President Trump is offering a more generous than anticipated legal status for undocumented immigrants who came into the United States as children in exchange for new border security measures, including the wall, and sweeping legal immigration reforms.
That’s the big takeaway from the immigration framework the White House released Thursday, days earlier than press secretary Sarah Sanders told reporters to expect the Trump administration’s latest guidance on what kind of fix for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals the president would sign into law.
Just the day before, the White House had floated numbers ranging from 690,000 to 890,000 DACA beneficiaries, suggesting they might exclude from legal status the larger population of people who were technically eligible for the Obama-era deportation protections but never enrolled in the program.
Instead the Trump framework offers legal status, including a 10- to 12-year path to citizenship, for 1.8 million people. What immigration hawks would get in return is a $25 billion trust fund for the wall and other border security enhancements, an end to “catch-and-release,” a crackdown on visa overstays, abolishing the diversity visa lottery, and reducing legal immigration by limiting family reunification to spouses and minor children.
There is broad public support for the people who benefit from DACA staying in the country lawfully, but there were questions about the legal basis of its creation by executive action under President Barack Obama. Trump announced in September he would end the program by March 5, but he has regularly said he would back legislation accomplishing DACA’s goals if accompanied by “serious border security,” scrapping the visa lottery, and ending chain migration.
“I want to thank President Trump and his administration for their work on this important issue,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., on Thursday. “This framework builds upon the four pillars for reform that the president has consistently put forth and indicates what is necessary for the president to sign a bill into law.”
But there are several policy disputes that could easily blow up this framework.
Amnesty first, restrictions later
It is a significant political achievement for the president to propose what many of his supporters would characterize as “amnesty” while keeping the Senate’s leading immigration hawks — Sens. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and David Perdue, R-Ga. — on board. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, also released a supportive statement.
But many outside immigration hawks have protested that DACA’s legalization comes first, while the changes to chain migration are phased in more gradually, after a large backlog of applications is cleared.
The “plan fails because it front-loads the amnesty, but delays the gains and safeguards,” reports Breitbart. “As Popeye’s friend J. Wellington Wimpy might have said,” quipped Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies, “I will gladly reduce immigration on Tuesday for an amnesty today.”
Some other conservative groups have sounded concerned, but not outright opposed. “Amnesty comes in many forms, but it seems they all eventually grow in size and scope,” Heritage Action CEO Michael Needham said in a statement. “Any proposal that expands the amnesty-eligible population risks opening pandora’s box, and could lead to a Gang of Eight style negotiation. That should be a non-starter.”
“If any amnesty negotiations are to take place, they should remain extremely limited in scope so as not to encourage further illegal immigration,” Needham added. “It is imperative President Trump holds firm to his commitment to eliminate chain migration. Voters overwhelmingly agree with his position that immigration should be based on merit, not whether a distant relative holds a green card.”
Past comprehensive immigration reform bills under the last two administrations have failed because the legal status came before other more hawkish provisions. The 1986 amnesty signed into law by President Ronald Reagan failed to deliver on its enforcement promises. Future administrations and Congresses would have time to roll back such commitments from the Trump administration.
From talk radio to Capitol Hill, some will revolt against anything that could be construed as amnesty, even if Trump and Stephen Miller are selling it. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, began making noise about the path to citizenship even before the numbers and details were announced. So how this dilemma can be resolved without losing centrists and any crossover Democrats bears watching.
Wait, what are all these restrictions?
Democrats and lawmakers representing immigrant communities are likely to balk at making it harder for their constituents to sponsor extended family members to immigrate to the United States. These changes would also have the effect of reducing legal immigration overall over time, perhaps by as much as 50 percent.
These changes have not been as widely debated as amnesty versus enforcement or what should happen to so-called Dreamers and DACA. Many Republicans in the Senate — Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Marco Rubio of Florida, and Jeff Flake of Arizona, to name a few — are likely to object to them. Some will point to specific hardships, others will invoke America as a “nation of immigrants” that enacted immigration restrictions only during dark chapters of its history.
In the House, some liberal Democrats weren’t even wild about the minor concessions Graham and Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., made on chain migration or diversity visas. Trump’s comments, from his 2015 campaign announcement to the “shithole countries” episode, have made it easy for black and Latino legislators to question his motives and harder for Democratic leaders to accede to anything other than a clean DACA fix.
Hostage-taking
If nearly everybody agrees that DACA should be codified and the vast majority of Dreamers should stay, why agree to attach all these other more contentious immigration policies? The Trump administration clearly calculated that phasing out DACA was one way to potentially gain bipartisan support for its broader immigration agenda.
Democrats have revived one of Obama’s favorite descriptions of Republicans driving a hard bargain: hostage-takers. “Dreamers should not be held hostage to President Trump’s crusade to tear families apart and waste billions of American tax dollars on an ineffective wall,” Durbin said in a statement.
Immigration hawks counter that they are making major concessions on amnesty and the trade they are offering strikes a sensible balance between prudence and compassion. DACA as an executive action held its beneficiaries hostage because it will always be subject to being reversed by a future president or overturned by the courts.
“If you give amnesty to one or two million illegal immigrants who were brought here through no fault of their own, as kids, you’re going to have at least a couple negative effects,” Cotton argued recently. And one of those negative effects is you’re going to have a whole new chain of chain migration. The way to control for that negative effect is to stop chain migration.” The senator has called it an “obvious compromise.”
Yet it may not seem so obvious to members of Congress on the other side of the issue.
Verification
The people who have enrolled in DACA or whose status has lapsed and have not renewed are known to the federal government. They have been vetted and are in the Department of Homeland Security’s databases.
The Trump administration is proposing legal status for at least some people who could have applied for DACA but didn’t. In addition to increasing the size of the population legalized, it requires the verification process to begin anew.
Senate math
All these policy disputes have to be resolved in a way that can get 60 votes in the Senate. That requires holding together all 51 Republicans, despite their disparate immigration-policy perspectives, and peeling off at least nine Democrats. For every Republican defector, another Democrat is needed.
This comes at a time when Senate Democrats believe they were offered an up-or-down vote on DACA as a condition of reopening the government and many House Republicans cast their votes for a short-term funding based on similar promises that they would get to vote for a conservative bill.
Red-state Democrats are a promising target to at least win a cloture vote. This includes the ten Democratic senators seeking re-election this year in states Trump carried. But it won’t be easy, and there’s no guarantee a bill that could win supermajority in the Senate would pass muster with House Republicans.
Trump could go down in history as someone who improbably broke an immigration stalemate. Or this framework, attacked as racist by the Left and as a betrayal on the Right, could be the latest immigration reform disappointment.
