President Donald Trump unveiled his vision for a major reform to the legal immigration system Thursday, calling for the slashing of family-sponsored visas in favor of those for highly skilled and educated workers.

The White House is betting that the idea of slowing family-based migration while raising the number of high-skilled migrants will unify the Republican Party as Trump moves into a contentious reelection battle. Some of the more hard-line voices within or allied with the administration, like White House adviser Stephen Miller and U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), have endorsed the idea, contending that low-skilled migrants depress the wages of working-class Americans by competing with them for the same jobs.

It’s a compelling idea for Trump, who built his political career by stoking hostility toward migrants by casting them as job thieves. But the premise of the new plan defies the administration’s own logic. If migrants truly depress native-born workers’ wages, as the White House contends, then it hardly makes sense to look beyond America’s borders specifically to staff some of the country’s most lucrative positions.

“There’s no economic basis for their position,” David Bier, an analyst with the libertarian Cato Institute, told HuffPost. “It’s just entirely based on the political calculation that high-skilled sounds better than family-based. Or, in their words, ‘chain migration.’”

Immigration policy is a blunt tool for rejiggering the labor market, and the relationship between immigration and wages is more complex than the White House acknowledges. The administration’s new immigration plan is based on at least two false premises.

First, immigration ― both skilled and unskilled, authorized and unauthorized ― does not uniformly depress wages for American citizens. And second, the current system privileging family-sponsored visas isn’t as biased toward low-skilled migration as the White House appears to believe.

Economists differ on whether and how much low-skilled immigration drives down U.S. wages, but most agree that immigration, regardless of skill level, increases economic growth overall, and that the kind of direct competition for jobs that may modestly depress American wages is limited to a few sectors of the economy and to Americans with less than a high school education.

The upshot is that low-skilled migrants also tend to push Americans out of manual labor and into higher-paying managerial jobs.

For Bier, family sponsorship is a separate issue from the economic concerns about migration ― U.S. citizens should have a right to be with their families, he says.

And Bier, like other experts consulted by HuffPost, has no problem with the United States accepting more high-skilled migrants.