Eric Gay/AP PHoto
Guardsmen fortify the border along the Rio Grande with concertina wire, February 2, 2024, in Eagle Pass, Texas.
On Sunday, after extensive negotiation, a bipartisan group of senators with the support of leaders Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell, released the text of a border bill that makes it significantly harder for migrants to enter the United States. The $118.3 billion bill also includes $60.1 billion in aid to Ukraine, $14.1 billion for Israel, and $10 billion in humanitarian assistance to Gaza, the West Bank, and Ukraine, as well as $20.2 billion for border security.
Trump and Republican House members are determined to deny President Biden a victory, no matter what the costs to resolving the refugee crisis, which has been cynically used by Republican governors such as Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida to flood northern cities with migrants. The measure has been pronounced dead on arrival in the Republican-led House and is far from a sure thing in the Senate, which will seek to take up the bill on Wednesday.
The package makes it far more difficult to claim asylum at the border, expands detention facilities, and effectively closes the border whenever more than 5,000 migrants seek entry in the course of a week. It allows the president to lower that threshold to 4,000, and President Biden says he will use it. Migrants seeking entry would be rapidly processed. The system that critics have derided as “catch and release” of releasing migrants into the U.S. with court dates far into the future would be drastically curtailed.
The measure is far more restrictive than anything Democrats have contemplated since the original anti-immigrant law of exactly a century ago. But the border crisis is real, and so is the political and fiscal damage in blue states and cities far from the Mexican border.
The bill falls short of more extreme Republican demands to close the border entirely.
House Republicans have cynically calculated that continuing to let the crisis fester is far more to their advantage than helping to solve it. If former Democratic Rep. Tom Suozzi loses the special election on February 13 to fill the Long Island House seat vacated by George Santos, a key reason will be local anxiety over the flood of migrants.
The vote in the Senate, which requires 60 votes, is likely to be close. Some on the Democratic left have denounced the bill as anti-Hispanic as well as anti-humanitarian; other progressives reject unconditional aid to Israel. On the Republican right, Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) preposterously termed the measure “an open border bill.”
Assuming the bill does pass the Senate, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said he will refuse even to call it up for a vote. Depending on the outcome of the Long Island election, Republicans will have a majority of either three or four. The only hope for a win in the House is that a Democrat-led discharge petition could peel off a few Republican votes.
Regardless of the outcome, Biden needs to get tough in one other respect. Abbott is using the border issue not just to flood northern cities with migrants but to re-start the Civil War.
Despite a clear Supreme Court ruling that the federal government controls the border, Abbott has sent the Texas National Guard and state police to enforce his version of immigration policy, and there have been standoffs between armed Texas forces and outnumbered federal Border Patrol agents. In his latest ploy, Abbott was joined Sunday by 13 Republican governors at the border who backed his stance.
Biden needs to federalize the National Guard, add federal agents to the border, and treat Abbott’s move as the insurrection that it is. Despite Abbott’s efforts to revive it, the Civil War is over. His side lost.
The compromise bill is not pretty. Much better comprehensive immigration reform was nearly enacted a decade ago but was blocked by far-right Republicans. But the idea that a long-term program of aid to Central America could solve a short-term crisis always was a fantasy.
Assuming that the bill does pass the Senate but is blocked in the House, a worsening crisis may eventually backfire on the Republicans. Biden can now say that he was willing to fix the border and support an ally from an invasion by Russia, but was cynically blocked by Trump’s minions who wanted an issue in the elections. Running against the do-nothing Congress worked for Harry Truman.
But there is a long-term cost to this. The bargain always was that Democrats would trade border security for a path to citizenship for the 11 million or more undocumented immigrants here now. That was the basic framework of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, a bargain between the Democrats and Ronald Reagan. Now Democrats have said they could trade border security for other priorities, like military aid. The millions of undocumented are the collateral damage.
