President Joe Biden rescinded Donald Trump’s president proclamation banning new immigrant visas for most new legal permanent residents coming from abroad. Trump justified the ban based on old, disproven economic protectionist arguments. He claimed immigrants would take jobs. During his campaign and in this proclamation, President Biden rejected this idea. Yet incongruously, he’s keeping an identical ban on temporary work visa holders.

The State Department issued nearly 290,000 fewer immigrant visas in the categories that the ban targeted during the year that it was in effect. If they are not from a country on which Biden has imposed a countrywide entry ban—mostly Europe, South Africa, Brazil, China, and Iran—these immigrants will now be able to immigrate to the United States. This is great news for them and for the Americans with whom they plan to associate.

Altogether, the banned categories saw a 90 percent decline in visa issuances over the last year. The family‐​sponsored categories saw an average decline of 94 percent, while employees of U.S. businesses were least affected (partly due to a favorable court decision that exempted employees of members of the National Association of Manufacturers and the Chamber of Commerce). 83 percent of the banned immigrants were family members of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents.

Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens were exempt from the ban, but they also saw a decline in the number of visas issued due to the travel restrictions. According to a government filing this month, the State Department had nearly 473,000 documentarily qualified family‐​based immigrant visa applicants—presumably some of these cases will ultimately turn into denials, but this will be a huge undertaking for the consulates to process.

Four ideas to help with this backlog (mostly borrowed from our one‐​time Cato author David Kubat):

1. The government should use “parole‐​in‐​place” authority to waive the requirement to travel to consulate abroad for certain applicants who would otherwise be eligible to adjust in the United States if not for the fact that they initially entered without inspection (illegally).
2. It should adjudicate applications for waivers on grounds of inadmissibility before conducting the interview to save time and streamline the process. Under the current process, the State Department waits until after they’ve taken your fingerprints, medical evaluation, and other documents and then get denied. Only then do you restart the many months‐​long process of trying again.
3. It should allow for remote or virtual interviews to speed the interview process. Remote immigration court hearings are already happening.
4. It should waive as many interviews as possible for applicants with no red flags and a history of travel to the United States.

As Figure 1 shows, the number of immigrant visas had already declined by more than a quarter before the pandemic. This means that even without the visa bans, the new administration will have to go further to rescind the numerous restrictions on legal immigration that led to that decline.

Of course, the other major visa ban—on the most common nonimmigrant work visa categories for skilled and seasonal nonagricultural workers—is still in effect. President Biden states in his order revoking the immigrant visa ban, “The suspension of entry…. does not advance the interests of the United States. To the contrary, it harms the United States including…. industries in the United States that utilize talent from around the world.” These lines apply just as much to the nonimmigrant visa ban, yet Biden has chosen to keep it.

The nonimmigrant visa ban and immigrant visa backlog are just two of the numerous issues that Biden will have to address to get the legal immigration system back to what it was pre‐​Trump. There are also country‐​specific entry bans on Europe, South Africa, Brazil, China, and Iran that lack any health basis. The public charge rule to keep out low‐​income immigrants is also still in force. USCIS has not reinstated its prior deference memo and so is still relitigating past approved petitions and applications in order to increase denials. The immigration forms still contain the bogus, vague, time‐​consuming, and expensive “extreme vetting” questions based on a faulty reading of the data on vetting failures. At the border, Border Patrol is still “expelling” asylum seekers under a political CDC order. The immigration courts and asylum process generally is still in chaos.

With this action, the president makes his first real attempt to reinstate the system to how it once was, but he’s not even 10 percent of the way there. Still, it’s a great first step.

President Biden endorsed the U.S. Citizenship Act last week that would create a path to citizenship for most noncriminal illegal immigrants in the United States. Republicans were quick to criticize the bill’s lack of money for border security. But more funds for the border bureaucracy won’t stop illegal immigration. Sadly, however, the better solution—more guest workers—also didn’t make the cut.

The failure to include guest workers violates a campaign promise by Biden. His immigration platform states that his proposed legislation would “expand opportunities for individuals seeking temporary worker visas or another form of legal status for which they may qualify to be able to come to the U.S.” Yet the U.S. Citizenship Act doesn’t address this issue at all.

The relationship between more Mexican guest workers and less illegal immigration from Mexico is as clear as any long‐​term immigration trend in recent American history. In the 1950s and 1960s, the Bracero program funneled hundreds of thousands of Mexican workers into the legal system to U.S. farms every year, and illegal immigration virtually disappeared.

But in 1965, Democrats terminated the Bracero program after unions complained about it, citing now‐​disproven claims that doing so would increase farm wages. By 1970, illegal immigration had spiked again, and many Republicans urged the resurrection of the Bracero program. Indeed, former‐​border state governor Ronald Reagan and presidential candidate repeatedly argued for an open‐​door policy with Mexico.

Once elected, Reagan tried to get more guest workers through Congress, but ultimately, Democrats enacted only an amnesty for long‐​term illegal residents alongside a temporary program that allowed former farm workers to stay or reenter the United States at the southern border and obtain permanent residence. Cross border illegal traffic did fall but then continued at still‐​high, albeit lower rates.

In the 1990s, ramping up the Border Patrol became a bipartisan goal. But without a guest worker program, it had a perverse effect. It became so expensive to cross that anyone who made it in never left, building permanent, albeit illegal, lives here. This caused the illegal population to balloon even as crossings declined.

But then something interesting happened. Permanent lives meant most illegal workers switched to permanent, year‐​round jobs, so suddenly, employers faced a shortage of workers for temporary or seasonal positions. With declining workers coming across the border, employers urged reforms to the seasonal guest worker programs—H-2A for agriculture and H-2B for others—that would make those visas more widely available.

In a few years, farmers, landscapers, and other seasonal employers were recruiting tens and then hundreds of thousands of legal H-2A and H-2B guest workers from Mexico, and crossings again began to fall even further and faster. Just before the pandemic, illegal immigration had hit a sustained low rate last seen under the Bracero program in the 1960s.

Despite their success, the H-2 programs have a major shortcoming: they are only for seasonal or temporary jobs. Permanent, year‐​round positions don’t qualify, so employers returned to workers crossing the border. With Mexicans waiting for visas, the new wave of border crossers were from Central America. Rather than evade detection, they crossed, requested asylum, were released, and ultimately received work permits while they waited for a final decision.

The result is hundreds of thousands of Central Americans legally working in the United States in year‐​round jobs as they waited for asylum hearings. But that result came at huge costs to them, their families, and the government. They have to travel illegally through Mexico over a thousand miles, get arrested, and caged often in deplorable conditions just to fill open positions that employers are hiring for.

A better idea would be to allow them to obtain visas to work in year‐​round jobs in the United States and let them fly to the United States. Yet the Biden bill not only lacks this reform. It doesn’t do anything to increase temporary workers at all from anywhere. That’s a huge error with profound long‐​term effects. Biden’s original immigration platform—on which campaigned—explicitly called for more guest workers for Central America. He should return to that plan.

President Biden and Democrats in Congress unveiled the U.S. Citizenship Act last week. The 353-page bill is more modest than the sweeping 1,000-page comprehensive bill that passed the Senate in 2013, but it nonetheless proposes some significant changes in the operation of the U.S. legal system. Given that Democrats never bothered to try to get their support, even moderate Republicans universally denounced the effort as a partisan messaging bill, and so it has almost no chance of becoming law.

But the fact is that Congress has already given President Biden authorities to carry out much of the agenda on his own without the bill becoming law. The Supreme Court has unfortunately recognized that Congress has the constitutional authority to delegate to the president broad powers on immigration, and it has. Presidents (especially but certainly not exclusively the last one) have usually used their powers to restrict immigration and interpret the laws restrictively. But this is entirely a policy choice.

As I and my coauthors explained last year in Deregulating Immigration: A Blueprint for Agency Action, President Biden has the ability not just to reverse Trump’s restrictive regulations, but many other restrictions that predate him as well. While it is regrettable that Congress passes ambiguous laws authorizing enormous executive discretion, the goal (as attorney Angelo Paparelli and I argue) should be to interpret these statutes in favor of the liberty of immigrants and the Americans with whom they associate, not as restrictively as possible.

Certainly, a successor could eventually reverse many of the actions that Biden takes, but as President Trump’s term in office showed, that is much easier said than done, and many are simply irreversible for the immigrants who already benefited from them. Certain immigration documents cannot simply be revoked by another administration on a whim. Even if they could be reversed, these actions would have great benefit in the meantime.

President Biden is uniquely positioned to improve the immigration system. While he should work on bipartisan legislation to update the laws and make them unambiguously open to immigration, he should not make the mistake that President Obama made by spending the majority of his term acting as if he is required to adopt the worst possible interpretations and worst applications of the current laws.

National conservatives have latched onto the idea that cutting immigration will increase wages despite all of the evidence to the contrary. One of the pieces of evidence they cite most is a 2016 article in the Wall Street Journal that states that wages for construction and farm occupations in Arizona went up by 10 percent and 15 percent, respectively, in the 4 years after Arizona passed its immigration enforcement law SB1070 in 2010. Both Oren Cass and Christopher Caldwell use this data point.

The only problem is those claims about wages are not true. Wages did not rise in Arizona after the passage of SB1070. This blog post uses data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) and different methods to investigate whether wages for construction and farm workers rose in Arizona after the passage of SB1070. In every instance, wages did not rise in Arizona after that state passed immigration enforcement laws in 2007 and 2010. Just as economic theory would predict, there was no absolute rise in wages after Arizona cracked down on illegal immigration.

Senators Romney (R-UT) and Cotton (R-AR) announced that they intend to introduce a bill to raise the national minimum wage and mandate E-Verify for all new hires in the United States. Immigration restrictionists have tried to use minimum wages to reduce immigration for more than a century. Combining a high minimum wage with E-Verify is not as surprising as it first seems. Restrictionists assume that higher minimum wages will increase unemployment for lower-skilled workers, which it will, and that will mostly force lower skilled immigrant workers out of the country entirely.

E-Verify is an electronic eligibility for employment verification system that checks identities of newly hired workers against government records to guarantee that they are legally employable. Since 1986, illegal immigrants have not been legally allowed to work in the United States. E-Verify is based off a Reagan-era employment verification form called the I-9. After collecting I-9 forms from employees, the employer enters the worker’s information into a government website. The system then compares these data with information held in Social Security Administration (SSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases. SSA checks the validity of the Social Security number while DHS checks immigration status.

Employers are supposed to fire new employees if E-Verify flags them as being in the United States illegally. In this way, E-Verify is supposed to turn off the jobs magnet that attracts illegal immigrants in the first place. Proponents of the system, such as Sens. Romney and Cotton, believe that illegal immigration would decline and many would return home without that economic incentive to be here. There are many reasons why E-Verify won’t work as they intend.

Cato released my new policy analysis about espionage and immigration. It is the culmination of many months worth of original research to meticulously document and quantify every espionage and espionage‐​related criminal conviction in the United States from 1990–2019 – including those convicted of economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, and other related commercial crimes. Although my goal was to find each one, I undoubtedly missed a few, but the sample provided here is still large enough for analysis. Espionage is a serious issue that impacts American national security and that frequently infringes upon the property rights of Americans. Countering this threat in an efficient manner is an important job of the government. The information in my analysis will help the government formulate more efficient counter espionage policies, should it wish to do so.

My research is an advancement over earlier databases of espionage that include only those spies who targeted the U.S. government. However, modern concerns about espionage from China are more focused on theft of commercial secrets as part of an “economic blitzkrieg,” according to former attorney general Bill Barr. My analysis also focuses on spies who committed their crimes on U.S. soil, so it doesn’t include hacks from abroad or other espionage that occurred overseas. My analysis also has information about the specific criminal violations, countries of benefit, countries of origin, immigration statuses, ethnicity, and other information about the spies that can be downloaded here.

My analysis identified 1,485 spies on American soil who, from 1990 through the end of 2019, conducted espionage against the U.S. government or commercial espionage against private organizations and individuals. Of those, 890 were foreign‐​born, 583 were native‐​born Americans, and 12 had unknown origins. The chance that a native‐​born American committed espionage and was identified was about 1 in 13.1 million per year from 1990 to 2019. The annual chance that a foreign‐​born person in the United States committed espionage and was discovered was about 1 in 2.2 million. The government was the victim in 83.3 percent of espionage cases, firms were the victims of commercial espionage in 16.3 percent of the cases, and hospitals and universities were the victims of espionage in 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent of the cases, respectively.

About 54.9 percent of all the people convicted had violated the Arms Export Control Act (AECA), a law that makes it illegal to export arms, ammunition, and other defense articles without a permit. Many of the people convicted of AECA violations were probably not spies. However, some of the people convicted of AECA violations were almost certainly spies, such as Kan Chen, John Reece Roth, and Mozaffar Khazaee. Chen exported to attempted to export 180 export‐​controlled military items to China. Roth exported data on specialized plasma technology for use in drones that he had developed under a U.S. Air Force contract while he was a professor at the University of Tennessee. Khazaee, an Iranian‐​born U.S. citizen, attempted to export to Iran proprietary material about military jet engines and the U.S. Air Force’s F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program that he had illegally gathered from his employer.

The cases of Chen, Roth, and Khazaee were the exceptions as most of the AECA violators likely benefited criminal organizations and drug cartels in Latin America as well as insurgents in the Middle East, South America, and elsewhere. Unfortunately, the specific beneficiaries aren’t always known in these cases so I included them all lest I be accused of cherry picking. After all, it’s better to error on the side of overestimating the threat of espionage in this type of novel analysis than underestimating it. The other criminal violations such as economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, being an unregistered agent of a foreign government, or being convicted of false statements, tax fraud and visa fraud in the course of an anti‐​espionage investigation, and other violations were all easier to identify.

There are three main reasons why I conducted this research. The first is that many future policy issues will be in response to the United States’ growing geopolitical conflict with China based on the numerous bills introduced, administrative actions, and statements by political appointees. Second, there is almost no data on estimated espionage levels. The arguments on both sides rely almost entirely on scary anecdotes. Policy making by data is almost always bad, but generally better than policy making by anecdote. One hope is that my research will improve the policy debate. Third, I want to understand reality. Protecting national security is a good reason to impose targeted immigration restrictions if potential security benefits are greater than the potential costs, reasonably estimated. Since nobody had done that work yet, the task fell to me.

One surprising finding is that many of the cases have no clear nexus to national security. They are crimes, to be sure, but the national security component is missing from many of them. When it comes to Chinese‐​born spies prosecuted, they stole commercial secrets or intellectual property in two‐​thirds of the cases and they were rarely related to national security. For instance, Chinese immigrants Li Chen and Yu Zhou conspired to steal research as part of their jobs as pediatric cancer researchers. They wanted to establish a firm in China. Xiaorong You, a Chinese immigrant, was indicted for stealing a chemical formula for a new type of coating for the inside of Coca‐​Cola cans that was intended to better preserve flavor. Chinese‐​born Xudong “William” Yao was convicted of stealing secrets related to operating train locomotives. James Patrick Lewis, a native‐​born American professor at West Virginia University, was convicted of fraud because he lied about his involvement with a Chinese program that may be tied to economic espionage. That’s just a small selection of the individuals involved, but many of them are similar and have no national security aspect.

The growing geopolitical conflict with China is going to impact many American policies. Hopefully, this Cato analysis will inform the debate and give policy makers the tools to craft better laws and regulations that address actual problems rather than scary non‐​representative anecdotes.

President Biden issued an executive order providing for a number of changes to the U.S. refugee program that President Trump had gutted during his four years in office. One important change follows a recommendation from Cato’s compilation of 30 executive actions to restore legal immigration (and many other times): private refugee sponsorship. The president states:

To meet the challenges of restoring and expanding USRAP, the United States must innovate, including by effectively employing technology and capitalizing on community and private sponsorship of refugees, while continuing to partner with resettlement agencies for reception and placement.

As I’ve explained before, private sponsorship has been highly successful in Canada for decades and following the United Nations’ call for more such programs at least seven other countries have created some version of private sponsorship since 2014. The president can implement a privately funded refugee program with his existing authority under the Refugee Act of 1980, which already requires him to consider available private funds before setting the refugee target.

While this is an extremely positive development, the order provides no specifics on implementation. The State Department had previously committed to creating a private sponsorship program under the Obama administration in 2016, so hopefully the department already has some particulars worked out.

I have outlined four models under which private individuals or community groups could select refugees for resettlement under a private sponsorship program. The Biden administration could implement all of them simultaneously.

1. Allow the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to recommend certain refugees referred for resettlement for private sponsorship.
2. Allow private sponsors to choose from a pool of refugees referred for resettlement under the existing system.
3. Expand existing Priority 3 (P-3) family sponsorship to include more extended relatives as was done for Bosnians in the 1990s could expand sponsorship through an existing channel. Similarly, I proposed that the administration grant refugee status to any family who are refugees caught in the green card backlog. Family of Americans shouldn’t die abroad waiting for a green card.
4. Allow sponsors to select any refugees that they want abroad. While more complicated to administer, the ability to select refugees of particular concern to the sponsor would create a powerful incentive to engage with the program.

Another important element that must be a part of any private sponsorship program is the concept of “additionality.” Any privately sponsored refugee should come in addition to those resettled by the U.S. government. If private resettlement merely does what the government already committed to do, that vastly reduces the incentive to participate.

However, because the president has not yet raised the refugee cap, we aren’t sure if private resettlement or “additionality” will be part of this year’s plan. If the president does raise the refugee limit to 125,000, it will come close to meeting another recommendation in our compilation of 30 ideas for the administration: that more resettlement is warranted due to increasing numbers of refugees worldwide. This would reverse a trend of the United States taking a decreasing share of the worldwide refugee population.