Even as Biden stakes his campaign on a “return to normalcy,” his immigration platform might double down on the contradictions that have powered the past five years of political disruption.
Even as Biden stakes his campaign on a “return to normalcy,” his immigration platform might double down on the contradictions that have powered the past five years of political disruption.
O ne of the central issues of the 2016 presidential race, immigration was rocket-fuel for Donald Trump’s insurgent candidacy. But immigration has played much less of a role in the 2020 campaign. It received little attention in the initial presidential debates, and the third debate’s brief discussion of the issue was mostly confined to border policies. Nor have the Trump or Biden campaigns led with this issue.
The relative lack of discussion of Biden’s immigration platform has obscured the scope of his plans for immigration as well as the tensions within his vision for immigration policy. Though he doesn’t talk about it much on the campaign trail, Biden is running on an agenda of increasing legal immigration. He supports expanding guest-worker programs, maintaining family preferences, giving a green card to everyone who earns a doctorate from an American university, increasing refugee admissions, and expanding employment-based visas. Many of these agenda items would require legislation, but they indicate Biden’s preferred direction for legal-immigration policy.
On enforcement, Biden opposes building more border fencing and instead supports “virtual” strategies of border surveillance. He endorses a “roadmap to citizenship” for the over 11 million current illegal immigrants in the United States. He supports extending DACA as an executive action until a legislative amnesty has passed; he also supports exploring “all legal options” to protect the residency of the parents of DACA recipients. (Some have wondered whether Biden would use other executive measures — such as parole in place — to exempt large categories of unauthorized immigrants from enforcement efforts.) While the campaign acknowledges that about half of new illegal immigrants are visa-overstayers, interior enforcement gets little attention in the immigration platform, though it does mention that a Biden administration would “also work to ensure employers have the right tools to certify their workers’ employment status and will restore the focus on abusive employers instead of on the vulnerable workers they are exploiting.” More broadly, Biden in his platform and on the campaign trail has pledged to roll back deportation and interior-enforcement processes in order to target a smaller number of threats to “national security and public safety.”
Biden’s plans for an expansionist immigration policy may be in some tension with his professed policy aim of improving outcomes for American workers. The inconsistency here is worth exploring. Part of Biden’s plan actually does assume that high rates of migration do depress opportunity for workers. While it supports increasing employment-based immigration, it also would have a mechanism for “temporarily reduc[ing] the number of visas during times of high U.S. unemployment.” This seems to imply that certain rates of immigration can harm the employment prospects of U.S. workers (otherwise, you wouldn’t try to restrict it during a recession). If that’s the case, though, why not also try to have a tight labor market during times of prosperity in order to help workers’ wages rise?
A tight labor market plays a role not only in improving mobility for native-born Americans but also in encouraging integration for immigrants and their families. In many European countries, immigrants (especially non-European immigrants) and their families are often locked out of upward mobility in the labor market. Across the spectrum of class and background, a lack of clear employment prospects can stoke alienation and social despair. Center-right proponents of immigration reform (such as Reihan Salam in his book Melting Pot or Civil War?) have increasingly turned to the question of how to promote the integration of immigrants into American society and the structure of the immigration system itself may affect that project of integration. The effect of immigration upon the wages of the native-born remains a contested topic among economists, through Harvard’s George Borjas and others have argued that it does indeed affect native-born career prospects. However, even economists who have disputed the idea that immigration can drive down wages of the native-born have conceded that it has a “substantial negative effect” on the wages of recent immigrants. An immigration policy that prioritizes integration will also seek to create the conditions that allow immigrants and their families to have access to economic opportunity. A tighter labor market — for both blue- and white-collar jobs — can be an important instrument for that task.
An amnesty for illegal immigrants also embodies that policy tension. The legacy of the 1986 amnesty reveals that, unsurprisingly, immigration patterns respond to incentives. An amnesty rewards breaking the law, and family-based migration preferences only compound the rewards of the amnesty (not only the amnestied immigrant but also his spouse, children, siblings, and parents can walk the path to citizenship laid by any amnesty). Though the population of unauthorized immigrants has not seemed to grow substantially in recent years, an amnesty combined with a post-coronavirus recovery could very much incentivize more illegal immigration. A policy regime that rolls back immigration enforcement while implementing an amnesty would likely invite more illegal immigration, and that influx of labor in the shadows could threaten economic opportunity for the recently amnestied. Voices across the political spectrum have called attention to the way that illegal immigration can undermine the positions of workers. Cesar Chavez was a vociferous opponent of illegal immigration not because he was a xenophobic bigot but because he saw that unrestricted illegal immigration would weaken unionization efforts and depress agricultural (and migrant) workers’ wages. In his book Losing Control, the journalist Jerry Kammer shows how an influx of unauthorized immigrants helped slash the wages for the construction trades in California.
Biden’s place-based visa program reveals further tensions in his approach. Adapting the Economic Innovation Group’s model of a “Heartland visa,” Biden’s campaign outlines a program in which county or city executives could petition for additional visas. Visa-holders would then be obligated to “work and reside in the city or county that petitioned for them.” For proponents of a more-expansionist immigration policy, the appeal of such an approach is obvious: It affords a vehicle for increasing net levels of migration while seeming to attribute this increase to the decisions of local governments. Nor is a non-national immigration policy a new idea. In the 19th century, many states had their own immigration policies; they often banned bringing into their borders those convicted of crimes, and Massachusetts, for example, sometimes required the captains of ships to post a bond for foreign passengers who were viewed as a potential financial burden. (Gerald L. Neuman’s Columbia Law Review article “The Lost Century of American Immigration Law” surveys these various state policies regarding immigration.)
Yet the United States is now unquestionably a national union, and — with all due respect to Sin City marketing gurus — what happens in Vegas does not stay in Vegas. Those cities and counties might petition for additional visas, but (assuming that these visas do offer a path to permanent residency and citizenship), eventually the holders of those visas would be legally able to move elsewhere.
A placed-based visa program would make every county and city a border one. Rather than making the national labor market more fluid, it would introduce new distortions, tying immigrant workers to certain municipalities like serfs in tsarist Russia. Economic disruption would add further complexities. What would happen, for instance, if a municipality sponsored a number of place-based visas for a major employer that closed after a year or two? Those laid-off workers might have a hard time getting another job in that municipality, but they would also be barred from looking for a job in a neighboring county if they were still locked into that municipality (Biden’s plan does not specify when these visa-holders would be able to work elsewhere). It is unclear how such place-based visas would actually be enforced. One of the core premises of Biden’s immigration program is that the United States enforces immigration law too strictly at its own peril — that people should even be able to go to their job without “fear of an immigration enforcement action.” The additional legal complexities caused by this system could make American immigration policy even more baroque and contested.
Many of Biden’s proposed changes would require legislative action, but a Democratic trifecta in November gives them more of an opening, especially if Democrats do decide to blow up Senate rules and eliminate the legislative filibuster. While immigration has temporarily receded as an issue, a far-reaching effort to pass an amnesty and sweeping changes to legal immigration could reignite a contentious battle over immigration politics. Even as Biden stakes his campaign on a “return to normalcy,” his immigration platform might double down on the contradictions that have powered the past five years of political disruption.