Subject: Re: Why the border bill will fail
If the Bill will improve all the things that proponents claim, then why on earth did they include a three year sunset or steadily declining caps on the number of shutdown days allowed?

I suspect it's because a big part of their constituents hate this bill. Hate it, hate it, hate it. A sizable part of the Democratic coalition believes - correctly - that accepting asylees is both a legal obligation on the U.S. under the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees and a humanitarian/moral obligation for any just and good country. Signatories to the Refugee Convention (and at this point, international law generally) are permitted to set the processes and conditions for how they handle refugees....but they aren't allowed to just send them back to their home country. And while this bill doesn't actually get us to the point where we're violating international law, it does set up likely instances where legitimate refugees end up getting hurt in their own countries because they couldn't seek asylum.

So the Administration is trying to sell them on the idea that this is a time-limited response to a temporary problem. Our southern border issue used to be folks coming for work from Mexico, not asylum-seekers looking to resettle from the Central Triangle and elsewhere. The pitch to sell this to the Left is that the current overload to the system is temporary, and that once those conditions have receded a more normal immigrant flow will resume, allowing for a return to a more normal response to asylum seekers. That extraordinary conditions justify the extraordinary measures, but the extraordinary conditions won't last - the flow exceeds the bandwidth right now, but a few years of constricting the flow and increasing the bandwidth will resolve that.

A permanent change would probably doom the bill on the Left - they're not willing to eat the humanitarian cost just to save Ukraine, and there's virtually nothing in the bill that they like on immigration (there's a handful of tiny sweeteners, but they don't change the basic calculation).