WASHINGTON, DC – FWD.us President Todd Schulte issued the following statement today in response to a letter from Republican Senators calling for President Trump to cut legal immigration further:

“Three years ago, when unemployment was at 4%, the signatories who were in the Senate at the time tried to slash legal immigration by more than 50% – in what would have been the largest cuts since the racial quota laws a century ago – through the RAISE Act. Today, as unemployment has skyrocketed, these Senators now say we need to slash legal immigration in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Tomorrow, they will find a new crisis to exploit to try to enact their harmful, decades-old plot to slash immigration radically. There are zero public health experts and zero economists who will say that slashing immigration and eliminating non-immigrant visas like those for biomedical researchers is a good idea. Every single one of these proposals were ideas that those seeking to eliminate as much immigration, and as many visa programs, as possible have proposed for years.

“No matter the time or situation, when the proposal is always ‘slash legal immigration,’ everyone knows what this is really about.”

BACKGROUND
Earlier this week, FWD.us released a new post highlighting how President Trump’s executive order cutting legal immigration will hurt the economic recovery just when we need economic growth and job creation most.

The policy’s architects have stated that the policy is part of a larger, long-term strategy to severely restrict legal immigration, even though economic evidence suggests these measures would actually inflict further damage on the economy and hinder America’s coronavirus recovery.

Read more here: President Trump’s immigration ban won’t help fight coronavirus, but it will hurt our economic recovery