“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.”
The U.S. needs to pull together its different resources in different domains to successfully compete against China, including not just militarily, but taking an active diplomatic and economic role in Asia.
His plans increase the deficit, which is inflationary.
Large and broad tariffs are inflationary.
A massive crackdown on illegal immigration will also be inflationary as without cheap labor, making products will be more expensive or won’t happen here at all–particularly agricultural goods and housing.
Trump wants to end the independence of the Federal Reserve. Trump has been in favor of lower interest rates, which will increase inflation.
“Argentina’s 2020 Rental Law, intended to protect tenants, ended up making housing unaffordable for the average Buenos Aires resident. The issue isn’t unique to Argentina—rent control measures have had similar outcomes elsewhere. In San Francisco, expanded rent control laws led to in a spike in evictions. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands, rent caps have prompted property owners to sell their buildings and exit the rental market, according to Reason’s Christian Britschgi.
Argentina’s experience should serve as a cautionary tale for policymakers: Well-intentioned policies aimed at protecting tenants can sometimes backfire, causing more harm than good.”
“During his first term, from 2017 to 2021, Trump withdrew the US from multiple international agreements, including the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), often called the Iran deal. That agreement, negotiated in 2015 under President Barack Obama, essentially eased US sanctions on Iran in exchange for curtailing its nuclear program and allowing greater international oversight of it.
“The Iran deal was one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into,” Trump said when the agreement was terminated in 2018. Since then, Iran has built up its stockpile of enriched uranium and increased its missile supply, reportedly bringing the program much closer to developing nuclear capabilities — despite the Trump administration’s promise that Iran would never have them.
Trump also pulled the US out of the Paris climate agreement, which commits all signatories to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Other diplomatic casualties of the Trump administration include the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), a Cold War-era pact between the US and Russia limiting the development of short- and intermediate-range nuclear weapons; the Open Skies Treaty, which allows signatories to conduct military reconnaissance flyovers; and two international migration agreements.
Trump also repeatedly critiqued NATO during his first term. He argued the other countries in the military alliance weren’t spending enough on defense (and they did begin to spend more), questioned whether the organization was still necessary, and in 2020 withdrew almost 10,000 troops stationed in Germany, a decision Vice President Kamala Harris’s foreign policy adviser Philip Gordon said seemed “designed to send a message about the limit of what Americans are prepared to spend to defend foreign borders and, more broadly, uphold world order.””
The U.S. trade deficit is a problem, and the best way to solve it is by a weaker dollar. Free trade is good, broad tariffs are bad, and the trade deficit is best dealt with by a weaker dollar.
“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.”
“The Republican presidential nominee’s threat to impose new tariffs on nearly all imports into the United States would make video game consoles 40 percent more expensive, according to an analysis published this month by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA), an industry group best known for its annual Las Vegas conference showcasing the latest tech for home and personal use.
The report assumes that Trump can carry out his threat to hit all imports from China with a 60 percent tariff, along with a baseline tariff of 10 percent or 20 percent on all other imports. (Trump has been unclear about which level he’d prefer, and recently suggested a “thousand percent tariff.”)
If that happens, the retail price of video game consoles will increase by nearly $250, according to the CTA. Retail price would also grow for laptops (up $357), tablets (up $201), smartphones (up $213), and televisions (up $48).”
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“The theory behind Trump’s push for more tariffs is that making imports more expensive will spur more domestic manufacturing. Instead of importing Xboxes and PlayStations from China, those products would be made in the United States, his supporters claim.
But hold on. If Trump’s tariffs are sufficient to drive consumer technology manufacturing out of China, those jobs won’t all shift to the United States—they’ll go to other countries instead. If that happens, consumers in the U.S. will still bear the cost of the universal tariffs on their game consoles and smartphones.
CTA does project a 31 percent increase in domestic production of video game consoles—but that would not be enough to offset the other consequences. Ultimately, the group comcludes, the economy would shrink by an estimated $4.9 billion, due to the combination of higher costs and lower consumer spending power.
The vastly increased availability and affordability of tech like TVs and video game systems shows what free trade can achieve. Americans should be cautious about taking it for granted.”