Forget the invasion of Greenland for a moment. Forget too the incorporation of Canada into the United States. These are the reddest of red herrings; PT Barnum circus stuff of which there will be plenty over the next four years. But Donald Trump is coming back into office to do more than entertain us: he and his Republican supporters mean business.
It is striking that the very first bill before Congress in the new session, in which the Republicans have majorities in both the House of Representatives and the Senate, is an immigration bill.
The Laken Riley bill is named after a 22-year-old Georgia nursing student who was killed by a Venezuelan immigrant living in the country without legal permission. The killer – who is now serving a life sentence – had been caught at the Texas-Mexico border in September 2022 but allowed to stay in the US on parole while making his immigration case. Not only that, but he had been arrested in the US for both endangering a child and shoplifting while the immigration case was pending. That is when he tried to rape Laken Riley, who had gone out for a run, and ended up killing her.
The bill requires the detention of anyone, including asylum seekers, if they have been accused of theft, burglary or shoplifting. So the killer of Laken Riley would have been off the streets.
And the millions of people who have flooded across the southern border in the Biden years would – if the bill becomes an act – be put on notice: behave impeccably or face incarceration.
So to the politics. The Laken Riley bill passed through the House of Representatives last Tuesday with the support of 48 Democrats. This matters. It feels as if the Democrats, or a significant number of them, are now willing to accept that the public mood on illegal immigration has hardened.
The acid test of that will come now in the Senate, where the manoeuvring has begun to try to get enough Democrats to support the bill to have it passed within days. Although the Republicans control the Senate by 53 seats to 47, the filibuster rules mean that it has to have 60 votes to get through. A few Democrats have said they might vote yes, and one – John Fetterman, who could be a presidential candidate in 2028 – is actually co-sponsoring the bill.
But it is not easy for the Democrats. In the wider party ecosystem there are plenty of very loud voices raised in opposition. They point out that the bill mandates incarceration on merely the accusation of theft, not an actual conviction. So might some blameless person, living a decent American life having crossed illegally many years ago, find themselves falsely accused of shoplifting and stuck in jail, perhaps even deported, as a result? Is that the America that the party now supports?
The fact is that Democrats are used to sticking up for the rights of those who come to the USA for a better life, not sticking them in jail. For many party members the very idea of borders is problematic. That is why some cities – run by the party – have declared themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants and promised to fight for their rights during the coming Trump presidency.
So for the Democrats this is a tough test. If they help this bill get onto Donald Trump’s desk in the Oval Office on 20 January it might become the very first bill he signs and the Democratic party will have enabled something that many of its supporters abhor. There will be much gnashing of teeth and many party rows.
But the complex politics of immigration does not stop with the Democrats. Donald Trump will unquestionably sign the Laken Riley bill if it passes through Congress. But is that enough for him and his supporters? He has promised in the past to deport all of those in America illegally – this could be as many as 11 million people, many of whom have children who are American citizens as a result of being born in the USA. Does he press ahead and set up an infrastructure of mass deportation and family separation, with all the very visible human misery that causes?
Or might Laken Riley, if passed, provide an off ramp for Trump? He will almost certainly sign an executive order or two, bypassing Congress, to enforce tougher border control. And that would be popular: polls last years suggested a majority of Americans now approve of the Trump idea of a full border wall with Mexico (it was never a majority during his first term in office) and most also think asylum seekers should have their requests processed outside the USA.
But that is before children and parents are separated and – a vital point given Trump’s other great priority – inflation inevitably ticks up, because many cheap labourers are suddenly off the streets.
If Laken Riley passes, there will be plenty more that Donald Trump says about immigration, but perhaps not much more that he does. It would be a win, a big win, potentially on day one. One of the early biographies of Trump was entitled Never Enough – on this occasion it might be.
Justin Webb presents the Americast podcast on BBC Sounds
