Gregory Bull/AP

People cross from Tijuana, Mexico, into the United States for their appointments to seek asylum that were made through the CBP One app, Feb. 2, 2024.

President Joe Biden and congressional Republicans agree there is a “crisis” at the southern border.

But they disagree on whether the president has the authority to make substantial policy changes alone – or must wait on Congress for more sweeping reforms and the funding to enact them.  

Mr. Biden has urged Congress to pass the bipartisan Senate deal released this weekend, saying it would give him new emergency authority to “shut down” the border – authority he has pledged to use immediately. His vow, in effect acknowledging a failure to adequately control a migrant surge under his watch but putting the onus on Congress to act, has sparked a broader debate about how much executive authority Mr. Biden already possesses to secure the border. 

Now that question has taken on greater urgency. With the Senate deal looking increasingly unlikely to pass, executive authority may end up being Mr. Biden’s only option. 

The debate goes to the balance of power between two of America’s three branches of government, and raises the question of who is ultimately accountable for securing the border. That’s not only a policy question but also a political one, with one recent poll showing that immigration is now voters’ No. 1 concern heading into the 2024 presidential election.

Mr. Biden’s likely rival, former President Donald Trump, issued 472 executive orders on border and immigration policies according to a 2022 report from the Migration Policy Institute, which supporters credit with keeping illegal crossings to an average of half a million per year. Among other things, the Trump administration required 70,000 migrants to await far-off court dates outside the United States through his “Remain in Mexico” initiative, revived a Clinton-era provision that fined unauthorized immigrants up to $813 per day if they didn’t comply with an order to leave the country, and – once the pandemic hit – invoked a 1944 law to expel migrants on public health grounds. 

Mr. Biden, who campaigned on promises of instituting a more humane and comprehensive approach to fixing America’s broken immigration system, reversed many of those policies through executive action that at least initially outpaced Mr. Trump. On his first day in office, Mr. Biden terminated the national emergency at the southern border, and with it the construction of a border wall – and sent Congress a comprehensive immigration reform bill that the Migration Policy Institute characterized as the most ambitious in a generation.  

Evan Vucci/AP/File

President Joe Biden signs an executive order on immigration in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, Feb. 2, 2021.

But in the three years since, Congress has so far failed to pass such legislation. Meanwhile, the average number of annual crossings has quadrupled to more than 2 million, though that number reflects in part a higher rate of repeat attempts by migrants expelled on public health grounds. This fall the Biden administration announced plans to restart construction on a portion of Mr. Trump’s border wall, and the president asked Congress for $13.6 billion to address the crisis. 

Republicans say if Mr. Biden would just avail himself of the powers already at his disposal, the bulk of the illegal crossings could be stopped virtually overnight. In a rebuke of what they call irresponsible Biden administration policies, GOP House members were expected to hold a vote today on impeaching Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. Speaker Mike Johnson has compiled a list of 64 executive actions the Biden administration has taken that Republicans say undermined border security and encouraged illegal immigration.

“Without any congressional action, Biden could fix this crisis,” says Mark Morgan, who served as acting commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection in the latter part of the Trump administration. “With that same pen that he used to stop [Mr. Trump’s] policies, he could reinstitute them.”

But while Mr. Trump’s policies were depicted by supporters and critics alike as some of the most restrictive in history, they did not shut down the border. Though illegal crossings dropped significantly as the president set a tough tone in his first year in office, they increased substantially later in his tenure before he implemented additional policies. Those included expedited deportations and a deal with Guatemala to limit asylum-seekers in July 2019, after which the numbers dropped precipitously.

At the same time, courts overturned some of Mr. Trump’s policies. And there were still significant gaps: The wall he promised to build was not completed, the border remained porous, and immigration courts were backlogged. Democrats say Mr. Trump’s actions were not nearly as effective as he and his allies claimed, and add that the policies presented a threat of a different kind to America.

America will survive as a nation only if “we live up to our basic values of fairness and justice and treating people well,” says Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy, calling Remain in Mexico a “deeply inhumane” policy. Rights groups say migrants were subject to kidnapping, assault, and other dangers while awaiting word in Mexico.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP/File

Then-President Donald Trump gives the pen he used to sign an executive order ending family separations to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen in the Oval Office of the White House, in Washington, June 20, 2018.

Many immigration experts say a president can steer policy to some extent, but that numerous other factors affect border security – from global migration trends to job prospects in the U.S. to Congress’ willingness to allocate funding for things like border agents and immigration judges. Both sides agree that the asylum system is broken and needs an overhaul. 

“Because of existing law, whether [asylum-seekers] make that claim at a legal port of entry or are just caught crossing the Rio Grande illegally, once they do, the border agents are required to begin their processing,” says Gary Schmitt of the American Enterprise Institute by email. “So, while there are various things the president might try and do with executive orders, the biggest thing that needs addressing is only something the Congress can fix.”

Indeed, Mr. Trump and his GOP allies repeatedly urged congressional action during his tenure. And as recently as December 2023, GOP Speaker Johnson called for statutory reforms to be enacted, though he also called on Mr. Biden to use a 1965 provision known as 212(f) that allows the president to restrict or suspend the entry of migrants he deems “detrimental to the interests of the United States.”

While both parties have increasingly sought to accomplish their policy goals through executive action, experts across the spectrum say that only Congress can and should enact more sweeping changes on an issue this complex and important – unless voters want a monarch instead of a president. 

The Senate deal, brokered by a Democrat, an independent, and a Republican, would give the president the authority to shut down the border when the daily average of illegal crossings over a seven-day period reaches 4,000. It would require him to do so when that figure reaches 5,000. In the past several months, the U.S. has hit that average all but one week, according to the GOP negotiator, Sen. James Lankford. It also raises the threshold for asylum-seekers and adds penalties for deportees who try to cross again. 

Both hard-line Republicans who say the deal would normalize thousands of illegal crossings a day, and progressive Democrats seeking more comprehensive reforms, have taken issue with talk about “shutting down” the border.

“Is there a door that rolls down?” asks New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, saying the lack of specificity suggests the rhetoric is more political than practical. 

“It becomes more of a slogan” than actionable policy, says lawyer Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow with the Migration Policy Institute. “Let’s say [Mr. Biden] says, ‘I’m going to expel everyone.’ You can’t expel people to Mexico unless Mexico accepts them.”

Indeed, though Speaker Johnson has called for renegotiating Remain in Mexico, Mexico now opposes the policy. Meanwhile, Mr. Trump has urged House Republicans not to compromise on border security – a stance consistent with his record but one that would also likely benefit him politically in this year’s presidential election. Even if the border deal were to somehow pass the Senate, Speaker Johnson has declared it “dead on arrival” in the House.  

“Illegal immigration is illegal; it is against the law. Why would you tolerate 5,000 a day before you sought to suddenly enforce the law?” asked Mr. Johnson, a constitutional lawyer, last week. “The goal should be zero, not 5,000 – and all the president’s authority should be utilized at zero.”

AS1 Jake Green/RAF/AP

A Royal Air Force Typhoon FGR4 aircraft is back at base, following strikes against Houthi targets in Yemen, Feb. 4, 2024. The United States and Britain struck 36 Houthi sites in Yemen in a second wave of assaults meant to degrade and deter Iran-backed groups that have relentlessly attacked American and international interests during the Israel-Hamas war.

Since the Hamas-Israel war erupted Oct. 7, Iran-backed militias in Iraq and Syria have mounted more than 165 attacks against U.S. military bases in the region. After a cross-border drone strike killed three American soldiers in Jordan last week, the United States vowed to “hold accountable” those responsible.

American warplanes launched 85 strikes Friday against militias allied to Iran, and the U.S. promised more retaliation to come as it targets weapons depots, rocket stockpiles, and command-and-control infrastructure of Iran’s self-declared “Axis of Resistance.”

From Lebanon through Syria, and Iraq to Yemen, as well as in Gaza, the Iran-led “Axis” has been active in targeting Israel and its closest ally, the U.S. While the militias’ autonomy provides Iran with a degree of deniability, analysts say the current escalation is dangerously prone to overreach and miscalculation that could lead to a direct U.S.-Iran conflict.

American troops number 2,500 in Iraq and 900 in Syria, nominally to prevent a resurgence of the Islamic State (ISIS). But the uptick in militia attacks and the scale of U.S. counterstrikes – which sparked outrage among Iraqi officials – have effectively stalled U.S.-Iraqi talks underway prior to Oct. 7 that were progressing toward a long-term American withdrawal plan.

Who are Iran’s allies in Iraq?

When Islamic State fighters swept from Syria into Iraq and to the gates of Baghdad in June 2014, the U.S.-trained and equipped Iraqi military disintegrated. Yet Iran – which had supported Shiite militias in Iraq for years, as part of an insurgency against American occupation – immediately sent weapons and ammunition to Iraq, and helped marshal and support the newly formed, mostly Shiite Popular Mobilization Forces to fight back.

For years, U.S. airstrikes against ISIS were conducted in parallel with ground forces of the Iran-backed militias and reconstituted Iraqi armed forces. After ISIS was declared defeated in Iraq in late 2017, those Shiite militias – which have at times numbered more than 65 different groups – had sizable political clout and were officially brought under the wing of the Iraqi security forces.

Pro-Iran factions helped violently quell popular street protests that started in 2019, and since October 2023 have operated under the umbrella name of the Islamic Resistance of Iraq, which includes Kata’ib Hezbollah – one group long at the forefront of attacks on U.S. bases.

Joshua Roberts/Reuters

Members of the U.S. military carry the remains of Army Reserve Sgts. William Rivers, Kennedy Sanders, and Breonna Moffett, three U.S. service members who were killed in a drone attack carried out by Iran-backed militants, at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, Feb. 2, 2024.

How much control does Iran have over its “Axis”?

“This is a set of armed groups that are closely aligned to Iran, and at times will take orders from Iran – but at other times will diverge; they do have some autonomy,” says Renad Mansour, head of the Iraq Initiative at the Chatham House think tank in London. “The word ‘proxy’ here is difficult, because it implies just working entirely on behalf of someone else. These groups have their own interests.”

Both Tehran and Washington have signaled repeatedly that they do not want a wider war that would put the two archfoes into direct conflict. Immediately after the three Americans were killed in Jordan, for example, Kata’ib Hezbollah claimed responsibility.

But then after direct intervention by Brig. Gen. Esmail Qaani, commander of Iran’s Qods Force, which handles the “Axis” across the region, and Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed Shia al-Sudani, the militia issued a statement saying it would cease all attacks on Americans – and even indicated that it had been unhappily pressured by Iran.

“The logic of violence that Iran wants is to show force, but not to risk any escalation,” says Dr. Mansour.

Can the U.S. degrade the “Axis” from the air?

The record of achieving lasting militia degradation through airstrikes alone is not very promising, if the U.S. military experience in Afghanistan and Iraq is any measure.

U.S. Central Command says it struck seven different targets in Iraq and Syria. With the help of Britain and other regional partners, it has also been launching almost daily strikes against another Iran-backed group, the Houthis in Yemen, who have not been deterred from targeting Red Sea shipping.

One month ago, a U.S. drone strike in Baghdad killed a leader of the Harakat al-Nujaba militia, accused of planning attacks against American service members. Back in 2020, also in Baghdad, the U.S. assassinated Iran’s Maj. Gen. Qassim Soleimani, the Qods Force commander and architect of the “Axis of Resistance,” along with Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis, founder of Kata’ib Hezbollah and deputy leader of the Iraqi Shiite militia forces.

Hadi Mizban/AP

Members of an Iraqi Shiite militia attend a funeral in Baghdad, Iran, Feb. 4, 2024, for the group's members killed by a U.S. airstrike.

In addition to such targeted killings, for years, the U.S. has “struck [Iran-backed militias’] weapons depots and tried to financially strangle them through sanctions, and yet the groups have kept their capabilities and still operate across the region,” says Dr. Mansour.

“There can be intense military bombardment to go after adversaries, but that does not make a coherent strategy,” he says. “What’s becoming clear is the U.S., for all its military and economic might, fundamentally has a predicament: It does not have a sustainable approach for dealing with these groups.”

How are the U.S. strikes impacting Iraq?

While Washington aims to deter further attacks on U.S. forces, the stepped-up militia action linked to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza and the new level of kinetic American response touch a raw nerve in Iraq.

“We already know the damage that the Americans can do – that’s the whole political sensitivity of this issue,” says Hamzeh Hadad, an Iraq expert and visiting fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “So the Iraqis don’t need a reminder of what the Americans are capable of, which is why we always had that fear of, ‘Will this extend to that level?’”

And there is another practical concern, he says, about the continuing threat from the Islamic State. In Syria and Iraq, for example, the U.S. Department of Defense estimates that 1,000 dispersed ISIS fighters remain, and camps in Syria still hold tens of thousands of people linked to the original ISIS “caliphate.” Likewise, nearly 100 people were killed in Iran a month ago, in a double explosion claimed by the ISIS Khorasan branch.

“When this Iraqi militia decided to attack this American base bordering Iraq, Syria, and Jordan, you are arguably attacking a side that is keeping ISIS in check there,” says Mr. Hadad. “And the same can be said for the Americans: When they attack the bases on the border of Iraq and Syria, they are also attacking [militias] that are basically stationed on the border to take care of ISIS.”

When companies make an honest mistake, customers are usually willing to forgive. When they make a series of errors or are found to be lying about a practice or a mistake, it’s harder to rebuild trust.

That’s the dynamic now playing out at two U.S. companies – old-guard Boeing charged with skirting safety rules with its 737 Max jets, and upstart Cruise, a driverless car company now under investigation over its handling of a robotaxi collision. The failures highlight ethical concerns at a time when public confidence in institutions generally – and in large tech companies specifically – has deteriorated. 

This deterioration may complicate the prospect of corporate redemption for both Boeing and Cruise. “The FAA will consider the full extent of its enforcement authority to ensure the company [Boeing] is held accountable for any non-compliance,” Michael Whitaker, administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, told a House of Representatives committee Tuesday in prepared remarks. It may also make it harder for other tech companies to push innovations – from artificial intelligence to gene therapies to robots – on a doubting public. 

Yet public confidence remains as important to business as it is to society.

“Trust is kind of like the grease of a productive and positive relationship and a positive reputation,” says Jonathan Bundy, a management professor at Arizona State University. “Once that trust starts going away, it becomes much more difficult to just say you’re sorry.”

Boeing’s most recent problems began on Jan. 5, when shortly after takeoff from Portland, Oregon, a panel of one of its 737 Max 9s blew out. Despite loss of pressurization, passengers suffered only minor injuries, and the Alaska Airlines crew was able to return to Portland. The FAA grounded all the Max 9 planes with the special panel – actually a “plug door” used to seal off unused emergency exits – after loose bolts were found on other Max 9 plug doors. 

On Tuesday, federal investigators, in a preliminary report, said there was evidence that four bolts designed to hold the plug door in place on the Boeing 737 Max 9 were missing when it blew out.

A day earlier, The Boeing Co. said it needs to address a new problem with fuselages on some unfinished 737 jets. Two holes on each plane not drilled to required specifications will force the company to rework about 50 planes, raising further concerns about quality at the manufacturer and its suppliers.

NTSB/Reuters

The fuselage plug area of Alaska Airlines Flight 1282 Boeing 737-9 MAX, which was forced to make an emergency landing with a gap in the fuselage, is seen during its investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board in Portland, Oregon, Jan. 7, 2024.

The grounding was similar to an earlier Boeing debacle, when the FAA forced the company to ground its 737 Max planes after two crashes in 2018 and 2019, resulting in 346 fatalities. In those crashes, Boeing initially blamed pilot error. But investigators pinned the cause on software changes that took control of the planes away from pilots without their knowledge – a problem Boeing knew about a year before the first crash but did not tell airlines, pilots, or regulators. Boeing lost billions in sales to rival Airbus. 

Eventually, the company apologized, instituted new safety procedures, and brought on a new CEO to clean up the mess. It is that CEO, David Calhoun, who faces the task of rebuilding trust once again. 

Some travelers have avoided booking on Boeing’s 737 Max planes, even if that means paying extra for a different flight. Public forgiveness will depend, at least in part, on whether people believe the latest problems represent unrelated mistakes or reflect a pattern in which the company consistently puts profits ahead of safety.

“There’s lots of research that says that a breach of trust based on competence is something that is easier to recover ... from,” says Sandra Sucher, a professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of a 2021 book “The Power of Trust: How Companies Build It, Lose It, Regain It.” But “persistent breaches of competence begin to look almost like a breach of integrity.”

And moral failure is much harder for a corporation to recover from.

“Even if they address this one specific issue with the doors, if the broader culture is not changed to address the safety issue, then why would we place faith in the organization?” asks Peter Kim, a professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California’s business school and author of the 2023 book “How Trust Works: The Science of How Relationships Are Built, Broken and Repaired.”  

High-tech products are complex, involving so many parts and procedures that it’s not fair to jump to conclusions before all the facts are in, Dr. Kim adds.

“A flawed corporate culture”

Sometimes, it’s a fine line between mishap and a flaw in corporate culture.

On Oct. 2, 2023, a driverless taxi owned by Cruise was moving through an intersection in San Francisco when another driver hit a pedestrian, propelling her into the path of the robotaxi, which ran over her. The initial collision was clearly the fault of the human driver, who fled the scene. Anxious to prove it wasn’t at fault, Cruise quickly provided the press the portion of the video that it could download remotely from the robotaxi, which showed only what happened up until the Cruise taxi hit her. 

Hours later, when Cruise employees could download the full video from the car, they found something more chilling. After running over the pedestrian, the car stopped, and then immediately started up again to pull over to the side of the street, dragging the woman some 20 feet, even though she was visible to one of the car’s left-side cameras.

While even an attentive human driver might have accidentally hit the woman in the first place, they certainly would have investigated the situation before starting up again, a third-party technical analysis later determined.

Cruise made no effort to alert the media to the dragging incident. The following day, when it showed the full 45-second video to regulators, employees let the video speak for itself, according to a third-party investigation of the incident paid for by Cruise and released late last month. That decision not to speak up about the incident proved the company’s undoing.

Terry Chea/AP/File

Associated Press reporter Michael Liedtke sits in the back of a Cruise driverless taxi that picked him up in San Francisco's Mission District, Feb. 15, 2023. General Motors is facing a U.S. Justice Department investigation into a collision involving a robotaxi operated by GM's Cruise subsidiary.

In three initial meetings with government officials, internet connectivity issues probably made it difficult – or impossible – to see the dragging incident, the report concluded. The California Department of Motor Vehicles, claiming it was not shown the full video, suspended Cruise’s permit to operate driverless cars. The company may not have intended to deceive regulators, the report says, but neither did it tell the whole truth.

Reluctance to admit mistakes is not unusual among corporations. “Top executives at the firm, directors, the one thing in their mind, I suppose, when they wake up and when they go to bed is litigation risk,” says Sandra Vera-Muñoz, professor of accountancy and a fellow at the Notre Dame Deloitte Center for Ethical Leadership at the University of Notre Dame. “So of course they’re going to try to find ways of denying responsibility.”

But Cruise’s actions were also the result of a flawed corporate culture, the report concluded, including “poor leadership, ... an ‘us versus them’ mentality with regulators, and a fundamental misapprehension of Cruise’s obligations of accountability and transparency to the government and the public.”      

Restoring confidence 

General Motors Co., which owns Cruise, has taken the first steps to rebuild confidence, trust researchers say. It paused all autonomous vehicle operations. It has apologized: “We are profoundly remorseful both for the injuries to the pedestrian, as well as for breaching the trust of our regulators, the media, and the public,” it said in a Jan. 25 blog post. It has made efforts at transparency by releasing the report and a redacted version of the third-party technical analysis. A dozen key Cruise executives, including co-founders Kyle Vogt and Daniel Kan, are gone. GM has named a chief safety officer to the operation.

Boeing, grappling with its more recent plug door incident, is following a similar path. On an earnings call on Jan. 31, the company’s CEO, Mr. Calhoun, owned that Boeing was responsible for the equipment failure. “An event like this must simply not happen on an airplane that leaves one of our factories.”

The company has put in place more quality controls and inspections, appointed an adviser to independently review its quality control, and allowed client airlines access to its factories in a bid to increase transparency as it awaits a federal investigation’s findings. 

“It’s saying the right things, but I think it’s too early to tell how much better their inspections are,” says Bill Benoit, author of “Accounts, Excuses, and Apologies: Image Repair Theory Extended.” 

If customers conclude that the problem lies in the corporation’s character, the repair process could take years, trust researchers say.

The flip side is that companies that do the hard work of real reform can become stronger as a result. For example, in the 1990s, accused of working with Asian contractors using child labor in sweatshop conditions, Nike initially denied the reports. Eventually, it owned up to its mistakes and instituted quality controls to ensure Nike’s contractors and subcontractors treated workers fairly.

“They internalized the mistake to say ... ‘We’re going to change the culture of the organization to ensure that something like that never happens again,’” says Professor Bundy. “Now, they’re generally celebrated as a bit of a champion on this issue.”

Such trust is sorely needed at a time when confidence in big business and large tech firms is at record lows, according to Gallup. Trust in tech firms is key because the public is looking to these companies to manage technology, according to the 2024 Edelman Trust Barometer, released last month. But the international survey found that most respondents felt innovation is poorly managed, which will require companies to address public concerns. 

“Innovation is accelerating and should be a growth enabler,” Richard Edelman, CEO of Edelman, said in a press release. “But it will be stymied if business doesn’t pay as much attention to [public] acceptance as it does research and development.’’

Students and teachers, as well as some parents, sit on two wooden benches running the length of the hallway of their school, organized not by age or grade but by their clans.

They take turns reading from the Ohén:ton Karihwatéhkwen, which translates from the Mohawk language to “Words before all else.” These words, which recognize all life forces in creation, mark the day’s start at the Akwesasne Freedom School.

But the 60-odd students here wouldn’t understand these lessons if it weren’t for this little schoolhouse at the United States-Canada border that for decades has been fighting to preserve Mohawk language and culture. “This makes us who we are, and if we don’t have this, who are we going to be?” asks teacher Kawehnokwiiosthe, whose name in English means “She makes the island beautiful.”

“This is more than just language; it teaches us how to live,” she says.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Elder Wathahilostha uses worksheets that she has adapted by whiting-out any English and replacing it with Mohawk.

Kawehnokwiiosthe turns to her young pupils, who introduce themselves by their clans – Wolf, Bear, and Eel – and state that they are wisk, or age 5. Every class in K-8 that students take is full language immersion. When a child asks a question in English, Kawehnokwiiosthe responds in Mohawk.

Most parents pay tuition with a quilt sold at an annual auction in August. The school is run as a co-op, where parents do the cleaning (along with the students) and the maintenance work. Students come from American and Canadian sides of the border, but the school has never accepted funds from either government, says Alvera Sargent, who heads the nonprofit Friends of the Akwesasne Freedom School and is one of the last first-language speakers of Mohawk.

Riley Robinson/Staff

Alvera Sargent, seated with her daughter, Jessica Sargent, and granddaughter, Lehaserenhawe Francis, is one of the last in the community who speaks Mohawk as a first language.

That makes her precious, says Waylon Cook, former teacher and now project manager of the school’s nonprofit arm. “We treasure our first-language speakers,” he says. “We treasure them because they are so important for us to continue on our language,” he says. “If you lose it, you can’t go to France like you could to learn French. There is nowhere else to do it but here.”

In 2021, Indigenous leaders in Kamloops, British Columbia, announced that they believed they found the remains of over 200 children on the site of the former residential school there. It shocked Canada, and spurred the search for hundreds more unmarked graves.

For Mr. Cook, the Akwesasne Freedom School has always been the path to justice for Indigenous children abused at residential schools – by being cut off from their language, spirituality, and way of life. The Akwesasne Freedom School offers the opposite of what residential schools did. “This is our own solution,” says Mr. Cook. “They’ve made it so hard to be who we are. And we won’t give up the fight to maintain our language and culture.” 

Riley Robinson/Staff

Elder Wathahilostha mentors a student at the Akwesasne Freedom School.

Riley Robinson/Staff

A teacher helps a young Akwesasne Freedom School student plant seeds.

Reuters

An old village in Spain that was submerged under a reservoir has re-emerged during a drought, the worst in 1,200 years.

Any democracy fragmenting over political differences might take a lesson from Spain in recent days on how to build unity.

Last week, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez sustained a political loss when a bill offering amnesty to separatists from the province of Catalonia was voted down in parliament. The blame for the loss went to one of the secessionist parties, Together for Catalonia, or Junts. Some in Spain called for reprisals. But the government has responded instead with compassion.

Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years. The effects are direst in Catalonia, which hasn’t seen rain in more than a thousand days and last week declared a state of emergency. Madrid yesterday announced a plan to invest $502 million in new desalination plants in Catalonia and will soon start shipping in water. That follows an earlier decision to forgive $17.5 billion owed by the province to the national government in debt and interest.

The amnesty bill, which has now gone back to committee for further debate, and the drought and debt measures reflect a patient, ongoing effort by the prime minister to heal divisions through “dialogue, generosity and forgiveness,” as he said last November. Mr. Sánchez took office in 2018, just eight months after the Junts held a referendum on Catalonia independence despite a Supreme Court ruling declaring the ballot unconstitutional.

Unlike attempts at reconciliation in other countries with high conflict, his approach has not made forgiveness conditional on terms such as remorse or disclosure. He sees reconciliation as a shared and negotiated outcome between two sides of a dispute. Forgiveness, as many theologians note, is an individual act – “a private and ongoing discipline of mind, heart, and soul,” wrote Loyola Press author Vinita Hampton Wright.

It can also require grace from one side. Forgiveness “can be done not by the one who is more at fault, but by the one who has more mental and spiritual strength,” wrote Stanisław Glaz, a professor at Jesuit University Ignatianum in Kraków, Poland.

The amnesty bill triggered street protests from hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan leader who fled into exile in Belgium following the referendum to avoid arrest, has said Catalonians need not ask for forgiveness because they have done nothing that needs to be forgiven. That has not dissuaded Mr. Sánchez. In 2021, he pardoned nine secessionist leaders jailed for their roles in the separatist bid.

“Almost always to reach an agreement,” he said then, “someone has to take the first step. We are going to rebuild social harmony from respect and regard. We cannot start from scratch, but we can start again. We love you Catalonia.”

Will that soft approach be just the right solvent? As Omar Encarnación, a chaired professor of politics at Bard College in New York, noted recently, support for secession has dropped sharply in Catalonia since 2017 – below 40% in one recent poll.

It “remains unclear that Sánchez can sell amnesty to a very skeptical Spanish public,” Professor Encarnación wrote in Foreign Affairs. But “restoring peace to Catalonia is a step in the right direction.”