Ross D. Franklin/AP Photo
Migrants are loaded onto shuttle buses as hundreds gather along the border, December 5, 2023, in Lukeville, Arizona. The U.S. Border Patrol says it is overwhelmed by a shift in human smuggling routes, with hundreds of migrants from faraway countries like Senegal, Bangladesh, and China being dropped in the remote desert area in Arizona.
In 2006, senators and the White House worked tirelessly on a comprehensive immigration reform deal, which allowed for a path to citizenship for undocumented people. It passed with 62 votes, but the Republican House didn’t want any part of it. The deal never became law.
In 2013, senators and the White House worked tirelessly on a comprehensive immigration reform deal, which allowed for a path to citizenship for undocumented people after a period of 13 years. It passed with 68 votes, but the Republican House didn’t want any part of it. The deal never became law.
In 2023, senators and the White House are working tirelessly on an immigration package that is not at all comprehensive, offers no path to citizenship, and is mainly about locking up the border to asylum seekers and migrants, not substantially different from policies Donald Trump and Stephen Miller favor. The Republican House leadership says they don’t want any part of it, and they’ve left town for the year.
This rather desperate attempt from the Biden administration to secure a border deal in exchange for military aid to Ukraine seems destined to end the way all immigration deals of recent vintage end, because hard-line conservatives prefer having an “open border” as an issue, especially under a Democratic president. However, the last two decades of House GOP stonewalling have worked to contour these deals so that they are now purely restrictionist.
This is in part a function of a Democratic leadership that has given up making any kind of argument about how the country benefits from migrants. That has helped mold public opinion to think about immigration only as a problem to be solved. And it’s led us down this policy spiral, one that a potential Trump second term would sink even further.
JOE BIDEN’S PRIORITY IN OFFICE ON IMMIGRATION has been simply to reduce the perception of chaos at the border. This was attempted through an initial flurry of deportations, extended use of Title 42 public-health expulsions during the pandemic, and warnings to migrants not to show up. None of this worked to stem a growing international tide of displacement, especially as the pandemic dissipated and people could more easily leave their home countries.
When Title 42 ended this year, Biden’s team tried to use an app to schedule appointments for asylum claims, keeping migrants out of the country. They barred migrants from seeking asylum if they didn’t seek it in countries they passed through along the way. Or they used “humanitarian parole” to move a small number of migrants into the U.S. interior. None of this worked easier. However painful, harsh, or arduous the situation at the border, it has clearly not felt to asylum seekers materially worse the risk of violence, political unrest, economic collapse, or climate disaster at home.
Accordingly, the attempt to shape perceptions has failed dramatically. Polling out this week shows that the public believes Biden to be too liberal on immigration, and that the system is out of control. Moreover, the parole policies only shifted focus from the border to blue cities, whose residents and leaders have become fed up with the steady stream of asylum seekers, and blame the president.
This could lead one to believe that the politics are ripe for Biden to make a border deal. But that’s only if you believe there is some agreed-upon reality about the border for both sides of this issue. It’s not hard for right-wing news media to present a border out of control if it damages their political opponent; remember the “migrant caravans” that only pop up within the months before a national election? That’s not going to magically stop, even if a deal gets made. When presented with a relentless narrative of bedlam fueled by bad policies, and a president who never makes the case for anything else, what are people supposed to think?
A LITTLE OVER A WEEK AGO, BORDER DEAL TALKS were collapsing, for obvious reasons: You really can’t lock in policy details contested for years in the space of a few weeks. The cynic would say the whole setup was deliberately impossible. Conservatives have rebelled against Ukraine aid over the last year, and proposing a ludicrously high bar as the condition for success gave them the ability to blame Democrats when it inevitably didn’t work out. This may be why House Speaker Mike Johnson has consistently said that he would accept nothing less than H.R. 2, the party-line conservative border policy, if Ukraine aid were going to move.
But it’s important to note that Biden initially tied immigration and Ukraine together, by adding border security funding in the original supplemental request as a sweetener for skeptical conservatives. He put himself in his own box, and Republicans pounced.
As talks flailed, Mitch McConnell, who sees Ukraine as part of his personal legacy, announced that the only way anything would happen on the border-for-Ukraine swap is if Biden got personally involved. McConnell is someone with personal experience fleecing Biden in moments of weakness, dating back to the 2012 fiscal cliff. And because Biden both believes Ukraine is the leading foreign-policy challenge of his presidency, and hopes against hope to take the border issue “off the table” in the next election, he was eager to engage, from a position of weakness.
The cynic would say the whole setup was deliberately impossible.
Biden sent his chief of staff Jeff Zients and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas into the talks, and made a series of concessions. One allows for unilateral expulsions without asylum screenings, a reversion to the Title 42 expulsion policy that was lifted when the pandemic emergency expired, on days with a high number of border crossings. (How this would not violate international law is unstated.) In addition, Biden has offered tightened “credible fear” standards for granting asylum, mandated detention for some migrants pending a court hearing (it’s anyone’s guess where they would be held, as there is already a shortage of beds), and expansion of expedited removal to deport migrants anywhere in the country who fail an asylum screening. As Dara Lind of the American Immigration Council explains, if that ever passed it would be a nice tool for Stephen Miller’s dreams of mass deportation.
The offer has made some Democratic lawmakers, commentators, and immigrant rights groups apoplectic. It devolves the deal-making from “comprehensive immigration reform” to a border crackdown, with no new path to legal standing in the U.S. for any migrant. I’m not sure Latino voters, whose top issues are inflation and jobs and whom Biden is messaging to by likening Trump to Latin American dictators, will see this as a betrayal, but the people who volunteer and knock on doors for Biden might.
But most important, while the deal would certainly make it harder for migrants to get into the country, it’s hard to say that it would stop so many from trying. That’s because every change at the border over the past three years has led to a temporary drop in crossings, followed by a surge. This is an infrastructure problem, and a global displacement problem, rather than a “CBP is not being mean enough” problem.
Senate Republicans are cagily “weighing” Biden’s offer, but House Republicans haven’t budged from their even more punitive H.R. 2 demand, which includes resuming border wall construction, requiring all migrants to remain in Mexico for processing, and more. This hasn’t stopped Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer from calling for votes on Monday on a deal that isn’t in writing, hasn’t been agreed to, and has no guarantee (or even the semblance of a guarantee) of success in the House. Having attempted to work around House Republicans for 17 years and trying to jam them with an agreement after the fact, with no real success, Biden and the Democrats are going to that well once again. Combine that with the 100 or so hard no votes in the House GOP on Ukraine funding no matter what’s attached, and it’s difficult to understand why we’re having this conversation.
So Biden is either angering his own base for no reason, or putting together a deal that finally gets congressional sign-off that won’t work, and that certainly won’t be shown on Fox News to be working. I’d almost understand the former, if I thought Biden’s team were entering talks knowing that they won’t pass. I think they’re genuine in wanting a solution; certainly they want that funding for Ukraine.
Immigration policy is a political liability for Biden. But it’s a liability of his own making, born of a failure to make an argument in public and sell any vision for why immigrants, who built America, still help America. Instead, like several presidents before him, he’s running in circles to cut a deal, in a way that seemingly guarantees defeat. And the deals keep getting worse.
