The U.S. Set One Very Bad Record in 2016

Thanks to President Donald Trump and a Republican majority in Congress, 2017 was a banner year when it comes to putting our country back on the right track. A year ago, it would have been hard to believe how much we could begin to put right in such a short amount of time. The Obama years are finally behind us, and the markers for positive change are all around us. Unfortunately, we still have a long way to go, as evidenced by a new report from the Center for Immigration Studies. Years of neglect have left America’s immigration system in shambles, and boy, have we been taken advantage of.

Using Census data, CIS found that 2016 was a particularly bad year in terms of extended family migration, an issue that President Trump has highlighted time and again over the last few months. Also known as chain migration, this problem exists because our loose laws allow immigrants to bring over family members by the thousands. Wait, did we say thousands? We meant millions. Indeed, in 2016, approximately 1.8 million immigrants of both legal and illegal status landed in the United States – 53% higher than in 2011. Not all of these folks came through our borders courtesy of chain migration, but enough of them did to prove that this – along with shoring up security and clamping down on low-skilled migration entrants – needs to be part of any immigration reform process.

“These dramatic increases are truly extraordinary,” said CIS director Steven Camarota. “Our generous legal immigration system allows in a huge number of immigrants and then permits them to sponsor their relatives causing a multiplier effect.

“The numbers have profound implications for American schools, taxpayers, workers as well as our culture and national security,” he continued. “Yet the whole system is allowed to run largely on autopilot with few asking whether any of this makes sense for our country.”

Thankfully, one of those asking the question is none other than President Donald Trump, who has been pressuring Congress to end chain migration in the wake of several terror attacks carried out by individuals who were allowed to come to the U.S. for no better reason than that a relative had already migrated here. When you combine chain migration with ill-conceived ideas like the Diversity Lottery Visa, you get a system that is letting millions of highly questionable migrants from extremely dangerous parts of the world come to our communities and carry out violence.

Hopefully, in a few years when CIS runs the numbers on the “Trump years,” we’ll see that our 2016 election actually made a huge difference in terms of stomping out this abject nonsense.