Brewster Hutchinson | Spring 2025
J-1 visas are temporary, nonimmigrant visas granted to international research scholars, students, professors, and laborers with the goal of promoting cultural exchange while simultaneously stimulating the American economy through providing short-term labor and transfers of knowledge. According to the US Department of State (2023), around 300,000 participants come stateside from over 200 countries each year on J-1 visas to contribute to the American economy, and indirectly to the culture. The current Trump administration, however, is poised to implement measures to restrict the entry of temporary migrants into the United States. Figure 1 visualizes the amount of legal immigration into the United States for each president from 2015 to 2023.
In Trump’s first term as President, there was an 82% reduction in temporary visa issuances, though the vast majority of this decline occurred in 2020 due to global disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. To demonstrate that legal immigration was decreasing in Trump’s first term even before the pandemic, J-1 issuances in only the first two years were analyzed to remove any COVID-related influences. For comparison, the same data was drawn from the first two years of Obama’s second term and Biden’s first two years in office. From 2013 to 2014, President Obama oversaw a 5.94% growth of the J-1 visa program. From 2021 to 2022, President Biden presided over a 119.4% growth of the J-1 visa program on the heels of the pandemic. However, from 2017 to 2018, President Trump oversaw a 0.34% decrease in the J-1 program, and in 2018, the highest percentage of J-1 visa applications were rejected of any year analyzed (15.6% of all J-1 applications were rejected in 2018). As the only president in the last decade to shrink the rate of temporary immigration, all signs are once again pointing toward a reduction of the J-1 visa program in the coming years.
Trump’s first term rhetoric frequently blamed migrants from Mexico for issues such as high drug use and crime rates, and in 2025, Trump has already taken action to implement rigorous vetting and screening of immigration applications, claiming these measures will “protect the United States from foreign terrorists and other national security and public safety threats,” (Anderson, 2025). These measures are likely to increase visa wait times at U.S. consulates, making temporary visas more difficult to attain. Decreasing the number of J-1 visas granted to foreigners or increasing the barrier to acquire them would harm America by eroding the labor market for temporary and seasonal jobs in local communities, shutting down valuable transfers of knowledge, and reducing cultural diversity and global perspectives across America.
If the Trump administration were to uphold their promise to decrease legal immigration, the United States would forfeit valuable talent, innovation, and diversity across a wide array of industries and disciplines. Nonimmigrant visa holders learn valuable skills in America while simultaneously disseminating their own traditions and culture to other Americans. The J-1 visa program began in 1948, when Congress aimed to bring together Americans and foreigners to “correct misunderstandings about the United States abroad,” (Cruz, 2005). Integral to the inception of this program was the notion that the exchange visitors must return to their own countries for a minimum of two years upon expiration of their visa in order to share their experience in the US with people of their home country. Since then, new-era Republicans have drastically shifted the narrative surrounding immigration, even temporary, from a positive transfer of knowledge and important facets of global communication to a problem: an entity that harms America through job theft, a burden on the US economy, a damper on the wage market, or other potential drawbacks. In reality, research shows that immigrants boost America’s GDP (gross domestic product) — Costa and Shierholz (2024) forecast that immigrants will contribute to a 2% boost to America’s real GDP at current immigration levels. Moreover, an influx of immigrants would help lower the senior-to-working-age ratio in America by “offsetting an expected decline in the working-age population from retiring Baby Boomers,” (Moslimani and Passel, 2024). An added benefit of lowering the senior-to-working-age ratio through increased immigrant labor is that more workers (including temporary immigrants) would pay into America’s social security system, helping to stabilize this system and support benefits for retirees.
Certain local labor markets are heavily reliant on J-1 workers in the summer or winter to fill labor and employment gaps, particularly in tourism-dependent areas or regions that rely on high agricultural output. J-1 workers often migrate to these markets to fill seasonal employment needs. Take Wisconsin Dells as an example: Wisconsin Dells is home to America’s largest outdoor waterpark—located just an hour north of Madison—and their community depends on J-1 visa workers to support their tourism-driven economy. Wisconsin Dells has a working-age (19 years or older) population of 2,269 citizens, with a total population of 2,942 as of the 2020 census. Despite their small population, the community relies on over 5,000 J-1 workers to support their tourism (Torres, 2024). Kliese (2019) asserted that the Dells are the second largest employer of J-1 students in America. J-1 visa holders, like the thousands of international citizens that travel to work at the Dells, are a crucial piece in supporting Wisconsin’s tourist economy, one that Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers (2019) declared generates almost 200,000 jobs and over $1.6 billion in state and local revenue annually.
If several thousand of potential J-1 visa workers are denied entry to the United States, places like Wisconsin Dells would begin to struggle to staff their tourist attractions, as young Americans are becoming less and less interested in non-specialized work. The National Immigration Forum (2018) claims that at an increasing rate, 16 to 24-year-old Americans are enrolling in summer school or pursuing internships, demonstrating a shift away from low-skilled summer jobs toward professionally oriented opportunities — a trend reflected in the fact that the share of 16- to 24-year-old Americans enrolled in summer school has tripled over the past two decades (Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). With this trend present among American citizens, J-1 visa workers will become more valuable than ever in America — steady or even increasing levels of temporary immigration would be in alignment with American workforce trends, as demand for low-skill labor remains high and as immigrants continue to fill these labor gaps.
While a widespread narrative is that ‘immigrants steal American jobs,’ the reality is that the American economy does not have a fixed number of jobs — the economy grows, and as it grows it creates new jobs for both US workers and migrant workers. As Costa and Shierholz write (2023), immigrants fill gaps caused by demographic changes and contribute to strong economic growth by playing key roles in a variety of industries and “complementing U.S.-born workers by contributing to overall population and workforce growth.” If the Dells see a decrease in temporary migrant workers, firms would have trouble staffing tourist attractions, thus decreasing the amount of overall tourism revenue generated. This loss of tourism revenue would go on to decrease the tax revenue at the local, state, and federal level. All in all, this would cut back on public service ameliorations and infrastructure improvements to local economies and would likely raise the tax burden on local residents.
On another note, temporary immigrants add valuable diversity and global perspectives to American communities, benefitting both the migrants and American citizens. In Park City, Utah, where winter tourist attractions such as seven ski resorts and the Sundance Film Festival attract over two million tourists annually, many local shops and restaurants rely on almost 2,000 J-1 visa recipients to help support the huge amounts of tourism in the winter months (Malatesta, 2023). Similar to Wisconsin Dells, cities with high levels of winter tourism—like ski towns—are often some of the main employers of J-1 visa recipients, as workers spend the winter staffing ski resorts, local restaurants and ski shops. J-1 employees possess a unique ability to provide their American coworkers with new global perspectives. Through day-to-day interaction, they share their cultural traditions, teach their native languages and share their cultural meals. A decrease in J-1 visas would deprive American workers of valuable interpersonal experiences that bring diversity into smaller local communities. More broadly, these cultural exchanges facilitate the development of innovation and foster a more productive local economy as knowledge and ideas disperse across borders.
All things considered, the J-1 visa program leads to a net gain for both the American economy and culture. In the short-term, J-1 exchange workers help to stimulate the American economy, especially in communities with high levels of tourism. The evidence portrays immigration as a boost to GDP, a stopgap to fill labor shortages, and an entity that increases the labor participation rate while keeping America’s workforce young. In the long-term, the J-1 visa program creates cultural links that give foreigners opportunities to experience American culture while simultaneously sharing slices of their own culture, helping Americans to learn foreign perspectives. With a whirlwind of political changes looming over the next four years, the J-1 visa program must be prioritized in order to support local communities both economically and culturally. A decrease in the amount of J-1 visas issued to foreigners would be detrimental — the US would lose out on valuable labor force participants that support local communities and foster intercultural interactions that make humans more well-rounded.
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Anderson, Stuart. “Donald Trump’s Team Takes First Steps to Cut Legal Immigration.” Forbes, March 4, 2025.
Bureau of Labor Statistics. “School’s Out: BLS Spotlight on Statistics.” www.bls.gov, n.d.
Costa, Daniel, and Heidi Shierholz. “Immigrants Are Not Hurting U.S.-Born Workers: Six Facts to Set the Record Straight.” Economic Policy Institute, February 20, 2024.
Cruz, Skyler G. “Have Foreign Physicians Been Misdiagnosed? A Closer Look at the J-1 Visa.” International Law Review 1, no. 2 (January 1, 2005): 295.
Department of State. “Facts and Figures.” BridgeUSA, n.d.
Evers, Tony. “Wisconsin’s Tourism Economy Reaches $21.6 Billion.” Wisconsin Department of Tourism, May 6, 2019.
Kliese, Jennifer. “Growing Visa Program Brings International Workers to the Dells.” WKOW, September 2, 2019.
Malatesta, Parker. “Some Foreign Workers Say They Won’t Be Back after Tough Season of High Rents, Low Hours.” KPCW, March 28, 2023.
Moslimani, Mohamad, and Jeffrey S. Passel. “What the Data Says about Immigrants in the U.S.” Pew Research Center, September 27, 2024.
National Immigration Forum. “Mutual Benefits: The Exchange Visitor Program (J-1 Visa),” August 29, 2018.
Torres, Ricardo. “Four Years after Pandemic, Employment in Tourism Industry Has Bounced back to 2019 Levels.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 29, 2024.