USING THE MINNEAPOLIS VIOLENCE TO PUSH IMMIGRATION REFORM. “Comprehensive immigration reform” has failed several times in Congress. The issue is too fraught, too complex, and the parties are too far apart for a fundamentally divided House and Senate to pass far-reaching legislation.
Nevertheless, calling for “comprehensive immigration reform” remains a safe strategy whenever immigration becomes a hot topic. For example, when the public finally caught on to the fact that President Joe Biden had set off a huge rush of millions of illegal immigrants, Democrats ran for political cover. Rather than demand that Biden close the border, which they didn’t want to do and would also anger their activist groups, Democrats instead called for “comprehensive immigration reform,” which made them sound like they wanted to address the problem.” It was a safe harbor in a political storm.
Now we are in another storm, this time over events in Minneapolis. And some politicians, including some Republicans, are again calling for immigration reform.
In an op-ed in the New York Times, Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) proposes a “common-sense bipartisan solution” to the violence and disorder that have accompanied President Donald Trump’s aggressive effort to enforce federal immigration law in Minneapolis.
“Congress and the president need to embrace a new comprehensive national immigration policy that acknowledges Americans’ many legitimate concerns about how the government has conducted immigration policy,” Lawler writes. He praises Trump’s record of stopping illegal border crossings and deporting 675,000 illegal immigrants. “Any balanced immigration policy would preserve and expand on this progress — but humanely,” Lawler writes, calling on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Border Patrol to “reassess their current tactics.”
And then it will be time for immigration reform. “A realistic plan would provide a path to legal status — not citizenship — for long-term illegal immigrants without criminal records,” Lawler writes. “This path would be rigorous and fair … those who benefit would face mandatory work requirements, forgo public assistance, and pay fines and any back taxes they might owe.”
Would that work? One thing we know is that this kind of talk has been going on for decades. Multiple failed attempts to pass comprehensive immigration reform have taught a few lessons. The first is that Congress will not secure the border. Just not gonna happen. On the other hand, a president can do it, or not do it. Trump is doing it, but the next president could undo that progress at the border, just as Joe Biden did from 2021 to 2025.
The second lesson is that Congress will not legislate Trump-level deportation numbers. And even if it did, it would take measures to ensure that its own law is never enforced. Back in 2006, amid another immigration debate, Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, mandating the construction of fencing on significant parts of the U.S.-Mexico border. The next year, it passed a bill saying that nothing in the Secure Fence Act required any actual fencing to be built.
A third lesson is that when considering a “path to legal status” for “long-term illegal immigrants without criminal records,” Congress will create a set of definitions —”long-term,” and “without criminal records” and “work requirements” can be very, very flexible phrases — that ends up including virtually everybody.
Take the notion of “without criminal records.” So what is a criminal record? In the last, biggest comprehensive immigration reform failure, the Senate’s Gang of Eight, lawmakers stipulated that an illegal immigrant could not receive legal status if he had a criminal record. Just what did that mean? Sorry for the long excerpt, but this is from a piece I wrote about the bill in June 2013:
The Gang bill says an immigrant cannot be legalized if he has been convicted of a felony, or if he has been convicted of three or more misdemeanors. But as far as those misdemeanors are concerned, there are some big exceptions.
The first is that the misdemeanor count excludes convictions for “minor traffic offenses or state or local offenses for which an essential element was the alien’s immigration status or violations of this Act.” So the government simply will not count immigration-related misdemeanors.
Then, the bill says the three misdemeanors that would disqualify an immigrant count as three misdemeanors only “if the alien was convicted on different dates for each of the three offenses.” What that means is that if a person is accused of multiple misdemeanors, and convicted of them during a single court session — a fairly common occurrence — the multiple convictions would count as just one conviction for the purposes of the Gang of Eight bill, since they all happened on one day.
“Say that because of court backlogs, an alien is awaiting trial on a misdemeanor committed in June,” says one Republican source. “In August, he is again arrested on a misdemeanor, and then a third time in September. Each time he posts bond. In the interest of judicial economy, all three trials are consolidated and held on the same day in December, and the alien is convicted of all three. Three different offenses, but all three convictions occurring on the same date. Under the language of the bill, such an alien is entitled to apply for legal status.”
The same principle would hold for any number of convictions, if they happened on the same day. The bottom line is an immigrant could have more than three misdemeanor convictions in his background check and still qualify for legalization.
But that is not the biggest exception in the bill. A few lines later, the legislation gives the Secretary of Homeland Security authority to ignore an immigrant’s record and grant legal status no matter how many misdemeanor convictions the immigrant might have. “The secretary may waive [the misdemeanor requirement] on behalf of an alien for humanitarian purposes, to ensure family unity, or if such a waiver is otherwise in the public interest,” the bill says.
That’s a lot of flexibility. And it is the kind of language that will emerge in any so-called “common-sense bipartisan solution” that comes out of the legislative process.
Democrats will be fully on board, of course. After abandoning old-style labor union opposition to mass immigration many years ago, the Democratic Party has embraced legal and illegal immigration. They can be counted on to push for “comprehensive immigration reform,” both because they believe it will help them now politically and because they think it will ultimately mean more voters in the future.
Any new effort is likely to fail, just like the old ones did. What Trump has shown is that simple executive authority, enforcing the law, fixed the border problem. The president also believes it will make a deportation policy work, even after the problems in Minneapolis. The one thing that is not needed is a big new bill on Capitol Hill.