Sightings of conservatives or limited-government types are hard to find on the formerly tax-funded PBS News Hour, which suffers from a malady of slanted source selection when it comes to booking balanced guest experts.
Yet the D.C.-based Cato Institute, which takes the fiscal conservative side on government size and spending, has bucked the trend, with David Bier, Cato’s director of immigration studies, making four guest appearances over the previous year, all on immigration, and all in opposition to Trump Administration immigration policies.
It’s not a coincidence that immigration (both legal and illegal) is one of a select group of public policy issues on which liberal PBS and the limited-government, libertarian think tank happen to ideologically align. It's unlikely that a Cato scholar would be invited on to PBS as the sole expert guest to discuss deregulation or online free speech, and almost certainly would not receive the warm welcomes Bier gets when making anti-Trump points on immigration.
Bier’s most recent appearance came Tuesday evening, spotlighting a Cato Institute study implicitly faulting Trump’s more closed-border policy on legal immigration.
White House Correspondent Liz Landers: The president often touts a sharp drop in illegal entries to the country, which have gone down by 50,000 entries per month since the end of 2024. But a new analysis from the Cato Institute suggests that's only part of the story. Legal immigration has fallen even more dramatically under the Trump administration, with 132,000 fewer people being admitted per month through legal pathways….What specific policy changes are driving that gap?
David Bier: Well, the biggest one by far is the suspension of immigrant visa processing for 75 countries around the world. These are -- mainly for family members of U.S. citizens who are coming to reunite with their family members here. Many are spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens. In addition to that, they have also suspended all entries from about 40 countries. So, 92 countries now face a de facto legal immigration ban by this administration, encompassing about half of all legal immigrants to the United States….
Landers: The president has been eager to tout this major drop in border arrests since he took office, going from about 47,000 arrests at the end of Biden's term to only about 8,600 last month. Illegal immigration, as you know, it was already dropping under President Biden. So how much credit does President Trump get here?
Landers faulted the sharp decline of successful asylum seekers uncovered by the Cato study at the southern border, where “asylum seekers have essentially been completely blocked” and numbers have fallen “99.9 percent in the course of a few months.” She asked Bier: “What are the potential economic impacts of this drop in legal immigration too in terms of the deficit, the birth rate, the social safety programs that we have in this country?”
PBS White House correspondent Liz Landers to scholar from its favorite right-leaning think tank, CATO: “What are the potential economic impacts of this drop in legal immigration too in terms of the deficit, the birth rate, the social safety programs that we have in this country?” pic.twitter.com/Csk8giFMbM
— Clay Waters (@claywaters44) April 15, 2026
Bier responded with an enormous hypothetical figure, based on modelling which is open to debate:
Bier: Well, our analysis shows that, over the last 30 years, immigrants have reduced the deficit by $14.5 trillion….
On a November 28, 2025 PBS appearance, Bier suggested Trump’s increased restrictions on legal immigration visa hurt “spouses of U.S. citizens” the most, making social conservatives out into hypocrites.
BIER: ….And when you think about who gets most legal immigrant visas to come to the United States, it is spouses of U.S. citizens. That`s going to be the number one category that`s targeted by a broad-based absolute ban on legal immigration to the United States. And that`s really cutting at the heart of family values and a lot of the other things that conservatives like to talk about.
Besides his frequent guest appearances, Bier’s pro-immigration work is often cited approvingly by PBS, including on July 8, 2025 by ultra-liberal former PBS News Hour reporter Laura Barron-Lopez, who paraphrased Bier warning that “ICE raids could very well become an everyday part of American life and hit communities that it hasn`t necessarily hit already. He warned that he thinks there could be an increase of racial profiling, including of American citizens.”
