‘Dreamer’ deal dead
For a fleeting moment this month, a deal to protect 2 million “dreamers” and rationalize our asylum system appeared within reach. Two senators with a history of bipartisan compromises were earnestly haggling over details. Much of the bill text was written. The talks were endorsed by influential right-leaning opinion-makers, and even encouraged by the conservative Border Patrol union.
But now the framework that Sens. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., and Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., were negotiating appears dead. Democratic leaders have privately informed numerous stakeholders that it isn’t going to happen in the current Congress because of Republican opposition, according to sources familiar with the discussions. At least one GOP leader has declared the same.
A genuine opening to address two major national problems is slipping away. There’s the absurdly unjust legal limbo endured by dreamers brought here as children through no fault of their own. And there’s the fiendish challenge of managing soaring numbers of desperate people seeking refuge in the United States at a time of rising international displacement.
The framework would have granted a path to citizenship for 2 million dreamers while overhauling the way asylum-seeking migrants are processed. Both will now remain intractable problems for years to come: Once Republicans control the House next year, the lower chamber will surely never support solutions that are remotely reasonable or humane.
What happened? Tillis and Sinema were negotiating over bill text, much of which had been written, as late as Wednesday night. But Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) informed Sinema and Tillis that he wouldn’t allow it to be attached to the end-of-year spending omnibus bill, effectively killing it, one of the sources tells me.
Some last-minute sticking points also arose. Some of them concerned detention issues, as well as the framework’s effort to retain temporary restrictions that barred most migrants from applying for asylum at all. The latter would have replicated the ban under the Title 42 covid-19 health rule, which a court has halted, creating expectations of a spike in efforts to cross the border.
The framework would have created new processing centers that would detain incoming asylum seekers - with increased legal and health services — until screenings could determine whether they have a “credible fear” of persecution if they were returned home. Those who passed would get a final hearing much faster than under the status quo, due to major investments in legal processing. Those who failed would be expelled promptly.
All this was designed to disincentivize exactly what Republicans rail about: migrants who seek asylum in hopes of disappearing into the interior and not showing up for hearings. The framework would have effectively continued the Title 42 ban on most asylum applications for at least a year, until the new system was operational.
But there was disagreement over whether migrants who enter the country between ports of entry should receive much more draconian treatment, such as longer detention or immediate expulsion, than under the current framework, the sources say.
What’s more, how open-ended the Title 42-type ban should be remained unresolved. For Democrats, that uncertainty raises the risk of the ban continuing indefinitely, or at least for many years, which would largely close down our asylum system and renege on international and human rights commitments.
What’s deeply frustrating about this moment is that the fundamental principles underlying reform were real and workable. Many Republicans recognize the absurdity of banishing the dreamers — who are culturally American and often know little of their countries of origin — to legal shadows where they are constrained from contributing to our country in keeping with their full potential.
And on asylum, these reforms represented a good-faith effort to come up with a solution that both sides could accept. It seeks to discourage the sort of abuses of the system that Republicans constantly decry as a “crisis” and a betrayal of the rule of law, while retaining fealty to our core commitment to provide a fair hearing to all who seek refuge here.
For some Republicans, particularly in the Donald Trump era, the only real “solution” to these problems is to reduce the number of immigrants accepted to as low a number as possible, regardless of the human rights consequences. So they won’t support such a compromise by definition.
Others probably see little political incentive in doing so. Our infrastructure is set to come under more strain once Title 42 is lifted, and contributing to solving the problem would provide less political payoff to Republicans than keeping the “border crisis” issue to wield against President Biden and Democrats in 2024.
On the Democratic side, a few opposed this compromise because it would in some fashion stiffen enforcement in inhumane ways. They were right to raise this objection.
Yet the compromise offered a real shot at making life more humane for well over 2 million people. It could have demonstrated that government can manage asylum-seeking effectively while remaining true to our core values, potentially opening political space for widening channels to more legal migration later.
But once again, space for compromise on this issue proved extremely hard to find. Even as a real window of opportunity opened, pundits who purportedly care about these matters sat the debate out, and we all squandered too much attention on some right-wing troll named Elon Musk. Now the moment is gone.