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HOW THE BIDEN IMMIGRATION BILL COULD PASS. House and Senate Democrats unveiled their version of the Biden immigration reform bill on Thursday. Some commentators have declared it dead, since the Senate, not having killed the legislative filibuster, would require 60 votes for passage. But the last time the Senate made a big immigration reform effort, with the Gang of Eight in 2013, the bill passed with 68 votes. It received the support of all 54 Democrats and 14 Republicans — about one-third of the Senate’s GOP conference at the time.
There were four Republicans on the Gang of Eight — John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Marco Rubio, and Jeff Flake. McCain has passed away, Flake has left the Senate, and Graham and Rubio remain. Rubio has called the proposal a “non-starter,” while Graham has expressed doubt that a comprehensive immigration reform bill, as opposed to some smaller, targeted measures, can pass.
One huge sticking point will be the issue of border security. It always is when Congress considers immigration reform. The current standoff goes back to the famous immigration agreement of 1986, in which President Ronald Reagan and Congress granted amnesty to three million illegal immigrants. The deal was to be that the amnesty would be given in exchange for strong border security, and also tougher employment enforcement, which would ensure that there would not be millions of new illegal immigrants in need of amnesty at some point in the future.
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The failure of the Reagan deal was that the country got the amnesty but did not get the security. By 2013, the Senate was again debating how to handle the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States, all of whom had come since the Reagan amnesty. The Gang of Eight bill would have set up a long path to citizenship and delved into all aspects of immigration, even micro-managing things like the wages that agricultural workers are paid. But it was not clear whether it had enough Republican votes to pass.
Then, almost like magic, came a last-minute agreement and a lot of Republican votes. What happened? Democrats, and their Gang of Eight allies, promised far-reaching new security measures. They proposed to add billions and billions to the bill, all to secure the border and ensure no new waves of illegal crossers.
But it was phantom security. Democrats, along with the Gang of Eight, promised a “virtual” wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. There would be sensors, and cameras, and drones, and all sorts of high-tech devices to detect illegal border crossers. But all that technology would not stop border crossers. Indeed, Democrats were dead-set against any measures, like a border fence or wall, that would prevent crossings. A few years earlier, many of them had voted for an actual barrier, in the Secure Fence Act of 2006. But the next year, they backed off actually building the fence.
In the end, the Gang of Eight bill did not become law. It was stopped in the Republican-controlled House. But it had still gotten those 68 votes in the Senate.
Then came Donald Trump. In 2016, he won the Republican nomination, and then the presidency, in part by promising to build a wall along the most porous parts of the southern border. The policy had big support among GOP voters. Trump ultimately fell short of his promise — he ended up building about 450 miles of the roughly 1,000 needed along the border — and then new President Joe Biden stopped the project altogether. But there is still a lot of Republican support for a border barrier — real, physical security — that Democrats would never allow in an immigration reform bill.
So here is a prediction: Security will be a sticking point for the new Biden reform bill. Then look for Democrats to throw in lots of “virtual” security as a way to attract Republicans support. Will the old trick work one more time? Say it this way: It shouldn’t, but it might.
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