The United States issued about a quarter 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 United States legally.
From January to August 2025, the State Department approved 11 percent 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 percent drop doesn’t include tourist visas, which also fell during the same period.
India and China bore the brunt of the visa declines. The U.S. issued many fewer temporary visas to international students, cultural exchange visitors, and fiancés and spouses of U.S. 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 U.S. military.
Most nations sent fewer immigrants to the United States. In a group of 61 countries with at least 5,000 visa approvals from January to August 2024, just seven received more visas in 2025 than the year before.
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The preliminary visa data helps paint a fuller picture of immigration declines in the United States. 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 Chair Jerome H. Powell noted last week.
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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 United States, 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.
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Business and tourism visas, which include those issued for leisure trip and business travel, fell by about 3.4 percent 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 United States’ 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 United States.
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Visas issued for family members were generally down, especially for spouses and fiancés seeking temporary visas.
However, permanent green cards for high-priority relatives of citizens, including young children, parents and spouses, increased by 6 percent 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 U.S. citizens, fell by more than 27 percent, 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 percent in the first eight months of 2025.
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The post Under Trump, Legal Immigration to U.S. Is Falling From Most Countries appeared first on American Renaissance.
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