Step right up to the greatest show on Earth, or at least the most expensive one currently running in the humid purgatory of Washington D.C. As the January 30 deadline for funding the Department of Homeland Security looms like a guillotine made of bureaucratic red tape, the usual collection of grifters, careerists, and well-meaning ivory tower dreamers have emerged to tell us how to fix the 'immigration crisis.' It is a phrase that has lost all meaning, much like 'organic' or 'bipartisan,' serving only to signal that another round of performative outrage is about to commence. On one side, we have the moronic Right, whose solution to any complex sociological shift is to throw more money at agencies that have proven themselves as competent as a screen door on a submarine. On the other, we have the performative Left, suddenly discovering a conscience just in time for a funding vote, using the tragic death of Renee Good in Minneapolis as a convenient moral shield for their latest bout of political brinkmanship.

Enter Kenneth Roth, the former executive director of Human Rights Watch and current visiting professor at Princeton. He has a plan. He calls it a 'grand bargain.' Because if there is one thing that decades of failed American policy have taught us, it is that a 'grand bargain' is usually a fancy term for a compromise that leaves everyone equally miserable while solving absolutely nothing. Roth, bless his academic heart, seems to believe that logic and human rights have a place in a building where the primary currency is lobbyist cash and the primary goal is re-election. He suggests that we can find a middle ground between Donald Trump’s fever-dream of mass deportations and the current chaotic status quo. It is a charmingly naive sentiment, the kind of thing you expect from someone who spends his days in the hallowed halls of Princeton rather than the mud-wrestling pit of the House of Representatives. To suggest a grand bargain to the current crop of legislators is like trying to teach a pack of hyenas to play the cello; they lack both the interest and the manual dexterity to pull it off.

The reality, of course, is far more cynical. The Department of Homeland Security, which houses the blunt instrument known as ICE, is not an agency in search of a solution; it is a self-perpetuating vacuum for tax dollars. The death of Renee Good at the hands of an ICE agent is not an anomaly to be fixed by a few 'limits' or a funding tweak; it is the natural byproduct of an organization that has been given a mandate of vague 'security' and the weapons to enforce it without the burden of oversight. The Right will look at this tragedy and see a necessary cost of 'protecting the border,' a phrase they chant with the rhythmic intensity of a lobotomized monk. The Left will point to it with theatrical horror, demanding limits on ICE while simultaneously ensuring that the money continues to flow, because heaven forbid a government shutdown actually prevents them from collecting their paychecks.

Roth’s proposal seeks to address the problems of both the old approach and Trump’s new approach, but he fails to realize that the 'approach' is the problem. The immigration system is not 'broken' in the eyes of those who run it. It is functioning exactly as intended. It provides a perpetual enemy for the Right to campaign against and a perpetual victim for the Left to defend. If you actually 'fixed' it, what would they talk about on the Sunday morning talk shows? How would the Department of Homeland Security justify its bloated existence if it weren't constantly managing a crisis of its own making? The January 30 deadline is not a moment for a 'grand bargain'; it is a deadline for the next installment of a long-running theater piece where the actors are overpaid and the audience—the American public—is perpetually scammed.

We are told that this time is different, that the threat of a shutdown will finally force a bipartisan agreement. This is the same lie told every few years, a cyclical ritual of political masochism. The 'long-elusive' agreement remains elusive because no one actually wants to catch it. They want to talk about it. They want to write books about it, like Roth’s aptly titled 'Righting Wrongs,' which I’m sure will look lovely on the coffee tables of people who think a well-worded op-ed can stop a bullet or a deportation order. Meanwhile, the machinery of the state will continue to grind, the funding will eventually be approved after a suitable amount of televised posturing, and the 'grand bargain' will remain exactly what it has always been: a hallucination of the intellectual elite who still cling to the quaint notion that America is a country governed by reason rather than a collection of competing grifts.