Trump Restrictions on Legal Immigration Could Sharply Reduce U.S. Population Growth

In his February State of the Union address, President Donald Trump asserted that even as his administration had brought unauthorized border crossings to a trickle, “We will always allow people to come in legally, people that will love our country and will work hard to maintain our country.” Yet as he spoke those words, his administration continued to systematically restrict many of the visa pathways that admit workers and family members to the United States, dramatically slowing the legal immigration system.

With all eyes on the administration’s highly visible immigration enforcement operations, less attention has gone to its arguably equally drastic changes to legal immigration, including:

• Travel bans and restrictions imposed on nationals of 39 countries
• Pauses in permanent visa issuance affecting 75 countries
• New vetting guidelines that have led to a sizable drop in student visa issuance
• A $100,000 application fee for H-1B high-skilled workers
• Diversion of staff from processing immigration applications to revetting recipients.

Though many measures are framed as furthering the important goal of enhancing vetting and security, taken together, the broad moves suggest instead a comprehensive strategy to reduce legal immigration across much of the spectrum. The administration’s actions, therefore, reflect not the president’s stated support for legal immigration, but rather a worldview that sees immigrants of all statuses as a threat to the country’s very fabric. Homeland Security Advisor Stephen Miller has extolled the 1924 Immigration Act, which severely curtailed legal immigration for 40 years. He has called for a “moratorium on immigration from third-world countries.” And he has cast immigration as a threat to American’s jobs, public safety, and shared culture. 

The administration has indicated some openness to temporary, seasonal immigration and permanent immigration of the wealthy. But the result of its broad restrictions across many immigration categories may be drastically lower overall legal immigration levels this year. And beyond that, with U.S. birthrates hitting historic lows, the moves threaten to tip the United States into population stagnation—or even decline, a development last seen in 1918, when World War I and a major pandemic coincided.

While a shrinking, aging population does not automatically condemn a country to economic contraction, it creates powerful headwinds against dynamism and overall growth.

Impact on Immigration Levels

The administration has not yet released detailed, updated data on immigration levels overall, but State Department visa issuance data for January through September 2025 already showed a slowdown in legal immigration levels compared to the prior year.

Figure 1. State Department Immigrant Visa Issuance, January 2024-September 2025

Notes: Immigrant visas are permanent visas. This analysis uses preliminary monthly data which may not match final end-of-year tallies. Totals based on monthly data for fiscal year (FY) 2024 were about 5 percent too high compared to final FY 2024 data.
Source: State Department, “Monthly Immigrant Visa Issuance Statistics,” accessed April 2, 2026.

The decline seen in temporary and permanent visa issuance came even before the expanded travel ban, 75-country visa pause, H-1B fee, and other changes had taken full effect. Some types of visas showed sharper drops than others. Student (F-1) visa issuance fell by almost half between June-September 2024 and June-September 2025. Among permanent visas, issuance for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens was 10 percent higher in January-September 2025 than in the same period of 2024, while visas for other family-sponsored immigrants fell by 30 percent.

Figure 2. State Department Nonimmigrant Visa Issuance, Excluding Tourist (B1/B2) Visas and Border Crossing Cards, January 2024-September 2025

Notes: Nonimmigrant visas are temporary visas. This analysis uses preliminary monthly data which may not match final end-of-year tallies. Totals based on monthly data for FY 2024 were about 2 percent too high compared to final FY 2024 data.
Source: State Department, “Monthly Nonimmigrant Visa Issuance Statistics,” accessed April 2, 2026.

Step by Step, Unprecedented Efforts to Slow Legal Immigration

Since Trump retook office, his administration has been layering legal immigration restrictions one by one, many of which face legal challenge:

Cutting refugee resettlement and humanitarian parole. On his first day back, Trump imposed a temporary pause on refugee resettlement, with the administration later resuming processing at the lowest level since the start of the modern refugee system in 1980, with just 3,664 refugees resettled between February 2025 and February 2026—down from 100,034 resettlements in fiscal year (FY) 2024.

The administration also stopped allowing legal entry through the various humanitarian parole programs created by the Biden administration, including for Ukrainians; Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans with U.S. sponsors; and those who had secured appointments to enter using the CBP One app. These programs, providing temporary relief from deportation and work authorization, permitted the entry of more than 1.7 million people.

Return of the travel bans. While the travel ban that became known as the “Muslim ban” in the first Trump term garnered public outcry, the second Trump administration has assembled a broader country-based travel ban, with much less attention. An initial June 4, 2025 ban blocked certain new permanent and temporary visa holders from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, Cuba, Haiti, Iran, and Venezuela. On December 16, the ban and restrictions were expanded to another 20 countries, including Nigeria and Syria, plus those with Palestinian Authority-issued travel documents.

Revetting resettled refugees and others. Following the killing of a National Guard member in Washington, DC by an Afghan man in late November, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced it was pausing processing of almost all applications from nationals of the 39 travel ban countries. This blocks renewal of temporary visas or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) protections and applications for work authorization, permanent residence, or U.S. citizenship. It even blocked some approved naturalization applicants from taking the oath of U.S. citizenship.

In January, USCIS also committed itself to rereviewing and possibly revoking any status granted since January 2021 to individuals from the 39 travel ban countries, following a similar order in November to revisit grants of refugee status to more than 200,000 people in the same period. USCIS has not pointed to specific cases or flaws that led it to conclude prior vetting was insufficient. This means the agency must rereview likely millions of past decisions, diverting vast staff resources from processing new applications.

The expected result is dramatically slower USCIS processing. This prevents U.S. citizens and permanent residents from reuniting with family members, employers from sponsoring workers, permanent residents from seeking citizenship, and noncitizens from maintaining legal status and work authorization. USCIS processing speed was already slowing in 2025, with hundreds of thousands fewer applications adjudicated each quarter than in the prior year.

75-country “pause” on permanent visas. The State Department in January 2026 announced it was suspending the issuance of permanent visas (these immigrant visas are necessary to secure a green card) for 75 countries. Collectively, these countries accounted for 46 percent (280,015) of the immigrant visas issued in FY 2024. The administration said the pause was necessary to combat the potential of some becoming a “public charge”—that is, primarily dependent on the U.S. government to meet basic needs. There has been no explanation of when the halt could be lifted.

Pausing the diversity visa lottery. The State Department halted issuance of diversity visas in late December, following the murder of two professors by a man who had received a diversity visa in 2017. The expressed reason for this suspension was to update screening and vetting procedures, but the administration has yet to reopen the green-card lottery. The diversity visa program typically allows up to 55,000 people to get a green card annually, through a lottery, from countries that send few immigrants to the United States.

H-1B visa challenges. The H-1B visa program has been under particular scrutiny. In September, Trump imposed a new $100,000 application fee for employers sponsoring H-1B workers coming newly from outside the United States. As of February, just 85 employers that did not need to wait for the annual lottery (nonprofits and universities) had paid the fee. The real impact will be felt soon as winners of the annual H-1B lottery, which was held in March, begin to apply for visas. Smaller employers and startups are likely to be particularly unable to afford the fee.

USCIS also changed how the annual H-1B lottery is run. Once a random selection process, this year’s lottery was weighted to assign a higher chance of success to applications for workers who will be paid higher wage levels within their occupation and geographic location. Early-career workers such as recent international graduates will have a harder time winning a spot. In FY 2024, more than one-third of new H-1B visas went to applicants transitioning from a student visa. Because the H-1B is often used as a bridge between student visas and employment-based green cards, blocking international student graduates from H-1B visas will disrupt a talent pipeline that has been a source of growth for the U.S. economy.

States have also jumped on the anti-H-1B bandwagon. Florida’s public university system, at Governor Ron DeSantis’s urging, paused sponsorship of H-1B visas for the rest of 2026. And Texas Governor Abbott ordered state agencies and public universities to pause H-1B sponsorship through May 2027.

New consular screening, social media vetting, and appointment requirements. Several State Department moves are creating barriers for visa applicants, rolling back Biden-era processing flexibilities. The Trump administration ended the wide availability of waivers of in-person consular interviews for temporary visa renewals, now requiring nearly all initial and renewal temporary visa applicants to schedule an in-person interview. The State Department also now requires applicants for temporary and permanent visas to attend consular interviews in their home country—eliminating the option of finding a third country with shorter wait times.

H-1B, student, exchange visitor (J), and other visa applicants must now undergo social media vetting for derogatory information, antisemitism, or “hostile attitudes” toward the United States. The social media policies were followed by a pause in student visa interviews last spring, and then a mass rescheduling of H-1B visa appointments across multiple consular offices in late 2025, apparently to enable implementation of additional screening practices. H-1B holders from India were hit hardest, with interview appointments scheduled for late 2025 and early 2026 pushed to spring 2027. Many H-1B visa holders who travelled to India expecting to renew their visa have been stranded, sometimes separated from family. Others are now forgoing international travel to avoid getting stuck and potentially losing their job.

Raising the bar for naturalization. The administration has also enacted new requirements for naturalization. Last year, USCIS added more potential questions to the citizenship test, and now requires applicants to answer 12 questions correctly instead of six. USCIS is applying a higher “good moral character” requirement for naturalization, asking applicants to affirmatively demonstrate their character by describing their educational attainment, employment, compliance with tax law, social and family ties, and other contributions. USCIS is also reinstating neighborhood investigations, not used since 1991, for certain applicants. If fewer green-card holders can naturalize, that has the potential to reduce future immigration levels, given the broader sponsorship pathways available for U.S. citizens relative to green-card holders.

A culture of vetting and enforcement. The more specific moves cited above come on top of a more general culture shift within immigration agencies. Trump’s call for enhanced vetting of immigrants has played out, for example, in the establishment of a USCIS vetting center; a new USCIS police force to “investigate, arrest, and present for prosecution those who violate America’s immigration laws;” more social media screening;” and the reframing of USCIS adjudicators as “homeland defenders.” It also involves “continuous vetting” of all 55 million temporary visa holders (who may be inside or outside the United States) for evidence of visa overstay, criminal record, or support for a terrorist organization. This revetting led to 10,000 visas, as many as 8,000 of them student ones, being revoked by early 2026; many student visa revocations appeared based on minor infractions such as a speeding ticket.

Favored Immigration: Of the Wealthy and Seasonal Workers

While these actions have stymied many forms of legal immigration, the administration is facilitating entry through selected streams at the high- and low-income ends. Applications are open for the Trump “gold card,” which offers permanent residence for those who pledge to contribute $1 million to the government upon approval.

The administration also has worked to facilitate seasonal immigration of generally low-wage temporary workers on H-2A agricultural worker visas and H-2B nonagricultural visas. It lowered the wage levels required for H-2A workers, tried to streamline the application process, and restored waivers of in-person interviews for H-2A visa renewals. It also opted to maximize use of a congressional option to expand H-2B visas, nearly doubling the number available.

The Drag on Legal Immigration Will Slow U.S. Growth

The measures described above will likely cause legal immigration to drop by hundreds of thousands of arrivals annually in 2026 and possibly beyond.

Because fewer babies are being born and deaths are rising as the U.S. population ages, immigration is the primary driver of all U.S. population growth. Without immigration, the U.S. population’s natural increase (number of births exceeding deaths) is roughly 500,000 a year—a slow rate of growth that is quickly falling to zero. A major decrease in legal immigration could tip the country into population decline as soon as this year. While increased productivity can sustain economic growth even with a shrinking workforce, falling immigration creates strong headwinds against economic dynamism and competitiveness.

The Trump administration sees falling immigration levels as positive, reflecting some officials’ view of immigrants as security and job threats. In reality, immigrants, especially the highly educated, drive disproportionate shares of innovation and entrepreneurship, while foreign-born workers of all skill levels often complement U.S. workers and expand job opportunities, especially in key sectors such as technology, health care, agriculture, and construction.

By constricting legal immigration, the United States risks discarding one of the essential ingredients in the recipe that has fueled its growth for 250 years.