Washington, DC — A new column in the Boston Globe by Marcela García asks the important question, “What has Biden gotten right and wrong on immigration?” The piece looks at the actions taken by President Biden on immigration since taking office and quotes Vanessa Cárdenas, Executive Director of America’s Voice, extensively.
Marcela García’s column can be found in its entirety HERE, and key excerpts are below:
“Has Biden actually mismanaged immigration and the border to the point of an emergency? A new analysis helps illuminate the debate a little more clearly.
Analysts at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, released a report that takes stock of the Biden administration’s policy moves on immigration at its three-year mark and calls it ‘the most active immigration presidency yet.’
As it turns out, Biden has undertaken more than 530 executive actions on immigration, which is more than Trump completed in all four years of his term (the former president enacted 472 executive actions on immigration). Partly as a result of these actions under Biden, ‘legal immigration is returning to and in some cases surpassing pre-pandemic levels, including refugee admissions on pace to reach the highs of the 1990s,’ wrote Muzaffar Chishti, Kathleen Bush-Joseph, and Colleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, the report’s authors. That constitutes not only a reversal of Trump-era restrictions — it’s also a remarkable expansion of legal pathways for immigrants.
…’Almost 2 million Americans have raised their hand and say we want to be part of the solution [as private sponsors]. That is a silent majority,’ Vanessa Cárdenas, the executive director of the immigrant rights organization America’s Voice, told me in an interview.
And yet, overall, Cárdenas deems Biden’s record on immigration as more of a ‘mixed bag leaning toward disappointment.’ The caveat is that she’s also willing to give the administration a lot of credit because ‘what they’re facing is something that our system is not capable of managing.’ Cárdenas is referring to the ‘four countries in the region that are pulling apart politically, the impact of COVID, [and] the climate change displacement’ happening both on a global and domestic scale. It’s a powerful concurrence of conditions juxtaposed against years and years of congressional inaction to fix an outdated immigration system.
…’The research that we’ve done for decades now shows that Americans want a mix of a secure border and compassion,’ Cárdenas said. That dimension also gets lost in the public conversation.
…But the ‘GOP is not going to give Biden a win, either on Ukraine or on immigration, just so he can get reelected,’ Cárdenas said, and she’s correct. If there is one thing that Republicans have long understood keenly it is that fear drives voters to the polls. It’s why they’re not interested in solving the immigration puzzle. It’s also why Biden should lean in to, rather than move away from, his immigration wins.”
