In his congressional office, Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) keeps a series of drafts on immigration reform at the ready. They are proposals– many bipartisan–that he’s painstakingly hammered out with colleagues over the years, reflections of the compromises that are possible if the Republican-controlled House ever wanted to prioritize immigration reform.
“You are not going to deport 12,13 million people. We are going to put millions of American kids in foster care?” Diaz-Balart said in an interview with TPM. “When most people start looking at the details, we all come to a very similar conclusion.”
After a week where Trump called for mass deportation, backtracked and came back to his original position, Diaz-Balart still doesn’t know where Trump stands on an issue he’s worked tirelessly on in Congress.
“Who really knows,” Diaz-Balart said. “There is bouncing back and forth. All this is frankly is a little bit of a guessing game because no one has ever seen any specifics.”
Maybe, Diaz-Balart hopes, Trump is finally reckoning with the issue. Maybe, he fears, Trump doesn’t really understand its complexities. Either way, Diaz-Balart, whose parents were Cuban, still plans to vote for Trump, caught in a wringer between his party loyalty and his signature legislative issue.
It might be an understatement to say that 2016 has been a difficult year
for Republican immigration reformers who once believed the GOP could make up ground with Latino voters by 2016.
“I have not liked the tone of the Trump campaign on this issue,” Diaz Balart said adding Clinton’s record hasn’t been better.
Diaz-Balart, who represents a south Florida district, has watched his party’s nominee attack the “Mexican” heritage of a federal judge, call for mass deportations and animate a wing of the Republican Party that already had made immigration reform in the House a long shot.
Diaz-Balart said he has spoken with advisers on the Trump campaign and asked for detailed proposals on immigration and other issues, but never heard back.
“I have yet to receive any clarification on any of the issues,” Diaz-Balart said Friday. “As of 1:35 p.m. on the 26th of August, I don’t have answers.”
Diaz-Balart has been a cornerstone of the immigration reform effort in the House of Representatives, a consummate optimist who believed–even when it was growing increasingly clear to everyone else that the prospects for reform were collapsing– that Republicans would find a way forward in the House before the 2016 election.
For years, Diaz-Balart toiled with a group of bipartisan lawmakers in the House in an effort to come up with a compromise immigration proposal. He worked behind the scenes with both conservatives like Rep. Raul Labrador (R-ID) and liberals like Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL). He’d brought his ideas to well-respected leaders like now House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-WI) to try and build consensus. But as Republican Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) faced the ire of the right for his involvement in the Senate Gang of Eight’s bill and after Majority Leader Eric Cantor lost his 2014 primary in a stunning defeat some tied to immigration, the desire for reform was outweighed by the pressure to keep the base happy.
In 2014, House leaders put the nail in the coffin. They sat down with Diaz-Balart and told him straight that immigration reform was not going to happen. Diaz-Balart called it “a lost historic opportunity.”
Diaz-Balart still organizes meetings for “dozens and dozens” of reform-minded Republicans on immigration. He’s still hopeful that after the 2016 election, the party may be motivated to pick up where it left off and carve out a solution. But, the challenges, he recognizes, haven’t gone away.
“This doesn’t get easier, it gets harder. That is just the nature of this particular beast,” Diaz-Balart said. “The folks on the fringes get more entrenched on both sides of this issue.”
Speaker Ryan, Diaz-Balart said he believes, is “a problem solver,” which always helps, of course, but he too has struggled this year to manage the Trump phenomenon.
“The thing about Ryan is that he wants to solve problems and he doesn’t accept inaction. We have a speaker who understand we have a system that is broken.”
When Ryan is ready and if he gets there, Diaz-Balart has some draft ideas of how to get it done waiting for the Republican Party in his office. In the meantime, he has a warning.
“Math doesn’t lie,” Diaz-Balart said. “If you are going to be the majority party, you are going to have to attract a majority of the American people.”
