What has Biden gotten right and wrong on immigration?
Aglitchy government app, an onslaught of crossings at the USMexico border, and a record immigration court backlog of 3.2 million pending cases. That’s one way to look at the Biden administration’s policies on immigration: as failures. The reality is more nuanced than that — and the president’s record much more mixed.
It’s a relevant conversation to have now as New Hampshire voters prepare to go to the polls Tuesday for the Republican presidential primary. Border and immigration issues will be top of mind for most of them. A recent Globe poll in New Hampshire, conducted in partnership with USA Today and Suffolk University
Political Research Center, found that nearly 80 percent of respondents said that the number of immigrants entering the country was an “emergency situation” or a “major problem.”
But is it a major problem? Has Biden actually mismanaged immigration and the border to the point of an emergency? A new analysis helps illuminate the debate a little more clearly.
Analysts at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, released a report that takes stock of the Biden administration’s policy moves on immigration at its three-year mark and calls it “the most active immigration presidency yet.”
As it turns out, Biden has undertaken more than 530 executive actions on immigration, which is more than Trump completed in all four years of his term (the former president enacted 472 executive actions on immigration). Partly as a result of these actions under Biden, “legal immigration is returning to and in some cases surpassing pre-pandemic levels, including refugee admissions on pace to reach the highs of the 1990s,” wrote Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, the report’s authors.
That constitutes not only a reversal of Trump-era restrictions — it’s also a remarkable expansion of legal pathways for immigrants.
“Because of temporary protections, such as parole, extended to hundreds of thousands of arriving migrants, approximately 2.3 million people living in the United States hold liminal legal statuses,” reads the report. Granted, that’s also “a ballooning population in limbo that may prove an enduring legacy of the Biden administration.” These legal immigrants have mostly been admitted through resettlement programs, including those based on humanitarian parole like Uniting for Ukraine and the processes for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans.
“Almost 2 million Americans have raised their hand and say we want to be part of the solution [as private sponsors]. That is a silent majority,” Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the immigrant rights organization America’s Voice, told me in an interview.
And yet, overall, Cárdenas deems Biden’s record on immigration as more of a “mixed bag leaning toward disappointment.” The caveat is that she’s also willing to give the administration a lot of credit because “what they’re facing is something that our system is not capable of managing.” Cárdenas is referring to the “four countries in the region that are pulling apart politically, the impact of COVID, [and] the climate change displacement” happening both on a global and domestic scale. It’s a powerful concurrence of conditions juxtaposed against years and years of congressional inaction to fix an outdated immigration system.
Why, then, does Biden continue to get flak for creating a hot mess at the border? Is this administration incapable of touting its successes? One data point that can help explain why critics accuse the Biden White House of inaction on the issue (as an example, consider the House of Representatives’ impeachment proceedings against Biden’s Homeland Security secretary), as noted by the report: There have been more than 6 million migrant encounters at and between points of entry at the US-Mexico border since Biden became president three years ago.
That statistic denotes encounters, not actual migrants. But that gets lost in the messaging. “The research that we’ve done for decades now shows that Americans want a mix of a secure border and compassion,” Cárdenas said. That dimension also gets lost in the public conversation.
Then there’s the current battle: Biden is still negotiating with congressional leaders on his $110 billion proposal to provide foreign aid, primarily to Ukraine, and restrict border and asylum eligibility. Perhaps this was a preordained fight since Biden decided to open a legal backdoor to such an unprecedented number of migrants, which Republicans would have targeted no matter what. Negotiations on the proposal have shifted the conversation on immigration policies dramatically to the right, to the point that Biden is considering giving in.
But the “GOP is not going to give Biden a win, either on Ukraine or on immigration, just so he can get reelected,” Cárdenas said, and she’s correct. If there is one thing that Republicans have long understood keenly it is that fear drives voters to the polls. It’s why they’re not interested in solving the immigration puzzle. It’s also why Biden should lean in to, rather than move away from, his immigration wins.
A new analysis helps illuminate the debate a little more clearly.