Immigration Reform: How America Built an Immigration System That Works for Nobody and Profits Everybody
Make America Grow Again Series | Part 12: Humane Borders, Clear Citizenship Paths. Stop the Chaos, Start the Order.
MAKE AMERICA GROW AGAIN · Episode 12 of 25 · Full Series Index →
By Rxan Smith · Uncomfortable · DIFFICULTY: 5/5 TIMELINE: 24–48 MONTHS
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📋 What We’re Covering in This Episode
The Design — Why the Chaos Isn’t an Accident
What the Numbers Actually Say
What Both Sides Get Wrong — And Why That’s Useful to Someone
The Economic Reality Nobody Wants to Say Out Loud
The Five Structural Fixes
The Uncomfortable Honest Part
And Finally...
The Design — Why the Chaos Isn’t an Accident
The United States immigration system has not been comprehensively reformed since 1986. That is not a typo. Nineteen eighty-six. Ronald Reagan was president. Top Gun was in theaters. The average home cost $89,000. And the last time Congress actually sat down and rebuilt the legal architecture that governs who gets to come here, work here, stay here, and become American — that was forty years ago.
Everything since then has been patches. Executive orders. Court injunctions. Enforcement surges. Deferred action programs. Administrative tweaks that the next administration reverses. A 3.4 million case backlog sitting in immigration court as of early 2026, with people waiting years for hearings that might take twenty minutes to resolve. A legal immigration system so slow and so narrow that the wait for a family-based green card for someone from the Philippines or Mexico runs, in some categories, to decades. And an illegal immigration system that, in the absence of a functional legal one, has become the only realistic option for millions of people whose labor the American economy quietly depends on.
3.4 million cases pending in U.S. immigration courts as of late 2025.
The last comprehensive immigration reform: 1986.
The system isn’t broken. It’s running exactly as designed — for the people who profit from the chaos.
Here’s the uncomfortable part that neither party wants to say out loud: the chaos is the product. Both sides of the aisle have spent forty years using immigration as a fundraising tool, a base-mobilization device, and a wedge issue sharp enough to cut through any other political conversation — precisely because they never fix it. The Democrats hold out the promise of reform to immigrant communities and progressive voters. The Republicans hold out the threat of invasion to nativist voters and enforcement contractors. Neither side closes the deal. And the $20 billion annual immigration enforcement industrial complex — the private prison companies, the detention contractors, the security technology vendors — keeps cashing checks regardless of who wins.
This is the corporate capture dynamic from Episode 17, playing out in the most politically radioactive policy arena in American life. The revolving door doesn’t just spin in healthcare and finance. It spins between DHS, the private detention industry, and the lobbying firms that write immigration enforcement contracts. The incentive to keep the system broken is enormous. The political will to fix it has to be larger. So far, it hasn’t been.
What the Numbers Actually Say
Let me give you the actual state of play as of 2026, because the political conversation about immigration operates in a fact-free zone that serves nobody except the people selling ads against it.
Pew Research Center estimated the unauthorized immigrant population peaked at roughly 14 million in 2023 — the highest on record. That population has since declined. The total immigrant population dropped by 1.4 million between January and June 2025 — the first decline in fifty years — driven by a combination of increased deportations, voluntary departures, and reduced arrivals at the southern border. Border encounters dropped from 2.1 million in fiscal year 2024 to roughly 444,000 in fiscal year 2025 — an 80% decline — as the Trump administration implemented aggressive enforcement both at the border and in the interior.
The immigration court backlog, meanwhile, stood at 3.37 million active cases as of December 2025, with 2.3 million of those being people who had already filed formal asylum applications and were waiting, sometimes for years, for a hearing. Only 26.7% of immigrants in removal proceedings had legal representation. The system is so underfunded and so undersupported that it processes cases slower than it generates them.
Most People Crossing Are Not Who You Think They Are According to TRAC immigration court data, only 1.64% of new FY2026 cases sought deportation based on any criminal activity beyond possible illegal entry. The rest — 98.36% — were people with no criminal record beyond the act of crossing. This is not the invasion of criminals the political rhetoric describes. It is, overwhelmingly, people fleeing violence, poverty, and climate disruption, and a legal system that has no functional pathway for them to enter legally, so they crossed illegally. The legal pathway being broken is not separable from the illegal crossing being common. They are cause and effect.
And here’s the number that tends to get left out of every cable news segment on immigration: the immigrant population — authorized and unauthorized combined — contributes massively to the economy that’s supposed to be protecting itself from them. The Congressional Budget Office projected that the post-2021 immigration surge would increase U.S. GDP by $8.9 trillion over the 2024-2034 period, generate $788 billion in federal income and payroll taxes from the surge population alone, and reduce federal deficits by $900 billion over ten years. That’s not from a pro-immigration advocacy group. That’s from the nonpartisan scorekeeper that Congress uses to price legislation.
What Both Sides Get Wrong — And Why That’s Useful to Someone
The right’s position on immigration, stripped to its structural argument, is: illegal immigration is bad, legal immigration is fine, enforce the law and the problem goes away. The problem with this position is that the legal immigration system is so narrow and so slow that it functionally cannot absorb the demand that exists. Green card wait times for certain nationalities and categories run twenty, thirty, even fifty years in backlogged queues. For a Mexican agricultural worker with no family in the U.S. and no employer sponsorship, there is no legal pathway. None. The choice isn’t “come legally or come illegally.” The choice is “come illegally or don’t come.” Telling people to follow the law when the law provides no mechanism to follow is not a policy. It is theater.
The left’s position, stripped to its structural argument, is: undocumented people are part of our communities, deserve humane treatment, and should have a path to legal status. This is correct and also incomplete, because it never grapples seriously with the question of what a functional legal system looks like going forward, how to manage the border in a way that doesn’t collapse the asylum system, or how to have a conversation about immigration levels and labor market effects without immediately being accused of nativism. The reflexive posture of treating any enforcement conversation as inherently racist has made it impossible for the left to build the political coalition that actual comprehensive reform requires.
“When people see chaos at the border, they hate it. I hate chaos at the border. My answer is to get rid of the chaos by letting people come in legally, because you legalize a market, you can actually regulate it. You can’t regulate an illegal market.” — Alex Nowrasteh, Cato Institute
That quote is from a libertarian economist. The logic holds across ideological lines. A legal system that can actually process the demand creates order. An illegal system that processes demand in the absence of a functional legal one creates the exact chaos that both sides claim to oppose — and that enforcement contractors and political fundraisers have both learned to monetize.
The 1986 Amnesty Didn’t Cause the Current Crisis — The Half-Measure Did The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 legalized roughly 3 million undocumented immigrants. It was supposed to be paired with employer sanctions that would eliminate the incentive to hire undocumented workers going forward. The employer sanctions were included in the law. They were never meaningfully enforced. So the amnesty happened, the demand side of the labor market stayed open, and new unauthorized flows resumed within years — because the underlying economic incentives were never addressed. The lesson isn’t that legalization doesn’t work. The lesson is that half a reform, with the enforcement half left optional, isn’t a reform. It’s a promise with no follow-through.
The other dynamic worth naming directly: immigration chaos is a feature for the private detention industry, and has been for decades. GEO Group and CoreCivic — the two largest private prison and detention companies in the country — have spent millions lobbying for tougher immigration enforcement policies that expand the detainee population they profit from housing. Their revenues track enforcement spending with remarkable fidelity. When enforcement goes up, their stock goes up. The financial interest in keeping immigration broken is not abstract. It is publicly traded.
Economic Reality Nobody Says Out Loud
Let’s talk about what actually happens to the American economy when immigration enforcement tightens dramatically — because we are living through that experiment right now and the results are coming in.
The San Francisco Federal Reserve found that without recent immigration, the U.S. working-age population would have started declining in 2012. Immigration has been the entire source of working-age population growth for over a decade. Take it away sharply, and the labor force contracts. The labor force contracting means fewer workers competing for jobs, which sounds good — until it means farms can’t harvest crops, hospitals can’t staff wards, construction sites sit idle, and the goods and services that everyone buys get more expensive because there aren’t enough people to produce them.
The Peterson Institute for International Economics estimated that deporting 8.3 million undocumented immigrants would reduce U.S. GDP by 7.4% by 2028 — and push consumer prices up by an additional 9.1%, costing the average American family roughly $2,150 a year in higher costs for food, housing, and services. That’s not pro-immigration advocacy. That’s a supply shock calculation. Take workers out of a labor market, prices go up. Economics 101.
Agriculture is the sharpest example because the numbers are least ambiguous there. Roughly 70-75% of U.S. farm workers are foreign-born. The vast majority of those are undocumented. The food on your table — the fruit, the vegetables, the dairy — moves from field to store through the labor of people who, under current policy, are simultaneously essential to the food system and subject to deportation from it. That contradiction isn’t sustainable. It is, however, politically convenient for the people who want to campaign on enforcement without being held accountable for the price increases that enforcement produces at the grocery store.
Social Security Needs Immigrants | Immigrants Don't Need Social Security | The Social Security crisis we documented in Episode 18 has an immigration dimension that almost never gets discussed in the same breath. Social Security is funded by payroll taxes from current workers. The ratio of workers to retirees — which determines the program’s solvency — has been declining for decades as the native-born population ages. Immigrants, who tend to be working-age when they arrive, are net contributors to Social Security for their first decades in the country. Unauthorized immigrants contribute payroll taxes using Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers or mismatched Social Security numbers, and cannot collect the benefits those taxes fund. Deporting the people who pay into Social Security while being ineligible to collect from it is, from a pure actuarial standpoint, a way to accelerate the program’s insolvency. The math on this is not complicated.
The Five Structural Fixes
Here is what a real immigration reform looks like — not the version that gets killed in committee because it’s too comprehensive, and not the version that’s only enforcement with no pathways. A real reform addresses the causes, not just the symptoms.
Fix One: Rebuild the Legal Immigration System to Match Economic Reality
The current legal immigration system allocates visas through a combination of family relationships and employer sponsorship, with hard annual caps that haven’t been meaningfully updated since 1990. The result is a system where demand — from employers who need workers, from families who want to reunite, from people who want to come legally — vastly exceeds supply. The solution is not “lower the demand.” The solution is “build a legal pathway that matches actual demand.”
This means creating a functional agricultural and low-skilled worker visa program — something that has existed in legislative proposals for twenty years and been killed by a combination of labor union opposition and nativist pressure. It means clearing the green card backlogs by eliminating per-country caps that create absurd waiting periods for immigrants from high-demand countries. It means expanding pathways for people who are already here, working, paying taxes, and contributing — and have been doing so for years or decades — to regularize their status through a process that isn’t a twenty-year court saga.
Fix Two: Fix the Asylum System — Actually Fix It
The current U.S. asylum system is not designed to process the volume of claims it receives. There are approximately 700 immigration judges for a backlog of 3.4 million cases. By comparison, the entire federal judiciary has over 870 judges and handles a fraction of that caseload. The asylum system is structurally incapable of doing what it’s legally required to do.
The fix requires: tripling the number of immigration judges, with salaries and working conditions that retain them. Expanding legal aid access for asylum seekers — because the 73% of immigrants in removal proceedings without a lawyer is both a due process crisis and a system efficiency crisis, since represented cases resolve faster and more accurately. And reforming the asylum screening standards to process cases in months rather than years, with a right of appeal that has meaningful limits rather than the current multi-year appeal chain that keeps cases alive indefinitely.
Fast Processing Reduces Illegal Entry — The Data Is Clear Countries that process asylum claims quickly and with reasonable accuracy see lower secondary migration and lower unauthorized entry rates. When people know they can get a decision in 90 days, even if that decision is denial, they are more likely to present at a legal port of entry than to cross illegally. The current multi-year wait creates a perverse incentive: crossing illegally buys years of de facto presence in the U.S. while the case winds through the courts. Fix the processing speed and you change the calculus for the crossing itself. This is the “stop the chaos, start the order” argument from series index, applied concretely.
Fix Three: A Legalization Pathway for Long-Term Residents
There are somewhere between 11 and 14 million undocumented people in the United States. Many of them have been here for a decade or more. They own businesses. Their children are American citizens. They pay taxes — yes, undocumented immigrants pay an estimated $11.7 billion in state and local taxes annually, and billions more in federal taxes through ITINs. They are, by any practical measure, members of American communities who have no realistic mechanism to become legal members of the American polity.
Mass deportation of all of them is, per the Peterson Institute’s numbers, an economic catastrophe. It is also logistically implausible — the DHS would need to locate, process, and remove more people than currently live in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston combined. What actually happens with mass deportation rhetoric is selective enforcement that primarily removes people with no criminal record who are easy to find, while people with genuine criminal histories who know how to avoid enforcement stay. The deterrence effect is largely on the law-abiding.
A earned legalization pathway — one that requires continuous residence, work history, clean criminal record, tax compliance, English language progress, and a fine — is not amnesty. It is a recognition that the economic integration has already happened, and the legal integration is just lagging forty years behind.
Fix Four: Address the Root Causes — Actually Fund Them
Migration from Central America and the Caribbean is driven by violence, corruption, climate disruption, and economic desperation. People don’t risk their lives and their children’s lives crossing a desert because they have good options at home. The only immigration policy that has a long-term effect on unauthorized flows is one that makes staying home a viable choice.
The U.S. spent decades destabilizing Central American governments — the gang crisis in El Salvador and Guatemala literally has Los Angeles zip codes in its genealogy, as U.S.-deported gang members established the organizational structures that now drive the region’s violence. Owning that history means funding economic development, institutional capacity, and anti-corruption efforts in the countries producing the migration. Not as charity. As cause-and-effect management. The Foreign Policy connection here links directly to the kinds of interventions covered in Episode 1 on Government Transparency — you cannot address the downstream consequences of policy without being honest about the upstream causes.
Fix Five: Employer Accountability — Actually Enforce It This Time
The demand side of unauthorized immigration is American employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers because those workers are cheaper, more compliant, and easier to exploit than documented workers who know their rights. This is not a secret. The meat processing industry, the hotel industry, the landscaping industry, the construction industry — these sectors run on undocumented labor at a scale that their own lobbyists will confirm privately while their public relations departments deny it publicly.
Real employer accountability means a universal, mandatory electronic verification system — E-Verify — with actual penalties for violations that are large enough to change behavior. Not the current E-Verify system, which is optional in most states and carries penalties that large employers treat as a cost of doing business. Penalties that scale with company size, that reach criminal prosecution for knowing and systematic violations, and that are actually enforced. Close the demand, and the unauthorized supply follows the demand down. This has been known since 1986. It has never been done. The reason it has never been done is that the employers who benefit from the status quo are among the most effective lobbyists in Washington. Episode 17 again. Every time.
The Wage Floor Connection | One of the legitimate labor market concerns about unauthorized immigration is that it suppresses wages in low-skill sectors, where undocumented workers — who cannot complain to labor authorities or unionize effectively without risking deportation — accept conditions and compensation that legal workers would reject. The solution to this isn’t to expel the undocumented workers. The solution is to legalize them, which immediately empowers them to demand prevailing wages and legal working conditions, eliminating the competitive advantage that employers derive from their undocumented status. Legalization protects documented workers by removing the subsidy that unauthorized employment provides to exploitative employers. This is the connection to Episode 4 on Income Inequality (fix the floor problem forget about the glass ceiling for now)
The Uncomfortable Honest Part
Immigration is the issue where intellectual honesty is most expensive and most necessary. It requires saying things that make the left uncomfortable — that borders exist for a reason, that enforcement is a legitimate function of sovereignty, that a country can want to control who enters it without being racist, and that the volume and pace of unauthorized migration over the past several years created real stresses on public services and real political backlash that the left’s reflexive dismissal as pure nativism simply failed to account for.
And it requires saying things that make the right uncomfortable — that the people crossing aren’t primarily criminals, that the economy they claim to want to protect depends on the labor they claim to want to expel, that mass deportation at the scale being contemplated would cause an economic disruption that American consumers would feel directly and immediately, and that the enforcement-only posture has been tried for forty years and has produced exactly the chaos that currently exists.
The actual through-line: the immigration system is broken because fixing it requires both sides to give up something politically valuable. Democrats would have to accept real enforcement and real legal limits. Republicans would have to accept real pathways and real legalization. Both would have to stop using immigration as a fundraising machine and start treating it as a governance problem with engineering solutions. The minute you frame it as a solvable engineering problem rather than an existential cultural battle, the political incentives on both sides collapse. That’s why it hasn’t been framed that way in forty years.
And Finally...
The Border Isn’t the Problem. The System Behind It Is.
Here’s what I want to leave you with.
Every few years, there’s a crisis at the southern border. The images are devastating. Children in detention facilities. People crossing in dangerous conditions. Communities overwhelmed by arrivals. And every time the crisis arrives, the political response is the same: more enforcement. More wall. More deportations. More rhetoric about invasion. More fundraising. More outrage. More nothing changing.
And then a few years later, there’s another crisis.
Because you cannot solve a crisis that is caused by a broken system by throwing enforcement at the symptoms of a broken system. You can reduce the symptom temporarily — the Trump administration demonstrably reduced border encounters in 2025, dramatically. Border crossings fell by 80%. And the immigration court backlog grew. And the agricultural labor shortage got worse. And food prices went up. And the 11 million people already here remained in legal limbo, now more frightened, less economically productive, less willing to pay taxes into a system that was actively trying to remove them.
The enforcement worked at the border. It didn’t fix anything. Because the border was never the problem. The system behind the border was the problem.
You want less illegal immigration? Build a legal system that can absorb the demand. You want fewer people in limbo? Create a pathway for the people who are already here. You want employers to stop hiring undocumented workers? Make the penalties real and enforce them. You want fewer people fleeing Central America? Stop funding the conditions that produce the fleeing.
None of that is complicated. None of it is radical. All of it has been known for forty years. The only thing preventing it is a political system that has decided the chaos is more valuable than the solution — because the chaos generates donations, and the solution just generates a functioning country.
A functioning country is apparently the harder sell.
— Rxan Smith
Uncomfortable
← Ep. 11: Childcare Support | Full Series Index | Ep. 13: Local Media →
Every Episode In This Series
Ep. 12 — Immigration Reform ← You Are Here
Ep. 22 — Tech Education & Workforce Prep
Ep. 23 — Family Formation Support (link when live)
Ep. 24 — Debt Relief Programs (link when live)
Ep. 25 — Systemic Poverty Areas (link when live)
rxansmith.substack.com · YouTube: @RealRxanSmith · X: @rxannsmith
Further Reccomended Immigration Reading (Substack)
FreeCap Financial — reporting on ICE contracts and private prison payments
The Lever — investigative reporting on power, contracts, and enforcement
The Bulwark — political analysis of immigration incentives and campaigns
Sources & suggested links:
Which incentive should Congress kill first?”
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The Complete Series — All 25 Episodes
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— Rxan Smith
Uncomfortable
Making America Grow Again, One Uncomfortable Truth at a Time
GEO Group. Core civic.
The ring leaders
I got to see the low -down -dirty despicable-downright-filthy inner workings of it all. Locked up for 3 years. 2018-2021. Long story….
When i got out i conducted my own due diligence. Something just seemed suspicious.
I was amazed at the size of this fucking racket.
Corporations profit from it by monopolizing basic needs, forcing families to pay predatory fees. Calls can cost $25 for 15 minutes, money transfers up to 45%, with kickbacks securing exclusive contracts.
Private prison firms cut staff and care to raise margins while charging per minute for tablets and music, extracting money even when call rates are capped.
And we the people foot the bill…
It costs taxpayers about $89 billion a year to run, but families pay an asinine amount more. Almost $348 billion comes out of their pockets for commissary, phone calls, and lost wages, with the average family paying around $4,200 a year for basics the state does not provide. Our tax dollars cover the buildings and guards, while families cover the 600% markups on essentials.
The financial survival of the incarcerated individual falls on those on the outside.
What a dirty game they’re playing.
And have you read about Trump’s “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets Act”?
Pertaining to the homeless population..
Civil commitment, institutional treatment.
Eliminating the “consent decree”. Meaning forced institutionalization.
Yeah. That’s gonna go over REAL well with everyone.
If this happens I believe it’ll will be worse than current events with ICE.