The United States needs a policy of “high-value migration,” not a continuation of the post-1990 easy-migration policies that create endless fights over migrant crimes, economic damage, and business-backed amnesties, according to White House aide Stephen Miller.
“President Trump has said we want to have high-value migration into this country, not low-value migration,” Miller told Fox News, adding:
We have to deal with the fact that we have millions and millions of people here who are on welfare, who are not contributing, who commit a lot of crime, who consume a lot of public resources, and it’s in the best interest of this country for those people to be humanely returned home. That’s the big conversation. And so this old Washington conversation about amnesty is missing the whole point. The real conversation is, ‘How do we have an immigration policy that makes America stronger and more unified, not weaker and more divided?’
Miller also downplayed public debates over the costs and benefits of migrant amnesties. “President Trump has always been clear in his opposition to amnesty… but I want to, I want to reframe this whole conversation” toward the costs and benefits of migrants, he said.
His comments are a dismissal of the mass amnesty and cheap-labor “Dignidad” bill being pushed by business groups, Rep. Maria Salazar (R-FL), and a handful of business-funded GOP legislators.
Miller’s comments counter the establishment’s framing of migration policy as “legal good/illegal bad” and also emphasize Trump’s periodic support for a greater national focus on technology-aided productivity over migration. “We’re going to need robots… to make our economy run because we do not have enough people,” Trump told Breitbart News, adding:
We don’t enough people to do it. So we have to get efficient… we’ll probably add to [the existing workforce] through robotically — it’s going to be robotically… It’s going to be big. Then, somebody is going to have to make the robots. The whole thing, it feeds on itself… we’re going to streamline things. We need efficiency.
Miller also made a national security argument against the current inflow of migrants that lowers Americans’ productivity while China invests in technology:
How do your schools work? How do your hospitals work? How does your economy work? How do you have a society that can win all these great civilizational struggles against our adversaries [such as China] around the world, if you have to feed, house, clothe, educate, support, give affirmative action to millions and millions of people from failed states around the world?
“Mass legal and illegal migration has driven down wages and crippled Americans’ ability to provide for their families [and grow their] productivity,” Jay Palmer, an expert who works with law firms to eradicate labor trafficking and forced labor, told Breitbart News. “A poultry manager at a plant in Alabama told me, ‘Why should I hire Americans when I can hire two Haitians… at a lower cost?”
Since at least 1990, the federal government has used migration to fuel the U.S. economy by extracting a huge population of low-wage workers, basement renters, and taxpayer-supported consumers from poor countries. The Extraction Migration policy spiked Wall Street and real estate prices, but also slowed productivity gains, flatlined wages for a huge number of Americans, and led to early deaths for millions of Americans.
In contrast, Trump’s low-migration policy is now pressuring companies to raise wages and invest in high-tech machines rather than low-productivity migrants, much to the distress of supposed Democratic “moderates.”
RestaurantBusinessOnline.com reported on January 23 that immigration enforcement officers are raising voters’ wages by deporting illegal migrants: “Fewer workers mean restaurants will once again have to compete for employees the only way they can, by paying higher wages. Wages over the next two years are expected to accelerate, according to Oxford Economics, from 3.7 percent this year to 5.6 percent by 2027.”
“Chicago-based John’s Food and Wine, which serves a $52 red snapper and an $83 steak, charges a 20 percent service fee across all orders, divided up among hourly staff… [ensuring] the restaurant’s dishwashers averaged earnings of $70,000,” the Wall Street Journal reported April 12.
Marketplace.org reported in February 2025:
At a machine shop at the Simi Institute for Careers & Technology, Liz Valdez, a student, is setting up a tool called a vertical mill so she can shape a piece of metal.
Valdez used to wait tables. But last summer, she quit, and became a full-time student at the machine shop. A big reason she signed up for this class, she said, is because a job in manufacturing will pay much more than she was making waiting tables — especially if she’s fully trained and certified before she even starts. “The more you do it, the more you practice, it becomes easier,” Valdez said.
Harvard’s business school reported in December 2024:
When John Furner, former CEO of Costco’s rival Sam’s Club, decided to raise wages, he faced pushback from HR, the finance department, and others within his company. But, as [the Costco CEO] said, he “could connect the dots between pay, turnover, productive work, and competitiveness.” The result? In just two years, productivity increased by 16 percent, turnover dropped by 25 percent, and sales rose by 25 percent.”
“Labor productivity rose 1.9 percent in 2025,” ProsperousAmerica.org reported on April 8, adding:
This is the largest annual increase since 2010, a critical signal of industrial strength. A real manufacturing recovery is not just about producing more, but producing more efficiently. Rising productivity reflects improving economies of scale and stronger use of labor and capital that will allow U.S. industry to increase production while keeping costs down. When productivity increases alongside rising orders and output, it signals a genuine strengthening of the manufacturing base.
In contrast, low-value migration imposes high costs on both Americans and America, Miller said as he dismissed Salazar’s push for amnesty and cheap labor:
This administration opposes amnesty. President Trump has always been clear his opposition to amnesty. And I, of course, you know my own views, but I want to reframe this whole conversation… [into] about having the kind of immigration to this country that makes us stronger, not weaker. I think this conversation gets siloed too often when we have to look at the whole picture.
You saw the recent tragic case where an illegal alien from Haiti bludgeoned a woman to death in broad daylight with the hammer, smashing her skull, one hammer blow after another. That’s what happens when you have open borders to this country from some of the most dangerous parts of the world. That’s one person that [President Joe] Biden and the Democrats let in to maim and murder our citizens. But there are thousands more when you have open migration, as we’ve had… largely for five decades before President Trump, we had open migration from the most dangerous places in the world.
However, Democrats prefer low-productivity migrants because they channel federal welfare funds into the Democrats’ unaffordable and unpopular political machines. The lower-productivity migrants are also profitable to investors with large stakes in the nation’s real estate sector and consumer economy.
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