One-sided compromises won’t fix the southern border crisis

If you search “immigration reform” on the internet, you’ll find articles dating back decades, each detailing some promising bipartisan proposal on immigration and border security that ultimately went up in smoke. The latest log on the fire was a Senate proposal unveiled barely a week ago, and which House Republicans rejected immediately.

Senate Democrats (and Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, who helped broker the deal) are trying to salvage the effort, but it seems doomed to fail because almost no one in Washington (or Donald Trump waiting in the wings) really wants meaningful compromise.

Still, while everyone recognizes the crisis on the southern border, there are good reasons for Republicans to be skeptical of any deal, and of this deal in particular.

The last major bipartisan compromise to address illegal immigration was the Simpson-Mazzoli Act of 1986. President Ronald Reagan and members of both parties in Congress agreed on amnesty for people who had entered the country illegally before 1982, with the promise that border security would be increased. The law also made it illegal to hire people who were ineligible to work in the United States.

» READ MORE: Why efforts to keep Trump off primary ballots defy every principle of democracy | Kyle Sammin

Reagan called the law an effort “to humanely regain control of our borders,” but the results were not what he anticipated. The amnesty did go into effect, but businesses easily evaded the new labor restrictions, and Congress waited a decade to fund the enhanced border security. In the meantime, illegal entry to the United States probably increased.

The 1986 compromise turned out to be entirely one-sided. Is it any wonder congressional Republicans are wary of doing the same thing again?

The main effort in the latest bill is to reform how asylum claims are processed. Federal law grants asylum to “a person who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of nationality … because of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

That seems straightforward enough and is in keeping with how this country has long sought to welcome people who were being persecuted abroad. But, as always, the devil is in the details.

People who claim asylum must have their claims adjudicated, and while they wait for that to happen, they need to stay somewhere. While Trump was president, the policy starting in 2019 was that asylum-seekers at the southern border should remain in Mexico while the courts processed their claims.

President Joe Biden reversed that policy.

The result: a record number of asylum claims and a two million-person backlog in the courts. According to the New York Times, “recent estimates show the wait times average three years in immigration court and 10 years if an [asylum] application is filed with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services.”

Some of these asylum claims are legitimate — the world is full of countries that persecute people. But it is a narrow legal category, not just another form of economic migration. A jump from 63,074 asylum applications in 2021 to 238,841 in 2022 to more than 800,000 in 2023 suggests that other calculations are at work here. When these claims are finally processed, a much higher percentage of them are rejected than in years past, which must further add to the suspicions that some of those claiming asylum are economic migrants gaming the system and creating enforcement delays for legitimate and illegitimate claimants alike.

So, when Democrats say that the reform proposal toughens the standard that determines asylum status, Republicans are right to suspect that it won’t speed up the process. The standard isn’t the problem; the delays in adjudication (and releases of migrants pending adjudication) are.

Republicans also have reason to doubt that the Biden administration would take advantage of changes in the law that would allow the president to close the border after a threshold of 5,000 border encounters per day. And why wouldn’t they doubt? In 2019, Biden joined all but one of his fellow Democratic candidates for president in indicating that he would decriminalize illegal border crossings entirely.

Republicans are not completely blameless in the impasse. Biden’s sudden conversion to securing the border is no doubt tied to his abysmal polling on the issue: An NBC poll last week showed Trump with a 35-point lead over Biden on the issue of securing the border and controlling immigration. Trump would love to keep this advantage, especially now that voters list immigration as their number one concern.

» READ MORE: America’s challenges are complex and serious. Too many of our leaders aren’t. | Kyle Sammin

For some Republicans in Congress, the prospect of helping to defeat Biden makes inaction the best course — preserving the issue to increase support for Trump. (Trump himself has said that he prefers this course of action.) But even for others who are less cynical, it might be seen as preferable to wait a year and hopefully get a better deal from the next president if Biden does, in fact, lose reelection.

This is a problem Biden created, and many Republicans don’t see why they should bail him out. That might be good politics, but it’s not good leadership.

For his part, Biden wants to improve voters’ impression of him on border issues but is more than happy for Republicans to vote against an unpalatable bill — thereby letting him blame them for the problem he made.

Lankford aside, who in good faith attempted to negotiate a bipartisan deal, there’s no shortage of cynicism on both sides.

This latest immigration reform push looks to be as dead as the last few versions. As long as everyone’s eyes are fixed on the November elections, it will probably stay that way.