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Let’s start with the obvious: Democrats shouldn’t trust Donald Trump any farther than they’re able to throw him (although they would be well-advised to get another doctor to confirm his actual weight before they even try).
As Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer rightly noted, negotiating with Trump is like “negotiating with Jell-O,” and the Orange Julius Caesar has had more positions on DACA alone over the past couple of years than he’s had White House communications directors (that would be four—actually five, if you count Sean Spicer’s two stints separately). In his campaign announcement speech (aka, the Mexican “rapists” speech), Trump promised to “immediately terminate President Obama's illegal executive order on immigration,” and repeated the promise to end DACA (and DAPA, which the courts ultimately blocked anyway) on Aug. 31, 2016.
But now he wants to save the Dreamers. Or so he claims, at least. The “deal” he proposed a few days ago has a number of elements, and is ably dissected in a long piece at Vox, but here’s the guts of it:
The administration is willing to allow 1.8 million unauthorized immigrants who came to the country as children to become legal residents and ultimately apply for US citizenship — including the 690,000 beneficiaries of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, as well as others who would have been eligible for DACA but did not apply — in exchange for a $25 billion fund for its wall on the US/Mexico border; reallocating slots currently given to immigrants via the diversity visa lottery on the basis of “merit”; and preventing people from sponsoring their parents, adult children, or siblings to immigrate to the US.
This plan would represent a huge change to the criteria according to which we admit immigrants going forward, as well as significantly reduce the overall number, a long-standing goal of anti-immigration advocates like White House adviser Stephen Miller. Our own Gabe Ortiz referred to the deal as one in which citizenship for the Dreamers is exchanged for “Miller’s white supremacist wish list.”
That’s theoretically when America was “great.” You know, before the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act, and when, thanks to the Reed-Johnson Immigration Act of 1924, coming here was almost impossible except for those originating in Northwest Europe (yeah, Norway!).
Now let’s talk about how this plays out in Congress given the Democrats’ commitment to finding a solution on DACA, at least as part of the negotiations over funding the government. It is worth noting that right wingers, both in Congress and outside of it, reacted angrily to Trump’s proposal, with one Republican congressman asserting that Trump was “giving away the farm.”
Of course, it helps Trump if people on the right (which is, of course, where he is as well) are saying things like this because then he can claim his plan represents a compromise opposed by supposed ‘hard-liners’ on both sides. Nevertheless, this criticism from anti-immigrant forces is nothing more than kabuki theater designed to push any ultimate deal even further to the right than what Trump initially proposed.
According to the White House, their plan is “extremely generous.” They also described it, in the words of the New York Times, as a “take-it-or-leave-it proposal.” Senate Democrats have, thankfully, done the latter.
Here’s the thing: Trump’s plan was always a trap, as made clear by statements that came from the White House itself. As CNN reported:
The White House official sold the plan as a "compromise position" that it believes would get 60 votes in the Senate -- a point White House officials underscored multiple times on Thursday -- and then could be "sent over to the House for additional improvement and modification."
[snip] But the officials signaled that while the framework should pass muster in the Senate, they did not expect it to be the basis for legislation in the House.
What does that mean? If Senate Democrats were to make some kind of deal and then the debate moved over to the House, the terms of any deal would only get shifted to the right in order to have any chance of passing that body—where Democratic votes are completely unnecessary. After Trump made his proposal, the next day he said he’s willing to “shift more” on immigration, but let’s see if that shift doesn’t end up being more to the right than anything else.
And in case it was unclear that the Dreamers were being held hostage, well, here’s the Trump administration’s take: "If it doesn't work then [Dreamers will] be illegal immigrants and if they fall into the hands of ICE. They won't be targeted, but if they fall into the hands of ICE ... well they'll be put into the system ... and ultimately could lead to their deportation." You’ve got some nice Dreamers here … sure would be a shame if something happened to them.
The take it or leave it deal has to come not from the White House, but from the Senate. Senate Republicans must negotiate on behalf of House Republicans and the White House, with the understanding that what the Senate agrees to is what will become law. To be sure, Democrats are in the minority here, and we must be reasonable in our expectations of what they can achieve. Remember that shutting down the government in order to defund Obamacare achieved nothing when Republicans tried it a few years ago.
In order to get a bipartisan agreement in the Senate, Democrats will have to compromise, as they did to achieve a comprehensive immigration bill in 2013—which contained border security measures, an end to the diversity lottery, changes to the family reunification elements of the immigration system, and which placed more emphasis on “skills” in granting entry to immigrants. In fact, that kind of bill is the one Democrats should hold out for, rather than sell out on immigration’s future to rescue the Dreamers being held hostage.
For now, the compromise should be a reprieve for the Dreamers in return for some form of the wall or fence or whatever that Trump has long made his highest priority. That may be the best we can get today, but when we clean the Republicans’ clock in 2018 and 2020, comprehensive immigration reform must be at the top of the list.
Here’s video of me discussing DACA/immigration a few days ago: