Trump Travel Ban Will Have Severe Economic, Humanitarian Costs

WASHINGTON DC, June 4, 2025—Today, citing national security concerns, President Trump reinstated and expanded the nationality-based travel bans from his first term in office. The sweeping travel ban follows a slew of Trump administration actions that, while invoking questionable legal authority, are aimed at making the United States less friendly to immigrants of all kinds. 

The new travel restrictions fully suspend the issuance of immigrant and nonimmigrant visas to nationals from Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen, and bans immigrant visas and B-1/B-2, F, M, and J visas for nationals of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.  

There are limited exceptions, including for immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, Afghan Special Immigrant Visa beneficiaries, and individuals who qualify for a national interest waiver. The ban also does not apply to individuals who currently hold valid visas, as well as people with green cards. The ban goes into effect at 12:01 AM on June 9.  

The 19 countries covered by this new ban represent over 475 million people. In 2023, over 115,000 people from Cuba, Venezuela, and Haiti alone received green cards.  

Simultaneously with this new travel ban, Trump invoked the same legal authority to ban all new foreign students and researchers aiming to attend or work at Harvard University, an unprecedented attack on American higher education.  Instead of fixing the root problems in our broken immigration system – no legal pathways for those who have lived here decades, massive backlogs, and lack of infrastructure for processing asylum seekers at the border– Trump’s policies are aimed at attacking all classes of immigrants.  

The following statement is from Jeremy Robbins, executive director of the American Immigration Council: 

“It’s imperative that our government protect our national security and ensure that people who present a danger to Americans are not let into the country. But President Trump’s decision to reimpose and expand the blanket and discriminatory nationality-based travel bans of his first term will have massive costs for all Americans. These travel bans do nothing to make us safer or more prosperous: they harm our economy and indiscriminately punish immigrants who otherwise qualify to come to the United States legally.  

We are already at a precarious moment for our economy. Within the United States, immigrants who originate from the 19 targeted countries are already contributing significantly to the U.S. economy, earning billions of dollars of income and paying back billions in taxes. People from some nationalities on this travel ban list are already playing an outsized role in driving entrepreneurship and filling in labor shortages in STEM and healthcare. By categorically denying visas because of where a person was born, we are stamping out one of the major sources of our country’s economic clout.  

Today’s decision will prevent people from joining their families, studying at our universities, or traveling here for business solely because of the country in which they were born or the nationality they derived from a parent.  

When President Johnson signed the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, he declared that ‘never again’ will discrimination based on national origin ‘shadow the gate to the American Nation with the twin barriers of prejudice and privilege.’ Unfortunately, today President Trump once again restores that exact discrimination.”