House GOP Bill Cuts Legal Immigration By 1.4 Million Over 20 Years

The Houseis scheduled to vote tomorrow on a bill —the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act,the supposed GOP compromise bill. The authors claim intheir bill summary that “the overall number of visas issued will not change,” yet that is simply incorrect. In fact, the proposal would reduce legal immigration at least 1.4 million over 20 years.The bill would reduce the number of legal immigrants in five ways: 1) eliminating the diversity visa lottery, 2) ending sponsorship of married adult children of U.S. citizens, 3) ending sponsorship of siblings of U.S. citizens, 4) restricting asylum claims, and 5) indirectly by restricting overall immigration, which will lead to fewer sponsorships of spouses, minor children, and parents of naturalized citizens years later. The bill partially offsets these effects by increasing employer-sponsored immigration and by granting permanent residency to some Dreamers in the United States, but the net effect is still strongly negative.Table 1 breaks down the cuts to legal immigration by category over the 20-year period from 2020 to 2039. The net effect is a reduction in legal immigration of 1.4 million including Dreamers or 2.1 million not counting Dreamers toward the total. This is a cut of 7 percent or 10 percent in the number of legal immigrants that would have been allowed to enter under current law.Table 1: Difference in the number of legal immigrantsEliminating the diversity visa lottery (#1) would reduce legal immigration by about ...
Source: Cato-at-liberty - Category: American Health Authors: Source Type: blogs