Donald Trump on Wednesday endorsed legislation that would dramatically reshape legal immigration to the US, slashing annual admissions in half and prioritising education and skills rather than family ties in deciding who can enter the country.
The proposal “will reduce poverty, increase wages and save taxpayers billions and billions of dollars,” said Mr Trump, speaking in the White House Roosevelt Room, named for former president Theodore Roosevelt, a descendant of 17th century Dutch immigrants.
Mr Trump was joined by Republican Senators Tom Cotton of Arkansas and David Perdue of Georgia, authors of the bill, in calling for a new points system that would favour migrants with greater schooling, English fluency and work skills.
Modelled on the Canadian and Australian immigration systems, the initiative comes as the Senate tries to rebound from its failure to pass a healthcare bill and still must approve legislation to raise the debt ceiling before the end of next month. Republicans also must agree on a budget and hope to overhaul the US tax code, goals that leave little time for immigration before the 2018 campaign season.
“It’s going to be very hard to get through Congress,” says Stephen Yale-Loehr, an expert at Cornell Law School. “Immigration is just as complicated as healthcare and tax reform.”
Democrats quickly signalled they were cool to the idea of halving the roughly 1m annual arrivals.
"The bottom line is to cut immigration by half a million people — legal immigration — doesn’t make much sense,” said Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “This is different than illegal immigration. It creates jobs in America. It helps America. And we think it’s a non-starter."
The last significant bid to fix the troubled US immigration system took several months to clear the Senate in 2013 before collapsing in the House.
This week’s renewed debate comes with a record 43.2m immigrants living in the US or 13.4 per cent of the total population. The foreign-born share is more than twice as high as in 1960, when it stood at just 5.4 per cent.
Since taking office in January, Mr Trump has ordered tightened enforcement along the border with Mexico along with increased deportations of undocumented migrants. As a result of the crackdown, some farmers in California say labour shortages are forcing them to leave crops to rot in the fields.
Advocates of the Cotton-Perdue approach say that the present system admits too many unskilled workers who compete with less-skilled Americans for jobs, in turn depressing pay. Inflation-adjusted wages for the least-educated cohort of Americans over the past 40 years have declined, according to Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favours lower immigration.
The current family-based system “puts great downward pressure on people who work with their hands and work on their feet,” said Mr Cotton.
Though native-born workers often are reluctant to perform the back-breaking work of picking crops, they do compete with migrants for other less-skilled positions such as truck driving and construction. Three-quarters of janitorial jobs, for example, are held by Americans, Mr Krikorian says.
“You can’t say that’s a job that Americans won’t do,” he says. “Immigration is loosening the labour market and undermining the bargaining power of American workers to demand higher wages.”
The US immigration system for decades has prioritised family ties, seeing them as vital for social cohesion and economic progress, says Tom Jawetz, vice-president of immigration policy for the Center of American Progress.
The plan backed by Mr Trump would dramatically change “the look and feel of individuals who are able to come to the US,” he says.
Public opinion is split with 38 per cent of Americans in a recent Gallup Poll favouring reduced immigration and an equal percentage saying they prefer the current inflow to continue. Just 21 per cent support higher immigration.
Mr Trump also repeated his earlier vow to prevent immigrants from receiving welfare for five years after arriving in the US, which current law already prohibits in most cases.
(Published by Financial Times - August 2, 2017)