Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs The federal government’s ability to regulate immigration, a basic function of any nation, is broken. Over the past four years, some eight million people settled in the United States, and most of them did so unlawfully. Instead of an immigration policy calibrated to the needs of the country, both Americans and immigrants are being let down by a set of outdated laws inconsistently enforced by underfunded agencies. Chaos has been a predictable result.Donald Trump won a second term as president on the promise that he would turn back the clock, restoring order by returning immigrants whence they came. The president-elect has vowed to deport all immigrants who do not have legal permission to be in the United States, and some who do. He also has described plans to curtail both illegal and legal immigration.The United States undoubtedly needs to establish control over immigration, and we describe below the necessary changes. But mass deportations, or reductions in future immigration, are not in the national interest.Immigrants are America’s rocket fuel, powering our nation’s unsurpassed economic and cultural achievements. The famous poem inscribed on the Statue of Liberty mischaracterizes those who leave their home countries behind. They are not the tired and the poor; they are people possessed of the determination, skill and resources to seek a better life. Nobel Prizes have been awarded to 142 immigrants to the United States. Nearly half of the companies in the Fortune 500 were founded by immigrants or their children. Blue jeans, Tesla, basketball, “God Bless America” — all the work of immigrants.There’s a more basic imperative, too. America needs more people. Americans no longer make enough babies to maintain the country’s population. To sustain economic growth, the United States needs an infusion of a few million immigrants every year.Without immigrants, the population would start to decline immediately, leaving employers short-handed, curtailing the economy’s potential and causing the kinds of strains on public services and society that have plagued Rust Belt cities for decades.In Japan, where the population has been in decline since 2009, there are no longer enough postal workers to deliver mail on Saturdays. Nine million homes have been abandoned, and a recent report estimated that more than 40 percent of Japanese municipalities may disappear. The challenges prompted then- Prime Minister Fumio Kishida to declare in January 2023 that “Japan is standing on the verge of whether we can continue to function as a society.”An effective American immigration system requires three big shifts in federal policy, and all three are necessary for any to succeed.1. The government must make every reasonable effort to prevent people from living and working illegally in the United States. Congress should allocate the resources necessary to secure the nation’s borders, and to overhaul the shambolic asylum system so that decisions are made at the border. To further deter people from coming to the United States to seek work — including the significant share of undocumented workers who enter the country legally, on temporary visas, and then remain illegally — the United States also needs to hold employers accountable for the legal status of their workers.2. Congress should legislate an orderly expansion of legal immigration, including a role for the federal government in directing people to the places that would benefit from population growth and in underwriting the transition costs.3. The nation also needs to deal humanely with the estimated population of 11 million illegal immigrants who already live here, including the more than three million “Dreamers” brought to this country as children. For too long, large parts of the economy have depended on the labor of immigrants neither paid nor treated as the equals of Americans, a system of exploitation that also undermines American workers and law-abiding employers. Most immigrants who have made their lives in this country should be given a path to citizenship.Versions of this tripartite approach were once embraced by political leaders in both parties. But in recent elections Democrats increasingly cast themselves as full-throated defenders of immigrants, regardless of legal status, while Republicans increasingly portrayed even legal immigration as a negative force in American life. The influx of immigrants into the country, in record numbers in the modern era, has overwhelmed red and blue state approaches. Both parties need a reality check.Democrats should embrace the need to control who enters the country. High rates of immigration across Europe and North America haven’t led to more tolerance of newcomers but instead have led to a resurgence of nativist political movements that have shaken liberal democracy. Climate change is likely to increase the pressure by propelling more migrants to search for safety and opportunity. The United States cannot admit everyone who wishes to come, and the choice of who may come should be intentional, not a result of a government that lacks the will and the capacity to enforce its own laws.Mr. Trump, for his part, is mistaken to portray immigration as a drain on the nation’s resources. He should be condemned for his routinely bigoted portrayal of immigrants, often in defiance of the facts, as a danger to the American people and to the nation’s identity.Instead, immigration ought to be regarded as an investment in the nation’s future.*The difference between welcoming immigration and trying to suppress it is the difference between Houston and Birmingham, Ala.Houston began to attract large numbers of immigrants in the mid-1980s. During a downturn in oil prices, large apartment complexes built for oil field workers in neighborhoods such as Gulfton, west of downtown, started advertising for new tenants in Spanish. The basic attractions have remained the same ever since: inexpensive housing, plentiful jobs and the comfort of following in the footsteps of other immigrants.The Houston area’s population has quadrupled, and nearly a quarter of the 7.5 million residents were born outside the United States, including more than 40 percent of Houston’s doctors, petroleum engineers and scientists, according to the Center for Houston’s Future, a nonprofit research group funded by the local business community.Ngoc Ho came from Vietnam with her parents in 2014 to join her grandfather, who settled in Houston after the Vietnam War. Ms. Ho, 33, who now runs a day care program, said she loves Houston for its diversity. “It’s like a hot pot,” she said. “You don’t feel different, because everybody has English as a second language.”The region’s prosperity stands as a rebuttal to Mr. Trump’s insistence that immigration is bad for American workers. Immigrants without specialized skills have pushed Americans out of some types of low-wage work, because they are willing to accept worse conditions and lower pay. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office predicts the current surge in immigration will slow the pace of wage growth for Americans without college degrees over the next few years.But as immigrants spend the money they earn, they create more jobs than they fill. To care for roughly three dozen children, most of whose parents are immigrants, Ms. Ho employs eight people. The C.B.O. predicts that by 2034, because of the surge in immigration, the nation’s annual economic output will be 3 percent larger.Americans have a long history of celebrating past waves of immigration while worrying that the newest arrivals will be different — perhaps less successful or less American. But in a study published in 2017, the economists Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan found that the current generation of immigrants was assimilating culturally and prospering economically at essentially the same pace as previous generations.“The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago,” they wrote in “Streets of Gold,” a 2022 book describing their research.In contrast to Houston, Alabama, in 2011, passed what was then the most restrictive anti-immigration measure in the country. It prohibited hiring, renting property to or transporting undocumented immigrants. It denied financial aid at state universities to undocumented students. Some parts of the law have since been repealed, but the state’s politicians continue to demonize immigrants, even though Alabama has relatively few.“Alabama has a terrible reputation, well deserved, for not welcoming immigrants,” said David Sher, a former chairman of the Birmingham Regional Chamber of Commerce.The state’s hostility to immigration helps to explain why Birmingham has lost population in every decade since 1960. It is a city of unfilled spaces — vacant lots, parking lots — and of open jobs. Alabama in August had just 55 available workers for every 100 job openings, among the lowest rates in the country, according to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.Ashley McMakin, who has built a popular chain of four Ashley Mac’s restaurants around the Birmingham area, serving home-style lunches and takeaway dinners, said she struggles to find workers. She offers signing bonuses and the kinds of benefits rarely seen in restaurant work, including health insurance and flexible scheduling.She has partnered with programs that help ex-felons and people recovering from substance abuse return to the labor force. But she still faces chronic staffing difficulties, which have forced her to postpone expansion plans. At one point, Ms. McMakin posted a picture of a T-shirt on her Instagram feed that read: “Please Be Patient, There’s Like 3 of Us.” The caption said: “Do you like our new staff shirts?! If we don’t keep laughing, we might start crying.”*In 1965, the Black playwright Douglas Turner Ward premiered a one-act satire that revolved around the premise that all of the Black workers in a Southern town had disappeared. Homes went uncleaned. Babies went unfed. The town’s factories were shuttered. A local businessman complained that “the absence of handymen, porters, sweepers, stock-movers, deliverers and miscellaneous dirty-work doers is disrupting the smooth harmony of marketing!”Immigrants are now the dirty-work doers. Americans rely on people born in other countries to pick crops, pluck chickens, build homes. Visit a wealthy neighborhood in the middle of the day and you will find the streets alive with immigrants caring for the children, the dogs and the lawns. It is a bitter irony that even as the United States was ending the legal segregation of African Americans, it was effectively creating a new caste system in which many immigrants were enlisted as workers but excluded from becoming citizens. Roughly 11 million people, one-fourth of the foreign-born population, do not have permission to live here.There is an inescapable unfairness in offering a path to citizenship to people who are in the United States illegally, while so many others wait for years or even decades for their chance for legal entry. After decades of political malpractice and misjudgment, there is also no better alternative.Mr. Trump will not succeed in making immigrants disappear. During his first term, he deported 325,000 people who were living in the U.S. Even if he deports 10 times as many in his second term, a volume many experts regard as beyond the government’s capacity, millions of immigrants would remain in the country, more vulnerable to exploitation because it will be dangerous for them to seek help.A saving grace of the current system is that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants are Americans in full; Mr. Trump’s avowed intention to end birthright citizenship, which would require a constitutional amendment, would make undocumented status hereditary.Americans face a choice between perpetuating a society maintained by an underclass of unauthorized workers or moving closer to the democratic ideal of a nation of citizens — a nation in which all are equal before the law. As Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote in 1958, “citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights.”Maintaining an underclass limits not only what its members can achieve but also what they can contribute. Cesar Espinosa’s family entered the United States from Mexico illegally in 1991, when he was 5 years old. Thirteen years later, he was accepted to Yale University, but he could not enroll because, as an illegal immigrant, he could not obtain financial aid. Instead, Mr. Espinosa built a nonprofit, FIEL Houston, that pushes to make higher education available to undocumented immigrants.“There’s a version of my life where I’m one of those people living in a condo downtown and working in the Energy Corridor,” he said, referring to the glass and steel Houston office towers where some of the nation’s largest companies are headquartered. “I’ve sat up all night sometimes thinking about it.”Mr. Espinosa’s family was part of the wave of immigrants who entered the country after the last major overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws, in 1986, under President Ronald Reagan, which was intended to greatly reduce illegal immigration.The fatal flaw was that the government did not impose any real obligations on employers.It is illegal to knowingly employ illegal immigrants, but the penalties are modest. The government runs a verification system called E-Verify, which is optional for most employers and notoriously easy to game. Verification is based on possession of a valid Social Security number, but illegal immigrants can use someone else’s.In the mid-2000s, Todd Davis, chief executive of an identity-protection company called LifeLock, published his Social Security number on billboards as a marketing gimmick. A Houston lawyer who works on immigration cases said he found at least 165 instances of undocumented workers in the Houston area using Mr. Davis’s number.The government’s longstanding focus on policing immigrants rather than employers is akin to arresting drug users rather than dealers, and it has been roughly as successful.In 2009, Marek Brothers, a Houston construction company, fired dozens after a government review found the workers had used other people’s Social Security numbers. Stan Marek, the company’s chief executive, said he soon noticed that some of those workers found jobs doing the same work for independent contractors too small to be subjected to scrutiny by federal regulators.The correctives are straightforward: Limit the classification of workers as independent contractors, so companies are responsible for more of their work forces; legislate an affirmative obligation for companies to verify the immigration status of those workers; create a robust verification system.Verification would protect workers and law-abiding employers from unfair competition as well as protecting immigrants from exploitation.Mr. Marek said his business is challenged not just by the low-priced competition but also by the difficulty in finding legal workers even at higher wages. He recruits at high schools and halfway houses, but a vast majority of those he is able to hire are legal immigrants, and there aren’t enough. “Immigrants do the hard work, and we haven’t had a legal way to have them do that since 1986,” he said.*Satish Nannapaneni left India on a student visa in 1997 to earn a master’s degree in software engineering at the University of Houston, Clear Lake. After obtaining a green card, he started Flexera Global, a tech services company based in Sugar Land. He is now an American citizen with 140 employees.He’d like to hire more people, but he can’t find American workers. Those who have the skills are often uninterested in a job that requires regular travel.Companies can use a special visa, the H-1B, to hire highly educated foreign workers, but the government hasn’t increased the number of visas since 2006. In 2024, Mr. Nannapaneni’s company applied for 47 H-1B visas and received nine.“People want to come here, they’re talented, and still the politicians keep talking about it instead of fixing the issue,” Mr. Nannapaneni said.From technology companies in Texas to turf farmers in Alabama, employers insist they can’t find enough domestic workers, and the numbers bear them out. The unemployment rate is low, and as Americans have fewer children, the shortage of workers is projected to increase. The nation must import more than 1.6 million people each year simply to maintain the population.Proposals to expand legal immigration often focus on identifying immigrants who are most likely to contribute, economically or otherwise, to our national life.Minimum standards, such as barring criminals, are a matter of common sense. Governments, however, are not always equipped to determine who will make the greatest contributions.Hugo Ortega had no obvious skills when he arrived in Houston in 1984 at the age of 19.He decided to leave Mexico City because he was hungry and facing homelessness. He knew that one of his uncles had found work in Texas, sometimes sending home letters that included $20 bills carefully wrapped in aluminum foil.He was caught at the border five times before he succeeded in crossing on the sixth attempt. In Houston, he took a job as a dishwasher. Four decades later, he is a Houston icon, the chef and a co-owner of a string of celebrated restaurants. “I put my life at risk to come here, and I would do it in a heartbeat again and again and again,” he said.The amnesty provisions in the 1986 immigration law allowed Mr. Ortega to obtain a green card in 1989 and to become an American citizen in 1996. Along the way, he married the restaurant owner and together they built a culinary empire, introducing Houston, long the homeland of Tex-Mex food, to more authentic varieties of Mexican cuisine.Houston restaurants now serve faithful renditions of a wide range of homeland cuisines, as well as mash-ups that may not be found anywhere else, like beef pho kolaches and brisket tikka masala. But Mr. Ortega knows that immigrant dishwashers in Houston today cannot follow his path. They have little chance of becoming full members of the society in which they work. Indeed, they now face the possibility of being forced to leave.What would he say to Americans skeptical of immigration?“Give us an opportunity,” Mr. Ortega said. “You know, just give us an opportunity to cook for you. Give us an opportunity to be part of this wonderful country.”Source images by Amy Powell for The New York Times, Spencer Lowell for The New York Times, Simbarashe Cha/The New York Times, Johannes Eisele/AFP, via Getty Images, Damon Winter/ The New York Times, Erin Schaff/The New York Times, Paola Chapdelaine for The New York Times, Dieter Nagl/AFP/Apa/Wiener Philharmoniker, via Getty Images, Mel Melcon/The Los Angeles Times, via Getty Images, Oscar Wong/Getty Images, Wavebreakmedia/Getty Images.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, WhatsApp, X and Threads.
