Adviser and deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller led US President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, supported by economist George Borjas, who provided intellectual underpinnings. Photo / Getty Images
Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller has been the public face of the Trump Administration’s unprecedented immigration crackdown and deportation campaign.
But a Cuba-born Harvard University economist, who prefers a lower profile, provided the intellectual underpinnings of United States President Donald Trump’s sweeping policy changes until he left the White House last week.
In the 1980s and 1990s, George Borjas pioneered the field of immigration economics.
In seismic papers, Borjas’ research described the drawbacks of immigration, including his oft-cited, though much-disputed, findings that the arrival of lower-skilled immigrants hurts American workers who compete for jobs, especially poor people and African Americans.
More recently, his research has found new attention and urgency in Trump’s second term. Borjas, 75, worked as a top economist on the Council of Economic Advisers, a post he stepped down from last week.
Borjas is an immigrant and refugee who escaped Cuba for the US in 1962 and later obtained citizenship - a point of tension he has referenced in his writing.
“Not only do I have great sympathy for the immigrant’s desire to build a better life, I am also living proof that immigration policy can benefit some people enormously,” he wrote in a 2017 opinion piece for the New York Times.
“But I am also an economist and am very much aware of the many trade-offs involved. Inevitably, immigration does not improve everyone’s wellbeing.”
One of Borjas’ direct contributions to the Trump Administration this past year was his extensive behind-the-scenes work on Trump’s overhaul of the H-1B visa system for highly skilled workers that added a US$100,000 ($170,000) fee, according to three people familiar with his work and a White House official.
Borjas had previously written about the “well-documented abuses” of that programme over the years.
The White House official said Borjas was among many Trump Administration members involved in redesigning the H-1B visa programme and confirmed that Borjas provided intellectual support for other Trump immigration initiatives last year.
Borjas declined to comment at length for this story. But he confirmed to the Washington Post that Friday was his last day on the job, which he had always intended to be temporary, saying that the commute from Massachusetts to Washington “was just too much”.
Several of Borjas’ peers told the Post they believe he was the most-cited economist serving in the Trump Administration last year.
His resume includes a prestigious international economics award, half a dozen books, some 170 published articles, and more than 73,000 citations on Google Scholar, influencing thousands of studies on immigration.
“He’s probably the most-cited academic on the issue of immigration. He was foundational to the field of immigration economics,” said Alex Nowrasteh, senior vice-president for policy at the libertarian Cato Institute and an advocate for legal immigration.
“The field has now moved beyond his methods and has taken a different direction and stance. But politically, his ideas have never been more popular. His stature amongst policymakers, politicians and the public is probably higher than it’s ever been.”
That’s in part because few economists share Borjas’ view that the harms of immigration outweigh the benefits.
The consensus among economists has long been that immigration has a net positive impact on the economy and society, with small costs to US workers.
“George has always been a minority among economists,” said Daniel Hamermesh, an emeritus professor of economics at the University of Texas at Austin and close friend of Borjas for three decades.
“Nonetheless, his scientific work, in particular two papers he published in the ’80s, are probably the most influential of all papers published by economists on immigration.”
Borjas’ influence on the US President dates back to Trump’s speech accepting the GOP presidential nomination in 2016, in which the economist says Trump cited his research to explain a proposal to restrict immigration and build a border wall.
Weeks later, with two days’ notice, Trump called Borjas in for a meeting with Miller and Stephen Bannon at Trump Tower in Manhattan to help strategize about his campaign’s immigration platform, New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael D. Shear wrote in their 2019 book Border Wars.
Miller has also relied on Borjas’ research going back a decade.
At a heated press briefing in 2017, Miller invoked Borjas’ findings that US-born workers were paid lower wages because of Cuban immigrants who had arrived during the Mariel boat lift.
During Trump’s first term, Borjas was also in talks to join the Council of Economic Advisers, though that never materialised, according to people familiar with the matter. Last year, Borjas took a lower-profile role in the White House as a senior economist at the CEA.
Born in Cuba in 1950, Borjas was still called “Jorge” when the Castro Government seized a small men’s jeans factory owned by his family and closed his private school. A young Borjas played the drums for Communist Party officials.
“My neurological system has never fully recovered from the shock of going from my introductory algebra class to learning about Marx, Lenin, and the Cuban Revolution,” Borjas wrote in his 2016 book We Wanted Workers.
“I’m a conservative,” he told the American Conservative in a 2017 interview. “Very conservative. Having grown up in Cuba, it’s impossible not to be.”
At 12, he fled with his mother to Miami, thanks to a Kennedy-era policy welcoming Cubans. She found work at a garment factory, and then they relocated to Hoboken, New Jersey, following family. Borjas changed his name to George, became a naturalised citizen and fell in love with the Beatles.
“I have been a lifelong Beatles fan,” Borjas wrote in We Wanted Workers. “But it is clear that [John] Lennon’s claim about how easy it would be to imagine life in his borderless utopia was far off base,” Borjas added, referring to the song Imagine.
Borjas attended St Peter’s College, a small Jesuit school in Jersey City - “really, the only college that gave me money”, he said on a 2024 podcast with a Princeton University economist.
There he gravitated to economics, earning his PhD from Columbia University and setting off in the late 1970s for the University of California at Santa Barbara, where he became one of only a few economists looking deeply at immigration at a time when millions of Mexicans were arriving in California in search of work.
“In Southern California, you could really see the place changing, almost overnight,” Borjas said on the podcast. “That’s what really got into my mind.”
Borjas advised California Governor Pete Wilson (Republican) during Wilson’s 1994 re-election bid, when he campaigned for the passage of Proposition 187, aimed at blocking undocumented immigrants from accessing government services, including healthcare and public schools. The ballot initiative was ultimately struck down as unconstitutional.
Years later, Borjas gave a poolside immigration lesson to Arnold Schwarzenegger at the actor’s Brentwood, California, home amid his campaign for governor, Borjas said on the podcast.
Borjas’ influence also spread to Washington. Although he declined an offer to work in the George W. Bush White House, according to the American Conservative interview, he became a go-to economist for Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (R), who often cited Borjas’ studies and served as Trump’s attorney-general in his first term.
While Borjas’ work built the case for the economic justification for tougher immigration enforcement, it’s unclear whether Borjas played a role in designing Trump’s deportation efforts.
In November 2024, before entering the White House, Borjas lamented the latest wave of mass migration to the US under President Joe Biden, saying on the same podcast that he found “the whole thing very depressing”.
He added: “It’s very hard to talk about what kind of immigration policy to have, and what’s the best thing for us, if your border is sort of wide open”.
The Post could not confirm what part of the recent H-1B visa overhaul Borjas worked on. When the plan was rolled out in September, the changes sparked widespread confusion and chaos, from Silicon Valley to India.
The US$100,000 fee prompted lawsuits from the US Chamber of Commerce and 20 states, including California and New York, and created a rift between pro-business Republicans and Maga conservatives.
Despite his overarching pessimism about immigration, Borjas has long held that some immigration can benefit the US, pointing out in his books and articles that higher-skilled immigrants can boost the US economy with spillover effects on native-born workers.
His research has also found that immigration results in a wealth transfer from native-born workers to companies, providing a small net boost to the overall economy.
Some of Borjas’ peers told the Post they were shocked to learn of his contribution to the H-1B visa changes, given his academic work noting the benefits of higher-skilled immigration.
In recent years, though, Borjas has endorsed the idea of steeper fees to prevent companies from replacing American workers with immigrants, telling the American Conservative that corporate H-1B proponents “should bear some of the cost”.
Borjas’ peers who spoke to the Post described him as a sharp academic whose research methods have influenced decades of scholarship. Some of them, though, said his political work has been motivated more by personal belief than empirical research.
“He deserves an enormous amount of credit for being a scholarly pioneer in the field,” said Nowrasteh of the Cato Institute. “Then he’s got opinions and op-eds that nobody should really pay attention to.”
In a 2017 interview with the Miami Herald, Borjas rejected the idea that he was xenophobic, saying he “absolutely detests” such a characterisation.
His field of immigration economics, he added, has become so heavily politicised that he would never pursue it if he were starting his career over.
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