Trump administration moves to restrict asylum-seeker work permits

CBS News reports the Trump administration is moving to restrict work permits for asylum seekers—tightening a system that already keeps many applicants in limbo for months or years. The policy logic is: make legal life difficult enough that fewer people come, then express surprise when the predictable substitutes appear—informal work, dependency, and black‑market coping strategies.

Under current practice, many asylum seekers can apply for employment authorization after waiting periods and procedural milestones. That limited access to lawful work is one of the few mechanisms that lets people support themselves while their claims are processed. The administration’s new plan, as described by CBS, would narrow eligibility and slow access further.

This is sold as deterrence. It is a state-manufactured underclass: individuals physically present under government control, required to navigate a complex adjudication process, yet increasingly blocked from legal income. The result is not “self‑deportation” so much as a policy-driven shift from taxable wages to cash labor.

A slower, more restrictive work-permit pipeline increases reliance on shelters, NGOs, and local services; it also increases the value of intermediaries—lawyers, “case management” contractors, and compliance businesses that monetize paperwork friction. Meanwhile, the federal government gets a political talking point (“tougher rules”) without having to do the hard administrative work of actually adjudicating cases faster.

The US government routinely argues it needs expansive authority to control borders and manage migration flows, yet here it chooses to suppress the most basic market mechanism available—work—inside its own jurisdiction. If you want fewer people to be a public charge, the obvious move is to let them earn money. If you want a dependent population that can be blamed for being dependent, you do the opposite.

CBS notes the administration’s plan is still being rolled out, meaning the real impact will hinge on implementation details: new waiting periods, categorical exclusions, and how aggressively agencies enforce them. But the direction is clear. The state is not merely “failing” to integrate; it is actively prohibiting integration through employment, then treating the consequences as evidence that the people themselves are the problem.

If the goal is deterrence, the policy’s most reliable effect may be to deter compliance. When legal work is blocked, the market does not stop—it simply moves to the shadows, where wages fall, exploitation rises, and enforcement becomes yet another growth industry.