Why Trump turned down deal for his border wall

Ramesh Ponnuru

While the world waits and waits to see if donald trump will run for president again, it’s worth remembering one of the lingering conundrums of his time in office: why he failed to achieve some of his key immigration goals, even when the opportunity to win seemed to be in his hands.

Immigration was central to his rise to power. During the 2016 primaries, the Republican voters for whom he was the main issue were among his biggest supporters. A wall on the border U.S with Mexico it was his most famous political goal. However, he only managed to wall off 75 kilometers of the border during his term.

Although he was elected alongside Republican majorities in the House and Senate, he did not make wall funding a legislative priority. And he blew a bipartisan deal that represented his best chance to pay for it.

In February 2018, while Republicans still held a slim majority in the Senate, seven Democratic senators offered to provide $25 billion in funding for a wall. In exchange, Republicans would grant legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants who came to the US as minors. Since Trump had also been saying he wanted his legal status regularized, this idea had the makings of a double win for him. He could fulfill his base and soften his image at the same time. A month earlier, he had said that he would sign whatever agreement Congress sent him.

But then the president changed course. He said that he would veto any bill that did not meet four conditions. In addition to wall funding and targeted legalization, he wanted Congress to end chain migration and the diversity lottery, two categories of legal immigration (chain migration refers to the process by which extended families of immigrants settle in the US and the lottery distributes visas in an effort to diversify the immigrant population).

Trump had backed a bill to enact those changes a few months earlier, but never insisted they were conditions of a deal. The narrowing of the categories for legal immigration that he had not even campaigned for turned out to be a decisive factor. A day after his remarks, the Senate voted against those cuts 60-39, opposed by 14 Republicans. Then the political conditions for a deal disappeared, never to return.

A year later, Trump changed his position again. In his 2019 State of the Union address, he said he wanted higher levels of immigration: “I want more people to come into our country than ever before, but they have to come in legally.” He did not comply with any specific proposal, but reiterated this wish on multiple occasions. The result: Trump had squandered the opportunity to deliver on his promise to build the border wall and had done so in the name of narrowing immigration categories to which he had no real commitment.

This apparently counterproductive behavior was all a matter of public record in real time. But I hadn’t seen Trump explain this until I read the last pages of “Border Wars,” a book about his immigration policies that New York Times reporters Julie Hirschfeld Davis and Michael Shear published in late 2019.

Trump gave reporters a 35-minute interview in June of that year. He told them the country needed more immigrants, and they told him of his prior support for big cuts to immigration categories. The reaction? “‘I don’t agree with that aspect of it,’ Trump told us, almost as an aside.”

That aspect of it? The senators who introduced the Trump-backed bill, the one that would end the diversity lottery and chain migration, had explained from the start that the goal was to reduce immigration. Its initial press release promised “a 50% reduction” from recent levels. The Trump White House included that reduction in its list of sales pitches for the bill, while complaining that current levels were “adding more people to the country each year than the population of San Francisco.” .

The cuts to the migratory categories were, once again, the main obstacle to an agreement. Trump had said that funding a border wall and legalizing immigrants who came to the US illegally when they were minors was not enough for him; he would veto any immigration legislation that would maintain chain migration and the diversity lottery (in principle, other immigration categories could have been increased to make up for those reductions, but Trump never called for such a thing when he endorsed those changes, as he easily could have done ).

The mystery persists. Had Trump changed his mind about legal immigration levels and then forgotten? Or did he lie when he spoke to journalists? Did he really not understand him? Perhaps his advisers did not explain to him the meaning of the legislation that his Administration had endorsed? Didn’t he realize that he was risking his own stated priorities, primarily a border wall, in the name of something he didn’t even favor? It cared?

We may never know. Trump may never know either. One thing we can take away from the former president’s immigration record: If he doesn’t know what he wants, he probably won’t get it.