President Trump offering Democrats targeted amnesty in exchange for enhanced border security is his latest big political risk as his own party prepares to defend its congressional majorities.
Republicans have split on immigration for a decade plus; any deal to save nearly 1 million illegal immigrants from deportation — even the sympathetic Dreamer population, adults brought to the U.S. unwittingly as children — risks stoking divisions that costing the GOP seats in 2018.
Just moving a bill through Congress, even with Trump’s imprimatur, could spark a civil war across the Republican ecosystem of elected officials, conservative advocacy groups and media personalities, capped — pass or fail — by messy primary contests and defeated vulnerable incumbents in the general election.
“Everyone of those things is true,” conceded a concerned Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, the House Rules Committee chairman who spent two terms leading the National Republican Congressional Committee, the party’s House campaign arm, upon being presented with this nightmare scenario.
The agreement Trump is negotiating with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., would enshrine into law the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, allowing qualified illegal immigrant adults brought to the U.S. as children to remain here on a permanent legal basis.
But, crucially, the deal under development would not allocate any resources for the building of a wall along the Mexican border.
Trump is not dropping plans to construct a wall, but its absence from the proposed DACA deal rankled immigration hawks and Republican activists and voters, who have long viewed it as proof of the president’s commitment to halt illegal crossings.
This crowd’s fear that Democrats (and supportive Republicans) would secure citizenship or legalization for unauthorized immigrants in exchange for border security improvements that never materialize have stymied immigration reform for years.
Legislation limited to Dreamers that Republican leaders tried to negotiate with former President Barack Obama in 2013 fell victim to similar concerns. A Republican senator from a red state predicted that Trump’s emerging DACA compromise would trigger a rebellion.
“Any deal with only vague border security but no wall and nothing on chain migration will be very unpopular. It will allow millions of illegal immigrants to get amnesty because of chain migration,” this senator said, on condition of anonymity in order to speak candidly.
Immigration is complicated for the Republicans because their internal disagreements are so sharp. Those differences extend to the electoral map.
Battleground senators and House members who represent ethnically and politically diverse communities stand to benefit in the midterm from Trump’s DACA deal. They could also suffer at the ballot box if the negotiations collapse and participants in the program are threatened with deportation.
In safe Republican districts, voters tend to be more homogenous, and more circumspect, on immigration matters.
They might live with some form of amnesty if tangible border security measures were actually delivered, a trade-off that often polls well. But they lean skeptical to hostile, and the member of Congress that crosses them or stands idly by while it amnesty passes without a guarantee that the security will come to fruition risks a rebuke in their next primary.
Those pressures could “reduce the Republican Party into a pile of wreckage” in 2018 if Trump and the GOP leadership don’t craft a bill that can satisfy their party’s conflicting concerns, warned Doug Heye, a Republican operative and former congressional aide.
Amidst the danger for a GOP crackup over yet another attempt to address the immigration issue is the prospect that the party could come out better for it.
The Republican Party has seen its support among Hispanics and other nonwhite voters drop precipitously since former President George W. Bush won reelection in 2004. Trump’s caustic immigration rhetoric and hardline proposals during the 2016 campaign compounded the GOP’s problems.
This president and a Republican Congress being able to claim responsibility for protecting Dreamers, a policy that, at least conceptually, enjoys broad popularity across party lines, could begin to repair the GOP’s frayed relationship with nonwhite voters, providing a boost next year and in 2020.
“Donald Trump has the ability to be Nixon to China on immigration. If he says, we’ve got a good deal on border security, on the wall, whether it’s concrete fencing, or electronic, whatever it is, then I think his followers, and our base, will go, okay, they’re finally getting that done,” said House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., who succeeded Sessions at the NRCC.
