The New York Times rightly celebrates the "confounding" discovery that millions of working-age Americans aren't lost causes after all. But there is a downside: if we aren't going to give up on these Americans, we've lost a major justification for continued record levels of immigration.
Terms like "chain migration," "amnesty" and "Dreamers" aren't going to go away - short-hand descriptors are necessary, if not always of equal value - but we should understand the underlying policy. The differences between "chain migration" and "family-based migration" (or between "Dreamers" and "DACAs") are significant beyond mere ideological virtue signaling.
Failure to get the idea of immigration limits contributes to a debate marked by distrust and incivility.
Industries that have been corrupted by a business model built on illegal hiring have a long way to go to make themselves attractive to a broader swath of the American workforce. E-Verify would make the transition easier by reducing the need for disruptive raids. 95 percent of business support mandatory E-Verify if it includes a safe harbor provision for employers who use the program in good faith. The Goodlatte bill (H.R. 4760) includes such a provision. It currently has 96 cosponsors and the backing of the White House.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act is well-known for increasing immigration and for ending the national origins quota system that had existed since the 1920s. News stories will often give the misimpression that ending Chain Migration would reverse all of the 1965 Act when actually it wouldn't reverse any of it (moving to a merit-based system, on the other hand would reverse the 1965 bill's priorities). In combination with the existing chain categories, the 1965 Act's changes resulted in the doubling of immigration over the next 25 years.
The Washington Post's reporting takes a page out of Lyndon Johnson's Blue Book: Highlight the popular elimination of national origins; keep the unpopular numbers in the dark.
A working group of "key Senate Republicans" have all but agreed to Democratic demands to exclude E-Verify from any DACA deal. Illegal immigration and illegal employment continue because Congress is not willing to stop them.
Under pressure from Dreamer groups, the House Minority Leader says the goal is to pass a legalization without any measures to control illegal immigration and the Senate Minority Leader says that the very measure he considers necessary to discourage illegal immigration must not be included in any deal.
By quibbling over whether Jim Acosta or Stephen Miller has the nicer apartment, the media is once again missing an opportunity to facilitate a constructive conversation about immigration limits.