Trump extends immigration restrictions, citing pandemic impact on labor market

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Maintaining the restrictions, which comes with only 20 days remaining in the president’s term, is the latest effort to prevent immigrants from entering the country. Restricting immigration has been at the center of the administration’s concerns since its earliest days, when it issued travel bans to seven Muslim-majority countries, and continued until the last year in power of Trump as the White House uses the coronavirus pandemic as cover.
In April, Trump signed an immigration proclamation targeting people outside the United States seeking to migrate legally to the United States, with a few exceptions. This order, which was set to expire, was extended in June until the end of 2020 and expanded to include certain guest worker visas.

“The effects of COVID-19 on the American labor market and on the health of American communities are a matter of continuing national concern,” reads Trump’s Thursday proclamation. “The current number of new daily cases worldwide reported by the World Health Organization, for example, is higher than the comparable number present in June, and although therapeutics and vaccines are recently available for a increasing numbers of Americans, their effect on the labor market and community health has not yet been fully realized. “

Citing the pandemic’s continued impact on the labor market as the reason for the restrictions contradicts the President’s campaign refrain that the United States is “bypassing the turning point” of the pandemic and his continued rhetoric that the United States has does a great job in dealing with the coronavirus – even as the country continues to set new daily records for deaths and hospitalizations.

The message of the proclamation on the economy is also contradictory for the president. In a video posted to his Twitter account earlier Thursday, in which the president touted the growth of the U.S. economy, he bragged about the unemployment rate and said the number “is heading much lower” than the 6 , 7% current.

As CNN previously reported, one of the key figures behind the push to limit immigration has been Stephen Miller, Trump’s top immigration adviser and the architect of the President’s radical immigration agenda.

Priscilla Alvarez contributed to this story.

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