The American immigration system has been called many unsavory things, most of them deserved. It was last reformed thirty-four years ago. What has emerged in the decades since is a welter of backlogs, visa shortages, piecemeal enforcement measures, and every manner of bureaucratic complexity. Ordinary people, trying to work and take care of their families, are often forced into surreal scenarios. Take the 1.1 million people in this country who are married to U.S. citizens but are undocumented themselves. You might assume that it would be relatively straightforward for them to get on firm legal footing. In fact, the process is quite complicated. Anyone who first entered the United States illegally must travel to another country for a visa interview at a U.S. Embassy or consulate. But if she has lived in the United States for more than a year without papers, as some eleven million people have, a law in place since the nineteen-nineties bars her from reëntering the country for up to a decade. That could mean, in effect, getting stranded outside the U.S., despite having a partner, possibly children, and a livelihood here. She can get a waiver permitting her to remain in the U.S. if she can prove that her prolonged absence would cause “extreme hardship” for certain members of her family. But, because of processing delays, getting the waiver can now take three and a half years.
A couple of weeks ago, at the White House, President Joe Biden announced the most consequential act of immigration relief in more than a decade. He gave roughly half a million undocumented spouses of citizens a path to permanent legal status, on the condition that they have lived here since at least 2014 and pass a criminal-background check. “I refuse to believe that to secure our border we have to walk away from being American,” Biden said. “The Statue of Liberty is not some relic of American history.”
The measure, known as parole in place, is part of a broader executive power dating from the early nineteen-fifties, which every President since then has exercised to grant special protection to particular categories of people. Biden has made liberal use of his parole authority, allowing more than a million people to enter the country in the past three years, about a quarter of whom have been displaced Ukrainians and Afghans. Republicans have attacked Biden for using this power too broadly, and there’s no question that the Administration has been creative. Last year, to reduce unauthorized crossings at the southern border, the Department of Homeland Security developed a parole program that has admitted more than four hundred thousand Venezuelans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Cubans who had financial sponsors in the United States. Conservative state attorneys general filed a lawsuit to block the program, but in March it was dismissed in a federal district court. There will almost certainly be legal challenges to Biden’s latest policy, too.
Some Administration officials who knew about the parole-in-place policy were unsure that the President would go through with it until they received an invitation to the announcement. He has spent much of the past year charting a resolutely centrist course as views on immigration have hardened among Democrats and Republicans alike. Two weeks earlier, Biden had issued an executive proclamation curtailing asylum at the southern border. This followed the failure of a Senate bill to restrict asylum, which Republicans abandoned under pressure from Donald Trump. Biden called the lawmakers “most pathetic” and “petty.” To reinforce his point—that he was pragmatic, his opponents cynical—the President made his asylum proclamation harsher than the Senate bill.
The problem for Biden was that his efforts still weren’t registering with the electorate. Polls show that voters consider immigration to be one of the most serious problems facing the country, and they now trust Republicans more than Democrats to handle the situation. They appear to have forgotten the chaos and the anguish of the Trump era, from the separation of families at the border to a travel ban denying entry to anyone from seven Muslim-majority countries.
Earlier this year, the polling firm Equis turned to a question that has been increasingly troubling Democrats: Why are so many Latinos, once a fairly dependable bloc of Democratic support, reporting that they prefer Trump and the Republicans to Biden and the Democrats on immigration policy? In one subset of results, Latinos in battleground states said that they were more concerned about Democrats’ “broken promises” than they were about Republicans’ “extreme measures.” Those findings reinforce the fact that the President, in trying to prove his enforcement bona fides at the border, hasn’t managed to communicate policy successes in other areas: he has increased legal immigration, restored a refugee program that was decimated by Trump, and reduced unnecessary immigration arrests in the interior of the country.
In addition, immigrants’-rights advocates have spent much of Biden’s Presidency trying to persuade him to take actions known as affirmative relief—policies that he can adopt, without congressional approval, to provide direct aid to vulnerable populations. The model is Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which President Barack Obama introduced in 2012, to shield from deportation some eight hundred thousand immigrants who had come to this country as young children. The program, which allowed them to work, study, and support their families, was an overwhelming success and has remained highly popular across the political spectrum. Trump tried to cancel it anyway, in 2017, and subsequent lawsuits brought by Republicans led a federal judge in the Southern District of Texas to block new applications.
Those who have been trying to make the case for Biden to do more went looking for a new policy, like DACA, that could have a significant impact and win broad political support. Another finding from the Equis poll was so striking, in this regard, that the pollsters and several advocates shared it at meetings this spring with Biden’s top advisers: some seventy per cent of voters supported an action that gave relief to undocumented spouses. The President cited this figure when he announced the plan and repeated a phrase that had the virtue of not only polling well but making sound moral sense: Democrats, he said, were “keeping families together.”
The new policy is a rare bit of unqualified good news. But it is also a reminder of the paradox of U.S. immigration policy: each act of relief underlines everything that hasn’t been done, both to make the system as a whole more equitable and to allow millions of people living in legal limbo a chance to settle their status once and for all. ♦
