Like moths to a flame, Republicans have once again flirted with a big immigration compromise only to get their wings singed.
This time, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma thought he could thread the needle and find a sweet spot for a bipartisan deal that angers the right and left but appeals to a middle majority.
It turned out the middle didn’t exist.
Mike Pence learned that lesson as far back as 2006. As a congressman from Indiana, he backed a legalization bill and took severe heat.
President Trump tried to broker a deal in 2018. Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona tried in 2007 with President George W. Bush’s blessing. Jeff Flake of Arizona tried, first as a congressman and then as a senator, for more than a decade.
The best comparison for Mr. Lankford may be Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who in 2013 tried leading negotiations on a bill to legalize illegal immigrants, welcome guest workers and strengthen the border. It cleared the Democratic-led Senate but didn’t get a vote in the Republican-led House.
Mr. Rubio got his nose bloodied for his trouble, and he has avoided immigration talks since. He was one of the first Republicans to denounce the deal proposed last week — in vehement terms.
“The ‘border deal’ is an easy NO,” Mr. Rubio said on social media. “It reads like a parody of an actual border security bill.”
Mr. Lankford, who was in the House at the time, was aware of the experience.
“This only happens about every decade to try to work on border security because it’s so contentious. It takes a decade to forget what happened to the last person,” he told reporters.
He tried anyway.
“I’m the ranking member on border management on the Homeland Security Committee, so I got the short straw on being in the chair at the moment when we were going to actually deal with this issue,” he said.
Mr. Lankford spent four months working chiefly with Sens. Christopher Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, and Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona independent. The agreement would have created an expulsion authority for when the flow of illegal immigrants topped certain thresholds, expanded the government’s deportation machinery and reined in some Biden administration catch-and-release practices.
It delayed border wall construction, included hundreds of thousands of new guest workers, gave a path to citizenship to Afghans airlifted out of the country in the chaotic 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal and granted government-funded attorneys to illegal immigrant children. It did not include the legalization of “Dreamers” or other illegal immigrants.
The plan was defeated in a Republican-led filibuster on Wednesday. Just three of Mr. Lankford’s Republican colleagues voted in favor.
Douglas Rivlin, senior director of communications at America’s Voice, a major immigration pressure group, said the Republican Party has drifted toward an “anti-immigration party” since 2013.
“There used to be support in the Republican Party for legal immigration. That evaporated,” he said.
He said 90% of the deal Mr. Lankford struck was border policies that the Republicans wanted. “I don’t know a pro-immigrant advocate that supported this bill,” Mr. Rivlin said, but Republicans still didn’t embrace it.
“It doesn’t bode well for solutions on immigration,” he said.
Emilio Gonzalez, who ran U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Bush administration and came out against Mr. Lankford’s proposal, said members of Congress will always struggle on the issue. He said a president needs to drive the negotiations.
“Immigration reform has to start at the White House,” he said. “One of the reasons it failed under President Bush, notwithstanding his great interest in wanting to enact immigration reform, is he essentially told Congress, ‘Hey, bring me something I can sign.’ And then it just collapsed in the Senate.”
That was in 2007 when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was the Democrats’ top negotiator and Mr. Kyl, a conservative senator from Arizona, was Republicans’ point man.
The deal they struck offered illegal immigrants a lengthy path to citizenship in exchange for paying a fine and returning home to collect their new visa. It also would have doubled the size of the Border Patrol and mandated employers to use E-Verify to screen out illegal immigrants from the workforce.
That bill blew up spectacularly in the Senate. It couldn’t muster a majority, much less the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Sixteen members of the Democratic Caucus joined 37 Republicans to defeat it.
Those Democrats said the deal was tilted too much in favor of businesses. Republican opponents said it didn’t do enough for immigration enforcement.
Six years later, Mr. Rubio was part of what became known as the “Gang of Eight” — four Republicans and four Democrats who tried another legalization proposal.
The lawmakers ensured they had labor and business community buy-in and got a bill through the Senate after pumping massive amounts of money into border security. The House, controlled by Republicans, rejected a motion to bring the bill to the floor. Republican leaders in the House said the deal was too lenient toward illegal immigrants.
In 2018, Mr. Trump suggested a package that included citizenship for illegal immigrant “Dreamers” along with funding for his border wall, an end to the visa lottery that gives away immigration passes by chance, and new limits on the chain of family migration.
Democrats rejected that offer and another potential deal to slim down the package just to the Dreamers and the border wall.
• Stephen Dinan can be reached at sdinan@washingtontimes.com.
• Ramsey Touchberry can be reached at rtouchberry@washingtontimes.com.
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