‘It is a basic principle that those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially,’ he tells Congress • Trump praises ‘new chapter in American greatness’ in optimistic Congress speech

Donald Trump has praised Australia’s “merit-based” immigration system as an economic boon to the country, in contrast to the US system which, he argued before Congress, costs America “many billions of dollars a year”.

Speaking to a joint sitting of the houses of Congress on Tuesday night in Washington, Trump promised to reform the US immigration system and cited other Anglosphere countries as exemplars.

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“Nations around the world, like Canada, Australia and many others – have a merit-based immigration system,” he said. “It is a basic principle that those seeking to enter a country ought to be able to support themselves financially.

“Yet, in America, we do not enforce this rule, straining the very public resources that our poorest citizens rely upon. According to the National Academy of Sciences, our current immigration system costs America’s taxpayers many billions of dollars a year.

“Switching away from this current system of lower-skilled immigration and instead adopting a merit-based system will have many benefits: it will save countless dollars, raise workers’ wages and help struggling families – including immigrant families – enter the middle class.”

Trump did not cite his source in his speech but the National Academy of Sciences has published a comprehensive examination of migration called The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.

That publication, which is more than 300,000 words, did not put a price on the US immigration policy but said: “On average, [immigrant] individuals in the first generation are more costly to governments, mainly at the state and local levels, than are the native-born generations; however, immigrants’ children – the second generation – are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the population.”

The US has a much larger immigration program than Australia. About 1 million people have been granted lawful permanent residency in the US every year since 2001. The US program is also much more heavily weighted – about 70% – towards family-based migration. About 15% is employment-based and 15% humanitarian.

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Australia accepted 262,170 permanent migrants in 2016 (many of those people were already living in Australia on temporary visas). Of them, 148,679 (57%) were skilled migrants, 88,639 (34%) came to Australia through the family migration scheme, and 24,852 (9%) were part of Australia’s humanitarian stream.

Several studies in Australia have demonstrated the economic benefit of Australia’s migration program. A Migration Council of Australia report said migration had a “profound positive impact not just on population growth, but also on labour participation and employment, on wages and incomes, on our national skills base and on net productivity”.

“Australia’s projected population will be 38 million by 2050 and migration will be contributing $1,625bn ($1.6tn) to Australia’s GDP. Moreover, migration will have added 15.7% to our workforce participation rate, 21.9% to after-tax real wages for low-skilled workers and 5.9% in GDP per-capita growth.”

