Joe Biden: the New Face for Much of the Same on Immigration

“Democrats have long gotten away with murder this way, shaking migrant hands in public view while mercilessly oppressing them out of sight.”

To much fanfare, President Joe Biden has begun pushing his preferred agenda to fix immigration. This includes shifting United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s enforcement priorities, ending construction on the border wall, reversing Executive Order 13769 (“the Muslim ban”), introducing a pathway to citizenship for a large portion of the nation’s undocumented immigrants, and even contemplating the rollback of the new citizenship test introduced during the Trump administration. While much of what President Biden has put forward in his early days in office sounds good (and looks even better on paper), it simply continues the veiled restrictionism long favored by the Democratic Party.

A proposed new law, The U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, would allow undocumented people first to obtain a temporary legal status. Then, after five years—and assuming they pass criminal and national security checks and pay taxes—migrants can move forward to become permanent residents of the United States. Three years later, they could further continue to the citizenship stage. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Temporary Protected Status holders, among others, could apply immediately for permanent residency. The legislation even looks to supplant the word “alien” with “noncitizen” throughout immigration laws. This looks both humanitarian and makes for a welcome nominal change, given that there has been no serious attempt at allowing undocumented people to change their status since President Ronald Reagan’s proposed “amnesty.” And, undoubtedly, this would save countless migrant families from further heartbreak. Many of the undocumented immigrants I have worked with, past and present, would wait at least this amount of time (if not much longer) to be given some semblance of political protection.

The current cadre of political elites knows that there is a great deal of electoral power to be harnessed by appearing to be allies of the migrant community.

But this is no evidence of Democrats taking a radical stance on immigration; this is only proof that they intend to be facially less awful than their predecessors. Capitalist politics consistently pull a fast one here. Occasional surges of hyper-nationalism and out-in-the-open immigration restrictions are, in due course, tempered by humanitarian pleas that simultaneously use immigrants as political pawns. The current cadre of political elites knows that there is a great deal of electoral power to be harnessed by appearing to be allies of the migrant community. It is precisely because of the current form of immigration law (and a particularly outward xenophobic posture by the United States federal government over the last four years) that Democratic “reform” will appear to be a shining light in the darkness, rather than being one more incremental shift in a long history of control over migrant bodies.