Like moths to a flame, Republicans have once again flirted with a big immigration compromise, only to get their wings singed.
This time it was Sen. James Lankford who thought he could thread the needle, finding a sweet spot for a bipartisan deal that angers the right and left but appeals to a middle majority.
It turned out that the middle didn’t exist.
It’s a lesson that Mike Pence learned as far back as 2006 when, as a congressman from Indiana, he backed a legalization bill and took severe heat for it.
President Trump tried to broker a deal in 2018. Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona tried in 2007, with President George W. Bush’s blessing. Arizonan Jeff Flake tried, first as a congressman and then senator, for more than a decade.
The best comparison for Mr. Lankford may be Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, who in 2013 tried leading negotiations on a bill to legalize illegal immigrants, welcome guest workers and stiffen the border. It cleared the Democrat-led Senate but never saw a vote in the GOP-led House.
For his trouble, Mr. Rubio got his nose bloodied by the effort and has avoided immigration talks since. He was one of the first Republicans to denounce the new deal last week, and in vehement terms.
“The ‘border deal’ is an easy NO,” Mr. Rubio said on social media. “It reads like a parody of an actual border security bill.”
It’s an experience that Mr. Lankford, who was in the House at the time, was aware of.
“This only happens about every decade to try to work on border security because it’s so contentious. It takes a decade to forget what happened to the last person,” the Oklahoma Republican told reporters.
He tried anyway.
“I’m the ranking member on border management on the Homeland Security Committee, so I got the short straw on being in the chair at the moment when we were going to actually deal with this issue,” he said.
Mr. Lankford spent four months working chiefly with Sens. Chris Murphy, Connecticut Democrat, and Kyrsten Sinema, Arizona independent, on the agreement. It would have created a new expulsion authority for when the flow of illegal immigrants topped certain thresholds, expanded the government’s deportation machinery and reined in some Biden administration catch-and-release practices.
It delayed border wall construction, included hundreds of thousands of new guest workers, gave a path to citizenship to Afghans airlifted out in the chaotic 2021 U.S. troop withdrawal and granted government-funded lawyers to illegal immigrant children. It did not include legalization of “Dreamers” or other illegal immigrants.
It was defeated in a GOP-led filibuster last Wednesday. Just three of Mr. Lankford’s Republican colleagues backed him in the vote.
Douglas Rivlin, senior director of communications at America’s Voice, a major immigration pressure group, said the GOP has been drifting increasingly toward being an “anti-immigration party” since 2013.
“There used to be support in the Republican Party for legal immigration. That evaporated,” he said.
He said 90% of the deal struck by Mr. Lankford was border policies that the GOP wanted — “I don’t know a pro-immigrant advocate that supported this bill,” Mr. Rivlin said — but Republicans still didn’t embrace it.
“It doesn’t bode well for solutions on immigration,” he said.
Emilio Gonzalez, who ran U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services in the Bush administration and who came out against Mr. Lankford’s latest proposal, said members of Congress will always struggle on this issue. He said it needs to be a president driving the negotiations.
“Immigration reform has to start at the White House,” he said. “One of the reasons it failed under President Bush, notwithstanding his great interest in wanting to enact immigration reform, is he essentially told Congress, ‘Hey, being me something I can sign.’ And then it just collapsed in the Senate.”
That was in 2007, when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts was Democrats’ top negotiator and Mr. Kyl, a conservative Arizona senator, was Republicans’ point man.
The deal they struck offered a lengthy path to citizenship to illegal immigrants in exchange for paying a fine and returning home to collect their new visa. It also would have doubled the size of the Border Patrol and mandated employers use E-Verify to screen out illegal immigrants from the workforce.
That bill blew up in spectacular fashion in the Senate when it couldn’t muster a majority, much less the 60 votes needed to overcome a filibuster. Sixteen members of the Democratic Caucus joined with 37 Republicans in defeating it.
Those Democrats said the deal was tilted too much in favor of businesses, while Republican opponents said it didn’t do enough to solve immigration enforcement.
Six years later it was Mr. Rubio’s turn, when he was part of what became known as the “Gang of Eight” — four Republicans and four Democrats who tried another legalization proposal.
The lawmakers made sure they had both labor and business community buy-in before giving it a go, and they got a bill through the Senate after pumping massive money into border security. But the House, controlled by Republicans, rejected even bringing the bill to the floor. GOP leaders in the House said the deal was too lenient toward illegal immigrants.
In 2018, it was Mr. Trump’s turn. He suggested a package that included citizenship for illegal immigrant “Dreamers” along with funding for his border wall, an end to the visa lottery that gives away immigration passes by chance, and new limits on the chain of family migration.
Democrats rejected that offer, as well as another potential deal to slim the package down just to the Dreamers and the border wall.