Biden must undo years of damage
There are plenty of steps he can take right away to repair U.S. immigration policies.
President Donald Trump never got around to erecting his GreatWall along the 1,900-mile U.S.-Mexico border, a wall he mused might be topped with spikes and painted “flat black” so it would blister anyone who came in contact with it under the southwestern summer sun. Granted, he built a few miles of wall during his four years in office, but he apparently found little, if any, support for a border moat teeming with ravenous alligators and poisonous snakes.
In his relentless effort to wall off America, figuratively and literally, Trump managed to make an already chaotic immigration system more chaotic and certainly crueler. Trump, feeding off the ideas of White House xenophobe-in-residence Stephen Miller, did his level best to push a nation of immigrants toward zero immigration. He and his young senior adviser envisioned a nation where immigrants of any kind, with or without documentation, as well as refugees and those seeking asylum, simply were not allowed in.
Among the first tasks for President-elect Joe Biden, then, will be to begin undoing the damage Trump has done. He won’t need to wait for Congress to get started, because so many of Trump’s own policies were the result of executive action, proclamations and, according to the Immigration Policy Institute, more than 400 policy memos.
The easiest fix, one that enjoys broad public support, is protecting the program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, implemented by President Barack Obama in 2012. Designed to prevent the deportation of immigrants who arrived here as children, DACA was a temporary program that provides renewable, two-year work permits and peace of mind to young immigrants trying to build a life for themselves in the only country that many have ever known. Obama’s idea was to create a safe space for those young adults while Congress wrestled with amore permanent fix.
Trump claimed it was overreach, and killed the program even as he called on Congress to replace it with new protections for the so-called “Dreamers.” He was immediately sued, and Trump has fought these lawsuits tooth and nail. Fortunately, Biden can change that on day one, and simply drop the government’s challenge to the lawsuits and if needed issue new orders to restore the program.
Biden can also restore Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows immigrants from countries that have experienced natural disasters, civil strife or other “extraordinary” conditions to stay legally. Many of these immigrants have established deep roots. In Texas alone, there about 36,000 TPS holders who have about 42,000 U.S.-born children.
And we’re hopeful, too, that Biden will see to it that migrant children who were ripped away from their families are located and reunited with their missing families.
Biden has also said as soon as he takes office he’ll end efforts to build the wall Trump has boasted of for years. Some construction may continue since contracts are involved, but on balance Texas landowners along the border, conservationists and preservationists and Native American tribes on reservations along the Arizona border can finally breathe easier. Biden also plans to rescind Trump’s 2019 emergency declaration that allowed him to
transfer billions of Pentagon dollars to finance his border dream.
Beyond our southern border, Biden can rescind Trump’s ban on travelers from13 African or Muslimmajority nations. He also can raise the annual ceiling for refugee admissions. The figure was at 45,000 in 2018; the Trump administration in September announced that it would allow no more than 15,000 refugees in the 2021 fiscal year. Biden is likely to increase the number to 125,000.
All of these steps will be welcome, but even taken altogether they are far from enough. Immigration policy by executive fiat is no way to run a country, whether the executive doing the ordering is Obama, Trump or Biden. A nation needs humane, sensible and well-ordered immigration laws and regulations, not the hodgepodge we have now. We need Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform.
That’s why it is such excellent news that this week Biden pledged to send a bill to Congress providing a pathway to citizenship for more
than 11million undocumented immigrants. It’s a bold plan, but it’s hardly new.
In 2013, 14 Republican senators joined with Democrats to pass legislation that included a 13-year pathway to citizenship for those currently in the country illegally. A member of the so-called Gang of Eight that negotiated the bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., exulted in the bill’s 68-32 passage. “This is as good as it gets in the Senate,” he said.
Unfortunately the House, where the Tea Party-inspired majority called the shots, voted it down.
But with a new president, a strong Democratic majority in the House and a closely divided Senate whose leadership remains uncertain, it’s time for another effort. The long list of reforms contained in the 2013 bill are still needed, both to assure that this nation is ever refreshed with the drive, energy and ideals of new immigrants and to assure that we remain what we have always been (until recently): a beacon of hope to people the world over.