The 11% drop in US permanent resident and temporary visas doesn’t include tourist visas, which also fell during the same period. Photo / Getty Images
The United States issued about a quarter of a million fewer visas in the first eight months of 2025 compared with the same period in 2024, as the Trump Administration introduced policies that have reshaped who comes to the US legally.
From January to August 2025, the State Department approved 11% fewer permanent resident and temporary visas compared with the same period a year before, according to State Department data released in early March.
These visas are generally issued for students, workers, and family members of citizens and legal residents. The 11% drop doesn’t include tourist visas, which also fell during the same period.
India and China bore the brunt of the visa declines. The US issued many fewer temporary visas to international students, cultural exchange visitors, and fiances and spouses of US citizens from those countries and beyond.
Visa approvals for permanent residency - known as green cards - also declined, with the largest drops in visas for workers, certain relatives, and Iraqi and Afghan nationals who worked with the US military.
Most nations sent fewer immigrants to the US.
In a group of 61 countries with at least 5000 visa approvals from January to August 2024, just seven received more visas in 2025 than the year before.
The Trump Administration’s travel ban, a pause on student visa interviews and heightened vetting requirements have all played a role in dampening visa figures. Plus, fewer State Department workers were available to process visas because of federal government cuts.
The preliminary visa data helps paint a fuller picture of immigration declines in the US.
For the first time in at least half a century, more immigrants left the country than entered last year, according to estimates released by Brookings Institution. That contributed to weaker job creation in recent months, as Federal Reserve chairman Jerome Powell noted last week.
“There’s no policy more important to the present and future of the US economy than immigration,” said Harvard University professor Jason Furman, who served as a top economist in the Obama administration.
“When we restrict immigration, we don’t just shortchange labour force growth today, we also reduce innovation and productivity growth in the future.”
In a statement to the Washington Post, State Department spokesman Tommy Pigott said: “A visa is a privilege, not a right. Unlike the Biden administration, President Trump is not willing to compromise the safety of American citizens to allow mass migration of unvetted foreign nationals into our country.”
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement that “President Trump was elected with a resounding mandate to put American citizens first and every policy decision he’s made has reflected that priority”.
Visas for Chinese and Indian nationals fell by about 84,000 compared with the same period in 2024, largely reflecting a drop-off in international students and workers from those countries.
Visas for Afghan and Cuban nationals also dropped sharply, reflecting the Trump Administration’s travel ban, which began in June. Visas also fell by more than 10,000 for citizens of the Philippines and Vietnam.
In June, the Administration enacted a travel ban on 19 countries - mostly majority-Muslim countries and those with a contentious relationship with the US, such as Cuba.
Around that time, the State Department also paused student and exchange visitor visa interviews for three weeks, before ordering the vetting of social media accounts for all those seeking visas.
The Trump Administration began eliminating thousands of positions from the State Department, describing the reductions as an effort to root out “bloat” and inefficiency.
Combined with expanded vetting requirements, staffing reductions resulted in fewer consular appointments and longer waiting times at certain high-demand consulates.
It’s not clear exactly how much the Trump Administration’s policies and heightened immigration enforcement have directly reduced visa applications. But some foreigners could have been deterred by Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric and canceled plans to come to the US.
“We don’t have a separation of how much of this decline is caused by demand and how much is caused by policy, and they’re obviously both putting downward pressure on the number of visas that are issued,” said Cecilia Esterline, an immigration analyst at the Niskanen Centre, a moderate think-tank in Washington.
Business and tourism visas, which include those issued for leisure trip and business travel, fell by about 3.4% in the first eight months of 2025 compared with that period a year earlier, a drop of nearly 200,000 visas.
Critics of the heightened restrictions say they limit the US’ competitive edge in the global economy and create enormous uncertainty among families and workers that have been waiting, in some cases for decades, to come to the US.
“The Trump Administration is using the power of the federal bureaucracy to grind the system to a halt, at least with respect to the people that are from countries that the Administration finds to be disfavourable,” said Jorge Loweree, managing director of programmes and strategy at the American Immigration Council, a non-profit that advocates for immigrant rights.
Limiting visas helps prioritise Americans in the labour market and education system, said Ira Mehlman, a spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for stricter immigration controls.
“It’s good for employers if immigrants flood in, which is why they lobby for it. But it’s not so great for US workers,” Mehlman said.
“There seems to be this assumption that if foreign workers are not here, their economic output will simply disappear. In most cases, those jobs would be filled by other workers, very often earning higher wages.”
Visas issued for family members were generally down, especially for spouses and fiances seeking temporary visas.
However, permanent green cards for high-priority relatives of citizens, including young children, parents and spouses, increased by 6% for the first eight months of the year over the same period in 2024. Those green cards have no limits.
A separate, capped family visa category, which includes adult children and siblings of US citizens, fell by more than 27%, or by about 44,000.
International students have been the hardest hit by the Trump Administration’s clampdown on legal immigration. Visas issued to international students fell by more than 30% in the first eight months of 2025.
The drop in student visas coincides with a statement by Marco Rubio in May that the State Department would “aggressively revoke” visas of students from China.
Later in the summer, the State Department announced that it had cancelled 6000 student visas for alleged crimes and overstays.
Exchange visitor visas, which are used by foreign medical residents to come to the US, also fell by nearly 30,000.
Omar Mousa, a 31-year-old Palestinian who fled to Ireland during the Gaza War, received a job offer last year from an internal medicine residency at Marshall University in West Virginia.
But the State Department denied Mousa an exchange visitor visa based on doubts that he would return home to war-ravaged Gaza after he completed his programme, a requirement of the visa.
The residency programme kept his offer open. But in August, the Trump Administration suspended visas for Palestinian passport holders, dashing Mousa’s dreams.
“I can’t stop thinking about this,” Mousa said. “I wasn’t just someone who just found himself a job. I’ve spent US$20,000 and five years of my life, preparing, just focusing on this.”
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