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About a year ago I made a post (with motte discussion here) about an immigration reform bill that would have handed Republicans a major victory on the issue with the most conservative comprehensive reform in a generation. Dems would have agreed to the bill since Biden's whoopsie defacto-open-borders made the issue a huge liability for them. Trump tanked it for purely cynical reasons, and the discussion hinged on whether the legislation was somehow a "trap" since Dems were agreeing to it, and whether Republicans should risk getting nothing if they lost in 2024. I contended that Republicans should take the deal and then maybe do additional legislation that was even more stringent if they won, that way they'd have something even if they lost, which was about at a 50% chance on betting markets at the time. But MAGA and Trump won out, going all-in on the double-or-nothing strategy.
In a sense that bet paid off, since Trump won and got a trifecta! There's just one little problem: he's not actually trying to pass any comprehensive enduring immigration legislation. There was the Laken Riley act, but it's quite small in scope. Overall, it's back to his first term tactics of mangling the interpretation of laws through executive orders, and hoping the courts don't stop him. It's likely to be about as successful as it was in his first term. Why do it this way? Why not just ask Congress to give you the powers to do what you want so you don't have to gamble on the courts? Matt Yglesias has a potential explanation in his mailbag post
So MAGA as a political movement has a better chance to change immigration than Republicans have probably ever had, and they're pissing it away with Trump cultism. They'll try to hide behind excuses like the filibuster, which could be ended with 50 votes in the Senate, and Republicans have 53 right now. Alternatively they'll try to hide behind political nihilism and say that passing laws doesn't matter since Dems could just ignore anything they pass -- this is wrong because the laws could help Trump (or other Republicans in the future) do things while there's a friendly president in power, and they could do a variety of things to try to force the Dem's hand when out of power like writing hard "shall" mandates in laws, giving Republican governors or even private citizens the standing to sue for non-enforcement, attach automatic penalties like sequestration-style clawbacks if removal numbers fall below some statutory floor, add 287(g) agreements with states giving local officers INA arrest authority, create independent enforcement boards, etc. None of these are silver bullets obviously since Dems would always be free to repeal any such laws (there are no permanent solutions in a Democracy, just ask Southern Slavers how the Gag Rule went), but that would cost them political capital or otherwise force them to try gambling with the courts if they tried to circumvent things by executive fiat.
But doing any of this would require telling Trump he needs to actually do specific things, and potentially punish him in some way if he fails to enact an ideological agenda he (vaguely) promised. That's very unlikely to happen.
Given that Trump single-handedly mitigated the vast majority of the border problem in about a month, we now have definitive proof that the entire border issue was a deliberate intentional undertaking by Joe Biden. So we're left with two possibilities:
democrats other than Joe Biden don't actually want an open border. In this case, all a future democrat president needs to do is not deliberately throw open the gates of the border and invite billions in. Seems easy to me.
democrats desire an open border with a fiery passion that burns with the heat of a thousand suns, and they are willing to stop at nothing to facilitate a flood of billions of migrants into the United States. Of course if and only if this is the case, then a future democrat president will throw open the gates of the border and deliberately invite billions in.
If option 1 is true, then no border bill is necessary. Successive administrations can continue the current secure border. Buuuuut, if option 2 is true, then it's extremely positively strong evidence that the democrat written, democrat supported border bill that the democrats tried to pass alone with zero republican support, is actually designed to increase migration.
Of course to your other point some new border laws would be nice, and I hope congress can at least make an attempt to do it. I haven't seen anything indicating they won't try, it's just that congress critters seem preoccupied with other bullshit like the budget fight right now.
I covered this in my earlier post. Yes, the flood that happened under Biden was his fault, although it didn't seem deliberate. It seemed like he wanted to roll back Trump's immigration vibes in nebulous ways, but they way they (Biden or his handlers) effectuated that had unintended consequences that were functionally open-borders via loophole. I know a lot of conservatives on this site take the approach of "never attribute to incompetence that which can plausibly be explained by malice if it involves the outgroup", but the Dem response to immigration afterwards sure made it seem like they knew they fucked up and had dropped a grenade at their feet that they never intended.
Coalitions in the US are large and amorphous, so both your points 1 AND 2 can be correct for different Dems, and they occasionally rotate turns at the wheel depending on who wins elections or who has dementia.
Better immigration laws are needed because the US system is fundamentally broken in ways that only Congress can fix. Executive orders can help (or hurt), but they're just bandaids on a bullethole. You can try mangling interpretations of laws created decades ago and hope the courts don't notice, but they have the annoying habit of saying "hey bro, you can't just ignore Congress" and striking things down. In the status quo, the best conservatives can hope for is Obama-era levels of immigration. At worst, they can expect open borders with next to no recourse. Changing the laws on the books could significantly help that.
I say "citation needed here." Even Trump isn't enforcing the laws on the books to their fullest extent. The idea we need more laws to fix the problem doesn't pass the smell test. If anytime a Democrat gets elected they stop enforcing the law, no law is going to fix that. As much as I think it would be brilliant design to make welfare contingent on border enforcement, that's never passing. And certainly nothing like that was in the 2024 law that fizzled out. There was nothing in that bill that could have prevented what Biden did in the first three years of his presidency, which was, essentially, tell ICE agents to do a different job. Because law enforcement and prosecution is the job of the executive. If he wants to dismiss cases against Ethyl Rosenberg because he loves commies, he can. The only recourse is impeachment + removal. And it simply will never happen for the border no matter how flagrant the violations because Democrats are not going to get onboard.
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