President Biden is on the verge of wiping out most of his predecessor’s immigration policies, with an eye toward restoring the consensus on the issue that existed in Washington before Donald Trump was in the White House.
Both Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, along with over 60 senators in both parties for most of their administrations, supported legislation, commonly referred to as comprehensive immigration reform, that would legalize most of the undocumented immigrants already in the United States, increase legal immigration, and create new categories of guest workers in exchange for border security enhancements.
Despite the backing of two presidents from both parties and a bipartisan majority in the Senate, various versions of these bills went nowhere in the House under Republican control. When Trump sought to negotiate on immigration as president, he included lawmakers like Arkansas Republican Sen. Tom Cotton, who opposed a pathway to citizenship for most illegal immigrants and favored reducing the country’s annual intake of legal immigrants.
Biden wants to halt Trump’s border wall and go back to the drawing board on immigration legislation. White House press secretary Jen Psaki said last week that the president would like to have “a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants who are living in the country” as well as “smart security … the kind of border security that we think is essential and more effective than what we’ve seen over the past couple of years.”
One likely obstacle: Republicans have moved to the right on immigration since the Obama administration, while many Democrats have moved to the left. Where Obama presided over 3 million deportations, stepping up removals of undocumented immigrants early in his tenure to establish credibility on enforcement and win support for a comprehensive bill, Biden has called that approach a “big mistake” and signed a 100-day moratorium on deportations. (That order is currently held up in court.) Rep. Joaquin Castro, a Texas Democrat, has introduced legislation to delete the word “alien” from federal immigration law.
A top Republican who supported the last attempt to reform immigration along the lines Biden is proposing, the 2013 “Gang of Eight” bill, has already come out against the president’s plan and his pause in deportations. “America should always welcome immigrants who want to become Americans,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida said in a statement. “But we need laws that decide who and how many people can come here, and those laws must be followed and enforced.”
Rubio said he would not support a “blanket amnesty for people who are here unlawfully,” which is how opponents frequently characterized the Gang of Eight.
“The politics of passing a big, comprehensive immigration plan is always really difficult,” said Republican strategist Alex Conant, who served as communications director for Rubio’s 2016 presidential campaign. “Incremental immigration reforms could certainly be possible, but there would need to be a real push from the White House and a willingness on both sides to compromise. A lot of the deal-makers from previous efforts are no longer in Congress or have changed their positions, so there’s an opportunity for new leaders to emerge.”
Biden is expected to strike first with executive orders, many of them reversals of those issued by Trump. Some of the most controversial actions undertaken by the Trump administration were related to immigration enforcement, especially family separations at the border. Trump nevertheless won the highest share of the Hispanic vote of any Republican presidential nominee since Bush in 2004 last year, which may embolden some GOP immigration hawks to stand their ground.
“Those who believe that President Biden will recreate the elite Beltway consensus on immigration amidst a weakened economy and global pandemic must have been asleep for the past four years,” said Matthew Tragesser, press secretary for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates tighter immigration controls. “The Biden administration’s radical day one immigration initiatives, including a deportation freeze and amnesty for all, have already drawn fierce opposition from Republican lawmakers, federal judges, and the American public.”
“The Gang of Eight days are over,” he added. “One party’s orthodoxy is securing the borders and protecting American workers, while the other focuses on amnesty and gutting enforcement.”
Biden has said he will not only roll back Trump’s policies but also heed the calls of activists who thought the Obama administration detained and deported too many immigrants. “It was painful,” he said as a candidate last year. “It took too long. But we began to get it right with the DACA program,” a reference to Obama’s executive order protecting some immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children. Trump tried to rescind this program, which opponents argued usurped congressional authority.
“Get some sleep this weekend,” Psaki told reporters at Thursday’s daily White House briefing. “We’ll have more to say next week on immigration.”
