WASHINGTON: Legal immigration from all Muslim-majority countries is on track to fall by nearly a third, a latest news report said on Monday, while Pakistan and India are among the countries which have posted decline in grant of immigrant visas.
Immigration is among the top most issues that have divided the US in recent months, but the Trump administration has also made "inroad" into reducing even legal immigration, an analysis by the Washington Post showed.
The number of those receiving visas to permanently move to the United States is on track to fall 12 percent in the first two years of President Trump, with the Muslim-majority countries on the President's travel ban list being the most affected.
The Supreme Court last month handed over the President one of his major victories by upholding his executive order that sought to ban travel of citizens from Yemen, Syria, Iran, Libya and Somalia. According to the report arrivals from these countries was heading toward an 81 percent drop by Sept. 30.
Overall, the report said legal immigration from all Muslim-majority countries was on track to fall by nearly a third.
The report quoted unnamed public officials and immigration experts as expressing concerns that the administration's approach targets certain nationalities, discriminating against those from poorer and nonwhite countries.
But, it was not only the countries targeted by the Trump's travel ban that had been affected as nearly half of the countries that typically receive the largest number of immigrant visas from the United States have also posted decline.
"The number of immigrant visas granted to people from Mexico, the Dominican Republic, the Philippines, China, India, Vietnam, Haiti, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Pakistan and Afghanistan has also declined," the report said.
As against it, the flow of legal immigrants from Europe has increased slightly, though the total number of visas is much smaller than that from Africa, Asia and Latin America.
It was not clear whether the drop in immigrant visas was in part due to the declining interest in immigrating to the United States as the US State Department did not release visa application data, saying it doesn't publish that information.
"The shift in legal immigration is a reversal of the trend under President Barack Obama. During Obama's time in office, immigrant visas increased by 33 percent, surging to 617,752 in fiscal 2016, the highest level in decades," the report said.
The Washington Post analysis focused only on those immigration visas granted to those people who seek to permanently move to the United States, and does not include temporary visas, such as the H-1B visas for skilled workers, and the H-2B for seasonal workers or student visas.
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