With the wall still in the works, President Trump isn't sitting idle as 1.5 million illegal migrants prepare to storm the U.S. border this year.  He's moving swiftly to get some kind of handle on the migrant surge by strengthening the U.S.'s loophole-filled system of laws that have made immigrating here illegally more attractive to would-be migrants than following U.S. law.  He's pulling up the drawbridge.

OANN reports that Trump's new package of measures, which should be complete by this summer, may just be the invisible architecture to deter illegal immigration as effectively as a wall.  With the migrant surge forming, it can't come soon enough.  OANN reports:

President Trump is preparing to make some dramatic changes to immigration policies.  He has reportedly directed top White House officials to take a more aggressive stance on immigration.  This comes as record-high numbers of immigrants are reaching the southern border, pushing Customs and Border Protection to its breaking point.

Some of the changes include a new way of analyzing asylum claims by comparing the person's fears to the actual conditions of their home country.

Regulatory changes will also make it harder for "difficult or low-skilled" immigrants to enter the country, while making it easier for high-skilled immigrants who will likely be self sufficient.

Additionally, the government will also be allowed to hold migrant children longer than the current 20-day limit.

There's also this, from the Daily Caller:

The White House plan to go after remittance payments falls in line with a proposal from former Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who is being considered to replace outgoing DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen. 

Kobach told Breitbart News on Tuesday that this will be an effective way for President Donald Trump to compel the Mexican government to take more enforcement action against Central Americans trafficking through their country.

Kobach told Breitbart, "The threat I propose is one that actually helps us if we follow through on it.  That is the threat of ending remittances from the majority of people in the United States from Mexico who are here illegally," adding "they don't want to risk losing that massive flow of foreign capital.  In most years, it's their second biggest source of foreign capital."

What we are seeing here is a legal wall going up, much as a physical one is going up.  Walls, as Richard Fernandez noted in his brilliant piece here, are basically sorting tools: "'Everybody knows' that bridges are good and walls are bad.  But events in Central America and the Middle East suggest that walls may actually play an important role in governing the global world after all," he writes.  After making a doozy of an argument illustrating that, he concludes: "Walls will eventually be understood as places where information can be intelligently applied.

What can be added to that is that legal infrastructure is a wall, too.  If you read The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else, by Hernando de Soto, you will also recall the important arguments made about invisible architecture, with a particularly strong chapter on the importance of legal order.

Columnist Debra Saunders made a good case the other day that this is where change is most critical, arguing that it is even more important than a wall, writing:

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen recently argued that a law which prevents immigration officials from promptly returning minors from the so-called Northern Triangle countries and a court decision that limits how long the government can hold minors serve as loopholes that "create a functionally open border."

That's why Mark Krikorian of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies always has argued that changing immigration law and enforcement would be far more effective than building a wall — not that he's opposed to spending on a wall.

Trump's push for the wall shows that he is working to keep to his 2016 campaign promise: But it really can't do much to discourage economic migrants who ultimately would not qualify for asylum but nonetheless believe they will be able to get into the United States through a port of entry.

That's the problem with Trump's beloved wall.  It may resonate with his base, but it won't bring about the changes the base wants.

Suddenly, we are seeing that someone in the White House understands that extremely well — and is presenting the legal changes she mentions.

It would also be good to see more strengthening and enforcement on the existing U.S. law to ensure that the migrants coming in are unlikely to be public charges — a longtime U.S. law that is being widely flouted now, and holding officials responsible for allowing in migrants who are obviously going to present costs and problems.

It is important, because the migrant surge as it is now is about importing poverty. The unvetted migrants rolling in are not only bringing poverty, social disintegration, a lack of skills, the lowest education levels in the hemisphere, the lowest English skills in the hemisphere, and low social capital with them, they are coming to claim U.S. public services, taking far more out than they will ever be able to put in in taxes.

Schools, in red districts gone recently blue in the last congressional election, are particularly susceptible to being flooded by indigent migrant children, brought in for their value to allow their parents instantly into the country without vetting.

Who's coming in and getting that instant customer service legal immigrants don't get? Well, people like Mirian Zelaya Gomez, a single mom with two kids and a fondness for Instagram luxury-life glamour shots who got her name in the news as "Lady Frijoles," the Honduran caravan migrant who disdained donated Mexican food in Tijuana, and who told the press she was migrating to the states to get free medical care for her kids. She's since been arrested for assaulting a relative who had given her housing in Dallas. Here she was, being booked:

Image credit: Telemundo T39 shareable video screen shot.

The Latino commenters on these threads are loaded with contempt for this person's arrogance and entitlement, writing time and again that it's time to build a wall. Examples of abusers of the system such as this do incense many Hispanics in the U.S. same as they do the rest of the country, and their observed fury is obviously a reason why so many are supporting President Trump - in a majority percentage higher than the general U.S. public overall. Why are people like this being allowed in at all, while legal immigrants to the states must wait ten years and pay thousands of dollars in costs? Zelaya treated her entry to the states for exactly the price she paid for it - which was nothing.

What Trump is ultimately doing now in his new legal reforms to wipe out abuses - is making immigration to the states again something that has value.