One of the issues which President-elect Trump says he wants Congress to act on is immigration. That’s not entirely surprising, given that he spotlighted just that issue, in incendiary terms, after gliding down that escalator in the Trump Tower and announcing he was running 17 months ago.

On Nov. 8, when many assumed Hillary Clinton would be elected, together with a Democratic Senate, many liberals also highlighted immigration legislation as an immediate priority. They looked forward to passage of something very much like the Gang of 13 bill that passed the Senate with bipartisan support in 2013 and the very similar bills that passed the Senate in 2006 and were squelched there in 2007 only by the legislative malpractice of the new Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Those bills provided for immediate legalization of millions of illegal immigrants, plus provisions purporting to strengthen border control and workplace enforcement — but which critics thought would prove as ineffective as similar provisions in the bipartisan 1986 law.

It seemed reasonable that a Democratic Senate would advance such a bill and that House Speaker Paul Ryan, sympathetic to it in the past, would allow it on the floor, where it would get enough Republican votes for passage.

That’s now off. The interesting question is what kind of bill a Republican Senate and House could pass. First principle: it must be acceptable to the inaugurated President Trump.

Such a bill wouldn’t provide for immediate deportation of 11 million illegals or a ban on Muslim immigrants. In the campaign, Democrats seized on Trump statements backing such moves and — understandably, for partisan campaigners — ignored his later statements dialing back from those positions.

Mainstream media — less understandably, since they’re supposed to report the facts — ignored those statements too, even though they were set forth with careful precision in the speech Mr. Trump delivered Aug. 31 in Phoenix immediately after his respectful meeting with President Enrique Pena in Mexico City.

In that speech, Mr. Trump reiterated his promise to build a wall along the Mexican border, but said that decisions on deportation and/​or legalization of noncriminal illegals would only be made “in several years, when we have accomplished all of our enforcement goals.” And he would bar not all Muslims, but suspend “visas to any place where adequate screening cannot occur.”

Enforcement measures would include not just the wall, but a biometric entry-exit visa system (about half of illegals overstayed legal visas) and mandatory E-verify for job applicants. Those provisions would likely produce attrition among the illegal population, as Arizona’s E-verify requirement did there.

Mr. Trump obviously would not approve the immediate legalization provisions that vote-hungry Democrats want and that Facebook billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s fwd.us lobby backs. And Mr. Ryan, after lunch with Mr. Trump last week, insisted that enforcement must come first.

Mr. Ryan also backed the little-noticed 10th of Mr. Trump’s 10 points in his Phoenix speech: shifting legal immigration from extended-family reunification, mostly of low-skill immigrants, and setting aside many more places for high-skill immigrants “based on merit, skill, and proficiency.”

That resembles the point systems of Canada and Australia. As law professor F. H. Buckley points out, Canada, with one-tenth the U.S. population, admits about 160,000 immigrants y early under economic categories — more than the United States’ 140,000. As a result, immigrants in Canada, unlike here, have incomes above, not below, the national average.

Some serious Democrats agree with Mr. Trump. “Our immigration laws should be reoriented to favor immigrants with higher skills,” wrote Clinton administration policymaker William Galston in the Wall Street Journal on Nov. 2. Clinton treasury secretary and Obama economic adviser Lawrence Summers called for more high-skill immigration in an American Enterprise Institute talk Nov. 4.

It’s possible that almost all Republicans and some Democrats, especially senators facing re-election in 2018 in Trump states, might support a bill with tougher enforcement, deferred decisions on deporting or legalizing noncriminal illegals, and a shift toward high-skill immigration.

Who wants to argue for a lower-skill future population or against enforcement measures technologically less challenging than transactions Visa and MasterCard process every day?

Who wants to argue that criminal illegal aliens should not be deported and that “sanctuary cities” should not be able to block enforcement of federal immigration laws?

Democrats won’t be happy to abandon their goal of immediate legalization of what they hope will be millions more Democratic voters, and Mr. Zuckerberg’s tech buddies won’t be happy to abandon the H-1B visas that enable them to hire low-cost indentured servants and to have to pay market salaries to high-skill immigrants. But Mr. Trump and the GOP, if they play it right, might force that.

Michael Barone is senior political analyst for the Washington Examiner, resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and longtime co-author of The Almanac of American Politics.

First Published November 17, 2016, 5:00 a.m.