No, Kathryn, you’re not wrong.
The Visa Waiver Program is supposed to be for advanced countries whose people have no reason to illegally overstay their permission to visit here, allowing them to come for short visits without getting a visa. Now the president wants to use the program as a reward for cooperative foreign governments, even though that will require relaxing the standards for participation and thus guaranteeing increased illegal immigration. If we’re going to even have such a program, we need to be raising the standards, not lowering them, and certainly not expand it until the check-in/check-out system at the borders and airports is fully functional, which isn’t even being planned for yet.