David Bier

1 month ago | cato.org | David Bier

First, the President lacks the authority to grant gold card purchasers lawful permanent resident status in the United States. The Immigration and Nationality Act lists precisely which legal immigrants can obtain the coveted “green card,” which denotes permanent resident status. Whether anyone would have standing to sue to stop the issuance of the Trump Gold Card is a more complicated question.

1 month ago | yahoo.com | David Bier

For years, my organization, the Cato Institute has supported the idea of a price-based visa category. A sort of “gold card” in which an immigrant pays a fee in exchange for a visa that allows the immigrant to live and work legally in the United States “would create a dynamic, market-based, merit-based, relatively more economically efficient, and self-regulating system that would serve the ever-changing American economy,” wrote my colleague Alex Nowrasteh in 2019.

1 month ago | cato.org | Jacob L. Vigdor |David Bier |Michael Howard

Immigration has increased sharply in recent years, and many people worry about its potential effects on government budgets. Many analyses have concluded that immigration is clearly a fiscal benefit to the federal government, but state and local effects can depend more on the particular circumstances in those areas.

1 month ago | usnews.com | Sarah Turberville |John Roth |David Bier |Ilya Somin

President Donald Trump has repeatedly pledged to oversee “the largest deportation operation in American history,” urging Congress to ramp up funding for mass deportations and invoking a centuries-old wartime law to defend shipping off migrants accused of having ties to a Venezuelan gang to a notoriously brutal El Salvadoran prison.

2 months ago | homelandsecuritynewswire.com | David Bier

IMMIGRATIONTrump’s New Immigration Ban: An Arbitrary, Discriminatory Legal Immigration RewritePublished 8 April 2025President Trump claims he wants a “merit-based” immigration system, but a system banning people based on their nationality is the opposite of merit-based. It is a national embarrassment. President Trump plans to rewrite—or, rather, write over—the Immigration and Nationality Act in the coming week.