Page 44 - Bloomberg_Businessweek

POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek January 29, 2018

Democratic Party preferred the position that Feb. 8 in return for a commitment by Senate
“immigrants today strengthen the country Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky
because of their hard work and talents.” Only Republican, to address Democratic demands for
42 percent of Republicans and leaners tilted that restoring protection to the Dreamers. That’s hardly
way. Understanding why the parties diverged the end of it. On Jan. 23, Schumer said his offer to
so abruptly is the first step toward developing— Trump on funding for a wall on the Mexican bor-
or rather, redeveloping—a national consensus on der was now off the table. And any bill that man-
immigration that could produce sensible policies ages to pass the Senate could still die in the House.
and help avert episodes of political brinkmanship. The stalemate dismays longtime participants
The idea of granting green cards to people in the immigration debate. One is Demetrios
brought to the U.S. as children was first intro- Papademetriou, who moved from Greece to the
duced as a Senate bill in 2001 by Democrat Dick U.S. for college, gaining citizenship in 1976 and
Durbin of Illinois and Republican Orrin Hatch of teaching international relations at the University
Utah. The Development, Relief, and Education for of Maryland at College Park and other schools. He
Alien Minors Act, or Dream Act, didn’t come up co-founded a pair of Migration Policy Institutes,
for a vote until 2007, when it got the support of one in Washington and one in Brussels. Both
12 Republicans. When it came up again in 2010, it help governments develop immigration policies.
got only two Republican votes. As the bill got less Papademetriou says Congress has lost its ability to
popular with one party, it got more popular with negotiate on the topic. “There was a time when ○ Share of Democrats
the other. The number of Democrats voting against congressional hearings were really honest oppor- and Republicans
who support giving
the act fell from eight in 2007 to five in 2010. tunities to try to figure out what to do,” he says. permanent status
By this year the partisan gap was wide enough “Now most of them are essentially an opportunity to Dreamers
to shut down the government. Immigration activ- for the majority party to have its message broad- 92%
ists put election-year pressure on Democrats to cast.” While Europeans seek pragmatic repairs to
use the budget as leverage to secure protections their immigration systems, he says, in the U.S., 50%
for the 690,000 undocumented “Dreamers” reg- “we think we know everything we need to know
42 istered under Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for because we reduce the issue to a political agenda.”
Childhood Arrivals program. The chances of that To Papademetriou, 2000 was a turning point
working were never good. Many Republicans con- for immigration politics in the U.S. Labor unions
sider DACA an illegal usurpation by Obama, and had traditionally feared new arrivals would push
Trump in September ordered the program to be down wages of native workers. But unions began
shut down in March while challenging Congress to realize that keeping them undocumented made
to produce a legislative fix. matters worse because they worked for a pittance.
Trump has since exasperated both parties by In February 2000 the AFL-CIO Executive Council
waffling. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, called for amnesty and “full workplace rights” for
a New York Democrat, complained that strik- undocumented workers while advocating crimi-
ing a deal with the president was “like negoti- nal penalties for employers that “exploit” undoc-
ating with Jell-O.” In the end, though, Schumer umented workers.
accepted a deal to fund the government through A year later the Sept. 11 terror attacks caused
a segment of the population to view immigrants
as a threat to their lives, not just their livelihoods.
A Widening Gap President George W. Bush and President Obama
Share of Americans who say immigrants today strengthen sought to calm those sentiments. President Trump
the country because of their hard work and talents has inflamed them. Concerns about jobs and terror
Democrat or lean Democrat fed into the decades-long realignment of the par-
Republican or lean Republican
ties. Democrats noticed the Hispanic population
80% was growing rapidly and calculated that they’d be
rewarded for embracing pro-immigration policies.
Meanwhile, the white working class took its mis-
givings about immigration with it as it decamped
50 from the Democratic Party to the GOP. Before the
2016 election, Stanford University political sci-
entist Adam Bonica found that the best predic-
tor of support for Trump was agreement with the
20 statement: “People living in the U.S. should follow
7/1994 3/2006 7/2017 American customs and traditions.”