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COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo.—Billionaire industrialist Charles Koch’s influential network of donors and business leaders is continuing its years-long push for immigration reform, even as hope for any immigration legislation in Congress has faded.

The “broken” immigration system in the U.S. “is a lose-lose situation, and hurtful to American citizens and immigrants alike,” said Jorge Lima, a senior vice president at the Koch-funded political advocacy group Americans for Prosperity.

“It keeps out too many good people who would contribute to this country, and incentivizes illegal entry,” Lima said at a recent conference here hosted by “Stand Together,” Koch’s network of nonprofit advocacy groups. During his speech, Lima said Americans for Prosperity would be “teaming up with many more partners” this fall to “launch a major new campaign to build more empathy and spark further action.”

President Donald Trump has made stricter immigration enforcement a cornerstone of his administration, but has so far failed to secure the money needed to build his signature campaign promise, a wall along the U.S. southern border with Mexico. Record numbers of migrants crossing the border—many fleeing Central American countries and seeking legal asylum—has led to overcrowded detention centers along the border. The conditions in those facilities, condemned as squalid by lawyers, activists, and Democratic lawmakers who have visited them, have been under growing scrutiny in recent weeks.

“Respecting the dignity of every person and securing our borders are not mutually exclusive,” Lima said. “We can have both, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not interested in actually solving this problem.”

In June, groups backed by the Kochs brought a group of immigrants—including so-called Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children—to the Nasdaq stock exchange to ring the opening bell, along with corporate partners including Microsoft.

The Koch network has pushedfor years to create “certainty” for the Dreamers. Periodic pushes to give the Dreamers legal status through The DREAM Act have fallen short in Congress. Trump sought to reverse an Obama-era executive order that temporarily protected them from deportation, but was blocked from doing so by the courts.

“America is missing out on the full contribution to our local communities” the Dreamers could offer with full legal status, Lima said.

The Libre Initiative, one of the Koch groups, advocates for immigration reform that would resolve the status of the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. A compromise, the group says in a petition on its website, should “uphold our commitment to welcome asylum seekers, respect the positive role that families play, make our system of employment visas more flexible and responsive to market demands, promote growth by allowing willing workers to match with employers, improve enforcement of the law, and provide certainty for the Dreamers.”

Write to Mary Childs at mary.childs@barrons.com