May 12, 2020
Trump’s Latest Decision on Immigration Is Bad for America
As the pandemic continues, President Donald Trump and Republicans in Congress have sought to impose new and potentially sweeping restrictions on immigration. Back in April, Trump issued a presidential proclamation to temporarily block the issuance of green cards for individuals outside the United States. While those restrictions will remain in place for at least sixty days, Trump’s advisers have indicated this step may be a prelude to further measures. And recently, four Republican senators argued in a May 7 letter to the president for the suspension of guest worker visas, including H1-Bs for specialty occupation workers. Such measures are contrary to U.S. values, counterproductive in this crisis, and damaging to long-term American competitiveness.
This call for additional restrictions on immigration builds upon and goes beyond Trump’s initial decision, which was seemingly an attempt to appeal to his base. That measure which contains a number of exceptions has provoked widespread controversy, including due to its dubious legality. While the administration’s purported motivation for the extreme, almost unprecedented restriction was to protect American workers, there is also little evidence that immigration restrictions generally save jobs for U.S. workers or help American businesses. Instead, the decision’s primary impact has been to disrupt and alarm hundreds of thousands of individuals who are currently entangled within this labyrinthine system. And the recent proposals to expand restrictions on immigration to students and highly-skilled applicants could cause still greater harm to the American economy and innovation.
Read the full article in The National Interest.
More from CNAS
-
Biotech Matters: Public-Private Coordination of Biotechnology
An appreciation of biotechnology’s great opportunities is, for many commentators, intimately joined with regret about a disconnect between the U.S. government and the private ...
By Richard Danzig
-
$6.6 billion TSMC deal in Arizona the latest in the CHIPS Act’s rollout
“President Biden signed the CHIPS and Science Act just about 20 months ago, which in government time is yesterday. And they’ve hired 200 people,” said Vivek Chilukuri, a senio...
By Vivek Chilukuri
-
Response to NTIA Request for Comment: “Dual Use Foundation Artificial Intelligence Models with Widely Available Model Weights”
In February 2024, the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) issued a Request for Comment (RFC) on the implications of “ope...
By Caleb Withers
-
Biotech Matters: Great Data Competition and Interoperability with Allies and Partners
Understanding and strengthening America’s biotechnology leadership requires exploring the limits of existing data relevant to the U.S. bioeconomy so that policymakers and the ...
By Michelle Holko