In the last few months, Republicans have repeatedly claimed that President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have pushed for open borders and unfettered illegal immigration. In their view, the way to fix the border is to shut it down entirely.

Fortunately for them, Senate Democrats have been diligently working to pass a bipartisan immigration bill that would accomplish that exact goal — what it fails to do, however, is definitively address rising immigration like some Democrats claim it will.

The bill practically aims to do almost exactly what Republicans want accomplished on the border: a complete shutdown.

Biden said as much in a press release on Friday, saying, “[The immigration bill] would give me, as president, a new emergency authority to shut down the border when it becomes overwhelmed. And if given that authority, I would use it the day I sign the bill into law.”

Former President and Republican front-runner Donald Trump did not hesitate to use his outsized influence to collapse the negotiations. At a campaign event in Las Vegas, Nevada, Trump bashed the deal, saying, “The so-called border deal Biden is pushing out is not designed to stop illegal immigration. … I’d rather have no bill than a bad bill.” 

Painfully, I somewhat agree with Trump, but certainly not for the same reasons. Biden’s bipartisan deal does little to address the root causes of illegal immigration — the backlogged asylum and immigration court systems.

For a migrant to declare asylum they must first be physically present in the country. From there, the various agencies that may receive them provide forms for migrants to fill out to declare their asylum status. 

Under our current system, as long as an immigrant enters the country, declares their asylum status and files Form I-589 — also known as the Application for Asylum and for Withholding of Removal — they are allowed to remain in the country until their case is decided.

This system makes sense. You apply for asylum and stay in the United States for your court case. After all, if the asylum claim is true, it would be morally reprehensible to send them back to the possible source of danger, right?

Not according to our current political hegemony. The key negotiatory device in the bipartisan bill is if more than 4,000 immigrants enter through the southern border in a single day, the President retains the right to reject all immigrants and turn them away. If there are more than 5,000 migrants a day, the policy becomes mandatory.

More than 2.4 million migrants were apprehended at the border in 2023, leading to an average far beyond what would immediately trigger expedited rejections under the proposed bill. In effect, the bill would completely close the border to asylum seekers. Is this not the exact policy Republicans want?

Many Republicans have made it a point to push for a stronger border. Both Kelly Daughtry and David Dixon, two North Carolina Republicans running in the newly gerrymandered 13th Congressional District — which many NC State students will fall under if they live south of Centennial campus — have made border security their top campaign priority.

But if this immigration bill comes to fruition, a major talking point for these candidates disappears. It’s why Republicans like Trump and House Speaker Mike Johnson have taken hard stances against “reforms” that are exactly what they’ve been whining about for years. The bill would remove the carrot on their electoral stick.

We need to expand immigration courts, provide more public defenders and translators and increase the number of border patrol agents by an order of magnitude akin to the New Deal or the Great Society. While the proposed bill does some of this, it is not nearly to the scale required to address the crisis. 

The average wait time for a hearing in an immigration court is nearly five years. Add on top of this the requirement that many asylum seekers are not allowed to work but must provide their own translators in trials and interviews. How is a legitimate asylum seeker expected to make their case heard in such a system?

Republicans, based on their urge to continue enabling the border crisis to bolster their carrot-and-stick approach to elections, likely never will accept such reforms. 

Democrats had the opportunity through this bipartisan bill to force the Republicans into accepting these reforms.

Instead, they’ve delved deep into the same fearmongering politics the Republicans have come to centralize. Instead of following the Obama administration’s precedent, “When they go low, we go high,” Democrats seem to be willing to play just as dirty as Republicans.

Nonetheless, when we go to vote in the primaries in March, I urge each of you to keep in mind what each party wants to do. President Biden may be bipartisan to a fault, but the alternative is a party more willing to shoot asylum seekers than help them go through the legal processes we guarantee them when they assert their claims. Choose wisely.