Today, Chief Judge John McConnell of the District of Rhode Island vacated four Department of Homeland Security (DHS) policies in Dorcas v. US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS). USCIS memoranda had frozen nearly all legal immigration benefits—everything from work permits to visa petitions and naturalization—for citizens of 39 countries, primarily affecting people already in the United States. 

I had testified about this ban before the US Senate, calling it one of the largest immigration frauds in American history as it involved taking money from applicants without rendering the services they paid for. Even Sen. John Kennedy (R‑LA) was shocked at the brazen misconduct. I estimated that the agency had received over $1 billion in fees from the over two million applications that it was refusing to process. 

Under Director Joseph Edlow, USCIS has issued a series of policy memoranda that: 

1. halted all asylum adjudications until March 30, 2026, when it restarted them for “non-high-risk countries”; 
2. suspended adjudications on all benefit applications (green cards, work permits, and naturalization) for nationals of 39 countries;
3. ordered re-review of already-approved benefits for those nationals who entered on or after January 20, 2021; and 
4. directed adjudicators to treat an applicant’s country of origin as a “significant negative factor” in discretionary decisions.

The court found that the policies were unlawful for the following reasons. 

First, the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) uses mandatory “shall” language requiring USCIS to adjudicate asylum applications within 180 days, naturalization applications within 120 days, and employment authorization and adjustment of status applications pursuant to specific regulatory timelines. USCIS has no statutory authority to simply stop adjudicating. The court also found that Section 202 of the INA prohibits nationality-based discrimination for green card applicants. 

Second, Judge McConnell found three independent Administrative Procedure Act failures. USCIS provided no rational connection between two crimes committed by Afghan nationals cited in support of the memo and freezing adjudications for 39 countries plus all asylum applications. It also ignored serious reliance interests of people who had built lives, careers, and families in reasonable expectation that their applications would be processed, and its stated national security rationale was pretextual. 

USCIS provided no evidence regarding the national security threats from these countries, which Cato has extensively researched. After meeting with President Trump, then–DHS Secretary Kristi Noem described immigrants as “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” and said “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.” Noem posted, and Trump shared, these comments literally the day before and the day of the policies’ implementation. The judge also noted the internal inconsistency of exempting athletes for the World Cup and Olympics and medical physicians from the hold while claiming national security necessity for everyone else.

Unfortunately, this decision did not consider and leaves in place all the restrictions on visa issuances for applicants outside the United States. Still, half of all legal immigrants (as measured by 2024 flows) are blocked by the State Department’s 75-country visa processing freeze and the presidential proclamation blocking entry for nationals of 39 countries. It also did not consider the recent effort to require legal immigrants inside the United States to leave (and potentially be subject to these policies). 

Moreover, it’s highly likely that the government will appeal the order. Until then, the challengers have achieved a major win over the most anti-legal immigration administration in a century.

On May 26, we submitted comments on a proposed rule by the Department of Labor (DOL) intended to increase the mandatory minimum wage—known as the prevailing wage—for employer-sponsored immigrants and H‑1B nonimmigrants. Our comments were unique in demonstrating that the rule change is unlawful and unnecessary. 

DOL claims that H‑1B and other employer-sponsored foreign workers are paid “below market” wages and that its rule fixes this problem. But the proposed rule only inflates wages to restrict the supply of skilled foreign workers beyond what the law allows and will force existing H‑1B workers to leave the country. H‑1B workers are objectively among the highest paid in America, earning wages in the top 10 percent nationally. It would be disastrous to exclude them.

Background

DOL’s proposed rule: 

• provides no empirical basis for raising the prevailing wage; 
• rejects 80 percent of current wage offers to H‑1B and other skilled foreign workers, even among the highest skill level; 
• forces out hundreds of thousands of H‑1B workers who have lived and worked in the United States under the current system for many years; and
• cuts visa issuances, particularly for researchers, professors, scientists, and workers in health care and universities because these workers are commonly not subject to the cap.

The upshot of reducing the number of H‑1B workers is less business investment, less US job growth, less innovation, and more outsourcing. 

The current prevailing wage is usually calculated using the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) survey, which surveys employers to collect information on employee wages. The law (Immigration and Nationality Act 212(p), 8 U.S.C. 1182(p)) requires DOL to take those survey results and create at least four wage levels for each occupational classification “commensurate with experience, education, and the level of supervision.” Jobs with higher requirements must pay higher wages.

DOL plans to raise the four wage levels from the 17th to 34th percentile for level 1 (entry-level workers), from the 34th to 52nd percentile for level 2, from the 50th to 70th percentile for level 3, and from the 67th to 88th percentile for level 4, the highest wage level for “fully competent” workers. The average H‑1B prevailing wage would rise about $26,000 annually.

As seen below, over 80 percent of H‑1B job offers would be disqualified under the proposed rule, including the vast majority of the highest-skilled workers (level 4). The same is true for, by far, the most common H‑1B occupation: software developers.

DOL’s Rule Is Based on a Statistical Fantasy

DOL never even offers a theoretical basis for an increase in the prevailing wage. The market sets wages based on marginal productivity. If an H‑1B worker is offered less than their productivity and market wage, they can refuse that job offer, take another job, or change employers, which H‑1B workers have done more than 1.1 million times in the United States alone since 2003. DOL does not even argue, let alone establish, that this high rate of H‑1B job change is insufficient to keep the market competitive.[1]

Not only does DOL fail to show that competitive market forces do not apply to employer-sponsored immigrants, DOL’s data show the opposite: that H‑1B workers are paid a $10,191 premium over the current prevailing wage level. If the market were uncompetitive, H‑1B workers would all receive the exact minimum wage. This reflects that H‑1B workers are paid higher wages than US workers in similar roles because they are more productive than those workers. 

DOL never empirically estimates what the wage levels should be. Instead, it simply asserts that the average foreign worker should receive the average wage for the occupational category. The levels are placed arbitrarily at wages necessary to meet the arbitrary target—not based on the wages of workers in similar roles. The statute explicitly rejects the idea of an overall target wage in favor of a wage targeted at each experience-education level.

The Current Prevailing Wage Properly Establishes the Entry-Level Wage

Using the American Community Survey (ACS) five-year sample of 2024, we calculated the median hourly wage for an entry-level worker by looking at the wages of young workers—specifically, the median wage for workers with ages at or below the 1st percentile for ages in the occupation. This is the only group we can be certain is, in fact, “entry-level” without prior experience. Samples of older age groups would be contaminated with at least some experienced workers.

In the top H‑1B occupations, the median entry-level worker earns wages at about the 9th percentile—well below the 17th percentile currently required. When we remove workers without a bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience required for an H‑1B visa, the median entry-level wage percentile rises to the 19th percentile for the top H‑1B occupations. The 19th percentile is slightly above the 17th, but the 17th percentile is within the 95 percent confidence interval for the estimate. There is no basis for changing the prevailing wage methodology for entry-level wages at all.

The Current Prevailing Wage Properly Establishes the Top Wage Level

To estimate the top wage level, we define “fully competent” workers as those with ages in the top third for the occupation who have the highest level of education typically required in that occupation. That’s because, at that point, wages stop rising with more experience. You can see how far DOL’s wage levels are from the median worker.

These experienced workers with the highest education required earn wages in the 70th percentile. For other skilled workers with H‑1B qualifications, the percentiles are the 70th, 66th, and 63rd, depending on the top skill level. While these values are not close to the proposed 88th percentile, they nearly match the currently required 67th percentile. This conclusion is logical. Of course, some workers will make far above the median for experienced workers, but those wages will be based on their individual characteristics—their unique productivity that is not a result of the statutory factors. 

There is no basis for changing the entry or top wage levels, and as the statute sets level 2 and level 3 at equal distances between level 1 and level 4, that means there is no basis for the rule at all.

DOL’s Alternative “Experience Benchmarking” Proposal Is as Problematic as Its Main Proposal

Perhaps sensing that its main methodology is illogical and illegal, DOL separately proposes an alternative methodology for estimating the prevailing wage that is partially based on the ACS. DOL inaccurately calls this method “experience benchmarking,” even though it does not directly estimate relevant work experience. 

This proposal would use a Mincer regression to estimate the ratio of nationwide wages for a specific age–occupation–degree combination (30-year-old software developers with a bachelor’s) to the median wage for the occupation nationwide. It would then multiply that ratio against the OEWS median wage, effectively adjusting the OEWS to account for differences in workers. Only after it sets this new minimum wage for each experience level would DOL create the four wage levels required by statute, based on the estimated “level of supervision” required for the job. The top wage level would take the same ratio and multiply it by the 90th percentile of the OEWS, rather than the median. 

According to the Institute for Progress (IFP), experience benchmarking would disqualify the wages of at least half of recent H‑1B workers using only the level 1 wage, but IFP’s analysis was limited to the level 1 wage (the lowest minimum wage level). Rerunning the IFP analysis assigning level 2 through level 4 wages shows that the DOL experience benchmarking proposal would also exclude over 80 percent of H‑1B workers—nearly as many workers as its main proposal. 

To be fair to IFP, there is ambiguity about exactly when these higher wage levels would apply. The rulemaking states that only level 1 would apply in the permanent labor certification context but not if the worker is an H‑1B worker. H‑1B workers would still have four wage levels. The law (Immigration and Nationality Act 212(n) and (p)) defines wage level as the minimum wage required for the occupation, and it would likely be illegal for DOL to say that the higher wages are the prevailing wages commensurate with the level of supervision but then not require those wages. Regardless, this new method has numerous problems. 

The ACS surveys do not provide sufficient sample sizes to reliably estimate wages for detailed occupations within specific metropolitan areas. 

Even at the national level, our sample only exceeded 100 observations for 23 of the 530 detailed occupational categories. At the subnational level, nearly all the samples are unusable. Using nationwide data, aggregating occupations, or grouping multiple years would each independently violate the statute. DOL knows the samples are insufficient, so it is proposing to use old data, different years, imprecise occupational groupings, and national data to estimate local wage rates for detailed occupations in a specific year—all of which is unlawful and inaccurate. But even after performing all these maneuvers, the error would be so large as to render the estimate unreliable. 

IFP’s estimates are problematic. For one, IFP does not quantify uncertainty. This is particularly important because the IFP’s results rely on the ACS five-year and the OEWS. Both are surveys, each with their own source of sampling variability. IFP never quantifies this variability, so we are unable to evaluate the reliability of their estimates. Moreover, IFP does not evaluate its model for fit. As such, we do not actually know how accurate IFP’s methodology is at predicting actual wages.

DOL arbitrarily and inaccurately sets the wage levels.

DOL’s proposal first estimates the age-education specific wage and then assigns the four wage levels based on level of supervision. The highest wage level is arbitrarily set at the 90th percentile for the occupation. DOL presents no data or argument that the 90th percentile represents the wages of US workers with jobs requiring similar levels of supervision. This arbitrary threshold results in about 16 percent of wages being set above the estimated 100th percentile (the highest wage) for the occupation.[2] 

Part of the problem is that DOL refuses to set any wages below the age-education median, even though workers in jobs requiring the most supervision are precisely those with below-median wages. Even in its main proposal, level 1 wage is set below the median based on this insight, but for experience benchmarking, it arbitrarily decides to exclude all wages below the median and, therefore, disconnects the wages from the level of supervision. 

DOL’s alternative proposal would disconnect prevailing wages from the requirements of the job. 

According to the law, the required wage must be based on the “specific employment” and the “occupational classification”—that is, the type of employment, not the type of worker. Employers won’t be able to know what wage to advertise or offer before they find the precise foreign worker since this proposal works backward from the conclusion of the recruitment process. Economic theory does not support an age-education–based wage system. In a market, wages are based on productivity, which will be based on the type of work performed, not the résumé of the worker. 

Age is an unreliable proxy for relevant experience for H‑1B and other foreign workers. 

By design, the immigration system delays the entry of foreign workers into the US labor market. Immigrants graduate later, and then the immigration requirements delay their entry into and advancement in the labor market, resulting in less experience at any given age than other US workers. Indeed, noncitizens are much more likely to stay in school after the Mincer equation assumes that their work experience started, overstating their work experience. During a person’s early career, ACS data suggest that each year of delayed entry into the labor market reduces H‑1B wages by between $3,000 and $5,000, depending on the type of worker.

Using ACS data, we can see that in top H‑1B fields, noncitizens earn lower wages than individuals in the same area with the same educational characteristics controlling for age but higher wages controlling for time spent in the United States—suggesting that age is not the best proxy for experience for foreign workers. Noncitizen workers enter the US labor market at entry-level wages, but because they are more productive than the average entry-level worker, those entry-level wages are much higher than the entry-level wage for US workers—exactly what Congress intended. Age is not a defensible basis for estimating relevant experience for new H‑1B workers.

The rulemaking contradicts congressional intent.

In 2002, DOL proposed codifying the OEWS prevailing wages with two wage levels. This was heavily contested by those who thought only the average wage should be used. Congress intervened in 2004 to mandate that DOL expand that division to two additional wage levels. DOL stated at the time that “evaluation of these comments is rendered unnecessary by enactment of the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2005.” It is impossible to assert 22 years later that the very provision through which Congress intended to ratify the existing wage structure and expand it to benefit employers requires DOL to impose a wage structure that bans most job offers. DOL can’t disregard what Congress understood the technical term “wage levels” to mean in 2005. 

Conclusion

The rule rests on no identified market failure. DOL’s own data show that H‑1B workers receive wages averaging $10,191 above the current prevailing wage—evidence that competitive market forces are already working as intended, not evidence that the floor must be raised. The rule would disqualify over 80 percent of current wage offers without producing even the average wage DOL claims is appropriate. 

The alternative proposal would also exclude over 80 percent of wage offers, and its procedures set wages at levels no comparable US workers are paid. DOL has offered the regulated community an arbitrary benchmark, reverse-engineered percentiles, and a self-defeating methodology in place of the reasoned analysis the statute requires and the Administrative Procedure Act demands. The current prevailing wage methodology, grounded in decades of administrative experience and confirmed by independent empirical analysis, should be retained. 

The Supreme Court is soon expected to rule on the future of birthright citizenship in Trump v. Barbara. If the Court rules in favor of the Trump administration, birthright citizenship will be restricted. Not only is birthright citizenship enshrined in the United States Constitution by the 14th Amendment, but it has also greatly benefited the United States economy. 

A new peer-reviewed study in the Journal on Migration and Human Security, authored by researchers at Princeton University, Cornell University, and Notre Dame University, conservatively estimates the economic impact of birthright citizens’ incomes to be $7.7 trillion in 2024 USD. This means that the United States would be leaving trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk by restricting access to United States citizenship.

The president’s executive order on birthright citizenship not only bars citizenship to the children of unauthorized immigrants, but also to the children of parents on work (H‑1B, O‑1, etc.) and study-based visas (F‑1, M‑1, J‑1, etc.). Even without birthright citizenship, these children may eventually be eligible for US citizenship through other pathways, but granting these children United States citizenship at birth minimizes needless government red tape and boosts the economic productivity of children of immigrants and their parents by encouraging them to invest in their education and skills.

A child who is born a US citizen is a child who is incentivized to adopt American culture from birth. As United States citizens, they know they can live their entire lives in this country and make full use of American institutions. Birthright citizens are incentivized to invest in their human capital—to focus on their studies and to develop skills that will make them economically productive, tax-paying adults. 

If, instead, children of immigrants are born with only the citizenship of their parents’ country of origin, they will sense the risk that any investment in skills valuable to the US economy may be wasted if they are forced to leave. While some skills are transferable across economies, some are country-specific (e.g., language) or have lower returns abroad. Rather than focusing on their studies and fully embracing American culture, children of immigrants denied birthright citizenship may focus their energies on less productive activities. Why should they invest in their human capital if they are uncertain about their future in this country? 

Similarly, the parents of these children are incentivized to assimilate into the United States when their children are granted birthright citizenship. Even if the parents of birthright citizens do not gain a pathway to citizenship for themselves, they will be grateful for the opportunities United States citizenship provides their children. Parents will do everything they can to allow their children to succeed in this country, such as joining parent-teacher associations and encouraging their children to speak English and study for high-earning careers.

The value of granting citizenship to children of immigrants at birth is not speculative. Prior research by economists in the Journal of Law and Economics found that after reforms to its nationality law, the parents of birthright citizens in Germany were more likely to adopt their host country’s language and interact more with the local community. Birthright citizenship in the United States likewise promotes loyalty and assimilation from its beneficiaries and their families.

Restricting birthright citizenship would, instead of promoting civic-minded, economically productive new Americans, create an underclass of noncitizens who, even if eventually eligible for United States citizenship through other means, could be harmed by exclusion from public life during their formative years. Youth is when people form strong bonds with their communities and the nation and when key decisions are made about the formation of human capital, such as investments in skills. 

The Journal on Migration and Human Security study uses established econometric methods to estimate the economic impact of birthright citizens’ incomes between 1975 and 2074. The study relies on identifying the children of two unauthorized or temporary visa parents in the United States Census’ American Community Survey and supplementary data products. 

Since the study estimates the effect of birthright citizens who have two unauthorized or temporary visa parents, it underestimates the economic impact of birthright citizenship. It does not count the children born to mixed-status households. Nor does the study account for previous beneficiaries of birthright citizenship who emigrated, died, or were otherwise not accounted for in the latest census data. It measures incomes, so it does not account for the value of goods, inventions, businesses, and other economic value created by birthright citizens. For these reasons, the estimated $7.7 trillion economic impact, measured by birthright citizens’ income, is a conservative calculation.

Table 1 presents the number of birthright citizenship beneficiaries by state/​region of residence, and over time. Among current working-age beneficiaries, those born between 1960 and 2009, a majority live in the Western United States, with approximately 40 percent of them residing in California and an additional 18 percent in Texas. The geographical distribution of beneficiaries is expected to change. The number of working-age beneficiaries living in the American South and Midwest will more than double soon. These prime-age workers will help rustbelt cities turn around demographic decline in the Midwest and further grow metropolises in the South.

The labor force created by birthright citizenship is, and is expected to remain, predominantly skilled. The study estimates that approximately 69 percent of birthright citizens work or will work in occupations that require some college, and 14 percent of those employed in skilled occupations are estimated to be working in the healthcare industry. Birthright citizenship not only provides the United States with a boost to its labor force but also a boost to its skilled labor force. Even many beneficiaries employed in occupations not requiring a college education work in essential services that increase the productivity of the US workforce.

The economic contribution of birthright citizens is only expected to grow over time. Between 1975 and 1979, birthright citizens are estimated to have contributed approximately $2 billion in 2024 USD to the United States economy. Between 2025 and 2029, the economic impact of birthright citizens as measured by income is estimated at $438 billion in 2024 USD; a staggering 200-fold increase. The increase in economic impact is partly driven by a growing population of working-age birthright citizens, but also by improvements in education and skills. The economic impact of birthright citizenship beneficiaries is only expected to increase as birthright beneficiaries continue to invest in their human capital.

As my colleague David Bier has previously noted, second-generation Americans as a group have the greatest fiscal upside: at any given age, they make the highest net contribution to all levels of government. Birthright beneficiaries contribute to the United States economy, work in skilled and needed professions, revitalize cities, create businesses that employ United States citizens, and generate more than their fair share of taxes. 

Birthright citizenship has been a great economic benefit to the United States. Even if the Supreme Court rules that the federal government can restrict birthright citizenship, it would be an economically disastrous public policy decision that would leave the United States poorer. America should preserve its highly successful policy of birthright citizenship.

In 1921 and 1924, Congress set nationality-based quotas for immigration. 

Recent research looks at the impact 

on the intergenerational mobility of US-born men.… [The authors use] county-level measure[s] of exposure to the quotas … [and] data from the 1900, 1920, and 1940 US censuses and the Census Tree project … to link US-born sons to their adult outcomes and trace family background, geographic location, and occupational status over time.

Outcomes differed by race:

[T]he quotas slowed intergenerational mobility among US-born white men.… For [them] the negative effects of the quotas were smaller for sons of wealthier fathers.… US-born white men from more exposed counties [also] earned substantially lower wages in adulthood. 

Alternatively,

[f]or black men, quota exposure was associated with increased intergenerational mobility, although [the results] cannot rule out the possibility of no effect.… [T]he quotas may have reduced competition for lower-skilled urban jobs, modestly improving occupational prospects for black men.

The most likely explanation for the quotas’ effects

is that immigrants complement native workers by raising their productivity and enabling them to specialize in higher-quality tasks.… [Indeed,] the negative mobility effects were nearly twice as large for white men living in counties with more reliance on non-English-speaking immigrant workers.

Cross-posted from Substack.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Friday that it will cease granting green card applications except in extraordinary circumstances. In short, DHS grants green cards when a qualified immigrant who is inside the United States applies to adjust their status to legal permanent residence. Now, every legal immigrant must leave the country—that is, self-deport—even if they are qualified for a green card and even if leaving would disqualify them. 

The policy is a radical expansion of DHS’s “quiet quitting” on legal immigration that has been going on for months. As I previously detailed, DHS—or, more precisely, its component known as US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS)—has slashed green card approvals in half over the last year. This drop came primarily from not processing applications. Now USCIS’s new memorandum details a plan for mass denials. USCIS has gone from the “quiet-quit” to walking out on 1.2 million green card applicants.

“From now on, an alien who is in the US temporarily and wants a Green Card must return to their home country to apply, except in extraordinary circumstances,” USCIS states. It calls adjustment of status inside the United States an “extraordinary form of relief.” The idea that this is an extraordinary form of relief is entirely baseless. This language and framing are not in the statute, section 245 of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), which has existed for decades. The law grants the authority to do it, which every administration has faithfully done according to the intent of Congress, until this one. 

As the figure below shows, most legal immigrants—56 percent—since 1980 adjusted status inside the United States. In no sense is this a policy reserved for extraordinary situations. The reason it has expanded so greatly over its existence is because more people come to the United States temporarily. More people coming means more opportunities for those people to apply to adjust. 

How USCIS (mis)interprets the law.

The USCIS claims that it is contrary to congressional intent to have so many temporary residents applying to adjust to permanent residence. This is wrong. In 1952, Congress created the adjustment of status provision because it was causing so much hardship to Americans and their families to have to leave the United States for the sole purpose of getting a visa to come right back. It was an illogical, complicated, and expensive process with no upside. Since then, Congress has repeatedly attempted to expand the use of the adjustment of status. 

USCIS states, “Nonimmigrants, like students, temporary workers, or people on tourist visas, come to the US for a short time and for a specific purpose. Our system is designed for them to leave when their visit is over.” But this ignores the realities of life. People come as students, and then they get a permanent job offer. People come to visit friends, and then they get a marriage proposal. People come for whatever reason, and their country is taken over by someone who will persecute them. 

The law explicitly envisions these things happening. The K‑1 visa was designed for fiancé(e)s of US citizens to come temporarily for the purpose of getting married. The H‑1B and L‑1 skilled work visas explicitly permit someone to have “dual intent”—both to come temporarily for work and to pursue a green card at the same time. Employment-based immigrants are explicitly entitled to change jobs based on a long-pending adjustment of status application. Congress clearly expected that many applicants would be applying for adjustment of status, and that backlogs would likely continue.

Who is affected by ending the adjustment of status?

The memo doesn’t explicitly cover asylees and Cuban Adjustment Act cases because it only discusses adjustment of status under one particular section of the law, but it notes that only a few categories—like refugees admitted abroad—have mandatory adjustment of status processing guarantees in law and would be exempt from the logic of the memo (i.e., that adjustment of status is discretionary and disfavored). Therefore, there is reason to believe that the same policy could eventually be used for Cubans and asylees, even though there is no way for them to be granted an immigrant visa. The only way to receive permanent residence is through adjustment of status. As the figure above shows, USCIS has stopped processing these humanitarian categories anyway.

The upshot of USCIS’s bizarre new policy is that the vast majority of the 1.2 million backlogged legal immigrants with pending green card applications for legal permanent residence will have to self-deport. This includes spouses of US citizens and legal permanent residents, as well as their minor children. It includes skilled H‑1B and L‑1 workers who have often waited for over a decade or more for green cards, along with their spouses and minor children.

Further implications: 

• Forcing green card applicants to leave will render many green card applicants’ ineligible because, when they leave the United States, they will trigger the 3- or 10-year bars on receiving an immigrant visa based on accrual of unlawful presence.
• It may cost them their jobs and, therefore, their sponsorship if visa delays prevent them from returning quickly (which is guaranteed to happen based on the flood of new applications). 
• It will cause them to be subject to the Trump administration’s 75-country immigrant visa suspension and 40-country travel ban (92 total countries)—or half the immigrant visa flow. 
• It will cause them to forfeit hundreds of millions in application fees. 
• It will force them to apply at consulates where the doctrine of consular nonreviewability protects any denial from judicial review, and there is no administrative appeals process. 
• When people are denied, if their underlying status has expired, they will be eligible for arrest and deportation—juicing ICE’s deportation machine. 

This policy is illogical and will harm Americans, their employees, employers, and family members. It will drive talented people to other countries and make America a less competitive place for business. 

America is celebrating its 250th anniversary, but President Trump has forgotten the Constitution. The Bank Secrecy Act is one of the biggest attacks on the Fourth Amendment, and yet he has chosen to expand it with his latest executive order. 

We’ve seen this playbook before. The war on drugs and the war on terror were used to create expansive surveillance regimes. Now it seems to be the war on immigration. 

When the original executive order leaked, David Bier and I both warned that forcing banks to collect citizenship information would be a mistake. Despite claims from Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent that he doesn’t read our work, it seems our warning didn’t go unheard because the new executive order takes a slightly different path.

Rather than immediately deputize banks as immigration officers, President Trump ordered the Department of the Treasury to advise banks of the risks of serving undocumented immigrants. That would be small on its own, but then President Trump goes further, saying banks need to start reporting people they suspect of being in the country illegally or of engaging in other illegal activity. This reporting would be done through suspicious activity reports (SARs) under the Bank Secrecy Act.

Yet, as if this were not enough, President Trump also created another new avenue for debanking. The executive order instructs the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) to warn all banks that undocumented immigrants pose a credit risk because of their “potential deportation.” In other words, he is saying that anyone suspected of being undocumented should be debanked. 

If the administration genuinely wants a freer, fairer financial system, the answer isn’t more surveillance dressed up as due diligence. It’s reforming the Bank Secrecy Act and getting regulators out of micromanaging banks.

The good news is that Congress can act. Representative Ritchie Torres (D‑NY) introduced the Financial Access Protection Act earlier this year to stop financial surveillance from expanding to citizenship checks. And Representative John Rose (R‑TN) has introduced the Bank Privacy Reform Act to rein in the Bank Secrecy Act. 

As America celebrates its 250th anniversary, Congress should remember that one of its jobs is to be a check on the executive branch’s power.

You can find my written testimony here. The video below gives my prepared remarks:

Chairman McClintock, Ranking Member Jayapal, and distinguished members of the subcommittee, thank you for the opportunity to testify.

For half a century, the Cato Institute’s research has shown that people—whatever their ancestry, background, or birthplace—can thrive in a free society.

Our research finds immigrants—legal and illegal—work at higher rates, generate more income and taxes, and have reduced the national debt by $14.5 trillion over the last 30 years.

Immigrants improve public safety by reducing violent crime rates, meaning that you are less likely to be a victim.

Fairfax highlights this reality. About half the county’s residents are immigrants or children of immigrants.

Its household income is double the national average, and its murder rate is less than half the average.

If illegal immigrants in Fairfax were their own city, they’d have a lower homicide rate than 90 percent of America’s largest cities and the country overall.

Nationwide, illegal immigrants are half as likely to commit crimes that land them in prison as US-born Americans.

Despite all this, Congress refuses to allow most would-be immigrants to come legally, which leads to illegal immigration.

Just 3% of applicants seeking legal permanent resident status were approved in 2024.

That was before the current administration banned a majority of the legal immigrants previously allowed to come, including half of all spouses of US citizens.

It has cut legal immigration twice as much as illegal immigration.

At the same time, it terminated legal status for over 2 million immigrants who were already here, creating four times as many new illegal immigrants as it has deported.

America’s cities must manage the fallout from this sabotaged system. Many have decided not to volunteer their cops, jails, and resources to DHS.

DHS doesn’t like that, but under our Constitution, cities and states don’t take orders from the feds.

And thank James Madison for that because we all know we wouldn’t want the Feds to dictate environmental policy, gun policy, or COVID policy to the states.

If you want Fairfax to change its policy, you must convince them.

The first step would be to give up the mass deportation dream.

About one in five Fairfax residents is someone who could be deported or who lives with them.

It would destroy neighborhoods, rip Americans from their spouses, parents, friends, families, customers, employees, employers, nurses, nannies, and teachers.

Let me be clear: Noncitizens who harm Americans should be arrested, convicted, and deported.

I think cities can help with that, but deportation is DHS’s job.

Indeed, you all passed the Laken Riley Act in 2025 to require DHS to immediately take custody of people charged with violence or theft.

Yet DHS is ignoring that law. It has deprioritized threats to focus on easy targets.

They aren’t tracking down serious criminal fugitives like the monster who killed Stephanie Minter.

Instead, DHS agents are racially profiling Americans at Home Depots, arresting spouses of US citizens at green card interviews, beating the parents of US Marines, and dragging legal immigrant nursing mothers from their homes without warrants.

Only 6% of ICE arrests have a violent criminal conviction. ICE has arrested 150,000 people who have no criminal convictions or even charges.

And we know it’s not because they got everyone with a serious record. Stephanie’s case and many others prove it.

It’s because they care about, as one ICE agent put it, “quantity over quality.”

How many Stephanies will get murdered before DHS follows the law and prioritizes serious criminals?

How many?

Most Americans don’t want to wait for the answer. They want to pause the mass deportation fantasy and focus on protecting Americans.

That’s the only policy that will defend our safety, prosperity, and freedom.

Thank you.

You can watch the entire hearing here. A few highlights below. I will say that Republicans did raise some good points, but their main criticism of the commonwealth’s attorney for Fairfax didn’t match the facts of the cases discussed.