Why did Republicans vote down the bipartisan immigration reform bill? Because Donald Trump told them to. However, serious border hawks really did have some substantive complaints as well. Two of them were the most significant.
First, the bill did nothing about President Biden's CHNV parole program, which allows residents of four countries (Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela) to apply for temporary two-year residence in the US if they have a sponsor and pass a background check. About 250,000 people entered the US under this program in 2023.
There's nothing complicated about this. You're either for it or against it—though it's worth noting that the immigration bill didn't make things any worse from a hawk's perspective. It just did nothing.
The second issue is more complex and revolves around wording in the bill that says anyone who makes an asylum claim “shall be released from custody.” The complaint about this is that it doesn't merely tolerate catch-and-release for pragmatic reasons, it codifies catch-and-release.
And this is true. But the details are all-important here. Under current law, anyone applying for asylum is supposed to be held in detention. In practice, however, limited detention space means they almost never are. They're released on their own recognizance to wait for their court date, which is often years away.
During this waiting period asylum seekers are monitored by ICE under a program called Alternatives to Detention. The most common version of this requires them to check in periodically using a smartphone equipped with facial recognition technology. In reality, however, ICE tracks only a fraction of asylum hopefuls using ATD monitoring. About 90% are tracked for only a few months and then unenrolled, primarily for budget reasons.
The immigration reform bill changed all this. It created a program called Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings that applies to nearly all asylum seekers. This program does indeed mandate their release while they wait for a decision, but it also mandates the use of ATD monitoring. In addition, it places asylum authority in most cases into the hands of asylum officers, not courts. These officers are required to hold a credible fear interview within 90 days and a final asylum determination within 180 days. The bill allocated about half a billion dollars to hire more asylum officers and asylum judges in order to meet this goal.
In practice, then, the bill is almost entirely hawkish on asylum:
- It raises the credible fear standard so fewer asylum seekers will be allowed in.
- It allocates more money for detention space.
- For those who are nonetheless released, it requires the use of ATD monitoring.
- It provides money for more asylum officers and judges.
- It mandates that final asylum decisions have to be made within six months.
This compares to a current system in which (a) release may not be codified but is almost universal anyway; (b) most released asylum seekers aren't monitored in any way; and (c) they stay in the country for years waiting for a court to decide their fate.
As with anything, you can poke holes in this. How tough will the asylum officers be? Can you guarantee that decisions will really be made in six months? How effective is ATD monitoring?¹
If you want, you can spin this skepticism into a firm belief that the immigration bill would have been worse than the status quo. But for anyone looking at this evenhandedly, it's a tough case to make. The bill's treatment of asylum really does seem clearly tougher than current law. Put this together with everything else the bill does and it's a no-brainer to go ahead and pass it. So why have immigration hawks breathlessly talked themselves into believing it would make things worse?
It's a mystery.
¹This is a surprisingly hard question to answer, but the bulk of the evidence suggests that the absconder rate is low and the court appearance rate is high for asylum seekers who are kept in the ATD program. In other words, it's pretty effective when it's used intensively, but less so when people are released from it.
What happened to Remain in Mexico?
Was it effective?
It seems to me that if you are fearful in Guatemala and want to come to the US, that you would be relatively safe remaining in Mexico. Am I wrong?
My personal view is I want more legal immigration of high skilled people and less immigration of lower skilled people.
Some of the asylum seekers might have a good case. But is it better than various minorities in Africa and Asia where you just can't walk to the US border?
I am pretty ignorant. It just seems to me that a policy that says if you can get here then you can stay here is a terrible policy.
Remain in Mexico program requires Mexico to agree with it.
And Trump was able to use the pandemic to close the border--that was the only command that worked, and was shot down by the courts after the pandemic waned.
Migration Protection Program was a failure and created a huge humanitarian crisis.
and those "lower skilled people" you seem to loathe are the ones doing the terrible. labor intensive jobs for shit pay that native borns wont do and that US companies seem to rely on
It's always good to have high skilled people, but I think we have work for low skilled people as well. When Georgia made it tough for immigrants, a lot of crops died because there was nobody to pick them. There are jobs in furniture moving, gardening, and general handyman work that don't require people who are fluent in English. I believe middle class Americans would have to pay a lot more for those services if the jobs were limited to American citizens.
They wouldn't do them at all. It wasn't just Georgia; it happened in Washington state and one other, maybe Mississippi, I forget. They cracked down on hiring of undocumented immigrants, and the crops rotted. And then of course the business community -- who tends Republican, especially in their donations -- screamed and ... the laws went away! Imagine that!
Native-born Americans aren't gonna work in meat-packing plants for anything like the prevailing wage. Nor are they gonna maintain lawns or do hotel laundries or work in restaurant kitchens. It's a silly, ignorant fantasy to think that our economy could function the way it does without a generous supply of undocumented -- and therefore cheap -- labor, a fact the business community, if not the MAGAtariat, knows all too well.
Should the economy function the way it does, with CEO's and others making billions while people earning minimum wage - or maybe less as some immigrants do - are below poverty level? Should peons be essential to the system? Is that a liberal view? I believe myself that all workers in the the US should earn a decent wage.
The importation of masses of people from poor countries is one thing which keeps this kind of stratification going. It keeps prices down, which is good for those who do not compete for jobs at the lower end of the scale, but not so good for unskilled workers in the US, who are disproportionately non-white.
And you're willing to pay what will be required to make every job in the US pay a decent living wage? Really? In a country where we can't even manage to raise the federal minimum wage above $7 and change per hour?
In theory I'm all for the US becoming urban Switzerland, where a server in a restaurant earns a wage you can raise a family on. But the massive reorganization of the US economy that would be required, and the political convulsions that would ensue, make that at best a next-century fantasy, and judging from the attitudes of more than a third of the country, too much of a shock to some people's sense of status to be possible even within imagination.
I'd rather see a properly funded immigration system, thorough enforcement of workplace safety standards, and a reliable social safety net for people who need it. THAT at least is a practical possibility.
"So why have immigration hawks breathlessly talked themselves into believing it would make things worse?
It's a mystery."
is it though? in an election year, is it really a mystery?
Not that much of a mystery. "Don't let the perfect become the enemy of the good" may be an overused phrase but actually letting the perfect become the enemy of the good is how all too many people view the making of public policy. If nothing is ever perfect enough for you than you can maintain your safe above it all perspective. I wasn't a fan of the policy because I thought Biden gave up too much without getting enough in return (like protection for the dreamers), but I thought the politics of the moment probably forced Biden to accept it. The fact that Trump sabotaged the whole thing so he could have a campaign issue tells us all too much about the modern Republican party.
And it ain't JUST about a campaign issue either. A LOT of Republicans simply don't want any "immigrants" here at all, except of course for nice White ones like "Norwegians," or the ones who work in meat-packing plants and maintain the landscape and do hotel laundries whom Nice Republicans never see because of course they don't; that stuff just happens. And they don't want any more of that "para Español, oprima el dos," either!
In other words, a LOT of Republicans are out-and-out racists, if not White supremacists, "Close the border" is a politically acceptable way of saying "I hate brown people too."
And just how was this bill going to fund all these "improvements"? Tax hikes? Tip jars at airports and border crossings?
Funding cuts to the IRS, FBI and AFT? (aka, Defunding the Police, GOP style.)
Meet the Society for American Civic Renewal, partly funded by a non-profit called the Howdy Doody Good Times Foundation,
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/inside-a-secret-society-of-prominent-right-wing-christian-men-prepping-for-a-national-divorce
It's an subversionist Moose Lodge and mystery cult.
@cld
These guys sound like a bunch of middle school pansies who got some money (stealing or inheriting, most likely), and are now interested in committing some violence against women. They have formed a christofascist boys club, documented their goals with various grandiloquent "mission statements, but it all boils down to they just want to beat their wives with impunity. Now that we know who they are, I give it a few months before we find out some of them are what they themselves would call perverts.
Its real simple, why take half a loaf now, when your high lord and master (Orange Jesus) commanded you to piss all over that 1/2 loaf and flush it into the sewer in order for him to have the issue to run on this November.
Maybe the question at the end of KD's post was sarcastic, but the answer is, the Republican party wants problems, not solutions.
+1!
Seems sensible to suggest we only take in as many asylum seekers as we can actually competently manage, as a baseline. Given only 10% are properly being monitored by ATD, we've made a big mess. Mandating reliable and proven ATD methods is one step, but I would be okay gradually ramping this up to acknowledge the reality of the management situation, and if that means less asylum seekers allowed during that ramp up period, so be it. This would obviously have to be accompanied by monitoring the monitors with actual teeth, in order to hit performance and efficiency goals and disallowing dragging feet and bureaucratic laziness.
A good number of the bureaucratic problems we have are related to mismanagement (strategic, tactical, analytic and data), we should know exactly how many monitors we have, how many asylum seekers each can actually monitor and case manage, and form and adjust policies in light of such (and the other political and value considerations).
Competency must come first.
About the CHNV parole program: we used to think that people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela deserved special consideration because those countries were either failed states, or undemocratic regimes that oppressed and jailed dissenters. But now the GOP realizes that democracy is old hat, and a strongman is just what this country needs! It needs the guy who’s promised to prosecute his political enemies, just like they do in those countries! So those folks should just suck it up and go back home and learn to like autocracy.
/s
Diving into these details is a useless exercise. This bill likely would have become law, but for the fact that Trump ordered R legislators to kill it.
Republicans were killing immigration reform before Trump. A bill in 2013 was set to get a majority in both houses, but the majority of Republicans in the House killed it.
Maybe. But this bill was giving R's even more of what they wanted than last time.
It's a mystery, unless you recognize that we are instinctively tribal. A few hundred million years of genetic evolution has taught our social instinct that the worst thing a social system can do is not act in concert.
"The very essence of instinct is that it is followed independently of reason." – Charles Darwin.
Translation: Republicans are following our species' social instinct independently of reason. So are we. Our reasoning kicks in after we've decided who is and who is not in our tribe. Let's hope the Republican tribe keeps getting smaller, and Democratic tribe keeps getting larger up to and including November.
So why have immigration hawks breathlessly talked themselves into believing it would make things worse? It's a mystery.
What, exactly, is mysterious about "The Fuhrer gave them an order"?