The new White House immigration plan presented to Republican senators Tuesday focuses on increased border security and a merit-based legal immigration program, a senior administration official told The Daily Caller.
The plan was spearheaded by senior adviser and the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, but also included input from senior policy adviser Stephen Miller and has now been signed off on by President Donald Trump, the official said during a briefing with a few reporters.
There are specifically six goals that the plan aims at addressing: securing the border, protecting American wages, attracting and retaining the best and brightest, unifying families, labor in critical industries and retaining the United States’ humanitarian values. Border officials and immigration experts had a hand in crafting the policies that they believed would achieve those goals.
On border security, the plan calls for a physical barrier and modernization at ports of entry to stop drugs and trafficking.
“We want to make sure that all people, vehicles and packages coming through the ports of entry are fully scanned for drugs,” the official explained. “This is something from a national security point of view that we believe our country should have.”
The official claimed that asylum seekers will be vetted more quickly but did not offer details on how the process will change.
In terms of merit-based immigration, the plan would create a “points-based” system, based on Australian and New Zealand models.
The official declined to answer if the diversity visa lottery and chain migration would specifically be eliminated under the plan, but noted that Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton’s RAISE Act was at least partially used as a guide in crafting the merit-based system. They also contended that the plan is more about stripping down immigration to its base and then building from scratch, rather than eliminating certain items.
Current legal immigration levels would remain the same under the new plan.
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