What should America’s immigration policy be?

This might seem like an absurd question to ask in a year when our current immigration agenda involves sending hundreds of people — including some who came here legally and many with no criminal record — to a Salvadoran maximum security prison known for human rights abuses, revoking the visas of PhD candidates and researchers in the country over speeding tickets or missing customs forms, and killing our tourism industry with random imprisonments and harassment at the border.

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All the while, Vice President JD Vance posts on X that we cannot afford to worry about “due process.” Yes, he put a foundational constitutional right in scare quotes because of the necessity of deporting the alleged 20 million people who came to the US illegally under Joe Biden. Although these claims that Biden let in tens of millions of people are popular on the right, there are literally no credible estimates to suggest that 20 million immigrants, legal or not, entered under his tenure. Most credible estimates are that between 4 million and 6 million people entered the US illegally during the Biden administration, and 8 million total.

In the face of all that, it feels futile to try to outline what our approach to immigration should be. Any immigration policy at all that obeys the Constitution would be an improvement over the current situation.

Every single one of the things I mentioned above is wildly underwater in the polls, but voters still tend to support Trump’s handling of immigration overall. That suggests........

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