Bloomberg Businessweek USA - January 25, 2018

42

Democratic Party preferred the position that

“immigrants today strengthen the country

because of their hard work and talents.” Only

42 percent of Republicans and leaners tilted that

way. Understanding why the parties diverged

so abruptly is the first step toward developing—

or rather, redeveloping—a national consensus on

immigration that could produce sensible policies

and help avert episodes of political brinkmanship.

The idea of granting green cards to people

brought to the U.S. as children was first intro-

duced as a Senate bill in 2001 by Democrat Dick

Durbin of Illinois and Republican Orrin Hatch of

Utah. The Development, Relief, and Education for

Alien Minors Act, or Dream Act, didn’t come up

for a vote until 2007, when it got the support of

12 Republicans. When it came up again in 2010, it

got only two Republican votes. As the bill got less

popular with one party, it got more popular with

the other. The number of Democrats voting against

the act fell from eight in 2007 to five in 2010.

By this year the partisan gap was wide enough

to shut down the government. Immigration activ-

ists put election-year pressure on Democrats to

use the budget as leverage to secure protections

for the 690,000 undocumented “Dreamers” reg-

istered under Obama’s 2012 Deferred Action for

Childhood Arrivals program. The chances of that

working were never good. Many Republicans con-

sider DACA an illegal usurpation by Obama, and

Trump in September ordered the program to be

shut down in March while challenging Congress

to produce a legislative fix.

Trump has since exasperated both parties by

waffling. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer,

a New York Democrat, complained that strik-

ing a deal with the president was “like negoti-

ating with Jell-O.” In the end, though, Schumer

accepted a deal to fund the government through

Feb. 8 in return for a commitment by Senate

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, the Kentucky

Republican, to address Democratic demands for

restoring protection to the Dreamers. That’s hardly

the end of it. On Jan. 23, Schumer said his offer to

Trump on funding for a wall on the Mexican bor-

der was now off the table. And any bill that man-

ages to pass the Senate could still die in the House.

The stalemate dismays longtime participants

in the immigration debate. One is Demetrios

Papademetriou, who moved from Greece to the

U.S. for college, gaining citizenship in 1976 and

teaching international relations at the University

of Maryland at College Park and other schools. He

co-founded a pair of Migration Policy Institutes,

one in Washington and one in Brussels. Both

help governments develop immigration policies.

Papademetriou says Congress has lost its ability to

negotiate on the topic. “There was a time when

congressional hearings were really honest oppor-

tunities to try to figure out what to do,” he says.

“Now most of them are essentially an opportunity

for the majority party to have its message broad-

cast.” While Europeans seek pragmatic repairs to

their immigration systems, he says, in the U.S.,

“we think we know everything we need to know

because we reduce the issue to a political agenda.”

To Papademetriou, 2000 was a turning point

for immigration politics in the U.S. Labor unions

had traditionally feared new arrivals would push

down wages of native workers. But unions began

to realize that keeping them undocumented made

matters worse because they worked for a pittance.

In February 2000 the AFL-CIO Executive Council

called for amnesty and “full workplace rights” for

undocumented workers while advocating crimi-

nal penalties for employers that “exploit” undoc-

umented workers.

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.

President George W. Bush and President Obama

sought to calm those sentiments. President Trump

has inflamed them. Concerns about jobs and terror

fed into the decades-long realignment of the par-

ties. Democrats noticed the Hispanic population

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

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

statement: “People living in the U.S. should follow

American customs and traditions.”

80%

50

20

7/1994 3/2006 7/2017

Share of Americans who say immigrants today strengthen

the country because of their hard work and talents

Democrat or lean Democrat

Republican or lean Republican

A Widening Gap

○ Share of Democrats

and Republicans

who support giving

permanent status

to Dreamers

92%

50%

 POLITICS Bloomberg Businessweek January 29, 2018