It is not enough to merely undo the damage of the Biden administration by deporting all illegal immigrants. There must be a moratorium on all immigration into the United States from culturally incompatible Third World countries. 

“The greatest political document since the Magna Carta,” tweeted columnist Ann Coulter on Aug. 16, 2015. She added, with the characteristic WASP restraint for which she is noted: “I don’t care if @realDonaldTrump wants to perform abortions in White House after this immigration policy paper.”

The policy paper in question: “Immigration Reform That Will Make America Great Again,” released that day by the Trump campaign to flesh out his throwaway line, when announcing for president two months earlier, that “when Mexico sends it people, they’re not sending their best.” That sound bite caused a nationwide furor that, in retrospect, seems almost comic. Trump surged into the lead in opinion polls, and stayed at the top of the rankings more or less constantly until he secured the GOP nomination, in the teeth of frantic and increasingly horrified opposition from the entire political establishment, a year later.

Coulter had just published ¡Adios, America! The Left’s   Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole, a powerful and intellectually rigorous expose of the disastrous consequences of the 1965 Immigration Act, combined with the simultaneous collapse of the southern border. (I would know. I’m a connoisseur of immigration books, having published my Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster way back in 1995). 

Trump was reported to have bummed a copy off of her, something that during many years as a financial journalist I have observed is a peculiar frugal trait shared by many tycoons. In The Atlantic magazine, neocon David Frum, long discreetly sound on immigration, compared the book’s political impact to that of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the run-up to the Civil War.

Immigration had long been kept out of public debate by a tacit bipartisan consensus. Remember that Jeb Bush, universally assumed to be the GOP front-runner until Trump came along, had ludicrously described illegal immigration as “an act of love” in 2014. He was obviously planning to amnesty illegal aliens, as his brother had tried to do before him, along the lines of the barking mad recommendations of the Republican National Committee’s 2013 “Growth and Opportunity Project,” after Mitt Romney’s wholly unnecessary loss to Barack Obama.

Now Trump had shattered this tacit consensus. It had been a long wait.

But the larger reason for Ann’s excitement, and mine: Colter’s ¡Adios America!, like my Alien Nation 30 years earlier, was ultimately about legal immigration—which we both regarded as a disease of the heart for the U.S., whereas illegal immigration, which is obviously indefensible and can be straightforwardly reversed, is an (admittedly unpleasant) disease of the skin.

However, such criticism of immigration as surfaced during the years of the Bush Blight and the Obama Fundamental Transformation usually focused on the much easier target of the illegal influx. Even the great immigration patriot Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.) focused on illegals when he left Congress to run for president on the immigration issue during the 2008 election cycle—though he was certainly aware of the problems with legal immigration as well and occasionally mentioned it. Tancredo eventually dropped out in favor of Mitt Romney who, amazingly, was then considered the best on the immigration issue of all the major candidates. That’s how bad things were. Needless to say, the deeply conventional Romney proceeded to freeze Tancredo out of his campaign. And, of course, lost.

However, Trump did not restrict himself to illegal immigration in his April 16 speech, although this was little noted amid the resulting furor. In fact, he did not use the term “illegal immigrant” at all. Mexico, as he would have known from Coulter’s book, was at that time the principal source not just of illegal, but also of legal, immigration into the U.S. And thus he would also have known that his now-famous criticism of the inflow (“They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists…”) applied equally to both streams.

Trump’s Aug. 16 immigration policy paper did indeed begin by focusing on illegal immigration, which in 2015 seemed to be a huge crisis. (Though it would pale in comparison to the tide of destruction unleashed by Joe Biden). It called for sensible measures like a border wall, nationwide e-verify to enable employers to use the internet to verify the immigration status of potential hires, and an end to birthright citizenship. This last item is crucial to building what would be in effect an “internal wall” that would prevent the U.S.-born children of illegals from entering, and ultimately subverting with their votes, the American political nation.

But, again little noted, Trump’s policy paper went on to launch a powerful explicit attack on the impact of immigration—that is, all immigration—on Americans’ incomes, which, it said, “are collapsing.” 

The policy paper’s climactic recommendation was for:

Immigration moderation. Before any new green cards are issued to foreign workers abroad, there will be a pause where employers will have to hire from the domestic pool of unemployed immigrant and native workers. This will help reverse women’s plummeting workplace participation rate, grow wages, and allow record immigration levels to subside to more moderate historical averages.

A “green card” is immigration-wonk jargon for U.S. government permission to become a lawful permanent resident. Note that, in 2015, over a million green cards (1,051,031) would be granted. 

This Trump recommendation was truly radical. Pausing legal immigration until U.S. wage rates started to rise could have taken a long time. Thus, real inflation-adjusted wages had actually fallen 2.1 percent for the lowest, 10^th percentile of U.S. workers between 2000 and 2015. The median, 50th percentile worker had experienced just a 0.9 percent increase in real wages over those 15 years. Americans were in rough shape, and reversing their plight through immigration policy would have taken time.

What Trump’s proposed “pause” in legal immigration was, in fact, was an immigration moratorium. 

This represented a staggering break from the immigration policy debate over the last 40 years—as far as I know, only Coulter since ¡Adios America! and I and my coterie of writers at our immigration patriot website VDare, (until we were mugged by New York State Attorney General Letitia James in 2024), really focused on the immigration moratorium issue. The main immigration patriot group in the D.C. Beltway, the Federation of Immigration Reform, was nominally in favor of an immigration moratorium but oddly diffident about promoting it, perhaps because its predominantly liberal-environmentalist population-control donor base was easily spooked by the accusation of “racism.”

This raises the question: how did Trump come up with the moratorium idea? Reportedly, the policy paper was the work of Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, the leading immigration patriot champion in Congress, and his aide Stephen Miller. Trump being Trump, it’s not impossible that he simply saw it as a path to power and never read the details.

Sessions’ career was subsequently brutally destroyed by Trump because, as attorney general, he had failed to interdict the Russiagate Hoax and the appointment of Robert Mueller as a special investigative counsel. Maybe Sessions was too punctilious, but it must be said that this episode is evidence that Trump put his personal pique over having patriotic immigration reform votes in the U.S. Senate above. (Admittedly, Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville, who, with Trump’s help, defeated Sessions’ attempt to regain his seat in 2020, has not proved as bad on immigration as was feared). 

However, Sessions’ aide Stephen Miller survived and even prospered, despite being in a White House dominated by Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, a New York liberal Jew instinctively hostile to immigration restriction (though Kusher’s primary interest was the Middle East). In the second Trump administration, Miller is now White House deputy chief of staff for policy and U.S. homeland security advisor, where he focuses on immigration enforcement. This time Kushner is safely tucked away in Florida, where he is managing money for Arab potentates.

This is a very good thing. The first and only time I met Miller was in 2007, when he was a student at Duke University, and had organized a debate between myself and open-borders advocate Peter Laufer, author of Wetback Nation: The Case For Opening The Mexican-American Border. Incredibly, Miller’s partner in that endeavor was none other than his fellow student Richard Spencer, later famous as a leader of the “Alt-Right”—a term coined by Chronicles Editor-In-Chief Paul Gottfried—and now, in a bizarre twist, a marginalized online Democrat courtier. 

Jeanne Guerrero, in her biography of Miller, helpfully titled Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda, claims that this debate shaped Miller’s career, but this is obviously merely an attempt to smear him through association with me. Nevertheless, I am certain that he knows the arguments—specifically, why legal immigration is a disease of the heart for America that can only be cured by an immigration moratorium.

Miller seems to be an exceptionally ruthless bureaucratic operator and he is not popular with some of his immigration patriot contemporaries. But, hey, he survived the Kushner White House. I periodically amuse myself by writing on X (né Twitter) that he is going to be America’s first Jewish president—by inventing, exactly like Britain’s Victorian Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, a nationalist grand strategy for his country’s conservative party.

The U.S. presidency is inherently a weak office. Presidents do not necessarily control their legislatures, as prime ministers in parliamentary systems do, by definition. So it’s no surprise that Trump’s Aug. 16, 2016 proposals weren’t fully implemented in his first administration—although more was done by executive action than is widely realized.

But, although also not widely realized, an immigration moratorium of sorts was in fact enacted beginning in June 2020. At Stephen Miller’s behest, the Trump administration issued two proclamations, temporarily restricting the issuance of new green cards for most categories of immigrants, citing the need to protect the labor market during the COVID-induced economic downturn. Only 707,000 green cards were issued in 2020. That was still a ridiculous amount of legal immigration to allow during one of the sharpest recessions in U.S. history, but it was down from 1.03 million in 2019. Immigration can be done.

Miller would probably have fought to extend and expand this moratorium had Trump remained in power. As it was, Biden rescinded it early in February 2021 and green card admissions rebounded to more than 1 million annually.

In extending the moratorium, Miller would have faced opposition from within the first Trump administration, which notoriously contained many camouflaged establishment Republican hacks, and from congressional Republicans, who are notoriously cowardly and sensitive to donors.

But an even more serious obstacle for Miller was Donald J. Trump himself. Increasingly as his first term wore on, it became clear that Trump had lost interest in a legal immigration cutback. Hence, having made the dramatic move of imposing this partial moratorium in an election year, he did not campaign on it, did not promise to extend it, and above all, did not point out that a Biden administration would certainly abolished it—as in fact happened.

Similarly, in 2017, Trump endorsed the RAISE Act, introduced by Senators Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Purdue (R-Ga.), which would have halved legal immigration by such sensible measures as limiting chain migration—the process by which legal immigrants can sponsor relatives, who in turn can sponsor relatives, and so on, in an endless chain. Chain migration, in effect, treats immigration as a civil right extended to a class of foreigners who are selected without regard to the U.S. national interest. (Chain migration remains a legal immigration quirk that has gotten Trump’s attention, and he continues to complain about it.)

Needless to say, the RAISE Act got nowhere in a Congress controlled by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the former donor-driven and the latter an unreconstructed immigration enthusiast. But Trump didn’t prioritize it, either.

The RAISE Act endorsement ceremony was chiefly notable for a fierce exchange between Stephen Miller and CNN correspondent Jim Acosta, who invoked the Statue of Liberty and began quoting from the Emma Lazarus poem (“Give me your tired, your poor…”), apparently unaware that this immigration-enthusiast cliché that a poem should determine U.S. immigration policy had long since been decisively debunked. Miller murdered him. Wikipedia sniffed that the “distinction Miller made between the Statue of Liberty and Lazarus’s poem has been a popular talking point among the white supremacist segments of the alt-right.” Which does not mean, it should not be necessary to point out, that the “talking point” is wrong.

But, in an interview with New York Times’ reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear for their hyperventilating 2019 book Border Wars : Inside Trump’s Assault On Immigration, Trump said he hadn’t been aware the RAISE Act cut legal immigration. And, in an April 21, 2020, COVID briefing, Trump actually denied he’d ever wanted to cut legal immigration at all. Significantly, his epochal April 16, 2015, immigration policy statement has long been scrubbed from his campaign website.

Ironically, by 2020, Trump had gotten illegal immigration at the southern border back under some semblance of control. And he—or people working for him, with an un-Trumpian attention to detail—had also significantly reduced legal immigration through administrative measures. These actions had sharply reduced the “refugee” flow, revised the public charge rules, more thoroughly adjudicated the asylum-granting process, enforced more rigorous inspections of the H-1B temporary visa applications, and slowed down green card applications.

Immigration lawyers began to refer to these stricter administrative policies as “the Invisible Wall,” a bitter reference to Trump’s border wall, which had also taken time to get underway. The immigrant workforce, which we used to track every month at VDare, began to fall even before COVID.

Very fairly, the columnist Michael Barone, a long-time immigration enthusiast, in late 2020 pointed out the paradoxical situation:

Astonishingly, Trump has failed to emphasize his two signature 2016 issues: immigration and trade. He can claim that his new trade agreements and economic policies have produced income and wealth gains disproportionately favoring low-wage workers—something administrations of both parties have failed to achieve for a generation.

And he can argue that his immigration policies—and the cooperation he has successfully wrested from Mexico—have preventedthe surge of unskilled illegal immigrants, which could easily resumethe minute the networks call the election for Joe Biden. [Emphasis added].

It’s not surprising that right now Trump and all his men are focused on undoing the astonishing damage that the Biden regime has done by unleashing illegal immigration. During the month of February 2025, the second Trump administration has already reduced “encounters” on the southwest border—meaning encounters with illegals attempting to cross the border—to 11,709 from 189,913 a year earlier, or an 94 percent decline, according to U.S. Customs and Border Patrol data. 

Over the four years of the Biden administration, the foreign-born population rose to 53.3 million from 45 million, or 15.8 percent of U.S. total population.

Estimates of the total inflow of immigrants, legal and illegal, during the Biden years range from 4 million to 8 million. The Center for Immigration Studies, which is always cautious, estimated in March that over the four years of the Biden administration, the foreign-born population rose to 53.3 million from 45 million, or 15.8 percent of the  total U.S. population, which is higher than the previous peaks reached in 1890 and 1910. It is truly amazing that the GOP made no move to impeach Biden for this after they regained the House in 2022.

It is tempting to view this border betrayal as a move by Democrats to “elect a new people,” as the communist playwright Bertold Brecht suggested after workers in East Germany rebelled against Soviet rule in 1953. In this view, Democrats aim to knock out the GOP before the immigration patriot movement that elected Trump in 2016 gets a chance to save the historic American nation as it existed before the 1965 Immigration Act opened the door to Third-World migrants. And there’s certainly something to this. But these enormous influxes have happened simultaneously across the Western World. Did they plot this at Davos?

Republican majorities in Congress are slim. As I write in mid-March, Washington is preoccupied with its recurring drama of trying to fund the government. A long-time Washington watcher, Rosemary Jenks of the Immigration Accountability Project, told me: 

I’m extremely optimistic that the House will pass HR2, the Secure the Border Act, which would make it impossible for a future Democrat president to open the borders again, like Biden. The question then would be whether seven or eight Senate Democrats have learned anything from the 2024 election and are willing to vote for it. 

About reducing legal immigration, I’m hopeful but not optimistic.

We already know, from Trump’s first term, that an immigration moratorium can be imposed by executive action. And we know that it works: the labor market tightened, and real incomes improved for lower-earning Americans.  

We already know, from Trump’s first term, that an immigration moratorium can be imposed by executive action. And we know that it works: the labor market tightened, and real incomes improved for lower-earning Americans

The reason Trump seems to have been blown off course on legal immigration is his pride in presiding over an economic boom. He seems to have been convinced by the old establishment narrative that economic growth requires immigrants. Still, consensus economic forecasts suggest a 15 percent to 35 percent chance of a recession by the end of 2025. And there could well be further economic disruption caused by Trump’s trade wars. Cutting immigration would cushion the blow to American workers.

And, we must remember: this is Trump. He could easily have another “S**t Hole” moment. I refer to the hilarious incident in his first term when, after a pleasant meeting with the (female) Prime Minister of Norway, he wondered why the U.S. doesn’t aim to attract immigrants like the nice Norwegian lady he’d just met with. Trump’s common-sense instincts often unexpectedly re-emerge and prevail over the  conventional wisdom of Washington, D.C. 

The reason a patriot administration needs to get a grip on America’s immigration disaster is ultimately not economic, but demographic. Demographics is destiny in American politics. Many otherwise sensible people can’t face this uncouth fact. Fundamentally, the Republican “Grand Old Party”—or the GAP, “Generic American Party,” as we used to call it at VDare, because it’s done nothing to deserve a “grand” status—is the party of white America, while Democrats are the party of minorities with some atypical whites, Jews, and homosexuals, thrown in.

An immigration moratorium that aims for net-zero immigration, such that further migrant inflows are balanced by outflows—is needed to prevent the U.S. becoming majority nonwhite and being, in Obama’s words, “fundamentally transformed.”

In early 2015, at a very dark moment for immigration patriots, I predicted that it would just take one good political speech to surface the immigration issue in America, as Enoch Powell’s “Rivers Of Blood” speech had done in the UK in 1967.

But, in fact, it only took a sound bite from a famous billionaire and reality TV star.

And it will only take one speech to surface the concept of an immigration moratorium—and why it is necessary.