Monthly Immigration Update: March 2026

The Wall Street Journal published an interesting article earlier in March about how Russia recruits Africans to fight on the front lines of its war against Ukraine. The article is worth reading to better understand one of the lesser-known dynamics of that conflict. What stood out to me, though, was the connection to U.S. immigration policy.

The piece focuses on the story of Malick Diop, a Senegalese man who is a prisoner of war in Ukraine who was deceived into military service for Russia while looking for paid work. He originally arrived in Russia on a scholarship to study political science and world history. This is the part of the story that gets interesting for immigration policy reasons.

From the article:

• Many wealthy countries, including the U.S., have sharply restricted entry by African students and other migrants from developing nations. Russia is the exception. It grants easy entry to citizens from nine African nations, including Zimbabwe, South Africa and Kenya. Moscow offers scholarships to 5,000 African students a year, a soft-power tactic to foster links with future elites on the continent.

I’ve written before about the demographic realities facing the U.S. immigration system. One of the only regions of the world that will have population growth in the near future is sub-Saharan Africa. The U.S. legal immigration system is not currently designed to compete for that talent. And that was before the current administration’s policies to ban most immigrants and temporary visa holders from dozens of countries, including many in Africa. Now, not only does the United States still need a revamped immigration system for the future, but we are already behind. Russia isn’t waiting to compete for that talent and is seizing an opportunity to get an edge while the U.S. government declines to admit legal immigrants.

There are many horrors in that article, of course – luring Africans under the guise of studying just to put them on the front lines is only one. Russia should be held accountable for its nefarious recruitment tactics.

But the United States doesn’t have to sit out this competition for talent. The administration could change course and allow African students to study in the U.S. again. Congress could work on immigration reform that will ensure our future prosperity, vitality, and security.

The longer America waits, the harder it will be to catch up in this vital race for talent and influence in a consequential region of the world.

Figure of the Month

13

Thirteen immigrants have died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody in 2026. Three of these deaths have been in the first few weeks of March, including an Afghan special forces soldier who worked with the U.S. military and was evacuated in 2021 with his wife and children; a Haitian man who complained for weeks about tooth pain; and a Mexican teenager who is suspected to have committed suicide.

Data Dive

• The United States saw 11 million fewer international visitors in 2025 than 2024, The New York Times reported. While global tourism grew, the United States was the only major destination to record a decline, according to the World Travel and Tourism Council: “When 11 million international visitors aren’t showing up, the result is billions of dollars in economic losses to the travel industry,” said Erik Hansen, senior vice president at the U.S. Travel Association.

• The Trump Administration is considering requiring banks to verify the citizenship status of its customers, a move that could impose significant administrative costs. A new analysis by Dan Goldbeck, American Action Forum director of regulatory policy, estimated the policy would add between 33.1 million and 73.3 million paperwork hours annually for new accounts alone, at a cost of roughly $2.6 billion to $5.6 billion.

• The Department of Homeland Security told Congress it detained 261 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients and deported 86 of them. DACA recipients have the ability to work and study in the United States as long as they meet the terms of the program, which includes regular background checks when their status is up for renewal.

What I’m Reading

• Four charts from The Economist illustrate immigration over our country’s history. Periods of large inflows have often been followed by political backlash and new restrictions, and these recurring cycles have shaped the size, origins, and public perception of America’s foreign-born population.

• The Department of Homeland Security has requested access to the Federal Parent Locator Service, a government database used to find people who owe child support payments, according to ProPublica. Federal law provides narrow limits on the use of this database, which is maintained by the Department of Health and Human Services and contains the name, address, Social Security number, employer, salary, and wages of every person in the United States who is employed or enrolled in a state unemployment program.

• On his new Substack, the Niskanen Center’s Gil Guerra analyzes trends in Iranian migration. Irregular Iranian migration to the United States tends to be very low, with other countries such as Turkey or Germany likelier destinations. For the chart-obsessed, he built a dashboard, too, on irregular migration from Iran.

• The U.S. government typically cannot detain children for longer than 20 days under the Flores settlement, an agreement that dates to 1997. But over 900 children have been in family detention for longer than 20 days, and hundreds have been detained for more than twice that long, according to data court advocates provided to NBC News. One family has been detained since June 2025.

• A DACA recipient in Texas was pulled over, arrested, and detained while trying to visit his newborn daughter in the NICU. Juan Chavez Velasco arrived in the United States with his parents when he was 8. “We’re all contributing, we’re all paying taxes, this is our home,” Chavez Velasco said. “I’m not asking for a free ride. I feel like a majority of people would agree that we deserve something because it wasn’t our fault to be here and because we love this country. We want to be here, we want to be part of this. We want to be Americans, because we’re Americans at heart.”

• Economist Michael Clemens argues that the study used by the U.S. government to justify the $100,000 fee on new H-1B highly skilled worker visa applications is flawed. Clemens outlines where he sees errors and omissions in a short post for the Peterson Institute for International Economics. If you want to get nerdy, you can read his full paper on this topic, Immigrant-Native Wage Gaps and Immigration Tariffs: Examining the Case for an H-1B Visa Tax.

Bush Institute Insights

• Last week, I had the opportunity to join host Kerri Miller on MPR News, a show on Minnesota Public Radio, to discuss how to fix our broken immigration system.

Upcoming Events

• March 26, 2026 – Baker Institute: The New Dynamics of North American Trade: The Review of USMCA 2026