Pathways

In recent memory, no single issue has wreaked greater havoc in American politics than immigration. Terrorism cost lives, upended aviation after 9/11, and brought disaster to Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria. Sub-prime mortgages cost Americans eight million jobs. A massive trade deficit with China made Wall Street, Omaha, and Silicon Valley billionaires unspeakably rich, while ripping the guts out of the manufacturing heartland. Donald Trump took malign Russian influence to the centre of the executive branch and triggered an attempted putsch. Yet the public policy file that has brought the most enduring derangement to the body politic is the one that governs who gets to come and who gets to stay.

Indeed, immigration is the shaky underpinning of a partisan house of horrors — a once-sound pillar weakened by perpetual neglect. In this, it is emblematic of America’s general tendency, at least since Lyndon Johnson’s administration in the 1960s, to eschew reforms that improve...