History of Failure on Border Policy Hangs Over Current Push in Congress

A bipartisan group of senators holds weeks of closed-door talks to assemble a border and immigration package in response to mounting demands to fix the migrant crisis. The president gets on board despite blowback from the left. The Republican-controlled House is another matter, with hard-right conservatives flexing their muscle and demanding harsh restrictions.

That was the situation in 2014 when a major congressional push to enact far-reaching changes to immigration law appeared tantalizingly close to bearing fruit — only to come to nothing.

And a similar scenario could be playing out today, as lawmakers struggle to find agreement on a new border security measure. After months of private talks, a bipartisan deal is on the brink of emerging from the Democratic-led Senate, but it is unclear whether it will have enough G.O.P. support to advance — and House Republicans, egged on by former President Donald J. Trump, are pre-emptively threatening to tank it.

As they look back, those involved in past negotiations say it is frustrating that they have come so close so many times to enacting major legislation only to see it fly off the rails — not once, but twice in the past two decades. Had the proposals become law, they say, the border would be secure today, and the nation could have moved past the constantly raging immigration fight.

“If we’d have done any of those bills, we wouldn’t have these problems today,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina and a charter member of numerous “gangs” of lawmakers that have repeatedly and unsuccessfully tried to strike border deals, notably in 2007 and 2014.

“Most of this problem would be manageable at least,” agreed Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and a leading proponent of providing undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children a path to legal status.

The spectacular legislative failures and the teetering of the current compromise underscore the enormous difficulty of reaching agreement on such a volatile issue. The past also accounts for some of the present lack of trust and wariness as lawmakers take on a subject that has bedeviled presidents of both parties and eluded resolution for decades.

“This is an incredibly challenging political discussion we’ve been having,” Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, said on Wednesday in trying to explain why the Senate negotiations were dragging on.

Managing the politics and policy of immigration has proved almost impossible since a major 1986 initiative of the Reagan era. The two parties have repeatedly tried and failed to thread the needle among progressive politicians and Hispanic constituencies seeking legal status for millions of undocumented immigrants, conservatives demanding tight border restrictions and no “amnesty” for those who entered without proper authorization, and a business community clamoring for more workers.

When George W. Bush was re-elected president in 2004 with significant Hispanic support, he saw an opening for an immigration overhaul and a signature second-term achievement. He began pressing for action in 2006 in an Oval Office address.

A bipartisan group of senators led by Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts and Jon Kyl of Arizona went to work and came up with what they termed a “grand bargain” that traded new border restrictions for a path to citizenship for millions. But conservative Republicans attacked the legislation, making the now familiar arguments that it would reward those who had come to the United States illegally and did not do enough to fortify the border. Months of work fell to a bipartisan Senate filibuster in June 2007.

The next big push came in 2013 and 2014. The re-election of Barack Obama in 2012 had exposed declining Republican appeal to Hispanic voters and persuaded party leaders that they must embrace an immigration overhaul to halt that slide.

While talks quietly got underway in the House, a bipartisan “Gang of Eight” emerged in the Senate. On the Republican side, it included John McCain of Arizona; Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising star with Hispanic and conservative credibility; and Mr. Graham. Democratic participants included Senators Chuck Schumer of New York, Mr. Durbin and Michael Bennet of Colorado.

What emerged from months of deliberations was the 1,200-page Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013. It tied a 13-year pathway to citizenship for 11 million undocumented people to tough benchmarks on border security. It established a new employee verification program to protect jobs from undocumented workers and created new visa programs for workers under an agreement between business and labor.

In contrast to 2007, the bill cleared the Senate with surprising strength, attracting 68 votes, including 14 Republicans and all Democrats. Mr. Schumer said at the time that the level of support would force the House to take up the issue, a dynamic similar to today, when senators hope a solid Senate vote will propel any plan over House Republican resistance.

But a decade ago, as now, the situation in the House was complex. Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio, a traditional Republican with powerful ties to the business world, was willing to consider an immigration overhaul. But he was confronting the rising influence in his ranks of far-right Republicans, who made railing against illegal immigration a signature issue, so he moved carefully. A series of smaller bills emerged from the House that excluded a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

Hoping to rally House Republicans, Mr. Boehner used a party retreat in January 2014 to unveil a set of immigration “principles” that were heavy on border security. They also omitted a path to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants, but instead proposed allowing them to remain in the United States and work if they met certain tests, including paying taxes and admitting they broke the law. But within days, Mr. Boehner was backtracking under pressure from the right, and the effort stalled.

In June, Representative Eric Cantor, the Virginia Republican and the majority leader, was defeated in a stunning primary upset by a challenger who had attacked him as a backer of amnesty for illegal immigrants.

“That night, I knew it was over,” said Representative Mario Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican and veteran of multiple immigration negotiations who was a leading proponent of the plan. “The folks who had supported what we had done immediately started saying, ‘Look, this is a problem.’ That’s what killed it.”

Mr. Bennet still laments the failure.

“If we had passed that, the country would be in a far better place today than we are,” he said. “It’s tragic.”

During the Trump era, immigration proposals popped up in the regular spending fights, including a plan to extend temporary protection to the so-called Dreamers brought to the United States as children in exchange for substantial border wall funding, but those too went nowhere, consumed by politics as the ones before them were.

As Congress tries to strike a deal to secure the border to free up assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan, the substance of the discussion has moved substantially to the right. No one is talking about citizenship for undocumented people — only how to secure the southern border and stem the tide of migrants seeking refugee status. It is a marked change for Democrats and President Biden, but they seem ready to give substantial ground to both tighten border security and win the assistance for Ukraine. The question now is whether election year considerations will prevent any bipartisan agreement.

But at some future point, the stubborn immigration issues that have tied Congress in knots for years will need to be resolved.

“What this country is really going to need,” Mr. Bennet said, “is a comprehensive approach like the Gang of Eight bill to not just address the immediate issues of the border, but to make sure we have a functional immigration system as well.”