Trump’s immigration limit makes little economic or health sense

The Washington Post and other papers reported on Trump’s latest executive order, barring immigration.

As with many things Trump is doing these days, this policy makes no sense, even for him. While his base may still love him, there is increasing intolerance of him by traditional republican business-people who were willing to put up with his shenanigans in exchange for favorable tax policies. For someone to shun mask-wearing, turn a health policy into a political statement, and rush the re-opening of the country the excuse of pandemic protection for H1B visas rings VERY hollow. In a speech many years ago, Trump proposed opening up visas for the skilled trades and programming jobs the US outsources because we can’t get enough programmers. Adding 500,000+ highly paid international programmers to US payrolls would have been fantastic. Instead, now he’s removing the payroll that was en-route. Dumb and it will piss off centrist Republicans.

Let’s do the math. One million top programmers (PHD or master’s level) $100K annual salary, 17% federal tax plus Fica+medicare 15%. 100 billion times 32% = 32 billion in additional tax revenue. Not counting the multiplier effect on all the stimulus those salaries bring to the US (could be another 20-billion)

There are many ways we could easily assure that the skilled workers arriving to help out Google, Facebook, MSFT and thousands of other companies were Covid-19-free.

Want to make America better, bring in a million coders from offshore and let them pay federal and state taxes.