Trump’s Immigration Crackdown Is Bigger Than You Think

Leave it to the open-borders eggheads at the Cato Institute to accidentally hand President Donald Trump the greatest compliment of his second term. Their latest report shows that the Trump administration is not only making massive cuts to illegal immigration—it is also cutting legal immigration nearly three times faster.

In an economy where recent college grads are already struggling to find jobs and afford homes, that’s good news for American citizens.

Cato calculates that monthly legal entries into the United States have declined by nearly 145,000 since Trump took office, compared with a reduction of approximately 53,000 in illegal border crossings. (Trump has notably delivered 16 straight months of zero releases at the southern border.)

In other words, legal immigration has dropped nearly 2.7 times more than illegal immigration (which is now basically nonexistent) on a monthly basis.

Liberals consider this a national calamity. For decades, the political class in Washington has pretended that legal immigration is automatically beneficial while only the illegal kind is a problem, as if all that matters is whether a newcomer remembers to fill out the proper paperwork.

That was always a lie. It is true that the United States has always welcomed immigrants willing to assimilate, work hard, and contribute to the prosperity of the country. But legal immigration since 1965—the year that President Lyndon Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act—has shifted sharply away from those goals.

Under Hart-Celler, America’s immigration system has de-prioritized skilled labor from countries that are culturally similar to the United States in favor of chain migration and importing mass numbers of unskilled workers, many of whom end up on welfare.

From a practical standpoint, much of the “legal” immigration to the United States today is functionally no different from illegal immigration. Under the Biden administration, millions of migrants simply claimed “asylum” with no real verification and were allowed into the country “legally.” Others made up phony refugee claims. The H-1B and student visa programs have also been shown to be rife with fraud.

But that enormous scam is now coming to an end under President Trump.

According to Cato, immigrant visa issuances for prospective permanent residents have fallen by roughly half thanks to bans covering dozens of high-risk countries and the suspension of the Diversity Visa lottery—effectively an affirmative action program for random foreigners.

International student visas have fallen 42 percent over the same period, opening up more admission spots at universities for America’s own best and brightest. The administration has tightened screening, restricted admissions from certain countries, and pursued new limitations on foreign students’ ability to remain and work after graduation.

Then there’s the H-1B program, Silicon Valley’s preferred method of importing cheap indentured servants to undercut American workers, which has collapsed by 78 percent amid sweeping new restrictions and Trump’s efforts to impose a $100,000 fee on foreign hires.

The refugee program has undergone an even more dramatic contraction. Monthly refugee arrivals fell nearly 90 percent, from 12,518 under Biden to 1,341 under Trump.

Legal entries by asylum seekers at southwestern ports of entry have virtually disappeared, declining 99.9 percent, from nearly 40,000 during Biden’s last month in office to just a couple dozen under the Trump administration. For years, the asylum system had been thoroughly gamed by economic migrants and cartels who treated asylum claims as a golden ticket for quick catch-and-release, allowing them to disappear forever into the interior of the United States.

This is what it looks like when a country starts retaking control of its borders and its future.

Trump’s crackdown on both legal and illegal immigration matters now more than ever. According to the Census Bureau, America’s foreign-born population reached 50.2 million in 2024, the largest number ever recorded. That represented 14.8 percent of the population, exceeding the peak of the wave of Ellis Island arrivals at the turn of the 20th century, when the country was still absorbing millions of newcomers from Southern and Eastern Europe.

That immigration surge triggered a political backlash so fierce that Congress slammed the door shut with the 1924 Immigration Act. What followed was a half-century of tightly restricted immigration that corresponded with enormous economic growth, particularly post-World War II, with the foreign-born share of America’s population plummeting to a low of 4.7 percent by 1970. America used that pause to assimilate the previous arrivals, build a common culture, and ensure rising wages for native workers. Then Hart-Celler reopened the floodgates.

Before Trump took office, we were right back at a historic high percentage of the U.S. population born abroad—only this time the numbers were even bigger and the newcomers were more distant culturally, because the political left has abandoned any pretense of assimilation in favor of multicultural grievance. The result is strained schools, crowded emergency rooms, depressed wages for the working class, fraying cultural ties, and a political system increasingly organized around ethnic patronage rather than a unified national interest.

Mass immigration is not an unalloyed good. It is a policy choice with trade-offs, and for 50 years the trade-offs have been systematically ignored by elites who never have to live with the consequences.

Trump’s approach is the correct one: reduce all immigration from all sources. While critics will decry this as racist and nativist, the reality is that America’s leaders should care first and foremost about the American people.

The distinction between legal and illegal has always been secondary to the more important question of scale. One million low-skill legal immigrants per year is not necessarily “better” than one million illegal aliens; both alter the country in ways that previous generations of Americans rejected when they had the chance. By cutting legal entries so aggressively, Trump is addressing the root of the problem rather than just the visible tip of the iceberg at the southern border.

Liberals, of course, are freaking out. They prefer the endless expansion of the labor supply and the progressive dilution of the historic American nation, which they disdain with every fiber of their being. But ordinary Americans—the ones who actually compete with immigrants for jobs, housing, and public services—see in Trump a president who finally treats immigration as a choice rather than an infinite moral obligation.

The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is at a record level. History shows what happens when it stays there too long without a pause. Trump is delivering the much-needed pause. The only question is whether the floodgates reopen after 2028.