Americans demand fewer immigrants, not more

Christmas week is usually the quietest time on the political calendar, but this year, conservatives and tech bros on political X (formerly Twitter) fell into a full-scale feud over H-1B visas. H-1B fraud and the indentured servitude fostered by Indian "body shop" cartel companies that monopolize these visas deserve serious attention. Before debating any expansion to so-called high-skilled visas, let’s first fulfill Donald Trump’s original promise to reduce other immigration categories to historic norms.

A bill that ends chain migration already exists, and Trump endorsed it during his first term. The Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act, originally sponsored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) in 2017, would slash legal immigration by half, eliminate the chain migration “extended family” category, and drop the annual 60,000 “diversity visas” selected through a lottery. It would also reduce the refugee program to 50,000 a year — an overdue correction to the antiquated 1965 and 1990 immigration bills that have distributed 1.1 million green cards per year for decades.

This time, the American people come first and immigrants come later.

The 1965 law forced immigration officials to prioritize family ties over skills, a flaw the 1990 legislation worsened. This policy has produced a record 51 million immigrants and 70 million residents who speak a foreign language at home, yet we still hear complaints about a lack of skilled immigrants.

When the late 20th-century influx of mostly low-skilled immigrants arrived from Third World countries, it triggered a phenomenon called “chain migration,” which resulted in new arrivals sharing similar socioeconomic backgrounds.

As a result, only about 15% of green cards — 1.6 million of the 10.8 million legal permanent residents over the past decade — are granted based on any skill. Most of these do not reward broad-based skills or assimilation but instead flow through crony visa programs.

As it turns out, most “skills” visas do not go to immigrants with extraordinary talent. Instead, H-1B lotteries — dominated by Indian body shops — bring in ordinary computer workers or accountants, often from upper castes in Southern India. Of the several million immigrant and long-term nonimmigrant visas offered each year, only 10,000 to 20,000 are O-1 visas for “extraordinary” talent.

Every year, a massive flow of 1.5 million foreign students — dominated by India and China — enter the United States and funnel into H-1B, L visas, and the executively created Optional Practical Training and Curricular Practical Training programs that steal jobs from Americans. Let’s abolish chain migration, bring the foreign student population back to a historic norm of a few hundred thousand, and only then discuss high-skilled visas. At that point, we will negotiate from a position of strength, having lowered overall numbers and achieved the electorate’s consensus.

We must finally put American culture and the American worker first. The public broadly agrees that immigration should be limited to people with unique skills. Newcomers need to assimilate American values and adopt the English language. Ultimately, immigration policy must benefit all Americans, not just the corporate-D.C. cartel.

That is why we need to abolish H-1B and any random visa lottery. We should also eliminate most employment-based visas, except for workers at multinational corporations operating under clear limitations. Many people confuse employment-based visas with skills-based visas, yet in recent years, employers have used these visas to artificially lower white-collar salaries, mirroring how illegal immigration undercuts wages for unskilled workers.

We should move to a points system that gives priority to individuals who benefit the broader public, rather than those brought in for a single corporation. Since the 1891 Immigration Act, the United States has tried to move away from contract-labor immigration. Section 3 of that law made it a crime to “assist or encourage the importation or migration of any alien by promise of employment through advertisements printed and published in any foreign country.” Earlier generations rightly distrusted special interests and industries that shaped immigration policy.

This principle brings us back to the RAISE Act. Its original version established a points system based on age, education, English proficiency, and earnings — the opposite of the current H-1B regime, which encourages companies to lower wages. We can debate the specifics, but the RAISE Act’s framework offers a solid starting point.

Adopting a points system would likely diversify the annual immigrant pool, rather than continuing the decades-long dominance of Mexico, other Latin American and Caribbean countries, India, and China.

Before we consider how many new immigrants we want under a points system, we should abolish about 500,000 green cards, abolish 500,000-1 million F student visas (and reform J-1 exchange student visas), and abolish hundreds of thousands of other worker visas, plus their families. We cannot fix the system by expanding it. First, we need to dismantle the broken system and address the illegal immigration that Biden allowed. No more “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”

Will special interests drown out the silent majority once again? Americans overwhelmingly oppose increasing immigration. A recent Gallup poll found that 55% of Americans, including 88% of Republicans, want lower levels, while 25% favor the status quo and only 16% support an increase — a position championed by bipartisan elites.

Opposition grows even stronger when people see the actual numbers. A 2018 Harvard-Harris poll posed an open-ended question — without revealing current immigration figures: “How many legal immigrants should the United States admit each year?” Only 19% chose 1 million or more, and 18% selected 500,000 to 1 million. Another 19% chose 250,000 to 499,999, and 35% — including 48% of black respondents — opted for 100,000 to 250,000, the largest share.

In other words, few Americans want current levels raised, and a clear majority favor lower levels than those in the RAISE Act. That stance makes sense.

In 1965, during debate over the Hart-Celler Act, the United States issued just 296,700 green cards. Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach claimed the law would boost net immigration by only about 60,000 per year. Instead, it rose by roughly 300,000 annually until the 1990 legislation pushed that figure higher than 1.1 million — where it has remained for 34 years.

After the smaller “Great Wave” of 1880-1920, we effectively shut down large-scale immigration until after World War II. For about 20 years following the war, annual totals hovered around several hundred thousand. Aristide Zolberg, among the foremost recent immigration historians, asked in his scholarly book “A Nation by Design” why, in every immigration debate since 1965, the public wanted a cool-down, but lawmakers went the other way. He cited other observers who pointed out that while broad support existed for reducing legal immigration, it was not well organized. Meanwhile, a liberal coalition of ethnic organizations, churches, and employer associations formed a powerful bloc against any restriction proposals.

Today, 60 years after the Hart-Celler Act and nine years after Trump’s original pledge to curb immigration, the president-elect and Elon Musk vowed to serve as the “force multiplier” absent for six decades. “Vox populi!” they declared. Now is the time to make good on that promise, which will help manage future disagreements over high-skilled visas. This time, the American people come first and immigrants come later.