President Donald Trump spoke from the White House’s Rose Garden on Thursday, May 16, to introduce a set of immigration policy proposals, doubling down on his long-standing interest in “securing the border.” But the new proposal also includes what he is calling a merit-based points system designed to prioritize highly skilled immigrant workers over those the president characterized as “low-skilled.”

The proposal includes scanning 100% of all material coming through borders and creating a border-security trust fund, in addition to Trump's long term focus on building a border wall. It also included his plans for overhauling the asylum-application system to weed out “meritless claims,” and the news that Trump wants to mandate that immigrants learn English and take a civics exam before being admitted to the U.S. But it was an emphasis on labor that set the speech apart from previous Trump rhetoric.

“Foreign workers are coming in, and they’re taking the jobs that would normally go to American workers,” Trump said. The president’s speech proposed a points-based immigration system that will reward immigration applicants for having “a valuable skill, an offer of employment, an advanced education, or a plan to create jobs.”

“Priority will also be given to higher-wage workers, ensuring we never undercut American labor,” Trump said. “To protect benefits for American citizens, immigrants must be financially self-sufficient.”

Should this proposal become a reality, it would have dire consequences for low-income immigrants, as the administration seems intent on only prioritizing immigration avenues for workers with higher levels of education. Historian and New York University assistant professor Mireya Loza said the proposals don’t account for guest workers, the immigrants granted authorization to enter the country temporarily, many of whom are employed for demanding and intense agricultural labor. To her, guest workers are often misunderstood in conversations about immigration, relegating them to being a “second-class workforce.” She wondered why guest workers aren’t given the opportunity to be considered permanent residents.

“It says to me that we don’t value these people as workers and, at times, we don’t value them as human beings that are capable of contributing to the U.S. in any other way than the sweat on their brow,” said Loza, who wrote Defiant Braceros: How Migrant Workers Fought for Racial, Sexual and Political Freedom.

Currently, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services offers several kinds of programs for temporary workers; Loza focused on two: the H-2A for agricultural workers and the H-2B for nonagricultural workers. Despite Trump’s claim that his proposal is “pro-immigrant and pro-worker,” Loza expressed concerns about the current state of affairs for low-income immigrant workers, workers she considers skilled.

“What we know in the past and in the present is that these guest workers are often highly exploited by their employers,” Loza said. That exploitation is often dealt with as an alternative to bleaker economic prospects in their nations of origin, according to Loza, who told Teen Vogue that guest workers perhaps “often don’t speak up when their labor rights are being violated because they fear that their contract won’t be renewed.” Loza said the current system is already “delivering the most vulnerable workers to the U.S., by design.”

Now, Trump’s policy proposals seem designed to reward entrepreneurial immigrants who have already overcome the challenges of obtaining a high-quality education, received a promising job offer, or have been positioned to start a business, while reducing prospects for low-income immigrants in the name of giving Americans the low-wage jobs immigrants purportedly steal; however, research indicates that immigration has “no negative effects on overall wages and employment of native-born workers in the longer term.”