With the march of modern industry and technology, immigration has increased to unprecedented levels, driving historic demographic change. The resultant dissatisfaction with mass immigration has been responsible for major political movements across the U.S. and Europe, and played a major role in the election and reelection of Donald Trump. Trump promised to close the border, begin mass deportations, and reverse the huge influx of illegal immigration into the United States that occurred during the Biden Administration. The American Conservative sat down with Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, to discuss the American immigration situation and whether the second Trump administration is fulfilling its campaign promises.
First, I just wanted to talk about the immigration situation generally. The U.S. foreign-born population just reached a record high, with both illegal and legal immigration contributing. From your perspective, what are the most serious consequences—economic, cultural or political—of this demographic shift for the United States?
All of the above. This is my basic take on immigration, or excessive immigration— is that all of the effects are different parts of the same phenomenon. Mass immigration is incompatible with the goals and characteristics of a modern society in a way that wasn’t really as true a century or two centuries ago. In other words, people talk about the fiscal effect, and then other people talk about the security problems or the labor market problems or the assimilation problems, but it’s all the same thing. And so the answer is kind of, “Yes.”
It undermines the life opportunities of less skilled workers, not just by driving wages down because it loosens the labor market, but also making lots of less economically valuable workers even less relevant to the labor market. And so we have the highest rate of working-age men who aren’t even in the job market. They’re not unemployed, because to be officially unemployed, according to the government, you have to have looked for work in the past four weeks. We’re talking about people who just dropped out of the labor market. Immigration contributed to that, and immigration also reduces the incentive to even address that socially and politically, and so we just give those guys their welfare check and their marijuana to go play video games. We’ll just import somebody else to do the work that any society needs to get done.
So that’s the economic part of it. Additionally, we have a welfare state now. Now, I’m a conservative. I want a more tightly run system of social provision for the poor, one that is less likely to lead to dependency, et cetera, but it’s an inherent part of modern society. It’s never going away. So how can you be importing people who are lazy? It’s not even that they’re coming here for welfare, it’s that they’re a mismatch economically. And so even if they have two jobs, they’re not going to earn enough money to feed their own children, and so the taxpayer ends up doing it.
There are no bad guys here. For the most part, the immigrants are not here to rip us off. But the fact of the matter is, with only a little bit of exaggeration, they’re Flintstones people in the Jetsons world, and they’re not going to be able to support themselves. It’s the way it is.
And then you have the assimilation challenge, which is different from the situation in the past. First of all, modern communications and transportation means you can kind of live in two countries at the same time. The imperative of assimilation, of cutting off your ties with the old country, whether you liked it or not, was forced in the past. Now it’s not, and so it’s a natural thing to want to keep your ties with the old country. It’s just a normal human impulse. But how do you promote assimilation in that kind of environment?
Now, advances in communications and transportation are a positive thing. It’s been a boon for humanity. But the negative side of modernity that relates to assimilation is that our leadership classes no longer even believe in assimilation. I mean, the United States is better off than most of Europe, which is frankly lost. But if the schools don’t teach immigrant kids to love their new country, and that same message doesn’t come across in all other formats—from government officials, from churches, from businesses—they get a very different message now than they would have gotten 100 years ago, and assimilation much more complicated in that kind of environment. It still happens to some degree, and it still happens very thoroughly for some people, but not to the degree it should. And you just need to have less immigration if you have that kind of environment for assimilation.
To follow up on the issue of assimilation, one thing that I think we increasingly see is the the interplay between immigration and identity politics, where you get immigrants, especially second-generation immigrants, who have assimilated to American culture, but who still don’t identify with the mainstream of American society, or who have assimilated to a certain kind of oikophobic, left-wing hatred of America.
There’s no question that those are very similar things, maybe even the same thing. It relates to my point that the leadership class is no longer promoting assimilation. Now, my mom was the daughter of immigrants; she went to public school outside of Boston in the ’30s and ’40s. And what did she learn? She memorized the Gettysburg Address, sang “Hail Columbia”, and learned that George Washington was the father of our country. They’re not teaching kids that in the LA Unified School District today, and it’s not because of immigrants, not even because the children of immigrants. It’s because of us.
My point is that mass immigration is kind of like eating donuts. I led the introduction to my book with that analogy years ago, and the editor took it out, so I bring it up all the time, just to kind of get back at her. So the point is, if you’re 7 years old, donuts may not be the greatest thing, but your body is growing. It needs fat, it needs sugar. But our body politic has changed. And we can’t eat the same donut—it may be a cruller instead of a jelly donut, but it’s still a donut—and get the same result. Our national metabolism is different than it used to be, and so we just can’t eat as many jelly donuts. That’s just the way it is.
The lefties get outraged when I use that analogy, by the way. But donuts are good! I’m not comparing immigrants to garbage or anything.
The Trump administration came in determined to close the border after the big influx of illegals under Biden, initiate a program of mass deportation, and hopefully take some steps to solve the problem of illegal immigration permanently. How successful would you say the administration has been in accomplishing those goals?
It’s only been six months, so in that context, very successful. The border is dramatically better off than it was in the past. I don’t want to say it’s solved or it’s closed, because there’s always going to be people trying to come across the border. In fact, now they’re trying to come up the coast and then cut inland to avoid the Border Patrol. So they’re always going to be some cat and mouse. But the difference is night and day.
And it’s not a flash in the pan, because you would expect that after Trump gets elected, or Trump is sworn in, people are going to say, “Oh my god, that orange man is going to machine gun our people as they’re coming across!” and so there’s going to be a drop. But it’s been sustained, and that’s because Trump is following through on a whole variety of policies. Not just restarting construction on the wall—which is important, but it’s just one piece of what you need to do. But they’ve come up with a policy that reclassifies all federal lands along the border as military installations, so MPs can arrest people and you can charge them not only with illegal entry, which is a crime, but trespassing on a military facility, which is an extra crime.
Most importantly, they’re just not letting people go anymore. That’s the key thing. If you have a pretty good expectation of being released into the country, who cares what color piece of paper they give you? It doesn’t matter if they let you go. You’re gone. But they’re not letting you go anymore. So, why spend all that money and take the risk of coming across the border? There are still people who do it, and there are always going to be people who do it, but it’s dramatically better than it was before.
There’s another challenge in the new illegal immigration area, and that is visa overstays. The border everybody kind of gets. You stop people from coming across. But visa overstayers have always been a significant element of new illegal immigration—under Biden less so, just because they were just letting everybody in along the border. But it’s always been a problem. People get a visa—a student visa, a tourist visa, whatever they can—and then they just disappear. They don’t go home when they’re supposed to. So that’s the new frontier of illegal immigration, and that’s going to take longer to deal with. They understand it’s a problem, they’re dealing with it, but I still give them a grade of “incomplete” on this, just because it’s a longer-term project.
The other thing is, what do you do about unwinding the problems that Biden created? That’s a harder job, and they’re working on it, but again, in six months, how much of that they’re going to do? People are saying they haven’t deported enough people yet. They’ve been around for six months. They’re deporting significant numbers of people, but it’s going to take a while to gain momentum. One of the biggest bottlenecks that they’ve now solved, but only recently, is detention capacity. They only have so much money to hold people, either by paying local jails or private companies that have detention facilities or using their own, ICE-owned facilities. They were burning through money way faster than would have been budgeted for the fiscal year. That’s why the One, Big, Beautiful Bill was so important for them.
I expect now you’re going to see way more people detained. If you arrest people, it doesn’t matter if you have nowhere to hold them, because you have to hold them to do the paperwork to deport them. Now they’re going to be able to arrest more people because they can hold more people and hopefully deport more people. So I think you’re going to see a significant increase in both arrests and deportations in the next six months.
So generally, on the illegal immigration thing, I’m pretty bullish. They’ve done a good job. I don’t really have anything I could point out to complain about, other than one little warning sign, which is the president’s talk about “well, maybe we’ll let some farm workers stay”—that kind of stuff. So far, that’s just been talk—because the president says all kinds of stuff. There doesn’t seem to have been any real follow-through on it. But if they do anything along those lines, what that does is undercut the argument for self-deportation. Self-deportation is a key part of what they want to achieve, because you can’t arrest all the illegal aliens. You want to arrest a lot of them and convince a whole lot of others to pack up and go home before they get arrested. So that is the one potential problem. But they haven’t really done anything in that regard yet, so I would probably make their grade an A instead of an A+ because of that.
Trump has several times expressed that there might be some kind of arrangement for illegal farm workers or certain other classes of workers. He doesn’t want to call it amnesty, but in practice, it would be amnesty. There’s also an amnesty bill, the Dignity Act, that Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL) has put forward. Do you think there’s any risk of the Republican Party slipping back into the old “grand bargain,” Gang of Eight–style approach to immigration reform?
There’s a real risk, but it’s not the same risk as before. In other words, some of those people like Salazar are there, and they’re never going away. And, you know, her bill is the same as the Gang of Eight bill. It’s the same as George Bush’s bill. It’s all the same thing. Increase immigration, let everybody stay who’s already here, and then promise—fingers crossed—that tomorrow we’ll enforce the law. It’s the “I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for an amnesty today” kind of thing. But it’s a whole lot more difficult to sustain, because even during the bad old days of the Bush view on immigration, it still failed, and things have really changed.
Part of it’s the president, obviously. But the thing is that the president, he is a transitional figure. He is basically a regular Republican who believes in “legal good, illegal bad.” It’s just that he actually means the “illegal bad” part, which is refreshing and new. The reason I say he’s a transitional figure is that the whole next—well, I won’t say the whole, but much of the next cohort of Republican leaders—are real restrictionists. The vice president, DeSantis, Senator Hawley, Senator Cotton, Senator Schmitt, these people actually want legal immigration reduced, not just enforcing the border. The old Bush-style Republican view of immigration is still there, but it’s very much in retreat, and I don’t see it ever being able to come back. Maybe I’m whistling past the graveyard, but I just don’t see it.
That’s a perfect segue into the question of legal immigration. The big fight in legal immigration right now seems to be over the H-1B visa program. Elon Musk and big tech-right figures have argued that H-1Bs are important for recruiting talent to innovate and get things done in the U.S. But there’s been a real backlash from the Republican base over H-1B visas. What’s the deal with the H-1B visa program? How should the U.S., and the Republican Party, address this question?
One thing that really encourages me about the new Republican take on immigration is that the vice president has been out front saying that the H-1B program is a total scam. Obviously, it’s not something that the president has set a line on and you’re not allowed to deviate from it.
He’ll say stuff, of course. During the campaign, he was on a tech podcast, and it was bonkers. He was saying every foreign student, when they graduate, should get a green card—even community college associate degree recipients. It’s just bonkers. On the other hand, he’s never mentioned it again, so it’s probably that he was just telling people what they wanted to hear. And I’m not even denigrating the president. He’s just like that. He sort of market-tests stuff—says it and then looks around and thinks, okay, what are people saying about what do people think? So he’s kind of riffing. But my point is, the vice president obviously has not been told, “no, you can’t say this,” because he has slammed the program several times.
Still, I don’t see legislation happening on that. Congress is just not in a position to pass any immigration bill—but H-1Bs in particular are untouchable, because so many of the Democrats are also beholden to the tech donors.
But administratively, there is a significant change they can make that will give both tech bros and the base some of what they want, and that is to stop giving H-1B visas out by lottery. That’s literally how they’re given out, by lottery. They get millions of applications from companies that hope that they’re going to get a certain number of approvals. It’s part of the business model of these cheap-labor rent-a-programmer companies based in India. If they stop the lottery and convert to awarding visas based on the highest salary offers, where businesses make clear by offering a high salary that they value these workers, you’re going to wipe out the business model of the worst actors, these rent-a-programmer companies, without actually even having reduced the numbers (which I think you should).
I mean, I’d get rid of H-1Bs, but, you know, I’d also like to lose 50 pounds, and neither one of those things is going to happen anytime soon. But this is something the new head of USCIS [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services], Joe Edlow, who was just sworn in a couple weeks ago, has said this is something they want to do. They tried it right at the end of the first administration—literally like two weeks before the administration ended—and obviously couldn’t follow up. Then the Biden people pulled the plug on it. But I’m almost certain they’re going to try some form of that again.
That still won’t give immigration critics everything they want, but it will be significantly less harmful, and will kind of call the bluff of the tech bros, because if you really want the best and brightest, you’re not paying a programmer $60,000 a year. You’re paying somebody a quarter million a year. If you’re willing to pay that, the guy clearly has some value to offer economically to your company.
Anyway, my point is that that is what you’re going to see on H-1Bs. Administrative reform, but one that’s kind of low hanging fruit, that is completely obvious, that should have been done a long time ago, and that will turn down the political volume at least on the right with regard to the issue.
To close things off, just for fun: If you, Mark Krikorian, were in charge of setting U.S. immigration policy for a day, what would be your top priorities for reforming the legal immigration system here in the U.S.?
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My top priority is not zero legal immigration, but zero-based budgeting for immigration. A continental nation with a third of a billion people, one that invented modernity, doesn’t actually need any immigration, but there are going to be certain categories of people who have such a compelling case to be let in, that we should let them in anyway.
In other words, I’d start from zero and say, which narrowly defined groups of people do we think are important? For me, that would be the husbands, wives, and little kids of U.S. citizens—which is a lot of people! That’s 350,000 people a year, sometimes. Second, a handful of real Einsteins. I don’t mean a B- graduate from Hyderabad Community College, I mean an actual top person on the planet in his field. There are not that many Einsteins created by humanity in any given year. And then third would be a handful of humanitarian refugees, or humanitarian immigrant refugees in asylum. But very, very narrowly defined as people who have nowhere else to go and can’t stay where they are one more second. There aren’t that many people in emergency cases like that.
So if I were king, that would translate into roughly a 60 percent reduction in legal immigration. Still more legal immigrants, for permanent residents, than any other country the world takes. I don’t mean Saudi slaves imported from India, I mean actual people that we intend to become Americans. But it’s a lot less than we’re taking now, and dramatically reduces the problems that mass immigration creates.
