Few could dispute that the American immigration system is broken, and has been for years. The waiting list seems interminably long for those who are attempting to follow existing rules.

Many who despair at gaining a green card by following the sanctioned path, or are unmotivated to try, find some other means to enter and, in many cases, stay beyond the legal limits.

Certainly, making the immigration system more rational would be a marked improvement. But would the RAISE Act, proposing a more merit-based immigration system, achieve that?

That’s the short name for a bill introduced Wednesday by two GOP U.S. senators and favored by the Trump administration. Legislative fixes, from whatever source, ought to fix something, or at least not make things worse.

This bill doesn’t meet that standard. Ultimately, passing this bill would roughly cut in half the number of people allowed in as legal residents, heavily weighting the admissions for people who speak English and come with career skills and educational credentials.

Those sent farther back in line would be those with family ties to a U.S. resident, as well as many refugees.

The apparent assumption, that only the more intellectual immigrants have “merit,” is hard to accept in Hawaii. Here immigrant descendents feel proud of the state’s melting-pot heritage, embracing the words inscribed on the Statue of Liberty, about the lamp lifted “beside the golden door.”

The society was shaped in large part by people who showed enough grit to gain the education and language skills that they needed to thrive. And thrive they did.

RAISE stands for Reforming American Immigration for Strong Employment. The argument is that by severely restricting the “unskilled” workers allowed into the country, the downward pressure on wages in a more competitive labor market would be relieved, a benefit to job seekers who are citizens or legally established within the U.S.

Economists dispute, some of them quite strongly, that this would be the result.

Advocates for the bill point to a Harvard University analysis of a 1980 incident known as the Mariel Boat Lift. In that case, 125,000 Cuban refugees from the port town of Mariel arrived on fishing boats and pleasure craft in the U.S., mostly bound for Miami.

The study, conducted by economist George Borjas, concluded that the influx depressed wages for existing low-skilled workers. Borjas’ critics have faulted his research methods and countered that the effects of the Mariel episode don’t apply broadly to the labor landscape.

Instead, they point to more recent studies asserting that on balance, immigration is an economic benefit to the United States.

In September 2016, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine released a study, “The Economic and Fiscal Consequences of Immigration.” Among the key findings:

>> When calculated over a decade or more, the impact on wages of native-born workers generally is very small. Negative impact is most likely among earlier immigrants or native-born workers with no high school diploma.

>> First-generation immigrants do bring a cost, largely for the education of their children. But that second generation, by and large, proves worth the investment. “Children of immigrants … are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population,” according to the report.

>> Immigration impacts vary “tremendously” across states, according to the report, but are generally positive on the federal level but negative at the state and local level.

Immigrants are not overall the uneducated burden on the country as they are sometimes described. The Pew Research Center analyzed U.S. Census Bureau data and found that 41 percent of those arriving in the past five years had completed at least a bachelor’s degree. This compares to 20 percent of the cohort that emigrated to the U.S. in 1970 having college degrees.

Some of the advocates’ other talking points have been called into question by the opponents, including the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. For example, Cato concluded, the RAISE Act is being wrongly compared to the merit-based Canadian and Australian systems, which allow two to three times as many immigrants as the U.S., when measured as a percent of the population.

The RAISE Act is likely to run into congressional headwinds, some generated from agricultural and other business interests worried about filling labor needs. Others may point with concern to potential loss of gross domestic product and growth, two criteria in Republican economic planning.

If there is reform to be salvaged here, it lies in a more nuanced assessment of what will make America great again. Surely the answer doesn’t lie in extinguishing the lamp and shutting the fabled golden door.