That's just hazing bullshit, "I went through this misery so you must, too!". You fix it by making the legal route less awful, not by intentionally inflicting even more suffering.
It won't be politically possible to change much of anything about the legal immigration system until we stop the ~200K[1] of people illegally coming across the border every month.
The minute you announce some kind of concession for people already here (which would most definitely be part of a broader immigration reform bill) then the floodgates will open with people trying to make it in before the effective date.
Are you a US citizen making this statement? If you are, then you don’t know the scale of social spending that you will be hit with if that legal route for that comes to pass.
Either way, I can’t see any progress on immigration reform. It’s not happening, unless the flow at the border stops or reduces significantly.
Undocumented immigrants in the US already pay taxes today. Their employers pay into the tax system and the undocumented workers never get any of it back, unlike citizen taxpayers.
The idea that immigrants are a net cost in terms of social services is nonsense.
The minute you announce some kind of concession for people already here (which would most definitely be part of a broader immigration reform bill) then the floodgates will open with people trying to make it in before the effective date.
[1] https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-enc...