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President Donald Trump has been criticized for adopting his "America first" campaign slogan because of its fraught historical implications. But it shouldn't be controversial that Trump wishes to shape his policies for the benefit of the country he leads.

That's at least as true on immigration as in on any other issue. Trump signed two executive orders Wednesday setting in motion the building of a wall on America's southern border. There are many border walls in the world and there is nothing inherently wrong with them. (Comparisons with the Berlin Wall are utterly inapt, for that edifice was built to keep people imprisoned within, rather than intended to keep people out).

The trouble with a wall is not that it does too much but that it does too little. A wall won't solve today's most pressing immigration problems.

"We are in the midst of a crisis on our southern border," Trump said at his appearance at the Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday. However that may be in the intangible sense that the U.S. no longer controls its frontiers as it should, it is not so if Trump's words were intended to convey a flood of illegal aliens coming north into America.

Border crossings are way down. The Pew Research Center has found that the number of illegal immigrants coming from Mexico has decreased for the last nine years, and more Mexicans are leaving via our southern border than are trying to come in.

Most immigrants who arrive in America illegally aren't burrowing under fences or trying to evade border control agents. And most aren't the young male gang members of campaign imagery, but young mothers with small children fleeing mayhem and seeking shelter in the U.S. They approach the border hoping to be detained so they can get a hearing before an asylum judge. They are escaping gangs and poverty-ridden countries in Central America, specifically Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador. About 80,000 Latin Americans sought asylum last year, up 900 percent in less than a decade.

An even bigger problem are people who enter the country legally then fail to leave once their visas run out. A recent estimate suggests this accounts for three-fifths of illegal immigrants. A Homeland Security Department study found that nearly half a million people were here illegally because of visa overstays in 2015, and that more than twice as many (93,000) came from Canada as from Mexico (42,000). Again, a wall will do nothing to address this problem.

A better approach would be to control which foreigners are granted residency. Immigration resonated with voters this year not merely as a security issue, but also as a jobs issue. Some critics overstate the negative effects of immigrants on the economy and ignore the benefits. But there are economic costs, and American workers have good reason to complain about mass immigration.

It drives down wages, the best recent research shows. Harvard economist George Borjas described his findings this way: "When the supply of workers goes up, the price that firms have to pay to hire workers goes down. Wage trends over the past half-century suggest that a 10 percent increase in the number of workers with a particular set of skills probably lowers the wage of that group by at least 3 percent."

The biggest victims are low-skilled workers.

Guest-worker programs aren't about helping the oppressed or welcoming new citizens. Their purpose is to provide lower-wage labor for businesses. Guest workers are less free to demand higher wages or better treatment, because "you're fired," also means "you're deported."

President Trump should end the low-skilled guest-worker program and reform the high-skilled program. White House adviser Stephen Miller has the good idea of allocating high-skilled guest-worker visas to the highest-paying jobs. Another good idea, as Washington Examiner columnist Michael Barone has noted, is to emulate Australia's skilled immigration points test, under which applicants must score a minimum number of points, based on age, skill, education, English language proficiency and other factors, to be granted residency.

These are just a few examples of what can be done. Trump should think beyond the wall when it comes to reforming our broken immigration system.

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Immigration reform, beyond Trump's wall - Colorado Springs Gazette