Inside Another Senate Lollygag on Migrant Rights
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Negotiations on migrant policy are said to continue this week in the Senate, with no work product yet to be revealed. No memo leaked. No framework published.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) again claimed progress on an agreement on Tuesday. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) concurred.
The Democrats’ lead negotiator, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT), seemed less optimistic. So did Senator James Lankford (R-OK), the lead Republican.
Neither had a timeline for a substantive update beyond platitudes about how “parole is the sticking point” while praising the other, McConnell, Schumer, and Senator Kyrsten Sinema (I-AZ), who hasn’t said much at all to the press since the Senate returned Monday afternoon.
Sinema has been relentless, firmly sacrificing fundamental rights for migrant in hopes of unlocking GOP support for further funding for the Ukrainian military.
President Joe Biden said last month that he was open to major concessions on border security.
The president's words were all the Senate’s immigration hawks needed to hear to jam $61 billion in emergency assistance to Ukraine, just a fraction of what experts say is needed to win the war against Russia.
Senators are unclear about when Ukraine will come calling again on Congress for more war funding, but no one believes this $61 billion is to “defeat Vladmir Putin.”
Does that mean regime change? Retaking Crimea? Or will Russia get to keep the territory it has seized in exchange for peace?
Most Senators either don’t know or won’t say, though several Republican lawmakers in both chambers are skeptical of funding Ukraine’s war with Russia no matter how many migrant rights concessions get chucked aside in the Senate negotiations.
This is all to say that a deal on migrants rights and Ukraine is unlikely at this point, and probably always was.
From the start these talks in the Sentate have been dominated by buzzwords like “border” and “parole” for the Capitol beat to fixate on. “The biggest hangup is parole” remains the current conventional wisdom, a leftover from the holiday season.
But what does parole mean? Broadly speaking, it means the authority to release a detained migrant. Folks turn themselves into Border Patrol, get detained, processed, and some get paroled, usually to family members, while they continue through an immigration system that everyone agrees is supremely broken.
Without parole or some other mechanism to release migrants to their families, the Department of Homeland Security must keep migrants in detention them while they wade through a process that can take years, even decades in some cases.
Hundreds of thousands of migrants crammed into for-profit concentration camps would make any president look bad. Such is the cynical political logic at play by the Congressional GOP. By offering major concessions, the Biden administration has walked straight into the Republican trap.
“People are going to die if you do this — a lot of people,” Todd Schulte of Fwd.us told The Messenger in a deep dive into what’s at stake in the talks concerning migrant rights and funding for Ukraine. We hope you read every word of what Schulte said because he’s absolutely right: This is about life and death for a lot of migrants in this country.
Ultimately, the negotiation in the Senate is not really about domestic policy at all, as Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) reminded us last night when House members returned to the Hill after nearly a month away for the holidays.
We asked AOC if she was comfortable with Senator Murphy leading Democrats in a migrant policy negotiation with Republicans.
“At the end of the day, while people are saying this is about immigration, or they’re saying it’s about the border, it’s really not about that, at all,” she said. “On the Democratic side you have folks who are not the go-to experts on immigration, but they are the foreign policy folks who want to see something on Ukraine or Israel. So in terms of leading actual immigration policy, it’s important to have the Hispanic Caucus at the table, and folks that have a lot of experience in immigration overall.”
“But that’s not what the Democratic side is really seeking in this so-called deal,” she continued. “You have the Republicans who have made their ask on immigration, but there aren’t really any Democratic counters on what we want to get done on immigration, as well.”
AOC said she sees no wins for the Democrats in the negotiating space. Asked what a good Democratic ask would be, the three-term Latina from New York didn’t waffle.
“We can get resources to judges and to our USCIS civil system, an expansion of visas, expanding paths to citizenship, work permits, negotiating down the work permit waiting period which is statutory so Congress has to deal with it,” she said. “We can reduce the statutory waiting period so people can start working and rely on our systems less. There’s no shortage of things ask for and fight for: Dream Act, Promise Act, DACA, registry. I hear a lot about what the Republican side is fighting for, but I haven’t heard of advancements of processing visa statuses in a meaningful way to counter.”
We asked her what structural changes she’d like to see in how migrant rights get negotiated in Congress.
“I think having some of those coalesced specific points and demands is really important,” she said. “I think in a movement space, there are so many different requests and demands, so it’s important for us to organize ourselves around some central principles, not just about what we’re fighting against, but about what we want.”