Invisible Wall

The Invisible Wall That President Trump Has Already Built

Legal immigration and the number of foreigners visiting the United States has taken a serious hit within the last year, as the Trump administration makes changes to policies and procedures without any Congressional action or approval.

These actions have already had a disturbing, cumulative effect as the administration begins to severely limit flows of immigrants and visitors without even beginning construction on a border wall.

While building an actual, physical wall was the hallmark of the Trump campaign, this primarily depends on congressional action and funding—which the administration has so far failed to secure.

However, it has slowly but quite deliberately started to restrict and attack legal immigration causing significant negative impacts on tourists and students choosing to come to the U.S., as well as employment-based, family-based, and humanitarian-based immigration.

These policy changes are detailed in the new report “Deconstructing the Invisible Wall” by the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

The report breaks down the administration’s changes to policy and procedures into six broad categories, covering issues from the travel bans and extreme vetting to the growing immigrant benefits backlog and new hurdles to naturalization for foreign-born soldiers.
As the report notes, the administration has already placed additional scrutiny in a variety of employment-based immigration areas, including:

“…nonimmigrant petitions for skilled workers, managers, executives, and others; a dramatic increase in Requests for Evidence (RFEs); the dismantling of rules to facilitate immigrant entrepreneurship; new interview requirements; and proposals to eliminate work authorization for spouses of certain H-1B workers, among many other changes.”