Lucas Guttentag, too, acknowledges that the very same tools deployed by the current administration could be used to great effect if an administration that prioritizes immigrant admissions and integration, as well as humane treatment, comes into place. He reminds us of the inescapable tradeoff in bureaucratic administration between the virtues of deliberation and consultation on the one hand and the urgency of action on the other.

Guttentag, too, makes a crucial structural point: that presidents and their administrations hire the civil servants who will outlast them – civil servants who are not automatons who simply apply some objective version of the law but who instead hold worldviews that will infuse their judgments. This is a lesson in personnel that a new administration will hopefully learn quickly.

But as Nicholas Espiritu and Guttentag emphasize, the courts have taken troubling turn in the last couple of years. In Trump v. Hawaii, as we have argued separately and together, the Court broke sharply with past precedent, holding that Trump’s ban on immigrants from several majority-Muslim nations was constitutional regardless of whether the president was motivated by religious animosity. Since our book went to press things have only gotten worse.