Our broken immigration system is what got Donald Trump elected president. The two most recent past presidents have tried and failed to reform it. Trump’s latest framework is a noble one, with main pillars deserving support from both parties and which Congress could easily improve to become an excellent proposal.
The first step of any immigration reform worthy of the name will be stanching the flow of illegal immigration. Trump is calling for spending billions to beef up border security through many means, including a wall. Democrats used to admit walls were good. Hopefully they’ve gotten the Trump-era wall hatred out of their system, and they can support more walls and fencing and other barriers as part of a broader effort to ensure that everyone entering this country is coming in through valid border checkpoints.
Trump’s proposal is moderate in that it aims to shift the composition of immigration without reducing the flow.
Trump would scrap the diversity lottery and curtail chain migration. This is sensible.
Chain migration is the undesired outcome of “family reunification” visas. If you think of family reunification, you may picture an immigrant who comes here, gains citizenship, and is then able to bring his wife and young children behind with him.
Under Trump’s proposal, that would remain unchanged. What would go would be the categories of “family reunification” visas that lead to the massive chain: parents of noncitizens, those parents’ other adult children, those other adult children’s spouses, and thus their parents, and so on. (Trump’s proposal goes too far by ending reunification visas for the spouses and minor children of legal immigrants who are not yet citizens.)
Trump would also scrap the diversity lottery and shift hundreds of thousands of visas over to a skill-based visa program. In his current framework, the net result is approximately the same number of entrants per year as under current law.
Additionally, his plan demands of immigrants that they learn English and understand U.S. civics.
Trump’s plan hints toward a couple of important principles, and it can be revised to further advance those principles. One virtue of moving away from lottery and chain migration and toward skills-based immigration is that the average wages of an immigrant will increase. This is a virtue not because we want more tax collections or more rich people, but because one of the deleterious effects of our current immigration regime is the downward pressure it applies to working-class wages. It’s better to leave high-income Americans to compete with new Americans.
But Trump could go further to advance this idea by scrapping the low-skilled guest-worker program. This is a laser-guided missile aimed at reducing wages for unskilled workers. We understand why employers like it, but it’s hardly a free market policy to aggressively import low-wage workers and arm their employees with the threat of deportation.
Trading guest-worker visas for immigrant visas would have another virtue: tilting our immigration policies more toward people on the path to citizenship. If we are to get choosy about who enters our country, and we should, the first priority ought to be those who say, “I want to become an American.”
