Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., left, and David Perdue, R-Ga., speak to the media during a news conference on Capitol Hill Feb. 7. Cotton and Perdue unveiled immigration legislation that they say is aimed at cutting by half the number of green cards issued annually by the U.S. (Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

While much of the media has been focused on the administration’s campaign against illegal immigration, a rising star among Senate Republicans, Tom Cotton of Arkansas, has been pursuing a parallel agenda: a bill to cut legal immigration in half, an idea long considered toxic in Washington but whose time may be coming around.

Perhaps no one in Washington was happier to hear the news than Roy Beck, a cheerful 68-year-old former reporter who founded the anti-immigration group NumbersUSA, and has been waiting for a moment like this for 20 years. Curtailing legal immigration has long been an untouchable subject in politics — an idea pushed by a handful of groups like Beck’s but largely ignored on the Hill by members of both parties. Now the environment has drastically changed, with Cotton, who enjoys access to Donald Trump’s White House, championing the cause, and a president who seems open to the idea.

In 1996, Beck was crushed when a Republican-controlled Congress pulled back from a bipartisan plan to enact sweeping restrictions on both legal and illegal immigration. He can still narrate the ins and outs of the congressional defeat in vivid detail. Beck, who voted for Barack Obama in 2008, says he came to his position not out of ethnic nativism but out of concern about the environmental and economic impacts of population growth, founded his organization the next year. But he realized it might take another decade for a risk-averse Congress to tackle such a hot-button issue again.

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t once a decade; it was once every two decades,” Beck said last week in NumbersUSA’s Arlington, Va., office. Beck put his dreams of restricting legal immigration on hold as he instead directed his energies toward stopping congressional efforts to offer a path to legalization for undocumented immigrants in 2006 and 2007, and again with the “Gang of Eight” talks in 2013. In 2007, Beck marshaled his grassroots supporters to flood senators’ offices with more than a million faxes, helping to kill the immigration bill.

Then, suddenly, the winds of the immigration debate shifted. Republican candidates for the presidency — from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — began to talk about the need to limit legal immigration. And Trump’s candidacy, which often focused on the supposed dangers of immigrants from Mexico and Muslim-majority countries, began to take off. In a policy paper, Trump called for a total “pause” on employment-based visas — something virtually no member of Congress would have advocated before.

“It was very heartening all of the last two years … as one candidate after another began to talk about how there needs to be some trimming [of legal immigration],” Beck said. Trump’s victory seemed to prove that many more Americans than D.C. politicians shared Beck’s concerns.

Beck saw his organization’s Facebook membership grow from under 1.5 million at the end of 2015 to 6 million this year. When he first started NumbersUSA, Beck worked for nativist John Tanton, who warned of a “Latin onslaught” in immigration and compared immigrants to bacteria, the Southern Poverty Law Center reported. But Beck has disavowed Tanton’s views and says the country should not discriminate against immigrants based on their race or nationality. He proudly pointed at the 6 million number, printed out and pasted to the glass wall of his office’s glass conference room, last week.

“I guess immigration was in the news,” he joked.

Cotton’s bill delivers on several of Beck’s longtime key policy wishes, such as eliminating the visa diversity lottery, which gives 50,000 green cards to people in nations without significant immigration levels to the U.S., and capping refugee levels at 50,000 per year. But the majority of the bill’s legal immigration reduction comes from revoking U.S. citizens’ right to sponsor their siblings, parents and adult children for a green card. (Some elderly parents will still be allowed in on temporary renewable visas if citizens need to care for them.)

The bill will cut legal immigration by more than 400,000 people in its first year, and by more than 500,000 people each year 10 years from now. It works so fast because the millions of family members who are currently waiting in line for a green card — some for more than a decade — will see their petitions disappear immediately. The plurality of those on the waitlist are from Mexico, according to a State Department analysis.