“Take Trump’s record on the H-1B program, the largest U.S. temporary work visa program for high-skilled workers. Jorge Loweree, managing director of programs at the American Immigration Council (AIC), described the program to Reason as a “critical tool for us to attract talent from abroad” and to continue “our leadership role in the tech sector around the world.” Every year, it provides 65,000 visas for “highly educated foreign professionals,” with an additional 20,000 reserved for “foreign professionals who graduate with a master’s degree or doctorate from a U.S. institution,” according to an H-1B visa factsheet by AIC.
“During his prior term in office. His administration implemented a series of policy changes that made obtaining and maintaining [H-1B] status significantly more challenging,” Loweree stated.
Trump increased regulation on the program, starting with the Buy American and Hire American Executive Order which instructed agencies to “propose new rules and issue new guidance…to protect the interests of United States workers in the administration of our immigration system.”
This increased denial rates for H-1B applicants and made the process of applying costlier, according to Forbes. In FY 2015 denial rates for H-1B visas were six percent. By FY 2018 they rose to a high of 24 percent, according to AIC. Attorney fees for filing an H-1B visa increased between $2,000 and $4,500 per applicant. Wait times for spouses of H-1B applicants also increased, taking up to two years, in some instances, for them to receive their H-4 dependent, which allows them to live in the U.S.
Prior deference, which allowed current H-1B recipients to avoid going through the time-consuming interview process and paperwork to extend their H-1B visa, was also eliminated by Trump, according to Loweree. It was later reinstated by President Joe Biden.”
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“H-1B workers impact the U.S. economy in many ways. Highly skilled immigrants who use the H-1B visa “directly increase the production of knowledge through patents, innovation, and entrepreneurship,” according to the Cato Institute. And, because they primarily specialize in STEM fields, foreign-born workers increase productivity, employment, and wages for native-born workers.
While Trump’s promise on the All-In podcast is encouraging, his record shows that it will unlikely be kept. A calculated attack on H-1B visas by a second Trump administration would hurt U.S. innovation and the native-born workers who benefit from the skills that legal immigrants bring.”
“Mostly, the economy spins ever onward because individuals show up for work and produce something that other people—their employers, customers, clients, donors, etc.—value and are willing to pay for, and then they do it again the next day.”
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“If nothing changed, Springfield would simply experience an ongoing slide into oblivion. The city has been losing population since the 1960s and more than a fifth of those who remain are below the poverty line. Translation: Anyone who had better economic prospects somewhere else was already gone, or on their way out.
“The real story is that for 80 years we were a shrinking city, and now we’re growing,” a local pastor told NBC News.
In other words, immigration isn’t the cause of Springfield’s problems. Stagnation is.
Is the influx of thousands of foreign-born workers going to be smooth? Of course not. Some culture clash is inevitable. More workers willing to pay market rates for housing and a more competitive local economy might make life marginally more difficult for, as Williamson writes, “a reliable Trump-voting constituency: marginally employed white people on the dole.”
Vance and former President Donald Trump have rushed to amplify those culture clashes—and knowingly exaggerate them too, as Reason’s Jacob Sullum explained yesterday. In doing so, they’ve demonstrated how little they understand about what make an economy work and what makes a place successful. Thriving cities, even small ones, are home to a constant churn of cooperation and competition between newcomers and natives. Places that don’t grow are doomed to die.”
“Musk’s claim that the undocumented population in swing states is surging, sourced to unspecified “government data,” appears false: Data from both Homeland Security and Pew Research Center debunks Musk’s claim of a Biden-era surge in undocumented immigrants to swing states. (In a few swing states, undocumented populations have shrunk, whereas in others, they’ve increased slightly or been stagnant.) Migrants aren’t being “put” in those states by anyone, let alone Democrats — that’s not how undocumented migration works. Nor is there any evidence Harris has a viable plan to grant them all citizenship in four years or proof they’d all vote for Democrats forever once given the franchise.
Really, what Musk is doing is taking a hoary old white nationalist trope — the “Great Replacement” mainstreamed by X’s most prominent talk show host, Tucker Carlson — and reiterating it with dubious swing-state demographic data.”
“The idea that Haitians in Springfield are abducting people’s pets and eating them is not just a normal lie, the way that Trump has long accused migrants of selling drugs and committing street crimes. The idea of barbecuing a neighbor’s beloved pet is such a violation, so alien in nature, that it renders the alleged targets outside the scope of what we recognize as human behavior. It is an attack on Haitians not only as individuals, but as an entire group. It is a kind of dehumanization that has historically led to deadly violence against the targeted group — often by design.
Two New York Times columnists, Lydia Polgreen and Jamelle Bouie, have labeled the animal eating rhetoric a “blood libel” for this reason.
The term originates in medieval Europe, specifically to describe the lie that Jews were abducting Christian children and using their blood to bake matzah (an unleavened bread we eat during the Passover holiday). The calumny, which persisted through the Nazi era, was designed explicitly to cast Jews beyond the pale of acceptable society — to link Judaism as a religion and identity to barbarism and brutality. It was, as Bouie notes, frequently employed to whip up violence against the Jewish community.
You don’t need to be a historian to see the obvious connections between accusing Jews of eating children and Haitians of eating pets. And since the Haitian Revolution, Americans have often treated Haitians as the embodiment of the terrifying racial “other” in the same way that Europeans displaced their fears and resentments onto Jews. The crank presidential candidate Marianne Williamson helpfully made the subtext the text in a tweet, saying that Democrats dismiss Trump’s lies at their peril because “Haitian voodoo is in fact real.”
The same is true with another Vance lie about Springfield: that Haitians are responsible for a surge in communicable diseases, including HIV/AIDS. I say it’s a lie because there’s no public evidence supporting it, and authorities on the ground contradict it.
“A common myth that I’ve heard is that we’ve seen all of our communicable diseases skyrocket and go through the roof. And really, when you look at the data, that’s not supported,” Chris Coon, a county health commissioner, told the local ABC affiliate.
Once again, this lie has a deeply troubling history. Immigrants have long been falsely accused of bringing disease to keep them out; Nazis did the same to Jews.
Specifically, Nazi propaganda would regularly accuse Jews of spreading typhus, a lice-borne disease that killed millions in early 20th century Europe. Much like HIV, typhus was a stigmatized ailment stereotypically associated with the moral defectiveness or dirtiness of the afflicted. Nazi doctors wrote pseudo-scientific papers accusing Jews of spreading typhus due to our alleged “low cultural level” and “uncleanliness,” part of the justification for cramming Jews in Polish ghettos before shipping my ancestors and their co-religionists to death camps.
In the past, attention to these kinds of glaringly obvious Nazi parallels might have seemed like enough to shame the Trump campaign into at least toning down its rhetoric. But now, those normative guardrails no longer hold.
On the right today, there is a pervasive sense that any allegation of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism is a bad-faith smear designed to delegitimize conservative policies and politicians. It is a tactic used by American defenders of Viktor Orbán’s regime in Hungary, but one most often used to excuse bad behavior at home. It can be used even to whitewash the flirtations with open fascism that are common among young rightists nowadays, like the inclusion of a Nazi symbol in a video pushed out by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s primary campaign.
I’m sure it’s frustrating to be constantly accused of backing a fascist for president when you genuinely don’t see yourself in that light. But at the same time, it gives the green light to ignore an awful lot of extremely dangerous behavior.”
“There is a “small number of non-detained migrants” who have been convicted of homicide but can’t be sent back to their home countries after serving their time, mostly because the U.S. doesn’t have repatriation agreements with those countries, Nowrasteh says. A 2001 Supreme Court decision bars ICE from indefinitely keeping someone in immigration detention, but “non-detained” people are often still subject to ICE check-ins or electronic monitoring.
Trump is also wrong to claim that these individuals all came to the U.S. under the Biden administration. The list “includes individuals who entered the country over the past 40 years or more,” explained the Department of Homeland Security in a Saturday statement, “the vast majority of whose custody determination was made long before this Administration.””
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“The number of convicted criminals on ICE’s nondetained docket hasn’t grown significantly under President Joe Biden, reported The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler. In August 2016, five months before Trump took office, there were 368,574 on the docket; in June 2021, five months into Biden’s presidency, there were 405,786; and in December 2022, nearly two years into Biden’s presidency, there were 407,983.
As he campaigns ahead of the presidential election next month, Trump has routinely said outrageous, misleading, and false things about immigrants and crime. He often talks about a “migrant crime” wave and claims that it “is taking over America.” Much like his migrant murderers claim, the true picture looks very different. Crime decreased in the cities that received the most migrants through Texas’ Operation Lone Star busing activities, per NBC News. “The most recent significant crime spike in recent years occurred in 2020,” Cato Institute Associate Director of Immigration Studies David J. Bier told Reason in March, “when illegal immigration was historically low until the end of the year.”
Trump paints a terrifying picture of migrants and migration, but the reality is far more nuanced and far less dangerous than he would suggest.”
“Former President Donald Trump’s promise to carry out “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history” would not only be a moral calamity requiring an enormous expansion of government—it would also be hugely expensive and ruinous to the American economy.
The governmental infrastructure required to arrest, process, and remove 13 million undocumented immigrants would cost nearly $1 trillion over 10 years and would deal a “devastating” hit to economic growth, according to a report published last week by the American Immigration Council (AIC). The think tank estimates that a mass deportation plan would shrink America’s gross domestic product by at least 4.2 percent, due to the loss of workers in industries already struggling to find enough labor.”
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“The costs of mass deportation would rebound into the economy in several ways. The economy would shrink and federal tax revenues would decline. The construction industry, where an estimated 14 percent of workers are undocumented migrants, would be particularly hard hit, but the effects would be felt throughout the economy.”
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“Immigration restrictionists often assume that deporting millions of undocumented workers would allow more Americans to fill those jobs, but the economy is not a zero-sum game. A shrinking economy would be bad news for many workers who aren’t directly impacted by Trump’s deportation plan.”
“government data show immigrant labor contributes to economic growth and provides promotional opportunities for native-born workers. And a mass deportation event would cost U.S. taxpayers up to a trillion dollars and could cause the cost of living, including food and housing, to skyrocket, economists say.”
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“The latest U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey data shows that as of 2023, native-born Black workers are most predominantly employed in management and financial operations, sales and office support roles, while native-born Latino workers are most often employed in management, office support, sales and service occupations.
Foreign-born, noncitizen Black workers are most often represented in transportation and health care support roles, and foreign-born, noncitizen Hispanic workers are most often represented in construction, building and grounds cleaning.
How has immigration contributed to U.S. growth?
In 2023, international migrants — primarily from Latin America — accounted for more than two-thirds of the population growth in the United States, and so far this decade they have made up almost three-quarters of U.S. growth.
After hitting a record high in December 2023, the number of migrants crossing the border has plummeted.
The claim that immigrants are taking employment opportunities from native-born Americans is repeated by Trump’s advisers. They often cite a report produced by Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a right-leaning think tank that seeks a reduced immigration flow into the U.S. The report combines job numbers for immigrants in the U.S. legally and illegally to reinforce the claim that foreigners are disproportionately driving U.S. labor growth and reaping most of the benefits.
Camarota’s report states that 971,000 more U.S.-born Americans were employed in May 2024 compared to May 2019, prior to the pandemic, while the number of employed immigrants has increased by 3.2 million.
It is true that international migrants have become a primary driver of population growth this decade, increasing their share of the overall population as fewer children are being born in the U.S. compared with years past. That’s according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s annual American Community Survey.
Are immigrants taking native-born workers’ jobs?
Economists who study immigrant labor’s impact on the economy say that people who are in the U.S. illegally are not taking native citizens’ jobs, because the roles that these immigrant workers take on are most often positions that native workers are unwilling to fill, such as agriculture and food processing jobs.
Giovanni Peri, a labor economist at the University of California, Davis, conducted research that explores the impact of the 1980 influx of Cuban immigrants in Miami (the so-called Mariel Boatlift) on Black workers’ employment. The study determined that the wages of Miami’s Black and Hispanic workers moved above those in other cities that did not have a surge of immigrant workers.
Peri told the AP that the presence of new immigrant labor often improves employment outcomes for native-born workers, who often have different language and skill sets compared to new immigrants.
In addition, there are not a fixed number of jobs in the U.S., immigrants tend to contribute to the survival of existing firms (opening up new opportunities for native workers) and there are currently more jobs available than there are workers available to take them. U.S. natives have low interest in working in labor-intensive agriculture and food production roles.
“We have many more vacancies than workers in this type of manual labor, in fact we need many more of them to fill these roles,” Peri said.
Stan Marek, who employs roughly 1,000 workers at his Houston construction firm, Marek Brothers Holdings LLC, said he has seen this firsthand.
Asked if immigrants in the U.S. illegally are taking jobs from native-born workers, he said, “Absolutely not, unequivocally.”
“Many of my workers are retiring, and their kids are not going to come into construction and the trades,” Marek said. He added that the U.S. needs an identification system that addresses national security concerns so those who are in the country illegally can work.
“There’s not enough blue-collar labor here,” he said.
Data also shows when there are not enough workers to fill these roles, firms will automate their jobs with machines and technology investments, rather than turn to native workers.”
“What this allows the survey to demonstrate is that between 2002–2022—with the exceptions of 2004–2006 and 2013, in which no birthplaces were recorded—foreign-born respondents accounted for 18.6 percent less Medicare and Medicaid spending than their native-born counterparts. On average, this amounted to $1,775 per person in 2022 dollars, compared to $2,180 per person among those born in the U.S.
Bier breaks down the numbers even further to demonstrate that this trend holds across each year in the sample for which data was available: In 2022, the most recent year recorded, U.S.-born patients cost the health agencies $2,691 apiece, while foreign-born cost $2,116 each. The closest the two groups ever came to parity was in 2015, when the U.S.-born cost $2,312 and the foreign-born cost $2,233.
“Despite their lower incomes, immigrants are less likely to use publicly funded health care for several reasons,” Bier writes. “Most importantly, they are younger, but even controlling for age, immigrants tend to be healthier and participate in fewer high-risk activities. In addition, their eligibility for Medicare and Medicaid is more limited than for the US-born population….Finally, some eligible immigrants also do not enroll in these programs out of ignorance or fear about its immigration effects.””
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“The survey only notes a respondent’s birthplace, not their immigration status.”
“There’s a straightforward logic to both candidate’s claims. Increased demand for housing, whether from immigrants or corporate investors, would be expected to increase prices.
But increased demand should also be expected to increase supply, bringing prices back down.
Corporate investors and immigrants also play an important, direct role in increasing housing supply. Investors supply capital to build new homes. Immigrants supply labor for the same.
At least one study has found that the labor shortages caused by immigration restrictions do more to raise the cost of housing than they do to lower it through reduced demand.”
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“one study has found that restrictions on investor-owned rental housing raised rents and raised the incomes of residents in select neighborhoods by excluding lower-income renters. Studies on the effects of rent-recommendation software have found mixed effects on housing costs. In tight markets, such software raises rents. When supply is loose, it lowers them.
As always, the ability of builders to add new supply is what sets the price in the long term. Both candidates gestured at this in their own way, although Walz was more explicit about the relationship.”