The Good and the Bad of the Senate Border Bill
It mixes much-needed reform with changes that could upend the asylum system in damaging ways.
A bipartisan group of senators unveiled a long-awaited border security bill on Sunday night that links a plethora of immigration-related provisions to funding for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, the culmination of four months of negotiations. The 370-page, $118 billion proposal, released by Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I–Ariz.), James Lankford (R–Okla.), and Chris Murphy (D–Conn.), would bring dramatic changes to the U.S. immigration system if passed.
Several House and Senate lawmakers have already voiced their opposition to the bill, suggesting a tough road to passage. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R–La.) said the bill wouldn't receive a vote in his chamber, a sentiment that Speaker Mike Johnson (R–La.) echoed, calling it "dead on arrival" in the House. Over a dozen Republican senators are reportedly already against the bill, as are Sens. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Bob Menendez (D–N.J.), and Alex Padilla (D–Calif.).
The bill is slated for a first vote in the Senate on Wednesday and seems to face long odds in the House. Still, it's worth examining key provisions in this bill, if for no other reason than to understand what constitutes compromise border legislation these days.
The border security package includes some boosts for legal immigration and legal immigrants, including "work authorization for family members of certain visa holders" and 50,000 additional employment and family-based visas per year for five years. It would provide relief to so-called Documented Dreamers, dependent visa holders who were brought to the U.S. legally as children by parents on nonimmigrant visas. They would be protected from "aging out" of legal status at 21 if they don't secure a green card (a situation that forces some Documented Dreamers to self-deport).
The package includes the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would eventually provide "permanent legal status to tens of thousands of Afghan nationals" who assisted the U.S. and were evacuated here following the August 2021 Taliban takeover of Afghanistan. It also aims to establish more efficient vetting processes for Afghan allies still located overseas.
The bill would most drastically affect the asylum system, making it harder for migrants to qualify for protection. It has some good intentions—for example, quicker adjudication of protection claims, which often takes years under the current system—but it would require a massive investment of resources to accomplish and the upending of certain legal standards, likely to the detriment of due process and humanitarian protection.
The bill would create "a new temporary expulsion authority" to be used "when migrant numbers overwhelm the system," according to a summary of the package. The Department of Homeland Security would have to close the border "if the daily average of migrant encounters reaches 5,000 over a week" or "8,500 in a single day," something that Johnson opposes because "the goal should be zero illegal crossings a day." Ports of entry would "process at least 1,400 migrants daily during periods" when the authority was in use, and the migrants would be subject to a "new enhanced asylum standard and removal authority."
The American Immigration Lawyers Association warned that "rapid and truncated procedures" would "undermine the fairness and thoroughness of asylum screenings" and put asylum seekers at risk "by pushing them back to unsafe and violent conditions." Immigrant advocacy organizations, including FWD.us and the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, criticized the asylum changes and the bill's failure to outline a pathway to citizenship for the country's undocumented people.
The package would preserve the status quo in some good and some bad ways. It would maintain a key measure used by the Biden administration to relieve border pressures: humanitarian parole. President Joe Biden has used the authority to establish a legal pathway to entry for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, which has been successful in reducing illegal border crossings among those nationalities. But, as the National Immigration Forum has noted, it doesn't offer solutions for Dreamers or the country's farm work force.
As is usually the case with too-big, too-expensive bills, the border security package would throw money at unprepared agencies in ill-conceived ways. The infusion of cash is so far beyond immigration agencies' current budgets, the Cato Institute's David J. Bier argued, "that it's likely that the agencies will have to engage in gross financial mismanagement just to spend it within the required timeframes." The package's funding is intended to hire 4,338 asylum officers, but it's anybody's guess how long that will take.
These kinds of lingering questions may never be resolved, given House opposition to the package. Even if the bill passes, lawmakers will have a more difficult task ahead: finding long-lasting solutions for nearly every level of the U.S. immigration system, from the undocumented people who already call the country home to the highly educated, highly skilled people who have no workable way to migrate and launch new lives here.
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The “border” bill, gives 75 times as much to Ukraine as it does to the border.
Why can Ukraine have a border but not us?
Because Democrats are enacting the “we have border at home” meme as actual policy.
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We actually spend most of the money in the US building arms which we then give to Ukraine.
We give Ukraine some money, but most of it is munitions and such.
Can the asylum seekers work in the munitions factories?
Cheaper arms for Ukraine, jobs for the new Americans.
Win-win.
The good = nothing.
The bad = everything that’s in it.
It’s horrendous. I hear Levin go into some of the details on his show. If this thing is signed into law, there should be a civil war to stop it.
Fiona, the Open Borders Slut: Good, anything that makes immigration easier; Bad, anything that might limit immigration, legal or not.
These people think of America as just a resource colony for billionaires.
Otherwise they despise it.
Milk the taxpayers until the globalists take over.
None of this is good.
Stopped at 118 billion.
Undoing all Biden did with executive orders can be done at no cost with other executive orders.
Actually, the only border getting any real impact is Ukraine.
I’m sure the Russians are just looking for a better life. Why can’t Ukraine be more libertarian?
Trump tried doing that with reversing daca.the court shit stains said trump had to follow a stupid process to undo an illegal executive order
Why does every pro illegal immigration advocate always substitute the euphemism “pathway to citizenship” for amnesty? If your position is such a good one why do you lie when presenting it?
Here’s my “pathway to citizenship”: If you are here illegally go back to your native country and apply for legal immigration. No pathway to anyone who is an illegal and still in this country. No exceptions.
My second option is to allow the amnesty but give every citizen the right to ignore in malum prohibitum laws they wish with no consequences. Why should illegal aliens be the only people who get to violate the law with impunity? Open borders advocates and their ilk do not get this right.
I’ve been reading portions of the bill and it’s worse than no bill at all. It effectively codifies the Biden open border and would prevent any future president from utilizing current law to control the border. Catch and release would no longer be optional, it would be mandatory. It would give billions to NGOs to help illegals navigate the system. It purports to place a cap of 5k per day average but allows the regime to ignore the cap if they feel like it. The Ukraine, Israel, Gaza billions are just more graft cash dumped into the same black hole. Bottom line is that the status quo is maintained and all of the right people get paid.
IOW, it’s pretty much standard for “grand bargains” on illegal immigration. They’re always just thinly disguised caves by the GOP, and tend to fall apart as soon as the details aren’t secret any more, so the Republicans favoring it can’t successfully pretend they’re not caving.
The only difference between today, and back when Reagan negotiated a amnesty in return for enhanced border enforcement, (That never happened!) is that today everybody knows what’s up, so the ‘bargains’ fall apart earlier.
Nobody in the GOP proposes these trades meaning to actually get anything in return. It’s just an effort to take a dive on an issue the base cares about, and pretend to have been robbed instead of having given the store away.
Here’s how you know it’s a crap bill–the center-right loves it:
Bill Melugin and the Border Patrol union are far more reliable and they see what I see: one of the biggest border game-changers in memory. The only reason to reject it is some combination of 1) ignorance about what the real problem at the border is (hint: it’s asylum) or 2) ignorance about the meaning of the 5,000 number (does not mean 5,000 people sneaking in illegally but 5,000 encounters which will mostly be presenting themselves for asylum); 3) wanting the crisis to continue for the benefit of the Donald Trump (such people do not actually care about the border) or 4) fear of pig-ignorant voters laboring under the first two listed forms of ignorance…
Could it be tweaked around the edges in theory? Sure. But in practice any deal that Dems agree to is by definition unacceptable to the morons in the GOP base. Even a deal as awesome as this. And this deal is awesome. It’s the greatest legislative proposal on immigration I have seen since I started this site in 2003.
Fuck the Republican Party.
Patterico (0f4039)
Patterico aptly demonstrates why his claque of center-right snakes aren’t running the GOP anymore–because for 20 years, the party’s voters told the party to clamp down on immigration, and for 20 years, guys like McCain and McConnell kept giving the Dems 90% of what they want on these supposed “bipartisan” bills. Trump comes along and homes right in on the primary issue with the voters’ alienation from the neocon party leaders, that they aren’t actually pushing back on mass migration. And they STILL, after nearly a fuckin’ decade of him building support within the party, remain obtuse as to why, insisting on the same stupid proposals over and over and over and over again, and calling the voters resisting such policies morons who “don’t understand the real problem.”
No wonder they can’t get any traction for Haley; corpo dick-suckers who are supposedly all about “the business of America is business,” but can’t figure out how to market their product to their primary customer base.
Right on cue, this french-fried faggot proves my point:
Even if I liked the Republican party, this episode would be enough to estrange me from it for years to come. Just this one single episode. Patterico (dcca7c)
Gosh, Pat, you mean you’re furious with the failure of the GOP to pass the kind of immigration bill you want them to pass? What the fuck do you think GOP voters have been angry about since 1986, which eventually led them to boot you and your Chamber of Commerce shills out of the party 30 years later, you stupid, obtuse fucking hack?
The bill is a compromise and as such it will have both good and bad within its content. The point is that the different groups will see the good and the bad differently, no body get all they want. If the bill fails to pass and that is likely it will really say that there is no solution to the problems at the border. If you want things to get better you have to start somewhere and this is a start. Put this bill into place and see where it works and where it fails and then move to correct problem. Anyone who works in any area of business know PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act), yet Congress seems to be oblivious to the idea. More likely it easier to complain than to act because when you act people hold you responsible. Sadly no one hold the complainers responsible.
No, it’s just bad you, stupid bitch.
Well Donald Trump has said it is bad, do we really need more proof than that?
BTW – the PDF of the bill is over 200 pages so I am guessing Trump did not read it.
Plenty of other people did, you disingenuous piece of shit. The pathetic part is that your side continues blaming Trump for your agenda not getting through, when the reality is that enough people actually read the contents of the bill, including media members, to understand that it’s a trash bill which is hardly a “bipartisan” compromise.
The Dems in the Senate did not, either.
The Dems in the House sure as hell did not.
Congress skips the PDCA and goes with PDSC (Posture-Debate-Spend-Celebrate).
The idea for the Repubs is to fail to pass any border bill prior to next November so they can use the border crisis as an election issues to beat up the Dems.
The Dems brought this on themselves with their head-in-the-sand do-nothing attitudes for years with this issue.
I dunno. I think passing something to give the border states some relief (like limiting #encounters per day before pushback) is better than nothing. If the Repubs get elected with majorities in both houses they can just deport everyone with an accent. Problem solved.
The idea for the Repubs is to fail to pass any border bill prior to next November so they can use the border crisis as an election issues to beat up the Dems.
If that was the case, they wouldn’t have bothered passing HR 2 or HR 29. So that media narrative can be summarily dismissed, although the center-right is certainly blissfully pretending they never happened.
The Dems brought this on themselves with their head-in-the-sand do-nothing attitudes for years with this issue.
They weren’t sticking their heads in the sand, they’ve been openly facilitating it for a generation now, because their political pundits were telling them that importing more migrants now meant more Democrat votes later.
I think passing something to give the border states some relief (like limiting #encounters per day before pushback) is better than nothing.
Passing a shit bill just to say you did something is political laziness and ennui at its peak.
I have a spare bedroom in the house.
It can’t cost much to feed one. I like good south of the border cooking. I am thinking I can “sponsor” one from Chicago. Let them stay at the house. Cook, clean, fix things, mow the yard, shovel snow. I could let em have access to the wifi and use my spare laptop when they weren’t working. Yo hablo un poco Espanol. Is anyone else out there doing this? Maybe make an app -MyIndenturedHelp. This is probably bigger than food trucks.
Thinking along the same lines. I have a large collection of monocles that need almost constant polishing. The same kind of unskilled labor that Koch Industries needs in abundance. I’m not too far from the windy city and I’m thinking mayor pinhead, er Brandon would jump at the chance if I were to offer a room for lets say 2k a week.
What if you offer her a position as an au pair, but you don’t have kids? Would it still be considered human trafficking, or is it okay because she’s seeking asylum? Asking for a friend.
Ask Arnold Schwarzenegger, he’s got real-life experience.
And again. This purports to be a bipartisan bill that is technically a tri partisan bill but looks a lot like a mono partisan bill . The lone Republican has been censured in his home state for supporting it and the independent is a former Democrat who caucuses with the Democrats. The Biden regime gets everything they want. Looks a lot like a D bill to me.
This whole thing, and this bill has got to be THE most agree-to-disagree situation going right now.
People are agreeing to disagree about how open the border should be, and so the border remains open.
but it would require a massive investment of resources to accomplish and the upending of certain legal standards
Oh no, not the upending of legal standards.
You know who else invested a massive amount of resources and didn’t accomplish what they spent the massive amount of resources on?
Zuckerman?
Khufu?
.
https://thepostmillennial.com/eagle-pass-border-crossings-drop-from-thousands-per-day-to-3-after-texas-occupies-park
“See? ZerO ILegAl immaGRunts iZ unaCHievaBLe!!!”
Proving once again that there’s no Congressional impasse that can’t be solved, if only both sides will agree to spend a lot of money they don’t have.
Still, it’s worth examining key provisions in this bill, if for no other reason than to understand what constitutes compromise border legislation these days.
And yet, somehow you avoid mentioning Ukraine and gutting local self-governance completely.
Maybe they can move into your place.
How anyone who calls themselves human can be a democrat is beyond me.
Because you can have open borders or a welfare state, you can’t have both.
We have a welfare state. Not as big as Europe, but one nonetheless.
That’s because the majority of the regulars on here are not.
Or your snatch.
Let ‘em into your place honey.
It is illegal to cross the border without permission, that is the law. That law was decided by American citizens through their representatives.
They are already criminals.
Fuck them.
What if it’s Mormons walking around in front of your house?
Cool, maybe the governor of Texas can bus some of those lovely gentleman to your house.
And if the law is so bloody unpopular, it should be easy for you to repeal it.
They are literally criminals. Why would they care about violating your rights?
You got a problem with CHUDs, bitch?
“In my experience they are far more likely to keep to themselves and avoid drawing attention if they aren’t here legitimately.”
NYC says hello.
Who wouldn’t want to be a sister wife?
I get the feeling lynn may be gender confused.
That’s up to he/her
LOL
Ok honey.
Sure you can have both. Just save the welfare funds for American citizens who are down on their luck.
Just because you’re too stupid to understand the limits of scale doesn’t mean anything you support is fine.
Problem is that most immigrants aren’t allowed to legally work, so if they want to eat they go on welfare. Which is ironic considering the same people who oppose letting them work are the same ones complaining about them being on government programs.
If they weren’t here, they wouldn’t be eating or working.