They had the Presidency, House and Senate from 2009 through 2011, not 2013. Immigration reform was not a quagmire the Obama administration was going to delve into in the first 2 years of his administration, among all his priorities, however they did signal the desire to create a bipartisan solutions.
A comprehensive bipartisan bill did pass the senate in 2013, however it was never brought to the House floor for a vote. So perhaps your partisan theory needs re-evaluation.
Immigration reform was not a quagmire the Obama administration was going to delve into
So, you acknowledge that it's a "quagmire", not a benefit.
The Democrats had the legislation all done and ready to go in the previous Congress, when it was just a tool to bludgeon Bush with rather than accomplish anything (otherwise, they could have brought the exact same bill back in the 111th). But that bill failed because 14 Democrats opposed it at cloture; it never even made it to Bush's desk:
They could have just brought back the exact same legislation. It could have traversed the process and been passed within weeks... had they ever actually wanted it to become law.
Their leadership isn't stupid. They know that a broad-based amnesty would be a long term economic disaster, and they acknowledged that even before the post-2010 recovery demonstrated that even upbeat economic periods won't provide real employment for the unskilled anymore (the "gig economy").
> So, you acknowledge that it's a "quagmire", not a benefit.
I don't know what this means. After seeing the amount of political capital and time spent by the Bush administration the prior years, there was no way the Obama administration was going to delve into the same "quagmire."
It seems to me that that bill was bipartisan in it's support and detractors. So I'm not sure what the poison pills were that prevented it from passing. But I remember personally being against it because it seemed to me to establish a caste system in the US.
I think you miss the largest issue with the premise that the Democrats could have forced anything. The Democratic party is not a party of fall in line, there are procedural differences between how both parties operate in congress, and those differences create partisanship on the Republican side specifically.
Perhaps the greatest error by the Democrats and Pelosi was to abandon the "Hastert Rule" and be the ones actually implementing steps to be less partisan.
A comprehensive bipartisan bill did pass the senate in 2013, however it was never brought to the House floor for a vote. So perhaps your partisan theory needs re-evaluation.