.

Ironically, more emigration from the developing world to the United States has a better chance of improving economic institutions overseas according to a vast quantity of empirical peer-reviewed research. Mass emigration convinces elites to improve institutions to stop the exodus, so-called social remittances send new governance and social ideas back to poor countries, and return migrants bring back norms, habits, resources, and opinions from developed countries. By eliminating low-skilled immigration to the United States, Salam would likely slow down the process of economic and political reform that has lifted living standards in impoverished countries over the last generation.

The subtitle of Salam’s book is: A Son of Immigrants Makes the Case Against Open Borders. Being the son of immigrants does not give one license to cherry-pick research, produce unfounded predictions of a looming civil war, and make a generally inconsistent and self-contradictory argument. If anything, Salam’s book is evidence that the second generation assimilates just fine into a political culture that rewards identity over logical and reasoned argument supported by evidence. If that’s the result of assimilation, perhaps we’d all be better off with a little less of it.

Subscribe now

As I have detailed, Trump had already cut legal immigration far more than illegal immigration—2.5 times as much. These two rules will exacerbate that trend. Neither targets anyone who crossed the border illegally. Both target people who did exactly what the law asked of them.

The student rule: banned from changing your mind.

Previously, international students on F visas, exchange visitors on J visas, and foreign media on I visas were granted admission for their “duration of status”—that is, for as long as they were in status or following the rules of the visa programs. DHS’s final rule replaces that with a fixed period of entry of no more than four years (for international students and exchange visitors). But it does far more than end open-ended admission. Littered throughout it is a set of unprecedented restrictions with no statutory basis.

• Students can’t change majors or transfer schools in year one—and graduate students can’t ever. The rule’s own summary states it plainly:

For F‑1 students changing educational objectives or transferring to an SEVP-certified school, requiring that the student complete his or her first academic year of a program of study at the school that initially issued his or her Form I‑20 or successor form, unless an exception is authorized by SEVP; Prohibiting F‑1 students at the graduate education level or above from changing educational objectives at any point during a program of study.

Undergrads get one year before this restriction lifts. Graduate students never get it lifted at all, absent a SEVP exception. Change your mind about your PhD topic in year four, and you’re the same as someone violating status on day one.

• You can’t complete a second degree at the same level, or step down a level, ever. Also from the summary:

Requiring any nonimmigrant who has completed a program at one educational level to only be allowed to begin another program at a higher educational level as an F‑1 student and prohibiting a change to the same or a lower educational level while an F‑1 student.

Finish a master’s and want a second master’s in a different field? Illegal. Finish a PhD and want to pick up an associate’s degree in something practical? Illegal.

• DHS’s real response to people worried about the need to double-major: plan ahead, or too bad. Commenters pointed out this would devastate students in interdisciplinary fields who need two degrees to do their work. DHS’s answer:

this rule does not prevent students who need double majors to achieve their goals from planning ahead and enrolling in both at the same time. For example, nothing in this rule prevents someone from doing a J.D./M.B.A. program at one institution with one I‑20 indicating the program end date that accounts for the longer time it takes to complete the double major.

A J.D. and M.B.A. are not even examples of majors at all, as opposed to types of credentials, so whoever wrote this rule doesn’t have the slightest idea what students are even doing in higher education. More to the point, though, many people arrive at a US university not already knowing they’ll need to pursue a joint degree on day one. DHS’s answer to that reality is: you should have known in advance.

• 30 days to find a job, get out, or become illegal. The rule also slashes the departure/status-maintenance window from 60 to 30 days. Giving people 30 days to leave the country is an unreasonably short period after many of these individuals will have spent many years in the United States.

• And the paperwork will bury USCIS’s own broken system. Every one of these changes—first-year transfer denials, graduate-level exceptions, program extensions past 4 years, OPT filings—now requires a Form I‑539 filed with USCIS. Right now, 20 percent of Form I‑539 applications to change to F or M student or J exchange visitor status from another status already take 8 months or more to process. This rule is about to flood that same broken pipeline with hundreds of thousands of additional filings a year.

• “May apply” is not a promise. Cato adjunct scholar Stuart Anderson flagged the tell in DHS’s own language, responding to comments that four years isn’t enough time for most degrees:

Students who demonstrate continued academic progress and meet F‑1 eligibility criteria may apply for an extension of status to complete their programs, consistent with the realities of U.S. higher education.

In other words, there is no guarantee of approval. DHS will still subjectively evaluate each request. DHS’s own numbers make clear how often that gap matters: NCES reports a median of 52 months—4.3 years—to finish a bachelor’s degree, and NSF reports a median of 5.7 years for a PhD. Both exceed the fixed four-year period, for a majority of students, in the government’s own data.

• J‑1 research scholars and physicians get squeezed hardest. J‑1 categories like research scholars and alien physicians are authorized under DoS rules for programs running 5 to 7 years—longer than most F‑1 degree programs. Under this rule, none of that matters. DHS says it outright. A physician in a multi-year medical training program, doing exactly what their visa category contemplates, still hits a DHS-imposed wall at year four and has to file for permission to keep doing the thing they were already approved to do. That’s more costs, uncertainty, and wait for important researchers and physicians.

DHS can’t explain why any of this is necessary. Read DHS’s own characterization of the comments, and it becomes obvious there is no reason for these rules, no statutory mandate to create them, and no engagement with the practical harm the agency is creating. International students keep American universities the most elite in the world, and they often stay after graduation to start many of America’s most valuable businesses.

The public charge rule: a stealth ban on “low-income” immigrants

The second rule made public today paves the way for the USCIS to ban most legal immigrants who it projects will have low incomes. The Immigration and Nationality Act section 212 renders inadmissible people deemed to be “likely to become a public charge.” Back in the 19^th century, public charges were people who lived in almshouses supported by the public. Since 1999, it has meant people who are institutionalized or receive most of their cash income from welfare—“primarily dependent” on the taxpayer. If the officer projected that an immigrant was likely to meet this definition after receiving a green card, they could deny the green card application.

• Replacing a clear rule with nothing: In 2019, in his first term, President Trump rescinded this rule and replaced it with an extremely detailed, convoluted, and perverse regulation. The Biden administration quickly reinstated the 1999 rules. This time, DHS decided not to reissue that 2019 rule. Instead, it is simply rescinding the current public charge regulation and replaces it with nothing—not a new definition, not a new standard, just unbounded agency or officer discretion. This one hits family immigration hardest, because family-sponsored immigrants—the spouses, minor children, and parents of US citizens—dominate the flow of legal immigrants subject to the rule.

Officers will now decide, in their own discretion, whether someone might ever use any of a much broader list of public benefits than DHS previously considered (such as, free school lunch), based on nothing but “the totality of the circumstances.” DHS suggests that it may provide “subregulatory guidance,” but we have no idea what that will be. Either way, it sets up a situation for arbitrary denials of legal immigrants based on a subjective standard.

It is important to clarify that this rule does not simply ban noncitizens or even green card applicants from using benefits, as many news outlets have reported. It is a rule that bans people based on a prediction that they might, someday, use welfare. If DHS simply banned green card applicants from using welfare, that would be no problem at all—they’d just stop using it. That’s not what this does. This is about excluding people from the country based on a subjective guess about their future, not about giving anyone a chance to prove themselves self-sufficient under a knowable standard.

• The “low income now” framing is wrong. As we show in our recent paper, low-skilled immigrants—defined in our analysis as those without a bachelor’s degree, the population public charge officers will be most inclined to flag—were fiscally positive by $2.8 trillion from 1994 to 2023. They work at higher rates than similarly-educated US-born workers, and use old-age benefits, education, and prison spending at well below the per capita average.

What’s more is that it makes no sense to look at someone’s income the moment that they apply. Green card applicants are often ineligible to work when they are applying. That’s why historically as long as someone could work, the default was to assume that they would work. The default presumption should hold, absent strong evidence to the contrary, such as still being on benefits when they apply. The exact effects remain unknowable because DHS states it will provide more guidance only after the rule is final—the “finalize the regulation to find out what’s in the regulation.”

The Most Anti-Legal Immigration Administration

Neither of these rules touches anyone who crossed the border illegally. One targets people who already followed every rule to get a student visa and simply want the same academic flexibility every American student has. The other targets people whose only “offense” is being related to a US citizen and not being wealthy enough to satisfy an undefined, unappealable, after-the-fact judgment call by a single officer.

These rules highlight that the administration’s focus is not on reducing illegal immigration. It is about making legal immigration illegal as well. Immigrants are good for government budgets and our prosperity, increasing our productivity through innovation, entrepreneurship, and work. There is no reason to adopt these harmful, ill-conceived rules. Congress should intervene to prevent them from taking effect.

I have an op-ed on President Trump’s order to restart ICE traffic stops in which I explain why they are happening, why they are dangerous, and why they’re unnecessary.

Subscribe now

Here’s an excerpt:

It’s true that ICE officers receive less training on vehicle stops. That’s because, before this administration, most arrestees came straight from federal, state or local custody, and when ICE had to go to the streets, it carefully planned operations — surveilling suspects to learn their routines, sometimes for weeks, and working as a team of agents and creating a pre-enforcement action plan.

To speed up arrests, however, ICE reportedly eliminated the pre-enforcement planning last year as it started targeting areas more than specific people. “It’s hard to fill out a worksheet that just says, ‘Meet in the Home Depot parking lot,’” one former ICE official told NBC News. Enforcement went from targeted and planned to indiscriminate and opportunistic, which led to more chaotic interactions.

Reflecting this lack of planning, both of the immigrants shot and killed in the past two weeks were not the individuals ICE agents were originally looking to arrest, according to lawmakers who spoke to officials. A similar situation played out in Minnesota earlier this year, when ICE agents mistook a DoorDash driver for their target before shooting him after he ran into his home. (That officer was charged after video evidence from a city traffic camera contradicted his account.)

Even when pre-arrest surveillance of a specific suspect is conducted, ICE agents appear to relish the car chases and often fail to stop the suspect before they drive away. One Department of Homeland Security supervisor described the attitude to The New York Times as “we’re adrenaline junkies who want action, foot chases, car pursuits.”

In October 2025, for instance, agents waited outside the home of Carlitos Ricardo Parias, a TikTok influencer, whom ICE was particularly interested in arresting. But rather than leap immediately into action, they let him get into his car. This led to a vehicle stop at which an ICE agent shot Parias, and the bullet ricocheted into a U.S. marshal.

Another shooting in California in April 2026 followed the same pattern. ICE did the surveillance but let the suspect get into their car. This appears to have been intentional. In June, surveillance video captured what appears to be a targeted ICE arrest in Milwaukee, in which officers allowed the suspect several minutes to get a snack and re-enter his vehicle before the team moved in for the arrest.

When stops do happen, as a Wall Street Journal investigation found earlier this year, ICE agents commonly use tactics that place themselves in unnecessary risk: failing to tell drivers to turn off their engines, grabbing cars when they start to move, placing their bodies — rather than vehicles — in the way, and then shooting at uncooperative drivers.

I conclude:

On Fox News Tuesday, White House border czar Homan admitted that there’s no downside to ending vehicle stops. “I hear a lot of noise right now, ‘this will affect ICE arrests.’ It’s not going to,” he said. “Before he gets into the car, you can arrest him then. You can wait until the vehicle gets to its destination,” he said — unless the target is a violent criminal. He added, “If we can take that 2-ton ‘weapon’ away from them, that’s good.”

Homan is admitting what the record shows: ICE has been endangering its officers and others for no enforcement benefit. Ending vehicle stops won’t end all the problems, or even all the deaths. But continuing them means more danger for ICE personnel and the public.

You can read the entire piece here: Trump’s order to resume ICE traffic stops means more danger for the public

1. Cartel labels, not new threats, drove the border watchlist spike

On Thursday, in the Washington Examiner, Anna Giaritelli reported that CBP “is on track to encounter more than 12,000 known or suspected terrorists” at the border this year — 16 times the highest annual total under Biden.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, said related CBP data do not show an uptick in criminal arrests. “It is worth noting that the [FBI terrorist watch list] for ports of entry includes U.S. citizens, so it’s not even a reflection of migration at all.”

2. A green card memo told a million applicants to go home first

On Monday, in the International Business Times, Francis Miñoza reported that a new USCIS memo meant legal immigrants already in the U.S. “must return” to their home countries to pursue permanent residency, a shift that could affect roughly one million pending applicants.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, described the change on X as “the most anti-legal immigration administration in U.S. history,” warning it could separate families and disrupt careers.

3. Trump’s housing math didn’t hold up

On Tuesday, in AOL, Joseph Zeballos-Roig reported that the Dallas Fed working paper attributed “30% of the rise in residential home prices” to illegal immigration — a distinct claim from Trump’s blanket 30% figure.

“US population growth has never been lower. It is only because of supply constraints that population growth increases prices,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian-leaning Cato Institute, wrote on X. “It isn’t immigration causing the price increase. It’s the short-run supply constraint, as the paper itself says.”

4. The 100-mile zone where the Fourth Amendment didn't apply

On Thursday, in Alternet, Thom Hartmann wrote that more than 213 million Americans lived inside a 100-mile border band that researchers had dubbed the “Constitution-free zone.”

That zone, first drawn by a federal regulation back in 1953, swallows 10 entire states and cities like New York and Los Angeles, and the libertarians at the Cato Institute, who are nobody’s idea of open-borders radicals, call it the “Constitution-free zone” and have gone to the trouble of mapping the checkpoints one by one.

5. Immigrants used less welfare than natives

On Tuesday, in WebProNews, Dave Ritchie reported that “immigrants consume 24 percent less in welfare and entitlement benefits per capita than native-born Americans,” per fresh Cato Institute analysis.

Cato researchers put it plainly: “Immigrants are less likely to enter the welfare system, less likely to remain on welfare for long periods, and less likely to age into the most expensive entitlement programs.”

1. | Thu, Jul 9
Looking for a bathroom. Got shot instead.

2. | Thu, Jul 9
ICE says they apologized to Miguel. Miguel says they didn’t.

3. | Thu, Jul 9
Killed by an agent nobody will name

4. | Thu, Jul 9
The “ramming” that left no dent

5. | Wed, Jul 8
Border Patrol's excuse just got debunked

6. | Wed, Jul 8
Stopped on the way to work. Never came home.

7. | Tue, Jul 7
ICE’s “oversight” office is coming for your tweets, not its agents

8. | Tue, Jul 7
Banned move. No badge number. No answers.

9. | Mon, Jul 6
Read the study, not the headline

10. | Mon, Jul 6
A conservative asks the question ICE won’t

On Tuesday, I appeared on CNN’s Amanpour to discuss the Supreme Court’s recent immigration rulings. The birthright order had no legal basis and the court was right to reject it. The TPS ruling is a different story — it leaves Haitians trapped between a disaster zone and illegal status, and the administration has cut legal immigration by nearly 50% while welcoming white South Africans. That contrast lacks a rational basis.

Subscribe now

More comments in the media, from last Wednesday:

The One Line Trump Couldn’t Cross

In The Associated Press, Rebecca Santana reported that the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration “the backing it was looking for” on immigration across nearly every front, with birthright citizenship as “one key exception.”

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that advocates for more immigration, said the court’s decision has a far wider impact than just the 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians covered by the case. Roughly 1 million others are covered by temporary protected status decisions, and Bier said the ruling leaves them without any meaningful way to challenge the administration’s moves. “It just fully closed the door to any challenges,” Bier said.

Britain as a Warning, Not Blueprint

In The Daily Wire, Zach Stark argued that "there is no serious evidence to support the claim that legally residing immigrants commit crimes at higher rates than native born Americans," drawing on Britain's experience with mass migration to warn against conflating legal and illegal immigration.

A 2019 study from the Cato Institute found that 75% of first-generation immigrants were “very proud” to be Americans — over and above the 69% of native-born Americans. Immigrants have also historically reported higher levels of respect for American law enforcement.

A Green Light With One Red Line

In MISRYOUM, Nina Krueger reported that the Supreme Court “backed much of President Donald Trump’s hard-line immigration push,” ending temporary protections for Haitians and Syrians, limiting asylum applicants, and expanding officer power over certain green card holders — while refusing to narrow birthright citizenship.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank that advocates for more immigration, said the decision’s implications stretch beyond the 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians named in the case, noting that roughly 1 million others hold temporary protected status and that the ruling left all of them without a meaningful way to challenge the administration’s actions. “It just fully closed the door to any challenges,” Bier said.

The Bill Comes Due

In the Daily Sentinel, letter writer Mike Corbett reported that "ICE's budget a decade ago was $6 billion, and in 2026 was raised to $30 billion," warning that the accelerating costs of mass deportation are straining Social Security, eliminating jobs held by non-immigrant Americans, and hitting sectors like healthcare where immigrant labor is concentrated.

ICE operations detained 329,000 in fiscal year 2025. In November of 2025, the Cato Institute reported only 5% of these had a violent conviction, and those “violent convictions” included minor assaults like bar fights, and 73% had no convictions.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither.

Subscribe now

Free legal immigration was a foundational American principle to the Founders, as I explore in more detail in Cato’s new book on the Declaration’s enduring legacy: A History of Repeated Injuries. All the major founders explicitly stated the desire for America to be an asylum for the masses of people of all religions and nations from around the world seeking freedom. It’s not just that they favored immigration. They established the freest immigration system in the world. My purpose in this post is to show that the Founders were not naïve. They had witnessed high rates of immigration firsthand and chose to expand that successful policy.

Legal Immigration Rates Were Higher in Colonial America

Since 1776, the United States has received about 130 million immigrants—a legacy that the Founders fully expected and would have welcomed. In absolute terms, permanent legal immigration has increased enormously. So far in 2026, the United States is on pace for about 884,000 new legal permanent residents, with probably about 400,000 of those coming from new arrivals. In FY 2025, the total number was closer to 1.3 million. The US population did not even reach 1.3 million until after 1750. By comparison, according to historian Aaron Fogleman, a total of 973,600 people—slave and free—entered the colonies or states in over a century from 1700 to 1809.

But the better comparison is to compare the immigrant population to the population of the United States. The effect of 1.3 million people entering a country with only 1.3 million residents in a year would be quite different from that in a country with 340 million residents. The United States had an average annual legal immigration rate—as a share of the population—of about 0.9 percent from 1700 to 1770, including slaves, and about 0.5 percent excluding slaves. In FY 2026, the rate will likely be less than 0.3 percent, including people already in the United States who adjusted to legal permanent residence. Even in FY 2025, the legal immigration rate was less than 0.4 percent.

Fogleman’s research, which combines a variety of sources, uses two approaches to estimate colonial immigration rates. The first is based on statistics on births and deaths, assuming the residual population increase is from immigrants, but the absence of complete records leaves a significant margin for error. The second is based on direct counting from both foreign and colonial port records. These records are incomplete, so they need substantial interpretation and extrapolation to obtain a full picture using that method. But both methods reinforce each other.

Fogleman’s research did not produce annual inflows, so from 1700 to 1782, I distributed the totals—slave and free—based on annual estimates for slave entries from the Voyages database. We would expect that slave and free traffic to correlate closely enough that it would not change the big picture for our purposes. Any other method would produce similarly high rates. Fogleman’s total slave entries were distributed based on the Voyages database through 1819, but for 1783 to 1819, annual free immigrant flows were based on the work of Hans-Jürgen Grabbe using immigrant arrivals in the Philadelphia area—the most important entry point during those years and the only one with quality records. Starting in 1820, official records were used for immigrant arrivals by ship.[i]

130 Million Immigrants Have Come to the United States

Of course, illegal immigration has also increased because the Immigration Act of 1924 closed the borders to most legal immigrants. Demographer Robert Warren of the Center for Migration Studies has published research on inflows of illegal immigrants.[ii] Warren also estimated the number of illegal immigrants who adjusted their status to legal permanent residence, so we can subtract those from the total inflow to avoid double-counting, and we will use the ratio of illegal immigrant adjustments to total adjustments in 1995 to estimate the earlier numbers of illegal immigrant adjustments.[iii]

Altogether, based on the available records, about 130 million immigrants have come to the United States in its history. Of these, 94 million obtained permanent residence in the United States since 1776. Another 35 million likely came, at least for a time, illegally without ever receiving permanent residence in the United States. Of these numbers, about 50 million remain today—13.5 million illegally.

The Immigrant Share Was Higher at the Founding Than it Is Today

Another way to look at immigration is to look at the share of the US population that is foreign-born. The first census to ask about birthplace or citizenship was the 1850 census. To calculate the pre-1850 immigrant population, there are two methods. Start with zero in 1607, adding immigrant inflows minus their deaths and returns, or start with 1850 and work backward. From 1850 to 1869, immigrant inflows were 4.9 million, and the immigrant population increased by 3.3 million, or 68 percent of the flow. This percentage was used to estimate the effect of inflows on the immigrant population.[iv]

For example, in the 1840s, 1.4 million immigrants came, and in this estimate, the immigrant population grew just under 1 million (68 percent). Then we can subtract this number to calculate the immigrant population in 1840 and divide by the known total US population to get the immigrant share. Under this methodology, the immigrant population share was falling throughout the 18th century from 49 percent in 1700, but it was still 21 percent of the population in 1776.

The alternative method starts in 1607 with the first immigrants to the colonies. Fogleman estimates that in addition to the numbers already discussed for the 18th century, 198,400 foreigners entered the United States from 1607 to 1699, including 33,200 slaves. Starting with zero in 1607, we can distribute them annually again using the Voyages data and add these arrivals to the immigrant population each year, assuming again that 68 percent survive. Under this method, the immigrant share was 49 percent of the population in 1700 and 21.2 percent of the population in 1776—nearly identical to the first methodology.

Obviously, there is still great uncertainty with these estimates. For instance, the graph starts in 1640 because population estimates before then were very uncertain and very low, and both methods produce results showing over 100 percent of the population being immigrants. Moreover, changing the death-emigration rate even a small amount can produce significantly different results. Nonetheless, this conclusion about the colonial immigrant share is robust.[v]

We also have complete records on the birthplace of members of Congress, and these records track the same pattern as my estimates of the immigrant share in 1776. Immigrants were 14 percent (8) of the 56 Declaration of Independence signers at the Second Continental Congress. The Constitutional Convention, which is not included below, had a similar percentage, 14.5 percent (8 of 55). The Constitution intentionally allowed immigrants to run for office, partly to encourage immigration to the United States, and the very first Congress under the new Constitution had the highest share of immigrants, 10 percent of members, in US history aside from the Continental Congress. Congress’s immigrant share is less than 4 percent today.

America at its Founding Was Diverse

Founding-era immigrants were ethnically and religiously diverse. The studies on this topic classify the population based on their names, and this methodology can only take you so far. The default is to classify someone as English, and anglicization of people’s names obscures their true ethnic origins. But no matter how you look at it, there were very substantial shares of the 1790 population who were not ethnically English or even British and from non-English-speaking countries or territories.

Thanks to assimilation, we largely ignore the distinctions between these groups today, but that is not how it was felt at the time. Despite being relatively open to outsiders compared to other foreign powers, many English were still alarmed by the large numbers of Scots, Scotch-Irish, Irish, French, and other groups. Famously, Benjamin Franklin had concerns about the extent of German settlements in Pennsylvania in the 1750s, but as I note in my book chapter, by the 1780s, he was listing Germans among the many successful groups of poor people who had come to the United States.

Although most blacks were slaves, about 9 percent were already free in 1790, with another 5 percent enslaved in states that would soon end slavery. Free blacks already composed 5 percent of the population in Delaware and 6 percent in Rhode Island in 1790.

The ethnic diversity was matched by high levels of religious diversity for the time. The Founders rejected the closed system of religious tests for naturalization and for office. Among the delegates at the Second Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention were Congregationalists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Catholics, Dutch Reformed members, Baptists, Deists, and several who were raised Quakers but left to participate in politics. Again, modern Americans forget how significant those differences were at the time, but the Founders would have been acutely aware of Europe’s intra-Christian religious wars. But the tolerance of the Founders explicitly included non-Christian immigrants as well.

The Founders did not stumble into a diverse, immigrant-heavy society by accident—they lived through it, debated it, and ultimately enshrined it in a Constitution that barred religious tests for office and left the door open to immigrants of every nation and faith. The immigration rate they experienced, the share of the population that was foreign-born, and the ethnic and religious composition of the founding generation all point to the same conclusion: America was never a homogeneous nation that only later became diverse through immigration.

It was diverse and immigrant-heavy from the start, and the Founders—whatever anxieties individual figures voiced about one group or another—chose to build a system more open than any other in the world at the time. Two hundred and fifty years later, the debate over immigration continues, but it’s worth remembering that the level of openness we now call unprecedented was, for the Founders, normal.

Notes:

[i] Therefore, those estimates exclude all arrivals by land, and even the ship records are incomplete. The DHS records in the 1930s and 1940s fail to include people who adjusted their status in the United States through the immigrant registry—an early legalization process—as well as those granted permanent residence through private bills in Congress. Lyman Stone notes other shortcomings of the available data as well. When slave Voyages data for a given year were zero, the lowest value in the series (45) was used to distribute the legal immigration flow.

[ii] For 1990 to 2010, he has published complete annual numbers. For 2011 to 2018, he has only published the average numbers. For 2019 to 2023, Warren has produced estimates of the total illegal immigrant population, so we first calculate the number of arrivals necessary to keep the population total steady for 2018 and then add the net increase for 2019 through 2023. For 2024 through 2026, the ratio of inflow to Border Patrol arrests in 2023 was used. Border Patrol arrests (available from 1925 to 2026) can be used to estimate earlier years, using Warren’s ratio of estimated inflow divided by Border Patrol arrests for 1990.

[iii] back to 1952. Adjustment was only available for illegal immigrants back to 1930 via the immigrant registry. Warren treats the 1986 amnesty people as having received their legal status in 1987 to 1989, even though they received legal permanent residence in the 1990s. I’ve added those to his numbers in the 1990s years to make subtraction from the legal flows as simple as possible. This methodology obviously has shortcomings, but it will give us a general idea of the earlier figures.

[iv] Both decades had similar percentages (67 percent versus 69 percent). After the 1860s, the percentage plummeted.

[v] The only three ways to get a lower 1776 immigrant share:

1. Assume immigration was much higher between 1776 and 1819. This would increase the population subtracted from the 1850 population. But from my reading, Fogleman assumes a somewhat higher rate of immigration than Grabbe and other scholars, and given all the wars in Europe and the United States during the years between 1776 and 1819, it would be challenging for the level to have been any higher.

2. Assume attrition (emigration-deaths) was much lower, if subtracting back from 1850. But this isn’t likely. First, I already used the lowest attrition rate (highest survivorship rate) for any period recorded by the Census. Second, if you assume a lower attrition rate, then the total immigrant population quickly drops below zero in the mid-1700s. If we change the 68 percent survivorship assumption to, say, 80 percent, the foreign-born share in 1776 is lower, but the total immigrant population is negative by 1749.

3. Assume attrition was much higher in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, if you start from 1607. In this way, you could suppress the growth of the immigrant population. But even if you assume that only half survived, the immigrant share would still be 15.5 percent, still the highest in US history, and you still end up with way too few immigrants in 1849 when the series reaches the first Census. All other ways to deflate the immigrant population in 1776 create problems irreconcilable with the known facts, such as producing negative immigrants in the 1700s or too few immigrants in 1850.

1. | Wed, Jul 1
The press won't say what the ruling actually means

2. | Fri, Jun 26
One employer’s testimony the nativists don’t want you to hear

3. | Sat, Jun 27
A killing with no accountability

4. | Fri, Jun 26
Death threats for telling the truth

5. | Sun, Jun 28
Even Springfield’s Republican mayor opposes these deportations

6. | Sat, Jun 27
Rage toward people they’ve never met, judged only by birthplace

7. | Wed, Jul 1
The real danger isn’t birth tourism

8. | Mon, Jun 29
The new ICE director has never worked in immigration law

9. | Tue, Jun 30
Conservatives still haven’t said these kids are Americans

10. | Tue, Jun 30
A historic day that never should have been necessary

In Trump v. Barbara, the Supreme Court invalidated President Trump’s executive order that banned birthright citizenship for illegal or temporary residents of the United States.

Subscribe now

1. Courts keep finding DHS and Trump are violating the Constitution in their immigration agenda. In my recent congressional testimony, I documented 28 cases in which courts have found the administration’s immigration actions were unconstitutional, including violations of First, Fourth, Fifth, Tenth, and Fourteenth amendments. This case is the third time the Supreme Court has found Trump’s immigration actions to be unconstitutional, with the other two being rebukes of his denial of due process to people deported under the Alien Enemies Act.

2. The decision is crucial to protect all Americans’ rights. As has been extensively documented in cases in Minnesota and Los Angeles, DHS deliberately stops individuals without evidence that they have violated any laws to interrogate them about their citizenship. I have shown that between one-fifth and one-quarter of all ICE arrests are of people who have not been charged with any crime and do not have an order of removal against them—people whom there would be no reason to seek out specifically. Since DHS agents ignore assertions of citizenship and even “REAL IDs,” the birth certificate is the only bulletproof way to prevent DHS from detaining and deporting you. Without birthright citizenship, Americans would have to supply evidence of their parents’ immigration status at their birth.

3. The majority opinion did not cite the fact that the Fourteenth Amendment granted citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants at the enactment. The only “deportable aliens” in 1868 were slaves trafficked into the United States in violation of the prohibition on the slave trade. Jack Chin and Paul Finkelman have a detailed article on this point in which they note that deportations of slaves were not merely hypothetical, but had actually occurred.

4. Despite their votes, no justice agreed with the executive order in full.

   • Justice Clarence Thomas asserts that citizenship should be based on where someone’s parent is domiciled and on their intent to remain. But the executive order is based on legal status, not residence.

   • As fellow dissenter Neil Gorsuch notes, this rule would grant citizenship to domiciled illegal immigrants, which he doesn’t rule out. In the absence of a congressional statute, it would also seemingly limit citizenship for children born to US citizens in the United States when their parents’ residence is abroad.

   • Justice Alito thinks it should be based on whether the child gets citizenship from a foreign country at birth, but he admits that this would grant citizenship to some children of illegal immigrants. Alito seems to acknowledge that this interpretation could affect the citizenship of some children of naturalized citizens as well.

   • Only Kavanaugh defends the scope of the executive order itself but then finds that it violates Congress’s statute. I think they’re all in conflict because their underlying theory has no historical, legal, or textual basis.

5. The issue isn’t as dead as it should be. Unfortunately, because there are four votes in favor of some kind of restrictions on birthright citizenship, opponents will continue the fight. President Trump has already urged Congress to pass a law, and multiple senators have already filed legislation on the point. A majority of the current Court would strike down that statute, regardless of what it says, based on the reasoning in this decision. But presumably, conservatives plan to play the long game, and opposition to Barbara may become a new litmus test of appointees. That’s unfortunate because the best policies signal that immigrants and their children should feel comfortable assimilating into American society. That is another major policy reason to keep birthright citizenship.

I previously wrote about the Supreme Court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe, permitting the deportations of Haitians and Syrians with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), but here’s a rundown of our comments in the media about the case and other immigration stories.

Subscribe now

A 6-3 Ruling Lets DHS Deport Legal Immigrants

On Wednesday, in Texas Public Radio, Andrew Schneider reported that the Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling puts more than 1.3 million immigrants under TPS, including roughly 147,000 in Texas, “at imminent risk of arrest and deportation.”

The ruling did not just come under attack from the political left. David Bier, director of immigration studies for the libertarian Cato Institute, blasted the decision as fueling “the deportation agenda” of the Trump administration. “Going after legal pathways only creates more chaos and undermines the economic and fiscal benefits of immigrants by depriving immigrants of their ability to work legally and businesses of qualified workers,” Bier said. “It will be harder for the U.S. to compete on the global stage or keep up with a growing fiscal crisis if policymakers continue down a path that targets legal immigration pathways.”

The harshest turn against legal immigration in modern history

On Monday, in International Business Times, Bgie Areña reported that a new USCIS memo could affect “roughly a million people with pending applications” by requiring most green card seekers already in the country to leave and apply from abroad.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at Cato, called it the harshest turn against lawful migration in modern US history. “This admin continues to prove itself to be the most anti-legal immigration admin in U.S. history,” he wrote on X. “The harms this will cause to legal immigrants is incalculable. Impossible to explain how stupid and evil this policy is. It’s intended to cost people their jobs and their families.”

A 27% drop in approvals

On Tuesday, in USA TODAY, Ignacio Calderon reported that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services approved 8.3 million applications in 2025, “a 27% decrease” from 11.4 million the prior year.

“When the workforce starts to decline, that means less economic growth. That means less things are produced, which means higher costs for consumers,” said David Bier, director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. “It’s a real problem for the country that the administration has taken such a hard line, even against legal immigration.”

Doubling down on employer fines won’t shrink the deficit

On Monday, in KUER 90.1, Macy Lipkin reported that Utah Sen. Mike Lee is cosponsoring a bill to “double fines for immigrants who enter — or try to enter — the country illegally and employers who hire them.”

A 30-year study from the libertarian Cato Institute found that immigrants without legal status “likely reduced the deficit by at least $1.7 trillion.” David Bier, director of immigration studies at the think tank, said Lee’s assertion is incorrect. “Particularly illegal immigrants receive far fewer benefits and are much less likely to be in public schools than the U.S.-born population, and so they are paying taxes, and they are covering those costs.”

DOL’s case for higher H-1B wages doesn’t hold up

On Tuesday, the International Legal and Business Services Group reported that the Department of Labor’s proposed H-1B wage increase would price skilled foreign workers out of their own jobs.

According to the Cato Institute, the wage increase wasn’t based on legitimate wage surveys. The organization basically accused the DOL of inventing evidence to drive policy.

Immigrants and Housing: It’s complicated

On Tuesday, in Breitbart, Neil Munro reported that the White House says “rents are falling sharply across the country for the first time in years as the record surge in illegal immigration has been reversed.”

But even the business-backed, pro-migration Cato Institute admits that all migration — legal or not — forces young Americans to pay more for housing: “Even immigrants who work in construction increase housing demand first before they can construct more housing. That increase in demand drives up prices and incentivizes new supply through further construction, renovation, or increasing the supply of rental units through other means. However, the marginal immigrant increases housing demand more than he increases housing supply.”

“True Americans” over a growing economy

On Saturday, in NPR, Brian Mann reported that the U.S. now faces “record low birthrates and low numbers of migrants at the same time” for the first time since the Great Depression.

This kind of opposition to both legal and illegal immigration is now widespread among conservatives, said Cato’s David Bier, who worked as a Republican congressional staffer on immigration policy. He told NPR that when he talks to conservatives about the economic and demographic risks of closing the country’s doors to migrants, many answer with a cultural argument. “[They] would rather have a declining population of ‘true Americans’ than have an economy kept afloat by people who don’t share [their] values,” Bier said.

In Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court upheld Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians. Lower courts had found that Noem violated the TPS statute by failing to “consult” with other agencies—as the law requires—during her mandated “review of the conditions” in those countries before terminating TPS.

Subscribe now

The Supreme Court did not really disagree. Instead, it held that whether Noem violated the law does not matter because Congress stripped courts of jurisdiction even to review the statutorily mandated process behind her determination. The case shows why a future Congress should systematically repeal laws that bar judicial review, at least within the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA).

DHS’s lies about following the law

The consultation and country condition determination matter because, despite its name, TPS automatically extends indefinitely unless there is a determination that the country no longer meets the criteria for designation based on a change in its country conditions (8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(3)). Here is how the Supreme Court described DHS’s “consultation”:

the Secretary, either personally or through her subordinates, made a series of procedural determinations: to communicate with the State Department by email, to send a terse and unspecific email, and to proceed to terminate [Haiti and] Syria’s TPS designation after receiving a laconic answer.

That’s a sanitized version. Here is what actually happened.

DHS stated in a July 1, 2025 Federal Register notice that “after consulting with appropriate U.S. Government agencies, the Secretary reviewed country conditions in Haiti.” In reality, according to emails obtained from DHS only after the Supreme Court took the case, Secretary Noem “elected to terminate Haiti without” receiving any information about “country conditions from [the Department of State].” In other words, Noem blatantly lied.

Under pressure from a lawsuit, however, DHS issued a new Federal Register notice in November repeating its claim. This time, DHS sent State another email saying, “We are re-reviewing country conditions in Haiti... Can you advise on State’s view on the matter?” State responded 53 minutes later: “State believes that there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS status of Haiti.” In other words, there was no consultation about country conditions in Haiti. DHS conceded that this was all it did to consult. The same exact irrelevant emails were exchanged about Syria’s country conditions.

Why the law is unenforceable

The Supreme Court held that it did not matter because “the TPS judicial-review bar expressly restricts review.” The only debate before the Court was whether the bar applied to the precursor consultation requirement or only to the final decision to designate or terminate TPS for a country. Although the statute itself only says it applies to the determination, the Court held that the bar covers all precursor requirements—and that even if it did not, the final determination still could not be challenged.

By interpreting the statute this way, the Supreme Court rendered unenforceable numerous precursor requirements that members of Congress presumably expected agencies to follow. This power to strip judicial review is frighteningly dangerous. It allows Congress to pass laws that grant unconstrained powers to the executive. The majority opinion seems to embrace the void suggested by the Plaintiffs here:

a rogue Secretary in one fell swoop could issue a 50-year TPS designation, contrary to the 18-month statutory cap. Or a Secretary could terminate a TPS designation based on a coinflip. …Congress would have ample means to stop that abuse, including, for example, through the annual appropriations process.

Never mind that Congress has already ended the annual appropriations process for certain components of DHS, including the secretary’s office. More importantly, Congress cannot simply pass a law without the president's agreement, unless it amasses a veto-proof majority, which is as fanciful as a 50-year TPS designation.

The majority opinion did not apply the judicial-review bar to the challengers’ constitutional claims, but three conservative justices declined to join that part of the opinion. Justice Clarence Thomas wrote separately to say that allowing Congress to bar constitutional challenges to its laws would not raise any “serious constitutional question.” That is even more frightening.

Why Process Matters

Here, DHS violated the law and got caught, yet the courts decided they are powerless to stop the violation. The loss of these procedural elements that lead up to a decision is not without consequence. The Court’s description of DHS policymaking reflects a culture of court-sanctioned lawlessness and unaccountability: “terse, unspecific, and laconic” emails should not drive policies affecting millions of people. Nor should policy rest on, as the Supreme Court majority put it, “denigrating the character of” people based on conditions in their home countries.

Even when a decision—such as designating or terminating a TPS designation—is granted to an agency’s discretion, policy is more likely to be thoughtful, fair, and unbiased when the government runs the policy through the proper procedures. That’s the theory behind the Administrative Procedure Act’s notice and public comment rulemaking process. It obviously doesn’t guarantee it, but we have seen that even with an administration hellbent on adopting destructive policy, procedural obstacles can force improvements. The final travel ban upheld by the Supreme Court in Hawaii v. Trump during President Trump’s first term was far better and more targeted, as the majority opinion noted, than the one adopted a week after the inauguration that applied instantly in the dead of night to all passengers in the air.

Unfortunately, the TPS statute is not the only immigration statute that strips courts of jurisdiction. I counted about 18 in the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, another two in the Immigration Act of 1990, three more in the Real ID Act of 2005, six more in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, six more in the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, and three in the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952.

What Congress Should Do

Congress should immediately strip out all these provisions. They serve no purpose except to block accountability for the executive branch. The courts should be empowered to fulfill their role to interpret the law and the Constitution and vindicate our statutory and constitutional rights. Congress should also consider mandating TPS in certain circumstances, so DHS can’t decide to terminate when country conditions clearly warrant a designation.

Congress should also give less discretion to the executive branch to arbitrarily change its mind as it has here. Once someone is granted the right to live and work legally in the United States, it should take clear and convincing reasons to reverse that decision. Ending TPS and other forms of legal status of immigrants in the United States is a critical plank of the Trump administration’s mass deportation plan—an expensive way to reduce the US population by government force. Most Haitians affected by this decision entered legally, so it has no bearing on illegal immigration—something Secretary Noem also got wrong in her TPS regulatory notice.

The administration is celebrating the Supreme Court’s decision as a “tremendous win.” But its “tremendous win” obscures its manifest illegality and deceptions. Congress should not tolerate the executive branch ignoring its laws, lying to the public, and rashly adopting policies without thoughtful consideration. Americans deserve better. Congress should demand it.

But these economic questions bleed easily into the migration issue: Too much immigration actually destroys the social cohesion necessary to form labor unions. Alex Nowrasteh, an analyst at the Cato Institute, a free market think tank, has argued that the decline of American labor unions is traceable directly to the relaxation of immigration restrictions in the 1960s. Nowrasteh thinks this is a good thing because he doesn’t like the idea of giving workers bargaining power over massive corporations.

Vance gets the facts right and muddies my values. Vance is responding to several pieces I’ve written over the years, so I’ll start with the oldest when explaining what we found. Wretched Refuse? by Benjamin Powell and me is a book-length response to the argument that liberalized immigration could reduce the quality of economic institutions in destination countries, slow economic growth in places like the United States, and thereby kill the goose that laid the higher-income eggs that attracted immigrants in the first place. It’s the best potential argument against liberalized immigration. Our book’s chapter on the United States shows that several proxy measurements for the size and intrusiveness of the federal government in economic affairs are negatively correlated with immigrant stocks.

In plain language, there’s less growth in the size and scope of government where there are more immigrants. How could that be the case? Labor unions is my favorite theory. Powell and I hypothesize what Friedrich Engels knew (I’ve never written “Friedrich Engels knew” before), that immigration divided American workers into different nationalities and ethnic groups who would never cooperate to start a socialist labor movement that is a necessary precondition for a communist revolution. Engels complained in 1892 that immigrant workers were so “divided into different nationalities” that the bourgeoisie could “play off one nationality against the other.”

That’s why labor union organizers like Samuel Gompers, the restrictionist leaders of the American Federation of Labor, and Cesar Chavez were right to treat immigration as a threat to organizing unions. Employers grasped it too, and factory owners deliberately hired across national and ethnic lines to raise the cost of forming a union. Powell and I didn’t make up this theory on our own, we relied on work by Seymour Lipset and Gary Marks, who tried to answer why there was never a successful socialist labor party in the United States and listed immigration-induced diversity as one explanation.

Weak unions meant small constituencies for redistribution, and heterogeneous voters proved less willing to fund welfare for neighbors different from themselves. The era of closed borders bears the pattern out as federal expenditures climbed from 4.5 percent of GDP in 1922 to 18.3 percent by 1967. The very decades when DC built the New Deal, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights Act-era regulation over private hiring and firing were when the border was closed. The welfare and administrative states grew when immigration stopped, the opposite of the argument you used to hear from conservative immigration restrictionists, who also used to like free markets. It’s no coincidence that labor unions grew during this period.

Labor unions manufacture progressive voters while undermining firm profitability. Workers who join a union become more progressive, more skeptical of markets, and more hostile to trade, and most of that shift reflects a treatment effect of membership rather than self-selection. Unions then convert those opinions into policy through lobbying and voter drives. For those of us who value economic freedom, an organization that turns its members leftward and spends to enlarge government is a problem, and whatever weakens it without coercion is a gain. Immigrant diversity weakens it without coercion. Diversity helps preserve a relatively free American market.

The connection between labor unions and immigration is tight, although not in the way JD Vance understands. Union membership has roughly halved over the past four decades, from more than one in five workers to about one in ten. In a 2022 working paper, Town Oh, Artem Samiahulin, and I found that immigration reduced union density by 5.7 percentage points between 1980 and 2020. In other words, immigration can account for nearly 30 percent of the entire decline in unionization in the United States. The mechanism is drawn from a social-customs model of unionization based on social solidarity, whereby immigrants have a lower taste for unions and raise the workforce’s ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity, which raises the transaction costs of collective action. We used Borjas’s (2003) skill-cell method to estimate the effect and found that a one-point increase in a cell’s immigrant share lowers union density by 0.479 points (cells are defined by worker experience and education).

The negative effect of immigration on unionization is largest among low-skill men in the private sector and absent in the public sector, where law, not shop-floor solidarity, sets union density. Our finding survives robustness checks. Labor-supply dilution does not explain it, and a fractionalization index carries its own negative coefficient. The relationship is correlational, and the skill-cell design narrows the causal gap rather than closing it.

Vance read our numbers carefully and reported the size of the effect fairly. Our research found that immigrants preserved free markets in the United States by undermining labor unions. That’s quite a bit different from how Vance described our normative take on our research as good for “giving workers bargaining power over massive corporations.” It’s true that labor unions cut into firms’ profits, but the focus of our research is on how they undermine progressive anti-capitalist policies. None of this is hostile to workers who prosper in an open free market economy, not in one where a shrinking cartel of insider unionistas lobbies the state that taxes them. It is odd for a Republican to defend labor unions, but Vance is the most prominent member of the postliberal anti-capitalist camarilla in modern American politics. To be sure, most Republicans don’t agree with Vance about labor unions, but there are undoubtedly more today like Vance who take a fundamentally progressive view on those destructive organizations than there used to be.

Vance is right that immigration gutted private sector American labor unions. He just has the moral of the story backward. Weaker unions meant a freer market, and that is the part worth thanking immigrants for. My thanks to the Vice President of the United States for pointing more readers to Cato’s research.