I. How the Bill Would Inflict Massive Harm on Millions of People.

If it gets through Congress, this bill would inflict massive suffering on enormous numbers of people. Hundreds of thousands who could otherwise find greater freedom, happiness, and prosperity in the US will instead be consigned to poverty and oppression in the Third World, in many cases for the rest of their lives. For many of the excluded refugees, their fate could be severe persecution or even death, or at best prolonged misery in refugee camps.

Refugees and potential immigrants would not be the only victims of Trump’s proposed policy. Many native-born Americans would suffer too. Increased immigration restrictions reduce their ability to interact with, work with, and hire immigrants. If, like many conservatives, you believe it is wrong for the government to tell us what kind of health insurance we must buy or what kind of food we can eat, you should also be skeptical of letting the government dictate which immigrants you are allowed to associate with or engage in economic transactions with. Immigrant workers, business owners, and entrepreneurs also make major contributions to the economy, which would be severely curtailed if Trump’s proposal is implemented. Instead of improving the economy, as advocates hope, the bill would do serious damage to it. As GOP Senator Lindsey Graham points out, the bill would particularly damage sectors such as agriculture, tourism, and many service industries.

II. The Bill has no Benefit Remotely Comparable to the Enormous Harm.

Even if immigration does reduce the wages of low-skilled natives, or some subset thereof, it doesn’t follow that restrictionism is the right solution to this problem. We do not generally assume that the government should use force to insulate people from the effects of labor competition. If workers moving from West Virginia to much wealthier Virginia create competition that reduces pay for some already in the latter state, few argue that the government should take steps to prevent it. Competition is part of the price we pay for a dynamic economy that increases wealth for all in the long run, including by reducing the price and increasing the quality of goods produced by new workers.

The administration claims that its “merit”-oriented point system will improve the quality of immigrant labor. In reality, as Alex Nowrasteh explains, the proposed bill would do nothing to increase the quantity of high-skill immigration to the US. Indeed, it would result in a far lower rate of such immigration than exists in Canada and Australia, the ostensible models for the approach it adopts.

The bill’s approach also has an even more fundamental flaw: it assumes that bureaucratic measures imposed by the federal government are a good way to measure worker “merit,” in this case a crude point system that takes account of English proficiency, higher education degrees, age, and whether the applicant has a job offer that pays at least 150% of the median household income in the state in question. The best judges of worker merit are not federal officials but potential employers. They are the ones in the best position to know what qualifications are actually useful for the job at hand, and they have far better incentives to get the decision right than government bureaucrats do.

Conservatives are generally among the first to recognize this when it comes to assessing native workers. It is no less true with respect to immigrants. At the risk of stating the obvious, it should be clear that there are many jobs for which a college degree is not a relevant credential. It is similarly clear that people can be valuable contributors to the economy even if they make less than 150% of the median household income in the state where they live.

The bill’s criteria also err by ignoring the possibility that workers can improve their language proficiency and other credentials after arriving in the US. Data show that today’s immigrants assimilate and rapidly improve their English proficiency at roughly the same rate as in past generations. They also often increase their education level after coming to the US.

To put the point differently, it is worth asking whether the rest of the population would be better off if we deported some large percentage of the native-born Americans who would score poorly on the bill’s point system. After all, many millions of Americans do not have college degrees, have jobs that pay less than 150% of the median household income, and so forth. The answer is obvious: even aside from humanitarian considerations, getting rid of this portion of the population (or some large fraction of it) would make the rest of us worse off. Workers of different skill and education levels can each benefit from the productivity of the others. What is true of native-born workers also applies to immigrants, as well.