How will Joe Biden undo Trump’s immigration policies?

One of the most radical and rapid reversals in policy by the Biden administration has been over immigration to the US. No longer are those arriving from Mexico “drug dealers, criminals, rapists” as Donald Trump suggested they often were; now Joe Biden’s manifesto says that “it is a moral failing and a national shame when a father and his baby daughter drown seeking our shores ... Immigration is essential to who we are as a nation, our core values, and our aspirations for our future. Under a Biden administration, we will never turn our backs on who we are or that which makes us uniquely and proudly American. The United States deserves an immigration policy that reflects our highest values as a nation”.  

President Biden has certainly set about implementing that new approach. Family reunification is a pressing priority, and first lady Jill Biden will join a taskforce to achieve that end. Some 611 children are still without their parents after being split up in 2017 and 2018.

Mr Biden will shortly announce a near-tenfold increase in the number of refugees being admitted to the US, to some 125,000 (set in the context of a population of 328 million). President Biden wants to strengthen asylum systems, so that the border patrols, courts and Department for Homeland Security (DHS) are no longer simply different mechanisms to deport people. To that end the president has anointed a 100-day moratorium on deportations. The causes of mass migration – the long “caravans” of desperate people travelling north to escape drugs crime, violence, tyranny and poverty in Latin America – will also be addressed. Refugees will be encouraged to register and settle in other south and Central American states, with economic support from the US.  

The DHS, somewhat neglected and denuded of staff and morale under President Trump, is to be reinvigorated. Mr Biden’s nominee to be secretary for the department is Alejandro Mayorkas, himself a Cuban-born refugee. Last week, facing hostility to his appointment from Trump-ist senators such as Ted Cruz, Mr Mayorkas pleaded: “My father and mother brought me to this country to escape communism and to provide me with the security, opportunity and pride that American citizenship brings to each of us.”

Mr Mayorkas will be supported by a beefed-up team of lawyers and administrators tasked with bringing order to the system, and protecting human rights. Many of them, as elsewhere in the government, are veterans of the Obama administration. One, Esther Olavarria, who will advise the president, was unabashed in setting the new agenda. Referring to a new order rescinding restrictions in low-income migrants, and other anti-migrant rules, she said that “these are policies that ignored the decades – and centuries, actually – of contributions that immigrants have made to our economy, to our society, to our culture. We’d rescind those policies and return to a country that welcomes immigrants and acknowledges their contributions.”

In his first hours in office Mr Biden moved swiftly to dismantle the tangled nativist anti-migrant infrastructure constructed by Mr Trump, and halting work on the famous Mexican wall. The so-called Muslim travel ban has been lifted, and the Department of State ordered to expedite visas and review “extreme vetting”. The action on childhood arrivals programme, DACA, has been reinstated, part of the general aim to end child separations. The “remain in Mexico” rule, for those awaiting court hearings, has effectively been abolished. So has family separation.  

President Biden, like his predecessor, is making the most of his discretionary right to make laws in some areas via brief executive orders. Yet on the most prized asset of all for any refugee – US citizenship – the president cannot act alone. The eight-year pathway to citizenship Mr Biden envisages requires legislation, which means persuading, cajoling, and very possibly opening up the pork barrel to Congress. Moreover, Mr Biden and his allies will have to persuade public opinion that this sharp change of direction is in the interests of America and its working families. Mr Biden will soon find himself being reminded that 74 million of his fellow Americans voted for Donald Trump for a reason.