The U.S. immigration system has become a byzantine labyrinth. It is so complex and costly that ordinary people can’t navigate it without lawyers, years of waiting, and prohibitive cost.

When a legal pathway is effectively unusable, it shouldn’t surprise us that people resort to illegal or dubious workarounds.

This is a policy failure.

Decades of congressional inaction and piecemeal executive fixes have produced a system that exploits the very people it claims to help. Only Congress can fix it, and it must.

Today’s framework is both burdensome and perverse.

Congresses, Republican and Democrat alike, going back generations, have failed to modernize laws or align immigrant supply with economic demand.

In that vacuum, administrations have pursued stopgap measures. For example, President

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