When President Trump appears in the White House Rose Garden on Thursday to unveil his proposals for overhauling America’s immigration system, he will be presenting a plan drafted by Jared Kushner during weeks of listening sessions with enforcement agencies, think tanks, and business leaders.
It is billed as a unique chance to skirt political divisions and rebuild the system from scratch. The strategy for avoiding political divisions? Avoid the politicians.
The crafting of the immigration proposal represents the signature Kushner method, deployed with success on the criminal reform bill, that eschews some of the key players on an issue so that, at the very least, a starting point can be hammered out. On immigration, the lawmakers are kept at arm’s length. In the Middle East, the Palestinians are left to cool their feet.
But removing the stakeholders can lead to problems.
Far from offering a new way to break Washington deadlock, the immigration plan fails to tackle the most difficult questions and will be bogged down by a lack of buy-in from Republican and Democratic leaders who must steer it into law, according to analysts, strategists, and senior GOP figures.
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Symptoms of trouble emerged on Tuesday when the president’s son-in-law made a lunchtime presentation to Republican senators. Several expressed confusion about why the plan did not tackle the thorny issues of temporary workers or the so-called Dreamers, said a senior Republican source.
“It is easy to come up with stuff that everyone can agree on,” he said, “but what about the difficult issues that have plagued the debate for decades?”
Resolving the fate of 3.6 million Dreamers, who arrived as undocumented children, is seen as crucial to winning over Democrats.
But leaving those sticking points until last is the approach pursued by Kushner, according to a senior administration official, who said the aim was to agree on a defined set of positions. Only then did they present the plan to small groups of Republicans. He said they have no timetable yet for approaching Democrats.
“A lot of people can say what they are against, but few people are willing to put pen to paper to define what they are for,” he said.
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The plan is predicated on six goals: fully securing the border, protecting wages, attracting and retaining the brightest and best, unifying families, building a workforce for critical industries, and preserving America’s humanitarian values.
The effort to achieve the six aims is split into two work streams. The first focuses on border security, while the second marks a shift to a merit-based immigration system modeled in part on examples in Australia, New Zealand, and Japan.
Finding agreement meant avoiding the fault lines that run through Congress.
“So what we did is we didn’t talk to politicians, we spoke to the border security professionals, the career folks,” the senior administration official said.
Kushner deployed his strategic approach to steer a major criminal justice bill into law last December, using the liberal commentator and former Obama administration official Van Jones as well Kim Kardashian West to help win bipartisan support.
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“Our system was designed to make change hard, and I remind my team all the time not to be afraid to follow intuition over ceremony and to try new approaches,” Kushner reflected in an article for Time.
It remains to be seen whether his approach to immigration and Middle East peace — building agreement from the outside in, working closely with Israeli and Arab allies such as the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia while keeping Palestinian leaders at arm’s length — can find success.
The Middle East strategy has won the backing of some advocates for immigration reform.
James Carafano, a national security expert at the Heritage Foundation, said there was little to lose after years of frustration.
“There is no downside,” he said. “The worst that can happen is that we are right back where we started.”
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Jeanne Zaino, professor of political science at Iona College, said both immigration and Middle East peace had proven resistant to conventional approaches.
“One of his big selling points is that he’s not a politician and that we should welcome his lack of experience and expertise,” she said. “Only in Washington could that make sense.
“But you need leadership to push things through, and with a divided Congress that’s a really tough call on immigration.”
Rich Galen, a veteran Republican strategist, said his management style was alien to the Hill.
“Like his father-in-law, he is schooled in the idea that you just need five guys around you to start selling condos,” he said. “That’s not how it works in Washington.”
Any attempt to present congressional leaders with a comprehensive package was fraught with risk, said a senior congressional Republican source who used the example of Hillary Clinton’s effort to overhaul healthcare.
“Clintoncare was essentially written in the White House and the Hill was like, ‘Nah, we’re not doing that,’” he said.
