Washington’s center of gravity on immigration has shifted to the right. Can the parties make a deal?

WASHINGTON (AP) — It was a decade ago that Capitol Hill was consumed by an urgency to overhaul the nation’s immigration system, fueled in no small part by Republicans who felt a political imperative to make inroads with minority voters by embracing more generous policies.

But nothing ever became law and in the time since, Washington’s center of gravity on immigration has shifted demonstrably to the right, with the debate now focused on measures meant to keep migrants out as Republicans sense they have the political upper hand.

Long gone are the chatter and horse-trading between parties over how to secure a pathway to citizenship for immigrants, or a modernized work permit system to encourage more legal migration. Instead, the Jghts of late have centered on how much to tighten asylum laws and restrain a president’s traditional powers to protect certain groups of migrants.

Now, Democrats and Republicans are again struggling to strike an immigration deal — and the consequences of failure stretch far beyond the southern border.

Congressional Republicans are insisting on tougher border measures as their price for greenlighting billions in additional aid to Ukraine, and the stalemate is putting the future of U.S. military assistance to Kyiv at risk as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine nears the two-year mark.

Democrats have “ceded the ground to Republicans on immigration and the border,” said Aaron Reichlin-melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a nonprojt that advocates for immigrant rights. “The administration seems to see no advantage in leading on this issue, but I think that they’re shooting themselves in the foot.”

The intractable nature of immigration debates is coming into sharp relief this week as a bipartisan group of senators tasked with Jnding a border deal is running out of time to reach an agreement. The Senate on Wednesday failed to advance a nearly $106 billion emergency spending request from Biden to cover national security needs including Ukraine, Israel and the border. Senate Minority Leader Mitch Mcconnell, R-KY., is an unwavering backer of Ukraine yet has stressed privately to President Joe Biden that the administration will need to bend on border policy to unlock that money.

In remarks at the White House on Wednesday, Biden made it clear that he was prepared to agree to at least some of the changes Republicans are seeking.

“I am willing to make significant compromises on the border,” he said. “We need to Jx the broken border system. It is broken.”

Behind closed doors, Democrats have resisted demands from Republicans to scale back Biden’s executive powers to temporarily admit certain migrants into the country. Yet Democrats privately appear willing to concede to GOP negotiators in other areas, particularly on making it tougher for asylum-seekers to clear an initial bar before their legal proceedings can continue in the United States.

That’s a shift in favor of Republicans from even last year: There were similar agreements around asylum among Senate negotiators back then, but that would have been in exchange for a conditional pathway to citizenship for roughly 2 million “Dreamers” who came to the United States illegally as children.

Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., a perennial negotiator on immigration, stressed that in “every Congress, the foundation for compromise changes.”