Migrants at the top of Biden’s agenda
He is prepared to push a bold immigration package that includes a path to citizenship for 11 million people.
During his first days in office, President-elect Joe Biden plans to send a groundbreaking legislative package to Congress to address the elusive goal of immigration reform, including what’s certain to be a controversial centerpiece: a pathway to citizenship for an estimated 11 million immigrants in the country without legal status.
The bill also would provide a shorter pathway to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of people who have temporary protected status or are Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals beneficiaries who were brought to the U.S. as children, and probably also for certain front-line essential workers, vast numbers of whom are immigrants.
In a significant departure from many previous immigration bills passed under both Democratic and Republican administrations, the proposed legislation would not directly link an expansion of immigration with stepped-up enforcement and security measures, said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center and its Immigrant Justice Fund, who has advised Biden aides on the proposal.
Both Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris have said their proposal will include a pathway to citizenship for millions of immigrants in the United States illegally, and The Times has confirmed that the bold opening salvo that the new administration plans in its first days doesn’t
include the “security first” political concessions of past efforts.
Hincapié, who was cochair of the Biden-Sanders Unity Task Force on Immigration — part of Biden’s outreach to his top primary rival, Bernie Sanders, and the Vermont senator’s progressive base — said Biden’s decision to not prioritize additional enforcement was probably a result of lessons learned from the Obama administration’s failed attempt to appease Republicans by backing tighter immigration enforcement in hopes of gaining their support for immigration relief.
“This notion concerning immigration enforcement and giving Republicans everything they kept asking for … was f lawed from the beginning,” Hincapié said.
Biden-Harris transition team officials declined to comment on the record. But on Saturday, Biden’s incoming chief of staff, Ron Klain, sent a memo to the administration’s senior staff that said the new president’s agenda includes “the immigration bill he will send to Congress on his first day in office,” which Klain asserted would “restore humanity to our immigration system.”
Biden’s proposal lays out what would be the most sweeping and comprehensive immigration package since President Reagan’s Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted legal status to 3 million people who were in the country without documentation.
Under Biden’s plan, immigrants would become eligible for legal permanent residence after five years and for U.S. citizenship after an additional three years — a faster path to citizenship than in previous immigration bills.
But even with Democrats holding the White House and slender majorities in both chambers of Congress, the bill will probably face months of political wrangling on Capitol Hill and pushback from conservative voters and immigration hard-liners.
Several immigration activists who spoke with The Times praised the reported scope and scale of the bill and expressed surprise at its ambition. A number of lawmakers and analysts had predicted that the new administration, at least in its first months in power, would be likely to pursue immigration measures that would stir minimal controversy and could be achieved by executive actions rather than legislation.
“I think this bill is going to lay an important marker in our country’s history,” said Lorella Praeli, an immigrant and longtime activist who has been talking with Biden’s staff, noting that the measure “will not seek to trade immigration relief for enforcement, and that’s huge.”
Praeli, president of Community Change Action, a progressive group based in Washington that advocates for immigrants, described the bill as “an important opening act.”
“If there is a silver lining to the Trump era, it’s that it should now be clear to everyone that our system needs a massive overhaul and we can no longer lead with detention and deportation,” she said.
Rep. Joaquin Castro (DTexas) said in a call with reporters Friday that in the meantime, he was working on a bill to give essential workers in the country illegally immediate protection from deportation and a fast-tracked path to citizenship.
“It’s time for essential workers to no longer be treated as disposable, but to be celebrated and welcomed as American citizens,” he said. “If your labor feeds, builds and cares for our nation, you have earned the right to stay here with full legal protection, free from fear of deportation.”
In an interview last week with Univision, Harris gave a preview of the bill’s provisions, which include automatic green cards for immigrants with temporary protected or DACA status, a decrease in wait times for citizenship from 13 years to eight, and an increase in the number of immigration judges to relieve a significant backlog in cases.
Rep. Raul Ruiz (D-Palm Desert), chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, told The Times he anticipates the Biden administration will present a combination of executive orders, stand-alone bills and a comprehensive immigration overhaul package — the building blocks of which the House has already passed.
Ruiz said now is the time to act for comprehensive immigration overhaul, after a “constant barrage” of dehumanizing rhetoric against immigrants during the Trump administration contributed to a rise in white supremacist backlash.
“I believe that our nation has been traumatized,” Ruiz said. “We need to be able to change the narrative to heal from that, to build trust amongst communities and to tone down the hateful rhetoric from the Trump administration. And to really show — not only ourselves but the world — that America still at its core is good and will uphold our humanitarian values.”
President Trump ignited international condemnation when his administration separated more than 5,000 children from their parents in 2017 and 2018 as part of a “zero-tolerance” policy on unauthorized attempts to enter the country.
The policy was eventually stopped, but not before many adults were deported to Central America, leaving behind hundreds of children, from toddlers to teens. Many are still separated from their parents.
Leon Rodriguez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services from 2014 to 2017, said “the public attitude toward immigration enforcement is at a different place in 2021 than it was at any point prior to the Trump administration.”
“I think there just has been a lot of things about how immigration enforcement was executed … that didn’t sit right with a lot of Americans, and that just creates a different attitude toward these matters and a different political calculation,” he said.
Though a traditional enforcement component won’t be part of Biden’s initial bill, that doesn’t mean it can’t be approached later, Rodriguez said. But he believes Biden’s overall approach will set an entirely different tone.
“It’s not going to be about walls and keeping people in Mexico,” he said.
Ruiz said that rather than adding more resources for immigration enforcement, the existing federal agencies tasked with security should focus on going after guns, drugs and criminals.
“What we don’t want is to militarize the border,” he said. “We don’t want to demonize and dehumanize and criminalize an immigration process.”
Lora Ries, acting deputy chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security in 2019 and now a homeland security research fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, said granting most immigrants a path to citizenship would sow division and erode the country’s immigration system.
“Such rewards will attract more people to illegally enter the U.S. to await their eventual green card, undermining border security,” she said.
Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor at UCLA, said any long-term immigration overhaul has to address why people migrate in the first place.
“Legalization is essential, but [legalization] alone is going to mean we’re going to have the same conversation in 25 years or even sooner,” he said, noting that’s exactly what happened after the 1986 overhaul.
This time, he thinks a comprehensive immigration bill stands a better chance at success. Having Democrats in control of the Senate will make a difference, Motomura said, adding that “the pandemic has exposed the hypocrisy of [relying on] essential workers who don’t have legal status.”
“We’re seeing the Republican Party go through a lot of internal upheaval about what it stands for,” he said. “Issues on immigration never used to be as polarized along partisan lines. We may have a moment where there’s some movement for people to vote less on party lines.”
Rodriguez also said the timing of the bill is important. For years, Republican and Democratic presidents have tackled immigration in incremental ways and deferred or procrastinated on passing a large immigration bill. “Biden is saying we are not going to do it that way anymore,” Rodriguez said.
Hincapié said Biden’s team can also quickly make a number of changes without legislation. She expects him to announce several executive actions to expand DACA, overturn Trump’s 2017 travel ban targeting Muslim-majority countries, and rescind Trump’s rule allowing denial of green cards to immigrants who use — or whose U.S. citizen children use — food stamps or other public benefits.
If the broader bill dies or takes too long to pass, Praeli said, Democratic leadership could still legalize a substantial group of people — specifically the estimated 5 million essential workers now in the country illegally.
As part of COVID relief, the president-elect and Democratic leadership could include measures offering legal status to essential workers via a process known as budget reconciliation, which would need only 51 votes to pass the Senate.
“We are talking about potentially 5 million workers who have put their own lives on the line as essential workers,” Praeli said. “You cannot be essential and deportable.”