President Obama’s executive action on immigration revealed some deep-seated problems with our immigration laws. They include broad grants of presidential discretion, arbitrary immigration restrictions, and complicated quotas that make a mockery of James Madison’s vision of the Constitution. Obama’s executive actions should be seen as a logical consequence and feature of our immigration laws, not some overreach that shreds them.

Obama’s actions, combined with our dysfunctional immigration laws, hint at a radical solution: scrap the Immigration and Nationality Act altogether and replace it with laws that actually work.