UK around Brexit time thought kind of similar: let's keep the "riffraff" immigrants out by applying higher criteria. The narrative also changed this way: we don't want immigrants in general, but you , with your highly paid PhD-requiring job, you can go in, on a 2 year rolling basis. Then everyone's a winner, except for unwanted, unskilled labour. But a lot of skilled labour left anyway. Partly because the general atm…
This is probably a good thing for nations providing the bulk of high skilled labor, namely India and China. Their best and brightest will tend to leave less. Much has been said about Trump, but his main quality is this: he's a foot-gun artist.
And I think it is significant to note that the foot-guns are intentionally foot-guns. Plausible, yet subtly and catastrophically bad solutions to real and imagined problems. Downward spirals for everyone! ...to create favorable conditions for further exploitation.