Immigration Is a Mess. Here’s How to Fix It.

In 2018, I published Melting Pot or Civil War?, a short book on immigration. Despite its provocative title, the book offered a cautious, careful, almost hilariously mild case for immigration restriction. Having closely followed how countries around the world had handled, and more often mishandled, immigration, I laid out a road map for Making Immigration Great Again. Among other things, I called for rebalancing immigrant admissions toward the young and skilled; rejecting identitarian ideologies that undermined immigrant assimilation and sowed racial resentment; embracing labor-saving automation as an imperfect substitute for low-wage migrant labor; and investing in low-income youth.    

If this sounds like a boringly centrist Davos Man manifesto, I don’t disagree.

Keep in mind, though, that I wrote the book in the thick of the Donald Trump–era immigration wars, when the rhetorical temperature was high and public opinion was as pro-immigration as it had ever been. Against a backdrop of family separations, attempted Muslim bans, and anxious Dreamers, it felt taboo to even suggest that Steve Bannon and friends might be half-right about the wisdom of opening our borders, especially in my small, hyper-educated, blue state–parody world. 

As I was labeled a fascist by anonymous trolls, and my arguments were called “completely off the rails,” a vocal minority on the right was growing ever more extreme in its opposition to immigration. By making a moderate case, my arguments weren’t restrictionist enough for the hardcore restrictionists or cosmopolitan enough to satisfy enlightened opinion.

But I came by my position honestly. My parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, settled in Brooklyn in the mid-1970s. They were part of a larger wave of newcomers that helped revitalize New York and other cities that had fallen on hard times. I had seen all that immigration can do to enrich urban neighborhoods up close. Yet I also recognized that mass immigration wasn’t a free lunch, and that open borders romantics were inviting a backlash that risked slamming our borders shut for a generation. 

By offering a middle course, my hope was that some number of moderates would read my book and be convinced that the reaction to Trump’s shock-and-awe restrictionism must not be to heedlessly dismantle immigration enforcement altogether.

Instead, a few years later, the Biden administration came in and did just about everything I warned against, torching Democrats’ credibility on the most important issue facing the country. 

Within 100 days of his inauguration, President Joe Biden took 94 executive actions on immigration, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. Taken together, these actions represented a repudiation not only of Trump’s approach, but of long-standing immigration limits that had been embraced by the Clinton and Obama administrations. Spurred on by the activist left, the Biden White House tamped down interior enforcement, rolled back travel and visa restrictions, greatly expanded humanitarian protections, and paused the highly successful Remain in Mexico program. 

By April 2021, it was already clear that something was going badly wrong at the U.S.-Mexico border. At the same time administration officials were loudly insisting that unauthorized border crossers would be expelled, a large majority of border-crossing families were allowed in, which meant that smugglers could still make a compelling pitch to potential migrants—not to mention enormous profits.

Predictably, irregular migration surged. Once the word got out that even the weakest asylum claim would allow you to live in the U.S. for years before you’d get a hearing in immigration court, migrants from around the world decided to try their luck. 

Fact-checkers have had a field day litigating exactly how many millions of people entered the country during the Biden years. While we know the number of new green cards and nonimmigrant visas that have been issued over this period, no one has a solid grasp on the number of “other foreign nationals” currently residing in the U.S., a Congressional Budget Office category that encompasses illegal border crossers, visa overstayers, asylum-seekers who are still waiting for a hearing in immigration court, and people who’ve been admitted to the U.S. under parole authority. The CBO estimates that we will have seen a net increase of six million in the number of other foreign nationals from 2021 through the end of 2024 over the pre-2021 trend, but that’s no more than an educated guess.

Meanwhile, a series of more specific controversies shook the country. In 2022, the border-state Republican governors of Arizona and Texas took immigration matters into their own hands, launching large-scale busing operations that sent migrants to progressive strongholds, including Washington, D.C., Chicago, and New York, where officials promptly complained about how hard it was to handle a sudden influx of impoverished newcomers. Imagine that! Ruthless Venezuelan gangs made headlines for their violence in Colorado, Texas, Tennessee, Illinois, and New York, where they’ve found willing recruits in migrant shelters.

Then came the Hamas massacre in Israel on October 7, 2023—the aftermath of which was marked by violent antisemitic protests at college campuses and urban centers, often led by immigrant and second-generation youth. News from Europe—where Muslim immigration has been higher, and where antisemitic attacks have grown alarmingly common as Israel has ramped up its fight against Hamas—was even worse, driving home the consequences of getting mass-scale immigration wrong.

Public opinion on immigration tends to be “thermostatic”; it runs counter to the excesses of those in power. Just as it turned in favor of immigration during the previous Trump administration, it turned sharply the other way under Biden. Now an outright majority of Americans want to reduce immigration, rather than leaving it the same or increasing it, for the first time since the 2000s. 

It is thus unsurprising that Trump has been elected again, with Tom Homan lined up for a border czar role and Stephen Miller returning to the White House as deputy chief of staff for policy. The incoming administration has promised the largest deportation effort in American history, despite considerable uncertainty regarding how such a plan will fare in the face of myriad implementation and legal challenges and the inevitable thermostatic reaction from the public (to say nothing of the moral and even financial dimensions to the problem).

I have spent much of my adult life thinking about how to balance the economic and cultural dynamism that comes from immigration against the need to control ethnic tensions, protect American workers, assimilate newcomers, and maintain an orderly process that commands legitimacy and respect. Much as I urged the political left to remember common sense in 2018, I would urge the Trump administration to consider the following 10 priorities now—some of them broad matters of rhetoric, and others highly specific elements of policy: 

1. On deportations, take steps that build credibility and support, like expelling criminals and recent immigration-law violators. Those protesting such moves reveal their own extremism, rather than rallying the public to their side. Conversely, deporting people who’ve been living in the U.S. peacefully and productively for over a decade is guaranteed to spark damaging headlines, especially if they have citizen spouses or children, as many of them do. Remember, this isn’t about being sentimental—it’s about maintaining the support the administration will need to bring the border back under control. 

2. Under current law, those who seek asylum and can show a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country cannot be summarily deported. To deter weak or fraudulent asylum claims, move quickly to detain all individuals who cross the border illegally and ensure everyone is vetted and passes a credible fear interview before they are released. Work with Mexico and the Department of Defense under a national emergency declaration to build detention capacity. And if these efforts don’t succeed in curbing irregular migration, the administration should work with Congress to further tighten asylum rules.

3. In recent years, migrants from Asia and Africa have been exploiting lax visa rules in Ecuador and other Western Hemisphere countries to get close enough to the U.S. to make an overland trek. Pressure these countries to tighten their visa requirements so migrants from other parts of the world can’t reach our southern border to begin with.

4. Hire additional immigration judges as quickly as possible to address the case backlog. 

5. For legal immigration, enact an improved version of the first Trump administration’s “public charge” rule, which bars the immigration of those unable to support themselves. This will help ensure that new legal immigrants can support themselves and their families, which in turn will help restore faith in our immigration system. Immigration agents need more guidance than the previous rule provided; the improved version should require consideration of earnings, education, and age, and explicitly define the weight assigned to each factor.  

6. Consider reducing family-based visa approvals, including by invoking the new public charge rule. Unused family-based visas carry over to the employment-based categories, which are better focused on skills. 

7. Enforce the anti-communism provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) to ban members of communist and authoritarian parties from receiving immigrant or nonimmigrant visas, including student visas. As my colleague Daniel Di Martino has observed, the president could mandate that U.S. consular officials vet visa applicants on the basis of whether they support Hamas and other terrorist organizations. We have the right to decide who we allow into our country, and barring anti-American extremists is a no-brainer. 

8. Allow legal immigrants to pay for premium processing, and allocate a portion of the funds to support the expansion of credible-fear screenings. 

9. Develop a new H-1B visa rule with a focus on abuse by “third-party” companies that place immigrants at worksites. 

10. Explain how immigration can—if handled wisely, with an emphasis on recruiting talent and minimizing burdens to local communities—contribute to a Great Renewal rather than the Great Replacement feared on the far right. For years, voices on the right have warned that immigrants and their descendants would ensure a permanent progressive majority. Judging by Trump’s massive gains among naturalized citizens and second-generation Americans in 2020 and 2024, that’s not, in fact, how things are turning out. Why not welcome newcomers who can reinforce all that is best in American life?

Most of all, though, the incoming administration should learn from Biden’s overreach. 

Not only does the public tend to shy away from drastic approaches to immigration, but the open borders left and its allies in prestige media will seek to capitalize on every misstep the Trump administration makes. President-elect Trump has a rare opportunity to impose order on the immigration system without alienating the public—and to prevent a relapse into Biden-style border chaos four years from now. Let’s hope he makes the best of it.

Reihan Salam is the president of the Manhattan Institute and the author of the book Melting Pot or Civil War? Follow him on X @Reihan.

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