They weren’t bluffing.
On Wednesday night, Senate Republicans made good on their threat to hold up military aid to key allies — Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan — unless President Biden agrees to big changes to policies on the southern border. Never mind that most of those Republicans supported aid to Ukraine a year ago, and have rubber-stamped aid to Israel for their entire careers. Never mind that support for policies to counter China have been a bipartisan bright spot on Capitol Hill. Never mind that the world is watching in horror — or in the case of our adversaries, delight — as American foreign policy priorities are put in jeopardy over domestic politics.
That might have mattered years ago to your grandparents’ Republican Party. But Senate Republicans these days are far less interested in Ukraine and the world than in chanelling public anger about immigration. They see border security as a winning political issue for them, and they aren’t wrong about that. Republican voters consistently rank securing the border and halting irregular immigration among their top priorities. That’s why party leaders in Washington are falling over themselves to prove their devotion to the cause.
Even Senators Mitch “Not the time to go wobbly” McConnell and Mitt “Russia’s Our No. 1 Geopolitical Foe” Romney were on board with the Republicans’ ultimatum: We’ll cut off the flow of missiles to Ukraine unless you Democrats cut off the flow of migrants into Texas.
Curiously, though, Senate Republicans have been so busy demanding big changes to Mr. Biden’s policies that they apparently haven’t noticed how much of their wish list has already been granted.
They want the resumption of the construction of the border wall. The Biden administration already conceded to resuming construction this fall when it agreed to spend money that Congress allocated for that purpose in 2019.
They want to deny asylum to those who have passed through a third country en route to the United States. That’s an expansion of a rule that the administration has already instituted.
And they are insisting that asylum seekers meet a higher standard during screenings at which migrants have to demonstrate a “credible fear of persecution,” to make sure that fewer claims are granted. The Biden administration has already done that for people who have been apprehended between ports of entry — in the desert, for instance, or crossing the Rio Grande.
This is not to say that the Biden administration and the Republicans are on the same page about immigration. There are real differences of opinion regarding what legal protections asylum seekers should get, where they ought to wait while their cases are heard, and how wide to open the door to people from countries like Cuba, Haiti and Venezuela. Many of those people don’t meet the traditional definition of asylum seeker and are just trying to find work and feed their families.
Democrats tend to err on the side of opening the doors so wide that their own poor and working-class voters can feel displaced. But increasingly Republicans talk of slamming the border shut, a demand that is both unrealistic and economically damaging. Resisting those demands requires an important fight, but not until next year, when lawmakers have time to give these issues the attention they deserve.
The biggest thing that Senate Republicans seem to be demanding is that the president take the problems of the border seriously, after years of downplaying or avoiding the subject. That seemed to be their main message as they stormed out of a raucous classified briefing this week with top military brass who were there to talk about Ukraine. But the administration’s request for almost $14 billion for border security — an amount that is much higher than the numbers discussed over the summer — shows how far the Biden administration has come toward the Republican position that something big must be done.
“The money is a major acknowledgment and concession to Republicans, just in terms of the level of importance and seriousness,” Doris Meissner of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group, told me.
The White House request includes funding to hire an additional 1,300 Border Patrol agents — a key Republican demand — as well as 1,000 Customs and Border Protection officers, 1,600 asylum officers and support staff members, and 1,470 Immigrations and Customs Enforcement attorneys. That growth in personnel reflects the vast expansion of the number of people who have been showing up at the border and entering our hopelessly backlogged asylum system.
The new amount also includes $1.4 billion for local governments and nonprofit groups that bear the brunt of housing asylum seekers and migrants, a request that came after the White House got an earful from Democratic leaders in New York, Chicago and other cities that have been struggling to feed and house the migrants that have been arriving by the busload daily.
President Biden, whose press secretary avoided using the word “crisis” to describe the border during his first year in office, admits that the system needs fixing.
“We all know it’s broken,” he said in videotaped remarks from the White House this week, begging Senate Republicans to vote for the military aid package or at least to roll up their sleeves and hammer out a deal.
“I am willing to make significant compromises on the border,” he said.
Of course, there are things that the Biden administration should not compromise on. Some Republicans want to shut down asylum completely. That would be morally wrong but also unwise, making it harder to persuade the Latin American countries that have taken in the bulk of the asylum seekers in the hemisphere to keep shouldering that burden.
Senate Republicans are also trying to take away the president’s power to grant humanitarian parole, which is a permission slip to enter the country and stay for a limited period. It’s true that the Biden administration has leaned more heavily on this tool than previous administrations, creating a program that allows up to 30,000 people per month to travel to the United States from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela and work for two years. The creation of that program has been a sore spot for Senate Republicans working on immigration.
“We never signed off on that,” one Senate staff member told me, adding that it “ kind of poisoned the well,” making the current negotiation more difficult. But the Biden administration was trying to persuade people not to walk thousands of miles to the southern border by giving them hope for a legal pathway if they applied from home. The program has had mixed results, relieving some pressure at the border but creating a new problem of a growing population inside the United States with temporary status.
Still, even those who are angry about that program should understand why presidents need the authority to grant humanitarian parole. Presidents have used it at least 126 times since its creation in 1952 for everything from rescuing allies during the fall of Saigon to allowing orphans who were in the process of being adopted to be evacuated to the United States after an earthquake, according to David J. Bier of the Cato Institute. A compromise could be struck to put some guardrails around the use of parole while keeping this power intact.
Of course, there are Republicans who want to hold out for more, like Mike Johnson, the new speaker of the House, who is insisting on more draconian demands included in a bill that passed the House this year. The bill would make it easier for families to be held in detention indefinitely and make it a federal crime to overstay a visa, among other things.
“The House is saying, ‘Give us the farm or you get nothing,’” said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, policy director at the American Immigration Council, an immigrants’ rights group in Washington.
If Republicans want to pass this aid package before the end of the year — and I believe that deep down, plenty of them do — there is a deal to be had. There are bipartisan ways to limit the abuse of our immigration system while preserving the rights of the most vulnerable. But truly fixing this broken system is going to take more time than Congress has at the moment. Our allies in Ukraine need help now.