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 greatest numbers ever, but they must come legally.” In 2024, as he ran for re-election, he reiterated the point: “We need people.”
The president was right. But since Trump returned to power, his administration has dramatically reduced legal immigration. Illegal immigration has also fallen, but not by much. All told, the government has cut legal immigration twice as much as illegal immigration. My report for the Cato Institute, which President Trump cited, shows that the decline in immigration is mainly due to fewer legal immigrants.
The president previously promised to prioritize Christian refugees, saying “we are going to help them.” But he didn’t do that. In 2024, most of the refugees vetted abroad and legally admitted to the U.S. were Christians, yet he cut the refugee program from 125,000 to 7,500. It now only admits a small number of South Africans. There are zero places for religious persecution.
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If persecuted people can somehow reach the United States, the law protects their right to seek asylum. In 2018, President Trump encouraged asylum seekers to apply to enter legally, promising that immigrants “can take advantage of our asylum system, provided they properly present themselves for inspection at a port of entry.”
But in January 2025, the president signed an executive order that completely ended the ability to seek asylum. The order reduced legal entries of asylum seekers by 99.9 percent. On Truth Social, the president praised this finding from Cato’s report detailing Trump’s legal immigration numbers, sharing the graph of declining legal asylum claims as evidence that his policies were “the best in US history”
President Trump has praised his own family’s immigration stories, which are themselves a product of family ties, and has said how “nice” it was that his own wife was able to immigrate legally. Yet his administration has not spared even the immediate family members of U.S. citizens applying for immigrant visas.
In December, the president signed an executive order banning legal permanent immigration for 40 nationalities, and the State Department expanded the immigrant visa ban to more than 90 nationalities. This policy now blocks about half of the previous immigrant visa flow, including half of all immigrant spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens.
It’s not just family. Workers also become entangled in the escalating web of legal immigration bans. A single father with two adult disabled children told PBS that Sierra Leone’s immigration ban is preventing him from getting his home care provider back for them. “The burden on me is enormous. It’s a struggle to get enough sleep,” he said.
This policy is not based on individualized risk assessments. Background checks on all legal immigrants are far superior to anything Trump family members would have undergone decades ago. There are legal immigrant spouses of Americans who have been vetted for years but are now being blocked.
It’s not just the time burden. The administration has also collected nearly $1 billion in fees from legal immigrants and U.S. sponsors blocked by its various policies.
President Trump has long advocated for merit-based immigration reform, but even the most highly 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 employees, we need great employees, and this pretty much ensures that that’s going to happen.” Yet the government says entry prices have been slashed so much that the government has lost $20 million, while nearly 90 percent of new skilled workers applying for visas from abroad are being kept out.
President Trump also campaigned to allow skilled foreign students to come and stay in the United States. “It’s so sad when we lose people from Harvard, from MIT, from the greatest schools, and from lesser schools that are also phenomenal schools,” he said in 2024, adding, “You should be able to stay.”
Even after coming to power, the president has recognized the importance of foreign students whose high-quality tuition helps subsidize even American students. In 2025, he said, “if we cut back [student visas] in half, half the universities in the United States would go bankrupt.”
Strange, then, that the Trump administration cut student visas by 40 percent last summer, largely by suspending visa issuance during the busiest weeks. That hasn’t put many colleges out of business. Nevertheless, it has cost American colleges $3 billion in revenue and forced many colleges to cut back on student programming and other expenses. Many colleges are holding out, hoping that these cuts will be reversed next year.
If you add up all these cuts, you arrive at the conclusion that the government has cut legal immigration twice as much as illegal immigration. That is not consistent with the president’s goals. So what happens?
Trump’s overzealous underlings deserve some of the blame. They tell him that these cuts only take away the number of problem immigrants, not that they reduce the total number and don’t replace them with anyone.
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When the president signed the H-1B order, White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf told Trump that the order “will ensure that companies have the ability to hire truly extraordinary people.” That’s very different from telling him that this will cut visas for new skilled workers by 90 percent. Trump reiterated that “we need people” as he finished signing.
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The president’s instincts are right. America needs people. Population growth in the US has fallen by 90 percent. Social Security is already short of the millions of workers needed to keep revenues equal to expenses. Without immigration, the working population will shrink. Fewer workers with more retirees will lead to higher prices.
White House adviser Stephen Miller tells the president that immigrants are “the number one cause of the national debt.” Some immigrants can certainly be a burden, but several organizations across the ideological spectrum agree that, overall, legal immigration is a huge win for the U.S. budget.
No one is claiming that America’s legal immigration system was perfect. It would be wise to improve the process, limit access to social services, and ensure that all legal immigrants can contribute to the United States. But President Trump needs to take his own advice: Get the people we need. Focus on merit, improve the process and make immigration great again.
