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President Trump spent his first weeks in office vowing to crack down on illegal immigration with deportations and other get-tough proposals. But when he went before Congress on Tuesday to lay out his agenda, he offered a far broader plan that echoes an approach long favoured by mainstream Republicans for reshaping the nation’s immigration laws.
Trump’s call for a “merit-based” immigration system — one that puts a priority on skills and employability over family ties — revived a central element of the broad immigration compromise sought in 2007 by President George W Bush, which paired stricter border enforcement with an eventual grant of legal status for many of the estimated 11 million immigrants illegally living in the United States.
But such a system is viewed with scepticism by some Republicans who fear it would harm the economy by shutting out less-educated immigrants who fill vital jobs, such as farm and kitchen workers.
“It sounds great just to bring the total brainiac, most skilled people here, but when you look at the economy, it’s not that simple — you need the brainiacs, but you need the low-skilled people as well,” said Tamar Jacoby, the president of ImmigrationWorks USA, who advises Republicans on immigration issues.
Democrats and those on the left have an even more sinister view of the idea, arguing that Trump’s emphasis on choosing the most skilled immigrants is a backdoor way to re-engineer American laws to filter out certain ethnicities and nationalities.
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A vast majority of immigrants admitted to the United States are granted entry based on their family ties. Less than one-fifth are admitted through job-based preferences, and a similarly small number come in through refugee or asylum programmes. United States citizens may sponsor immediate family members — spouses, minor children and parents — for visas that are not subject to any caps. Their siblings and adult children get preferences under a programme that provides a limited number of visas each year to citizens’ relatives. Legal permanent residents, those who have green cards, can also apply for visas for their spouses and children.
Trump did not say how the government would carry out the changes he envisions. But he cited Canada’s merit-based system, in which immigrants are awarded points according to their educational and employment background.
A points system was a feature of the 2007 immigration proposal that died in the Senate. In that measure, temporary workers would have been barred from bringing family members to the United States unless they accepted a shorter-term visa and could show they would not become primarily dependent on government benefits.
Trump argued that the current immigration system is “straining the very public resources that our poorest citizens rely upon,” and made the case that one based on merit would provide an economic boost to American workers.
“It will save countless dollars, raise workers’ wages and help struggling families, including immigrant families, enter the middle class,” the president said. “And they will do it quickly, and they will be very, very happy, indeed.”
Trump’s assertion is based on the view that because the current system allows people to immigrate to the United States without regard for their employability, it creates an oversupply of low-skilled workers, who in turn drive down job opportunities and wages for Americans with a high school diploma or less. Critics of the merit-based system say the reality is not so simple.
The number of family-based immigrants who enter the United States each year is a tiny fraction of the total work force, and there is no guarantee that reducing the number of those immigrants or substituting people with better education and skills would increase either wages or employment opportunity.
“There’s certainly a rationale for increasing the number of people who get permanent residency who employers want to hire for both lower-skilled jobs and higher-skilled jobs, but there’s no reason that can’t be accomplished without still allowing people to bring family members in,” said Stuart Anderson, the executive director of the National Foundation for American Policy, a nonpartisan policy research organisation.
“This is more of a political rationalisation for just cutting out family categories, rather than some belief that if we got more highly skilled people, it would genuinely help the economy,” Anderson said.
© 2017 The New York Times
