WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is set to expand a measure restricting visas to the United States to target many temporary foreign workers, limiting immigrants from coming to the country for employment in industries including technology, academia, hotels and construction.
The order would primarily impact H1-B visas, broadly set out for high-skilled workers; H2-B visas, for seasonal employees; H-4 visas, for spouses; L-1 visas, for corporate executives; and J-1 visas, for professors and exchange programs, restricting new authorizations through Dec. 31 “in light of expanding unemployment,” according to senior administration officials who described the plans Monday.
Yet it also comes with broad exemptions, such as for many agricultural, health care and food industry workers — even au pairs, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
“The president’s priority is getting Americans back to work,” said one senior official, who estimated the move would “protect” more than 500,000 jobs.
Amid his administration’s struggle to respond to the coronavirus, Trump has cited high unemployment as the primary motivation for moves to restrict immigration, such as a bar on most new green card applicants that will also be extended.
Yet neither the president nor the senior officials on the Monday press call provided evidence to back the claim that immigrants have taken the jobs of Americans out of work in those fields due to the virus, and the latest measure would mostly target “nonimmigrant” visa categories.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy counsel at the nonpartisan American Immigration Council, estimated based on fiscal 2019 data that the proposed measure — if kept in place for a year — could impact more than 550,000 potential immigrant workers.
At the end of April, Trump signed a proclamation that restricted some new entrants from entering the country for 60 days who did not already have visas or other travel documents but included carve-outs for several categories of foreign workers and employers, as well as their spouses and children.
That order did not change the status of immigrants already in the U.S., and neither would the expanded version as described Monday.
After coming under pressure from business interests, who argued work authorizations for immigrants in fields like agriculture and health were critical to the coronavirus response, the president instead issued in April a dramatically scaled-back memorandum than what he initially described as an executive order to “temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”
But after announcing the restrictions, which primarily targeted potential green card applicants, Trump also faced criticism from immigration restrictionists, including in his own White House, who motivate his political base.
“Amending it or extending it, that we can do at the appropriate time,” Trump said in April, previewing Monday’s changes. “But it’s now signed.”
Research shows immigrants strengthen the economy and typically don’t compete with U.S.-born workers for jobs, or lower their wages. Most employment-based immigration to the U.S. already requires a labor market test to demonstrate there’s no available U.S. citizen to fill the position, and many of the impacted industries, as well as Trump officials themselves, have advocated for more immigration, not less.
Amid coronavirus, the Trump administration touted making it easier for agricultural workers to come from Central America to the United States to work in an industry it deemed “essential” to the coronavirus response. These workers would continue to be largely exempted from the latest restrictions.
As the administration urges a reopening of the U.S. economy and states start to ease coronavirus restrictions, it’s increasingly unclear how the latest measure and other prior steps to stem immigration are connected to public health.
Even before the emergence of the coronavirus, anti-immigration hard-liners such as White House adviser Stephen Miller sought to use public health to bar migrants.
Now, immigration to the United States has ground to a near-complete stop, primarily stemming from a March order from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that border authorities have cited to rapidly expel tens of thousands of migrants without due process, including asylum-seekers and unaccompanied children. That order has been extended indefinitely, and Canada and Mexico have agreed to continue border closures barring “nonessential” travel through July.
The administration has also threatened to shut down U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the Homeland Security Department agency that administers the legal immigration system and many of the impacted visas, citing a $1.2 billion shortfall, despite pausing most of the programs the fee-based agency processes.
If immigration to the U.S. had not essentially been paused, the restrictions on green card applications would impact a large number of people — more than 350,000 if the ban remained in place for a full year, according to some analysts, beyond those likely to be impacted under the expanded measure.
More than 1 million foreign nationals obtained lawful permanent residence last fiscal year. Of those, about 55% were already in the United States and about 45% entered as new arrivals, according to the Homeland Security Department’s latest statistics.
As he gears up for his 2020 reelection bid, Trump has been increasingly frustrated by the broad perception that his administration has poorly handled the coronavirus response, and that he has not been able to fulfill the promises of his 2016 presidential campaign on signature issues such as immigration and “the wall” on the U.S.-Mexico border.
On Tuesday, following a Saturday rally in Tulsa, Okla., that fell far short of expectations, the president heads to Yuma, Ariz., to “mark the completion of 200 miles of new wall along the southwest border with Mexico,” according to a Department of Homeland Security release.
The department’s latest “border wall status” report shows that after nearly four years and some $15 billion in federal funding directed to the effort, despite completing projects to replace outdated and dilapidated fencing, in total, only approximately “3 miles of new border wall system constructed in locations where no barriers previously existed.”
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