Welcome to the Cato podcast. I'm Ryan Bourne Cato's R. Evan Sharf Chair for the public understanding of economics.

There's been a lot of focus on President Trump's efforts to clamp down on illegal immigration,

both at the southern border and through stepped-up internal

enforcement within American cities. But that can often obscure what may be an even bigger story,

the sharp fall in legal immigration to the United States since early 2025. Refugee admissions,

asylum entries, student visas, family-vase visas, and now H-1Bs have all seen

big declines. So what's going on? How much of this is actually a change in immigration policy?

How much is tough a vetting? And how much is due to America looking at a less desirable location

for some immigrant groups, given the administration's

positions and rhetoric. To discuss that, I'm joined by my Cato colleague David Beer. He's the director

of immigration studies and occupies the Celts Foundation Chair in Immigration Policy. And most

pertinently for this conversation, he's the author of a piece titled, Trump has cut legal immigration

more than illegal

immigration. David, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. Let's start off with the big

picture, the conclusion, and then work back. When you say Trump has cut legal immigration more than

illegal immigration, is that in terms of absolute numbers? Is that proportionately? What's going on here? Yeah, so it's the

absolute number. So I think that's the most relevant number when you're talking about what,

what effect is this going to have on the country? What, what, how many people are we talking about?

So if you look at it on a monthly basis at the end of the Biden administration, on the main programs that we're talking about, almost 190,000 legal entries per month. And now we're down to fewer than 55,000 per month. So an enormous cut. And if you look at the illegal immigration

side, I just included all Border Patrol arrests, even though most of the people who are

arrested at the border were not released by the end of the Biden administration. But if you

just look at the just total number of Border Patrol

...