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 largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.” In 2024, as he ran for reelection, he repeated the point: “We need people.”
The president was right. But since Trump reentered office, his administration has . Illegal immigration is down, too, but not as much. All told, the administration has cut legal immigration twice as much as it has cut . Indeed, my report for the Cato Institute, which President Trump cited, shows the immigration decline has come mainly from fewer legal immigrants.
The president previously promised to prioritize Christian refugees, saying “we are going to help them.” But he has not. In 2024, most refugees vetted abroad and admitted legally to the U.S. were Christians, yet he cut the refugee program from 125,000 to 7,500. It now admits only a small number of South Africans. There are zero slots for religious persecution.
If persecuted people can somehow make it to the , the law protects their right to apply for asylum status. In 2018, President Trump encouraged asylum seekers to apply to enter legally, promising that immigrants may “avail themselves of our asylum system, provided that they properly present themselves for inspection at a port of entry.”
Yet in January 2025, the president signed an executive order that completely ended the opportunity to apply for asylum. The order slashed lawful entries by asylum applicants by 99.9 percent. On Truth Social, the president hailed this finding from Catos report detailing Trumps legal immigration numbers, sharing the graph of falling legal asylum entries as proof his policies “were the best in the History of the U.S.A.”
President Trump has praised his own familys immigration stories, themselves a product of family connections, and has said how “beautiful” it was that his own wife could immigrate legally. Yet his administration has not spared even U.S. citizens who apply for immigrant visas.
In December, the president signed an executive order banning legal permanent immigration by 40 nationalities, and the extended the immigrant visa ban to more than 90 nationalities. These policies are now blocking about half of the prior immigrant visa flow, including half of all immigrant spouses and minor children of American citizens.
Its not just family. Workers are also caught up in the escalating web of legal immigration bans. One single father who has two adult disabled children told PBSÂ that the immigration ban on Sierra Leone is blocking him from bringing back his in-home care provider for them. “The load on me is tremendous. It’s a struggle to be able to get enough sleep,” he said.
These policies are not based on individualized risk assessments. Indeed, background checks of all legal immigrants are vastly superior to anything Trumps family members would have undergone decades ago. There are legal immigrant spouses of Americans who have spent years getting vetted only now to be blocked.
Its not just the time burden. The government has also collected nearly $1 billion in fees from legal immigrants and American sponsors blocked by its various policies.
President Trump has long advocated for , but even the highest-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 workers â we need workers, we need great workers, and this pretty much ensures that that’s what’s going to happen.” Yet the administration has said the fee cut entries so much it has lost the government $20 million, while keeping out nearly 90 percent of new skilled workers requesting visas from abroad.
President Trump also campaigned on letting skilled foreign students c
