President Trump's immigration road map has a big flaw

The new White House immigration proposal is intended as a policy road map, showing what Republicans are for, not merely what they are against. As such, it has many strengths — but also one large weakness.

The plan’s most significant change is to focus family immigration on the nuclear family, rather than other adult relatives who have their own families. Those other categories are the drivers of chain migration — when, for instance, an immigrant, now a citizen, sponsors his brother, who moves here with his wife, who eventually sponsors her own siblings, and so on.

Research shows that each immigrant over time brings in an average of 3.45 additional immigrants. In other words, immigration to America is now largely based on who you know, not what you know.

The president’s proposed merit-based system would change this by putting more emphasis on a prospective immigrant’s skills and education.

The White House is to be commended for proposing these and other changes.

OUR VIEW: How immigration plan could migrate from doubtful to doable

However, there is one serious flaw in this plan. It explicitly endorses the current level of legal immigration of 1.1 million new green cards every year, contrary to the president’s repeated prior statements.

That might not be a big problem if this were a bill that had emerged from the congressional meat-grinder. Politics is, after all, the art of the possible.

But this plan is not a bill — it’s a campaign document, intended to reflect Republican concerns and preferences. This is why the lack of even a token reduction in overall immigration is so disappointing — it presents the current 1.1 million per year as a given.

Even a proposed cut to “just” 1 million a year would have been an acknowledgment the administration understood that there are problems with mass immigration that go beyond the question of immigrant skills, related to assimilation, security, crowding, etc.

Mark Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies.

If you can't see this reader poll, please refresh your page.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: President Trump's immigration road map has a big flaw