A Reaganesque Resolution to the Immigration Wars

Keith Raffel
Wed, 04 Feb 2026 13:38:20 -0800
Opinion

According to a recent poll, over three-quarters of the Americans who voted for Harris in 2024 believe immigration makes the United States better off. Fewer than one-quarter of those who voted for Trump agree. It sure looks like voters in blue states support immigration, while those in red states do not.

There is a way for the opposing camps to both be satisfied. In Canada, decisions about immigration are influenced heavily by the provinces, which can decide how many immigrants they want and which kinds of applicants best meet their local needs. Why couldn't the United States do something similar by leaving much of immigration policy to the states?

If Mississippi and Oklahoma want no immigrants for fear of increased crime or higher unemployment among its residents, so be it. If California and Massachusetts want immigrants to pick crops, build housing, fill professorships, start companies, tend to the elderly and staff hospitals, that's their choice.
Updated: Wed Feb 04, 2026

According to a recent poll, over three-quarters of the Americans who voted for Harris in 2024 believe immigration makes the United States better off. Fewer than one-quarter of those who voted for Trump agree. It sure looks like voters in blue states support immigration, while those in red states do not.

There is a way for the opposing camps to both be satisfied. In Canada, decisions about immigration are influenced heavily by the provinces, which can decide how many immigrants they want and which kinds of applicants best meet their local needs. Why couldn't the United States do something similar by leaving much of immigration policy to the states?

If Mississippi and Oklahoma want no immigrants for fear of increased crime or higher unemployment among its residents, so be it. If California and Massachusetts want immigrants to pick crops, build housing, fill professorships, start companies, tend to the elderly and staff hospitals, that's their choice.

When Donald Trump declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2015, he described the United States as becoming a "dumping ground" where other countries sent "people that have lots of problems." In his second term, he has significantly cut legal immigration and even barred or restricted students from over three dozen countries from attending American universities.

What is it about Trump and immigrants? With a Scottish-born mother, he is one of only two presidents in the past century with a parent born outside the United States. Trump's political rise was fueled by attacks on the citizenship of the other one, Barack Obama, whose father was Kenyan. Yet when it comes to his own family, Trump has shown no prejudice against the foreign-born. His first wife, Ivana, was born in Czechoslovakia; his current wife, Melania, was born in Slovenia. According to the Associated Press, Melania even worked illegally in the United States before her marriage.

Trump's embrace of the foreign-born extends beyond his family. He appointed the South African-born multibillionaire Elon Musk to slash federal employment as head of the Department of Government Efficiency. Musk, too, reportedly violated the terms of his visa.

If even the leader of the anti-immigrant movement finds considerable worth in foreign-born individuals for his family and key advisers, it must be that an immigrant's value is often in the eye of the individual beholder. Or, perhaps, in the eye of the individual state.

For example, residents of the country's most populous state regard immigrants very differently than Trump. A poll last fall showed almost three-quarters of Californians see immigrants providing an overall benefit. No wonder. If California were an independent country, it would arguably have the world's fourth-largest economy, ahead of India, Japan and the United Kingdom. That success rests in no small part on technology companies founded by immigrants such as Sergey Brin of Google, Jerry Yang of Yahoo and Jensen Huang of Nvidia. While American-born himself, Apple's Steve Jobs was the son of Abdulfattah Jandali, a Syrian.

And it's not just in Silicon Valley that immigrants have played an outsized role in the United States. Since 2000, roughly 40% of U.S. Nobel Prize winners in physics, chemistry and medicine have been foreign-born. Beyond Nobel Prizes, immigrants fill essential roles in agriculture, health care, manufacturing and countless other sectors where states face chronic labor or talent shortages.

Former California governor and American president Ronald Reagan understood what immigrants provide this country. He argued that the dynamism of the United States comes from immigrants who "continuously renew and enrich our nation. ... Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas. ... If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."

How do we preserve Reagan's "shining city" while respecting the "fortress" mentality of MAGA nativism?

We let the states decide.

This century, the United States has issued about 1.1 million permanent resident visas, or green cards, per year. That annual number could be allocated to states based on population. Each state would be free to accept as many or as few of their allotted visas as it chose and to prioritize applicants based on its own economic needs. Any unused visas would return to a national pool and be redistributed to states that wanted more. As a condition of their green card, immigrants would remain in the sponsoring state for a set period, say two or three years, with exceptions if they are unable to find work.

Under such a system, Mississippi could decide to take no immigrants. California could take many. Leaving the decision to the states would break the decades-old congressional deadlock. Red states aren't forced to take immigrants they don't want. Blue states aren't blocked from accepting immigrants they need. The overall federal cap of 1.1 million immigrants is maintained.

Canada provides a precedent for this type of approach. Its Provincial Nominee Program allows participating provinces to select immigrants suited to their local labor markets with the federal government still granting final residency.

The Reagan State Nominee Immigration Program would respect regional differences, preserve national control over totals and allow states that value immigration to continue benefiting from it, while letting others opt out. It would keep the country both united and competitive.