I wanted to wait to read more of the immigration bill myself and more of the informed commentary before giving my opinion of it. David Frum and others had suggested that this was the best deal Democrats could strike and argued that the art of politics is saying yes to the best offer. The new bill shows that the immigration debate has been moving. Traditionally, compromise has been framed as “Democrats will get the amnesty they want, Republicans will get the enforcement mechanisms they want, and both sides agree to a higher level of ongoing legal immigration.”

Now, it was Democrats offering a bill with no large amnesties, and some productive measures like tightening up the requirements to qualify for asylum status. In return, Republicans would vote for Ukraine war funding that their party base has soured on.

That’s a move to the right, in a way. But it’s a move that almost every single rich nation is undergoing, as the politics of migration continue to develop under conditions of low-cost emigration from the Global South. Despite what you hear, the global trend is toward hardening borders with walls.

But the main problem with the bill is that it does nothing to oblige the Biden administration to admit, parole, or give work permits to one fewer illegal immigrant. It does however create a process of bypassing overwhelmed immigration judges and having “non-adversarial” hearings on asylum status with asylum officers — many of whom aren’t lawyers, and all of whom will be acting under the directive of the secretary of DHS. These officers will have the discretion not only to release border crossers into the country but to grant them work permits.

All the complex powers involved in “shutting down the border” are a kind of distracting mechanism from the fact that the law formalizes and expands on the chaotic system Biden has invented for dramatically changing this country in contravention of its own laws.