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Trump has temporarily gotten it back to the levels that Obama had. He's done almost nothing in regards to helping ensure that will continue long-term.
You're saying it like it's a bad thing?
In American democracy, how would you propose to achieve ensuring some policy continues forever, regardless of what future voters or executives want, and how such a situation is different from a dictatorship?
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What you're saying is that it continuing long-term is entirely up to the next administration. If they want to return to open borders that will be their decision, not Trump's.
Trump could absolutely make the job of anyone seeking to explode immigration harder by changing the law, i.e. passing legislation, not just executive orders.
Under Article I, legislation must be passed by Congress. The President only has the power to veto or not.
The POTUS absolutely helps set legislative priorities. This is even more true for Trump, who's basically the God-King of the Republican Party at the moment.
Trump can yell at GOP congressmen, but that's pretty much all he can do. He can't rain fire and brimstone on them or flood them out. And the congressmen, while being very pious in appearance, are right now very reluctant to actually follow Trump's commandments (where have I seen this kind of thing before?) and actually do things. All Trump can threaten them with is to primary them (sometime in the future) and even that may be not that much of a threat for those who has a strong local base, and given there's 220 of them, nobody gets more than 1/220 of the fault if nothing happens, which isn't a lot of fault. He can't implement the legislation alone, and there's not a lot he can do beyond yelling if GOP congressmen are dragging their feet. He can't executive order them into action.
Eh, I think the more that a bill's vote becomes a close thing (or is forecasted to be a close thing), the proportion of fault for a given congressperson can rise in accordance with how decisive their vote could be. At least, this is how it works with both legacy and social media.
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"Helps" not really in any formal sense. Republican Congressmen are not actually in thrall to Trump to the degree you seem to think. He got very little from the Republican Congress his first term (not even border wall funding!) and seems likely to get little from them his second term either. Key members have interests more or less orthogonal to Trump's. He could possibly pound the table and demand legislation, but I'm skeptical how much it would move the needle - after all, Congressmen are not elected nationally.
They kind of are though. Some House Freedom Caucus members wanted to block the current bill, then Trump told them to fuck off, and now they're supporting the bill.
The fact Trump doesn't get everything he wants has more to do with Trump just being a buffoon who doesn't know how to do politics very well. He can sometimes get his way when he has a ton of political capital, but otherwise his blunt-force trauma style oftentimes fails to work.
Obama was quite involved in passing the ACA, for example, which was a campaign promise of his. source 1 source 2 source 3
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I have wondered if he could massively expand the APA notice-and-comment regime by executive fiat. He lost a number of cases to APA procedure questions in his first term (and seems somewhat likely to again), but "now all executive policy changes require 4 years of notice and comment, effective 60 days from now, conveniently the day before I leave office" seems like, if IMO a poor governance choice, the sort of live policy grenade Trump likes tossing.
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No he absolutely can't, that's what the Congress is supposed to do.
See my comment here.
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Yes, but if they reverse his policy, the responsibility for that is on them. If the non-MAGA politicians want to act like "adults in the room" they need to stop blaming the parents for not hiding the cookie jar out of their reach.
Sure, if they reverse the legislation that would be on them, but undoing legislation is much more difficult that just doing executive orders, which is how Biden basically got to defacto open borders via loophole.
It will be, in fact, perfectly in their power to just continue Trump's policy. If they don't want that, they will be entitled to their decision, but it will be their decision.
The issue is the Dems are a hostile party when it comes to immigration, so Republicans should try to make any attempts to liberalize immigration as hard as possible, which generally means passing legislation when R's have a trifecta. Dems will try all sorts of things, and some of them might get through, but good laws can block others, like how DAPA was eventually shredded by the courts for conflicting with the INA.
Why? Aren't they the adults in the room?
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Why do you think he doesnt do that? "Le dumb" was kind of believable during the first admin, but now theres all sorts of people who could be doing that and presumably understand the importance of it. Why isnt e.g Vance writing an immigration bill?
I have a post rolling around in my head around that, but it basically comes down to Trump not really liking to do legislation since it's harder than doing EO's, and the party and especially the base broadly respecting that. Trump absolutely could pass sweeping immigration reform if he wanted to, but he doesn't really want to.
I think legislative efforts could be made without really compromising EOs - theres more than enough people "on board" now. Theres even all sorts of MAGA congresscritters who are presumably doing *something * with their time/staffers. And thinktanks willing to assist. What youre saying makes sense if Trump actively dislikes legislation (why?), but not if he just puts lower priority on it.
I mean sure, he could do both EOs and legislation. But he treats EOs as an end unto themselves, and the MAGA base broadly goes along with it, then goes SuprisedPickachuFace.png when Dems revoke them with a stroke of a pen. Then MAGA rewrites history so that EO's are the only thing that matter, implying things like legislation is fake and winning the Presidency is the only thing that ever matters. This thread has responses that motion towards those ideas a lot.
Trump doesn't actually like making deals that much, he likes having done deals, and announcing that he's a great dealmaker, etc. Biden was far more involved in getting deals across the finish line even in his diminished state than Trump was during either of his two terms. Trump has told a few House obstinate R reps to essentially fuck off and has broadly mentioned he doesn't want huge Medicaid cuts, but he's really not pushing on a day-to-day basis to get legislation done.
Putting a "lower priority" on legislation often means the legislation just doesn't happen, since political capital has an expiration date. There's no reason Trump couldn't have done an immigration deal in his first term when he had a trifecta, but he just... never did it.
I dont think this really addresses what I asked. Its just repeating "Trump doesnt focus on it", when I said I dont think he needs to. The closest thing to a limited resource youve mentioned is political deals, since theres only so many important considerations someone can be given - but the EOs havent involved any concessions. If its about the negotiations themselves, they could be done by someone other than Trump with him approving the result.
Basically, if Trump isnt actively against legislation, and there isnt a real obstacle to it, then any one of many MAGA politicians could do it, but they apparently dont. Wanderers comment is a more serious explanation than what youre doing here.
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The obvious answer for a skeptic is "because they're all - to a man, young or old, dumb or brilliant - basically amoral nihilists maximizing their short-term gains, not selfless statesmen invested in the long-term advancement of Republican ideals". eg Vance isn't even trying to write an actually effective immigration bill because he needs immigration to still be a live issue in 2032 so he can use it to win the Presidency then.
Observably, this is why we never got an abortion rights bill, even after Dobbs.
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Easier said than done. The administration right now is putting most of its energy into dismantling the federal bureaucracy in a way that will be difficult for a future administration to undo, but successive administrations being able to reverse the policies of previous administrations is a feature, not a bug, of American politics.
Trump could certainly push for laws that will make immigration much harder, establish enforcement norms that will require effort (and perhaps public, politically unpalatable action) to reverse, and generally make it difficult (but not impossible) for the next administration to roll it back and open the gates again. But that is not where he's actually focusing his efforts.
Yes, and that's a bad thing. He's spending his (legislative) efforts right now passing regressive tax cuts that will blow out the deficit even further. It would be much better if he focused on long-term immigration reform instead.
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Wasn't the problem with enforcement, and not the law?
Both the enforcement and the law were broken.
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