Senior White House Advisor Stephen Miller and Public Health Restrictions on Immigration During the Pandemic

As we have posted before, Senior White House Advisor Stephen Miller is the brains behind many of President Trump’s aggressive immigration policy measures.  The global pandemic is allowing Miller the opportunity to push new restrictive measures.

Since the early days of the Trump administration, Miller has tried to invoke the president’s public health powers to curtail immigration — then COVID-19 arrived, report Caitlin Dickerson and Michael D. Shear in The New York Times. “One official said the ideas about invoking public health and other emergency powers had been on a ‘wish list’ of about 50 ideas to curtail immigration that Mr. Miller crafted within the first six months of the administration.”

Even during the Obama administration, Stephen Miller — then a Senate aide — helped draft a bill that would have eliminated the Optional Practical Training (OPT), which helps international students remain in the U.S. and work following graduation, Stuart Anderson writes in Forbes. Now the administration is considering imposing new restrictions on OPT, particularly for Chinese students. Anderson references a Business Roundtable study which found that “[c]ontrary to claims that immigrants displace American workers, scaling back OPT would cause the unemployment rate to rise 0.15 percentage points by 2028.” 

Watch that man!

KJ