In the 10 months since returning to the White House, President Donald Trump has forcibly deported half a million illegal immigrants and compelled another 1.6 million to voluntarily self-deport. And thanks to his crackdown on unfettered student visas and low-skilled J-1 visas, the total temporary “nonimmigrant” population in the country is expected to fall by 120,000 migrants this year.
All in all, the nation’s total immigrant population — legal and illegal — is falling for the first time in half a century.
But Trump is correctly refusing to eliminate high-skilled immigration into the country. During an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, Trump admitted that the United States doesn’t “have certain talents” in its domestic labor force, necessitating the use of H1-B visas. Thanks to a dismal birth rate and even worse public school system, our native-born labor force is getting smaller and dumber by the year.
Curbing low-skilled immigration could be justified politically. Low-skilled immigrants compete with native-born Americans who earn the lowest wages and have the highest unemployment rate. As evidenced by research from the Manhattan Institute, the average 30-year-old immigrant without a high school diploma costs $6,000 more in taxpayer benefits over a decade in the country than they contribute in taxes.
But a 30-year-old college-educated immigrant contributes a net surplus of $171,000 in taxes over a decade, while adding another quarter of a million dollars in GDP.
Furthermore, the unemployment rate for college graduates aged 24 and older is just 2.7%. For those without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate is 6.7%. It is true that the unemployment rate among recent college graduates, at 4.8%, is higher than the overall rate for college graduates. But these 22- to 27-year-old college grads are still faring much better than the overall cohort, which has an unemployment rate of 7.4%.
It is true that, especially under former President Joe Biden’s dramatic expansion of the welfare state for illegal immigrants granted temporary protected status overnight, employers were able to undercut wages for blue-collar Americans, with Haitians and Cubans already receiving Medicaid and food stamps. By contrast, the median H1-B visa recipient earned $120,000 last year, on par with the 90th percentile of all American wages recorded by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Control earnings for educational attainment, and the story holds. The median H1-B visa holder with a bachelor’s degree earned $116,000 in 2023, compared to $80,000 for the median overall worker with a bachelor’s degree. And whereas a median H1-B visa worker with a master’s earns $127,000, the median overall worker with a master’s brings home $98,644. Mind you, the median H-1B visa recipient is a full decade younger than the median American worker, making the difference in their wages even starker.
Employers that hire H-1B workers must pay them competitive wages, in addition to thousands of dollars in administrative costs, even before Trump’s proposed $100,000 H-1B visa fee. So then why do employers shell out so much for a tiny number of foreign talent?
The last time the International Association for the Evaluation of Educational Achievement conducted its study of high school seniors around the globe, the Trends in International Mathematics and Science study found that just 11% of American 18-year-olds studied advanced math such as calculus, and fewer than 5% of Americans studied physics. By contrast, a third of all Slovenian students completed advanced math before university, and more than one-fifth of French students studied physics. Meanwhile, teachers unions in the past decade have fought tooth and nail to eliminate gifted programs, phonics, middle school algebra, and even high school calculus.
So it should come as no surprise that American students start college well behind the curve.
At the University of California, San Diego, which Forbes ranked as the third best public university in the nation, an eighth of the 2025 incoming class did not meet middle school math standards, necessitating the creation of a remedial math course recapping elementary school arithmetic. In a test given by the remedial math class, a quarter of the students could not answer 7+2=x+6.
You may laugh thinking about critical race theory majors who could not add 66 and 44 (9% of students failed the question), but get this: the majority of 2024’s remedial math students were science, technology, engineering, or math majors!
EVERYTHING TO KNOW ABOUT THE H-1B VISA DEBATE SURROUNDING TRUMPWORLD
Even Harvard University launched a remedial math class. Admittedly, it covers middle school “foundational algebra skills” rather than UCSD’s first-grade long division.
It is indeed imperative that Trump liberate America’s failing public schools from the teachers unions, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and whatever woke nonsense is used as a smokescreen to conceal that the majority of our fourth graders are functionally illiterate. But if it might be too late for America’s wannabe STEM majors by university, it definitely is by the time they want six-figure salaries. In the meantime, we need H-1B visas to fill the void.
