The most misleading line in Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this week may have also been the most revealing about how he is reconfiguring the Republican Party and reshaping America’s electoral alignment.

“Legal immigrants enrich our nation and strengthen our society in countless ways,” he declared at one point. “I want people to come into our country, in the largest numbers ever, but they have to come in legally.”

Trump ad-libbed the part about “the largest numbers ever,” but even the base claim—that he supports legal immigration—radically rewrites his record. Trump just last year supported legislation from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa that would have cut legal immigration by more than 40 percent—the largest reduction since the 1920s, according to a study from the libertarian Cato Institute. If that bill had been in place since 1965, when Congress rewrote the nation’s immigration laws, it would have blocked nearly three-fifths of all the immigrants the nation has actually admitted since then, the study’s author, David Bier, calculated.