Nigeria, May 20 -- Shocking it might be, yet still part of an old pattern. The US Department of Homeland Security is floating the idea of using a reality television program to select immigrants vying for US citizenship. Whether this involves gladiatorial combat or inane pillow battles remains to be seen, though it is bound to involve airhead celebrity hosts and a set of fabricated challenges. What matters is the premise: the reduction of a government agency's functions to a debauched spectacle of deceit, desperation and televisual pornography. Much, in some ways, like the Trump administration itself.

In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, television producer Rob Worsoff, the man behind the Duck Dynasty reality show, comes clean in...