America needs workers, but Trump's policies are sharply cutting legal immigration

President Trump stood before Congress in 2019 and said, "Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways. I want people to come into our country in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally." In 2024, as he ran for reelection, he repeated the point: "We need people."

The president was right. But since Trump reentered office, his administration has cut legal immigration dramatically. Illegal immigration is down, too, but not as much. All told, the administration has cut legal immigration twice as much as it has cut illegal immigration. Indeed, my report for the Cato Institute, which President Trump cited, shows the immigration decline has come mainly from fewer legal immigrants.

The president previously promised to prioritize Christian refugees, saying "we are going to help them." But he has not. In 2024, most refugees vetted abroad and admitted legally to the U.S. were Christians, yet he cut the refugee program from 125,000 to 7,500. It now admits only a small number of South Africans. There are zero slots for religious persecution.

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If persecuted people can somehow make it to the United States, the law protects their right to apply for asylum status. In 2018, President Trump encouraged asylum seekers to apply to enter legally, promising that immigrants may "avail themselves of our asylum system, provided that they properly present themselves for inspection at a port of entry."

Yet in January 2025, the president signed an executive order that completely ended the opportunity to apply for asylum. The order slashed lawful entries by asylum applicants by 99.9 percent. On Truth Social, the president hailed this finding from Cato’s report detailing Trump’s legal immigration numbers, sharing the graph of falling legal asylum entries as proof his policies "were the best in the History of the U.S.A."

President Trump has praised his own family’s immigration stories, themselves a product of family connections, and has said how "beautiful" it was that his own wife could immigrate legally. Yet his administration has not spared even close family members of U.S. citizens who apply for immigrant visas.

In December, the president signed an executive order banning legal permanent immigration by 40 nationalities, and the State Department extended the immigrant visa ban to more than 90 nationalities. These policies are now blocking about half of the prior immigrant visa flow, including half of all immigrant spouses and minor children of American citizens.

It’s not just family. Workers are also caught up in the escalating web of legal immigration bans. One single father who has two adult disabled children told PBS that the immigration ban on Sierra Leone is blocking him from bringing back his in-home care provider for them. "The load on me is tremendous. It's a struggle to be able to get enough sleep," he said.

These policies are not based on individualized risk assessments. Indeed, background checks of all legal immigrants are vastly superior to anything Trump’s family members would have undergone decades ago. There are legal immigrant spouses of Americans who have spent years getting vetted only now to be blocked.

It’s not just the time burden. The government has also collected nearly $1 billion in fees from legal immigrants and American sponsors blocked by its various policies.

President Trump has long advocated for merit-based immigration reform, but even the highest-skilled workers have faced insurmountable new barriers under this administration. In September, the president imposed a new $100,000 fee just for the chance to apply for an H-1B high-skilled visa.

As he signed the order, he said, "We need workers — we need workers, we need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that that's what's going to happen." Yet the administration has said the fee cut entries so much it has lost the government $20 million, while keeping out nearly 90 percent of new skilled workers requesting visas from abroad.

President Trump also campaigned on letting skilled foreign students come and stay in the United States. "It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, MIT, from the greatest schools, and lesser schools that are phenomenal schools also," he said in 2024, adding: "You should be able to stay."

Even after he came into office, the president has recognized the importance of foreign students whose high-value tuition even helps subsidize U.S. students. In 2025, he said, "if we were to cut [student visas] in half, half the colleges in the United States would go out of business."

Odd, then, that the Trump administration cut student visas by 40 percent last summer, largely by suspending visa issuances during the busiest weeks. That didn’t bankrupt many colleges. Nonetheless, it has cost US colleges $3 billion in revenue and forced many colleges to cut back on programming and other spending for students. Many colleges are hanging on, hoping next year reverses these cuts.

When you add up all these cuts, you find that the administration has cut legal immigration twice as much as it has cut illegal immigration. That doesn’t align with the president’s stated goals. So what’s happening?

Trump’s overzealous subordinates deserve some of the blame. They tell him that these cuts are just zeroing out the problematic immigrants, not that they are slashing the total numbers and replacing them with no one.

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When the president was signing the H-1B order, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf told Trump the order will "ensure that companies have a pathway to hire truly extraordinary people." That’s quite different from telling him that it will cut visas for new skilled workers by 90 percent. Once again, Trump repeated that "we need people" as he finished signing.

The president’s instinct is right. America needs people. U.S. population growth is down 90 percent. Social Security is already short the millions of workers it needs to keep revenues equal to expenses. The workforce will shrink without immigration. Fewer workers with more retirees will lead to higher prices.

White House Advisor Stephen Miller tells the president that immigrants are "the primary cause of the national debt." Some immigrants certainly can be a burden, but multiple organizations across the idealogical spectrum agree that legal immigration overall is a massive win for the U.S. budget.

No one suggests that America’s legal immigration system was perfect. It would be wise to improve the process, restrict welfare access, and ensure that all legal immigrants are set up to contribute to the United States. But President Trump should follow his own advice: get the people we need. Focus on merit, improve the process, and make immigration great again.