In August, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that adjudicates and grants immigration benefits like visas, residency, and naturalization, put out a bizarre three-page policy alert. Among other things, it noted vaguely that the agency would scrutinize applicants who “support or promote anti-American ideologies or activities” and “enforce all relevant immigration laws to the maximum degree, including the use of discretion, to deny the benefit request.” Effectively, it instructed evaluators to deny people engaged in anti-Americanism, which it did not define there or elsewhere. 

What is anti-Americanism? What are those “ideologies or activities,” exactly? And without any meaningful guidance, how is anyone on either side of the immigration process supposed to identify it? Maybe the imprecision is the point. Three weeks on, practitioners tell The Verge that it is almost impossible to figure out how to advise clients on this standard or properly prepare for it. “The problem that I have been stating is that it’s entirely pretextual anyway, that having something be this vague is not a bug, it’s not a problem, it’s exactly what they’re going for. Because if they have it vague, then they can say that somebody can be disqualified for any reason they want,” said Pittsburgh-based immigration lawyer Adam S. Greenberg.

In one potential indication of where the administration could draw the line, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted that people “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Charlie Kirk’s assassination could be denied visas or stripped of status without pointing to any specific authority. The uncertainty “creates an environment of self-censorship where people delete their accounts or delete their posts or simply do not post things because they’re worried that they will have to report them to the government and that the government may read them and it might influence their immigration status in the future,” said Eva Galperin, the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

“Fear about whether this would impact applications has been around for a while, since March or even earlier, with the administration’s antisemitism policy,” said New York-based immigration attorney and scholar Cyrus Mehta, referencing the administration’s earlier announcement that it would screen applicants’ social media for supposedly antisemitic content. “The anti-Americanism policy really kind of flows from the antisemitism policy.”

Mehta said he’d attended multiple naturalization interviews since the announcement and had not seen it come up. Still, clients remain on edge and lawyers bewildered. “I don’t know how it’s going to be applied. It might be applied more vigorously, and I think it’s far more insidious than the antisemitism … It’s really vague, it’s really broad.” He said that his and many other attorneys’ belief in free speech “is totally antithetical to the advice that one may have to give to clients.”

Keeping immigration policies broad and discretionary to confuse applicants has been a penchant of Donald Trump’s going back to his first term. The public charge rule, for example, threatened immigrants with status denial over extraordinarily subjective analyses of their risk of becoming dependent on public assistance, which could take into account not just existing but hypothetical future use of benefits like food stamps. Ultimately, I’ve never heard of anyone denied status specifically on the basis of the expanded public charge analysis, at least in part because it was only briefly in effect before it was blocked by a federal judge during covid. Nonetheless, a 2024 report by the Urban Institute found widespread reluctance among immigrant and mixed-status families to use safety net benefits they were entitled to, including some that were state and local and would not have been part of the public charge calculus.

The idea at least in part was for people to overcorrect, and overcorrect they did. Now, Trump officials are doing the same but for speech. This is not the first immigration effort targeting what very much seems like protected speech, following the now-notorious detention of former Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil and others involved in campus protest and activism, which shocked observers earlier this year. This does, however, seem far more expansive, and comes on the heels of Homeland Security and the State Department announcing that visa adjudications would require applicants to both share all their social media handles and set their accounts to be publicly visible, which together suggest that online criticism of the administration could now effectively be an obstacle to status. “It has clearly altered behavior. A lot of people say, ‘Well, I make sure that I don’t post anything.’ I’ve never really had that reaction before,” said Mehta.

The guidance does not specify how exactly government adjudicators would assess applicants for “anti-American” sentiment, though there are some concerning clues in other recent immigration actions. In April, the administration abruptly began mass-terminating thousands of student visas across the country before just as abruptly reversing course as it faced dozens of lawsuits and court losses. It soon emerged in court that administration officials had simply run international student information data through a federal crime information database and then directed the terminations without ever confirming if the data was accurate or if identified students had actually committed offenses that could trigger loss of status. Activists and lawyers worry that a similar approach could be used to identify supposed anti-American ideology.

“We can make guesses based on the half-assed technical implementations that the Trump administration has made since February. Especially the behavior of DOGE is usually to essentially create enormous troves of data and merge them all together in a deeply undifferentiated way,” said Galperin. “You get a lot of extremely inaccurate or useless data, and then either just do a search for incendiary keywords — which is how you end up getting funding pulled for talking about transitions or transgenic mice — and then there’s just feeding the entire thing into AI and having AI make the determination, or have AI write a summary, which, again, you are feeding garbage into a garbage machine that will then spit out more garbage.”

USCIS did not respond to a list of detailed questions, including how it defined anti-Americanism, what criteria it was giving its adjudicators, and if it would use any automated tools to evaluate applicants.

At least the students with canceled visas were able to pursue legal action on the basis that the government obviously lacked any real rationale to attempt to terminate their status. When it comes to the initial issuance of benefits like work and student visas or even permanent residency, the government under the law gets quite a fair bit of leeway, and doesn’t always have to explicitly lay out the reason for a denial. That opens up the possibility that applicants could be denied on this anti-American basis and not even know it.

“Adjustment [to permanent residency] is discretionary. Extensions of status are discretionary. Waivers are discretionary. They don’t have to provide their reasoning,” said Greenberg. While a federal court could in theory point out that a denial violates the First Amendment, there are limited avenues for people to actually appeal these decisions or get clarity on why they were denied, especially at consulates abroad.   

“I think, for example, students applying for the visa to study in the US are particularly vulnerable,” said Mehta. “It would be very difficult for everybody to bring lawsuits. So a lot of people are trying to conform. A lot of people are basically avoiding, you know, posting.”

Throughout his 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump often claimed that his efforts against immigration were primarily against irregular or illegal immigration, and that he was happy to have people go through “proper channels.” Those assurances got weaker as he moved into his first term, but he still made at least rhetorical overtures to legal immigration — he had to appease a business community that was still skeptical of his then-new political movement.

Now, Trump and anti-immigration ideologues like Stephen Miller have succeeded at targeting the pipeline of international students and foreign workers on visas like the H-1B. They’ve crafted a narrative about outsourced workers replacing native-born ones. But in actuality, this wide-ranging campaign now threatens to hamstring industries across the economy.

This public perception of the H-1B visa system imagines bringing in cheaper (and, the stereotype goes, often lower-skilled) international labor, especially in technology spaces. This undeniably has happened; there have in the past been a few outsourcing firms hoovering up masses of the visas, and as there is research backing up that employers have behaved in exploitative ways toward workers that are effectively tethered to them by law and far less able to seek better conditions or organize.

But this is only one piece of the puzzle — an increasingly small one in recent years, as the Biden administration took steps to rein in abuses, extending into the weeks leading up to Trump’s inauguration. The other side of the coin is that H-1Bs are often used to populate the workforces of technical industries that simply cannot find domestic workers with the skills or expertise at the volumes they need, a sort of mirror image of industries like agriculture and construction’s reliance on often undocumented workers for jobs that locals can’t or won’t do. That includes tech, yes — and indeed the biggest beneficiary is Amazon — but also high-tech manufacturing, educational services, consulting, healthcare delivery and research, and even ostensible Trump priorities like a domestic semiconductor industry, which is highly dependent on the visa.

Setting aside how different the reality of legal immigration is from how most Americans, including Trump himself, probably envision it, this always had the ring of shifting the Overton window toward immigration antipathy. This would clear a pathway for true-believer restrictionists like Stephen Miller to move against every facet of immigration into the country. His campaign began during Trump’s term but has launched in earnest during his second, with the administration all but axing the refugee program, targeting family reunification, and attempting to kneecap the system that brings foreign talent to the US, from students to workers.

The administration revived this week a first-term proposal to far more heavily favor very high-wage earners in the lottery that allocates the 85,000 available such visas annually, such that people with job offers or current employment earning an average of over $160,000 a year would get four lottery entries as opposed to one for those at the $85,000 band. That came right after Trump issued a legally dubious executive order purporting to require employers to pay a $100,000 flat fee to even apply for such visas. This all came on the heels of the administration’s efforts against international student visas, including vague speech restrictions for both student and worker visas and the abrupt cancellation of thousands of student visas, many over campus activism or minor law enforcement contact.

“Because the delay and gap in the way that they release data, we won’t really know for probably one or two school cycles what the current level of political rhetoric and fear and results have done to reduce top-of-funnel demand,” said Xiao Wang, CEO of Boundless Immigration, a national immigration research and consulting group. Over 1.1 million international students were enrolled at American universities in the last school year, though countries like Canada and China are quickly gaining ground.

At the end of the day, pursuing an American education and subsequent work visa is a significant investment — of money, yes, with international students being categorically less eligible for all manner of financial aid and fully ineligible for things like federal student loans — but also of time and effort. It’s years of cultural and professional acclimation with the expectation that they at least have a chance to apply their skills here in the long term.

“What investment needs most — and I mean any type of investment — is a confidence and stability in what you’re putting that money into, whether that’s building infrastructure, whether that is building a plant, whether that is building a farm, whether that is building a career or investing in education,” said Wang.

There was instant chaos in the aftermath of the executive order signing, which had not been previously announced by the Department of Homeland Security or the White House; some visa holders abroad worried they would not be allowed back into the country without paying the exorbitant fee before the White House quickly clarified that it would only apply to new applicants. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft scrambled to send warnings to their workers that they should return to the US immediately. The entire order itself is on shaky legal ground; immigration law gives the executive the ability to institute visa fees to cover processing costs but not to simply enact whatever fees the administration wants. Challenges are likely and those challenges may well succeed given just how untethered it is from any legal basis, though certainly that has not stopped some federal courts from signing off on administration actions thus far. 

Trump is gearing up for more. One proposal currently pending is a change for student and exchange visas from being valid for the duration of a recipient’s status as a student to fixed four-year terms that would require reapplication. Per a survey conducted in August and September by the Institute for Progress and NAFSA, the professional organization for international student advisers, this would discourage enrollment, with half of respondents saying they would not have enrolled in US universities if this was the current policy.

“There’s no PhD program that lasts four years, right? Most undergrads actually take more than four years. So you’re almost guaranteed to have this giant uncertainty right in the middle or towards the tail end of your course of study,” said Doug Rand, a former senior Homeland Security official (who was also a cofounder of Boundless). Rand pointed out that recently confirmed US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Joseph Edlow had also been talking about taking aim at Optional Practical Training (OPT), the work authorization that recent grads get at the end of their academic programs that often acts as the stopgap until they can secure full work visas. “The Trump administration is already engaged in trying to break every step of that process very deliberately. … To me, [OPT] is the real pinch point. It’ll be very interesting to see whether corporate America and tech actually go to war on that one.”

So far, the response from tech and other H-1B-heavy industries has been notably muted in contrast to the outrage when Trump targeted the visas at the tail end of his first term. (In 2020, for example, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, himself once an H-1B holder, said he was “disappointed by today’s proclamation — we’ll continue to stand with immigrants and work to expand opportunity for all”; this time around, he’s not made any public statements.) Rand attributes that in part to tech leaders’ increasing closeness to Trump and skittishness over his willingness to target companies that publicly defy him. “I think we’re going to enter a world in which you’re not going to see the spicy press releases saying that this is bad, but you’re going to see associations launching lawsuits, so that no individual company is in the crosshairs,” he said.

Restrictive immigration efforts don’t have to be practically successful to have a deterrent effect. The salary rule similarly won’t technically decrease the total number of H-1B visas available, but it would almost certainly deter employers from even attempting to hire recent graduates who would be heavily weighted against in the lottery system, strangling the talent pipeline. The general ambiance of uncertainty and open hostility from the federal government discourages participation on two fronts: Would-be students and workers are less likely to want to brave the gauntlet, and would-be employers don’t want to roll the dice on hiring processes that the government might change the rules for at any time. “[H-1B] is a random lottery. I get it: We put names in a hat, we draw names out. That is what I signed up for. I understand how that works. I understand how many shots I have at the lottery. I understand what happens if I don’t win the lottery. Now it’s unclear,” said Wang.

This specter could have catastrophic long-term effects on certain industries. According to an analysis by the Kaiser Family Foundation, roughly 500,000 of the nation’s 3.2 million registered nurses as of 2022 were immigrants under a mix of statuses including H-1B. Separately, the little-known Conrad 30 program allows certain medical graduates to obtain waivers to remain in the country post-graduation to practice in medically underserved areas, and the program has been growing in use over the past two decades. 

The upshot of a collapse of medical students, doctors, and nurses on student, exchange, and work visas would not be that those highly trained professionals would be replaced immediately with native-born health workers. The consequence would be fewer doctors and nurses working in the country, particularly in areas that are already experiencing shortages and as the American public writ large ages and requires additional care.

These issues compound — if there are suddenly fewer professionals in the training and early-career pipeline for medicine, or high-tech manufacturing, or whatever else, we’ll be seeing the effects for years even if the policies are at some point reversed. It might all seem extremely technical and a bit arcane to the general public, but these policies will have a wide-ranging impact on the US’s ability to compete with tech companies abroad and our ability to keep people safe and healthy. The H-1B is what Trump deemed a “proper channel” for immigration — but his administration seems to be eliminating those pathways too.

“I don’t think Stephen Miller can turn off the spigot overnight, right? But you kind of whack at the machine in enough places along the pipes and you can do a lot of damage, and I don’t know how much of it is reversible,” said Rand.