Immigration advocates see work permits as Biden’s best option

President Biden’s left flank is pushing to expand work permits for undocumented immigrants, not just as a humanitarian imperative, but as a political advantage before November.

Speculation about Biden’s next move on immigration has reached a fever pitch, with reports of imminent executive action on two fronts: expanding work permits and cracking down on asylum at the border.

While the administration is expected to do both, civil rights advocates say the work permit measures will do more to move the needle in Biden’s favor.

“It’s not just good policy, it’s good politics. Recent polls show that two-thirds of voters in swing states support expanding work permits for undocumented immigrants, including long-term workers, farmworkers, Dreamers without DACA and spouses of U.S. citizens,” said Deirdre Schifeling, political and defense of the ACLU.

“Today, President Biden has a remarkable opportunity to act on behalf of the American people and deliver on his campaign promise to ensure immigrant families can stay together.”

The Biden administration is trying to balance support for mixed-status families and strict border enforcement.

While tough stances on the border can be found across the political spectrum, Biden’s campaign is leaning toward the sharp contrast between him and former President Trump when it comes to family relief.

“While President Biden will continue to do everything in his power to create more legal paths to citizenship, it will be necessary for Congress to act to fix our broken system, which Donald Trump made worse as president,” said Fabiola Rodríguez, deputy director of Hispanic media for the Biden campaign.

“That’s exactly why he worked in good faith to pass bipartisan immigration legislation. Trump killed this legislation and openly advocates an anti-immigrant agenda. The American people deserve a president who works to provide solutions for families rather than personal politics – only Joe Biden is that president.”

But advocates are warning Biden against a middle-of-the-road approach amid Trump’s heated immigration rhetoric.

“I don’t think we’ve ever faced the kind of MAGA extremism that we face now. And Democrats have always, forever — but sometimes to our chagrin — wanted to do things in a bipartisan way, wanted to solve this problem the way we know it needs to be solved, which is through Congress,” said María Cardona, a leading strategist Democratic politician.

Cardona added that former President Obama did everything he could to show good faith in bipartisan immigration and border negotiations.

“And we know how that ended. Joe Biden did the same thing. He tried to do this in good faith. Good faith no longer exists on the Republican side. And now we’re at the point where we need to do this because it’s the right thing to do and because, frankly, it will save lives.”

Data for progress poll reviewed exclusively by The Hill found that voters overwhelmingly support a softer approach to asylum if it is framed as a choice between humane and punitive approaches.

The poll found that 52 percent of respondents overall are more likely to support a candidate with a human approach, while 26 percent said they would be less likely; 38 percent said they would be more likely to support a candidate with a punitive approach and 40 percent said they would be less likely to support such a candidate.

The poll found that Democrats overwhelmingly support an approach labeled humane, with a net positive result of 63 percentage points. The punitive approach polled a net negative of 30 percentage points among Democrats.

The numbers are closer among independent voters — a net positive of 18 percentage points for a humane approach, a net negative of 9 percentage points for a punitive approach — and among voters in swing states, who returned a net positive of 7 percentage points for a human and a net result of 6 points. negative to a punitive.

An order limiting asylum will face at least two practical constraints: the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget and Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador.

An asylum crackdown, such as proposed in the Senate’s bipartisan immigration deal that failed earlier this year, would prevent U.S. border authorities from processing asylum requests at the border in certain circumstances. Foreign nationals encountered by Border Patrol would then be returned to Mexico, detained indefinitely until repatriated or released with deportation orders.

López Obrador, a crucial partner in immigration enforcement, would have to approve any plan to return third-country citizens to Mexican territory.

Indefinitely detaining hundreds of thousands of migrants is neither a political nor a logistical option, and releasing migrants with deportation orders versus pending asylum claims could mean hundreds of thousands of new arrivals without work authorization, a situation that is likely to anger Democratic mayors in big cities.

Still, many advocates are preparing for an executive order that would limit who can seek asylum at the border, even as they prepare to campaign for Biden on an expansion of work authorization.

“I can share with you that if the president decides to do affirmative action relief for the undocumented individual, he will take MAGA out of the talking points and rhetoric, because suddenly they won’t know who ‘shouldn’t be here,’” and use that in quotes,” said María Teresa Kumar, CEO of Voto Latino.

At least one of the measures on advocates’ wish list, Temporary Protected Status (TPS), is a commonly used program that has proven resistant to lawsuits and has already been used aggressively by the Biden administration.

Under TPS, DHS designates specific countries as too dangerous or unstable to repatriate their nationals, who – if already present in the United States – are granted work authorizations and a deferral of deportation.

The Biden administration’s largest TPS designation by population has benefited more than 400,000 Venezuelans who were in the United States before August 1; a redesignation of Venezuela, for example, could give TPS protections to Venezuelans who have come since.

These protections apply regardless of immigration status, so TPS would apply whether foreign citizens are undocumented, have been processed and released into the country with deportation orders, are asylum seekers, or even if they have temporary visas. .

But nearly half of the country’s undocumented population originates from Mexico, a country that, for diplomatic, logistical and geographic reasons, is unlikely to be designated for TPS. For similar reasons, designations are unlikely for other countries of origin for large undocumented populations, such as India.

Advocates are also eyeing an existing program that currently allows undocumented spouses of U.S. military service members to regularize their status, which could be expanded to apply to all undocumented spouses of U.S. citizens without legislative changes.

And they are pushing to expand Cancellation of Removal, a program that allows U.S. citizens to petition an undocumented family member whose removal would cause the citizen “to suffer exceptional and extremely unusual hardships.”

Granting work permits to long-term undocumented immigrants could also alleviate some growing pressure in cities like Chicago, where some undocumented immigrants and their families are chafing at Democrats as newcomers obtain work permits. work and they don’t.

In all, advocates hope that up to 3 million undocumented immigrants will be able to apply for work permits under these programs.

Expanding the military spouse program and canceling removal would also directly benefit adult U.S. citizens – eligible voters.

“We firmly believe that if President Biden acts to solve our family’s immigration nightmare, he will be rewarded by voters, by the 10 million voters in mixed-status families, by voters in Latino and immigrant families, and by the overwhelming majority of Americans decent people who believe in immigration solutions,” said American Families United board member Allyson Battista, whose undocumented husband of 20 years would have to leave the United States for 10 years to have a chance to get his paperwork straightened out.