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The provisions that Republicans want are temporary. The provisions that Democrats want are forever.
So how is this not just another click of the ratchet?
Anyways, the deal was advertised as border security for Republicans in exchange for Ukraine funds, but instead the bill was a weak border compromise with more points for Democrats than Republicans, and Ukraine funds on the side. There is no doubt that Democrats loved the terms of their trap, and would have voted yes for it even without Ukraine in the mix. Democrats have been calling for years to have an asylum "express lane" where even if the conditions are stricter on paper, anyone coached to tell the right lies will breeze right through the process to a "legal" path to permanent residency and citizenship.
The bill hands Democrats exactly what they want, and enshrines a permanent increase in "legal" unrestricted immigration forever. Doing nothing at least leaves all these people in limbo, with no path to legal status forever, and the possibility of eventual deportation.
Don't pass the bill = miniscule chance of deporting them.
Pass the bill = 0% chance of deporting them
Of course Johnson gave away the Ukraine funds in exchange for nothing anyways in the greatest anime betrayal ever, but that's another story for another day.
Again, you do realize all these people’s kids get passports anyway, right? Birthright citizenship renders ambiguous status, doing nothing, limbo blah blah arguments complete bullshit. Any of their children born on US soil are 100% unquestionable Americans under the law. Whether their parents do or don’t get a green card means nothing, these people (quite rightly) care about their descendants more than whether their lives in the US might be slightly easier or not.
What this bill did was allow a future GOP president to create a little more friction. It didn’t make things any easier or harder for the Dems, who can already (and have) left the fence open anyway. But it improves the selection of options a Republican might have.
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All of the provisions that the Democrats received were minor, and they were (as far as I can tell) all temporary, either because they directly expired like the 50K more legal immigrants for 5 years, or because they were minor carveouts in the things Republicans wanted which would expire themselves.
Blatantly false. The increase in legal immigration had an expiration date of 5 years. Check the bill summary or even the full text if you think I'm wrong.
This is what's basically happened in the status quo with Catch and Release, something that the bill would have ended.
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