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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

This is my opening statement for a hearing entitled: Amnesty and Chaos: Abuse of U.S. Immigration Policy. My full written testimony can be found here.

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Thank you all for the opportunity to testify before this task force on Constitutional Rights and Exposing Institutional Abuses.

The Cato Institute’s half century of research has shown that when constitutional rights are secure, people—whatever their ancestry, background, or birthplace—can thrive.

Unfortunately, our current immigration policy is, indeed, leading to constitutional abuses.

Courts have found DHS has likely violated at least the 1^st, 4^th, 5^th, 10^th, and 14^th amendments to the US Constitution, as well as the spending power, the taxing power, and the writ of habeas corpus.

DHS agents invade homes without judicial warrants.

They arrest and detain legal immigrants, US citizens, and others without evidence of a violation of law.

They detain Americans based on their perceived race and demographics.

They deport legal immigrants for their speech, and they threaten Americans who lawfully protest or record the abuses.

DHS agents pumped 10 bullets into US citizen Alex Pretti—a nurse for veterans who was peacefully recording them.

Yet officials immediately labeled him a terrorist simply for lawfully possessing a firearm while protesting—a complete repudiation of the First and Second amendments.

DHS has arrested and falsely accused dozens—maybe hundreds—of people of assaults, only for charges to be dismissed when their lies were exposed.

In fact, most people DHS has publicly accused of assault were never even charged, let alone convicted.

Willful deprivations of constitutional rights under color of law are crimes under section 242 of Title 18 of the US Code.

Yet the violations continue. Why?

Amnesty.

Whatever this hearing’s intent, the amnesty happening now is not for immigrants but for agents who violate the Constitution.

The amnesty has five main sources:

• First, DHS gutted internal review mechanisms by—for example—firing 80% of the Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Office.

• Second, DHS regularly undermines state investigations by withholding evidence to protect its agents hiding behind their masks

• Third, DHS repeatedly ignores court orders, and last week, the new DHS Secretary refused to repudiate that behavior under oath.

• Fourth, DHS has imposed multiple unconstitutional policies in secret, thwarting judicial review.

• Fifth, perhaps most importantly, the administration tells DHS agents that they have “absolute immunity” and won’t be held to account.

The president’s pardons for his allies further embolden rogue agents.

So what recourse do citizens have? Sadly, very little.

First, you could request a court injunction. Americans believe, somewhat naively it turns out, that “if a policy is illegal, you can just ask a court to stop it.”

In reality, your rights having been violated is insufficient.

You need to show that you’re likely to be targeted again and that blocking the policy is the only way to protect you.

Unless the government admits it will go after you, that’s a huge barrier to stopping the policy.

And, even if you win, DHS is often free to continue the policy against other people.

That’s because the Supreme Court’s decision last year that no statute permits universal injunctions by district courts.

Your second option is to sue the agents for damages.

But since federal law only allows suits against state agents, not federal ones, there is effectively no way to sue DHS agents for constitutional violations in federal court at all. No matter how egregious the crime.

That’s the real amnesty.

It’s not amnesty when immigrants follow the law and procedures set up by Congress for them to get vetted and get on the right side of the law.

It is amnesty when government agents violate the law and our constitutional rights with impunity.

The opposite of amnesty is accountability.

Instead of targeting peaceful immigrants, Congress should end amnesty for DHS agents by allowing Americans to vindicate our rights in court. Thank you.

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I had testified about this ban before the US Senate, calling it one of the largest immigration frauds in American history as it involved taking money from applicants without rendering the services they paid for. Even Sen. John Kennedy (R‑LA) was shocked at the brazen misconduct. I estimated that the agency had received over $1 billion in fees from the over two million applications that it was refusing to process.

Under Director Joseph Edlow, USCIS has issued a series of policy memoranda that:

1. halted all asylum adjudications until March 30, 2026, when it restarted them for “non-high-risk countries”;

2. suspended adjudications on all benefit applications (green cards, work permits, and naturalization) for nationals of 39 countries;

3. ordered re-review of already-approved benefits for those nationals who entered on or after January 20, 2021; and

4. directed adjudicators to treat an applicant’s country of origin as a “significant negative factor” in discretionary decisions.

The court found that the policies were unlawful for the following reasons.

First, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses mandatory “shall” language requiring USCIS to adjudicate asylum applications within 180 days, naturalization applications within 120 days, and employment authorization and adjustment of status applications pursuant to specific regulatory timelines. USCIS has no statutory authority to simply stop adjudicating. The court also found that Section 202 of the INA prohibits nationality-based discrimination for green card applicants.

Second, Judge McConnell found three independent Administrative Procedure Act failures. USCIS provided no rational connection between two crimes committed by Afghan nationals cited in support of the memo and freezing adjudications for 39 countries plus all asylum applications. It also ignored serious reliance interests of people who had built lives, careers, and families in reasonable expectation that their applications would be processed, and its stated national security rationale was pretextual.

USCIS provided no evidence regarding the national security threats from these countries, which Cato has extensively researched. After meeting with President Trump, then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” and said “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” Noem posted, and Trump shared, these comments literally the day before and the day of the policies’ implementation. The judge also noted the internal inconsistency of exempting athletes for the World Cup and Olympics and medical physicians from the hold while claiming national security necessity for everyone else.

Unfortunately, this decision did not consider and leaves in place all the restrictions on visa issuances for applicants outside the United States. Still, half of all legal immigrants (as measured by 2024 flows) are blocked by the State Department’s 75-country visa processing freeze and the presidential proclamation blocking entry for nationals of 39 countries. It also did not consider the recent effort to require legal immigrants inside the United States to leave (and potentially be subject to these policies).

Moreover, it’s highly likely that the government will appeal the order. Until then, the challengers have achieved a major win over the most anti-legal immigration administration in a century.

DOL claims that H‑1B and other employer-sponsored foreign workers are paid “below market” wages and that its rule fixes this problem. But the proposed rule only inflates wages to restrict the supply of skilled foreign workers beyond what the law allows and will force existing H‑1B workers to leave the country. H‑1B workers are objectively among the highest paid in America, earning wages in the top 10 percent nationally. It would be disastrous to exclude them.

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Background

DOL’s proposed rule:

• provides no empirical basis for raising the prevailing wage;

• rejects 80 percent of current wage offers to H‑1B and other skilled foreign workers, even among the highest skill level;

• forces out hundreds of thousands of H‑1B workers who have lived and worked in the United States under the current system for many years; and

• cuts visa issuances, particularly for researchers, professors, scientists, and workers in health care and universities because these workers are commonly not subject to the cap.

The upshot of reducing the number of H‑1B workers is less business investment, less US job growth, less innovation, and more outsourcing.

The current prevailing wage is usually calculated using the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, which surveys employers to collect information on employee wages. The law (Immigration and Nationality Act 212(p), 8 U.S.C. 1182(p)) requires DOL to take those survey results and create at least four wage levels for each occupational classification “commensurate with experience, education, and the level of supervision.” Jobs with higher requirements must pay higher wages.

DOL plans to raise the four wage levels from the 17th to 34th percentile for level 1 (entry-level workers), from the 34th to 52nd percentile for level 2, from the 50th to 70th percentile for level 3, and from the 67th to 88th percentile for level 4, the highest wage level for “fully competent” workers. The average H‑1B prevailing wage would rise about $26,000 annually.

As seen below, over 80 percent of H‑1B job offers would be disqualified under the proposed rule, including the vast majority of the highest-skilled workers (level 4). The same is true for, by far, the most common H‑1B occupation: software developers.

DOL’s Rule Is Based on a Statistical Fantasy

DOL never even offers a theoretical basis for an increase in the prevailing wage. The market sets wages based on marginal productivity. If an H‑1B worker is offered less than their productivity and market wage, they can refuse that job offer, take another job, or change employers, which H‑1B workers have done more than 1.1 million times in the United States alone since 2003. DOL does not even argue, let alone establish, that this high rate of H‑1B job change is insufficient to keep the market competitive.[1]

Not only does DOL fail to show that competitive market forces do not apply to employer-sponsored immigrants, DOL’s data show the opposite: that H‑1B workers are paid a $10,191 premium over the current prevailing wage level. If the market were uncompetitive, H‑1B workers would all receive the exact minimum wage. This reflects that H‑1B workers are paid higher wages than US workers in similar roles because they are more productive than those workers.

DOL never empirically estimates what the wage levels should be. Instead, it simply asserts that the average foreign worker should receive the average wage for the occupational category. The levels are placed arbitrarily at wages necessary to meet the arbitrary target—not based on the wages of workers in similar roles. The statute explicitly rejects the idea of an overall target wage in favor of a wage targeted at each experience-education level.

The Current Prevailing Wage Properly Establishes the Entry-Level Wage

Using the American Community Survey (ACS) five-year sample of 2024, we calculated the median hourly wage for an entry-level worker by looking at the wages of young workers—specifically, the median wage for workers with ages at or below the 1st percentile for ages in the occupation. This is the only group we can be certain is, in fact, “entry-level” without prior experience. Samples of older age groups would be contaminated with at least some experienced workers.

In the top H‑1B occupations, the median entry-level worker earns wages at about the 9th percentile—well below the 17th percentile currently required. When we remove workers without a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience required for an H‑1B visa, the median entry-level wage percentile rises to the 19th percentile for the top H‑1B occupations. The 19th percentile is slightly above the 17th, but the 17th percentile is within the 95 percent confidence interval for the estimate. There is no basis for changing the prevailing wage methodology for entry-level wages at all.

The Current Prevailing Wage Properly Establishes the Top Wage Level

To estimate the top wage level, we define “fully competent” workers as those with ages in the top third for the occupation who have the highest level of education typically required in that occupation. That’s because, at that point, wages stop rising with more experience. You can see how far DOL’s wage levels are from the median experienced worker.

These experienced workers with the highest education required earn wages in the 70th percentile. For other skilled workers with H‑1B qualifications, the percentiles are the 70th, 66th, and 63rd, depending on the top skill level. While these values are not close to the proposed 88th percentile, they nearly match the currently required 67th percentile. This conclusion is logical. Of course, some workers will make far above the median for experienced workers, but those wages will be based on their individual characteristics—their unique productivity that is not a result of the statutory factors.

There is no basis for changing the entry or top wage levels, and as the statute sets level 2 and level 3 at equal distances between level 1 and level 4, that means there is no basis for the rule at all.

DOL’s Alternative “Experience Benchmarking” Proposal Is as Problematic as Its Main Proposal

Perhaps sensing that its main methodology is illogical and illegal, DOL separately proposes an alternative methodology for estimating the prevailing wage that is partially based on the ACS. DOL inaccurately calls this method “experience benchmarking,” even though it does not directly estimate relevant work experience.

This proposal would use a Mincer regression to estimate the ratio of nationwide wages for a specific age–occupation–degree combination (30-year-old software developers with a bachelor’s) to the median wage for the occupation nationwide. It would then multiply that ratio against the OEWS median wage, effectively adjusting the OEWS to account for differences in workers. Only after it sets this new minimum wage for each experience level would DOL create the four wage levels required by statute, based on the estimated “level of supervision” required for the job. The top wage level would take the same ratio and multiply it by the 90th percentile of the OEWS, rather than the median.

According to the Institute for Progress (IFP), experience benchmarking would disqualify the wages of at least half of recent H‑1B workers using only the level 1 wage, but IFP’s analysis was limited to the level 1 wage (the lowest minimum wage level). Rerunning the IFP analysis assigning level 2 through level 4 wages shows that the DOL experience benchmarking proposal would also exclude over 80 percent of H‑1B workers—nearly as many workers as its main proposal.

To be fair to IFP, there is ambiguity about exactly when these higher wage levels would apply. The rulemaking states that only level 1 would apply in the permanent labor certification context, but not if the worker is an H‑1B worker. H‑1B workers would still have four wage levels. The law (Immigration and Nationality Act 212(n) and (p)) defines wage level as the minimum wage required for the occupation, and it would likely be illegal for DOL to say that the higher wages are the prevailing wages commensurate with the level of supervision but then not require those wages. Regardless, this new method has numerous problems.

The ACS surveys do not provide sufficient sample sizes to reliably estimate wages for detailed occupations within specific metropolitan areas.

Even at the national level, our sample only exceeded 100 observations for 23 of the 530 detailed occupational categories. At the subnational level, nearly all the samples are unusable. Using nationwide data, aggregating occupations, or grouping multiple years would each independently violate the statute. DOL knows the samples are insufficient, so it is proposing to use old data, different years, imprecise occupational groupings, and national data to estimate local wage rates for detailed occupations in a specific year—all of which is unlawful and inaccurate. But even after performing all these maneuvers, the error would be so large as to render the estimate unreliable.

IFP’s estimates are problematic. For one, IFP does not quantify uncertainty. This is particularly important because the IFP’s results rely on the ACS five-year and the OEWS. Both are surveys, each with their own source of sampling variability. IFP never quantifies this variability, so we are unable to evaluate the reliability of their estimates. Moreover, IFP does not evaluate its model for fit. As such, we do not actually know how accurate IFP’s methodology is at predicting actual wages.

DOL arbitrarily and inaccurately sets the wage levels.

DOL’s proposal first estimates the age-education specific wage and then assigns the four wage levels based on the level of supervision. The highest wage level is arbitrarily set at the 90th percentile for the occupation. DOL presents no data or argument that the 90th percentile represents the wages of US workers with jobs requiring similar levels of supervision. Once the 90th percentile is multiplied by the ratio of education-specific median wages to overall median wages, this arbitrary threshold results in about 16 percent of wages being set above the estimated 100th percentile (the highest wage) for the occupation.[2] Obviously, the law can’t require wages that don’t exist.

Part of the problem is that DOL refuses to set any wages below the age-education median, even though workers in jobs requiring the most supervision are precisely those with below-median wages. Even in its main proposal, level 1 wage is set below the median based on this insight, but for experience benchmarking, it arbitrarily decides to exclude all wages below the median and, therefore, disconnects the wages from the level of supervision.

DOL’s alternative proposal would disconnect prevailing wages from the requirements of the job.

According to the law, the required wage must be based on the “specific employment” and the “occupational classification”—that is, the type of employment, not the type of worker. Employers won’t be able to know what wage to advertise or offer before they find the precise foreign worker since this proposal works backward from the conclusion of the recruitment process. Economic theory does not support an age-education–based wage system. In a market, wages are based on productivity, which will be based on the type of work performed, not the résumé of the worker.

Age is an unreliable proxy for relevant experience for H‑1B and other foreign workers.

By design, the immigration system delays the entry of foreign workers into the US labor market. Immigrants graduate later, and then the immigration requirements delay their entry into and advancement in the labor market, resulting in less experience at any given age than other US workers. Indeed, noncitizens are much more likely to stay in school after the Mincer equation assumes that their work experience started, overstating their work experience. During a person’s early career, ACS data suggest that each year of delayed entry into the labor market reduces H‑1B wages by between $3,000 and $5,000, depending on the type of worker.

Using ACS data, we can see that in top H‑1B fields, noncitizens earn lower wages than individuals in the same area with the same educational characteristics controlling for age but higher wages controlling for time spent in the United States—suggesting that age is not the best proxy for experience for foreign workers. Noncitizen workers enter the US labor market at entry-level wages, but because they are more productive than the average entry-level worker, those entry-level wages are much higher than the entry-level wage for US workers—exactly what Congress intended. Age is not a defensible basis for estimating relevant experience for new H‑1B workers.

The rulemaking contradicts congressional intent.

In 2002, DOL proposed codifying the OEWS prevailing wages with two wage levels. This was heavily contested by those who thought only the average wage should be used. Congress intervened in 2004 to mandate that DOL expand that division to two additional wage levels. DOL stated at the time that “evaluation of these comments is rendered unnecessary by enactment of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005.” It is impossible to assert 22 years later that the very provision through which Congress intended to ratify the existing wage structure and expand it to benefit employers requires DOL to impose a wage structure that bans most job offers. DOL can’t disregard what Congress understood the technical term “wage levels” to mean in 2005.

Conclusion

The rule rests on no identified market failure. DOL’s own data show that H‑1B workers receive wages averaging $10,191 above the current prevailing wage—evidence that competitive market forces are already working as intended, not evidence that the floor must be raised. The rule would disqualify over 80 percent of current wage offers without producing even the average wage DOL claims is appropriate.

The alternative proposal would also exclude over 80 percent of wage offers, and its procedures set wages at levels no comparable US workers are paid. DOL has offered the regulated community an arbitrary benchmark, reverse-engineered percentiles, and a self-defeating methodology in place of the reasoned analysis the statute requires and the Administrative Procedure Act demands. The current prevailing wage methodology, grounded in decades of administrative experience and confirmed by independent empirical analysis, should be retained.

Chairman McClintock, Ranking Member Jayapal, and distinguished members of the Subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify.

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For half a century, the Cato Institute’s research has shown that people—whatever their ancestry, background, or birthplace—can thrive in a free society.

Our research finds immigrants—legal and illegal—work at higher rates, generate more income and taxes, and have reduced the national debt by $14.5 trillion over the last 30 years.

Immigrants improve public safety by reducing violent crime rates, meaning that you are less likely to be a victim.

Fairfax highlights this reality. About half the county’s residents are immigrants or children of immigrants.

Its household income is double the national average, and its murder rate is less than half the average.

If illegal immigrants in Fairfax were their own city, they’d have a lower homicide rate than 90 percent of America’s largest cities and the country overall.

Nationwide, illegal immigrants are half as likely as likely to commit crimes that land them in prison as US-born Americans.

Despite all this, Congress refuses to allow most would-be immigrants to come legally, which leads to illegal immigration.

Just 3% of applicants seeking legal permanent resident status were approved in 2024.

That was before the current administration banned a majority of the legal immigrants previously allowed to come, including half of all spouses of US citizens.

It has cut legal immigration twice as much as illegal immigration.

At the same time, it terminated legal status for over 2 million immigrants who were already here, creating four times as many new illegal immigrants as it has deported.

America’s cities must manage the fallout from this sabotaged system. Many have decided not to volunteer their cops, jails, and resources to DHS.

DHS doesn’t like that, but under our Constitution, cities and states don’t take orders from the feds.

And thank James Madison for that because we all know we wouldn’t want the Feds to dictate environmental policy, gun policy, or Covid policy to the states.

If you want Fairfax to change its policy, you must convince them.

The first step would be to give up the mass deportation dream.

About one in five Fairfax residents is someone who could be deported or who lives with them.

It would destroy neighborhoods, rip Americans from their spouses, parents, friends, families, customers, employees, employers, nurses, nannies, and teachers.

Let me be clear: Noncitizens who harm Americans should be arrested, convicted, and deported.

I think cities can help with that, but deportation is DHS’s job.

Indeed, you all passed the Laken Riley Act in 2025 to require DHS to immediately take custody of people charged with violence or theft.

Yet DHS is ignoring that law. It has deprioritized threats to focus on easy targets.

They aren’t tracking down serious criminal fugitives like the monster who killed Stephanie Minter.

Instead, DHS agents are racially profiling Americans at Home Depots, arresting spouses of US citizens at green card interviews, beating the parents of US Marines, and dragging legal immigrant nursing mothers from their homes without warrants.

Only 6% of ICE arrests have a violent criminal conviction. ICE has arrested 150,000 people who have no criminal convictions or even charges.

And we know it’s not because they got everyone with a serious record. Stephanie’s case and many others prove it.

It’s because they care about, as one ICE agent put it, “quantity over quality.”

How many Stephanies will get murdered before DHS follows the law and prioritizes serious criminals?

How many?

Most Americans don’t want to wait for the answer. They want to pause the mass deportation fantasy and focus on protecting Americans.

That’s the only policy that will defend our safety, prosperity, and freedom.

Thank you.

You can watch the entire hearing here. A few highlights below. I will say that Republicans did raise some good points, but their main criticism of the commonwealth attorney for Fairfax didn’t match the facts of the cases discussed.

Some background. The US is richer because its institutions are freer. Immigrants come from poor countries with lower incomes because their homelands have less capitalism and representative government. The average immigrant in the United States in 2022 comes from a country with an economic freedom score of 6.8, nearly identical to that of Rwanda. Our book explores the fear that immigrants could somehow bring the poorer institutions of their homelands with them to the United States, most likely through politics, which would degrade US institutions and undermine economic prosperity here. In other words, immigrants could kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.

If you convinced me that immigrants would undermine our institutions and the cost of the destruction would overwhelm the other positive economic benefits of immigration, then I would support strict legal controls on the flow of people across borders. However, our research convinced me that this is most likely a non-issue and that there is strong evidence that immigration often leads to better policies and improved institutions.

Osband concedes that our three case studies of Jordan, Israel, and the 19^th-century United States are solid evidence that immigration made host countries freer. His central objection is that these findings depend on context and do not generalize to the contemporary United States. He contends that low-skilled immigrants have fiscally negative effects, that assimilation pressures have weakened, and that the libertarian prescription of targeting policy distortions rather than immigration itself is politically unrealistic. He proposes instead a policy that welcomes high-skilled immigrants while excluding most low-skilled ones. I disagree on the fiscal effects (they’re positive), the pace of cultural assimilation (it’s fast), and whether some measures of cultural assimilation matter (trust doesn’t and most others don’t either).

Osband argues that the Israeli and Jordanian quasi-natural experiments aren’t perfect for our purposes, but the Jordanian one is stronger than he lets on and Israel isn’t bad either. Start with Jordan. 300,000 Palestinians were living and working in Kuwait at the beginning of the first Gulf War. By the end, all had either left or been kicked out to Jordan, where they could go thanks to a complicated legal quirk. The influx increased Jordan’s population by 10 percent and the Jordanian government reacted with a vast campaign of liberalization that strengthened that country’s institutions. Jordan went from having the economic institutions of a typically sclerotic Middle Eastern country in 1990 to being a regional outlier in quality just 15 years later. Immigration increased free markets.

Osband argues that this doesn’t tell us much about how the United States would adapt to a rapid increase in immigration, because the Kuwaiti-Palestinians were so culturally similar to the Jordanians. On the contrary, this migration tells us more than you’d think for several reasons. First, Jordan’s political and economic institutions are not as robust, adaptive, or liberal as those in the United States, so they were less resilient to big shocks.

Second, Palestinians and Jordanians only look culturally similar to outsiders. They are different from each other and there is much political tension between the two groups in Jordan. We didn’t elaborate much on the details of the political tension in our book, but it’s worth doing so here. King Abdullah I of Jordan was assassinated by a Palestinian nationalist when he visited the Al-Aqsa Mosque in 1951. Besides being an early example of the Palestinian nationalist resistance strategy that has come to characterize that movement’s complete failure, it’s also one of the early causes of the long-lasting political enmity between two groups of people in close physical proximity who look about the same to Americans. Palestinian nationalists also tried to assassinate King Abdullah’s successor in June 1970, which led to a Jordanian crackdown, and to Palestinian nationalists assassinating the Jordanian prime minister Wasfi Tal in 1971.

Those events have caused some lasting political rivalry between Palestinians and Jordanians. Add 300,000 Kuwaiti-Palestinian refugees, equal to 10 percent of Jordan’s population, to that volatile mix and how Jordan’s government reacted tells us quite a bit. A large immigration of people into one side of a domestic political disagreement in a country with weak political and economic institutions sounds similar to a large increase of immigration to the United States from, say, south of the border with the difference that the institutions here are better to begin with, more resilient, and the immigrants aren’t part of an ethnic group known for political assassinations, terrorism, and revolution. Jordan’s experience should increase our confidence in America’s institutions’ ability to adapt to immigration-induced demographic change under less harrowing circumstances.

Another case study is when Israel admitted about one million Soviet Jews between 1989 and 2000, which increased its population by about 20 percent. Instead of importing the economic institutions of the original command economy, Israel’s reaction to the immigrants was market liberalization. Osband’s critique of the usefulness of the Israeli case study rests on two observations. Soviet émigrés were highly skilled and they hated the system they came from. Both are true and neither undermines our argument.

The institutional-transfer hypothesis, or the immigrants will kill the goose that lays the golden eggs theory, predicts that immigrants carry the institutional culture of their origin countries. Soviet immigrants spent their lives in a command economy with no private property, no price system, and no democratic tradition. They had no other ideas to bring with them from that closed totalitarian society. Perhaps it was just enough that they didn’t like it, but which immigrant group loves the government and economy of their homeland? Immigrant self-selection is a generalizable feature of immigration.

Have you talked to Mexican, Venezuelan, or Chinese immigrants? The latter may like public safety in Chinese cities (except for the Uighurs), but none of them have much positive to say about the places they came from, except for vague things about the food, traditions, family, and other cultural habits that have little to do with the economy or governance.

Osband suggests that the logical extension of our argument is that Israel should have absorbed displaced Palestinians, and he notes that we concede this would change Israel’s character. That concession concerns democratic composition and changes in policies, but that’s not the same as institutional degradation. True, a democratic state that absorbs a large population with different political preferences will produce different electoral outcomes and will lead to some policy changes. Institutional resilience and improvement are about how property rights, the rule of law, and market competition survive or even improve with demographic change. It does not mean that every policy outcome remains frozen in place. For instance, the Soviet Jews likely pushed Israeli foreign policy to be more right-wing.

Immigration to the United States historically slowed the growth of government through either a diversity-induced collective action mechanism or by undermining labor unions when the borders were open. Our central empirical finding is a negative correlation between the immigrant stock as a share of the population and federal expenditures as a share of GDP from 1850 to 2018. During the 45-year restrictionist period (1922-1967), when the borders were closed to most lawful permanent residents, federal spending rose 302 percent as a share of GDP. During the preceding open-immigration period (1876-1921) of the same duration, spending rose 118 percent. During the subsequent liberalization period (1968-2013), spending rose by almost 9 percent.

City-level data are consistent with a one-standard-deviation increase in a city’s immigrant population reducing property tax rates by 13.6 percent in the early 20^th century. State-level regressions with two-way fixed effects show that a one-percentage-point increase in the foreign-born share reduced state-only expenditures by 6.9 percent. The correlations all run in the direction of more immigrants, less growth in government.

There are two related reasons why immigrants slowed government growth in the US. The first is by undermining labor unions. Immigrant-induced ethnic, racial, and linguistic fractionalization increased the transaction costs of worker solidarity, thereby reducing union formation. That’s why unionization rates and immigrant stock are strongly negatively correlated. That matters because unions are some of the most effective lobbying and mobilizing organizations for left-wing economic causes, which was known then. Marx and Engels even complained that immigrant diversity fractured worker solidarity and would delay a socialist revolution in the United States. It’s not often I cite those guys, but their reasoning is sound. Early union leaders seemed to agree, arguing for immigration restriction at every opportunity to support their own efforts at forming unions and to affect economic policy. Mass unionization surged only after Congress closed the border in 1921. The second reason is that less diverse societies tend to favor more welfare. New Deal legislation became politically feasible only after immigration restrictions neutralized the “immigrant welfare queen” counterargument that immigrants would move here to take advantage of welfare.

This doesn’t mean immigrants had no effect on American institutions or policies. The two major policy changes that immigrants accelerated during this time were positive. German immigrants, especially after 1848, were abolitionists and early Republican partisans who supported Abraham Lincoln in the 1860 election in the pivotal states of Illinois, Indiana, and Pennsylvania. Their support was critical for accelerating abolition. Catholic immigration also forced the secularization of public schools by ending Protestant Bible instruction in publicly funded education. We find no evidence that immigrants worsened American economic or political institutions during the period of open immigration. On the contrary, they slowed government growth, frustrated socialist organizing, and expanded individual liberty.

The last chapter is the global impact of immigration on economic freedom across countries. We examined 110 countries between 1990 and 2011 to see whether those that received more immigrants scored higher or lower after a lag on the Economic Freedom of the World Index. We found no evidence that immigration hurts institutions and, if anything, countries that took in more immigrants as a share of their populations tended to see small improvements in their economic freedom scores.

One of Osband’s fears is that immigration is especially bad in an age of DEI and affirmative action. Ignore for a moment that those pernicious policies are in steep decline here, but they are likely in steep decline partly because immigration undermines them. Affirmative action was created by Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon when the foreign-born share of the US population was at its lowest point, which should immediately make you question the theory that immigration is somehow responsible for them to begin with. Asian Americans also brought the SFFA case that ended affirmative action in college admissions. Historically, states with more immigration had more bans on affirmative action. Immigration created the constituencies that undermined affirmative action. The correlations run in the opposite direction as Osband’s theory would predict.

Osband’s preferred policy is letting the government choose better immigrants. The labor market already has a mechanism for matching workers to productive opportunities—it’s called wages. Those prices allocate labor more efficiently than any visa category ever will. Osband’s vision of a high-wage, high-tech, Enlightenment-oriented oasis also contradicts his fears about how immigrants affect institutions if you take the effect of ethnic and racial voting patterns in the US on policy seriously. Asian Americans, who are mostly either highly skilled immigrants or their descendants, tend to vote for left-wing politicians and parties, while Hispanics, who are mostly descendants of lower-skilled immigrants, have more mixed political opinions and likely systemically favor Republicans if you consider ethnic attrition. He is perhaps under the misapprehension that skilled workers are right-wing merely because some loud people in tech are, but they are only speaking for themselves. Naturalized immigrants likely barely voted Republican in 2024, although I admit that weakens my argument since Trump is governing as a socialist with strong nationalist tendencies.

Maybe Osband is on to something but probably not what he thought. It’s not a coincidence that as the Republican Party embraces nativism, it also embraces the other policies of prominent 20^th-century Labo(u)r Parties. Nativism is often the gateway drug or vector that infects otherwise reasonable pro-market moderates with the disease of industrial policy, planning, big government welfarism, and dirigisme. If that’s true, nativism is the bad imported idea and it certainly wasn’t brought here by the recent immigrants.

Osband and I agree that there isn’t much evidence that immigrants undermine institutions and plenty to the contrary. We disagree on how far that evidence generalizes. Every quasi-natural experiment, cross-country regression, and case study we have conducted or examined points in the direction that immigration either improves host-country institutions or leaves them unchanged. Our research isn’t foolproof and we’re not done gathering evidence, but he should have more confidence in our conclusions.

We evaluate the pitch, not just the résumé. The Cato Innovation Project is open to a deliberately wide range of applicants with different skills and interests. Aspiring policy researchers can propose covering new issue areas or established ones in different ways. Technologists and data scientists can pitch tools, platforms, analytical capabilities, or more that change how a think tank operates. Communications specialists, filmmakers, and media producers can design new ways to translate libertarian ideas into formats to reach audiences we currently miss. Organizers and coalition builders can propose external engagement strategies that connect Cato’s research to communities, legislators, or institutions in novel ways.

Or something else we haven’t even thought of.

The point is to uncover talent we don’t know about who could work on ideas we haven’t considered, and to open new opportunities for themselves and for libertarian principles. The Cato Innovation Project is not restricted by career stage. Recent graduates with a sharp proposal compete on equal footing with mid-career professionals pivoting into policy.

Let’s say you graduated from law school in 2022, you’ve been working at Big Law for a few years, and you realize that corporate law isn’t for you. Or you could have recently graduated, and that nagging, crazy idea for how to effectively spread the ideals of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace is keeping you up at night. Or you took time off work recently for personal or family reasons, and you realized there’s a missed opportunity you have the skills and know-how to take advantage of, but you need an organization like Cato behind you to make it happen. People like these and many others should apply.

Applicants will identify a problem, design their new job to address it, and make the case that they are the right person to fill it. If you have an idea for advancing individual liberty, limited government, free markets, or peace that does not fit neatly into an existing position, this program was built for you.

Apply at https://www.cato.org/innovation.

The suspension of processing both prevents them from receiving legal permanent residence and, in some cases, causes them to lose their prior legal status. It also prevents them from receiving a more secure status that can prevent their arrest, detention, and removal. This is a deliberate effort to boost ICE arrests by thwarting people’s efforts to stay on the right side of the law.

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Cutting green card approvals in half

The agency responsible—US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—has worked with ICE to set these legal immigrants up for arrests by failing to process their applications. Immigrants may apply for green cards—or lawful permanent residence—inside the United States, typically by converting from another temporary legal status or from refugee or asylee status. By obstructing their ability to receive green cards, USCIS degrades the rights of these applicants and may even cause them to lose their underlying status.

Over the course of the year, USCIS has cut grants of legal permanent residence by about half. The cuts have affected all categories except employment-based applicants, but USCIS has reserved the biggest cuts for the humanitarian green card categories: asylees, refugees, Cubans, and other (mostly crime victims). USCIS Director Joseph Edlow has repeatedly emphasized how closely USCIS and ICE work together. “We already have a great relationship with ICE where there is someone at any one of our offices who needs to be arrested,” he said in September last year.

Cutting green cards for family of US citizens

Start with family-sponsored immigrants, since their picture is the most nuanced. After a brief dip following Inauguration Day, the administration appears to have shifted adjudicators from other categories toward the family-sponsored cases, leading to a spike in approvals. But following the confirmation of Joseph Edlow to lead USCIS, the spike ended, and ultimately the number of approvals fell by 54 percent from July 2025 to January 2026. January 2026 approvals are now 22 percent below the January 2025 level.

Why this decline happened is more difficult to pin down than for the other categories. USCIS intentionally shed staff throughout the year, with total employment falling about 10 percent in 2025. Nonetheless, in September 2025, USCIS shifted resources into a new enforcement wing of the agency. In August 2025, USCIS stated it would increase interviews of family-based petitioners (the citizen or legal permanent resident sponsors). In November 2025, USCIS announced it would start using “country-specific” factors to weigh against approving applicants from certain countries. In December 2025, USCIS suspended all green card processing for 19 countries and extended the suspension to 40 countries in January 2026.

This suspension of green card processing allows ICE to arrest immigrants with pending green card applications. We don’t know how often this happens, but the graph below shows how the administration was ramping up enforcement, including against the targeted 40 countries, even as it slashed green card approvals. While only a small fraction of ICE arrests hit relatives of US citizens, the throttling of green card issuances has enabled ICE to arrest their family members. The delays can even cause the immigrant’s underlying status to expire.

ICE has arrested many spouses of US citizens whose status had expired but who are otherwise eligible for green cards. Ukrainian Viktoriia Bulavina—initially allowed entry legally with parole status—was detained in front of her US citizen husband at a USCIS office in December 2025 after her Temporary Protected Status had expired (though she had a pending application to extend that status as well, which USCIS had not acted on). A Swedish student who graduated from a US university, married a US citizen, and had a pending family-based green card application was also detained after her status expired. An active-duty Navy sailor’s wife was detained in the same situation. There are many other such cases.

The law permits people who entered legally to adjust to permanent residence and receive a green card even if their initial temporary status expired, but the law does not prohibit ICE from detaining them—despite their potential eligibility for a green card. KPBS reports, “ICE is transferring people arrested at green card appointments to the Otay Mesa Detention Center—a privately owned facility where it costs taxpayers approximately $200 per day to keep someone detained.”

Ending Cuban green card approvals

As bad as the situation is for family of US citizens, Cuban immigrants have faced an even more concerted targeting. In late February 2025, USCIS suspended all immigration requests, including for permanent residence, Temporary Protected Status, employment authorization documents, and other immigration benefit requests, by applicants who entered under the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela parole processes, while canceling their underlying parole status—again to set them up for ICE arrests. Cubans were the most negatively affected because, under the Cuban Adjustment Act, they all qualified for permanent residence and green cards.

In December 2025, USCIS suspended all work on adjustments of status and other immigration benefit requests for Cubans, along with 18 other nationalities (later expanded to 40 total nationalities).

As a result of these actions, ICE is able to arrest Cuban parolees with green card applications pending. For instance, Jose Miguel Suri Hernández, who entered legally via parole in 2024, was still being detained in March 2026, despite being eligible for the Cuban Adjustment Act with an application pending. The sole reason for his detention is that USCIS is refusing to process his green card application, which has now been suspended for seven months. Although not all Cubans arrested by ICE are eligible to adjust their status, ending Cuban Adjustment Act green card approvals has certainly helped ICE to increase arrests of Cubans by 463 percent.

Ending refugee green card approvals

The most illegal and absurd collaboration between USCIS and ICE has occurred with respect to refugees. In March 2025, USCIS paused refugee and asylee green card applications for a period of about three weeks. Processing resumed at a much lower level. In December 2025, USCIS stopped virtually all approvals on refugee green cards, and in early January 2026, it announced Operation PARRIS, which it claimed would focus on reinterviewing 5,600 refugees in Minnesota who had not yet received lawful permanent residence.

In reality, in December 2025, as USCIS suspended green cards, ICE and USCIS had secretly reinterpreted an old statute to allow ICE to arrest refugees who had not yet received green cards, quietly rescinding a long-standing internal policy that forbade such arrests. Refugees cannot apply for green cards until they have been in the country for a year, and of course, by delaying the processing of these applications, USCIS allowed ICE to arrest the refugees whose legal status is unquestionable. In February 2026, ICE and USCIS director Edlow signed a joint memo permitting the arrest of refugees.

The law requires refugees to return to “custody” for “inspection and examination” after one year if they have not yet received legal permanent residence, while also prohibiting applying for legal permanent residence until one year of residence as a refugee. This means all refugees are technically exposed to arrest after one year. Rather than sending letters to these refugees asking them to appear for interviews voluntarily, USCIS sent ICE agents to their homes to drag them away from their families and send them to ICE detention facilities in Texas—not to interview them and approve or deny their green card applications, but to hold them indefinitely.

ICE shackled and took away Selamawit Mehari, an Eritrean refugee and single mother of three, in front of her children in her home. ICE sent her to Texas. Mehari and other refugees were dumped on the streets in Texas and left to find their way home. The New York Times reported on the arrest of a man from Moldova whom ICE arrested in Minneapolis and moved to Texas on January 16, 2026, despite—according to a judge’s later order releasing him—“ample evidence in support of his refugee status and his pending adjustment application.” One judge wrote about Te Eh Doh La, a Burmese refugee who entered legally and had properly filed an application for adjustment of status to permanent residence: “There is something particularly craven about transferring a nursing refugee mother out of state.”

A district court has temporarily blocked ICE from undertaking further arrests under Operation PARRIS. The court stated clearly: USCIS “could simply notify refugees of their adjustment interview and afford them the chance to attend voluntarily—summoning them only after the interview is scheduled.” ICE arrested approximately 150 refugees before the policy was blocked, but the suspension of green card issuances appears to have continued.

Conclusion

As I’ve explained before, the administration’s mass deportation strategy depends crucially on preventing immigrants from receiving or extending legal status. The mass cancellation of parole status for 1.5 million immigrants, the elimination of Temporary Protected Status for nearly a million more immigrants, the virtual elimination of asylum, and the suspension of various green card pathways have permitted ICE to increase arrests of people who would otherwise have had legal status or been protected against arrest. Removing their legal status is a necessary precondition for removing people from the country.

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America’s tax revenues would suffer severely from banning immigration (as President Trump is attempting to do). The primary reason that immigrants pay more in taxes than the average person is that they are far more likely to be employed than the average person. This means that even though they earn lower hourly wages, they work more total hours, so an immigrant’s per-capita earned income is higher than an American’s.

That’s why in the image below, you can see immigrants’ share of the workforce far above their share of the population. Their share of income is in the middle because they earn below-average wages per worker. However, their share of taxes and income remains disproportionate to their share of the population because there are so many more immigrant workers per capita.

In the table below, you can observe the amount of taxes paid cumulatively over 30 years by type of tax. Immigrants generated more per capita than the US-born for every type of government revenue except federal and state nontax revenues and supplemental medical insurance payments, which are tied to participation in Medicare, which immigrants use at a much lower rate.

Most taxes and other revenues (about 75 percent) generated by immigrants and the US-born are not federal, state, and local income taxes. A very significant portion of taxes is never directly paid by the person on whom the tax incidence ultimately falls. For instance, the employer portion of the payroll tax doesn’t show up on your paycheck, but it still reduces your earnings.

What about illegal immigrants? Illegal immigrants also pay taxes, directly or indirectly. We estimate that, at least before President Trump’s mass deportation campaign, illegal immigrants were complying with income taxes at about 75 percent of the rate of the average person, which was 80 percent of the required amount. This is because illegal immigrants often work with borrowed, fake, or stolen identities under which employers still withhold their taxes about half the time. They also file for refunds at much lower rates. The result is that illegal immigrants have paid about $3 trillion in taxes over the last 30 years.

All of our estimates about the tax effects of immigrants are conservative because—unlike the Congressional Budget Office (CBO)—we do not include any of the indirect effects that immigrants have on the productivity of US workers, which increases their income and tax payments. In its 2024 study, CBO found that about one-third of the revenue effect of recent illegal immigrants, other humanitarian immigrants, and their children came from these indirect effects. The CBO found that President Trump’s early 2025 immigration policy changes have already put the federal government on a trajectory toward adding $500 billion more in deficits over 10 years—primarily by lowering tax receipts.

Of course, taxes are just one side of the fiscal ledger. In our full study, we analyze how immigrants also receive fewer government benefits. The net result after accounting for benefits received is $14.5 trillion in debt reduction from immigrants, $7.9 trillion when we include the entire 2nd generation, and $1.7 trillion from illegal immigrants. To get America’s fiscal house in order, governments must address spending for US-born Americans.

It is important to note that the net effect on the government budget is an indirect consequence of the much larger economic benefits from immigration: the goods and services that they provide to Americans through their work, innovation, and entrepreneurship. If immigrants did increase the deficit, as some subset certainly does, the best solution is to further wall off the welfare state, not the country, so that Americans could still realize these economic benefits without the costs.

You can read the full study and methodology here.

Illegal entries had already fallen before he took office, and while they have fallen further, the declines in legal immigration far surpass the declines in illegal entries. The falloff in illegal immigration continued a prior trend, while the cuts in legal immigration broke the trend of rising legal immigration from 2021 to 2024.

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Illegal immigration had already fallen by over 80 percent before Trump.

The number of Border Patrol arrests at the southwest border had fallen by 82 percent from December 2024 to March 2025, but by December 2024, they had already fallen by 81 percent from their peak in December 2023. Of the decline from the peak, 83 percent occurred under President Biden. Prior to Trump taking office, Border Patrol releases had already dropped 96 percent from their peak. Border Patrol releases have declined further under Trump’s second term, but in absolute terms, releases fell far more before he took office. Of the decline in releases from their peak, 96 percent occurred before Trump took office.

Recorded evasions of Border Patrol—known “gotaways”—also fell about 80 percent under President Trump from December 2024 to September 2025 (the most recent data available). But again, by December 2024, evasions had fallen well before Trump took office, falling by 83 percent from their peak in November 2022. President Trump’s administration continued an earlier trend in declines in illegal immigration.

President Trump’s administration has credited the low levels of illegal immigration to an executive order that requires Border Patrol to ignore US asylum law and immediately return any crosser to their home country. In an amicus brief for a case challenging the order, I detailed some reasons to believe that this claim is likely wrong. Besides the fact that illegal immigration was already falling, I note that arrests by the one population exempt from the order—unaccompanied children—fell just as much, and just as quickly, as other arrests. Better explanations for the changes are the fear of the Trump administration and worsening economic conditions here. 

Asylum seekers entering legally fell 99.9 percent.

Every prior administration allowed some asylum seekers to enter legally at the southwest ports of entry because the law explicitly allows them to apply there. The first Trump administration terminated this practice in 2020, and the second Trump administration did so again in January 2025 by eliminating the CBP One scheduling app and banning asylum. As a result, the number of monthly southwest border legal entries by asylum seekers fell 99.9 percent from almost 40,000 in December 2024 to just 26 in February 2025. Other “inadmissibles”—Customs and Border Protection’s broad classification for undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers, and others trying to enter legally at ports of entry—also fell in 2025.

Update: President Trump shared this chart.

Refugees entering legally from abroad fell by about 90 percent.

The number of refugees—who enter legally and are granted full protection based on their fears of persecution—has also declined by nearly 90 percent. The president initially suspended the refugee program entirely before restarting it to exclusively admit white South African refugees. The drop was from 12,518 in December 2024 to 1,341 in March 2026. The cap for FY 2026 is just 7,500, so the monthly average for the rest of the year will be 500. As I’ve pointed out previously, most refugees blocked by the administration were persecuted Christians.

Immigrant visas for legal permanent residents fell by about half.

The State Department has not published the number of immigrant visa issuances since September 2025. Since then, President Trump has banned all immigrant visas for nationals of 40 countries, including the Palestinian Territories, starting on January 1, 2026. As I’ve previously described, this affected one in five immigrant visa applicants. The State Department also suspended the Diversity Visa Lottery, effective December 23, 2025. Meanwhile, in a three-sentence press release, the State Department suspended immigrant visa issuances for 75 countries (for a total of 92 banned countries) on January 21, 2026. 

As I’ve detailed before, these bans affected half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad, including half of all spouses and minor children of US citizens, based on 2024 immigrant visa processing. However, it’s possible some of this flow could be replaced with immigrants from other countries, but that did not happen when President Trump enacted a narrower ban on certain categories of immigrants from 19 countries in June. Immigrant visa issuances fell for those nationalities, but rather than other countries increasing to compensate, visas for other nationalities also declined.

Theoretically, the State Department could resolve this issue for the new ban, but we should question how quickly. Moreover, only about a third of the visas are employment– and family-based capped categories that would even theoretically be available for reallocation. If these were reallocated, the immigrant visa cut would be 43 percent from December 2024. This projection also assumes a cautious 1‑percent cut per month to account for the pre-ban downward trend and for all other policies intended to reduce issuances, including the new health-related rules that debuted in November 2025.

Visas for fiancé(e)s and spouses of US citizens fell by 65 percent.

Visas for fiancé(e)s and spouses of US citizens were down by at least half by summer 2025, compared to December 2024. It’s not obvious how seasonal these visas are, but the year-over-year decline was 65 percent when compared with the summer of 2024. The 40-country ban—that started in January 2026—also affects them, excluding about 3,000 visas annually, but because the 75-country immigrant visa ban does not, it’s possible that at least some spouses will eventually try to shift from immigrant visas to K‑1 visas. This will not be possible immediately, as restarting the process would be too costly and time-consuming.

International student visas fell by 40 percent last summer. 

The Trump administration has enacted specific policies targeting international students. In January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order that led to the cancellation of F‑1 status and revocation of between 1,700 and 4,500 student visas between January and April. The administration also arrested and placed in detention several students for their political speech. In May, the administration attempted to suspend the right of Harvard to enroll international students at all, but was blocked by the courts. 

In May and early June, the State Department suspended all student visa issuances for three weeks during the peak season. In June, Trump signed an executive order banning student visas from 19 countries, which affected about 10,188 students annually, and in December, he expanded that ban to 40 countries, affecting about 23,000 students per year. Comparing the peak months when students typically get visas, student visas had already fallen by 40 percent, comparing the summer of 2024 to the summer of 2025. As the figure shows, the country ban does not play a massive role. The visa suspension last year and other policy moves mattered much more last year. What will happen this year is still unclear.

H‑1B visas have likely fallen by about 25 percent.

In the average month, H‑1B visa issuances in 2025 were already lower than in 2024. But in September, President Trump signed an executive order mandating a $100,000 fee to petition for an H‑1B worker outside the United States. There were 65,000 H‑1B approvals for workers outside of the US in FY 2024, and there were  219,659 visas issued abroad, implying that about 30 percent of visa issuances are for workers targeted by the ban. 

The State Department hasn’t been totally transparent about the effects of the fee, but in one court filing, it implies it led to an 87 percent decline in petitions for workers outside the United States. H‑1B visas had already declined somewhat by September, so a reasonable estimate would place current H‑1B visa issuances down by about a quarter. Since the fee only applies to new petitions approved after September 2025, it might take a bit longer than projected for the full effect to be felt. The chart below shows H‑1B and H‑1B dependent (H‑4) visa issuances based on this projection.

Legal entry cuts are now likely 2.5 times higher than illegal entries.

When we put together the full picture of legal and illegal immigration, we see that President Trump has indeed cut legal entries far more than illegal entries in absolute terms. The available information suggests that about 2.5 times as many legal entries are being stopped as illegal entries: 132,000 versus 50,000. Among the cuts to immigration, 72 percent were from legal entries, not illegal entries.

This comparison is misleading in favor of illegal entries because most illegal crossers caught by Border Patrol were not being released into the United States in December 2024. It also assumes that 100% of the cuts to the employment– and family-based categories from banned countries result in increases in family– and employment-based categories from other countries. These are just the major visa categories. If we included every category, the cuts would be more severe. It also does not include all the people who are already in the United States and are banned from receiving legal status or converting from temporary to permanent status.

These cuts to legal immigration are harming US citizens seeking to reunite with their spouses, fiancés, children, and other relatives. They are also undermining US prosperity and increasing the US deficit. But they also illustrate the central misconception about the Trump administration’s immigration agenda.

It is not about stopping “illegal” immigration. It is a broader assault on all types of immigration. As Americans debate the path forward on immigration, that’s a reality everyone should understand.