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Oh, he can't. There's no question about that. The Biden Wave was unprecedented and terrible.
But I think net immigration will be negative for the next 4 years. If Biden had got a second term, that would have resulted in a second Biden Wave and put us firmly on the path towards a Third World future.
I think it’s possible net immigration can be ‘engineered’ to be negative by including stuff like returning students (if Trump doesn’t follow through with his / Elon’s plan of stapling green cards to diplomas) and border pushbacks, but
There have been no announced plans to cut H1B numbers and Elon, H1Ber-in-chief appears even more powerful than most people expected, such that we’re more likely to see the number of those visas rise (mirroring the ongoing rise in O1 visas) along with those for dependants than we are to see them fall.
Restricting family / chain migration, which is the other major source of legal immigration, would have to go through congress and there seems to be no big effort to do that at all, nobody even seems to be speaking about it.
Refugee intake will likely go down, or the composition will change (there are not ‘that’ many white South Africans, but it would conceivably be possible to eg. hand out a full allocation of refugee visas to them and Ukrainians or whatever such that the composition would be altered), but that makes up a small percentage of legal migrants.
Trump has criticized the Diversity Visa / lottery but hasn’t done anything about it yet. 2025 visas are being granted, 2026 applications are open and the program is going full steam ahead. Congress is doing nothing.
H1B depresses wages -> political power for Blue voters, so that's working as intended; and the O1s you want no matter what anyway (it's a vital part of the brain drain pipeline, and I'd expect exit controls from countries that generate a lot of these before any limit from the US, perhaps as part of a response to economic sanctions).
Deleting the paragovernmental organizations that bring them across will help with this.
It's been what, 3 weeks?
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