A bipartisan group of senators just managed something that happens only once a decade or so, crafting a compromise bill to reform the immigration system. Republicans’ reaction was emphatic: Though the bill would give them much of what they say they want, while offering Democrats only minor concessions in return, almost the entire GOP refuses to pass it.
The deal’s swift collapse confirms an important truth that everyone must now accept: Republicans don’t actually want to fix the immigration system. And accepting that truth clears the way for a new era in America’s immigration debate — one when we’re not waiting around the GOP to come to its senses.
Any bipartisan reform that could involve more than a handful of Republicans is dead.
Yes, a few Republicans are sincerely interested in improving the current immigration system. But as a whole, their party is much more interested in creating and exploiting chaos at the border, in between holding photo-ops at the Rio Grande. Some conservatives are even saying so openly. “Why would we do anything right now to help [President Biden] with that 33% [approval rating]?” one Republican congressman said to a reporter. “Why give [Biden] this in an election year?” a Fox News anchor asked Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, Republicans’ chief negotiator on the bipartisan bill. “There are a good number of people for whom border security is too good an issue to give up,” admitted Sen. Kevin Cramer, R-N.D.
Former President Donald Trump, still the leader of the GOP, has not only been attacking the bill publicly; he is reportedly lobbying Republican lawmakers to kill it. So when President Joe Biden went before the cameras on Tuesday to discuss the bill, he put responsibility squarely on his predecessor, just as he should have.
“Republicans have to decide: Who do they serve? Donald Trump or the American people?” Biden asked. “Every day between now and November the American people are going to know that the only reason the border is not secured is Donald Trump and his MAGA Republican friends.”
It’s debatable whether, as Biden claimed, this deal is really “the toughest, fairest law that’s ever been proposed relative to the border.” But Republicans’ decision to block it marks an important turning point in the convoluted history of immigration policy and politics.
For many years, most experts and members of both parties agreed about what the basic contours of bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform would look like. Republicans would get beefed-up border security, and Democrats would get a path to citizenship for at least a substantial number of undocumented immigrants, including “Dreamers,” the people brought as children to America who have never known any other home. While there would be other policy questions to resolve, these two pillars would underpin any compromise.
“Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?”
Sen. James Lankford
That idea is now dead. In fact, any bipartisan reform that could involve more than a handful of Republicans is dead. Not just for this congressional term or as long as Biden is in the White House, but for the foreseeable future. Dead, dead, dead.
Remember, the only reason there was an immigration reform negotiation at all is that Republicans demanded it as the price of further aid to Ukraine. So a bipartisan group of senators negotiated a bill that was heavily tilted in favor of GOP priorities.
The bill would create a trigger that would essentially close the border if migrant encounters exceeded 5,000 a day. It would make it more difficult for migrants to receive asylum and provide funding to process asylum claims much more quickly — which, in practice, since most asylum-seekers are ultimately rejected, would mean fewer such migrants staying in the country. It would allocate billions of dollars for more Border Patrol agents, new border wall construction and Immigration and Customs Enforcement projects, including $3 billion for detention facilities.
What Democrats got was far less substantial. The bill would grant an additional 250,000 family and employment-based visas over five years. Asylum-seekers who passed initial screenings could work until their claims were processed. Unaccompanied children would receive legal assistance. But Democrats didn’t get the change they want the most: a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers or other undocumented immigrants.
Lankford, very much a conservative, has struggled to hide his exasperation after his fellow Republicans threw his deal under the bus. “Are we as Republicans going to have press conferences and complain the border is bad and then intentionally leave it open?” Lankford asked “Fox and Friends.” The answer is yes, that’s exactly what they’re going to do. “How can you trust any Republicans right now?” said Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut, one of the Democrats’ lead negotiators. “They told us what to do. We followed their instructions to the letter. And then they pulled the rug out from under us in 24 hours.”
Immigration reform has long been one of the trickiest legislative goals to accomplish. Now the era of even hypothetical bipartisan immigration reform is over. Democrats will have to fix the system themselves the next time they have complete control in Washington. In the meantime, they should make sure the voters know who’s to blame.
