Mark Krikorian is executive director of The Center for Immigration Studies and a long-time advocate of restrictive immigration policy.  Here are excerpts from his August 5 interview with the American Conservative Magazine:

Border control and deportations

It’s only been six months, so in that context, [deportation] very successful. The border is dramatically better off than it was in the past. I don’t want to say it’s solved or it’s closed, because there’s always going to be people trying to come across the border. In fact, now they’re trying to come up the coast and then cut inland to avoid the Border Patrol. So they’re always going to be some cat and mouse. But the difference is night and day.

Trump is following through on a whole variety of policies. Not just restarting construction on the wall—which is important, but it’s just one piece of what you need to do. But they’ve come up with a policy that reclassifies all federal lands along the border as military installations.

Most importantly, they’re just not letting people go anymore. That’s the key thing. If you have a pretty good expectation of being released into the country, who cares what color piece of paper they give you?

There’s another challenge in the new illegal immigration area, and that is visa overstays….That’s going to take longer to deal with. They understand it’s a problem, they’re dealing with it, but I still give them a grade of “incomplete” on this, just because it’s a longer-term project.

I expect now you’re going to see way more people detained. If you arrest people, it doesn’t matter if you have nowhere to hold them, because you have to hold them to do the paperwork to deport them. Now they’re going to be able to arrest more people because they can hold more people and hopefully deport more people. So I think you’re going to see a significant increase in both arrests and deportations in the next six months.

So generally, on the illegal immigration thing, I’m pretty bullish. They’ve done a good job. I don’t really have anything I could point out to complain about, other than one little warning sign, which is the president’s talk about “well, maybe we’ll let some farm workers stay”—that kind of stuff. Self-deportation is a key part of what they want to achieve, because you can’t arrest all the illegal aliens. You want to arrest a lot of them and convince a whole lot of others to pack up and go home before they get arrested. So that is the one potential problem. But they haven’t really done anything in that regard yet, so I would probably make their grade an A instead of an A+ because of that.

Cutting back legal immigration

[Trump is] a transitional figure is that the whole next—well, I won’t say the whole, but much of the next cohort of Republican leaders—are real restrictionists. The vice president, DeSantis, Senator Hawley, Senator Cotton, Senator Schmitt, these people actually want legal immigration reduced, not just enforcing the border.

One thing that really encourages me about the new Republican take on immigration is that the vice president has been out front saying that the H-1B program is a total scam…. Congress is just not in a position to pass any immigration bill—but H-1Bs in particular are untouchable, because so many of the Democrats are also beholden to the tech donors.

My top priority is not zero legal immigration, but zero-based budgeting for immigration. A continental nation with a third of a billion people, one that invented modernity, doesn’t actually need any immigration, but there are going to be certain categories of people who have such a compelling case to be let in, that we should let them in anyway.