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You might think, since these young people called Dreamers are a group most politicians want to protect from deportation, that a legislative solution to do just that wouldn’t be hard to find. You’d be wrong. Since the bill known as the Dream Act was first proposed in 2001, Congress has failed to come up with a long-term solution.
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Staring into this dismal legislative abyss, Politico Magazine and I decided to try to take matters into our own hands. If Congress couldn’t manage to forge a deal in their wood-paneled offices and marble halls over the past 17 years, maybe we could do it in POLITICO’s carpeted conference room in two hours. What did we have to lose? We couldn’t possibly do worse than Congress.
So, on Monday, we invited four people from across the political spectrum, people who have fought with and against each other in the trenches of the D.C. immigration debate for years, to sit at a table and talk. We asked them if they could come up with a compromise, any compromise, that might give the young immigrants a way to avoid deportation, a goal Trump too has endorsed. We gave our model Congress water, cookies, paper, pens and two hours to see what they could do. They never left the room. (But we probably would have allowed them to if they had asked.)
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Members of the Model Congress: To simulate a real immigration negotiation, we tried to select participants from across the policy spectrum—advocates and operatives, defenders of more immigration and proponents of less. In the end, we ended up with a well-rounded expert group of four:
Theresa Cardinal Brown is director of immigration and cross-border policy at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a research group in Washington. She was an immigration policy adviser at the Department of Homeland Security under President George W. Bush from 2005 to 2008 and the agency’s attaché in Canada under Obama from 2008 to 2011. Before that, she served as director of immigration and border policy at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Steven Camarota is director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that seeks less immigration overall and has opposed past measures to legalize undocumented immigrants.
Leon Fresco, an immigration lawyer at Holland and Knight, was previously a staff member for Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, where he was one of the main drafters of the comprehensive immigration bill that passed the Senate in 2013.
Tom Jawetz is vice president for immigration at the Center for American Progress, a progressive policy group. As chief counsel to the immigration subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee and adviser to Democrats, he helped negotiate an immigration reform bill in the House in 2014. It never went to a vote.
I acted as the moderator.
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The makings of a deal: So that’s where our negotiators ended up after two hours: A pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and a 50,000 reduction in visas across several categories that would last for some period of time.
Significant thorny details remained to be worked out, such as just how many Dreamers would be included—those currently holding DACA or all those eligible, up to the 1.8 million the White House proposed—and how many years before the visa reductions would expire. But all agreed that progress had been made.
The negotiators were also clear that their deal was delicate, so that adding any other component—an increase in border spending, for example—would cause it to tip over and collapse.
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The disclaimer: At the end of the session, however, none of the negotiators thought the real Congress would be anywhere near as successful as they were. Camarota, Fresco and Jawetz all agreed that Congress would most likely do nothing by March 5. The best they expected was that lawmakers would approve a short-term DACA extension to punt the issue down the road for at least another year. Brown, the optimist in the group, gave even odds between Congress doing nothing and punting for a year or so.
“If I’m in Vegas,” Fresco said, “1-to-2 on nothing, 3-to-1 on a one-year punt, 75-to-1 on a deal, on an actual deal.”
If they’re right, the Dreamers’ future in this country will be in limbo once again.
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I thought this was a cool idea by Politico. Not really news, but interesting anyway.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/st...ts-daca-216954