Immigration reform advocates are so deliriously happy to be rid of President Donald Trump that many seem blind to the fact that the prospects for a kinder, gentler, and more humane immigration policy are not likely to improve much under President Joe Biden.
Biden insists that, with a new sheriff in town, things are going to change. But he still has to convince Congress, and navigate the politics of the immigration debate.
Put me down as skeptical. Biden makes it all sound so simple, but both his track record and the delicate position he’s in suggest that he’s likely to fall short.
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First, expectations are impossibly high. Following on the heels of, well, a heel like Trump who spent several years reveling in anti-immigrant vile and demagoguery, Biden seems to have gone overboard and overpromised. And that means he’s likely to under-deliver.
Biden has pledged to issue, in the first 100 days, more than a dozen executive orders and policy changes rolling back Trump’s immigration policies. Specifically, he wants to reinstate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), the Obama-era program that gives Dreamers a two-year reprieve from deportation and a work permit. However, the program is severely flawed. It’s not permanent, and thus it’s subject to the whims of politicians. Besides, in order to earn the reprieve, participants have to turn themselves in, get fingerprinted, and give their home address to authorities. Those details caused a lot of angst in the immigrant community when Trump ended DACA and left more than 600,000 people vulnerable to deportation.
Biden has also promised, in the first 100 days, to halt construction of one of Trump’s signature agenda items: the U.S.-Mexico border wall. This would be an ironic development given that, while serving in the Senate, Biden was an enthusiastic supporter of the Secure Fence Act of 2006 which authorized and partially funded the construction of 700 miles of fencing along our southern border.
Fun fact: that is roughly the same amount of fencing and barrier construction that Trump built in his four years in office.
That right there—those two things—are likely to be the extent of the Biden immigration agenda for the first term.
The other things he promised to do in the first 100 days—ending the practice of separating families, stopping prolonged detentions, restoring asylum, curbing deportations etc—are not likely to happen. Not right away, and probably not at all.
That goes double for the big ticket item on Biden’s agenda: the comprehensive immigration reform bill that he promises to send Congress—again, in the first 100 days—to give legal status to the estimated 11 million migrants and refugees living illegally in the United States.
That’s the whole enchilada.
Beyond trying to show up Trump, there is another reason for Biden’s flurry of promises. The president-elect has his own sins for which to atone. He came close to admitting as much during the campaign when, in a February 2020 interview with Univision’s Jorge Ramos, Biden said that the Obama administration—in which he served as vice president—had made “a big mistake” by mangling its policy toward immigrants and refugees.
Here’s some of that “big mistake”: President Obama broke his 2008 campaign promise to make immigration reform a top priority. He vastly expanded the Secure Communities program, which enlisted local and state police to help in the apprehension of illegal immigrants, and went on to deport about 3 million people in eight years, divide hundreds of thousands of families, and put into the foster care system tens of thousands of U.S.-born children whose parents were deported. Obama also refused initially to halt deportations because, he insisted, he wasn’t a “king” and claimed falsely that his administration only deported criminals even though subsequent audits by advocacy groups would prove otherwise. And whenever he faced criticism from the left, Obama would simply claim he had to be this tough to please Republicans in Congress—something he never seemed very concerned about doing when it came to any other issue.
Immigrant advocates are well aware of this record, and they’re demanding that Biden go high where Obama went low.
And here is where the disappointment will likely come in. In politics, the players may change but the game stays the same.
I’ve been covering politics—and specifically, the politics of the immigration debate—for 30 years, and this is what I know:
The game is all about lying to constituents, situational ethics, inconsistency, mutual hand-washing, backroom deals, kicking the tough issues down the road, and gentlemen’s agreements to not make one another look bad. It’s also about pulling off the hat trick of getting money from one group of folks, and votes from another group of folks—even when the groups want different things from you.
And how do you pull off that stunt? Well, for one thing, you hope that folks focus on what you say, and not what you do—or, in some cases, what you don’t do. This allows Democrats to promise Latinos that they’ll deliver immigration reform, even while they’re dropping the hammer with tough enforcement measures.
What drives the game of politics is reciprocity. Politicians take care of those who take care of them.
For Biden, taking care of his supporters means taking care of two groups above others: working-class whites and African Americans.
The first group figured prominently in an internet campaign ad that Bruce Springsteen narrated for Biden. The ad was set in the candidate’s hardscrabble hometown of Scranton, Pennsylvania. There, Springsteen said, “success (is) forged with sweat, grit and determination.” Scranton isn’t just where Biden is from, The Boss assured us, “it’s who he is for.”
And of course, Biden would not have survived the South Carolina primary without the support of African Americans. During his victory speech, Biden promised his Black supporters: “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”
Both of these groups have, over the last 30 years, shown a desire for tighter immigration laws not looser ones. Both groups have told pollsters that undocumented workers take jobs. And both are afraid that adding millions of new legal workers to the U.S. economy would put more of them on the unemployment line. For these groups, the answer for what ails America is not more immigrants but fewer of them.
These are Biden’s people, and he won’t betray them. Not when it has proven to be so easy to fool immigrant advocates into accepting a slice of bread and calling it a steak dinner.
