Let (a lot more of) them in.

• Author: Dalmia, Shikha
• Position: Immigration reform

Comprehensive immigration reform isn't coming anytime soon. Here's what to do in the meantime.

The United States immigration system doles out millions of green cards every year. Of course, the Post Office manages to deliver millions of letters every day, millions of Amtrak passengers reach their destinations every month, and American public schools hand diplomas to millions of students every year. But no one would say those bureaucracies are high functioning.

America's immigration system is far worse than the Post Office, Amtrak, and public schools combined. It is bottlenecked and broken at every level in almost every category, yet comprehensive reform seems politically impossible.

At the time of this writing, President Barack Obama had just announced a controversial plan to realign immigration enforcement priorities. Since he has been unable to get lawmakers to budge, the president will instead use administrative tools to defer deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants with American children or spouses and deep community ties--at least for as long as he is in office. The plan also involves concentrating resources on ejecting unauthorized immigrants with criminal records. Up to J million people who entered the country illegally--about half of the undocumented population--would likely qualify for relief under this plan.

Obama's plan utterly fails to address the underlying problems with the immigration system, yet it still may squelch any hope for comprehensive reform. That doesn't mean, however, that immigrant-friendly lawmakers should simply twiddle their thumbs. They can pass a series of improvements that enjoy bipartisan support to start fixing the system as soon as the new Congress is in session. These include a guest worker program for low-skilled workers and deregulation of the high-skilled visa program.

To make their case, reformers can point to how America worked until the beginning of the 20th century. At that time, immigrants could simply show up on our shores, undergo a physical exam at the point of entry, and obtain their papers on the spot. Today, remote bureaucrats make decisions about who stays and who goes based on their own notions about what is good for the economy and the country, rather than leaving such questions to individuals. The immigration system subdivides the pool of potential immigrants into a complex taxonomy of bureaucratic categories and subcategories--J-I, K-3, L-IA, H-2B--each with its own unique maze of requirements.

Americans who are unlucky enough to fall in love with a foreigner can't simply marry and live happily ever after. Instead, the citizen must sponsor his or her spouse for a green card, which requires the couple to divulge intimate details of their lives to suspicious bureaucrats to prove that they are not faking the whole thing for money or friendship. If you are a green card holder and want your overseas spouse to join you in America, you usually have to wait years. Wait times for green cards for adult unmarried children or siblings of American citizens in foreign countries are somewhere between seven and 22 years, depending on their country of origin.

American employers fare no better under the current system. High-tech companies get an annual quota of 85,000 H-IBs--temporary work permits, renewable after three years--to hire foreign geeks. That quota is typically filled in a matter of weeks each year, forcing everyone else to wait another year to play the visa lottery again.

And that's not even the worst of it. Companies that sponsor these H--IBs have to prove to the labor department that they have made a good faith effort to hire Americans, which includes advertising in approved channels. If companies are deemed "H--IB dependent" they become subject to "labor audits"--a stipulation brought to you courtesy of politically connected labor unions. This means they must be prepared to justify the discharge of any American worker 90 days before or after hiring an H-IB. They have to demonstrate either that the employee's departure was voluntary or caused by poor performance or unacceptable behavior. A company that is found to be willfully violating the law can be barred for three years from hiring foreign workers and slapped with serious fines.

Converting these H-IBs into green cards is so complicated that a whole industry of lawyers has grown up around it. When it goes smoothly, it takes tens of thousands of dollars and decades, especially if the workers are from India and China. Many expensively trained, productive employees give up midway through the process in frustration and go home, especially since their spouses, until the president's executive order, were barred from working unless they miraculously managed to obtain their own H-IBs.

And believe it or not, these beleaguered high-tech companies are actually the lucky ones. If you are a farmer who wants to hire...