First 100: The Refugee Cap Debate Shows the Left’s Role in the Biden Coalition

Also, rolling back the corporate tax increase.

by

It’s April 19, 2021 and welcome to First 100. You can sign up to have First 100 delivered to your email by clicking here.

The Chief

The news came out on Friday, though it was lingering for weeks. Joe Biden had dragged his feet on simply signing a piece of paper that his administration already fully agreed to and briefed Congress on, which would raise the refugee cap for the current fiscal year from 15,000 to 62,500. The delay had already cost thousands of refugees the opportunity to resettle in the United States, as paperwork went out of date and the protracted screening process needed to start over. But on Friday, news leaked that the number would stay at 15,000. (This was purely an executive decision, as the mid-year change would be done under an emergency declaration.)

This was an appalling decision. Refugees suffering under extremely vulnerable, miserable conditions would be harmed for months if not years, seemingly because there was too much fearmongering of the completely separate situation on the border. As Reva Dhingra writes for us today, it’s also a failure of global leadership. There’s not a single point of congruence between the two, and refugee resettlement has traditionally been fully bipartisan. But the political team was running the show, and frightened by, I don’t know, images of people of color walking off a plane in the U.S.

Mind you, the Biden team hadn’t even been moving to resettle enough refugees to meet that cap; we were on pace for the lowest number of admittances since the program began. But the confirmation that the number would not be increased spurred significant pushback. Members of Congress, advocates, just about everyone not named Stephen Miller was upset. (Literally; Miller was quoted in several articles about this.)

If this were the Clinton administration, howling on the left would be the desired response. If this were the Obama administration, there might be an attempt to response the left, but in a way that suggested that whatever the decision made that angered them was actually righteous and just. But this is the Biden administration, where the left is a part of the governing coalition. That doesn’t mean that they get what they want unilaterally, but it means they are listened to. And sometimes, that listening leads to a change in policy.

Read all of our First 100 Reports

In this case, White House Press Secretary Jan Psaki issued a statement that began “The President’s directive today has been the subject of some confusion.” She cited the poor condition of the refugee admissions program after Trump and the burdens on the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which places unaccompanied minor children from the border, to justify the prior announcement. But there was a final line, promising that “we expect the President to set a final, increased refugee cap for the remainder of this fiscal year by May 15.”

That would only leave four and a half months to ramp up resettlement, but Biden has already announced that the Fiscal Year 2022 cap (starting in October) would be 125,000, nearly ten times as much as the current number. Increasing the cap mid-year would help ramp up that infrastructure to allow for the restored figures; that’s why going to 62,500 mid-year was desirable.

Biden was really unable to defend the policy in remarks over the weekend. “The problem was that the refugee part was working on the crisis that ended up on the border with young people,” and “we couldn’t do two things at once.” But this really isn’t true. While it’s the same office, the vetting overseas is a separate process and has already been completed on 35,000 refugees. The flights are ready to go. If two things at once were impossible, there wouldn’t be a vow to raise the number.

The truth is that there was no defense. They just didn’t want to allow entry to immigrants into the country in the midst of a heavily demonized “border crisis” (it’s not a crisis) happening simultaneously. And lawmakers and activists in the coalition played their role by loudly saying it was unacceptable. That didn’t lead to the agreed-to 62,500 number getting restored—I imagine the final number will be somewhere below that—but it will likely save tens of thousands of people from these refugee camps.

There is an ongoing dialogue within the Democratic Party, for the first time in two generations. There’s a back and forth. It’s not going to lead to a progressive nirvana, but it offers a chance at better policy.

Speaking of Not Getting Everything

Early on, there was a strain of logic on the Biden infrastructure package suggesting that Democrats and Republicans could come together and find common ground on elements of the package, and then the rest could be reserved for a more one-sided reconciliation bill. Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) brought that up again yesterday, and Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) provided the blueprint for it, with an $800 billion bill that would focus on “core infrastructure.”

A smaller package is fine if it’s part of a process that eventually gets to something bigger. Coons and Cornyn seemed to be talking about two different things, however; Cornyn thinks the compromise is the whole package, while Coons is repeating that early strategy, with the bipartisan bill followed by reconciliation from Democrats only (or multiple reconciliations, though this is not clear). But once you bifurcate the process like this, decisions made for the smaller bill affect the larger one. That’s at play with the rollback of the corporate tax nominal rate, which now appears likely to go to 25 percent instead of 28 percent.   

This was already a compromise, as restoring the full corporate tax rate would go to 35 percent. I don’t really think it’s that important to offset infrastructure investment with revenue, so this doesn’t bother me too much. But if some Senate Democrats insist on “paying for” the package, you’ve just taken away about $500 billion in pay-fors. And raising the corporate tax by a penny won’t bring in Republican support. Democrats are negotiating with themselves here.

Restoring tax fairness is going to be excruciating. It’s easy to ratchet down and hard to ratchet back up. That’s how we have gutted the tax base over the past 40 years.

What Day of Biden’s Presidency Is It?

Day 90. Yes, we’re in the final 10 days of this pop-up series.  

Today I Learned

You can count on the Prospect, can we count on you?

There's no paywall here. Your donations power our newsroom as we report on ideas, politics and power — and what’s really at stake as we navigate another presidential election year. Please, become a member, or make a one-time donation, today. Thank you!