Washington.- There are hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the United States who have been living illegally in the country for years, working and earning a living, founding families and sending their children to school. President Biden says they can stay.
And then there are the new arrivals, who have crossed the US-Mexico border in record numbers, seeking protection from poverty and persecution. They will have to wait.
This month, Biden has taken two important actions on immigration: he has expanded legal protection for undocumented spouses of US citizens and he has closed the border to most people seeking asylum in the United States.
Together, these decisions underscore Biden’s approach to one of the most polarizing issues of the 2024 campaign: He will help migrants already here, but try to keep the border closed to those trying to enter.
The strategy, described by a former White House official as a “border in versus border out” approach, is a reflection of the political complexity of immigration, a major concern of voters in both parties in the campaign. presidential election in 2024. Polls show that American voters see the situation at the southern border as a problem and that more tend to trust former President Donald J. Trump to manage it than those who trust Mr. Biden.
Democrats hope Biden’s actions this month will help neutralize the problem. Matt A. Barreto, a Biden campaign pollster focused on Latino politics, said Americans make a distinction between “long-term undocumented immigrants” and “newcomers.”
“We see them, and most Americans see them, as totally different,” Mr. Barreto said, adding that voters support immigrants they see as “my friend or my uncle who has been here a long time and is even working or paying taxes and are just trying to get a work permit.”
In recent years, more Democrats have called for the kind of border security measures the party once denounced under Mr. Trump.
As the number of people crossing the border reached record levels, Mr. Biden has been forced to navigate delicate politics. His decision earlier this year to grant work permits to thousands of newcomers – an effort to make them less dependent on shelters and other aid – angered other immigrants who had been waiting for years to work.
Biden’s top advisers believe his new policies will appeal to Hispanic voters, many of whom want to see both stronger law enforcement and better pathways to citizenship. Although polls show that some of Trump’s proposals, including mass deportations, resonate with voters, the Biden campaign believes Republicans are painting all immigrants with too broad a brush.
The White House has attempted to work with Congress on immigration in the past. When Biden took office, he tried to establish a path to citizenship for about 11 million immigrants and, in February, he tried to push a bill that would turn away many immigrants at the border. Neither was approved by the Republican opposition.
Trump, who has made being tough on immigration a central part of his political identity, has encouraged Republicans not to approve Biden’s immigration policies. Following Biden’s announcement this week, Republican spokesman Mike Johnson accused him of participating in “an election-year border farce” and playing “both sides.”
But earlier this month, as Biden stood in front of signs reading “secure our border,” he articulated a “simple truth” as he announced major new restrictions on asylum.
“If the United States does not secure our border, there is no limit to the number of people who can try to come here, because there is no better place on the planet than the United States of America,” Biden said in the East Room of the White House.
Just two weeks later, Mr. Biden entered a very different environment in the same room. This time he joined an enthusiastic crowd of immigrants to announce that he would protect some 500,000 undocumented spouses of American citizens from deportation.
He seemed to recognize that he was balancing.
“I also know that many people in this room were also concerned about the actions that he had taken,” Biden said, referring to the asylum ban. “As president I had to take these measures. Every nation must secure its border, it’s that simple.”
Mr. Biden used the event to draw a connection to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program, a popular Obama-era program that protected hundreds of thousands of young immigrants from deportation.
Like Biden, President Barack Obama tried to combine tough immigration policies with more generous ones. He announced DACA in the midst of a reelection campaign in 2012, at a time when his law enforcement policies earned him the nickname “deporter in chief.”
And while some advocates celebrated Mr. Biden’s policy to protect the undocumented in the United States, they worried about those outside American borders.
“Access to the asylum system is a fundamental human right,” said Ahilan T. Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law. “It is not too late for Biden to fulfill his campaign promise to restore our asylum system while creating protections and opportunities for our undocumented neighbors in the United States.”
White House spokesman Angelo Fernández Hernandéz said the Biden administration “has repeatedly taken steps, within its powers, to secure the border, expand legal avenues and make our immigration system more fair and equitable. “
As Biden prepares for a debate later this month with Trump, he plans to emphasize that he is deterring newcomers and keeping families together in the United States.
But it remains to be seen whether American voters will make the distinction.
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