As the Trump administration has moved at a breakneck pace during its first few months in office, the administration’s near-total shutdown of the southern border and an end to the wave after wave of illegal immigrants has rightly been a major focus.

But illegal immigration is not the only kind of immigration into the United States. Today, the U.S. admits more foreigners through its legal channels than ever before. The percentage of the population that is foreign born is higher now than it has ever been, even during previous periods of mass immigration at the end of the 19th century.

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Immigrants have always been a part of the American story. From the Dutch and German immigrants who crossed the Atlantic before the Revolution, the refugees from the Irish Potato Famine of the mid-1800s, the immigrants of Ellis Island that came during the late 19th and early 20th century from all sorts of European nations, seek a new life in a new nation, to the Chinese and Japanese immigrants of the same period. Today, legal immigration continues from all over the world.

But the system that facilitates legal immigration is unique in the nation’s history. Today, the principles of the nation’s founding have seemingly lost their place in the conversation of who is allowed to enter through our legal ports of entry and why.

Instead of expecting that those who aspire to be Americans embrace the nation’s principles and become patriots in their own right, diversity is treated as more important than assimilation. Visa programs that may have once seemed well intentioned are awash with abuse, while others posed problems from the start. There are also major national security concerns that the current immigration programs fail to address. And caught in the middle of all of this, is the American citizen, both foreign and native born alike, who are forced to endure the consequences of a system that has not kept their well-being in mind.

Throughout this week, the Washington Examiner‘s Restoring America section will feature “Becoming an American: How to fix legal immigration,” a series that will explore the numerous policy and philosophical questions that are raised by the issue of legal immigration, featuring commentary from think tank scholars and academics that seek to provide the answers to those questions and provide a roadmap for a legal immigration regime that serves the interests of America and her citizens.