The executive action President Biden announced Tuesday is his boldest move on immigration ever. The new policy will protect close to half a million undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation and help provide work permits for eligible Dreamers (undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children). The overdue change is a new 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 thing since DACA,” one source familiar with the details of the Tuesday order told NBC News, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy announced by President Obama 12 years ago this past weekend. DACA has protected hundreds of thousands of Dreamers from deportation and allowed them to work legally in the U.S. But Donald Trump tried to end the program and even today it remains under constant legal and political attacks from Republicans.
Like Biden’s executive action Tuesday, DACA’s origins lay in politics. When Obama first ran for president in 2008, he promised comprehensive immigration reform and backed the Dream Act, which would create a path to legal status for undocumented students. But the bill fell to a Senate filibuster in 2010 (with five conservative Democrats voting against it). Immigration reform went nowhere. These failures only added to the intense political pressure leveled at the Obama administration from the undocumented youth movement and influential immigrant rights advocates speaking out against record deportations.
By 2012, Obama was losing the immigration debate to Republicans, a New York Times story reported, and “alienating the Latino voters who may be pivotal to his re-election bid.” The push for some kind of immigrant relief would still resonate with Latinos across Southwest and Midwest states who voted in large margins for him in 2008.
A few months later, the DACA policy paid off politically. Obama won his second term with 71% of the overall Latino vote, a 4% increase from 2008.
Biden is following a similar playbook, and the new action gives him a clearer path to secure a larger share of the country’s 36.2 million eligible Latino voters in 2024.
That route looked less promising earlier this month, after Biden issued an executive action restricting asylum. That policy left many Latino voters even more frustrated with his lack of any clear contrast between Biden’s views and those of Trump and Republicans, like the threat of violent crackdowns and massive detention camps. The congressional Hispanic Caucus called the order “deeply concerning,” and the ACLU and other immigration advocacy groups quickly sued the Biden administration over the policy.
To many, including myself, Biden’s attempt to win over GOP allies with a “tougher” immigration stance failed. It was a legislative game he could never win, even though he will claim Republicans caved in and reneged on a bipartisan immigration bill because Trump told them to.
But Biden’s new policy is thankfully more in line with what both his supporters and persuadable 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 allowed to stay legally,” Just 32% of Trump supporters feel the same. “Hopefully, it will also inspire people to not sit this one out,” Marielena Hincapié, a former executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, told The Washington Post.
Unlike when Biden was Obama’s vice president, though, this politically motivated policy may not be enough to win. It’s not clear whether the announcement can motivate younger Latino voters whose histories are tied to immigration politics of the last 14 years. And don’t discount the Western swing states like Arizona and Nevada, where Latinos account for close to 40% of all eligible voters. Words like “mixed status” and “DACA” are not just words. They are part of their communities.
For Biden to succeed, he needs a clearer contrast to 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 memory. It will continue to spiral into dangerous, violent extremism unless we as a country begin to put a face to a population we continue to make invisibe and dehumanize. It is not enough to condemn Trump’s now-infamous words that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country.” There needs to be bigger actions that uplift immigrant communities instead of defiling them.
Tuesday’s announcement gives Biden the foundations of a real contrast. Yes, the president has broken campaign promises, and yes, Democrats will always insist that Republicans are the ones who reject immigration reform bills — even though Democratic senators were key to the Dream Act’s failure. Perhaps those past lessons and the subsequent actions like DACA that have benefited Dreamers and might one day help mixed-status families have resulted in the realization that because today’s GOP will never agree to anything, a Democrat like Biden needs to show results. And show them quickly, with the first debate between him and Trump happening later this month.
Earlier this year, around the time there was talk that immigration reform would not become reality in 2024, I wrote that “Biden’s choice to be more like Trump on immigration can 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 may lose support from a demographic that was enthusiastic about him.”
Biden is now taking another gamble, but a necessary one. Whether it means a second term, it is still very uncertain; but his campaign is on the right path again.