Immigration has emerged as a dominant point of debate heading into the 2024 presidential election. Like so much of our discourse, there is more heat than light surrounding the matter. And yet the facts of the case are remarkably clear. After President Joe Biden suspended many of his predecessor Donald Trump’s enforcement mechanisms, millions of immigrants poured across the southern border.
Encouraged by Biden’s lax enforcement and spurred by nongovernmental organizations, they have made spurious claims to refugee status. Presumably, the overwhelming bulk of the claims should be denied asylum, either because they are flat-out false or because the immigrants failed to follow the established legal procedures. But they’ve been paroled en masse into the United States, with court dates years hence to adjudicate their claims.
All this has overwhelmed Customs and Border Protection, the force tasked with protecting the border, and encouraged drug cartels in Mexico. As the issue has come to a head, Biden has pleaded an inability to stop the influx despite the fact that it was a direct result of the changes that he made to the former president’s rules.
As Biden’s poll numbers dropped, a group of senators, helmed by Sen. James Lankford (R-OK) and Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), has been working over the last few months to put together a compromise. While legislative language has, as of this writing, not been released, details have come from multiple news sources indicating that the deal would allow approximately 5,000 migrants to cross per day before granting the president the authority to close the border. Thus, of the nearly 4 million illegal crossers over Biden’s administration, the compromise would allow for approximately half of this flow to continue.
What would happen to those allowed in remains unclear. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) has said they will be subject to “detention or alternatives to detention” — whatever on earth that means. The lack of details keeps us from answering these questions. But at a minimum, it is a legal codification of many of Biden’s executive changes to Trump’s policies. Trump kept them out of the country while their claims were processed. The compromise would let many of them in.
Trump, all but assured of winning renomination for the presidency this year, has denounced the compromise. This in turn has provoked howls of outrage from Senate Republicans. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) publicly disdained the president for choosing politics over solutions. And Politico has an unnamed Republican senator claiming that were it not for Trump’s involvement, most of the Republican caucus in the Senate would support the measure.
One would think that given these on- and off-the-record comments from Republican leaders, the party’s voters want a deal like this. The problem, judging by the Beltway press and Republican elites, is the ever-divisive Trump. Acting once more as a cult figure, he has drawn Republican voters away from their true preferences toward his banner.
But in fact, all evidence points to the contrary. Trump is speaking for the voters who most strongly support Republicans in elections to the Senate. Take, just as one data point among many, the annual Gallup release on immigration from this summer. Gallup found a strong plurality of voters want immigration, legal and illegal, decreased. No wonder Biden’s job approval on this is an abysmal 31% among all voters, according to the RealClearPolitics average. Among Republicans, moreover, Gallup found the number demanding a decrease in immigration at an astonishing 71%. Indeed, the party electorate has been sounding this note for over a decade. Republican voters are unhappy with the social and economic changes wrought by immigration. They want it cut back.
If one wanted to understand why the Republican base hates the “establishment” and distrusts its party leadership, one need look no further than immigration, which has become over the last decade a premier issue for the average GOP voter. And yet the upper echelon of the party has consistently, virtually without fail, gone against its own voters. And worse than this, party elites have consistently, virtually without fail, promised that they were doing the very opposite of what they were actually doing. The border must be secured, Lankford has intoned time and again as he has worked on this compromise, and yet the deal codifies a significant aspect of Biden’s executive decisions, presumably binding a future president from returning to Trump’s approach without a new law.
This has played out many times over the last two decades. It is not simply that Republican leaders are disconnected from the base. When he struggled to win renomination back in 2010, the late Arizona Sen. John McCain famously cut an ad in which he declared it was time to “complete the danged fence.” And yet he was a backer of all manner of immigration compromises that did no such thing. These migrants have flooded the border because “the danged fence” is still not built. And of course, there have been no reports of funding for a border wall, which would solve the problem of illegal crossings. When Romney, now disdaining Trump’s opposition to literally millions of continued migrants pouring over the southern border, ran for president in 2012, he was an immigration hard-liner who talked about “self-deportation.”
Among Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans, and Trump-exhausted Republicans, it has become a joke to say, “This is how you got Trump.” Still, immigration is, quite literally, how you got Trump. Trump achieved preeminence in the party in 2016 by saying aloud to voters two things that hardly anybody in its leadership was willing to utter: that the continuous war since 2001 had purchased very little for the U.S. and, much more saliently for average Republican voters today, that illegal immigration was bad and needs to be stopped.
Decent and well-intentioned people can have honest disagreements about the appropriate level of immigration, what should be done about those who have come here illegally, and what sort of changes, either in existing law or Biden’s enforcement of that law, should be made with respect to the migrant crisis on the southern border. All of that, however, misses the fundamental disconnect within the 21st century Republican Party. The leadership continues to pursue policies that its voters have opposed very consistently and very strongly.
A party, at its core, is supposed to be a team that unites for the pursuit of office to enact shared policy goals. The team includes not only the party leadership but also its rank-and-file voters, those who contribute financially to its success, and those who support the party regardless of whether political fortunes presently favor it or not. Those voters feel lied to by the party leadership. And on immigration, they have a point.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Republican leaders, if sufficiently convinced, can and perhaps should enact what they think is in the best interests of the country, even if their voters oppose it. But that’s not what they’ve done. They’ve supported laws that would substantially weaken, in one form or another, the legal regime surrounding immigration while telling their voters they have every intention of doing the opposite.
And that is how you’ve got Trump.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.