Legal migration took time to recover: consulates reopened slowly, and visa backlogs were huge. But in 2024 it has returned to pre-pandemic, and indeed pre-Trump, levels. Nearly 1.2m green cards were issued in the fiscal year of 2023, a 68% increase from 2020 and slightly more than the number doled out during Mr Trump’s first year in office. The government is projected to resettle at least 90,000 refugees in 2024, potentially short of Mr Biden’s 125,000 allotment but far more than the 11,000 or so settled during the doldrums of the pandemic.
Non-immigrant visas, the kind that temporary workers and students get, have also made a comeback. This is good news for firms wanting to hire skilled workers. The h-1b lottery system, which allots visas to high-skilled, mostly tech, workers, was rife with fraud. Hundreds of thousands of applicants compete for just 85,000 spots, a number set by Congress in 2004. Sometimes dozens of applications were submitted on behalf of one person. A tweak to the lottery system is intended to fix that.
Although more students are again coming to study in America, more than ever are also being denied visas. The same factors encouraging border crossings—a hot labour market, violence and instability at home, and a more welcoming president—may also be pushing young people abroad to seek their education in America. Cecilia Esterline of the Niskanen Centre, a think-tank, suggests that students may be failing to convince consulates that they will return to their home country after studying.
What has all of this meant for the workforce? At its peak in 2021, the shortfall of foreign-born workers identified by Mr Peri and Ms Zaiour reached about 2m people. That hole has now disappeared, partly due to the number of people who streamed across the border and found work. But Mr Peri reckons the rebound has also been fuelled in part by the return of college-educated legal migrants. Some 45% of recent immigrants have a college degree, compared with 38% of native-born Americans and 33% of those who arrived in the 1990s.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the system itself. Congress has repeatedly failed to create new legal pathways for migrants, to increase caps for limited visas and to make the system more responsive to the needs of America’s economy. The result is a monumental backlog for green cards, long wait times at consulates, frustrated families who worry they will never be reunited, and irritated businesses and states eager for more labour. The process is next to impossible, says Mr Bier. “There are the people who are screwed, people who are really screwed, and then the people who are just going to die before they get a chance to come,” he adds, bleakly.
Americans do not share Congress’s allergy to reform. They increasingly support more deportations and the border wall, but the desire for stricter enforcement has not yet shaken their approval of immigration overall. A majority of Democrats and a plurality of Republicans support more legal pathways. Some 61% of registered voters surveyed by Pew in April maintain that America’s openness to people from elsewhere is essential to its national character. But in an election year, with the black hole sucking up so much attention, reform of the legal system is unthinkable.
Liberty’s lure
Legal migration took time to recover: consulates reopened slowly, and visa backlogs were huge. But in 2024 it has returned to pre-pandemic, and indeed pre-Trump, levels. Nearly 1.2m green cards were issued in the fiscal year of 2023, a 68% increase from 2020 and slightly more than the number doled out during Mr Trump’s first year in office. The government is projected to resettle at least 90,000 refugees in 2024, potentially short of Mr Biden’s 125,000 allotment but far more than the 11,000 or so settled during the doldrums of the pandemic.
Link to Graph
Non-immigrant visas, the kind that temporary workers and students get, have also made a comeback. This is good news for firms wanting to hire skilled workers. The h-1b lottery system, which allots visas to high-skilled, mostly tech, workers, was rife with fraud. Hundreds of thousands of applicants compete for just 85,000 spots, a number set by Congress in 2004. Sometimes dozens of applications were submitted on behalf of one person. A tweak to the lottery system is intended to fix that. Although more students are again coming to study in America, more than ever are also being denied visas. The same factors encouraging border crossings—a hot labour market, violence and instability at home, and a more welcoming president—may also be pushing young people abroad to seek their education in America. Cecilia Esterline of the Niskanen Centre, a think-tank, suggests that students may be failing to convince consulates that they will return to their home country after studying. What has all of this meant for the workforce? At its peak in 2021, the shortfall of foreign-born workers identified by Mr Peri and Ms Zaiour reached about 2m people. That hole has now disappeared, partly due to the number of people who streamed across the border and found work. But Mr Peri reckons the rebound has also been fuelled in part by the return of college-educated legal migrants. Some 45% of recent immigrants have a college degree, compared with 38% of native-born Americans and 33% of those who arrived in the 1990s.
Link to Graph
One thing that hasn’t changed is the system itself. Congress has repeatedly failed to create new legal pathways for migrants, to increase caps for limited visas and to make the system more responsive to the needs of America’s economy. The result is a monumental backlog for green cards, long wait times at consulates, frustrated families who worry they will never be reunited, and irritated businesses and states eager for more labour. The process is next to impossible, says Mr Bier. “There are the people who are screwed, people who are really screwed, and then the people who are just going to die before they get a chance to come,” he adds, bleakly. Americans do not share Congress’s allergy to reform. They increasingly support more deportations and the border wall, but the desire for stricter enforcement has not yet shaken their approval of immigration overall. A majority of Democrats and a plurality of Republicans support more legal pathways. Some 61% of registered voters surveyed by Pew in April maintain that America’s openness to people from elsewhere is essential to its national character. But in an election year, with the black hole sucking up so much attention, reform of the legal system is unthinkable.