If he chooses …
Greg Sargent wrote this piece last week about the Sinema/Tillis immigration proposal and as annoyed as we are about Sinema’s announcement, it’s not a good idea to dismiss it:
You’re in luck, Senator Romney. You and other like-minded GOP colleagues have a big opening right now to demonstrate your seriousness of purpose — by supporting an emerging compromise on immigration reform that would address numerous significant problems all at once.
A big question is whether 10 GOP senators will support reforms being negotiated by Sens. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) and Kyrsten Sinema (D-Ariz.). The compromise would create a path to citizenship for 2 million “dreamers” brought here as children and invest a lot of money to speed the processing of the asylum seekers overwhelming infrastructure at the southern border.
Right now, negotiators are discussing including $25 billion to $40 billion in funds for border security and other border-related reforms, sources familiar with the talks tell me. Will Republican senators really forgo this opportunity?
To see why they shouldn’t, consider a newly relevant episode from the last presidency. In 2018, a bipartisan group of lawmakers offered President Donald Trump a deal that included $25 billion for his border wall and a path to citizenship for 1.8 million dreamers.
Trump rejected it. He did so under pressure from hard-liners who despised the thought that people brought to the United States as children — through no fault of their own — should gain citizenship after growing up in this country with little connection to their countries of birth.
With Trump raging from the sidelines, 10 GOP senators can now back a framework that should be seen as an even better one, from their perspective. Unlike the previous deal, which would have dumped billions on a mostly symbolic border wall, the new one would more directly address genuine problems at the border.
Dante Atkins had a nice thread succinctly explaining why this would be win-win for both Democrats and Republicans:
Greg has been talking about this for a few days now, and I want to amplify how big a deal it would be to pass the Sinema-Tillis compromise (I know, I know, but hear me out here)
FIRST: getting the 2 million dreamers off of their legal cliff and guaranteeing them citizenship to enable their de facto home country to also be their de jure home country should be our most important priority, and we should be willing to agree to concessions to get it done.
SECOND: the way we handle asylum claims now is an underfunded, ridiculous mess, and that’s part of what enables trolls like DeSantis to commit and justify their migrant trafficking to liberal enclaves, and also part of why Title 42 has become an unnecessary controversy.
conservatives have every reason to support this. currently, our international obligations require asylum seekers to be released into the United States, where they wait for years with uncertain status waiting for their hearings. They blame this for the border “crisis.”
the conservative logic is, if people can legally apply for asylum at the border, be released into the United States, and then live here in limbo until they run afoul of the law in some other way, it creates incentives for more people to overwhelm the system.
the left, meanwhile, has every incentive to better fund and structure our asylum claim system, which is a total shambles right now. So, everyone wins in this deal.
2 million dreamers get citizenship; our asylum system gets an overhaul; human rights and international law are respected; and if conservatives are right that our asylum system is incentivizing mass migration, they get a fix for that.
that said, I don’t think conservatives will accept a deal that allows for 2 million more younger, mostly non-white citizens, because their key goal is controlling the electorate. If the deal doesn’t get enough Republican votes, that’s the reason why!
Originally tweeted by 🕷Dante Atkins🕷 (@DanteAtkins) on December 11, 2022.
He’s probably right. But this is a good opportunity to push, as the Republicans are in chaos and feeling some distance from Trump in the wake of failing to win the Senate in November. It’s just possible that they can find the 10 among the handful of Trump apostates and retirees to actually do something on this. They should at least try.
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