I’ll confess that I was mildly excited about Jared Kushner’s immigration plan, which the president finally introduced today. Early reports held that Kushner would push to reorient the legal-immigration system around skills rather than trying to reduce immigration in general, which I have long argued is the best approach.
We should be getting the highest-skilled immigrants we possibly can, rather than letting people in based on family connections. Unlike overall cuts to legal immigration, this seems pretty popular — and with Trump on board, it could serve as a foundation for a bigger compromise. Bipartisan appeal is especially important here because any immigration reform will be vulnerable to a filibuster and thus will need 60 votes in the Senate.
But the final plan doesn’t even aim to be something that both sides could pass, now or after the 2020 election.
In and of themselves, the legal-immigration reforms Trump outlined live up to the hype and might be worth pursuing as a standalone bill, if only to see how reasonable Democrats are willing to be about it. Trump is right that a point system based on employment and skills is far superior to the mess we have today, in which some green cards are literally handed out by random lottery.
But other crucial elements of a broader compromise are lacking. The president called for heightened border enforcement going forward, with a “border-security trust fund,” more wall, legal reforms to discourage smuggling, and an overhaul of asylum laws to screen out frivolous cases — all stuff that Republicans love. Yet he was silent about how to deal with illegal immigrants who are already here, including the “Dreamers” who came as minors.
In other words, there’s little reason for Democrats to jump on board with the package as a whole. Meanwhile, despite the border measures, some restrictionist conservatives will be angry that Trump backed away from substantially cutting legal immigration (which he previously endorsed via the RAISE Act). It’s not a plan with legislative potential, and it’s as likely to divide Republicans as to unite them going into 2020, though Democrats may reveal their extremism by opposing some parts of it.
I’m not mad, just disappointed.