On Sept. 9 in Dallas, President Donald Trump unveiled the No Invasion of Our Country Act, meant to lock his border crackdown into permanent federal law so no future president can reverse it by executive order alone. Ten days later, on Sept. 19, his administration moved on a second, quieter front: an order tightening scrutiny of H-1B visa applications and renewing a $100,000 fee on certain petitions, aimed at employers who lay off American workers while importing cheaper foreign labor. Together, the two moves tell us something worth noticing. Even this administration treats immigration as two separate questions: who gets to cross illegally, and who America should be actively recruiting, and answering the first does not answer the second.

I came through the legal door myself. In 1982, after finishing a Ph.D. in organic chemistry at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, I entered the United States on a J-1 exchange visitor visa, cleared through consular vetting in Chennai and background checks that followed me through India, London, and New York before I set foot on American soil. Legal immigration means patience and repeated screening, not a single stamp on a single form. For those of us who came that way, the case for border enforcement is not an abstraction.