Biden gets real on immigration

No issue better illuminates America’s debilitating political stalemate than immigration. Everyone knows there’s a mounting humanitarian and law enforcement crisis on our southern border, but our political leaders find it safer to appease their most militant partisans than to work together to forge pragmatic solutions.

That may be changing. After ignoring an unprecedented surge of migrants for two years, President Biden has announced some modest steps toward restoring order. His reward for taking on this combustible issue is a fusillade of criticism from rightwing nativists who say he’s not serious and leftwing activists worried that he is.

During Biden’s first visit to the border earlier this month, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott handed him a churlish letter blaming him for the whole mess. “This chaos is the direct result of your failure to enforce the immigration laws that Congress enacted,” it charged.    

Immigrant advocacy groups and social justice warriors likewise were disinclined to give a Democratic president the benefit of the doubt. Instead they bewailed Biden’s “cruel” plan, absurdly describing it as something that could have been ripped out of former President Trump’s immigrant-bashing playbook.

Performative politics aside, Biden’s instincts are right. America’s immigration system is irreparably broken. But securing the border is just the first step to fixing it. The deeper political challenge is to build a broad political consensus for updating our obsolete immigration laws and align them better with America’s economic needs.

U.S. authorities encountered a record 2.4 million migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in fiscal year 2022, breaking the previous year’s record of 1.7 million. (The numbers include people caught multiple times trying to cross the border.) That works out to about 8,000 people a day, and border officials are overwhelmed.

Biden’s plan has three main elements: expediting expulsion of illegal entrants to deter people from flooding the border; boosting federal spending to bolster anti-smuggling operations and hire additional immigration officers and judges to speed up review of asylum cases; and opening the nation’s doors to more legal immigrants.

Specifically, it would expand the successful Venezuela parole program to include up to 30,000 newcomers per month from Nicaragua, Haiti and Cuba if they have a work sponsor, pass background checks and don’t try to cross the border illegally. And it would triple to 20,000 the number of refugees from Latin American and Caribbean countries annually resettled in the United States.

While not the sweeping reform we need, Biden’s plan is a realistic and empathetic start. It’s a big improvement over MAGA fantasies of walling off Mexico and the morally odious policies – like forcibly separating infants and young children from their parents – pursued by Trump.

Nonetheless, some immigration advocates regard any effort to enforce U.S. laws and deport illegal border-crossers as a concession to the xenophobic right. They implicitly favor an open U.S. border, though few dare say so openly because it would put them at odds with majority sentiment, not just here but everywhere.

There are 195 countries in the world, and not one of them has an open border policy. Some, like the European Union’s Schengen countries, have agreements with each other that allow their citizens to freely cross borders. Yet even these limited arrangements are controversial — witness how public anxiety over an influx of “Polish plumbers” and the sense of losing control over their borders helped to spark Great Britain’s exit from the European Union.

Now Britain and EU countries are contending with a steady stream of economic migrants and refugees, mostly from Africa and Middle East, trying to reach Europe in small boats. The specter of unregulated immigration is empowering rightwing nationalist movements across Europe, just as it was the rocket fuel that propelled Donald Trump to the Republican nomination and White House in 2016. 

The issue cleaves the two parties sharply, with Democrats seeing immigrants as mostly good for the country and Republicans seeing them as a threat to U.S. jobs and cultural identity. Apart from calling for legalizing the “Dreamers,” however, Democrats seem reluctant to talk about immigration reform.

Many won’t even use the term “illegal immigrant” for fear of being flamed by immigration advocates and their progressive allies, who instead insist on evasive euphemisms like “undocumented” or “unauthorized” immigrants.

Trying to mask real problems in semantic subterfuge is never smart politics. Half of U.S. voters – and, crucially, 55 percent of independents – think President Biden should be doing more to control illegal immigration. Midterm exit polls last year showed that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle immigration, by 51-45 percent.

Instead of shying from the issue, Democrats should back Biden’s plan. It’s responsive to what most Americans are asking for — a safe, orderly and humane system that lets them decide how many immigrants to let in, and on what terms.

Beyond that, Democrats need to bring our immigration laws into the 21st century. America will need more immigrants to fill skill gaps, do jobs natives don’t want to do and bring new inventions and business ideas to fruition.

For example, the Progressive Policy Institute has proposed a shift from our 1960s-vintage family unification-oriented policy to a “demand-driven” immigration strategy that would grant work visas to anyone who has a valid job offer from a U.S. employer. To win public support for such an expansion, however, Democrats will need to show they can secure the border and use E-Verify and other tools to enforce immigration laws in the workplace.

Innovation is the key to breaking today’s stalemate on immigration. With a little more imagination and courage, Democrats can fashion new and better laws that serve both our national interests and our tradition of welcoming new Americans.

Will Marshall is president and founder of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI).