Over the summer, as critics excoriated ICE’s detention centers as concentration camps, congressional Democrats approved an emergency bill that threw another $4.6 billion at the border security apparatus. Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi defended the legislation as a “necessary evil” to “get resources to the [detained] children fastest.”

Her comments were hardly out of character: Pelosi’s formal request to her colleagues to approve the spending measure came six years to the day after the then-Democratic-controlled Senate voted through a “comprehensive immigration reform” package that would have allocated ten times the amount of this year’s bill to militarize the southern border. Unlike the emergency funding measures, however, that failed measure also included a purported carrot: a “pathway to citizenship,” the holy grail for liberal politicians and pundits.

For a decade and a half, establishment Democrats have bent over backward to demonstrate their support for the proposal. Even outside the halls of mainstream liberalism, a “pathway to citizenship” has become popular. It’s included in both Bernie Sanders’s immigration platform and the recently adopted Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) “Support for Open Borders” resolution.