A lot is up for debate this week on Capitol Hill as immigration negotiations intensify, but one thing is clear about any deal: It's not likely to help businesses much.

What many in the business world want are changes to make it easier for companies to fill worker shortages with immigrants, such as an increase in the number of H-1B visas. But unlike in previous talks, that issue doesn't even appear to be on the table this time around.

"It's become a huge issue and you already have a slowing or ceasing of semiconductor facility build-outs," notes Greg Wright, a professor of economics at the University of California Merced who is focused on the labor market impacts of globalization and immigration.

"The only short- or medium-term solution is immigration," he added, noting that training efforts to have American workers fill many of these specialized jobs will take years to bear significant fruit.

But the political reality is that these companies can expect little help from Washington anytime soon. Instead lawmakers are focused on border security and closely related issues like asylum policy following a surge in border crossings under President Biden.

"This bill focuses on getting us to zero illegal crossings a day," Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) recently said on Fox News as he tried to drum up support for the Senate's still-unreleased bipartisan deal.

Of course, the immigration talks could end up providing little for anyone, at least this year.

Senate negotiators — Lankford as well as Sens. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) — are hoping to release the text of their bipartisan security deal in the coming days. But House Speaker Mike Johnson has declared the package dead on arrival before even seeing it.

House Republicans, meanwhile, are focusing their energy at the moment on an impeachment inquiry against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas over the issue.

Meanwhile on the campaign trail, former President Donald Trump appears intent on sinking any deal — business provisions or no — and has been markedly successful in pressuring House Republicans to follow his lead.

A different tenor in 2013

The landscape was very different in years past.

Take 2013, a key year in the immigration debate. Much like now, that year featured a bipartisan group of senators who made a run at getting immigration reform passed under a Democratic president, Barack Obama.

Their deal announced in January 2013 was built on the premise of pairing border security ideas with other reforms, notably changes to the visa system to increase the number of H-1B visas available to US companies. It also provided a pathway to citizenship for certain immigrants who had crossed the border illegally.

One of the key figures in that era was Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). He helped negotiate the bill and touted on his website how the deal would mean "when our economy needs foreign workers to fill labor shortages, our modernized system will ensure that future flow of workers is manageable, traceable, fair to American workers, and in line with our economy's needs."

That bill passed the Senate 68-32 but then was never enacted when the GOP-controlled House of Representatives refused to even put it up for a vote.

In a telling indication of the shifting politics, Sen. Rubio is now on the outside of the current talks and standing in opposition. In a recent op-ed, he called the current talks "unrealistic" and called instead for Biden to simply reinstate harsh Trump-era border security policies.

'Screaming into the void'

A recent report from the Semiconductor Industry Association (SIA) found that the chip workforce is expected to grow by over 100,000 jobs in the coming years but roughly 67,000 of those jobs may be unfillable given current degree completion rates in the US.

Few expect the current H-1B program — currently capped at 65,000 workers nationwide — will be enough to overcome the shortfall. Companies like Intel (INTC) will be grappling with the issue in the coming years and have highlighted the SIA report, calling it "troubling."

Arizona is also set to be a hotbed of the growing US chip sector but has already seen labor shortages impinge on their plans. The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is currently at work on a flagship fabrication plant in northern Phoenix but recently announced a delay in the plant's full-scale launch from 2024 to 2025 because of a worker shortage.

The push for growth in the semiconductor space is being spurred by Washington and the $231 billion in new investments contained in 2023's CHIPS and Science Act. As that law continues to roll out, the Biden administration is set to announce a wave of new headline-grabbing grants for companies like Intel and TSMC in the coming weeks, reports the Wall Street Journal.

But immigration changes for these companies are unlikely to come from Washington anytime soon. Professor Wright notes that Biden may have begun his term with grand ambitions for a comprehensive immigration approach but a surge of migrants has forced a narrowing of the focus.

"They just have to concede whatever is necessary to get control of the border," he says of the White House's approach as they face intense pressure on the issue in an election year.

Lost, Wright added, is the case that he and others have long made that immigrants are a net positive for the economy.

Making that case at the moment, he says, is akin to "screaming into the void."

Ben Werschkul is Washington correspondent for Yahoo Finance.

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