Reform our immigration system
…from taxes and redistribution to wealth creation for all Americans who struggle.
Every one of us has friends or family who came to this country with nothing but a work ethic and a willingness to start over. Within a generation, all of them are fully American. This story has been repeated tens of millions of times, and it is the foundation of what makes this country unusual among nations.
Which is why the current immigration debate frustrates me. We have reduced a complicated, important, and genuinely solvable problem to a bumper sticker war. One side says “open borders.” The other says “mass deportation.” Neither is a policy. Neither reflects reality. And neither will produce a system that works.
The United States lost effective control of its border and asylum system in the years following 2021. That failure should be acknowledged without embarrassment and corrected without cruelty. Restoring order does not require abandoning America’s long-standing commitment to lawful, humanitarian immigration. But it does require Democrats to drop their reflexive tolerance of failed enforcement and embrace what most Americans already believe: that immigration is a strength, and that a lawful system is a prerequisite for sustaining it.
America: the country of immigrants
Immigration has been a defining feature of the United States since its founding. Today, immigrants and their U.S.-born children number more than 93 million people — roughly 28 percent of the total population — underscoring how deeply immigration is woven into the American fabric.
Immigrants do not merely fill jobs. They create them. More than half of America’s privately held billion-dollar startup companies — 319 of 582, according to the National Foundation for American Policy — have at least one immigrant founder. Nearly half of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children. Prominent examples include Elon Musk, Sergey Brin, and Jensen Huang, whose companies have defined entire industries and created hundreds of thousands of American jobs.
The economic contributions run the full spectrum of the workforce. Immigrants account for 26 percent of physicians and surgeons, and nearly 40 percent of home health aides — a workforce that is indispensable as the baby boom generation ages. About 70 percent of hired farm laborers are foreign-born, with approximately 42 percent lacking work authorization. One in four construction workers is an immigrant, rising to more than 40 percent in states like California and New Jersey. Without these workers, food becomes more expensive, housing more scarce, and healthcare more strained — the exact opposite of what a pro-growth policy agenda should produce.
Research from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City found that the post-pandemic surge in immigration directly eased worker shortages and slowed wage inflation, particularly in construction and manufacturing. These are facts, not talking points.
A history of challenges — and of reform
None of this is new. Anti-immigration sentiment has appeared in every generation of American history. Benjamin Franklin worried about German settlers. The Know Nothing Party rose on fear of Irish Catholics. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the first major law barring entry based on nationality. The Immigration Act of 1924 imposed strict national quotas. The pattern repeats: fear, restriction, and then, eventually, recognition that the newcomers made the country stronger.
The policy record reflects the same cycle. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 replaced quotas with family- and employment-based admissions. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalized roughly three million undocumented immigrants and imposed employer sanctions. The Immigration Act of 1990 expanded legal immigration and reworked visa categories. Each represented an imperfect but genuine attempt to align law with reality.
The most recent serious attempt was the bipartisan Border Act of 2024. It combined meaningful enforcement measures — including new authority to shut down asylum processing at the border during surge conditions — with expanded immigration court funding and modest expansions of legal pathways. It failed when then-candidate Donald Trump weighed in against it. His political interest in keeping immigration as a campaign issue took precedence over the country’s interest in a functioning system.
What broke and why
Beginning in 2021, illegal border crossings and asylum claims rose sharply. The federal government’s capacity to screen, detain, adjudicate, and remove individuals did not keep pace. The result was not just higher numbers but a system under sustained stress.
The immigration court backlog tells the story plainly. At the end of fiscal year 2024, more than 3.6 million cases were pending — the highest in the history of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which received nearly 1.8 million new cases in that year alone. Individuals routinely wait close to four years for a hearing. A system that takes that long to resolve cases neither deters abuse nor serves legitimate asylum seekers well.
Two compounding failures drove this breakdown. First, asylum laws designed for narrow humanitarian purposes were not updated to reflect modern migration patterns, in which large numbers of economic migrants move through asylum channels. Second, the federal government consistently failed to fund and staff the adjudication system required to process claims quickly and credibly. These are management failures, not moral ones — and they are correctable.
State and local governments absorbed large, unplanned fiscal costs. Migrants faced extended periods of uncertainty. And public confidence in the system collapsed, which is precisely the outcome that makes rational immigration policy politically harder to achieve.
What a working system requires
The technical solution is not complicated. The political solution is considerably harder. Here is what a functioning system actually requires.
Enforce the border in practice, not just in statute. Illegal entry cannot be normalized. Border enforcement is not anti-immigration — it is the precondition for sustaining public support for immigration. Without credible enforcement, the political coalition needed to maintain a generous legal immigration system will continue to erode. This is not a concession to nativism. It is an acknowledgment of political reality.
Fund and staff the asylum system. Asylum courts, officers, case management capacity, and removal infrastructure are not optional overhead. The immigration court backlog did not accumulate because Americans changed their minds about due process. It accumulated because Congress chronically underfunded the system while simultaneously creating legal obligations it had no capacity to fulfill. A credible asylum system requires rapid initial screenings, timely adjudication, and removal when claims fail. All three are currently broken.
Align legal immigration pathways with economic need. Where the economy consistently relies on immigrant labor — healthcare, agriculture, construction, eldercare — lawful and well-regulated pathways are safer, more enforceable, and better for workers than informal tolerance of unauthorized employment. The H-2A agricultural guest worker program is a model worth expanding. Visa categories for construction and eldercare workers do not exist in meaningful form and should be created. The current system forces employers and workers into legal gray zones that serve no one.
Address visa overstays directly. In many years, overstays account for nearly half of new unauthorized residents. A credible immigration system cannot continue to ignore its largest channel of noncompliance. Exit tracking, enhanced employer verification, and targeted enforcement are necessary tools.
Modernize the legal immigration system. The employment-based visa system is backlogged by decades in some categories. The per-country caps for employment visas produce absurd results: a skilled engineer from India may wait 50 years or more for a green card while a less-qualified applicant from a smaller country is processed in months. These are not design features. They are bureaucratic fossils that cost the country talent and productivity.
The political problem
The honest assessment is that immigration has worked for the Republican Party as a political issue precisely because it remains unresolved. There is no incentive for the majority party to fix what it uses to mobilize voters.
Democrats face the mirror-image problem. The perception that the party is indifferent to enforcement — fair or not — has cost them credibility on the issue and damaged their ability to advocate for the legal immigration system that most Americans support. Until Democrats are willing to say plainly that illegal entry is unacceptable and must be controlled, they will continue to lose the political argument even when the policy evidence is on their side.
The Border Act of 2024 demonstrated that a bipartisan deal is reachable. It combined meaningful enforcement with humane processing reforms, and it had genuine support from both parties until it became politically inconvenient. That agreement, or something close to it, remains the template.
Conclusion
The United States does not face a choice between enforcement and immigration. It faces a choice between unmanaged inflows that erode public trust and a system that is firm, lawful, and economically rational.
Immigration has been fundamental to American prosperity. It is not a problem to be contained. It is an asset to be managed well. Preserving that asset requires restoring control, updating laws that have not kept pace with reality, and investing in the institutions that make a high-immigration society workable.
Done correctly, immigration reform serves both objectives: an asylum system that is manageable and credible, and a legal immigration framework that continues to attract the workers, entrepreneurs, and families who have always made this country stronger than it would otherwise be.
Our immigrant friends and family did not make America weaker. Neither did the 93 million people who followed a version of their path. The question is not whether to welcome immigrants. The question is whether we are serious enough to abandon our political narratives and compromise to build a system that works.