As Congress voted to reopen the federal government, senators huddled at the White House to discuss “the next steps on responsible immigration reform.” It was noteworthy that Sen. Tom Cotton was there and Sen. Lindsey Graham was not, according to the guest list.
That is the opposite of what some on Capitol Hill want, even as the White House dug in Tuesday with press secretary Sarah Sanders declaring a Graham-backed bipartisan immigration proposal “totally unacceptable to the president” and “dead on arrival.”
Graham, R-S.C., and his Democratic allies have been increasingly vocal about blaming Cotton, R-Ark., and other immigration hawks for the failure of talks about codifying Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and the rejection of their plan for handling the issue. Last week, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., said as much on the Senate floor.
“There is no deal that Sen. Cotton or Rep. [Bob] Goodlatte could forge that could earn the majority of either the House or the Senate,” Schumer said, adding, “If Sen. Cotton and Rep. Goodlatte have veto power over an agreement, everyone knows there won’t be an agreement.” He said the same thing directly to the president, Politico reported.
“Sen. Cotton knows Sen. Schumer and Democrats want to exclude him from immigration talks because he would get a good deal and they want a bad deal,” said Caroline Tabler, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas Republican.
“In the bipartisan meeting here at the White House two weeks ago, we outlined a path forward on four issues: serious border security, an end to chain migration, the cancellation of the outdated and unsafe visa lottery, and a permanent solution to DACA,” Sanders told reporters at Tuesday’s press briefing. “Unfortunately, the Flake-Graham-Durbin agreement does not meet these benchmarks.”
DACA, a program that protects undocumented immigrants brought into the country as children from deportation, was created by former President Barack Obama and rescinded by President Trump, who gave Congress six months to craft a legislative solution. There were legal and constitutional questions about providing this protected status through executive action rather than legislation, but concerns about people already losing their protections as the program winds down helped precipitate the government shutdown and a promise to vote on a DACA bill ultimately brought the standoff to an end.
The Trump administration has sought reforms to family-based immigration, an end to the diversity visa lottery and funding for border security measures including the president’s famous wall as part of any DACA deal. Goodlatte, the Virginia Republican who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, his Senate counterpart Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Cotton and Sen. David Perdue of Georgia are among the GOP lawmakers encouraging Trump to remain steadfast to these commitments — so opponents of these policies would like to minimize their role in the negotiations.
“I think their concern is that Cotton’s presence will prevent them from snookering the president,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “Just as newsrooms want diversity of skin color among people all holding the same opinions, the bipartisan Senate immigration talks want diversity of party affiliation among people all pushing the same immigration policy goals.”
Under Trump, immigration hawks have had a place at the table alongside Graham and the Democrats, a departure from even George W. Bush’s administration. “I was made a member of a ‘working group’ in the House by [Speaker Dennis] Hastert,” recalled former Rep. Tom Tancredo, the leading immigration hawk in Congress at that time. “Never invited to the White House although I created the Immigration Reform Caucus that had over a hundred members. Must also remember that Karl Rove told me I was to ‘never darken the doorsteps of the White House.’”
Cotton, Perdue and Goodlatte have walked through the White House doors at least as often as Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., the top Democrat dealing with Graham.
White House staffers who hold these immigration views have also been blamed for the DACA impasse. “Every time we have a proposal it is only yanked back by staff members,” Graham told reporters over the weekend. “As long as Stephen Miller is in charge of negotiating immigration, we’re going nowhere.” The senator said Miller, a domestic policy adviser to the president, has been “an outlier for years” on immigration.
“Pro-amnesty forces in Congress are trying to nullify the will of the American people by marginalizing those who would stand for the rule of law,” said Dale Wilcox, executive director and general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute. “The results of the last presidential election showed that voters are tired of business as usual in Washington, yet that is what they are getting from these negotiations.”
So far the attacks appear to be stiffening the White House’s resolve. Sanders defended Miller from what she characterized as a “sad and desperate attempt by a few people trying to tarnish a staffer.” One of her deputies, Hogan Gidley, shot back that Graham was the outlier on immigration, not Miller, and said the South Carolina Republican had been in “lockstep” with Democrats for “decades” on “amnesty” and “open borders.”
Democrats argue that this kind of GOP infighting demonstrates precisely why immigration hawks are disruptive of any attempt to arrive at a deal. If one is not reached by Feb. 8, they believe they are owed a vote on a clean DACA bill as a condition of ending the first shutdown fight — a strategic decision that did not wow liberal activists but may have been necessitated by the position of the ten Democratic senators up for re-election this year in states that Trump won as well as polling unfavorable to an immigration-driven shutdown.
Schumer has suggested Democrats will have more leverage in the second round, since the onus will be on Trump and the Republicans to deliver a DACA fix, and had already started talking tough Tuesday on the wall. The liberal base is not yet convinced of this approach, but was incensed by reported Trump remarks that initially blew up the bipartisan talks.
Yet it is also true that the toughest immigration hawks in Congress and the White House have almost uniformly conceded DACA legalization — by their view, an amnesty. “That’s a big chip,” said a Republican Hill staffer close to the situation. What they want in return, they say, are countermeasures that will reduce the incentives for future illegal immigration inherent in any amnesty.
These immigration hawks also dispute that they are in fact outliers on the issue. “I agree with Cotton and Perdue,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told Fox News in November. “The president has given us [until] March to deal with the issue of DACA and the question is whether you’re just going to do that and nothing else. I’m in favor of doing something on the DACA front. These kids came here through no act of their own, I think they have a legitimate case to be made, but I don’t think we ought to just do that.”
McConnell, who struck the deal with the Democrats on holding a DACA vote, specifically mentioned chain migration and the diversity visa lottery as part of a deal. “There are plenty of changes to the legal immigration system that should be added to any kind of a DACA fix that we do,” the Kentucky Republican said.
Outside conservative groups have also been pressing for such reforms. “We should have an immigration system that allows people into America based on merit,” Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham said in a statement. “Any future immigration discussions should include a permanent end to family-based chain migration by eliminating green card programs for relatives other than spouses and minor children. That is how we begin building an immigration policy that makes sense for 325 million Americans.”
The question is whether these provisions would become poison pills, making it impossible for any significant number of Democrats to support the measure, or if some middle ground exists between the bipartisan “Gang of Six” framework and proposals by Goodlatte or Cotton.
“We will work with Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate committed to fixing our broken immigration system,” Sanders said in a statement earlier this week. On Tuesday she added hopefully, “I don’t think they’re that far apart.”
For now, that includes Republicans with a variety of views about what the right fixes would be.
