Legal immigration cuts are also integral to any meaningful deal. Once the DACAs get green cards (as they surely will, since a non-citizenship amnesty is politically unsustainable), they can petition for relatives, and once they naturalize, they can sponsor even more relatives, leading to ever-more family-chain migration. The RAISE Act’s elimination of the unlimited legal immigration category for parents of citizens is key here: If we’re going to amnesty young people in part because they did not make the decision to come here illegally, then those who did make that decision should not be permitted to benefit from the amnesty.

This is why my feared outcome of the White House trading DACA merely for some wall funding would be such a disaster. It’s not only that it would be throwing away the only immigration leverage there is against Democrats; it would be a failure on its own terms. Useful though a wall would be, it isn’t even in the top three most important enforcement policies we need. And failing to include legal immigration cuts would simply create new anchors in the U.S. for even more immigrants in the future.