While Democratic lawmakers on Thursday unveiled their legislative proposal, they set it up as a deliberate rejection of the Trump administration’s approach. Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, a major sponsor of the bill, said that by sending Biden to the White House, Americans had effectively instructed Congress to “fix our immigration system, which is a cornerstone of Trump’s hateful horror program is. “
The bill will pave the way for citizenship for almost all undocumented immigrants living in the United States, increase legal immigration and speed up the consideration of asylum seekers. It will also take steps to secure the country’s borders and ports of entry, while investing $ 4 billion in the economies of Central American countries to reduce the incentive to emigrate. And that would be the word ‘foreign’ to federal law in favor of ‘non-citizen’.
To say that this is a break with the approaches to immigration reform in the past would be an understatement. The last time Congress underwent a major reform was in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan signed a law making it illegal for employers to hire undocumented immigrants.
President George W. Bush later outlined a center-right plan for comprehensive reform at the heart of his appeal to Spanish voters. He won 44 percent of Latino votes in the 2004 election, according to opinion polls – extremely high for a Republican candidate – but reform never materialized.
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His successor, Barack Obama, proposed an immigration bill that balanced enforcement measures with a path to citizenship for undocumented people, but it never became a top priority. This has undermined many immigration advocates – and in some cases cautiously for Biden, Obama’s former vice president.
Under Obama, the downward trend in the overall number of deportations from previous administrations continued, and he emphasized the persons with criminal records. But in the end, he deported more than five million people while establishing the role of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency under Bush.
Trump came to the Republican nomination, and then the presidency, in part because of his opposition to immigration, and the racial tones it made him sound. His draconian border policies were perhaps the crucial issue of his presidency and helped to gather his base around his conservative populism.