Sizing up Trump's green-card halt: Is it just temporary?

SAN DIEGO (AP) — Pamela Thompson, a recruiter at Adventist Health Bakersfield in California, made seven job offers to foreign nurses in February and just finished a first round of interviews with 12 more candidates. They are from all over the world, including the United Kingdom, Philippines, Australia and Malaysia.

The international candidates fill the private hospital's critical need for experienced nurses who can work in emergency rooms and intensive care units, Thompson said — jobs that can't be met only with U.S. nurses, many of whom are recent graduates.

That need could go unfilled, however, if President Donald Trump extends a 60-day hold on green cards he ordered in the name of protecting American jobs amid the coronavirus outbreak.

“It would be a huge setback,” Thompson said. “Those are holes I don’t have people to fill.”

Trump says the measure is necessary at a time when unemployment has climbed to levels last seen during the Great Depression.

Critics have dismissed the move as the president's veiled attempt to achieve cuts to legal immigration that he previously suggested but couldn't persuade Congress or the courts to accept — and to distract voters from his handling of the pandemic.

But immigrant advocates and political opponents are not the only ones who oppose the measure: Hardliners from Trump's base say it doesn't go far enough to limit immigration.

The order "is designed to satisfy powerful business interests that value a steady flow of cheap foreign labor,” Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, wrote in a letter to the president Thursday.

The Center for Immigration Studies, another hardline group, said the 60-day pause “will provide little relief to Americans” and criticized an exemption for...