As President Donald Trump ran for the 2016 Republican nomination, he embraced largely anti-immigrant rhetoric while also seeming to endorse legal and skilled immigration. Trump always qualified his statements favorably for both legal and skilled immigration; he said at a 2015 Oklahoma rally, “I want legal immigration. I want great people to come in.” As president, Trump endorsed skilled immigration with a new merit immigration proposal unveiled in 2019, which adopts a “points system” that rewards well-educated immigrants from “specialized vocations.” Other Republicans have supported his call for more high-skilled immigration, including Senators Kevin Cramer of North Dakota and Mike Lee of Utah.

The American people also agree with Trump’s statements. Around eighty percent of Americans favor more high-skilled immigration, a figure that far outnumbers the twenty-four percent of Americans who want more overall immigration, per a 2019 poll. In turn, Congress has responded with the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (“the Act”), a bill introduced every session since Lee joined the Senate in 2011. The Act would raise per-country caps on family immigration while getting rid of per-country caps entirely for employment, clearing the visa backlog for large countries like India and China.

Continue Reading The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act: The First Step to Comprehensive Immigration Reform