Democrats and Republicans seem hell-bent on debating immigration only after it happens. Amnesty or deportation? This leaves the more fundamental question of how immigrants can come legally on the back burner. If Congress could modernize the legal immigration system, enforcement would be both easier and more popular.
Congress has not substantively updated America’s legal immigration system since reforms in 1986 and 1990 — almost four decades ago. In those days, most illegal immigrants crisscrossed the border seasonally. Ronald Reagan urged Congress to “make it possible for them to come here legally with a work permit.”
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In response, Congress created the H-2A visa program for seasonal farm workers to work legally. It took until the late George W. Bush administration for all the relevant agencies to get the system working properly. But today, it finally provides an orderly and legal path for over 315,000 workers per year. Problem solved? Well, in seasonal agriculture, yes.
The story of the H-2A visa highlights both the problem and the promise of legal immigration reform. H-2A workers are vetted abroad, enter legally, and cause little trouble for law enforcement or government budgets. Yet we solved the problem of the 1980s. Today, most illegal farm workers aren’t in seasonal crops, but in dairy, livestock, and poultry processing.
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More importantly, 86% of illegal workers today aren’t in agriculture at all. They’re in construction, hospitality, restaurants, delivery, and other non-seasonal sectors, which have no path to hire anyone legally. If Congress is serious about illegal immigration, it needs to create a system that both immigrants and employers can use.
That’s also a system that’s more likely to be enforced. President Donald Trump himself has publicly recognized the economic problem with deporting illegal immigrants in agriculture, hospitality, and other sectors. If enforcing our current system can’t get the enthusiastic backing of the most hardcore enforcer in American history, it’s time to fix it.
Legal immigration means the workers who come would compete on a level playing field, which would benefit U.S. workers, including low-skilled workers. The availability of workers also plays an important role in businesses’ decisions to invest in the United States. If there are only half the workers you need to open a factory, the factory just won’t open.
Low-skilled Americans also benefit from low-skilled foreign workers because they create new job opportunities for them as managers, supervisors, and more specialized workers with better pay and working conditions. Visit a restaurant and see this complementarity play out. Many Americans can see directly how immigrants increase our productivity by caring for our children or ailing elderly parents.
To address illegal employment, Congress should create a work visa that lets employers hire vetted legal immigrants in year-round jobs without access to welfare. But it’s unfortunate that low-skilled illegal immigration has come to dominate this debate because this ignores, from an economic perspective, the far more significant issue of high-skilled legal immigration. High-skilled legal immigrants massively reduce federal, state, and local deficits by a combined $11.7 trillion over the last 30 years.
High-skilled immigrants have the largest economic upside as well. Their inventions and ingenuity hold the potential to increase the productivity, and therefore the wages and living standards, of all workers in the economy. The numbers here are staggering. Immigrants are founders of 59% of billion-dollar startups in the United States.
In recent decades, these skilled workers were responsible for about 40% of all total factor productivity growth in the economy — the growth that isn’t explained by mere inputs like labor and capital. That’s innovation, and it is the secret sauce that has kept America growing and improving better than any other developed country.
Unfortunately, America’s high-skilled immigration system is as backwards and confused as its low-skilled immigration system. The law tells international students (who were half of those immigrant startup founders) that they can’t plan to stay permanently after graduation, and 41% of foreign students accepted to U.S. universities had their visas denied for this reason in 2024.
The main path to obtain a high-skilled work visa, the H-1B lottery, rejects over 60% of the applicants, and the path to a green card is torturously slow. Some employment-based green card applicants will have to wait their entire lives to get the chance to stay. The limits prevent them from starting businesses and moving to more productive jobs.
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These artificially low limits will prevent the next Elon Musk — who went from foreign student to H-1B worker to green card applicant — from launching the next trillion-dollar business career. Congress should junk the artificial Soviet-style immigration quotas in favor of a flexible market-based system that responds to the economic needs of the country.
The Republican Party already calls for merit-based legal immigration. But if we limit welfare and require work, most immigrants — including the spouses and other close relatives of US citizens — will be valuable contributors. Walling off the welfare state without walling out legal immigrants should be the market-based position on reform.
David J. Bier is the Director of Immigration Studies at the Cato Institute and holds The Selz Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy.