Pressure from former Republican President Donald Trump in the middle of an election year has forced United States President Joe Biden to change the Democratic Party’s immigration policy and propose the biggest restrictions in recent years on the border with Mexico.
The White House has proposed cutting the asylum system and doubling the rapid return of migrants, a longstanding Republican demand, in exchange for Congress approving new military aid for Ukraine.
However, Trump supporters say this is not enough and are also unwilling to make any concessions to Biden with nine months left until the election.
Changes in immigration policy
Biden came to power presenting himself as the polar opposite of Trump, who proposed building a border wall in 2016.
The Democrat pledged to make the U.S. a “safe place for refugees and asylum seekers” and give legal status to the more than 11 million undocumented migrants living in the country.
More than three years later, these ideas have been forgotten amid a global increase in people movements and internal pressure to “control” the arrival of foreigners in the country when there are more than 2 million irregular border crossings in 2023.
That, coupled with Republicans’ urgency to lift the blockade on military aid to Ukraine, led the White House to negotiate an immigration pact that includes the biggest changes to immigration laws in decades and focuses on restricting the right to asylum.
“Now the conversation about immigration reform focuses only on the border and how to control it,” Yael Schacher, researcher at Refugees International, tells EFE.
Under current law, a person has the right to seek asylum in the United States at the border or within the United States territory.
Unlike other forms of legal migration, such as work visas, the law does not set a limit on the number of people who can be granted asylum each year due to the humanitarian aspect of this protection.
“It is something completely new for the United States to no longer view asylum as a right that anyone can apply for,” emphasized Schacher.
For some of the people who supported Biden in the 2020 election, abandoning his promises on immigration is a “disappointment,” Vanessa Cárdenas, who worked on his campaign, told EFE. “He is far from what he promised.”
Cárdenas believes that this change is also due to the Republican Party increasingly adopting right-wing ideas that have become part of public thought.
Blockade with a view to the elections
Although Republicans have for years denounced an “invasion” of migrants due to Biden’s supposed “open borders” policy, they have refused to support the president’s proposed restrictions.
That’s why the White House’s proposal, negotiated with some lawmakers, failed in a preliminary vote in the Senate on Wednesday, where virtually all conservatives voted against it.
Biden blames this blockage squarely on Trump, whom he accuses of “intimidating” Republican lawmakers into rejecting every proposal and thus gaining electoral advantages.
The New York tycoon is the heavy favorite to win the Republican nomination in November’s election, in which Biden is seeking re-election to a second term.
The Republican Party wants this campaign to be about immigration, which is why it has sought to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s immigration chief.
According to a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll, migration is now the issue that most voters cite as their top concern, along with inflation.
By contrast, a congressional report released this week predicted that immigration will contribute $7 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next decade.
Although the immigration plan appears to have no future, it shows that Trump is winning over Biden in the migration narrative.
“The Republicans have turned the issue into a problem and drawn the Democrats into a debate about the border,” summarizes Rebeka Wolf, an expert at the American Immigration Council.
