Editor’s note: This is the first of a three-part series.
Let’s assume, for a moment, that Joe Biden wins the presidency in November, and the Democrats also take the Senate, in addition to holding the House of Representatives.
They now have a free hand to undo many of the Trump administration’s nasty policies and pursue their own legislative agenda. What will they do about immigration? They will undoubtedly be nicer to the asylum-seekers arriving at the southern border, protect Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program recipients, and not mess with the visas of international students. But beyond these Obama status quo quick fixes, can we expect to see a bolder set of measures?
The proposals are out there, and they come from two main sources: Biden’s campaign, of course, and immigration nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). I have been closely following Biden’s evolution on the subject, and for the past few weeks, I have also interviewed representatives of several NGOs (RAICES Action, Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, Indivisible, No One Is Illegal), as well as a few unaffiliated individuals who have put some serious thought into what a truly progressive vision on immigration might look like.
In a three-part series, I intend to map out the main coordinates of this vision, as follows: 1) today’s column devoted to Biden’s proposals, 2) a second column examining a set of “moderate” liberal measures (such as the elimination of for-profit immigration detention centers and the raising of the refugee cap), and 3) a third column detailing some apprehension-inducing “radical” measures (such as open borders and the revolutionary reimagining of “citizenship”).
For better or for worse, everyone seems to agree that Biden is a “moderate.” He certainly entered the presidential race as one, making a play for all “reasonable” voters out there. His initial pronouncements on immigration amounted essentially to a resumption of Obama-era policies, with perhaps some letup in the number of deportations.
When Julián Castro and Bernie Sanders were busy laying down their “radical” markers on the decriminalization of border-crossing and the dismantling of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Biden stuck with such relatively uncontroversial proposals as halting border wall construction and prioritizing the deportation of individuals with a criminal record. To this day, “The Biden Plan for Securing Our Values as a Nation of Immigrants” remains organized around such terms as “restore,” “ensure,” “reinvest,” “streamline,” “modernize,” “reform,” “facilitate” and “promote.”
In a sign of the weirdness of our times, after vanquishing his Democratic rivals in the primaries, Biden reached out to the “radicals” in his party, rather than enact the usual post-nomination pivot toward lukewarm centrism. In May, Biden and his chief rival, Sanders (who himself has undergone some ideological shifts), agreed to form a “Unity Task Forces” to harmonize the two wings’ positions on climate change response, criminal justice, the economy, education, health care and immigration.
A month later, the task force released a 110-page report full of policy “recommendations” for Biden, as he enters the last four months of his presidential campaign. Predictably enough, the report fails to include the vast majority of “radical” proposals that had anchored Bernie’s and Castro’s immigration agendas. Nevertheless, Bernie’s representatives did manage to include some language that deviates from the existing Biden Plan, and it will be interesting to see how Biden addresses those discrepancies during the upcoming debates with Trump.
At first blush, the most “radical” promise in Biden’s current immigration platform is “providing a roadmap to citizenship for nearly 11 million undocumented immigrants” — that is, most undocumented immigrants in America, rather than just the roughly 700,000 Dreamers. However, given that three-quarters of American adults are in favor of granting legal status to undocumented immigrants, this position is not likely to seriously endanger Biden’s image as a “moderate” on immigration.
The Biden-Sanders task force did up the ante a bit by recommending that those undocumented immigrants who have been deemed to be “essential workers” since the pandemic began be “fast-tracked” for citizenship. Biden’s own proposal only talks about fast-tracking some agricultural workers.
During the 2019 Democratic debates, some of the fiercest immigration-related battles were fought around the issue of extending undocumented immigrants the ability to benefit from Obamacare health insurance. Back then, of course, there were no COVID-19 outbreaks in meat plants and the people picking lettuce and parsley for $3 an hour were not recognized as “essential” to our day-to-day lives, and so the question of health care for undocumented immigrants was the exclusive province of “radicals.”
The official “Biden Plan” still leaves this issue unaddressed, but the task force report recommends what looks like a compromise between the two wings of the party: allowing them to buy health insurance on the public exchanges set up by Obamacare without the benefit of government subsidies.
Neither the “Biden Plan” nor the task force report call for the abolition (or even radical reorganization) of ICE. The two documents use almost identical language when addressing the need for enhanced accountability and transparency on the part of the agency, with one small, yet significant, difference: where Biden promises to “increase resources” for the training of ICE agents, the task force wants to “reallocate existing agency resources” for the same purpose.
In the context of the wider debate on “defunding” the American institutions that maintain a legal monopoly on violence, whether Biden will stick with his “still there, but reformed and better funded” position will tell us something important about what we can expect from victorious Democrats.
Whatever Biden and his congressional allies end up agreeing on in terms of immigration reform, they are sure to also hear from the many NGOs who have been fighting an increasingly desperate battle for immigrant rights for the past several decades. In the next two installments of this column, I will bring you their voices, too.
Razvan Sibii is a senior lecturer of Journalism at UMass Amherst. He writes a monthly column on immigration and incarceration. He can be contacted at razvan@umass.edu.