As good as it will get
The Republican Party should take yes for an answer. By torpedoing the Senate’s bipartisan immigration deal under pressure from former president Donald Trump to preserve his election-year advantage on a wedge issue, congressional Republicans would blow an opportunity to reduce undocumented immigration and curtail mass crossings at the southern border—along with save Ukraine before it runs out of ammunition.
The 370-page legislative text released Sunday night, promptly declared “dead on arrival” in the House by Speaker Mike Johnson, emerged from months of substantive discussions and careful compromises by all sides.
Sen. James Lankford, the lead Republican negotiator, notes that about 1 million people who crossed the southern border over the past four months would have been deported rather than released into the United States if this agreement had been in place.
Limitations on the president’s power to grant humanitarian parole at land borders could stop more than half a million crossings annually, he says. There’s even $650 million to build a border wall, the sort of funding Democrats forced a 35-day partial federal shutdown to prevent five years ago.
Democrats made concessions under pressure from public opinion: Fresh NBC polling shows Trump has a 35-point advantage over President Biden on immigration. But this window for deal-making will close. Even if Republicans controlled the White House and Congress next year, the Senate filibuster would prevent them from having their way on the issue. Democrats will lose any incentive to deal if a president from their party no longer owns this problem.
The element of the agreement perhaps most misunderstood among Republicans is a Border Emergency Authority that would allow the president to turn away most asylum seekers if more than 5,000 people arrive daily, measured over the course of several days, which has been the case every week but one in the past four months.
This goes further than the Title 42 authorities Trump and Biden invoked during the pandemic, restricting migrants who are turned away from reapplying for a year. Practically, this authority would end the migrant caravans.
In exchange for the crackdown at the border, the supplemental package would provide $60.6 billion to support Ukraine and $14.1 billion in security assistance for Israel. The House plans to vote this week on a stand-alone bill for Israel, but that version includes no humanitarian aid to help Palestinians in Gaza. This does.
If this deal falls apart, the situation at the southern border will deteriorate. Inaction, combined with a fear across Latin America that Trump might prevail in November, could attract millions more migrants in the coming year.
If Republicans really care about curbing a migrant surge that they claim harms the country, rather than seeking political advantage by issuing such warnings, they would support this bill in droves.