Border security is a settled issue, but the questions of what to do with legal immigration and long-term illegal residents still divide the party.
I n many ways, the Republican party is more unified in its stance on immigration than ever before. Four years of exceptionally lenient policy under President Biden — resulting in approximately 8 million immigrants entering the country via asylum claims, parole, or simply evading authorities — have made border security a settled issue within the GOP. Nobody in the party complained when President Trump canceled asylum appointments at the border or shut down Biden’s categorical parole programs. Republicans have also cheered the president’s aggressive deportation campaign, reflecting Americans’ record-high support for expelling illegal aliens en masse. In fact, as part of their One Big Beautiful Bill Act, congressional Republicans just gave the executive branch $150 billion to expand immigration enforcement and detention.
Beneath the surface, however, divisions over immigration policy among Republicans remain. In particular, members have different ideas about what to do with the estimated 11 million people who have lived in the United States for more than five years — since before the Biden-era surge. They also disagree on how to reform the country’s legal immigration system, if at all. Such intraparty differences are best captured by two concurrent legislative proposals emerging from the House.
One idea comes from House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan (R., Ohio), focused almost entirely on tightening enforcement of federal immigration law and deterring illegal entry. Jordan hopes to revive Republicans’ immigration bill from the last Congress, H.R. 2, which the House passed without Democratic votes in 2023. As the Senate was controlled by Democrats and Biden held the White House then, the bill did not advance further. Now, though, with uniform Republican control of Washington, Jordan wants to take another crack at it.
If enacted, H.R. 2 would have required the executive branch to resume construction of a border wall and hire additional border agents, mandated the detention and removal of illegal entrants, strictly limited opportunities for asylum and parole, criminalized visa overstays, and required employers to use E-Verify. The bill did not address longtime illegal residents or the core facets of legal immigration: visas and green cards. Jordan says that he wants to reintroduce the legislation in exactly the same form.
A very different kind of proposal is being promoted by more-moderate members of the GOP conference. Led by Representative Maria Elvira Salazar (R., Fla.), eleven House Republicans — and an equal number of Democrats — have signed on to the Dignity Act, which pairs border-enforcement measures with a conditional legal status for longtime illegal residents. Applicants would need to have lived in the country since before 2021 and would be granted a special status for seven years. During that period, they would need to pass a background check, make good on any back taxes owed, and pay $7,000 in “restitution” to the federal government. Participants in this “Dignity Program” would have no pathway to citizenship, nor would they have access to federal welfare or entitlement programs.
Salazar contends that her bill “acknowledges a key truth: most undocumented individuals are not seeking citizenship at all costs, but rather the dignity of living and working legally, contributing to society, paying taxes, being safe from deportation, and traveling to see family during the holidays.” She also presents the legislation as a way to provide stability for industries whose workforces are threatened by deportations.
At the same time, Salazar’s legislation borrows many enforcement policies from H.R. 2. As in H.R. 2, the Dignity Act would enhance border-security infrastructure, require businesses to screen the legal status of new hires with E-Verify, restrict asylum applications, and raise penalties for illegal entry. The representative who originally introduced H.R. 2, Mario Díaz-Balart (R., Fla.), is one of the eleven Republicans co-sponsoring Salazar’s bill.
Yet the Dignity Act breaks with H.R. 2 in a few important ways. For one, unlike H.R. 2, it includes a path to legal status for most illegal residents. It also contains a modified version of the DREAM Act, which would create a path to permanent legal status for recipients of the DACA program, who were brought illegally into the United States as children. The bill would also expand legal immigration by tinkering with the visa system. It would exclude workers’ spouses and children from the caps on employment visas, effectively doubling the number of foreign workers allowed into the country. Salazar’s bill would also raise the per-country limit on green cards — which disproportionately blocks immigrants from India and China, who apply in large numbers — and would allow some undocumented family members of U.S. citizens to stay in America.
What these two competing bills reveal is that the GOP has not fully figured out its immigration stance. Undoubtedly, the highest priority that Republicans share is to secure the southern border and deport many illegal aliens who entered under Biden, especially those with criminal records. Beyond that, they aren’t exactly sure what they want to do on immigration — what our Michael Brendan Dougherty has long argued may be the “defining issue of the 21st century.”
Both Jordan and Salazar are asking President Trump to endorse their separate approaches. The former bill would leave mostly untouched the sticky questions of longtime illegal residents and the legal immigration system. The latter attempts to tackle them but, in doing so, flirts with a word Republicans have learned never to utter: amnesty. Salazar tells Trump that “the same God that saved you from death in Pennsylvania one year ago, and who put you back in the Oval Office against all odds, is the same God almighty who millions and millions are begging to for some type of dignity — not amnesty.” Many conservatives are sure to be more critical of her proposal.
Under the second Trump administration, illegal border crossings are at an all-time low. The number of immigrants in detention is at a record high. Arrests and deportations from the country’s interior are way up, and a massive boost in funding will ensure many more to come. For Republicans now, the million-dollar question on immigration is this: What next? They haven’t decided on an answer yet, but the argument in Congress has officially begun.