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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region Forums"Trump got his wall after all" - immigration down 70%
In the two years after Trump took office, denials for H1Bs, the most common form of visa for skilled workers, more than doubled. In the same period, wait times for citizenship also doubled, while average processing times for all kinds of visas jumped by 46 percent, even as the quantity of applications went down. In 2018, the United States added just 200,000 immigrants to the population, a startling 70 percent less than the year before.
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Senior adviser Stephen Miller is usually regarded as the White Houses immigration mastermind, but his maneuvering is only a sliver of the story. The most fine-grained and consequential changes would never have been possible without a group of like-minded figures stationed in relevant parts of the governmentparticularly the United States Citizenship and Immigration Service, the agency within DHS that administers visas. Early in Trumps presidency, said the former DHS official, there was a strategic sprinkling of people who shared a common vision and were ready to outwork everybody. They included Gene Hamilton, Millers terrible sword at DHS (his actual title was senior counselor to the secretary), and Francis Cissna, the soft-spoken former head of USCIS whom colleagues describe as an encyclopaedia of immigration law and a total immigration nerd. If you said to him, whats on page 468, second paragraph of the Immigration and Nationality Act, another former DHS official marveled, he would quote it to you.
Amidst the chaos at DHS, the restrictionists have already radically scaled back Americas asylum and refugee programs for years to come. But no category of immigrant has escaped the uptick of denials and delaysnot the Palestinian student with a Harvard scholarship who was deported upon landing in Boston, or the Australian business owner forced to leave after building a life here. Not the Bolshoi Ballet stars who somehow failed to meet the criteria of accomplished artists, or the Iraqi translators who risked their lives for the U.S. military and whose annual admissions went from 325 to just two after the change in administration. Then there are the consequences that are harder to capture in headlines or statistics: the couples whose marriages broke down when the foreign spouse was forced to wait far longer than usual in their home country, and the unknown number of people who have abandoned the attempt to stay because of financial hardship or the strain of living with a level of uncertainty that becomes untenable.
What became clear to me early on was that these guys wanted to shut down every avenue to get into the U.S., the first former senior DHS official said. They wanted to reduce the number of people who could get in under any category: illegals, legals, refugees, asylum seekerseverything. And they wanted to reduce the number of foreigners already here through any means possible. No government in modern memory has been this dedicated to limiting every form of immigration to the United States. To find one that was, you have to go a long way back, to 1924.
https://www.huffpost.com/highline/article/invisible-wall/
dalton99a
(81,065 posts)evertonfc
(1,713 posts)There is something I'm confused about here. There were 833,000 new citizens naturalized in fiscal year 2019 an 11-year high ( according to Houston Chronicle) and 766,000 in 2018. What is the 200,000 "new immigrant" number referred to in above story? Natiralyzations are steady or even up a bit but applications and backlogs are soaring.
Demovictory9
(32,320 posts)roamer65
(36,739 posts)That will be a good day.
Even John Quincy Adams was against that damn war.