In a public address at the White House on Wednesday, President Trump embraced a new Senate bill called the RAISE Act, which he promised would usher in a wave of high-skilled immigration, “restore our competitive edge in the 21st century,” and make the United States' vetting system more like Canada's and Australia's.
It was a pitch designed to appease supporters of high-skilled immigration reform, among the loudest of whom has often been the tech industry, which relies on highly educated immigrants to fill its glut of technical jobs. Titans of Silicon Valley have called for comprehensive immigration reform, including increases to high-skilled worker visas. The only problem is that the RAISE Act wouldn’t actually accomplish any of this. What it would do, instead, is cut legal immigration in half, make it harder for families to stay together, and give radical anti-immigrant groups something to celebrate at their weekly happy hour.
“We should make it easier for people to come here and contribute, not just eliminate the family-based immigration system and pretend that’s a more merit-based system,” says Todd Schulte, president of the bipartisan immigration lobbying firm FWD.us, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech industry leaders, and has led the charge for immigration reform in the Valley.
The RAISE Act, short for Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act, was introduced by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, two congressmen who have competed for the title of Congress’s most conservative senator since Jeff Sessions ceded it to become Attorney General. The bill eliminates the diversity visa program, which awards 50,000 visas every year based on a lottery. It cuts so-called “chain immigration,” in which immigrants can sponsor their family members to come to the United States. It caps the number of refugees admitted to the United States every year at 50,000. And it creates a point system in which visa applicants are scored based on “predictors of immigrant success,” like their ability to speak English and their education level.
It would be a chilly about-face for a nation that once promised to take in the world’s cold, huddled masses. And while such a point system looks like it would benefit the tech industry by prioritizing high-skilled immigrants, it includes no provisions to actually expand the number of high-skilled visas that the tech industry has been clamoring for. What’s more, it would force immigrants who do make the cut to kiss their families goodbye, which could lead more of them to choose to bypass the US in favor of Canada, as some skilled workers are already doing.
To make the proposed point system more palatable, President Trump noted its similarity to programs in countries like Canada and Australia, which both use a similar vetting system. And yet, as Alex Nowrasteh of the conservative Cato Institute points out, those countries admit far more skilled immigrants as a percentage of their population than the United States does. In 2013, he writes, new immigrants accounted for .74 percent of Canada’s population, 1.1 percent of Australia’s, and just .31 percent of the United States’ population.
Canada has recently become something of a haven for tech entrepreneurs who have been shut out of the US. It's one of several countries creating new visa programs aimed at attracting more entrepreneurs and high-skilled workers.
It's little wonder, then, that the RAISE Act is just the latest immigration proposal by the White House to receive pushback from the tech industry. According to PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, who came to the US as a refugee under political asylum, this bill and other aspects of the Trump administration's immigration agenda "severely harm our economic growth and eliminate our greatest global economic competitive advantage: our ability to attract the best and the brightest."
While the RAISE Act bears little resemblance to the legislation the tech industry has been advocating for, it is essentially ripped from the homepages of groups like NumbersUSA and FAIR, short for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. According to the SPLC, these organizations are the progeny of a man named John Tanton, an anti-immigrant crusader who has, since the 1980s, funded organizations focused on population control. Tanton has advocated in the past for “passive eugenics” and argued that Adolf Hitler besmirched eugenics’ good name.
Tanton founded FAIR and reportedly funded the creation of NumbersUSA, which was officially founded by Tanton’s close associate Roy Beck. (NumbersUSA denies any ideological connection to Tanton, but declined to comment on whether Tanton had funded the organization.) The RAISE Act is a carbon copy of the policies both FAIR and NumbersUSA have promoted for years, from the elimination of the diversity lottery to the refugee cap to the gutting of “chain migration.” “We’ve been rallying trying to get immigration reform that incorporates those principles,” says Eric Ruark, director of research at NumbersUSA. "Having the White House behind it is a big push."
An English language proficiency requirement is among the many policies Tanton advocated for through another one of this organizations, ProEnglish. And the think tank he created, Center for Immigration Studies, is the one that produced the study President Trump cited Wednesday, claiming that more than 50 percent of households headed by an immigrant are on welfare. Conservative analysts, including Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute, have challenged that finding, arguing that because it studies households, not individuals, it doesn’t account for the number of native-born people living within that household, which can artificially exaggerate the numbers. Meanwhile, as it stands today, immigrants are barred from receiving welfare assistance for their first five years in the United States.
As today’s White House ceremony shows, these once fringe ideas have now made it into the political mainstream and are being snuck into legislation under the guise of promoting skilled labor. The good news is that, while the White House may support this bill, it’s unlikely many senators will. “I think it’s dead on arrival,” Nowrasteh says. “A lot of Republican senators like legal immigration. They think it’s good for the economy. They think family unification is great. They’re just against illegal immigration.”
In his remarks Wednesday, President Trump framed the RAISE Act as a bid to protect American workers and create good-paying jobs in America. And yet 40 percent of Fortune 500 businesses were started by immigrants and their children, "many of whom did not speak English or came here as refugees," says AOL cofounder Steve Case. "For more than two centuries, we were viewed as a nation of opportunity for all, and I believe that this act not only fails to recognize the economic and social benefits of immigrants but could repel the very talent we want to attract.”
The RAISE Act, in other words, would likely end up creating lots of good-paying jobs—somewhere else.
