OPINION: A compromise on the border would have helped a lot.

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I have long argued that Democrats need to recognize that the crisis at our southern border is real, that it is the result of a completely dysfunctional asylum system, and that it needs to be fixed immediately. I did. I received a lot of backlash from people who said I was wrong and cruel and buying into Republican rhetoric. But this week, the Biden administration and Senate Democrats finally took action to fix the system along the lines Republicans had been pushing for, only to find that Republicans had changed their minds.

The new Republican argument is that there is no need to change asylum laws and that President Joe Biden can simply use executive authority to resolve the issue.This is the view now expressed by former President Donald Trump, Speaker of the House of Representatives. mike johnsonGovernor of Texas Greg Abbott governor of florida Ron DeSantissimilarly Elon Muskamong other influential figures.

This is a complete U-turn for the Republican Party. In 2019, Congressman Steve Scalise clarified that: The law needs to be changed. ” That same year, President Trump also said this. It is necessary to change the place of asylum. ” No more. “A year ago, they were saying, ‘We need to change the law,'” said conservative Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford, the lead Republican negotiator on the Senate bill, looking surprised. . …Now the conversation is, “You’re kidding, we don’t need to change the law.” ”

President Trump was right in 2019. In fact, he knows it because when he was president he tried to exercise executive power and it either didn’t work or was changed or blocked by the courts. He could turn people away if he could invoke Title 42, citing a public health emergency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Mr. Biden did acknowledge that authority had expired, but if he tried to use it today, a court would almost certainly rule that there is no public health emergency at this time. It will be. America remains a nation of laws, and the president cannot abuse his powers unchecked.

Conservative commentator David Frum explained this situation convincingly on my CNN show last Sunday. Most people think of this problem as the mass illegal immigration that occurred in the 1990s and 2000s, when people crossed borders to evade law enforcement. But that’s not what’s happening now. Today, people come to the border and run toward the law instead of running away from it. Many people understand that applying for asylum will allow them to legally enter the country and go through a vetting process that can take around five to seven years. Meanwhile, they slip into the countryside and start working. “Telling the president to enforce the law misses the point,” Frum told me. “He’s enforcing the law. The problem is the law needs to change.”

It’s not just the law. The reality is that border officials are completely overwhelmed, with insecurity at the Southwest border in 2023 about five times higher than it was a decade ago. Deporting them also requires personnel and funds. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which actually enforces deportations, is so cash-strapped that it plans to start winding down its operations in the coming weeks.

The Senate bill was a serious effort to solve many problems. It would have provided funding for significant staff increases: more than 4,300 additional asylum and support staff, and thousands of other new jobs in immigration and security. That would have given asylum officials far more power to quickly determine people’s status.

This would significantly shorten the five- to seven-year sentencing process, with an initial hearing within the targeted 90 days and a final judgment within another 90 days. It would have given the government the power to declare a state of emergency if the number of arrivals exceeded a certain threshold, allowing it to turn people away. If that number exceeded an average of 5,000 people a day for a week, the authority would have been triggered automatically.

It’s not perfect. The basic standards for determining asylum eligibility remain too low. A senior White House official told me the amount had been raised “a notch” and acknowledged that the Democratic left had resisted raising it any further. House Republicans could play a useful role by raising it even further. But again, this requires changes to asylum law.

The clearest evidence that President Trump recognizes that this bill will give his administration a powerful tool to deal with this crisis is that he is adamant that this bill should not pass. is. If it passes, it may resolve most of the border issues, but it won’t help him politically. “This bill is a great gift to Democrats,” he wrote on social media.

Other Western countries are facing similar challenges and grappling with how to reconcile their immigration and asylum laws. Many countries have taken important steps. But in America, one of the major political parties has decided to inflame the crisis rather than quell it, floundering while the country burns, hoping at least to inherit its smoldering ruins.