Trump should want Barbara Jordan's immigration debate, not Joe Arpaio's

President Trump has transformed Washington's bipartisan monologue about immigration policy into a real debate. For someone so often dinged for a lack of accomplishments over the past seven months, that's no small feat.

As late as 2013, when senators from both parties discussed "immigration reform," they meant two things: legalizing most illegal immigrants already in the United States and increasing legal immigration substantially. (Conventional wisdom aside, the latter is arguably less popular than the former.)

Republicans — including top Trump defender Sean Hannity and Trump himself — attributed Mitt Romney's loss in the previous presidential election to his failure to adopt these positions. To ever be competitive again, virtually everyone agreed the GOP must become the party of more immigration.

Now instead of amnesty, what Attorney General Jeff Sessions has called "the Trump era" is defined by enforcement. Illegal border crossings are down, not up. Instead of increasing immigration levels, we have a president and two ascendant Republican senators talking about cutting them. Instead of seemingly infinite chain migration via expansive family reunification, we are contemplating more skills-based immigration.

But Trump is not necessarily conducting the debate on the terms that will be most fruitful. Almost 20 years ago, Barbara Jordan was the face of immigration reform: a black Democratic congresswoman from Texas who was active in the civil-rights movement, picked to chair then-President Bill Clinton's commission examining the issue before her untimely death in 1996.