GoKawiilWhen the member states of the United Nations reviewed their Global Compact on Migration earlier this month, one country was conspicuously absent from the discussions: the United States. In a post on X explaining its reasoning, the State Department said it objects to global “efforts to facilitate replacement migration to the United States and our Western allies.” A subsequent post clarified that President Donald Trump’s administration supports “remigration — but not replacement migration.”
If “replacement migration” sounds like a dogwhistle, that’s because it’s one the administration’s loudest ones yet. Such allusions to the “great replacement” — a far-right conspiracy theory that a cabal of global elites is importing people of color to the US as a means of demographic warfare — and support of remigration, the notion that immigrants and their descendants should be returned to their countries of origin regardless of citizenship voluntarily or otherwise, were once limited to the fringes of the far right. Now they are coming from the government itself. (Elon Musk, a longtime proponent of the great replacement theory, applauded the State Department’s “banger thread.”) Eliminating “replacement migration” and pushing “remigration” are hallmarks of Trump’s second-term immigration policy, which has focused on deporting as many people as possible while preventing new immigrants from arriving here.
It’d be easier to ignore if it was just a post on X. But since returning to office, Trump has drastically slashed legal immigration and has worked to strip immigrants of their legal status in pursuit of his mass deportation policy. Where Trump once promised to go after the so-called “bad hombres” coming to the US illegally, Trump’s aggressive second-term immigration policies suggest that all noncitizens are fair game. For years, proponents of hardline immigration policies have said that the problem isn’t immigration itself, just the fact that some people come to America the “wrong” way. But Trump’s crackdown on legal immigration fulfills the far-right’s dream of racial exclusion.
A recent report by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, found that Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration. Unauthorized migration fell by over 80 percent in the final year of Joe Biden’s term, the report found. By the time Trump was back in the White House, border crossings were already at historic lows — lower, in fact, than when he left office in 2021. The drop in legal immigration, on the other hand, is largely a product of Trump’s own making.
“When he came in, he was really able to do whatever he wanted, because the flows were already so reduced,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute and author of the report, told The Verge.
Bier found that 132,000 fewer people are being admitted to the US each month under Trump. And unlike Trump’s suspension of asylum at the border — which a federal appeals court recently ruled illegal — the sharp reduction in legal immigration isn’t the product of a single policy. While much of the public’s attention is on the Department of Homeland Security’s shock-and-awe raids in American cities, the Trump administration has waged a quiet war on legal immigration through a patchwork of executive orders and regulatory changes.
The first year of Trump’s second term in office saw a net decline in migration for the first time in decades. Population growth slowed as a result, according to Census Bureau data. The decline in net migration will weaken the economy, according to researchers at the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute, both of which lean right. “Such weakness is the new normal under the current immigration policy,” the report found, “rather than weakness reflecting adverse business cycle conditions.”
Migration numbers will likely drop further in 2026. Last December, Trump banned the issuance of immigrant visas to nationals of 40 countries, including the Palestinian territories, to “prevent national security and public safety threats from reaching our borders.” The White House claimed that these nations, most of which were in Africa, had “deficient screening and vetting information” for prospective emigrants. The ban affected 20 percent of all visa applicants, and didn’t include a waiver for the spouses, minor children, or parents of US citizens and permanent residents. The White House also implemented a ban on non-immigrant visas — such as those issued to tourists or students — for nationals of some of the affected countries, including Nigeria and Venezuela.
In January, the administration suspended immigrant visas for 75 countries (some of which were already affected by the previous ban), claiming that people from them were “nationalities at high risk of public benefits usage” and would thus be a burden on US taxpayers. “We are working to ensure that the generosity of the American people will no longer be abused,” the State Department said in a post on X.
The administration’s rationale for this latter ban was the public charge rule, which originated in the 19th century. Since 1882, US law has denied entry to prospective immigrants deemed “unable to take care of himself or herself without becoming a public charge.” The statutory language has changed since then, but the practice remains — and has expanded under Trump, who has a habit of using very old legislation as threadbare justification for his new policies.
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