Immigration and President Biden's SOTU 2024
On March 7, 2024, President Biden delivered his annual State of the Union Address before a joint session of Congress. I watched it in its entirety and it felt like more of a partisan reelection speech rather than a consensus-building, unifying message. He spoke on a host of issues and proposed a wide array of solutions as he laid out his agenda in the last few years of his present administration.
One of the areas that is omnipresent in this yearly exercise is our favorite subject; immigration. This is not surprising as we all know what is going on at the border, highlighted by the fact that these migrants are transported to the inner cities in the US which, without federal help, have exhausted local resources.
It does not help that two weeks prior, Laken Riley, a 22-year-old American Nursing student at Augusta
University in the state of Georgia was allegedly killed by an undocumented immigrant from Venezuela who was previously caught for illegally crossing the border but was later released. Her death has become a rallying cry for bipartisan immigration reform and in fact has a bill named after her which requires federal officials to detain migrants who commit burglary or theft and allow states to sue the federal government if the latter fails to enforce immigration laws.
In his speech, Mr. Biden showed a very careful approach by insisting that he could be tough on the issue while still being compassionate on the undocumented. He stressed the revival of a failed border bill that would have financed more security measures, hired more immigration judges and asylum officers and given him more authority while at the same time emphasizing that he does not demonize immigrants as poisoning the blood of the country, contrasting himself from the rhetoric and policies of the former president, Donald Trump.
Immigration will continue to be a major issue as we go down in this election year. You will hear a lot of media coverage about it as both parties are all too willing to politicize before the American people about why this matters and how it can be resolved. As I have written in the past, the brokenness of the immigration system always comes to the fore in the general collective societal consciousness during an election cycle only to go back in slumber when the fiery speeches temper down. Immigrants are always used as pawns in the never-ending game of political chess and whenever it suits either party's convenient agenda.
“The brokenness of the immigration system always comes to the fore in the general collective societal consciousness during an election cycle only to go back in slumber when the fiery speeches temper down..”