Outlining his position on immigration in August of last year, Donald Trump, then the Republican candidate for U.S. president, made his motivating philosophy clear: “There is only one core issue in the immigration debate, and that issue is the well-being of the American people.” Although this nationalistic appeal may strike some readers as conservative, it is very similar to the position taken by U.S. civil rights icon and Democrat Barbara Jordan, who before her death in 1996 headed President Bill Clinton’s commission on immigration reform. “It is both a right and a responsibility of a democratic society,” she argued, “to manage immigration so that it serves the national interest.” Trump’s rhetoric has of course been overheated and insensitive at times, but his view on immigration—that it should be designed to benefit the receiving country—is widely held.
In the United States, there is strong evidence that the national interest has not been well served by the country’s immigration policy over the last five decades. Even as levels of immigration have approached historic highs, debate on the topic has been subdued, and policymakers and opinion leaders in both parties have tended to overstate the benefits and…
