In a public address at the White House on Wednesday, President Trump embraced a new Senate bill called the RAISE Act, which he promised would usher in a wave of high-skilled immigration, “restore our competitive edge in the 21st century,” and make the United States' vetting system more like Canada's and Australia's.

It was a pitch designed to appease supporters of high-skilled immigration reform, among the loudest of whom has often been the tech industry, which relies on highly educated immigrants to fill its glut of technical jobs. Titans of Silicon Valley have called for comprehensive immigration reform, including increases to high-skilled worker visas. The only problem is that the RAISE Act wouldn’t actually accomplish any of this. What it would do, instead, is cut legal immigration in half, make it harder for families to stay together, and give radical anti-immigrant groups something to celebrate at their weekly happy hour.

“We should make it easier for people to come here and contribute, not just eliminate the family-based immigration system and pretend that’s a more merit-based system,” says Todd Schulte, president of the bipartisan immigration lobbying firm FWD.us, which was founded by Mark Zuckerberg and other tech industry leaders, and has led the charge for immigration reform in the Valley.

The Details

The RAISE Act, short for Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy Act, was introduced by Republican Senators Tom Cotton and David Perdue, two congressmen who have competed for the title of Congress’s most conservative senator since Jeff Sessions ceded it to become Attorney General. The bill eliminates the diversity visa program, which awards 50,000 visas every year based on a lottery. It cuts so-called “chain immigration,” in which immigrants can sponsor their family members to come to the United States. It caps the number of refugees admitted to the United States every year at 50,000. And it creates a point system in which visa applicants are scored based on “predictors of immigrant success,” like their ability to speak English and their education level.

It would be a chilly about-face for a nation that once promised to take in the world’s cold, huddled masses. And while such a point system looks like it would benefit the tech industry by prioritizing high-skilled immigrants, it includes no provisions to actually expand the number of high-skilled visas that the tech industry has been clamoring for. What’s more, it would force immigrants who do make the cut to kiss their families goodbye, which could lead more of them to choose to bypass the US in favor of Canada, as some skilled workers are already doing.

To make the proposed point system more palatable, President Trump noted its similarity to programs in countries like Canada and Australia, which both use a similar vetting system. And yet, as Alex Nowrasteh of the conservative Cato Institute points out, those countries admit far more skilled immigrants as a percentage of their population than the United States does. In 2013, he writes, new immigrants accounted for .74 percent of Canada’s population, 1.1 percent of Australia’s, and just .31 percent of the United States’ population.

Canada has recently become something of a haven for tech entrepreneurs who have been shut out of the US. It's one of several countries creating new visa programs aimed at attracting more entrepreneurs and high-skilled workers.

It's little wonder, then, that the RAISE Act is just the latest immigration proposal by the White House to receive pushback from the tech industry. According to PayPal cofounder Max Levchin, who came to the US as a refugee under political asylum, this bill and other aspects of the Trump administration's immigration agenda "severely harm our economic growth and eliminate our greatest global economic competitive advantage: our ability to attract the best and the brightest."

Questionable Roots

While the RAISE Act bears little resemblance to the legislation the tech industry has been advocating for, it is essentially ripped from the homepages of groups like NumbersUSA and FAIR, short for the Federation of American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center classifies as a hate group. According to the SPLC, these organizations are the progeny of a man named John Tanton, an anti-immigrant crusader who has, since the 1980s, funded organizations focused on population control. Tanton has advocated in the past for “passive eugenics” and argued that Adolf Hitler besmirched eugenics’ good name.