US President Donald Trump announced his new immigration plan aimed at prioritising highly-skilled migrants and tightening family-based migration, while speaking at the Rose Garden in the White House on Thursday.
The measure is aimed at replacing family-based immigration rules with a point-based system that would encourage young and highly educated people to move to the United States.
“Only 12% of legal immigrants are selected based on skill or based on merit. In countries like Canada, Australia and New Zealand, and others, that number is closer to 60 and even 70 and 75% in some cases. The biggest change we make is to increase the proportion of highly skilled immigration from 12% to 57% and we’d like to even see if we can go higher,” said Trump to the press.
The plan will focus on allowing nuclear families – spouse and children – to migrate to the United States, while extended family members will be less likely be allowed to enter the country.
The plan, which will face an uphill battle in Congress even among the Republicans, does not address the issue of the ‘Dreamers’, undocumented immigrants who arrived in the US as children.