By Alejandra Arredondo and Eduard Ribas - EFE
Pressure from Donald Trump in the middle of an election year has forced the president, Joe Biden, to make a change in the Democratic Party's immigration policy and propose the greatest restrictions in recent years on the border with Mexico.
The White House has proposed
cutting the asylum system and redoubling the rapid returns of migrants
, a long-standing demand of Republicans, in exchange for Congress approving new military aid for Ukraine.
However, Trump's acolytes say it is not enough and are also unwilling to give concessions to Biden with nine months left until the elections.
Shift in immigration policy
Biden rose to power presenting himself as the complete opposite of Trump, who proposed the construction of a border wall in 2016.
The Democrat promised to make the US a “safe place for refugees and asylum seekers” and give legal status to the more than 11 million undocumented migrants living in the country.
[Immigrants, mostly Venezuelans, linked to cell phone thefts in New York are arrested]
More than three years later, those ideas have been forgotten, amid a global increase in the movement of people and internal pressure to “control” the arrival of foreigners to the country, when in 2023 more than 2 million irregular border crossings.
This, added to the rush for Republicans to lift the blockade on military aid for Ukraine, led the White House to negotiate an immigration pact that includes the largest changes to immigration laws in decades, focused on restricting the right to asylum.
“Now the immigration reform conversations are focused only on the border, on how to control it,” explains Yael Schacher, researcher at Refugees International.
Under current laws, a person has the right to request asylum in the US at the border or within US territory.
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Unlike other types of legal migration, such as work visas, the legislation does not establish a limit on the number of people who can be granted asylum each year, due to the humanitarian aspect of this protection.
“Stop treating asylum as a right that everyone can apply for is something completely new for the United States,” Schacher stressed.
For some of the people who supported Biden in the 2020 elections, the abandonment of his promises on immigration is a “disappointment,” says Vanessa Cárdenas, who worked on his electoral campaign.
She “she has moved far away from what she said she wanted to do.”
This change, Cárdenas believes, can also be attributed to the fact that the Republican Party has been adopting ideas increasingly towards the right, which have become part of popular thought.
Blockade with a view to the elections
Although Republicans have been denouncing an “invasion” of migrants for years due to Biden's alleged “open borders” policy, they refuse to support the restrictions proposed by the president.
For this reason, the White House proposal negotiated with some legislators collapsed on Wednesday in a preliminary vote in the Senate, where practically all conservatives voted against it.
Biden directly blames this blockage on Trump, whom he has accused of having “intimidated” Republican legislators into opposing any proposal and thus obtaining electoral benefits.
The New York tycoon is the big favorite for the Republican nomination for the November elections, in which Biden will seek re-election for a second term.
The Republican Party wants this campaign to revolve around immigration and, therefore, they have tried to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden's immigration chief.
[The bipartisan immigration reform fails in the Senate, which is now voting on an aid plan for Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan]
According to a Harvard CAPS-Harris poll,
migration is now the issue that most voters indicate as their greatest concern
, surpassing inflation.
By contrast, a congressional report released this week predicted that immigration will add $7 trillion to the U.S. economy over the next decade.
Although the immigration plan seems to have no future, it shows that Trump is winning over Biden in the narrative on migration.
“Republicans have turned the issue into a problem and have trapped Democrats in a debate about the border,” summarizes Rebeka Wolf, an expert at the American Immigration Council.