For too long the Republican story line has been “Too Much Lawbreaking,” when instead the real problem is “Too Much Immigration” — only one part of which involves lawbreaking. This exclusive focus on illegal immigration — opposing amnesty and pushing for more enforcement — is both incomplete and counterproductive. Incomplete because the effects of illegal immigration aren’t that different from those of legal immigration — an illiterate Central American farmer with a green card is just as unsuited for a 21st-century economy as an illiterate Central American farmer without a green card. And it’s counterproductive because the focus on criminality can seem punitive and serve to polarize the debate, potentially aliening not just immigrant voters, who really aren’t that numerous, but the native-born, who want less immigration but don’t want to feel bad about themselves for holding such a view.

A new approach would retain the widely popular, and morally compelling, support for more consistent application of immigration laws and opposition to legalization — but make them part of a broader push for a more moderate level of future immigration overall. If the debate focuses solely on legality, ultimately there’s no real argument against amnesty and open borders. You just legalize the whole thing and the issue goes away — no illegals, no problem. In the appropriately larger context, amnesty is bad not only because it rewards lawbreaking (which it does), but also for the same reason that the Visa lottery is bad: it leads to excessive immigration.

A new GOP approach to immigration would also recognize that there are two components to the debate — immigration policy and immigrant policy, the first governing who and how many we take, the second how we treat people once they’re here.

If you think of these two elements as axes on a graph, immigration levels are the x axis and treatment of immigrants the y axis. That gives rise to four general approaches, one for each quadrant. The first is a pro-immigrant policy of mass immigration — what Kennedy and McCain and Bush and Obama imagine themselves supporting, though it’s questionable whether tomorrow’s mass immigration helps yesterday’s immigrants.

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