Donald Trump’s State of the Union address pulled off the unusual feat of being both boring and frightening. With a style that screamed “written by committee,” the speech lacked Trump’s improvisations and inventions that have so enlivened our political scene over the last few years. Instead, it contained an unrelenting stream of policy horror stories. Throughout the speech, Trump made promise after promise that portend truly frightening developments in American politics.

The most dystopian of these proposals centered on the “four pillars” of Trump’s immigration plan. These are, roughly, a path to citizenship for undocumented young people, a border wall, new restrictions on green cards, and much harsher rules for family reunification. Besides these pillars, Trump also promised to hire more federal immigration agents, elsewhere putting the number to be brought on at ten thousand, a 50 percent increase in the agency’s personnel.

While the first pillar sounds like a compromise proposal to protect the “Dreamers,” who enjoy wide support in public opinion polls, the rest of the plan would rely on the first pillar’s implicit “good immigrant/bad immigrant” premise to impose even harsher conditions on immigrants trying to reach or already living in the US. The border wall would simply push migration to the most desolate and dangerous areas of the border, expanding the unofficial graveyard that the border has become since Bill Clinton’s first shot of border militarization in the 1990s. The restricted family unification rules would help ensure immigrants who come to the US remain more socially isolated, while ICE expansion would grow the ranks of the body snatchers already devastating communities across the country.