Merit-Based Immigration Quotes

Am immigration policy based on family unification is not in the best interest of our country. We should be looking for the most skilled and talented.

We have a legal immigration system that's outdated, it's primarily based on whether you have family members living here. In the 21st century, it has to be more of a merit-based system, and that is why our legal immigration system is in need of modernization.

America's strength in the past has been our ability to bring family members to join other family members in the United States and to look at skills but not have it be the only determination of how you get here.

You can see why there are more people wanting to come from economically-distressed areas, and they can't all come to America. So it gets into the valid, legitimate debate over immigration as to how do we choose. Do we have a diversity lottery and take people from everywhere, do we base it more on merit?

If you change our immigration system to a skills-based system that respects and treats people for who they are as individuals as opposed to residents of a certain country or relatives of certain people in the United States, it's a system that is more in keeping with American values.

Legal immigration should emphasize merit and meeting the needs of the U.S., including specific unmet workforce needs.

If you're a doctor, or a scientist, or a computer programmer, it shouldn't matter whether you come from Nigeria, or Norway, or any other country on this earth. Today though we have a system that rewards ties of blood, ties of kin, ties of clan. That's one of the most un-American immigration systems I can imagine.

Stephen Miller said, "Over time you would cut net migration in half, which polling shows is supported overwhelmingly by the American people in a very large number." This is why Donald Trump got elected. "It's a major promise to the American people to push for merit-based immigration reform that protects American workers, American taxpayers - protects the American economy - and prioritizes the needs of our citizens, our residents, and our workers. It's pro-America immigration", he said.

I'm very pleased when the smartest people come [to the U.S.] and almost never pleased when the very bottom of the mental barrel comes in.

We are specifically keeping the best and brightest out. It is the dumb and dumbest that we are letting in. Let me rephrase that: It is the ill-educated and the uneducated that we are letting in. The VCs, college graduates, PhDs, you name it, from all over the world, they are limited. The number of people of that caliber - severely limited and tightly controlled.

Legal immigration is good for America, if it's controlled and structured via the legal process, of course. But the problem is the system we have in place right now is broken. For example, it is completely family based which means that it's based not on what you can do or what talent you have or what merit you bring or what job you could fill, but rather on whether you know someone who already lives here.

I do think that we need more of a balance between merit-based and familial-based immigration.