A Hawkish Bill Meets a Dovish GOP

I f you could speak to any sentient political observer from ten years ago, when the “Gang of Eight” immigration-reform bill failed, and tell him that Congress had since abandoned amnesty entirely, your interlocutor would probably conclude that the GOP had won the great immigration debate.

Indeed, if you went on to inform your perplexed time-traveler that not only had congressional negotiators produced an enforcement-only immigration bill, but they’d also baked into it provisions designed to contain Russian, Chinese, and Iranian aggression, he would probably conclude that the Republican Party was the dominant force in American politics.

If you then notified him that Democrats controlled both the Senate and the White House while the GOP maintained only the smallest of conceivable House majorities, you might have a medical emergency on your hands. Only when you told your companion that the GOP had somehow convinced itself that it was in its best interests to reject all this would your company recover from the shock of it all. Republicans’ getting in their own way is the perennial constant, after all.

For over a decade, Republican immigration hawks have argued against grand bargains with the party disinclined to enforce immigration law on the grounds that no bargains were necessary. There should be no amnesty or pathway to citizenship until the government got serious about enforcement. Border security was the sine qua non upon which any broader immigration legislation must be based.

The compromise legislation released last night appears to fit that bill. The package deal provides funding to increase U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s detention capacity from 34,000 to 50,000 migrants. It tightens the requirements for those seeking asylum status by limiting the “credible-fear standard” for applicants to specific conditions that might reasonably constitute a “credible fear” of having to return home. It increases the number of judges (and, critically, Immigration Judge Teams) available to process the obscene backlog of immigration claims, and allows some claims to be handled by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. It puts curbs on the president’s ability to give migrants parole — what Republicans deride as a system of “catch and release” — which presidents of both parties have abused.

Perhaps most consequentially, the bill compels the Department of Homeland Security to turn away all border crossers at any point of entry, legal or otherwise, once officials encounter either a seven-day rolling average of 5,000 border crossers per day or 8,500 migrants on a single day. The provision ensures that Joe Biden would be legally compelled to take the migrant crisis over which he has presided — one that featured 302,043 encounters along the border just last month — seriously.

But among the provisions of this compromise to which Republicans have objected, this one has proven particularly vexing. “This bill is even worse than we expected,” House Speaker Mike Johnson wrote. “As the lead Democrat negotiator proclaimed: Under this legislation, ‘the border never closes.’” Johnson and his co-partisans have understandably objected to the notion that congressional lawmakers are obliged to take any action to compel the president to enforce immigration law. Beyond that, the notion that this bill tacitly allows any migrants to cross into the U.S. unmolested is a nonstarter.

But as Fox News’ star immigration correspondent Bill Melugin observed, the GOP is operating under a misapprehension. “This does not mean 5,000 are ‘allowed in’ before this authority kicks in,” he wrote of the legislation. “Single adults would be detained, families would be released via ATD (alternatives to detention), and asylum cases would be fast-tracked to months rather than years under a new rapid/expedited expulsion system. Those who fail would be quickly removed from the U.S.”

While this compromise deal favors Republican preferences on enforcement, it is still a compromise crafted with negotiators from a party that is dependent upon constituencies for whom enforcing immigration law is anathema. The GOP’s immigration maximalists might be surprised to learn that Democrat-leaning constituents are just as enraged by this bill as they are. That’s the nature of compromise legislation. By ensuring that everyone has their fingerprints on it, compromise bills induce whole-of-government consensus even if they deprive individual lawmakers of the opportunity to burnish their personal brands.

But then, perhaps the border provisions in this bill aren’t central to the GOP’s opposition — that’s certainly the impression one gets from the rump of malcontents in the Republican House conference who, given the meagerness of the GOP’s majority, can control the agenda. To hear them and influential outsiders loyal to Donald Trump talk about the bill, the biggest problem with it is the funding it provides to Ukraine for its defense against a Russian invasion. Indeed, the whole reason why funding for Ukraine was included in a comprehensive bill designed to address all of America’s mounting challenges abroad at once was to help GOP lawmakers swallow that pill. The ploy seems to have backfired. As Ron DeSantis’s press secretary, Jeremy Redfern, put it, given the $60 billion devoted to providing Ukrainians with ordnance, the bill provides “more cash to protect Ukraine’s border than our border.”

This flippant remark captures the biggest distinction between the GOP of 2024 and the GOP of 2014. This is not the same party that lobbied Barack Obama to provide Ukraine with lethal arms to beat back Russian aggression on the European continent, and that would not have balked at the chance to provide for the defense of our partners and allies on NATO’s frontier. Doing that and also providing similarly for Israeli and Taiwanese security, all while forcing Democrats to jam their thumbs in the eyes of the advocates for open borders they’ve cultivated as a part of their base, is a rare opportunity, indeed.

Republicans who have committed themselves to recalcitrance seem to think it is good politics. That is a strange calculation. As of the end of last year, only about one-third of Americans told Pew pollsters that the U.S. was providing “too much” support for Ukraine. And with the European Union’s commitment last week of another $54 billion in aid to Kyiv, blocking this bill scuttles a populist GOP talking point that maintained that the U.S. was shouldering a disproportionate amount of the burden of Ukraine’s defense.

Likewise, supporting Israel’s war against Hamas and Taiwan’s defense against Chinese irridentism are popular objectives. The GOP is placing a big bet on the notion that voters will blame Democrats for the border crisis Biden inaugurated to such a prohibitive degree that they will be unreceptive to his claim that Republicans could have held him back but declined to do so. But in that scenario, voters will be asked to evaluate two competing cynicisms. There is no guarantee that voters will balance the Democrats’ cynical messaging against Republicans’ cynical inaction and identify a clear winner.

What’s more, this outlook reduces the seriousness of the issues before Congress down to base politics. Voters are confronted with several real crises abroad — two hot conflicts in two theaters of the globe that have a demonstrated capacity to draw in U.S. participation (with a third looming), and an unmitigated catastrophe at the border. The voting public thoroughly dislikes how Joe Biden has handled these challenges. But in balking at this bill, Republicans are demonstrating a lack of good faith in their own approach.

And if the GOP’s opposition is really all about Ukraine, as the party’s most vocal members routinely suggest, it gives Democrats the opportunity to claim — bizarrely enough — that theirs is the party of enforcement at home and strength abroad. The GOP of ten years ago would never have dreamed of handing Democrats such a lifeline. But that was a different Republican Party.