President Trump and congressional Democrats are fighting over how much the U.S. government should spend on Trump’s proposed border wall, risking another government shutdown because of a dispute over immigration policy. However those negotiations turn out, though, here’s the thing: The massive wall, which Trump has said would stretch 1,000 miles across the U.S.-Mexico border, is very unlikely to be built, at least at that size. Mexico is not paying for it, and Congress is unlikely to put up much money for it.

You could call the wall’s meager prospects a major defeat for Trump, but that risks missing the point. The wall is something of an abstraction. Trump, in his two years in office, has already made U.S. policy much, much more resistant to immigration — without Congress agreeing to his wall or really any of his immigration ideas. There is no physical wall, but there are all kinds of new barriers for people who want to come to the United States and for undocumented immigrants who want to stay.

Here’s what we can measure, over the past two years:

Those are just the areas of immigration policy with the clearest data. I have no doubt that the Trump administration’s immigration changes are having other effects that we can’t measure as well. Here are some of the potential shifts that are harder to track:

Much of the political debate has focused on why Trump is taking all these steps: Is it because immigration is an economic or security threat to the U.S., as the president has said? Or is it because he opposes the country becoming less white and less Christian? I think the evidence points pretty strongly toward the second explanation, the white identity politics one.

But while understanding his reasoning is important, there’s little dispute about the effects of Trump’s policies. Wall or no, a lot has already happened, and more big changes could be on the way. The wall is a story. But the story is how Trump has already remade U.S. immigration policy.