The White House says it has reduced legalized migration from Muslim-majority nations by more than 90 percent.
The cutbacks are a huge setback to the progressive policy of importing diverse migrants to help fragment the civic rules that ordinary Americans have created to manage their neighborhoods, schools, and society.
The policy shift also reduces the growth of antisemitic communities in U.S. society, said Noah Pollak, a Trump deputy in the Department of the Treasury and the Department of Education. “This is the single most consequential policy to combat antisemitism in the US in the last decade and it’s not even close,” he wrote on X.
“The Trump admin — and especially those like @StephenM who implemented it — will get no thanks or credit from legacy Jewish organizations,” he added.
In 2024, President Joe Biden’s deputies welcomed a monthly inflow of roughly 14,000 migrants from Muslim-majority nations such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Malaysia.
But that monthly inflow plummeted to roughly 1,000 in February 2026, partly because of Trump’s agency reforms, such as extensive security checks.
The monthly inflows are mostly set by Congress and include new legal migrants, chain-migration relatives, and the refugee inflow set by the White House.
The chart does not include Muslims from nations that have Muslim minorities in countries such as India, which is providing a huge share of legalized migrants, mostly via the corporate hiring of Indians with H-1B, L-1, F-1, and J-1 visas.
The reductions come 25 years after Muslim migrants killed 3,000 Americans in the Twin Towers atrocity.
Then-President George W. Bush (R) favored mass migration for economic growth. But he also boosted Islamic migration as part of a foreign-policy strategy to reassure the Muslim populations of the Middle East.
His successor, progressive President Barack Obama (D), raised the Muslim inflow, and President Joe Biden (D) further accelerated the arrivals after the collapse of the Afghan government. The inflow was engineered by progressive deputies, such as Alejandro Mayorkas, with the aid of pro-migration laws passed in 1990 by Congress.
The size of the resident Muslim population in the U.S. is roughly 4 million, most of whom are concentrated in a few political jurisdictions, such as New York.
Obama downplayed the fundamental civic conflicts between Islam and Christianity. “So let’s start with this fact: For more than 1,000 years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace. And the very word itself Islam comes from salam, peace,” he wrongly declared when visiting a mosque in 2016.
This progressive eagerness to downplay the deep conflicts between Islam and American society reflects their ambitions and often-debunked claim that progressive policies can trump human nature.
For example, Americans govern their communities via their own civic rules that try to balance personal freedom and social order. The civic rules, or social norms, are shaped by citizens, parents, religious practices, school boards, town councils, and judges. The rules are mostly conservative because the costs of errors are often very high for individual Americans and their children.
But progressives want the power to rewrite Americans’ civic rules, which they often deem to be racist, xenophobic, and unfair to minorities. Democrats use migration to impose massive diversity that undermines the civic rules, so providing Democrats an excuse to impose their rules, such as legal rights for children who claim to be transgender.
Progressives also favor the Muslim inflow because Muslims mostly vote for Democrat candidates who welcome the migrants and protect them from popular pressure to assimilate into American society. That skew has tipped many elections to the Democrats, especially in Minnesota and New York City, because local Muslim leaders pressure legalized immigrant Muslims to vote in high numbers for Democrats.
In September 2025, for example, Obama explained the progressives’ political ambition to change America via migration:
[We] say, based on these ideals — we hold these truths to be self-evident…all men are created equal … and a constitution and a Bill of Rights and a democracy — that we can somehow figure out how to get along and maintain our private beliefs and pray to god in our own ways, and retain aspects of the cultures that we bring from wherever it is that we’re coming from, and yet still decide that we are all Americans … and try to make it better for each successive generation.
“There’s never been an experiment [emphasis added] like this, where you have people from every corner of the globe show up in one place,” he said.
Obama’s progressive experiment has imposed massive pain on ordinary Americans — including on Jewish Americans who now see pro-Hamas activists on New York streets, under the partial protection of the city’s new Muslim mayor.
Business groups, such as the Cato Institute, favor migration — even of orthodox Muslims — regardless of the massive costs it imposes on ordinary Americans. “About 30% of these immigrants were not Muslim, but they hate Muslims so much that they don’t care if this harms Christians,” said David Bier, a pro-migration activist at the Cato Institute.
Orthodox Muslims, however, hate Americans’ way of life and so teach that Islam requires immigrant Muslims to self-segregate from Americans’ balanced culture of freedom and cooperation.
Trump has also blocked illegal migration over the southern border and is on track to sharply reduce overall levels of legalized migration in 2026.