Immigration compromise remains elusive for U.S.

The last time Gallup asked Americans whether they thought immigration should increase or decrease, 35 percent chose a decrease, 24 percent an increase, and 38 percent preferred the present rate. To the extent that there is a middle-ground position, it is for something like the status quo.

From polling like this, you would imagine that recent reform efforts would have worked in that middle space. But instead, most attempts at a “comprehensive” bill have sought not only amnesty for immigrants here illegally but an increase in low-skilled immigration, above the already brisk post-1960s pace.

Bipartisan bills dramatically at odds with the shape of public opinion are generally bad for both parties.

They also helped give us the new proposal from Sens. Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, and David Perdue, of Georgia, and endorsed by President Donald Trump.

The bill is written for the 35 percent of Americans who want less immigration, which it achieves by creating a points-based system for applications (with points for English proficiency, education, a good job offer, and so on), limiting family-based migration, and cutting the number of legal immigrants we take by roughly half.

As such writers as Robert Ver Bruggen, of National Review, and Lyman Stone at The Federalist have pointed out, you can address many of the costs of mass immigration by embracing the bill’s points system without also making its steep cuts.

That’s because a system that focused more on skills, education and job prospects would automatically put less pressure on wages at the bottom. It would increase immigration’s economic benefits, and reduce its fiscal costs. And it would presumably bring in a more diverse pool of migrants, making balkanization and self-segregation less likely.

So that’s probably the compromise we’re waiting for: a version of the Cotton-Perdue points system, the shift to highskilled recruitment, that keeps the overall immigration rate close to where it is today.

But there are two obvious impediments.

The first is that the Cotton-Perdue proposal is associated with a president whose ascent was darkened by race-baiting, and whose ability to broker any deal is seriously in doubt.

The second problem is that mainstream liberalism has gone a little bit insane on immigration, digging into a position that any policy that doesn’t take us closer to open borders is illegitimate and un-American.

That’s how we got the strange spectacle of CNN’s Jim Acosta, ostensibly a nonpartisan reporter, hectoring the White House’s Stephen Miller last week with the claim that Emma Lazarus’ poem about the “huddled masses” means that the U.S. cannot be self-interested in screening new arrivals.

It was a telling moment, as was Acosta’s self-righteousness afterward. Liberalism used to recognize the complexities of immigration; now it sees only a borderless utopia waiting, and miscreants and racists standing in the way.

As long as these problems persist it is hard to imagine a reasonable deal.

But as long as a deal eludes us, the chaotic system we have is well designed to make both derangements that much more powerful, both problems that much worse.