In a recent article from the Washington Post, columnist Catherine Rampell explains how the Trump Administration has figuratively built a wall by bypassing Congress and enacting certain Proclamations that deter legal immigration and make it difficult for immigrants (“Dreamers”) with advanced degrees and skills obtain visas and eventually obtain permanent residency and citizenship. As Ms. Rampell notes, “As it turns out, the president didn’t need Congress after all. Without ever signing a single immigration law or completing his famous wall, Trump has cut the flow of foreigners by executive fiat. This fiscal year, the United States is on track to admit half the number of legal immigrants it did in 2016. This would bring levels of legal immigration down to what they were in 1987 — when the U.S. population was about a quarter smaller, substantially younger and less in need of working-age immigrants than it is today. If this milestone has gone mostly unremarked, it’s by design. It has been achieved through backdoor, boring-sounding, bureaucratic decisions. Small-bore and esoteric though many of them are, collectively they have crippled the legal immigration system and choked the flow of newcomers into the United States. Through hundreds of administrative changes, the machinery of the U.S. immigration system has become even slower, more cruel and more absurd than it was before.”
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