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Trump's use of twitter to announce immigration "pauses" and throw anti immigration propaganda out to the public has a negative impact on legal immigrants as well as illegal immigrants.

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This article speaks about how Trump tried to limit immigration while using the COVID pandemic as an excuse to limit immigration.

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trump's moves on immigration reveal his true motives (opinion)  - cnn

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Trump's moves on immigration reveal his true motives

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President Donald Trump's reckless tweet and subsequent narrower comments about immigration suspension show -- among other things -- how his administration is planning to use the Covid-19 pandemic to further its agenda of severely limiting immigration to the United States, says Rafia Zakaria.

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this article shows that President Trump's policies for immigration are actually hurting legal immigrants as well as the illegal immigrants

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This January, I flew into O'Hare International Airport on a long-haul flight from Argentina, showed my fiance visa to the immigration officer - then headed to the registry office to marry Robert, my boyfriend of five years. Robert is a medical student at the University of Illinois and a U.S. citizen, so our marriage made me eligible for a green card. I filed my application and was told I'd receive employment authorization within a couple of months, and full legal permanent residency a few months thereafter.

It's now September, and I'm still waiting. At the Chicago U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services office, backlogs and red tape mean the wait time for family-based green card applications like mine has soared to 39 months. In the meantime, my employment authorization still hasn't been processed.

That's left us scraping by on Robert's student loans even though I've had multiple job offers. With our city facing a $1.2 billion budget shortfall, Chicago needs all hands on deck, and I want nothing more than to join the workforce, pay taxes and support Robert while he prepares to treat patients. Instead, we're up at night worrying about our finances and wondering if I'll ever get permission to work.

Our situation speaks to a fundamental shift in the way the United States now handles even routine immigration cases, and the willful erosion of institutions that once made the United States a welcoming place for hardworking immigrants. According to New American Economy, Chicago has over 113,000 immigrant business owners, and foreign-born workers pay $16.8 billion in taxes. Immigrants fuel our economy - but increasingly, they're doing it despite federal policies designed to hold them back.

The frustrating part is that Robert and I wanted to do things right. After finishing college in Argentina, I spent two years teaching at the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts, then completed my master's in Spanish at Loyola University Chicago. I could have married Robert then, and stayed in the United States to wait for my green card - but to avoid any suggestion we'd married for immigration purposes, I returned to Argentina and applied for a fiance visa.

While I waited, I worked for the U.S. State Department as an academic adviser with EducationUSA and the Fulbright Commission, building connections between American and Argentine universities. After working for the U.S. government, I assumed it would be easy for me to return to the United States as the spouse of a citizen. Yet here I am, unable to work and facing a three-year wait for my green card.

I can't imagine how hard this system is for people without our resources. Even for Robert and me, the uncertainty and my inability to contribute has been tough. We'd planned to live off our savings until my work authorization came through, but as the weeks turned into months we've had to rely on student loans Robert never planned on taking out. To make ends meet, we've tightened our belts, postponed our honeymoon and eaten through money we'd saved to set up our home together.

We've spent our first year of married life fretting about how we'll cope if my employment authorization doesn't come through until next year. The longer the process drags on, the more it costs: so far, we've spent almost $13,000 on legal and filing fees.

I'm grateful for all that America has given me - an education, a wonderful husband, a path to permanent residency. But I know U.S. citizens shouldn't have to struggle like this to be united with their loved ones, and law-abiding immigrants shouldn't face such obstacles when all they want to do is work to support their families.

Quite rightly, the immigration debate focuses on the neediest people: the millions of undocumented immigrants excluded from coronavirus relief, the Dreamers who want nothing more than a stable future, the refugees on whom the United States is turning its back.

But as my story shows, fixing the immigration system doesn't just mean helping these groups. It also means addressing the broader decay of our immigration infrastructure. Our lawmakers should push for the comprehensive reforms America so badly needs. But they should also do their jobs, and demand to know why the U.S. immigration system has been allowed to fall into such disrepair.

Nadia Mufarregue is a Chicago-area educator and translator.

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Commentary: Trump's immigration policies are hurting lawful immigrants too

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This January, I flew into O'Hare International Airport on a long-haul flight from Argentina, showed my fiance visa to the immigration officer - then headed to the registry office to marry Robert, my boyfriend of five years. Robert is a medical student at the University of Illinois and a U.S.