The coming immigration argument between Biden and the GOP
W. James Antle III
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As President Joe Biden enters year three of his administration alongside a Republican-controlled House, expect a renewed argument over immigration.
Congressional Republicans will say Biden should sack his secretary of homeland security (if they don’t impeach him first) and head to the border for a much-delayed visit.
Biden and the White House will say that if Republicans are serious about the border, they will pass his preferred immigration legislation, which (among other features) includes an amnesty for most illegal immigrants already in the United States.
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“There’s an immigration reform plan that the president put out on the first day,” Biden’s press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said in the penultimate White House daily briefing of the year. “They should work with us and do this in a bipartisan way.”
“To truly fix our broken immigration system, we need Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform measures like the ones President Biden proposed on his first day in office,” she said again in a statement when the Supreme Court temporarily extended Title 42, the pandemic policy for turning back illegal immigrants at the border. “Today’s order gives Republicans in Congress plenty of time to move past political finger-pointing and join their Democratic colleagues in solving the challenge at our border by passing the comprehensive reform measures and delivering the additional funds for border security that President Biden has requested.”
But the White House solution assumes much of what is in dispute. How much of the border crisis is a product of the Biden administration signaling that a large number of illegal immigrants, once they cross successfully, will be allowed to stay?
If this is the case, the immigration plan Biden introduced on his first day in office and his vow to “continue expanding legal pathways for immigration” may become major drivers of the problem — and they could well make it worse.
Encounters at the border are now running at about 200,000 a month. Some 1 million illegal immigrants are also believed to have escaped into the U.S. More were dealt with by federal authorities in Biden’s first 20 months than in former President Barack Obama’s eight years.
The Biden program reflects an old Washington immigration policy consensus, at least until former President Donald Trump: Illegal immigration is a rational response to legal immigration being too difficult. An overhaul that liberalizes immigration, including legal status for most illegal immigrants, in exchange for some border security measures is therefore the solution.
Congress hasn’t been able to pass legislation along these lines in almost 37 years. It can be argued that lawmakers did not seriously try the last two times Democrats controlled both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. It’s also the case that the last time lawmakers did pass a sweeping bill that gave amnesty to illegal immigrants, in 1986 under President Ronald Reagan, it did not succeed in reducing subsequent illegal immigration.
This is partly because the amnesty happened and much of the promised enhanced enforcement did not, at least for very long. But many also suspect the legalization path for illegal immigrants incentivized more people to cross the border illegally.
Biden’s promises, plus the reversal of many Trump-era immigration controls that were regarded as too strict, were followed by a surge at the border that has not abated in months. The administration continues to maintain that more of the same, regularizing the influx, is at least a substantial part of the solution.
Much like the failure to act on large-scale immigration legislation the last two times Democrats enjoyed unified control of the federal government’s elected branches, an element of this is political.
Over the last two years, the White House has periodically blamed Republicans for failing to take up an immigration bill or pass “record funding” for homeland security. But Nancy Pelosi was the speaker of the House, and Chuck Schumer was the Senate majority leader.
Now a Republican will be the speaker of the House, and even with 51 Democrats in the Senate, the GOP’s upper-chamber filibuster power will only gain relevance. The 2024 election cycle will soon be upon us.
Blaming Republicans for the border crisis will take on new political salience at a time when Democrats are slowly seeing their vote share among Hispanics decline. Immigration is a political tool.
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Biden and the Democrats may or may not be misreading the politics of this issue. But more importantly, they may also be misdiagnosing the immigration and border policy problems.
That’s the debate we will be having in Biden’s third year.