In the United States, hundreds of thousands of immigrants have been living in the country illegally for years, working and earning a living, raising families and sending their children to school. President Biden says they can stay.
And then there are the new arrivals who have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in record numbers seeking safety from poverty and persecution. You’ll have to wait.
Mr. Biden took two major immigration actions this month, expanding legal protections for undocumented spouses of American citizens while sealing the border to most asylum seekers in the United States.
Taken together, the decisions bring into focus Mr. Biden’s approach to one of the most polarizing issues of the 2024 campaign: He will help immigrants who are already here but are trying to keep the border closed to those who want to enter.
The strategy, described by a former White House official as a “border-in vs. border-out” approach, reflects the political complexity of immigration, which is a key concern for voters of both parties in the 2024 presidential race. Polls show that American voters see the situation at the southern border as a problem and that they are more likely to trust former President Donald J. Trump to handle it than Mr. Biden.
Democrats hope Mr. Biden’s actions this month will help neutralize the problem. Matt A. Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster focused on Latino politics, said Americans differentiate between “long-term undocumented immigrants” and “new arrivals.”
“We see them, and most Americans see them, as completely different,” Mr. Barreto said, adding that voters support immigrants who they see as “my friend or my uncle who has been here a long time and even works or Pays taxes.” just trying to get a work permit.”
In recent years, a growing number of Democrats have called for the kind of border security measures the party once denounced under Mr. Trump.
With the number of people crossing the border reaching record levels, Mr Biden has been forced to grapple with tricky policy decisions. His decision earlier this year to grant work permits to thousands of newcomers – an attempt to make them less dependent on housing and other assistance – angered other immigrants who had waited years to become employable.
Mr. Biden’s top advisers believe his new policies will resonate with Hispanic voters, many of whom want both tougher enforcement and better pathways to citizenship. While polls show that some of Mr. Trump’s proposals, including mass deportations, resonate with voters, Mr. Biden’s campaign believes Republicans are painting every immigrant under too broad a brush.
The White House has tried to work with Congress on immigration issues in the past. When Mr. Biden took office, he sought to create a path to citizenship for some 11 million immigrants and tried to push through a bill in February that would turn away many migrants at the border. Neither passed due to Republican opposition.
Mr. Trump, who has made a tough stance on immigration a central part of his political identity, has encouraged Republicans not to pass Mr. Biden’s immigration policies. After Mr. Biden’s announcement this week, Republican spokesman Mike Johnson accused him of engaging in “an election-year border charade” and playing “both sides.”
But as Mr. Biden stood in front of signs reading “Secure our border” earlier this month, he articulated a “simple truth” as he announced sweeping new asylum restrictions.
“If the United States does not secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who could try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America,” Mr. Biden told the East Room of the White House.
Just two weeks later, it was a very different atmosphere in the same room for Mr. Biden. This time, he joined an enthusiastic crowd of immigrants and announced that he would protect about 500,000 undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens from deportation.
He seemed to acknowledge his balancing act.
“I also know that many people in this room also had concerns about the steps that I had taken,” Mr. Biden said, referring to the asylum ban. “As president, I had to take these actions. Every nation must secure its borders, it’s as simple as that.”
Mr. Biden used the event to make a connection to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), a popular Obama-era program that protected hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.
Like Mr. Biden, President Barack Obama also tried to combine a tough immigration policy with a more generous one. He announced DACA in the middle of his re-election campaign in 2012, at a time when his enforcement policies earned him the nickname “Deporter in Chief.”
And while some advocates celebrated Mr. Biden’s policies protecting undocumented people in the United States, they worried about those outside U.S. borders.
“Access to the asylum system is a fundamental human right,” said Ahilan T. Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California Los Angeles Law School. “It is not too late for Biden to fulfill his campaign promise to restore our asylum system while creating protections and opportunities for our undocumented neighbors in the United States.”
As Mr. Biden prepares for a debate later this month with Mr. Trump, he wants to emphasize both deterring newcomers and keeping families in the United States together.
But it remains to be seen whether American voters will recognize this difference.
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2024-06-19 19:51:32
www.nytimes.com
