The long-heralded compromise proposal on immigration between Sens. James Lankford (R-OK), Chris Murphy (D-CT), and Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ) finally became public on a Sunday. And it went over just about as well as a lead balloon.
Early reports threw up a lot of red flags for conservatives. Rather than securing the southern border by eliminating the flow of migrants, it was said that the bill allowed several thousand per day to enter, where their asylum claims would be quickly processed. Proponents of the bill assured skeptics that this was not at all true, but it turned out to be exactly the case. On top of that, the bill included all manner of items that made it effectively a no-go for conservatives: moving the judicial process to the federal court in Washington, D.C., billions of dollars to be dished out, in part to the very nongovernmental organizations that have facilitated the crisis, and enough executive discretion for President Joe Biden to alter the contours of southern immigration, which had caused the problem in the first place.
Events played out in a very predictable fashion. Conservative policy experts on immigration began picking the bill apart on X. They were followed by Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who likewise went through the bill with a fine-toothed comb. In shorter order, high-ranking House Republicans, notably Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, rejected the bill. And by the next day, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) called it dead on arrival in the House.
Commentators from legacy media outlets bemoaned Republican dissatisfaction as a sign that the party is no longer willing to compromise. David Frum of the Atlantic went so far as to claim that Republicans would never get a better bill on immigration. But that is all nonsense, a testament to the fact that many who write about politics do not much care about the immigration problem, do not understand the details of the policy debate, and are therefore willing to endorse anything with the thin patina of “bipartisan compromise attached to it.”
Conservatives who had been following it closely know better. To put the matter bluntly, Lankford got rolled. He produced a compromise bill that was so tilted toward the Democrats that it was beyond salvation.
It was not simply that he allowed Murphy to craft a bill filled to bursting with Democratic policy priorities. He fundamentally misjudged the situation. The crisis at the border is, at its core, a consequence of executive maladministration. The appropriate response is not to alter existing law to legalize many of the bad practices of the Biden administration. It is, rather, to eliminate the loopholes in the law that have enabled the president to create an open borders regime. That gave Republicans, if not the leverage in the negotiations, a mandate to drive a hard bargain — the basic ask should have been to return to the status quo ante before Biden took office.
The compromise proposal was so obviously bad that Senate Republicans walked away from it when House Republicans and policy experts denounced it. But still, it is remarkable that Senate Republicans were even thinking about this proposal. Would they ever consider a tax bill that granted so much to Democratic policy priorities, especially after the president used loopholes to raise taxes? Of course not. How about a bill regulating business environmental practices? Never. How about welfare? Not even for a second.
The unacceptability of this bill speaks to the yawning chasm between the party electorate and party elites on immigration. Senate Republicans were waiting to see on this issue. And why not insist on including House Republicans, who are much tougher on immigration and actually in charge of a chamber of Congress, into the mix? The strategy all along seems to have been to pass a bill that Senate Democrats would uniformly support and Senate Republicans would split on, then force House Republicans either to accept the compromise or take the blame for its failure. Again, on what other policy would Republicans do that?
Likewise, Senate Republicans seem content not to revisit the border problem or demand its satisfactory resolution as an integral part of any compromise on any issue important to Democrats. That would never happen on the issues of taxes or regulations or discretionary spending.
So, the border crisis is set to continue — although given that it is in the power of the president to fix, he might in fact begin making adjustments. Indeed, Secretary of State Antony Blinken went to Mexico a few weeks ago to discuss the migrant problem with our neighbors to the south, and the large caravans seemed to have dissipated. Likewise, the efforts of Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) seemed to have depleted the flow. In the meantime, Biden got in front of the cameras last week to claim meekly that the border mess is now former President Donald Trump’s fault, as the latter called for the compromise bill to be defeated. Nobody in his or her right mind believes that, and the fact that Biden can get away with such cynicism on something of such profound consequence is a testimony to the fact that legacy media are in the tank for the president.
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So what happens next? It is disappointing no doubt that Lankford negotiated such a bad deal that it could not be improved. And it is frustrating that Senate Republicans, as a whole, are shockingly out of step with the sentiments of their voters. Yet there are promising signs that elite opinion in the GOP is coming around to the concerns of the party. Abbott’s vigor and the House Republicans’ staunchness on immigration indicate that many Republican leaders are waking up to the salience of this.
And from the looks of it, this appears to be a policy on which compromise is outside the spectrum of possibilities. Just as Republicans want lower taxes, Democrats want higher taxes. Republicans demand a closed border, while Democrats want an open border that is orderly (i.e. not generating images of long trains of migrants that are disastrous for the party’s reputation). Fair enough. Republicans need to take this to the voters in November and, should they win the governing trifecta, move swiftly to deliver on their promises. And if Senate Republicans have to be dragged along kicking and screaming, so be it.
Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford senior nonresident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
