Jakarta—Despite the boom of recent years, Indonesia is still the sort of place from which young people seek to escape. Nearly all Indonesians who can afford it send their children to study in universities abroad, and my parents were no different. But where many of my former classmates have since become Canadians and Australians, I am again in Jakarta. Like most of the Indonesians I know who studied in the United States, I had trouble staying there after graduating. Many of these would-be Americans are now doing exceptional things elsewhere. One person who was denied a visa to the United States is now back in Indonesia, founding his own tech company. Another went to the Netherlands and is working on a software platform to sell to Indonesian companies. They would have preferred to be making contributions to the United States, but the American immigration system wouldn’t permit it.

No one can deny that immigration is a major political issue in the U.S.—it has, in some respects, dominated this year’s Republican presidential primary—but it’s lamentable how narrowly the issue is usually defined. Much of the American public is obsessed with the specter of poor, illegal immigrants, but there is little attention paid to the byzantine system for skilled migrants. There is a bipartisan skilled immigration plan sponsored by Charles Schumer and Mike Lee currently meandering through the Senate, but its prospects, like all recent immigration reform efforts, are dim.

In the absence of reform, the American immigration system will remain what it is—the product of a series of accidents and miscalculations by policymakers. From the preferences for family unification that have come to dominate America’s immigration system to the absurd lotteries that determine green cards, the overall picture is unflattering: of a country on autopilot, with a civil service incapable of formulating a long-term strategic plan in the national interest, and with rabid interest groups jockeying for narrow victories. There’s no perfect way to determine how many family members, skilled migrants, refugees, or other groups America should admit—broader questions of economic vitality, social justice, belonging, and obligation all need to play a part—but as it stands, there’s simply no coherence at all.

THE UNITED STATES’ modern immigration system was born in the postwar era with the abolition of the ethnic quota system that favored Europeans. Conservatives and patriotic groups were initially opposed to the 1965 reform to abolish quotas, but they eventually relented, in part because they imagined the concept of family reunification would help to freeze the ethnic landscape in the 1960s. “Do you not agree with me that it would be vastly easier for us to assimilate into American life an Englishman than it would be to assimilate a person from Indonesia?” asked Senator Sam Ervin, a notable conservative in the hearings, about people like myself. “I think immigration should be restricted to those who have relatives already in this country. I think that we should have our immigration drawn in such a way as to reunite families.” There was a general understanding that family reunification would prevent an excess of many non-white migrants entering the country. As Representative Emmanuel Celler, author of the 1965 Hart-Celler immigration act said, “since the people of Africa and Asia have very few relatives here, comparatively few could immigrate from those countries because they had no family ties to the United States.”

The congressmen’s assumptions turned out to be completely, even spectacularly wrong. Immigration from Asia totaled about 15,000 a year in the 1950s but surged to 43,000 a year in the ’60s, then to six times that amount by the ’80s. Policymakers had no understanding of the concept of “chain migration,” which renders the composition of the native cohort not nearly as meaningful as the future supply of the incoming cohort. To put it simply, while there were many Americans of French descent already in the United States, they had comparatively few relatives available and willing to migrate, whereas the small number of Thai in America were linked to millions of other Thai seeking to emigrate. The reason this miscalculation was important is not because we ought to prefer European immigrants to Asian ones. Rather, if policymakers had understood the concept of “chain migration,” they might have ditched the family reunification system entirely in favor of a more meritocratic or humanitarian one. Instead, the country was saddled with an immigration policy that neither sought out the most skilled applicants nor recognized its historic obligation to the needy of the world (“give us your tired, your poor”), opting instead to cater to the special interests of some of its citizens.