As many as a quarter of U.S. residents are foreign-born or the children of immigrants. Since the country’s founding, newcomers have made and remade the United States every generation. And yet debates about immigration policy are deeply fraught, highly cyclical and often coded in racial animus, says legal scholar Amanda Frost. America’s pathways to citizenship have gotten narrower in recent years, even as they face constant fire. It’s a problem, she argues, that political leaders shouldn’t ignore.