The design of our country’s immigration system matters a great deal to the economic, physical, and moral wellbeing of each person privileged to live in—or declined admission to—the United States. That is why immigration policy is, and has been for many years, a matter of special interest to me. The issues are politically and economically complex. Easy answers to important problems are rare, and bad answers are abundant. This article is the tale of two programs: the H-1B and the Trump Gold Card. The first is a troubled visa program for skilled foreign workers on which good progress has been made by the MAGA coalition. The second, a luxurious pay-to-enter ticket for foreign elites, paints the problematic priorities of America’s immigration rules in odious hues.
The MAGA base frequently demands that its elected leaders terminate the H-1B visa. The H-1B admits nonimmigrants to the U.S. for the purpose of providing “services in… specialty occupation[s]”[1]. In other words, it permits a non-American to fill an ordinarily high-paying, highly-demanded position in America. Why can’t we ‘save these jobs for Americans’? It depends on who you ask. Marjorie Taylor Greene represents popular opinion in MAGA; in defending her push to end the H-1B, she argued that the program has been “displacing American workers for decades”[2]. Each H-1B recipient fills a job that a qualified American could hold instead.
President Trump—who has himself admitted to profitably exploiting the ill-designed H-1B—holds a lower estimation of the American workforce’s aptitudes[3]. In an early November interview with Laura Ingraham, Trump countered her assertion, “We have plenty of talented people [in America],” with, “No, you don’t, no you don’t … You can’t take people off an unemployment line and… put [them] into a factory where we’re going to make missiles”[4]. From his vantage, we can’t save certain jobs for Americans because of a skill shortage. The H-1B is useful because it fills important jobs we could not reasonably fill otherwise. MAGA is at odds with Trump over his view.
Astonished as I am to say it, Greene and Trump are both partly right. I’m not aligned with their immigration philosophy or predominantly zero-sum view of the international labor market, but the H-1B in its current incarnation both displaces American workers and fails to offset human capital shortages. Companies—particularly tech companies—hire through the program because it allows them to pay lower wages to effectively indentured workers. Those employed through it are “cheaper and controllable,” but only rarely is their admission reparative of a genuine skill gap[5]. Trump recently imposed a $100,000 fee to file (yes, to file!) an H-1B petition [1]. The fee is effectively a tariff on foreign labor; a risky, double-edged solution with the useful effect of raising American wages and employment.
If the dysfunctional H-1B betrays our attitude toward foreign workers, then the new Trump Gold Card exemplifies our treatment of wealth. The Gold Card is less materially consequential than the H-1B but raises morally salient questions. It permits the global elite to gain American residency through $1 million, $2 million, or $5 million ‘contributions’[6]. Compare this with the Administration’s recent decimation of refugee admissions, and our human priorities come into unsettling focus. In 2026, the United States will welcome only 7,500 primarily Afrikaner refugees[7]. This is the lowest cap on admissions in our country’s entire history and among the lowest in the developed world[8]. It is an egregious abdication of the nation’s moral responsibility to offer some scrap of our vast economic resources—which far exceed those of other, more hospitable nations—to a fraction of the world’s 117.3 million forcibly displaced people[9].
While the United States careens toward moral bankruptcy through our forbiddance of refugees, the government is padding its coffers with the patronage of the foreign ultra-rich. Joining in the American Experiment has increasingly less to do with merit, need, opportunity, or desire to build. Like much else in our society and government, it has simply become something for sale. I’m told that the nation and I will be better off (through some over-credited trickle-down mechanism) when our country welcomes the investing wealthy. Perhaps so, and perhaps not. Such things add little to our moral and spiritual greatness.
We cannot do much better, however, than shelter refugees and contribute something to their dignity and self-sufficiency. Recall Emma Lazarus’ immortal words inscribed beneath the Statue of Liberty:
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”[10]
Welcoming the tired, poor, and homeless adds to the nation’s benevolent stature, and it is beneficial, not costly, to the taxpayer. Between 2005 and 2019, resettled asylees and refugees provided a net $42,700 fiscal benefit per capita, more than paying off the government’s expenditures on resettlement and their share of public services[11]. We should earmark these million-dollar Gold Card contributions for further refugee resettlement—that system would produce remarkable ROI and a real moral lift to an increasingly selfish nation.
An unattributed saying suggests that America is great because she is good, and if America ceases to be good, America will cease to be great. The pro-immigrant Ronald Reagan believed this was particularly manifest in America’s treatment of unassuming, garden-variety immigrants. In his very last speech as president, he said, “anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American… We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation… If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost”[12].
I count my American citizenship as among my greatest undeserved blessings. Many who do not share the blessing of citizenship or residence—from foreign tax-dodgers to suffering refugees—would regard it in the same way. Yet at this moment in our history, America has bad news for President Reagan: we have forgotten our priorities, and unless we correct our clear moral failings, we are on the path to lose global leadership. Until worthier policies govern admission to our “shining city on a hill,” perhaps we need to update Lazarus’ aspirational vision of America with something more true-to-life:
“Give me your loaded, your luxurious,
Your yacht-dwellers yearning for 9 months of tax-exempted foreign income,[6]
The loyal patrons of Mar-a-Lago’s shore.
Swipe here, you decadents, and fly to me,
I lift my card reader beside the gilded door!”