Of the many recent targets of the Trump administration’s ire—Jerome Powell, Denmark, Minneapolis—legal immigration may have been the least conspicuous and most consequential. On Wednesday, the State Department announced that it would “pause immigrant visa processing from 75 countries whose migrants take welfare from the American people at unacceptable rates.” The countries affected include Bangladesh, Brazil, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Nigeria. Among other measures taken to slash legal immigration in 2025, the Trump administration imposed travel restrictions or entry bans on people from 39 countries. Plot all of these countries on a map—newly targeted and old—and you will see that most of Africa, large swaths of Asia, and much of the Muslim world are now unwelcome. Western Europe is unscathed.
The Trump administration is not merely stomping out illegal immigration. It is trying, by executive fiat, to return America to the harsh quotas and nation-based restrictions that lasted from 1921 to 1965. In MAGA mythology, these were America’s glorious decades. Stephen Miller, one of the president’s most powerful advisers, romanticizes it as a period of prosperity and innovation, prematurely stalled because America decided to “open our borders to the entire third world for sixty years.” The plan is to return to a past that never really was—only to harm the future. Economic and technological progress depends on America’s continued attraction to the world’s best minds, which are not just in Western Europe.
[Read: The wrath of Stephen Miller]
The new policy affecting 75 countries does not restrict the flow of temporary visitors, including those arriving for business, education, and tourism. But it will prevent family members of American citizens—including spouses and young children—from receiving a visa or green card. Under what is known as the public-charge rule, authorities can reject applications from would-be immigrants who might seek government benefits if admitted. The Biden administration had weakened the public-charge rule when it decided to exclude noncash benefits, such as food stamps and Medicaid, from consideration. The new Trump policy goes beyond mere correction and represents a kind of collective punishment, presuming that all citizens of a country would fail to meet the criteria, whatever their individual circumstances.
It is unclear what calculations were made or formulas were followed in deciding which foreigners are too likely to be burdens. Recent research by Daniel DiMartino, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, has calculated the net fiscal impact—balancing future tax receipts against use of government programs—of various immigrant groups. He finds that the average Colombian migrant has a strongly positive fiscal impact, reducing national debt by $500,000 over 30 years, whereas “the most fiscally burdensome immigrants are Salvadorans, who increase the national debt by over $50,000 over 30 years.” Yet Colombians are now restricted, and Salvadorans are not.
The same traits—sloppy reasoning but a desire for collective punishment—animate other immigration-policy announcements. After the fatal shooting of a National Guard member in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national, President Trump added several African countries to his travel-ban list. The administration employed the same logic when announcing in December that it had suspended the diversity-lottery visa program, created by Congress, because one of its recipients had allegedly killed two students at Brown University and one professor at MIT. The assailant was of Portuguese origin—but almost half of the recipients of the 55,000 green cards awarded annually by the program are from Africa. A crime committed by a single migrant is now a license for sweeping restrictions on prospective legal migrants.
Other policies convey the administration’s animus to migrants—first-generation, second-generation, low-skilled, high-skilled. Trump attempted to end birthright citizenship, a constitutional right guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment, through one of the first executive orders of his second term. In September, Trump tried to impose a $100,000 surcharge on highly skilled immigrants pursuing an H-1B. (Courts have held up these efforts.) In December, The New York Times reported that the administration was setting targets of up to 200 denaturalization cases a month for foreign-born American citizens. The administration has also boasted about achieving net-negative immigration.
[Read: Birthright citizenship is a sacred guarantee]
There are exceptions, of course. The refugee program has nearly ceased to exist, except for white Afrikaners from South Africa. State Department data show that from February to December, only 1,226 refugees were admitted into the country (less than 2 percent of the average rate of admission since the start of 1975). Of these, 86 percent were from South Africa. Certain kinds of globalists, the extremely wealthy kind, also are welcome in America after all. Foreigners who can afford either the Trump Gold Card (for $1 million) or, even better, the Trump Platinum Card (for $5 million) can obtain a visa. As an end run around Congress, which is normally the creator of new visa categories, these fees are technically voluntary gifts given to the Department of Commerce—like the expensive tchotchkes you had to buy in D.C. cannabis shops to receive a “gift” of marijuana.
The details differ, but the underlying anxieties of today’s immigration restrictionists are the same ones that motivated America to close its borders one century ago. In 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed the Johnson-Reed Act, which essentially banned immigration from the continents of Asia and Africa while also severely restricting immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe (then considered undesirable). “America must be kept American,” he said. An article Coolidge wrote in 1921 gives a better sense of his state of mind: “Our country must cease to be regarded as a dumping ground,” he argued. “There are racial considerations too grave to be brushed aside for any sentimental reasons. Biological laws tell us that certain divergent people will not mix or blend. The Nordics propagate themselves fully. With other races, the outcome shows deterioration on both sides.” Although Trump has made his preference for Nordic countries known, alongside his disgust with migrants from Somalia, explicit statements of this kind are, for the moment, confined to fringe figures in the MAGA movement, such as the white nationalist Nick Fuentes.
Unlike when it enacted the immigration restrictions of the 1920s, Congress has passed no specific act sanctioning Trump’s actions. In the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Republicans gave the president a huge influx of cash—$170 billion—for his immigration agenda, including ICE and the border wall. Trump is able to do what he likes because Congress has already turned over so much of its immigration authority to the executive branch. For example, the Immigration and Nationality Act lets the president suspend the entry of immigrants if he deems their presence “detrimental to the interest of the United States”—for as long as he wants. The Supreme Court has interpreted this delegation of authority as carte blanche. In December, a federal judge ruled that Trump had the authority to impose the $100,000 fee on H-1B visas.
Of course, that which is imposed by executive fiat can later be repealed by executive fiat. And America has arguably ping-ponged between two extremes of immigration policy. During Joe Biden’s term, the net number of migrants in the country grew by 6.8 million, most of them unauthorized, which pushed America’s share of foreign-born residents to its highest level ever. Border mismanagement, alongside Biden’s stubbornness and senescence, helped return Trump to the White House. A more rational immigration policy may emerge under a future president. But Trump has spent one year tightening the ratchet against legal immigration—an effort that will stymie the prosperity he seeks. He has three more years to do as he sees fit.
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