opinion

Country club rules: How legal immigration became a GOP target

Immigration reform is dead! Again!

If you're like me, you haven't been this shocked since the Lions were shut out of this year's Super Bowl.

This immigration debate was supposed to be different. This time the disruptor-in-chief raised the stakes by rounding up the most sympathetic immigrants in America — the 700,000 Dreamers who entered this country when they were too young to know what "undocumented" meant — and threatening to push them over the cliff unless Congress united to rescue them.

President Donald Trump's reputation for closing deals has always been inflated, but putting the Dreamers in play was a strategic master-stroke. It reminded me of the time the National Lampoon's cover depicted an unseen gunman holding a revolver to the head of a terrified looking mutt over the headline: "If You Don't Buy This Magazine, We'll Kill This Dog."

More: Before we demonize a family — like Jorge Garcia's — consider how American it is

Dickerson:Wanted: A clean vote on Dreamers

Trump's ultimatum — "If You Don't Fund The Wall, I'll Deport These Kids" — was equally brutal. But it was also brilliant, because nobody (or at least nobody outside the dwindling base of bitter-enders that wants to deny green cards to all non-Scandinavians) wanted to see Dreamers dispatched to "home countries" none of them could remember.

But now President Art-of-the-Deal has played his trump card, and he's got as little to show for it as last two his predecessors did when they went to the brink for immigration reform.

Same standoff, different day.

Or is it?

A new obstacle

The conventional wisdom is that the Senate's abortive effort to hatch a bipartisan immigration deal ran aground on the same political shoals that doomed previous attempts: Republicans didn't want to be caught voting for anything a right-wing primary challenger might call amnesty, and Democrats wouldn't support any measure that denied a path to citizenship for undocumented (but otherwise law-abiding) immigrants.

In fact, both sides seemed willing to give up some ground this time around. Eight Republican senators and all but three of 48 Democrats coalesced around a bill that would have rescued Dreamers but barred citizenship for their parents and allocated $25 billion for beefed-up border security.

But White House hardliners rejected the compromise, mainly because it ignored Trump's demands for new restrictions on legal immigration. Somewhere along the way, it seems, the Republican line in the sand went from throwing those who've entered the U.S. unlawfully out to keeping those who've patiently waited in line from getting in.

This is a significant change in GOP orthodoxy that has received less attention than it deserves.

Until quite recently, most Republicans demanding deportation of the 11 million or so foreign nationals living in the U.S. without permission were at pains to say they had no issue with legal immigrants. Their objective, they emphasized, was not to deny residency to migrants of any race, color or economic status, but to uphold the immigration laws that specified who could enter the country and on what terms.

Those who followed the rules were welcome; those who flouted them were not.

But now, like country club members alarmed to see their dining room is filling up with new recruits of the wrong gender, the wrong complexion, or the wrong pedigree, even mainstream Republicans are wondering if merely enforcing the existing membership rules is enough. Maybe it's time to change the rules — and quickly, before an influx of "new blood" ruins it for those already here.

N-Q-O-C-D?

Immigration hardliners tend to be male, but they always remind me of the undergraduate woman I once overheard telling one of her sorority sisters that a prospective recruit seemed "NQOCD," which turned out to mean "Not Quite Our Class, Dear."

But it would be unfair to frame argument over legal immigration as solely a contest between decent moderates and white supremacists like Stephen Miller, Trump's most influential immigration adviser, and Steve Bannon, his exiled confederate.

There is a legitimate argument to be made, more conservative than racist, that any nation's social fabric can be stretched to the breaking point if it tries to absorb too many people with too many disparate priorities, needs, and expectations for the future.

The opposing view is that societies flourish by expanding and diversifying — and stagnate, or even disintegrate, when they fail to welcome new people and new ideas.

That is the sort of debate the nation might have profited from, if wishes were horses and senators were as interested in honest conversation as they are in a smooth ride to re-election.

But none of us, much less our elected representatives in Washington, are living in that world. And so the immigration impasse persists, and we all may be condemned to watch Dreamers go over the cliff, along with the dream Americans were once proud to claim as our own invention.

Brian Dickerson is the Editorial Page Editor of the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.