Karen Tumulty: On immigration, build a table, not a wall

It has been more than three decades since the country began a landmark experiment in how to balance the necessity of controlling the nation’s borders against the ideal of welcoming those who aspire to being an American.Then, a largely unknown 35-year-old representative from Brooklyn was in the thick of the negotiations. The day that President Ronald Reagan signed the result — the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act — into law, that congressman summed up what many were think