‘The two most frightening words in Washington are ‘bipartisan consensus,’” P. J. O’Rourke once quipped. “Bipartisan consensus is like when my doctor and my lawyer agree with my wife that I need help.” These words are worth keeping in mind regarding last week’s statement from the Alliance for a New Immigration Consensus, “praising the bipartisan effort” of Senators Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D. I., Ariz.) to craft a last-minute immigration deal in the final weeks of the 117th Congress.
First of all, there’s the question of why Republicans would want a deal in a lame-duck session. While the GOP cavalry did not arrive in the numbers many had hoped for last month, the party did retake the House. Congressional Republicans will be running the lower chamber in less than a month; it makes no sense to negotiate now, when they have less power and leverage, rather than later.
Then, there’s the substance of what Tillis and Sinema are talking about. Their proposal would pair a pathway to citizenship for so-called Dreamers — the more than 2 million young illegal arrivals who have, since 2012, been shielded from deportation under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program — with beefed-up funding for border security, swifter removal of illegal aliens who don’t qualify for asylum, and a year-long extension of Title 42’s Covid-era immigration enforcement measures.
Put aside for the moment that a rational government shouldn’t need to rely on a CDC edict and the falsehood that the coronavirus is still a major public-health emergency to exclude illegal migrants from its borders.
Of course, history says that deals like Tillis-Sinema — trading some form of amnesty for the promise of more enforcement and border security — don’t work as advertised. The Reagan-era Immigration Reform and Control Act, for example, “conferred amnesty upon some 3 million illegals in exchange for promises of stepped-up enforcement at the border and in the back office,” as we wrote in 2012. The amnesty side of that equation went off without a hitch, while the enhanced enforcement never arrived.
More fundamentally, there’s no reason to believe that additional funding and authorities would make any difference to the Biden administration, which is ignoring the law now to allow a historic flow of illegal immigrants into the country. Yes, we need more resources at the border, and Congress should address the morass that has been created by the perverse effects of past legislation and court settlements, but that’s not fundamentally the issue at the moment. If Tillis and Sinema could promise an end to Biden administration lawlessness — driven by its apparent belief that any bogus asylum-seeker should be permitted into the country and never deported — their handiwork might be worth considering; since they can’t, it deserves to be ripped up and thrown away forthwith.
If Congress wanted to get serious about enforcement, it would adopt the new proposal from the House Republicans in the Texas delegation, led by border hawk Chip Roy. The framework advocates the completion of the wall and associated infrastructure at the border, which is fine as far as it goes. More important are its proposals to reinstitute a robust Remain in Mexico policy, fix the legal morass mentioned above, reform our broken, self-defeating asylum system, and revive enforcement in the interior.
If the measure were adopted (and honored by the executive branch), it would end the crisis at the border. House Republicans should pass it next year to show they have an alternative to the status quo, even if it will go nowhere as long as an administration is in office that actively opposes immigration enforcement.
Whatever Tillis and Sinema or any other would-be grand bargainers promise, there’s no possible solution to that prior to January 2025.