Biden hopes new agenda wins over Latinos
A lot of Latino voters aren’t excited about Joe Biden. Some still associate the exvice president with former President Barack Obama, who is derisively remembered by some immigration rights advocates as “the deporterinchief ” because 3 million people were removed from the U.S. during his eight years in office.
But Biden is signaling a different approach to immigration, a path he explained in his Latino agenda unveiled this week.
One big change: Don’t wait for Republicans to help.
Biden doesn’t plan to waste months trying to woo a handful of Republicans to join Democrats in supporting a comprehensive immigration bill. Instead, he’ll focus on individual pieces of legislation, including one to provide a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented people in the U.S. “who register, are uptodate on their taxes, and have passed a background check.”
And unlike Obama, Biden plans to try to pass an immigration bill at the start of his administration, when the Democrats could have control of both the House and Senate. Obama prioritized passing a health care reform law. By the time he got around to immigration, Democrats had lost their congressional majority.
Biden’s change is a huge
positive for immigration advocates like Marielena Hincapié, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center’s Immigrant Justice Fund.
“I think that that’s one of the biggest lessons learned from the Obama administration and from the current dysfunction of Congress,” Hincapié told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast.
Yet Biden didn’t abandon the philosophy of pushing for comprehensive immigration reform even after he was out of office. Hincapié said he changed when his and Sen. Bernie Sanders’ supporters met to craft policy solutions that could unite Democrats after Biden clinched the Democratic presidential nomination.
“Joe Biden probably started off feeling that comprehensive immigration reform was the silver bullet that solves all the immigration problems. That’s the default of most Democrats,” said Hincapié, who cochaired the team’s immigration group after being appointed by Sanders. She supports his Latino agenda, noting that it mirrors much of what the panel suggested. “Joe Biden has shown that he can listen to the community. This is a different political moment.”
Of course, Biden’s ditchtheRepublicans approach requires a big “if ”: It will work only if the Democrats not only hold the House but gain at least three seats to take back the Senate. The latest polls show Democrats flipping GOPheld Senate seats in Arizona and Colorado, losing a Democraticheld seat in Alabama and running close against Republican incumbents in Maine, North Carolina, Iowa and Montana.
Biden has more immediate problems with Latinos. For starters, he’s polling well behind where Hillary Clinton was among Latino voters four years ago in six states that could decide the election, according to a June survey conducted jointly by Latino Decisions, Voto Latino and the Voter Participation Center.
At this time in 2016, according to the groups, Clinton was winning 73% of the Latino electorate’s support in the six states — Arizona, Florida, Texas, Nevada, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Biden is at 60%, the new poll found.
The survey shows “a low enthusiasm about the candidacy of Vice President Joe Biden,” Maria Teresa Kumar of the nonpartisan Voto Latino wrote Wednesday in an opinion piece for CNBC.
“Latinos are one of the largestgrowing demographics in the country, and their support is essential to ensuring a win that cannot be challenged or litigated — especially in key battleground states,” Kumar wrote.
Kumar said most Latinos haven’t heard from Biden’s campaign or the Democratic Party. Only 48% of the respondents said the party is doing a good job reaching out to them. Four years ago, 66% felt that way.
Biden’s problems with Latino voters aren’t new. Sanders beat him in California, Nevada and
Colorado during the primary season largely because the Vermont senator’s campaign was organizing Latino voters there for nearly a year before election day. Biden was seldom heard from.
A survey last month by Hincapié’s organization found that undecided voters in eight battleground states would respond positively if Biden crafted a more “proimmigrant” message. What works best, the survey found, are messages that appeal to issues beyond immigration and stress economic fairness, such as, “We need to build an economy that creates goodpaying jobs and gives everyone, including immigrants, a fair shot to succeed.”
It hasn’t helped Biden’s standing with Latinos that it took him until February — nine months after he launched his presidential campaign and three years after he left office — to say it was a “big mistake” for the Obama administration to have deported people without criminal records. He has since promised to call for a 100day moratorium on deportations if he is elected.
Hincapié is among the activists who want Biden to go further.
“Some of us would want the moratorium to be not just for 100 days, but frankly, it should be until there is some kind of legalization program,” she said. “But we’ll have to see how that actually gets implemented under a Biden administration.”