House Democrats are playing games on illegal immigration in ‘Build Back Better’ bill

One reason that so many voters distrust our leaders is the sense that they’re constantly playing games and skirting the rules.

Like, say, enacting a huge immigration policy change within a tax-and-spend bill.

That’s what Democrats in Congress hope to do. The “Build Back Better” social legislation that the House approved Friday would continue the federal spending spree on child care, climate change mitigation and health care. And it would create a temporary legal status for millions of people who came here illegally. It’s not a path to citizenship, but it’s a first step.

It’s bad policy, bad politics and bad timing. Legalization will encourage more people to flood the southern border, after a year in which charts had to be redrawn to show the explosion in illegal immigration. The message couldn’t be clearer: Just get here and you’ll almost certainly be able to stay.

But most of all, it’s a bad way to make law. Progress on illegal immigration has been elusive, in part because our leaders have insisted on trying to solve too many problems all at once. The legal-status provisions seem unlikely to survive the Senate, where perhaps it’s dawning on lawmakers that trying to remake the world all at once creates a juicy target for the law of unintended consequences.