The prospects for a deal to secure the border remain dim as lawmakers spar over full-year funding for the government and election year politics continue to embroil the debate over how to handle the problem, leaving many hurdles for Congress to navigate and few paths to getting a bill passed.
A bipartisan deal negotiated and passed by the Senate has been stalled out in the House for weeks amid Republican opposition that the bill doesn’t go far enough to deal with the problems. Some Republicans have said they will accept nothing less than H.R. 2, a border bill passed at the beginning of this Congress filled with more restrictive policies that Democrats and President Joe Biden would not support.
Instead, the U.S. will continue to operate on immigration laws that haven’t undergone significant reforms in decades, which experts say is part of the reason there are backlogs of millions of cases.
Along with arguments over the restrictiveness of the bill, there are also election year politics in play for lawmakers as both parties hope to win control of the chambers that are currently split under slim majorities. Biden and Trump’s involvement on the issue and bill have only ramped up the temperature on what is always a politically charged issue.
“Before the election, there's a snowball's chance in hell anything gets done and immigration,” said David Cohen, a professor a political science professor and director of the University of Akron’s Applied Politics program. “Politically, I don't I don't see any possible way that any legislation gets through.”
Despite few signs of movement in the Republican-led House, Biden has still pushed them to put the bill up for a vote, including challenging the House to pass it during his State of the Union address last week.
“This bill would save lives and bring order to the border,” Biden said. “It would also give me and any new president new emergency authority to temporarily shut down the border when the number of migrants at the border is overwhelming.”
The bill, negotiated over months by a bipartisan coalition of senators, would hire additional border agents and immigration judges, expedite the asylum process and add technology to entry points that could detect drugs in vehicles.
A Wall Street Journal survey released last week found a majority of voters within both parties are supportive of the legislation, with 59% saying they would support the package. One in five voters also ranked immigration as their top issue heading into November, outranking every other issue, including the economy.
Biden has accused Republicans and former President Donald Trump of playing politics with the border as he tries to flip the narrative that his policies led to record levels of crossings.
“And if my predecessor is watching: Instead of paying (playing) politics and pressuring members of Congress to block the bill, join me in telling the Congress to pass it,” Biden said during the State of the Union.
The White House is reportedly mulling over what executive actions the president can take in lieu of a bill from Congress as they seek to show voters Biden is trying to address the problem. Executive action is a route several Republicans have called on Biden to take on after the collapse of the bill.
The lead Republican negotiator on the bill, Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma, has been among the GOP lawmakers who have said Biden could take steps on his own despite the demise of the border bill.
“The problem is the president also left out some of the things that he could do right now he’s choosing not to do. He has a very open parole system that literally thousands of people today are coming across and being rapidly paroled,” Lankford said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Polling has found immigration to be a difficult issue for the president, who is in a neck-and-neck fight with Trump at this point in the likely general election matchup. The WSJ survey found a plurality of voters put more blame on Biden than Republicans for the situation at the border, with 45% that Biden’s executive actions reversing Trump policies were to blame, while around 39% said Republicans killed the Senate deal because of Trump’s opposition.
While Biden and his campaign have tried to turn the issue back on Republicans, it’s uncertain how that argument will land with voters.
“The question is how does it get out into the ether? Is the American public listening on this issue?” Cohen said. “Are they willing to hear the argument from the Biden campaign and the Biden White House, that ‘hey, guess what, it wasn't Democrats, and it wasn't Joe Biden that killed the immigration bill. It was House Republicans and Donald Trump.’”