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| DACA supporters march in San Francisco. Photo: David Bacon |
President
Trump had dinner with Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Chuck Schumer
(NY) and Representative Nancy Pelosi (CA) the evening of September 13.
Afterwards the two Democrats issued a statement saying they’d
made
a deal with Trump to protect the nearly 800,000 young immigrants currently
enrolled in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA)
program, which the Trump administration is terminating as of next March. “We
agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a
package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both
sides,” Schumer and Pelosi wrote.
As
has been usual with this administration, the next day the president contradicted himself several times, but in the end it appeared that Trump and
the Democrats had at least made, as Republican senator
John Cornyn (TX) put it, “
a
deal to make a deal.” So passage of a new law to protect young undocumented
immigrants is possible, although far from certain.
What Would Be Traded
Off?
To steer such a law through Congress the Democrats would need to make compromises in order to get enough Republicans legislators on board.
On
September 14 the
National Review published
an
article outlining a mainstream Republican negotiating position for
possible talks. The author,
National Review deputy managing editor
Robert VerBruggen, isn’t especially interested in increased border security.
Instead, he wants Republicans to push for an expansion of the E-Verify program,
through which employers use an online connection to government data bases to check the legal status of new hires. Making E-Verify mandatory for all
private employers should be non-negotiable, VerBruggen writes. And he insists
that if DACA recipients are given access to legal status or citizenship, they
should be barred from applying for green cards for their parents. Finally, he
wants changes to legal immigration, moving away from the current priority for family
unification toward greater emphasis on bringing in highly skilled workers.
(Although he doesn’t mention it, this would not only add valuable technical
workers to the U.S. work pool—it would also lure them away from other countries
that might be economic rivals.)
How much of this would the Democrats accept? Many
of them already back mandatory E-Verify. It’s true that Chuck Schumer has
objections to the program—but only because he wants something tougher. In a
2010
Washington
Post op-ed, he and Republican
senator Lindsey Graham (SC) called for a biometric Social Security card. “Prospective employers would be
responsible for swiping the cards through a machine to confirm a person's
identity and immigration status,” Schumer and Graham explained. “Employers who
refused to swipe the card or who otherwise knowingly hired unauthorized workers
would face stiff fines and, for repeat offenses, prison sentences.”
Will the Democrats Cave?
The
Democrats don’t actually have a good record on helping youthful immigrants like
the DACA recipients.
Proposals to legislate legalization for childhood arrivals began with the bipartisan
DREAM Act in 2001, but the bill stalled in Congress for years. From 2009 to
2011 the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency; they
could have passed the bill then, but didn’t.
Pressed
by the “Dreamers”—young immigrant activists supporting the DREAM Act—in
June 2010, Schumer claimed that passing the bill would hurt the chances for
passing comprehensive immigration reform later. The Democrats
finally
brought the DREAM Act up for a vote in December 2010. It passed the House,
but the Senate never voted. Supporters couldn’t come up with the 60 votes
necessary to block a filibuster by opponents. Three Republicans backed the
bill, but it was opposed by five Democrats: Max Baucus and John
Tester (MT), Kay Hagan (NC), Ben Nelson (NE), and Mark Pryor of (AR).
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| Photo: National Immigrant Youth Alliance/The Dream Is Now |
Will Trump’s Base Desert Him?
Schumer
and Pelosi's claim that Trump was making a deal with them stirred outrage among
some of Trump’s loudest supporters. “
Breitbart News called the president
‘Amnesty Don,’”
Politico
reported. “Commentator Ann Coulter mused about impeaching Trump. And hard-line
immigration hawks in Congress like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) called the contours
of the deal an ‘irreparable’ betrayal of Trump's base.”
But
it’s not clear that the far right was really breaking with Trump. It seems more
likely that people like Coulter are temporarily distancing themselves from the
president while stirring up their backers to help push for strong
anti-immigrant measures in any potential legislative compromise. A
New
York Times op-ed by Eric Cantor,
a former House majority leader for the Republicans, suggests the latter course.
“It is well past time for Republicans to stand up to those on the right who are
quick to denounce any sensible solution as amnesty,” he wrote, “and for
Democrats to stand up to those on the left who rail against any meaningful
steps toward border security and immigration enforcement.”
In
other words, the Republicans can hold back the Breitbart types if the
Democrats agree to hold back pro-immigrant activists.
(People
might wonder why Cantor and
Breitbart News see “amnesty” as a pejorative
term. This is a reference to the last major legalization of undocumented
immigrants, in 1986, which was widely referred to as an "amnesty." Ever since
then the right has claimed that the 1986 legalization caused the sharp increase
in unauthorized immigration during the 1990s. But there’s no evidence for the
claim. Asked to produce evidence, rightwingers generally
refuse to answer;
an effort to cite the argument in a 2015 lawsuit was
laughed out of court.
So “amnesty” as used by Cantor and
Breitbart is simply a far-right
fantasy like
“death
panels” and the
threat of Sharia
law. Nevertheless, media like the
New York Times still let it be employed in this sense.)
What Do the Dreamers
Say?
While reporting extensively on the reactions of
pundits and politicians, the media haven’t said much about the views of the
people actually affected—the DACA recipients themselves.
One exception was
NPR’s
Morning
Edition on September 15. NPR correspondent Richard Gonzales reported on
interviews with Dreamers: “[T]hey don't
want a deal that would, let’s say, implement the E-Verify system, which
requires employers to check the legal status of people they hire. To the
Dreamers, that’s just another way of increasing the threat of deportation to
their undocumented parents. And they also don’t want a deal in which their DACA
status is a tradeoff for enhanced border security. That, they say, would
further what they consider the militarization of the border.” (Even in this
otherwise excellent report,
Morning Edition host Mary Louise Kelly
persisted in using in the far right’s sense of “amnesty” as a pejorative term.)
