This weekend, the AFL-CIO and the US Chamber of Commerce agreed to a guest worker visa program, a major breakthrough in one of the biggest hurdles to immigration reform legislation. The agreement means that the “all major policy issues” have been resolved in the run-up to legislation. As Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on Meet the Press this weekend:
With the agreement between business and labor, every major policy issue has been resolved on the ‘Gang of Eight.’ Now, everyone, we’ve all agreed that we’re not going to come to a final agreement until we see draft legislative language and we agree on that. We drafted some of it already, the rest of it will be drafted this week.
The policy issues in the bill, even the most contentious ones, are being resolved, which means that now, the process is coming into focus. When it comes to the Senate, the process can be rife with landmines. In fact, one member of the Gang of 8, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), is now complaining that the immigration process is moving too fast [a viewed pushed by the likes of anti-immigrant Republican Senators including Chuck Grassley (IA), John Cornyn (TX), Ted Cruz (TX) and Jefferson Beauregard Sessions (AL).] That crew knows how to use the Senate process to derail progress — and they will. One big question is whether Rubio will coddle them.
As the Washington Post noted, Rubio has been positioning himself for months to be able to walk away from immigration reform should the process get away from him. If immigration reform succeeds, Rubio could say that he helped shepherd it. But if he needs to abandon the process at some point, he’s calculating that he could blame Democrats for making the bill too progressive, or for rushing it.
An analysis from Evan Soltas at Wonkbook points out how this thinking is completely backwards, however. According to Soltas, Rubio has gotten too far in to leave the process now. After the last election, in which Republicans lost the Latino vote by more than a 3-1 margin, Republicans know that they need to win more minority voters—as they demonstrated in the recently-released RNC “autopsy” report, which called for immigration reform. Republicans who know that immigration reform must succeed will blame Rubio if he tries to blow up the talks and demolish their greatest attempt to resuscitate their party among non-white voters to date. As Soltas writes:
This is a tricky game Rubio is playing. He’s trying to assure conservatives that he’s skeptical of this process and could walk away at any moment. But it would be disastrous for him to actually walk away at any moment.
The point of many of Rubio’s moves in recent months has been to capture the credit for leading immigration reform. But that ups the stakes if Rubio walks and the effort fails. There’s no particular shame in being a first-term senator with little involvement in yet another failed attempt to remake the immigration system. But Rubio has made himself into the key emissary to conservatives on the issue. The flip side to the credit Rubio will reap if immigration reform succeeds is that he’ll take much of the blame if it fails.
That would leave Rubio in a very awkward place. If conservatives end up turning on immigration, they’ll be angry he let it get as far as it did. But those who wanted to see immigration reform will, in large part, blame Rubio for its demise. It would be the worst of both worlds, and given that this is Rubio’s only major legislative initiative to date, it’s hard to see a successful 2016 presidential campaign rising atop that foundation.
As Ezra Klein noted this weekend, immigration reform is not a zero-sum game. Passing legislation will not mean one party wins, and another party loses. As Klein wrote:
On this issue, both parties—and importantly, their allied interest groups—see the game as positive sum. They believe they can both win.
Democrats believe in the policy, but they also believe that it’s good — even essential — politics to deliver on the number-one priority of the growing Hispanic electorate. Many Republicans also believe in the policy, and almost all Republicans believe that if their party is to prosper, they need to agree to immigration reform to show Hispanic voters that the GOP isn’t hostile to their interests.
A Latino Decisions poll from last month found that 64% of Latino voters already blame Republicans for past failures to pass immigration reform, compared to 10% who blame the Democrats. And even now, Latino voters credit Democrats with better Latino outreach and a platform that seems more inclusive to Latinos than what Republicans have to offer. If Republicans axe immigration reform, Latino voters will blame them for the demise of the legislation whether it’s Marco Rubio or another GOP legislator who kills it. And that won’t be good news for Republicans—or Rubio.
