The executive action that President Biden announced on Tuesday is his boldest move yet on immigration. The new policy will protect nearly half a million spouses of undocumented U.S. citizens from deportation and help provide work permits to eligible Dreamers (undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children). The overdue change is another sign that Biden has not given up on Latino voters in his quest for a second term. But it may not be enough.
“This is the biggest since DACA,” a source familiar with the details of Tuesday’s decision told NBC News, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy that President Obama announced 12 years ago last weekend . DACA has protected hundreds of thousands of Dreamers from deportation and allowed them to work legally in the US Donald Trump tried to end the program and even today it remains under constant legal and political attack from Republicans.
Like Biden’s executive action on Tuesday, DACA’s origins were in politics. When Obama first ran for president in 2008, he promised comprehensive immigration reform and supported the Dream Act, which would create a path to legal status for undocumented students. But the bill fell into the Senate filibuster in 2010 (with five conservative Democrats voting against it). Immigration reform has gone nowhere. These failures only added to the intense political pressure placed on the Obama administration by the undocumented youth movement and influential immigrant rights advocates who spoke out against record deportations.
In 2012, Obama lost the immigration debate to Republicans, a New York Times story reported, and “alienated Latino voters who may be crucial to his reelection bid.” The push for some form of immigrant relief would still resonate with Latinos in the Southwest and Midwest states, who voted for him by wide margins in 2008.
A few months later, the DACA policy paid off politically. Obama won his second term with 71% of the total Latino vote, an increase of 4% from 2008.
Biden is following a similar playbook, and the new move gives him a clearer path to securing a larger share of the nation’s 36.2 million eligible Latino voters in 2024.
That route looked less promising earlier this month, after Biden issued an executive action limiting asylum. That policy left many Latino voters even more frustrated by the lack of a clear contrast between Biden’s views and those of Trump and Republicans, such as the threat of violent crackdowns and mass detention camps. The Hispanic Caucus in Congress called the order “deeply concerning,” and the ACLU and other immigration advocacy groups quickly sued the Biden administration over the policy.
For many, including myself, Biden’s attempt to win over Republican allies with a “tougher” immigration policy failed. It was a legislative game he could never win, even though he will argue that Republicans caved and abandoned a bipartisan immigration bill because Trump told them to.
But fortunately, Biden’s new policy is more in line with what both his supporters and persuasive voters are telling him. According to a Pew Research survey released earlier this month, 59% of all voters and 85% of Biden supporters believe that “undocumented immigrants currently in the U.S. should be able to remain legally,” while only 32% think of Trump supporters the same. “Hopefully it will also inspire people not to delay this,” Marielena Hincapié, former executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, told The Washington Post.
But unlike when Biden was Obama’s vice president, these politically motivated policies may not be enough to win. It’s not clear whether the announcement will motivate younger Latino voters whose history is tied to immigration policies of the past fourteen years. And don’t discount Western swing states like Arizona and Nevada, where Latinos make up nearly 40% of all eligible voters. Words like “mixed status” and “DACA” are not just words. They are part of their community.
For Biden to succeed, he needs a clearer contrast with Trump on immigration or his campaign allies, who will always call any migration “a border invasion.” The fight for comprehensive immigration reform is well into its fourth decade, one of the longest political battles in recent history. It will continue to evolve into dangerous, violent extremism unless we as a country begin to give a face to a population we continue to make invisible and dehumanize. It is not enough to condemn Trump’s now infamous words that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” Greater actions are needed that uplift immigrant communities rather than defile them.
Tuesday’s announcement gives Biden the basis for a real contrast. Yes, the president broke campaign promises, and yes, Democrats will always insist that Republicans be the ones to reject immigration reform bills — even though Democratic senators were key to the Dream Act’s failure. Perhaps the lessons of the past and subsequent actions like DACA, which have benefited Dreamers and could one day help mixed-status families, have resulted in the realization that because the current Republican Party will never agree to anything , a Democrat like Biden has to show results. And show them soon, because the first debate between him and Trump takes place later this month.
Earlier this year, around the time there was talk that immigration reform wouldn’t become a reality by 2024, I wrote that “Biden’s choice to be more like Trump on immigration could certainly backfire on him. Most Republican voters, like Trump, will never give Biden any credit on immigration no matter what he does, and by alienating progressive and Latino voters, Biden could lose the support of a demographic group that is excited about him used to be.”
Biden is now taking another gamble, but a necessary one. Whether it means a second term is still very uncertain; but his campaign is back on track.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
