On immigration reform, Republicans and Democrats agree more than they realize

As the Trump administration’s misguided immigration enforcement efforts continue apace, ensnaring more and more people in a system that seems to be tuned for minimal accountability and maximum callousness, the hope of immigration reform has never felt more out of reach.

Yet, if you look at the data, most Americans are united in their desire for change, and Congress — for all its faults and lack of follow-through — reliably puts forward bipartisan proposals.

That was the message at a recent discussion sponsored by the Garden State Immigration Policy Institute, which offered a glimmer of optimism amid the gloom.

But first, the challenges.

Even if Donald Trump were not in the White House, there are real obstacles to overcome, said Jennie Murray, president and CEO of the National Immigration Forum, a nonprofit immigration advocacy group.

“The reason why we haven’t been able to have bipartisan solutions at a grand scale yet is because I think we’re in a policy, a political, and a cultural disagreement,” she said.

On policy, finding the solution and building legislation to effect change is not an easy task, especially if, politically, the parties have used the issue to their advantage or to the detriment of their opponents. Culturally, Murray noted, for the last decade or so “we’ve had some really strong conversations about what it means to be American; who gets to come, who doesn’t get to come and join us.”

I’ll be much less diplomatic and say that the rise of Trump as a political figure, which infamously began with him accusing Mexican immigrants of bringing drugs and crime, has seen the president’s virulently anti-immigrant positions spread to some of his followers, making it hard to even discuss the positive impact of immigration.

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But even under the current climate, polling consistently finds that fair, firm, and compassionate immigration solutions appeal to a majority of Americans, regardless of their political affiliation, Murray said.

This mirrors recent results by Commonsense American, a nonpartisan group dedicated to practical policy solutions, which found that cross-partisan supermajorities of survey respondents rejected blanket mass deportation and supported many individual immigration reform proposals.

These include legal status for immigrants who came to the U.S. as children, mandatory employer verification of immigration status, more worker visas, increased border security measures, and a pathway to legal status for long-term undocumented immigrants.

The group also asked participants to weigh in on how likely it would be for someone from the opposite political party to support a package of proposals that included lasting border security and enforcement, a modernized legal immigration system, and a path for undocumented immigrants to earn legal status.

“Republicans guessed it would be about 50% of Democrats, but it’s actually 86%,” said Keith Allred, founder and president of Commonsense American. “We similarly asked Democrats to guess what percentage of Republicans would support this proposal, and they guessed 45% when it’s actually 74%.”

That underlines that Americans are more divided in their perception of each other than in actual fact.

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Another misperception is that Congress has given up on bipartisan immigration reform, said Theresa Cardinal Brown, who spent more than a decade working at the nonprofit Bipartisan Policy Center and is a distinguished immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.

Looking at the period of 2015 to 2024, across five Congresses, 309 bipartisan bills — defined as those having at least one Democratic and one Republican cosponsor — were introduced. Out of that total, 78% would have eased restrictions on legal immigration.

“Most bipartisan legislation runs toward legal expansion of legal pathways for immigration into the United States, and it’s worth noting again that workforce is the biggest area of bipartisan agreement,” she said.

So, if most Americans support immigration reform, and at least some in Congress believe in doing the work of legislating, why has meaningful change eluded the nation?

Immigration reform is not too big to fail, Cardinal Brown said. In many ways, it’s too big to succeed.

“Every part of the immigration system has proponents who really care about it, or it’s their one thing, and it has to be exactly right for them to support a bigger package if it’s in it,” she said. “But you can’t really govern if you have an ‘I win, you lose’ mentality. That’s not going to succeed in any way, and we’ve seen it from both parties.”

The Trump administration’s immigration policies are hurting the country. The full extent of that damage is yet to be seen, but repair efforts will have to go through Congress, and the perfect cannot be the enemy of the good.

Fortunately, the American people also have thoughts on what legislators should do when they eventually consider reform.

Democrats were asked by Commonsense American if their representatives should hold out to give more undocumented immigrants status; Republicans were asked if lawmakers should keep pushing for more enforcement and border security.

In both cases, the answer was clear: Don’t wait, take the deal.