Washington, D.C. (April 23, 2020) – A new analysis by the Center for Immigration Studies concludes that the president's new
executive order does not curtail immigration. It appears actually to re-start entries for select categories that had been paused indefinitely when
the State Department shut down most visa adjudications on March 20, due to the pandemic. Even more concerning, it prioritizes the entry of the most
scandal-ridden category of all – EB-5 – in which foreigners essentially can purchase green cards for their families.
The executive order is confusing. It suspends the entry of people who don't even have an immigrant visa yet, and who can’t get one until the State Department’s visa units re-open. The order also provides a large number of exceptions to the suspension, including the fraud ridden EB-5 program and the very broad exception – “Any other alien whose entry is determined to be in the national interest.” If an applicant qualifies for one of these exceptions, the person now can have their immigrant visas processed and enter the United States, if able to travel here.
Read the entire analysis:
https://cis.org/Vaughan/Trumps-Immigration-Ban-May-Actually-Rev-Immigration-Back
On the bright side, the adjudication of other non-essential categories is still paused, including the chain migration categories of parents and extended family, the diversity visa lottery, most employment applicants from abroad, spouses and children of green card holders, and a few others. These categories number approximately 25,000 immigrant visa applicants per month. If the suspension lasts for 60 days, this will represent a pause of about 50,000 applicants from abroad, or about 5 percent of annual immigration. There is no indication that the applications will not eventually be issued.
Most of the applicants in these categories, with the exception of the diversity visa lottery, parents, and the highest-caliber employment applicants, have already waited many years on the waiting list, so an additional wait of two months is not especially significant.
However well-intentioned, this executive order will provide little relief to Americans. The pause applies to only a tiny fraction of total annual admissions. The order re-starts admissions that had already been paused, well before this health crisis is over and well before the employment crisis is over.
We recommend that the president take much bolder steps to help U.S. workers. For example, he should direct the Department of Labor and USCIS to review the labor certifications of thousands of pending employment-based green cards in order to ensure that the employer requests are still justifiable, that the businesses are still viable, and that the foreign workers are still needed at this time. The president should suspend all temporary work visa programs, including seasonal workers and white-collar visa workers, at least until the labor market stabilizes, or until Congress can pass needed reforms. There is no case for bringing in a million temporary visa workers when 22 million American workers are unemployed. Finally, the president should scale back the issuance of work permits to hundreds of thousands of foreign students, spouses of temporary workers, and those with unapproved pending green card applications.
