The GOP's brilliant new plan to copy Canada's immigration system

This is a federalist solution America's Founders would love

A worker harvests cranberries at a cranberry farm in Manseau, Quebec.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Mathieu Belanger)

President Trump is a man who prefers blunt instruments: He thinks he can solve America's complex immigration issues with a "big, beautiful wall." Meanwhile, two members of his party — Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Rep. Ken Buck of Colorado — have come up with a vastly more elegant solution to help the country meet its future labor needs. (Sen. John McCain has signed on as a cosponsor, too.) There are no walls involved — just a plan to let states set up their own guest worker programs.

Besides being inherently sound, the great upside of this approach is that it would sidestep the messy politics in Washington that have long made sensible immigration reform well nigh impossible. And we know that it works: It already does in Canada.

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Shikha Dalmia

Shikha Dalmia is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University studying the rise of populist authoritarianism.  She is a Bloomberg View contributor and a columnist at the Washington Examiner, and she also writes regularly for The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and numerous other publications. She considers herself to be a progressive libertarian and an agnostic with Buddhist longings and a Sufi soul.