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While eyes are on what will soon be a battle royale in the Supreme Court over whether or not President Donald Trump’s plan to do away with birthright citizenship is constitutional, he has elsewhere taken a full-spectrum approach to the immigration problem. Many of the changes now in play will engender court challenges, and some may require legislation, but they show Trump is receiving thorough, detailed advice on immigration, and acting where he can.
The first proposed change is to toughen up the civics test immigrants must pass in order to become American citizens. (There are also plans to change the required English exam.) Joseph Edlow, director of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) said the civics test was “not very difficult” and allowed immigrants to easily memorize the questions and answers. He argued this was not really “comporting with the spirit of the law.” He said the test must reflect assimilation expectations. The test was made up of largely random questions and was non-standardized until 2008, when the George W. Bush administration introduced a basic civics test requiring applicants to correctly answer six out of 10 questions. During Trump 1.0, the number of possible questions was raised to 128, and the number of correct answers to 12 out of 20, before the Biden administration switched it back in March 2021 to the current, easier, format.
The current list of 100 potential questions, and answers, is online to memorize. The test is oral, and the USCIS Officer will ask the applicant no more than 10 of the 100 civics questions; those age 65 and above with significant time in the U.S. face a smaller battery of questions and can do the civics test in their native language. All other applicants must answer six out of 10 questions correctly to pass. If they fail, they can retake the test one more time. Most TAC readers would hopefully pass without much preparation, based on their 8th-grade U.S. government high school class, so give it a try. If you need a refresher, USCIS has what looks just like an 8th-grade U.S. government high school textbook online. All in all, it is a test worth toughening up for immigrants when the prize for getting things right is American citizenship.
The next potential change has to do with the infamous H1-B, the skilled worker visa. Everyone (almost) agrees we need it, but no one can agree how it should be administered. The latest initiative out of Trump’s Department of Homeland Security would eliminate the current lottery system. At present Congress allows only 85,000 H1-B visas to be issued a year, a number dramatically below actual demand. Applications are tossed into a drum and 85,000 are chosen at random for further processing.
This puts the British quantum physicist on par with the fake credentials of the Indian web designer. DHS is hoping to replace this lottery with a “weighted selection process” of some kind. The Institute for Progress, a nonpartisan think tank, argues the economic value of the visa program to the U.S. could be increased 88 percent if applicants were evaluated based on seniority or salary, and the lottery done away with for good. A researcher at the Economic Innovation Group said, “Giving away these visas randomly is an enormous, missed opportunity to attract truly scarce talent that would benefit American businesses and communities.”
USCIS is also revisiting the public charge rule, which bars green cards for applicants likely to take public assistance. The rule has existed since Ellis Island days, but was more strictly interpreted during Trump 1.0 to include non-cash benefits like Medicaid or housing aid. The Biden administration reversed the decision, so the government currently does not take non-cash benefits into account.
Foreign students have already received significant attention from the Trump administration, with visas cut off or reduced for certain American universities alongside renewed scrutiny for those applicants granted visas elsewhere. Students’ social media, for example, is being scanned when they apply for a visa. In Niger, all visa processing has been suspended in part due to a 27 percent percent overstay rate among students. Foreign students in the U.S. have found themselves more often subject to deportation, such as Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and pro-Palestinian activist detained in March 2025.
Trump’s Justice Department has launched legal challenges in states that allow illegal aliens who are college students to pay the tuition rate reserved for in-state residents. That price can often be half of what out-of-state American students or legal foreign students shoulder. There are about 408,000 illegal immigrants studying at U.S. colleges. The Justice Department argues these tuition laws unfairly offer a benefit to foreigners unavailable to U.S. citizens and legal residents and wants it stopped. Attorney General Pam Bondi said, “The Justice Department will relentlessly fight to vindicate federal law and ensure that U.S. citizens are not treated like second-class citizens anywhere in the country.” Texas has already dropped the favorable treatment of illegal alien students. Following Texas, Rep. Randy Fine (R-FL), then serving in the state legislature, introduced a Florida bill that ended the tuition break in his state.
Policies that allow illegal alien students to pay in-state tuition remain in more than 20 other states, including California, New York, Kentucky, and Minnesota. Meanwhile, the federal Department of Education announced five new probes into University of Louisville, University of Nebraska Omaha, University of Miami, University of Michigan, and Western Michigan University, arguing their scholarships for illegal students are discriminatory.
Also on the chopping block are favorable tuition policies for the 119,000 illegal alien students protected under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) program, which encouraged in-state tuition for these students. Scholarships available exclusively to DACA students (i.e., not available to American citizens) are being looked at as discriminatory and thus unconstitutional.
Policies affecting students as well as all other business and leisure travelers are in the works. The “visa integrity fee,” a kind of bond, was included in the Big, Beautiful Bill Trump signed into law this July. It will require visitors traveling on a non-immigrant visa to pay an additional $250. Applicants must pay this amount on top of any other visa or DHS fees. The idea is that the $250 will be held by the United States as a bond against the traveler leaving the country. Given that some visas are issued for up to 10 years’ validity allowing for multiple entries, and that some students can stay legally in the U.S. for a decade or more through graduate programs, some sort of massive accounting system will be needed, as well as increased cooperation between DHS here at home and the visa-issuing Department of State offices abroad to track those who paid sometime in the past. A second plan, using a $15,000 bond, is also in the works for countries with high overstay rates.
Implementation issues like that are why there is no target date set to implement the fee. There are also concerns that to someone planning a new (illegal) life in America on their tourist visa, $250 is just not enough money to act as a deterrent. The fee also does not apply to travelers from more than 40 countries covered by the Visa Waiver Program. These visitors, however, will also feel a new financial pinch as the application fee for the Electronic System for Travel Authorization required for all those who enter the U.S. will soon increase from $21 to $40.
Almost too numerous to count are other Trump immigration initiatives. For example, illegal immigrants in the U.S. are suing the Trump administration’s new no-bail policy that requires them to remain in detention while their cases grind through the immigration court system. USCIS issued guidance which bars trans women athletes from obtaining “extraordinary ability” visas to compete in female sports. Overseas, there has been a return to post-9/11 personal appearance requirements for all visa interviews. Social media posts in Nigeria by the State Department remind visa applicants that traveling to the U.S. to give birth (and thus create an American citizen anchor baby) is not allowed. Local media responded with a list of six other countries still open to birthright tourism. Challenges remain.
There is a lot going on that may not be visible to most Americans. But one Mexican illegal alien has got it figured out. He said, “I truly do think that they want to make it as hard as they can, to make everybody get out. They make it more difficult so people just leave.”
That certainly is true.