On immigration, both parties mistrust the other’s motives, and the players all have their narratives.
On immigration, both parties mistrust the other’s motives, and the players all have their narratives.
W ith the border crisis entering an acute phase — one that has become an outright conflict between the states and the executive branch — the status of ongoing negotiations in Congress over a deal to address the crises America faces abroad is increasingly fluid.
“The politics on this have changed,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, according to Punchbowl News. In his estimation, the evolving border crisis combined with the near certainty that Donald Trump will emerge as the GOP’s presidential nominee for a third consecutive cycle have upended the Republican conference’s calculations.
For weeks, bipartisan negotiators sought to hammer out a deal to increase border security and reform immigration policy while providing additional support for America’s partners in Ukraine, Taiwan, and Israel. Democratic partisans balked at the border-security provisions. Republican firebrands rejected Ukraine aid. Neither would meet in the middle unless both got most of what they wanted. But then, according to reports, Trump intervened.
“Trump directly reached out to several GOP senators on Wednesday to tell them to reject any deal,” Huffington Post reporter Igor Bobic related. “Trump wants them to kill it because he doesn’t want Biden to have a victory,” said an unnamed source close to negotiations on the deal. “He told them he will fix the border when he is president. . . . He said he only wants the perfect deal.”
“We don’t want to do anything to undermine him,” McConnell reportedly said of the man the Republican National Committee may declare the GOP’s presumptive presidential nominee with just 58 of 2,429 delegates having been awarded. That makes sense. If Senate Republican negotiators are going to spend weeks laboring over a compromise only to have the rug pulled out from under them, why bother? Legislative compromises are, by their very nature, messy. No one gets everything they want. If partisan Republicans are only to be hectored from the sidelines by their presidential nominee for caving to Democrats when they could have held out for a “perfect deal,” the incentives for compromise dry up. No one in the Republican conference is going to stick their necks out for this.
But the GOP’s new approach to the border crisis is a gamble. Republican voters seem to have concluded that Joe Biden is so hopelessly inept and the conditions that prevail in the country today so intolerable that Donald Trump cannot lose in November. Their assuredness notwithstanding, he most certainly can. Sacrificing an imperfect deal to address an unmitigated crisis at the border in favor of a theoretical one, and only to maximize the GOP’s political prospects in the fall, is one way the party risks fumbling the ball in the red zone.
According to the new Harvard CAPS-Harris poll released this week, immigration (likely a proxy for the border crisis) has become the biggest concern for a plurality of Americans, narrowly eclipsing inflation. The issue rocketed into the No. 1 spot this month with an increase of seven points. Thirty-five percent of Americans now cite immigration issues as their foremost concern, with inflation close behind at 32 percent.
It must be said that, if inflation is a declining priority for voters, that is good news for the president. If Americans are no longer feeling the sharp pain in their pocketbooks they’ve endured over the last three years, that represents a reprieve for the White House. Nevertheless, the poll’s results have generally been interpreted as good news for the GOP, and for sound reasons. Biden didn’t inherit a disastrous border — he presided over its rapid deterioration. Voters know that. But voters’ minds can change.
“No, it’s not,” the president admitted when asked if the border was secure. That was no admission against interest, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre maintained. “The president has repeatedly said the immigration system is broken,” she insisted. The White House isn’t taking ownership of this crisis. They’re setting the table with the expectation that they can shift responsibility for it.
The president and his allies would love nothing more than to offload the liability represented by the chaos at the border — chaos that is increasingly felt by municipalities far removed from the Rio Grande — onto the GOP. If negotiations over a compromise deal collapse as a result of Trump’s intervention, on the assumption Republicans can successfully campaign on the issue, that would provide Democrats with a facially plausible claim that Biden isn’t the problem here.
But maybe Republicans think they have room to run. The border crisis has spiraled out of control on Biden’s watch. Democrats are revolting against their own president on the issue. Voters do blame the Democratic president for the conditions they so resent. The White House and Biden’s allies have tried everything in their effort to spread the blame for the immigration crisis around, but nothing has worked. Maybe Republicans believe voters’ impressions are already baked in. Even if congressional Republicans adopt a recalcitrant posture for the remainder of the year, Americans will still head to the polls intent on registering their dissatisfaction with Democratic maladministration.
Maybe. But a year is a long time, and conditions change. Democrats have only reluctantly conceded to negotiating with Republicans over the border because they’re feeling the political heat today. But that heat has also apparently shaken Biden out of his bizarre lethargy.
The White House recently leaned hard on Mexico to police its side of the Rio, and that pressure has produced results. “In the Border Patrol’s busiest area, arrests totaled 13,800 during the seven-day period ending Friday,” the Associated Press reported in early January, “down 29% from 19,400 two weeks earlier.” U.S. Customs and Border Protection suspended international railway crossings in Eagle Pass and El Paso in December. Late last year, the administration reluctantly restarted deportation flights for Venezuelan migrants, a modest act of border enforcement that yielded a 46 percent decline in unlawful border crossings by Venezuelans since September.
The results these policies have produced are positive, but not uniformly positive. The number of border crossers waxes and wanes from month to month, and nothing the White House has done amounts to securing the border. Still, the administration’s renewed emphasis on border security — up from no emphasis at all — is a positive step that risks muddying a clear GOP advantage on the issue.
The heat that is on Democrats presently may cool between today and Election Day, putting downward pressure on the prospects for any border deal. And unless you’re operating on the deluded assumption that congressional Democrats will be raptured out of existence by next January, there will be a deal of some kind.
On immigration, both parties mistrust the other’s motives, and the players all have their narratives. “Biden is breaking the border on purpose,” read one such narrative via the New York Post. “He wants mass amnesty.” That’s conspiratorial but not necessarily paranoid. But the Democratic narrative was until now both conspiratorial and paranoid, and none of it made much sense. The White House’s allies retailed conflicting messages ranging from the notion that there actually is no border crisis at all to the notion that Republicans only want to close America’s porous national boundaries because they are “sadistic” and love “chaos.”
If, however, GOP lawmakers pass on half a loaf in talks with their Democratic counterparts because they have convinced themselves they can get everything they want next year — condemning Americans to at least another twelve months of this humanitarian nightmare — the president’s party will finally have something to hang their hats on. And the GOP will have provided it.