Donald Trump

I won’t call him the least honorable participant, since there’s such competition for that title. But in leaving this announcement to the same attorney general he was trying to ridicule into quitting only six weeks ago, a man who usually prefers center stage was acting out of character, to say the least. Was he suddenly camera-shy because he had so often promised not to do what Sessions just announced? Was he edging toward what we’ve come to know as the “Jared and Ivanka hand-wring” posture, in which he wants it known that he is “troubled” by the very step that his administration is about to take?

Or was Trump unclear (as the latest New York Times account suggests) about what this new policy would actually mean? We can’t know the reason. But try as he might to wring his hands, or wash them of this policy, he’s stuck with the results.

The U.S. Congress

In principle, the Congress is the venue in which all the complex tradeoffs involving immigration might be worked out. And they are genuinely complex. To name just two: recognizing that immigration creates both winners and losers among native-born and newcomers alike, and doing what’s possible to minimize the harm; and providing “humane” treatment for people who arrived under DACA, without increasing incentives for further unauthorized flows.

Back in the 1980s, a bipartisan group in Congress juggled these and other complications—and came up with a reasonable compromise solution known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act. Republican Senator Alan Simpson, of Wyoming, and Democratic Representative Romano Mazzoli, of Kentucky, spent most of a full two-year congressional term working out the provisions, guided by findings of a bipartisan national commission on immigration reform. The Democratic-controlled House and the Republican-controlled Senate both approved the plan, and Ronald Reagan signed the resulting Immigration Reform and Control Act into law in 1986.

In principle, Congress could and should work through the complexities yet again. That’s the idea of a representative legislature. And again in principle, coming up with solutions should be much easier now than it was the last time around, since Congress and the White House are all under one party’s control.

That’s the principle. We’re about to see illustrations of the feckless reality of our current national governing structure.

The Republican Party

Hard-edged “We won, you lost, get over it!” statements like Sessions’s today are satisfying for true believers in the short run. But they often create resistance and reaction that makes them backfire longer term.

When listening to Sessions’s announcement, I could not help thinking of Pete Wilson, then governor of my home state of California, exulting over the passage of the state’s famous Proposition 187 in 1994. Wilson, a Republican, had tied his own reelection campaign to passage of Prop 187, which included a number of tough crackdowns on illegal immigrants. It passed; Wilson beat Kathleen Brown—Pat Brown’s daughter, Jerry’s sister—and stayed in office; “We won, you lost, get over it.” But then, as all chronicles of California politics attest, the “getting over it” involved not simply federal courts staying and eventually throwing out Prop 187 (as improper state interference with federal immigration law) but also the near extinction of the Republican Party as a force in current multi-ethnic California. In the nation’s most populous state, Republicans hold no statewide offices at all; make up less than one-third of both the state assembly and the state senate; and hold just over one-quarter of the state’s 53 Congressional seats (14 Republicans, 39 Democrats). And this is under a non-gerrymandered, “fair” districting plan.