Now Do the Border
Biden’s border-deal double-down would make for good politics and good policy.
IT WAS A VICTORY-LAP, SPIKE-THE-FOOTBALL MOMENT for President Joe Biden. “It’s a good day for America, it’s a good day for Europe, and it’s a good day for world peace,” he said in an address from the White House on Wednesday morning after signing the Ukraine-aid bill. Congress had reasserted America’s status as the “indispensable nation,” he said: “We don’t walk away from our allies; we stand with them. We don’t let tyrants win; we oppose them. We don’t merely watch global events unfold; we shape them.”
But Biden didn’t stop there. “There’s one thing this bill does not do: border security,” Biden said. “Just this year, I proposed, negotiated, and agreed to the strongest border-security bill this country has ever, ever, ever seen. It was bipartisan. It should have been included in this bill. And I’m determined to get it done for the American people.”
Biden is smart to keep the border-security pressure on. Earlier this year, Republicans spiked his border deal at Donald Trump’s behest; with that deal no longer tied to Ukraine aid, their excuses for opposing it will become even less plausible.
Tying the two issues together had been Biden’s plan for months. Late last year, Republicans were waffling on sending Ukraine the aid it needed to beat back Russia’s advance, and Americans were growing increasingly unnerved by record-smashing waves of illegal crossings at the U.S.-Mexico border. In October, Biden proposed a $105 billion package that would send tens of billions worth of U.S. weapons to Ukraine while spending billions more on aid to Israel, aid to Taiwan, and beefing up border security.
The White House saw the possibility for political synergy here: Such a package would show Americans Biden was serious about the border while sweetening the pot for Republicans to get right on Ukraine.
A bipartisan group of Senate negotiators got to work, and things looked promising: By January, they’d hashed out a legislative deal based on the bones of Biden’s proposal. Its border provisions were no joke: More funding to hire more border agents and fund more deportations, policy changes to make it more difficult for migrants with no valid asylum claim to abuse the asylum system, and a pressure-valve failsafe to shut down the border nearly altogether when crossings grew too numerous.
Then things fell apart. Congressional Republicans, egged on by Donald Trump, turned up their nose at the package’s border provisions. Naturally, they couldn’t admit that they rejected it because they were ordered to do so. Instead they kvetched that the bill would not bring the number of border crossings magically down to zero. Any bill that fell short of that ideal, House Speaker Mike Johnson scoffed at the time, “would be surrender.”
It was a ridiculous ask. Immigration hardliner Donald Trump never got border crossings anywhere near zero despite wielding sweeping emergency border-shutdown powers during a global pandemic; how could Republicans consider that their line-in-the-sand negotiating position? You could almost believe they would actually rather not strike any border deal with Biden at all.
Which, again, was the real reason: Republicans knew that Biden was vulnerable on immigration and didn’t want to give him an election-year life preserver. In this they were taking their cues from Trump: “I do not think we should do a Border Deal, at all, unless we get EVERYTHING needed to shut down the INVASION of Millions and Millions of people,” Trump wrote in mid-January. Some in Congress came close to admitting what was really going on: “I really think that if you want to change what is happening with the border, you are going to have to change administrations,” Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri said.
But it was one thing to make this case in the context of a complex deal including multiple tranches of foreign aid. Under those circumstances, Republicans could pooh-pooh any border deal as simply not being strict enough to outweigh their opposition to other parts of the package—to wit, more aid to Ukraine. The phrase We shouldn’t prioritize Ukraine’s border over our own has become something of an America First mantra, repeated endlessly by MAGA presidential candidates, Senate candidates, and senators.
Well, now Ukraine’s out of it. Biden has called for border-security legislation on its own, not linked to Ukraine aid. What excuses will Republicans concoct this time for spurning the offer? Will they have the temerity to respond the same way again—to claim that they would rather, as the saying goes, let the perfect be the enemy of the good?
Not all conservative criticism of the border bill was given in bad faith. Some commentators argued that the legislation as written risked codifying as law border-control practices, like treating “alternatives to detention” as the default method for processing illegal border crossers, that had heretofore existed merely as discretionary administrative practice. If another push to pass the bill ensues, you can bet there’d be new rounds of haggling between the Republican House and the Democratic Senate over this and other points.
But all that would simply be the system working as intended. Before, the package was all or nothing: The border deal blew up, so the Senate cut it loose and forged ahead on foreign aid without it. If Biden’s serious about trying again on the border before the election, it’s time to give his new buddy Mike Johnson another call.