The Heritage Foundation has made its first sustained foray into immigration policy with a Backgrounder by Ed Meese and Matt Spalding released yesterday — and the cause of America has been advanced significantly. It’s a preliminary effort, articulating basic principles and offering a few concrete recommendations, but all are sound and include specifics that explicitly reject positions promoted by the open-borders faction of the GOP. This is a welcome development, since Heritage has long been conflicted with regard to immigration. There have always been supporters of sound immigration policy within the think tank — most notably welfare expert Robert Rector — but disagreement among its staff, board, and funders had long led it to decide, as my grad school advisor would have put it, “when in doubt, fall on the ball.” Heritage’s new willingness to critique a broken immigration policy represents an important step toward a new intellectual consensus for reform.