Senators Tom Cotton (R‑AR) and David Perdue (R‑GA) are promoting their legislation titled “the RAISE Act” at the White House today. It would reduce immigration by 50 percent over 10 years by eliminating several categories of legal immigration. The legislation would reduce the per capita rate of immigration to the lowest amount since just after the Great Depression. Immigration would fall to a rate three times less than the historical average and 11 times less than the historical high.

Yet the senators claim that the RAISE Act would “restor[e] legal immigration levels to their historical norms.” This statement is so misleading that it borders on outright deception. The “level” is just the absolute number of immigrants each year. But this treats the number of immigrants in 1900 the same as the number of immigrants in 2017, despite the fact that the U.S. population quadrupled during that time. You have to control for the size of the country. It’s like saying a million immigrants to China is the same as a million immigrants to Estonia—despite the fact that China is 1,000 times more populous.

The figure below provides the true picture of the amount of immigration to the United States: the number of new legal permanent residents divided by the number of people in the United States (the per capita immigration rate). From 1820 to 2017, the immigration rate averaged 0.45 percent of the population annually. In 2017, that rate was 0.32 percent. In other words: 28 percent below the average historical rate. If the United States were to adopt the “historical norm,” it would need to raise immigration quotas by about the amount that RAISE lowers them: 411,000. By contrast, under the senators’ proposal, immigration would fall to 0.14 percent—more than three times less than the “historical norm.”

The figure below graphs the annual legal immigration rate from 1820—the first year that the U.S. recorded immigrant arrivals—to 2017. It assumes that the RAISE Act will actually be implemented in 2018 and uses the Census population projections to forecast the impact of the legislation through 2030. As it shows, the rate of immigration would dramatically drop in the first year and continue to fall until it reached a level not seen since just after World War II and far below the tradition of immigration prior to the progressive movement in the 1920s.

U.S. Per Capita Immigration Rates and Projected Rates Under the RAISE Act, 1820–2030

Sources: 1820–2017: Department of Homeland Security; 2018–2030: Tom Cotton and Census Bureau (Census population figures reduced by immigrants denied under RAISE Act minus the number who would’ve emigrated from the U.S. after initial entry in any case, using Borjas; the rate of decline in immigration for 2028–2030 based on Cotton’s projections for 2018–2027)

Below is a table of the immigration rates for every year from 1820 to 2030. If the RAISE Act becomes law, 2030 would have the lowest rate of immigration since 1954, and of the 30 years out of 211 with lower rates, 18 of them occurred during the Great Depression or World Wars, and seven were in the 1820s before steam power transformed the Atlantic crossing. Are these periods what the senators consider normal?

Immigration Rates Ranked Lowest to Highest