On Friday, a few hours after insisting that the government shutdown could last “months or even years” if Democrats in Congress refused to fund a border wall, Donald Trump offered an even more immediate warning. He was willing, he said, to declare a national emergency in order to build it. For the past two weeks, the President and top members of his Administration have been making their case, citing a “border crisis” and threats to American sovereignty and security, while blaming the usual suspects for the incursion, from MS-13 and the migrant caravan to Nancy Pelosi and liberal judges. “The crisis is not going away,” the Secretary of Homeland Security, Kirstjen Nielsen, wrote on Twitter. “It is getting worse.” The irony, in light of the continuing political deadlock, is that Nielsen and the President are right about the current situation. There is an immigration crisis at the border—it’s just not the one the President keeps talking about. In the last half decade, while immigration at the U.S. border has dropped significantly compared with earlier years, the profile of migrants has changed in ways that the U.S. immigration system has never been designed to address. Instead of young men and seasonal workers, most of whom migrated from Mexico, the majority of people now arriving are asylum-seeking families and children from Central America.