The following article by Melissa boteach Sawn Fremstad, Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Heidi Schultheis and Rachel West was posted on the Center for American Progress website July 19, 2018:
President Donald Trump is preparing to unilaterally and fundamentally change the U.S. system for legal immigration in ways that would restrict immigration to the wealthiest and most privileged applicants. Under a new policy being drafted by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), an archaic federal immigration provision known as the “public charge” test would be reinterpreted to limit both family-unity and diversity-based immigration in ways that are a radical departure from current immigration law.1 Under the rewritten test, people would generally fail if they had income and resources of less than 250 percent of the federal poverty guidelines or had a medical condition and no unsubsidized source of health insurance.2
In this brief, the Center for American Progress aims to give the public a sense of the radical nature of the unilateral action the Trump administration is planning. To do so, the authors estimate what would happen if all people in the United States—U.S.-born citizens and immigrants alike—had to take this “Trump test,” based on the most recently leaked draft of the rule.3 According to CAP’s estimates, the proposed Trump test is so restrictive that more than 100 million people—about one-third of the U.S. population—would fail if they were required to take it today.
This estimate is a conservative one that is based on a snapshot of people’s current circumstances. Yet the Trump test is ongoing, so people who pass the test today could very well fail it in the near future due to economic downturns, mass layoffs, job insecurity, health problems, disability, or other factors. While, in this brief, the authors do not estimate an upper bound for Trump test failures, it is reasonable to assume that at least half of all people in the United States could fail this test over a period of several years.4