A rare chance to compromise on immigration

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott isn’t popular in some big American cities these days, but in a key respect he has done them and the country a favor.

The Texas governor has sowed chaos in other states by dispatching busloads of migrants to big cities. His motives may be less than pure, but he has effectively called the bluff of local politicians on their repeated statements of welcome to migrants.

He’s forced much of blue-state America to confront the country’s immigration crisis in the most direct way possible — in a way that border states have had no choice but to face for decades.

The solutions to these issues lie not in cities such as Chicago and New York but in Washington. And that’s where Abbott’s gambit has helped focus the minds of lawmakers at last on an issue long demagogued and deferred.

There has been a dramatic change in the political calculations, particularly for Democrats.

For many years, Democrats have stood for extraordinarily liberal policies toward immigration. During the 2020 presidential primary race the majority of candidates advocated no longer treating illegal entry into the U.S. as a federal crime, effectively endorsing an open-borders policy, or something very close.

At the time, Democrats hoped that in the face of the Trump administration’s immigration excesses, the contrast would appeal to Latino voters. It clearly hasn’t, and Democrats are beginning to realize that.

Immigration has worked well as a wedge issue for Republicans, giving the party less incentive to find a solution. Republicans continue to stick to positions that are non-starters with Democrats, such as giving the president the authority to halt all asylum claims on the southern border.

It’s quite possible Republican lawmakers won’t enter into good-faith negotiations now that lawmakers on both sides acknowledge the border is at a crisis point, seeking instead to retain the issue for the 2024 election. That would be a terrible mistake.

Why? Immigration has bedeviled the country for decades. It’s extremely rare when that issue’s undergirding politics align in such a way to make real progress possible. We’re at such a point now.

The country’s broken process of administering asylum claims is at the heart of the latest debates. People of good will should be able to address this. Democrats call for beefing up and streamlining the system to process claims far more quickly. Migrants can and do spend years in the country waiting for final word on asylum. Republicans say the system is being abused and that few other countries in the world are as liberal as the U.S. on asylum. They want a crackdown on those abuses, and they have a point.

What should not be lost here is that asylum is an American value. This country since its founding has been a refuge for people facing starvation, war and even pogroms. There have been shameful periods where the U.S. failed to live up to its values — for example, in denying refuge to Jews in the lead-up to World War II. But the values remained, nonetheless.

We need to fix the asylum process, not scrap it. And, with Donald Trump seeking a return to the White House, giving the executive branch unfettered power on asylum would be a mistake.

Still to be determined, too, is the fate of the so-called Dreamers, people brought to the U.S. as children who’ve lived and worked here for decades. We need a practical solution to give them a path to citizenship. That should have been solved years ago. Let’s do so now.

And we need to encourage more legal migration other than through the asylum process, especially of immigrants with desirable skills. There’s no shortage of business voices who say they need workers and aren’t attracting enough citizens or legal residents to do the jobs.

At long last, this dysfunctional Congress, which if it ended today would be remembered mainly for the majority party in the House toppling its own speaker and taking three weeks to select a replacement, has a chance to rewrite its story in a more favorable light.

Democrats and Republicans, improbably, have an opportunity to show they can work in good faith on a major issue that the public badly wants addressed.

Do it.