There are rumors afoot that the Trump administration is open to reviving the concept of comprehensive immigration reform. Having added jet fuel to ICE and the Border Patrol in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, the time may seem right to cut a broader, generational deal on immigration that includes amnesty for illegal aliens.
The legislative politics of immigration reform, however, are extraordinarily complex and time-consuming. Any resulting deal is highly unlikely to pass both houses of Congress, and if it does it’s highly likely to infuriate Trump’s base on his longtime core policy issue. Immigration reform is a legislative siren song, and Trump should resist it.
Certain factions in the Republican coalition are always looking for immigration reform. Business interests, in particular, claim to need more workers than the native population will provide. One can see this argument made by growth conservatives like Steven Moore. At the same time institutional conservatives bemoan congressional inaction on the issue as evidence of legislative sclerosis.
These views don’t take into account the legislative realities of immigration reform. The two parties come at the issue from incommensurable positions, making even theoretical compromise impossible. In short, Democrats have a moral commitment to mass migration (see Dick Durbin, for example) — in particular of the low-skilled variety, regardless of legal authorization — while Republicans either have a commitment to high-skilled, legal immigration (John Cornyn), or total opposition to continued immigration at recent levels (Tom Cotton). Those sets of views don’t overlap.
That’s a problem because an immigration bill needs 60 votes to pass the Senate, which means support from all Republicans and a handful of Democrats or pluralities of both conferences. Table stakes for any Democrat support is a path to citizenship for Dreamers (not DACA recipients but the entire increasingly middle-aged class) and now, probably, an end to most ICE raids. That, in turn, is a nonstarter for most Republicans, making 53+7 an impossible strategy.
To cobble together 30 votes (plus or minus) from each party, then, the deal would need to be comprehensive. The traditional Democrat bargaining position — as seen in the Gang of Eight legislation — has been to trade high-skilled immigration for expanded low-skilled immigration. That is unlikely to get anything but token Republican support because the longstanding assumption that Republicans favor legal immigration no longer holds. Furthermore, Democrats have certain legislative sacred cows — diversity visas, family visas, and merits changes to the asylum system — that are necessary reform elements for Republicans.
There simply isn’t an available term sheet of off-the-shelf policy solutions that can get 60 votes in the Senate, to say nothing of the House.
Even if there were an agreement in principle, it still wouldn’t solve the issue. Immigration reform isn’t like appropriations, where you pass numbers back and forth and meet in the middle. An immigration term sheet kicks off a drafting quagmire, where every word is a knife fight because every word — to the Democrats — is a possible exception or loophole.
It’s like squeezing a balloon: restrict asylum and get more withholding of removal; limit diversity and get more asylum. It’s compromise on top of compromise on top of compromise, with the advantage going to the party willing to walk away. If the president is demanding a bill, which side will that be?
This isn’t just because both sides are partisan and refuse to deal in good faith. They simply have diametrically opposed views on the role of immigration law. In essence both sides see it as a moral issue. For Democrats it used to be the morality of love-your-neighbor and liberal universalism — now with more than a touch of critical race theory. For Republicans it has gone from being about economic growth tempered by the rule of law to the moral cost in lost lives and broken communities that follow in the wake of unrestricted immigration.
Of course politics plays into it too. Democrats do see illegal aliens as “undocumented Democrats,” while Republicans know that immigration without assimilation tends to go poorly for them at the ballot box. The countervailing pressure for Republicans — exemplified by the 2012-election “autopsy” — was that they’d be left behind by the inevitable Hispanic plurality if they didn’t get on board with immigration reform. But the staggering, continued success of the restrictionist, Donald Trump, among Hispanics has put that theory to rest.
The good news is that reform isn’t really necessary. The border is under control. Congress has enacted countless laws over the years to facilitate the rapid deportation of illegal aliens, and the attorney general has considerable power to strengthen those policies from the Department of Justice. Importantly, these are all tools that the president controls. That’s what Donald Trump has campaigned on for almost a decade now — and the key wedge he used to flip over the entire Republican establishment.
Inviting Democrats to sit at the immigration-policy table will accomplish nothing and will jeopardize this core issue of the president’s.
Michael A. Fragoso is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a partner at Torridon Law PLLC. He was previously chief counsel to Sen. Mitch McConnell and negotiated the Border Act of 2024.
