The Immigration Plan America Deserves for the Next 100 Years: Building the Immigration System America Has Never Had (American Government) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

The Immigration Plan America Deserves for the Next 100 Years
Building the Immigration System America Has Never Had

The United States does not have an immigration system. It has an accumulation — the residue of six decades of political evasion, legislative dysfunction, and deliberate maintenance by interests that benefit from the disorder. Every administration promises reform. Every reform attempt fails. The argument continues. The system does not improve.

The Immigration Plan America Deserves for the Next 100 Years breaks from that pattern by asking the question that three decades of immigration debate has refused to ask: not what position should we take, but what should a functional immigration system actually look like — and why?

Richard Diamond's answer is a complete, working-from-first-principles design for the immigration program the United States has never built. Not an argument for more immigration or less immigration. A program: specific, architecturally coherent, constitutionally grounded, and built to last across administrations that will hold entirely different political views about what the system should produce.

The book is organized around the method that policy debates consistently abandon: values first, then the specific situations those values require us to refuse to produce, then twenty-one design principles that translate commitments into rules, then the architecture those rules require. The result is an immigration program traceable from its moral foundations to its statutory provisions — a program that can be evaluated on its own terms rather than on the basis of whose political side it appears to favor.

The architecture includes four immigration streams — economic selection rebuilt around a merit-based points mechanism governed by an independent needs-assessment board, family reunification bounded to its core purpose, humanitarian admission with a genuine 90-day adjudication standard enforced by an independent Article I immigration court, and a temporary worker program large enough to actually replace the unauthorized labor market rather than supplement it. Four institutions designed to make those streams function across hostile administrations. An enforcement framework that is firm, consistent, and humane — established in statute rather than in executive memoranda that reverse with each change of government. An integration architecture that takes the receiving society's obligations to those it admits seriously. A federal-state compact that converts receiving communities from passive recipients of federal intake decisions into governance partners with a material stake in the program's success.

The transition provisions address the 11–12 million people currently present without authorization through a sequenced, conditional, earned pathway — designed specifically to prevent the failure of 1986, when amnesty was delivered and enforcement was not. Legalization in this program is not a promise that reform will follow. It is a certification that reform has already happened.

The book is neither a manifesto for open borders nor a brief for restriction. It is a design document — the most systematically reasoned treatment of American immigration dysfunction currently available, and the first to offer a complete architectural response to every failure the current system has produced.

For citizens exhausted by an argument that has produced nothing. For policymakers who need something credible to build from. For anyone who has concluded that the country deserves better than what six decades of evasion have produced.

The country deserves it. It is time to build it.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.