Editor’s note: This is the second of a three-part series.
Last month, I began a three-part series about what we can expect from a victorious Biden-led Democratic Party in the field of immigration reform. The first part consisted of a comparison between Biden’s immigration plan and the recommendations of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force.
Today’s column focuses on the main changes that various immigrant rights organizations would like to see implemented during the first months of a putative Biden presidency. Next month’s concluding piece will tackle the views of “radical” organizations and individuals who challenge not just unfair and ineffective immigration policies but also the conventional wisdom of national borders and citizenship.
My research for today’s examination of the “moderates’” priorities included a discussion with a representative of Indivisible, a distinctly anti-Trump network of progressive activists, a discussion with a representative of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, an organization that connects progressive Jews across the country, and a discussion with a representative of The Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services (RAICES), a Texas-based organization that provides legal assistance to immigrants, as well as close readings of three proposals for immigration reform: Moving Toward Justice, Free to Move, Free to Stay, and the Migrant Justice Platform.
Together, these resources offer a decent summation of the policies that most of the immigrant rights folks will demand from a Biden administration and a Democratic Congress.
The first thing one notices when talking to the “moderates” is that when it comes to bipartisanship, they’re not very inclined to be all that “moderate.” Obama’s failure to secure a legislative compromise after deporting more than 3 million undocumented immigrants in an attempt to bring conservatives to the table has soured the activists on the idea of negotiating with the Republicans, even if the latter managed to purge their party of Stephen Miller-esque xenophobia.
“The outdated model that the folks we’ve worked with in the past had was ‘comprehensive immigration reform,”’ says Mary Small, a legislative director with Indivisible. “The underlying formula was that you essentially traded legalization for one group of people — so help for some people, in exchange for harsher enforcement — so harm to other people. There was a help-for-harm tradeoff that, over time, worsened the structure of our immigration system.”
The Migrant Justice Platform, endorsed by RAICES and many other immigrant rights organizations, explicitly advocates discarding Obama’s grand bargain approach in favor of a multi-pronged strategy that would see some policies advanced through presidential executive orders and others through targeted congressional action.
As you would expect with a field as vast as immigration reform, the action items that the non-governmental organizations list on their agendas number in the many dozens, and range from relatively quick fixes (stop building the wall, rescind the “Muslim ban,” leave DACA in place, increase the number of visas, etc.) to systemic changes (combat corruption, poverty and violence in Central American countries, change the minds of millions of American citizens who perceive immigrants as a threat, etc.). It is, however, possible to identify a handful of priorities that most NGOs share:
1) Decriminalize border-crossing and deprioritize detention and deportation. This would necessitate many legislative and procedural steps, including instructing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement to leave non-dangerous undocumented immigrants alone, eliminating private prisons, and funding community-based efforts to care for immigrants while their cases are being heard.
“We would establish welcome centers” at the border, explains Adriana Quiroga, a community organizer with RAICES in Austin. Asylum-seekers who have experienced “severe amounts of trauma and fear” would be met “with psychologists, with social workers, with case managers, with folks that can process and assess their cases and view the whole picture of this person instead of a quick checkmark.”
2) Drastically reform ICE and the Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency, if not abolish them altogether. “These agencies are terrorizing communities,” says ArielleGingold, deputy Washington director of Bend the Arc. The #DefundHatecampaign endorsed by her organization calls for the shifting of funding from ICE/CBP to “education, housing, and health care programs that increase well-being, not bankroll xenophobic policies.”
3) Provide a path to legal status for all undocumented immigrants in America, not just the DACA recipients. Fully three quarters of all Americans would support such a measure.
4) Re-articulate the relationship between incoming immigrants and the U.S. job market. Small, of Indivisible, argues in favor of a mechanism whereby immigration quotas adapt automatically to the demand for workers in the country. Quiroga, of RAICES, speaks of creating some sort of “transnational labor citizenship” that would greatly enhance existing guest-worker programs.
5) Identify, and act on, the many strands that connect the phenomenon of migration with other systemic forces such as white supremacy, imperialism, income inequality and climate change. “As a country that has contributed to a fair amount of instability in the world, as a country that is one of the biggest contributors to climate change, I think it’s imperative that the U.S. be prepared to accept folks fleeing for their lives in response to that,” says Small.
Should most of these measures be implemented, many progressives will undoubtedly be satisfied that the stain of the Trump administration’s blatant xenophobia will have been largely erased.
Some, however, like the ones I spoke to for the last installment of this three-part series, will consider it yet another missed chance to accomplish what is really important: rethinking the very ways in which we partition the world around us and relate ourselves to our neighbors.
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.