After 12 years of failed attempts at immigration reform, the current round of negotiations are turning on a strangely personalized question: When a deal is being made, should Stephen Miller be at the table?
Miller is the White House's point man for immigration policy. He is also an immigration restrictionist: He wants a policy that favors skills-based recruitment over extended families, and he wants a lower immigration rate overall. He says he's concerned about assimilation and crime and native wages; his critics say he just wants to keep America as white as possible.
As Jim Antle points out in a column for The Week, previous immigration negotiations have been consistently bipartisan, bringing together John McCain and Ted Kennedy, Marco Rubio and Chuck Schumer, now Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin - but "they have mostly taken place between people who are fundamentally in agreement on immigration," who favor both amnesty for illegal immigrants and reforms that would probably increase immigration rates.
The problem with this approach is that it doesn't represent the actual divisions in the country. Americans have become more pro-immigration since the 1990s, but there is still a consistent pattern when you ask about immigration rates: About a third of Americans favor the current trend, slightly fewer want higher rates, and about a third, like Miller, want immigration reduced.
And there are various reasonable grounds on which one might favor a reduction. The foreign-born share of the U.S. population is near a record high, and increased diversity and the distrust it sows have clearly put stresses on our politics. There are questions about how fast the recent wave of low-skilled immigrants is assimilating, and evidence that constant new immigration makes it harder for earlier arrivals to advance.
With that said, illegal immigration has slowed over the last decade, and immigration's potential economic and humanitarian benefits are still considerable. And it's also clear that many immigration restrictionists are influenced by simple bigotry.
This bigotry, from the point of view of many immigration advocates, justifies excluding real restrictionists from the negotiating table. You can give them a little more money for border security, some promises about reducing illegal entry. But you can't let them play a large role in shaping policy. The limits of this strategy, though, are evident in the repeated failure of "comprehensive" immigration reform over the last decade and more, doomed each time by the gulf between the plans of Republican negotiators and the actual preferences of their voters.
The present view of many liberals seems to be that restrictionists can eventually be steamrolled - that the same ethnic transformations that have made white anxiety acute will eventually bury white-identity politics with sheer multiethnic numbers.
But liberals have been waiting 12 years for that "eventually" to arrive, and instead Trump is president and the illegal immigrants they want to protect are still in limbo. So maybe it would be worth trying to actually negotiate with Stephen Miller.
Especially since last week, Trump and Miller actually made an interesting offer: an amnesty and even a path to citizenship for DACA recipients and other Dreamers, more generous than what many restrictionists favor and with no promise of the new E-Verify enforcements conservatives often seek, in return for a shift (over many years) to a skills-based policy and a somewhat lower immigration rate.
If you're committed to the view that restrictionists can and must be steamrolled, you'll respond to this offer the way many Democrats have - call it a "white supremacist ransom note," punt on policy, and use the issue to rally your base in 2018.
But if you think that lasting deals are forged when all sides are represented, you might consider making a counteroffer: for instance, the same rough blueprint but with more green cards for skilled immigrants, so that Miller gets his cuts to low-skilled immigration but the overall rate stays closer to the status quo.
A bargain that actually reflects the shape of public opinion, not just the elite consensus, can only happen with someone like Stephen Miller at the table.
The New York Times