Fix the Path, Secure the Border, Respect the Process
Real reform doesn’t start with slogans. It starts with structure.
Let’s say the quiet part out loud.
We don’t have an immigration crisis. We have an immigration failure—a policy failure, a leadership failure, and a moral failure. For forty years, politicians have bounced between sound bites and gridlock while the system has rotted underneath. Now it’s held together with executive orders, detention quotas, and fear. No wonder people don’t trust it. No wonder the extremes are the only ones shouting.
But most Americans aren’t extreme. Most of us want secure borders, a legal path that works, and a process that respects both the law and the people following it. That’s not radical. That’s called governance.
And the truth is, we already know how to fix it. We’ve known for decades. What’s been missing is the will to do it and the decency to do it right.
This post is about how.
1. Legal Pathways are Broken—and Americans Know It
The United States hasn’t meaningfully modernized its visa and legal entry systems since 1990. That’s the last time we overhauled employment-based immigration quotas. Since then, the U.S. population has grown by over 85 million. The economy has nearly tripled. But the number of green cards issued annually has stayed roughly the same.
Think about that. We’re still trying to run 2025’s economy on a 1990 immigration framework.
The results are predictable:
Over 1.4 million people are waiting for employment-based green cards (Cato Institute, 2023)
More than 11 million undocumented immigrants are now in the country, largely because of expired work visas or failed asylum cases (Pew Research, 2022)
Agricultural labor shortages have doubled since 2015, with crops left unharvested across California, Georgia, and Florida (USDA, 2023)
At the same time, we’ve made the legal path so narrow, so underfunded, and so backed up that even those trying to “come legally” are waiting 7–12 years—if they’re lucky.
That’s not a deterrent. It’s a design flaw. And Americans know it.
In a 2024 Harvard CAPS-Harris poll:
76% of voters said the U.S. needs to expand legal immigration to meet labor needs
62% of conservatives supported faster legal pathways if they were paired with stricter border enforcement
This is not a fringe issue. It’s a mainstream demand. Fix the path, and we can fix the system.
2. The Border Is Not the Problem. It’s the Excuse.
Every administration—left and right—has used the border as a political wedge. Some build walls. Some send troops. Some just tweet. However, few address what lies behind the crisis: the complete collapse of processing capacity at our legal ports of entry.
Right now, we have:
Only 535 immigration judges nationwide (DOJ, 2024)
An asylum backlog of over 2.9 million cases, with average wait times of 4.3 years (TRAC at Syracuse, Q1 2025)
Fewer than 400 full-time asylum officers for a nation of 330 million
We aren’t overwhelmed because the border is “open.” We’re overwhelmed because the government is underbuilt.
More than 70% of southern border migrants present themselves at legal ports of entry. They're not sneaking in. They’re waiting in lines that stretch for days, weeks, sometimes months, often in tents or makeshift camps.
Here’s the kicker: many of them are granted legal entry after their cases are reviewed. But we don’t review fast enough. So the chaos grows.
Rather than scale the system, we criminalize the bottleneck. It’s like arresting everyone at the DMV because the printer broke.
3. Let’s Talk About Enforcement—Real Enforcement
Immigration enforcement does not mean chaos. It does not mean random raids. It does not mean throwing people into ICE vans because they "look foreign." It means real enforcement—targeted, intelligent, and tied to legal outcomes.
That’s not what we’re doing now.
Instead:
The U.S. spends over $25 billion a year on immigration enforcement—more than all other federal law enforcement combined (Migration Policy Institute, 2023)
Yet over 60% of ICE detentions involve individuals with no criminal record or only minor civil violations (DHS Enforcement Report, 2024)
Only 24% of removals result from completed court decisions. The rest are "expedited" through opaque administrative rules (TRAC, 2024)
That’s not enforcement. That’s production.
We need a more intelligent system that:
Prioritizes known threats and repeat offenders
Integrates biometric ID verification at visa expiration checkpoints
Partners with local law enforcement based on shared standards, not political pressure
And we need a fully accountable appeals system, with independent oversight, to ensure we never again deport legal residents, asylum seekers, or—God forbid—American citizens.
4. The Economic Case for Reform Is Overwhelming
Immigrants, documented and undocumented, make up 17.4% of the U.S. labor force. They are not taking jobs. They are filling in the gaps that Americans aren’t.
In construction, immigrants make up 31% of all workers (NAHB, 2024)
In agriculture, it’s over 73% (USDA, 2023)
In home care and elder care, it’s 1 in 4 (PHI National, 2024)
We’re also aging rapidly. By 2030, the United States is expected to have more people over 65 than under 18 (U.S. Census Bureau). That’s not a demographic trend—it’s a labor emergency.
The American economy will need millions of new workers in logistics, healthcare, hospitality, food production, and infrastructure. We can’t build that future without immigration reform.
The American Action Forum (a center-right think tank) estimates that comprehensive immigration reform would:
Grow U.S. GDP by $1.2 trillion over 10 years
Add 8.4 million jobs
Reduce the deficit by $180 billion
It’s not just a moral imperative. It’s an economic one.
5. Legal Immigration Needs a Door, Not a Trap
We have land ports. We have air terminals. We have biometric scanners, immigration agents, customs officials, and federal courts. What we don’t have is a working system for people to enter this country legally unless they already know someone, already have the necessary funds, or already fit a visa category designed decades ago for a different era.
That’s what I’m proposing to fix—with Port-of-Entry Embassies.
Not in other countries. Not in a theoretical future. Right here, at our legal points of entry—on U.S. soil. These would be fully staffed federal facilities located at the most heavily traveled land crossings, international airports, and major seaports. They’d function like embassies—but for entry, not foreign diplomacy.
Instead of waiting for people to cross illegally and then process them through chaos, we’d give them a legal pathway before they cross.
Here’s how it would work:
People seeking asylum, labor visas, student status, or family reunification would go directly to one of these facilities at the border, at the airport, or the seaport.
They would meet with a federal agent—not a Border Patrol officer in tactical gear, but a caseworker, a lawyer, a translator, and if necessary, an immigration judge.
All departments would be represented: DHS, DOJ, State, and Labor. One building. One case file. One digital system.
Every applicant would undergo biometric screening in real-time. Criminal records would be flagged. Legitimate humanitarian claims would be logged and assigned a court date. Those eligible for visas could apply on the spot.
There’d be no running through the desert, no handing your child over to a smuggler, no fake paperwork, and no hope of just disappearing into the system. You either qualify or you don’t. And if you do, you get processed like a human being, not warehoused like inventory.
And no, this wouldn’t just apply to the southern border.
Roughly 40% of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. entered legally—by plane or ship—and overstayed their visas. My proposal fixes that too. Every major international airport and maritime port would include these facilities. We’d catch overstays, fraud, and re-entry violations at the point of contact, not years later in some ICE raid on a food truck.
This isn’t “open borders.” It’s functional borders.
The Border Patrol gets to do its actual job—intercepting traffickers, blocking fentanyl shipments, and securing remote crossings. Meanwhile, law-abiding people trying to come here legally finally get a system that isn’t designed to fail them.
You don’t stop illegal immigration by yelling louder. You stop it by building a system people can use.
And we’ve seen this work. The CBP parole program that allowed sponsorship-based legal entry from Venezuela, Haiti, and Nicaragua dropped illegal crossings from those countries by over 70% in just two months. People want to follow the rules. However, we must provide them with rules worth following.
The Port-of-Entry Embassy model does exactly that.
It respects our laws. It respects our workers. And most importantly, it respects the human dignity of the people who still believe America is worth coming to.
The same approach, scaled and codified into law, could transform the border overnight.
6. And Yes, Citizenship Should Mean Something
Every society must draw a line between visitor and citizen. However, our path to citizenship has become so punishing and bureaucratic that many legal immigrants give up before even trying.
Let’s make the process real again. Not easy, but clear.
The American Majority believes in:
A 10-year earned pathway for undocumented immigrants with no criminal record and a consistent work history
Permanent protection for DACA recipients
Fast-track pathways for STEM graduates, essential workers, and military veterans
Clear-cut penalties—and real removals—for visa fraud, repeat criminal offenses, and false asylum claims
This is not open borders. This is an open structure.
7. What Americans Really Want
Here’s what the polling says:
68% of all Americans support a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants (Gallup, April 2025)
81% support expanded legal immigration for work and family reasons (Pew, May 2024)
88% want stronger border enforcement tied to faster asylum and visa systems (Reuters/Ipsos, March 2025)
And crucially, 74% believe immigration is good for America, if done legally and fairly (CBS/YouGov, Q2 2025)
This is not a radical platform. It’s a centrist one. It’s not mine. It’s theirs. It’s the will of the American Majority.
Final Word: Decency Is the Baseline, Not the Ceiling
There’s nothing decent about a broken system. About five-year waitlists and ten-year court appeals. About deporting children because their parents filled out the wrong form. About letting chaos carry the burden of what policy should do.
Decency doesn’t mean softness. It means standards. It means a legal framework that works, laws that are enforced fairly, and accountable systems.
We’ve done this before. We’ve reformed immigration under Reagan, Clinton, Bush, and Obama. We can do it again. But it starts with remembering who we are—and who we’re meant to be.
We are the American Majority.
Let’s act like it.
~Gary