The United States has been one of the most culturally diverse nations for centuries, and continues to grow more and more diverse every single day. People from unique and exotic cultures all across the world travel by boat, airplane, or even on foot thousands of miles to come to America for a promised better life. Americans practice over 100 different religions and originate from thousands of places.

People seek out America for various reasons; some come here to seek better job opportunities, others come to learn new skills, a few come to reunite with their families, and many seek asylum to avoid the racial or religious persecution that they faced back in their country of origin. Like Albert Einstein, David Ho, and Joseph Pulitzer, immigrants come here in search of improving their own lives and generally end up improving our country. Immigrants are quickly assimilating themselves into American culture and filling unfilled jobs, causing our economy to grow.

As time goes by, more and more Americans support our country gaining many new cultures and skilled individuals and developing our economy through legal immigration. However, some still oppose America’s increasing racial diversity. One prominent opponent is our president, Donald J. Trump. Trump is currently trying to pass laws that heavily limit the number of legal immigrants we accept.

President Trump is attempting to accomplish three main goals by backing the plan of Senators Cotton and Perdue. His first goal is to limit the number of extended family members who are allowed to reunite in the United States, his second goal is to reduce the number of refugees, in need of a safe home back to their war filled countries where they would be persecuted or even killed, who get to come to America, and his third goal is to eliminate racial diversity by removing the system that gives citizens from countries with low immigration rates a better chance to receive a visa to stay in America. He claims that immigrants “cost too much” for our country, but history has shown that the benefits of racial diversity and immigration far outweigh the costs and legal immigrants have always been a net benefit to the United States.

Currently, if you have a family member who lives in the United States and you want to come to the US to live with them, that person gets priority for a green card. This helps to keep families together, a longstanding core American value. Limiting the number of foreigners who are able to join their family in the United States will result in thousands of families who are permanently separated from each other, including former H1 workers who have since become citizens. This ultimately encourages workers to move back to their native country and America then loses the skills and talents they brought here.

Trump’s second goal is to cut the number of refugees that America accepts by over 50%. America already has an extremely low refugee acceptance rate while being the most economically developed country in the entire world. America is only accepting 100,000 immigrants, a trivial number when there are 65 million refugees currently seeking safe homes. America, having the highest GDP in the world, is currently the country most capable of supporting these refugees. However, we choose to accept less than 0.15%, and Trump plans to lower this number even further. Despite having populations much smaller and GDPs far lower, countries like Germany (who accepted 1,000,000 refugees in 2015) offer asylum to many more refugees than we do. Instead of lowering the amount of refugees that America accepts, we as a country that claims to provide moral leadership to the world, should focus on increasing it and providing better care for people in need.

Trump’s final goal is to eliminate the diversity visa lottery program. The diversity visa lottery gives visas to citizens from countries with low immigration rates. The program is not excessively important, but it helps increase diversity and increases the number of Visas given out yearly.

Trump and others who agree with this immigration plan complain that immigrants are “stealing” the jobs of American workers, and think that the solution is to prevent legal immigrants from entering the country. They say that companies are favoring immigrants when they choose employees due to the fact that they can use immigrants for cheap labor, but the opposite is actually true. According to an analysis done by Glassdoor, H-1B workers are paid about 2.8% more than American workers on average, meaning that these workers actually cost more for companies to employ. The reason that there are so many immigrants on H-1B Visas currently working in the US is that immigrants possess skills that many American workers do not, and companies are forced to hire them. The solution to the thousands of jobless American workers is providing them opportunities in new fields to give them the necessary skills to obtain high-level jobs, not to prevent immigrants that want to see America grow from entering the country. Trump is proposing 100,000,000 dollars should be devoted to educating unemployed workers, but in reality to educate the over 5% of our population that is unemployed over 500,000,000,000 dollars would be necessary to adequately train that many individuals. This is an immense quantity of money, and currently the only way to fill these jobs in is to bring in already-skilled immigrants from other countries.

Trump claims that what he is doing will create more jobs and stop illegal immigrants from entering the country. In reality, he is only decreasing cultural diversity in America, preventing people in need of a safe home from gaining protection, and stopping families from reuniting in the U.S. Trump’s immigration policy does little to nothing to create jobs for American citizens or allow only immigrants with skills to come to the US, and should not be passed.