One of President Joe Biden’s first acts was to send Congress the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, a long-promised immigration reform bill. Lauren R. Aronson, an associate clinical professor of law and the director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign College of Law, spoke with News Bureau business and law editor Phil Ciciora about the legislative prospects of passing comprehensive bipartisan immigration reform.
How would you characterize the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021?
It’s a progressive bill, significantly more progressive than former President Barack Obama’s attempt at comprehensive immigration reform in 2013, and that makes it even less likely to pass as is in the current Congress.
It seems that the bill was crafted this way by design – not only to signal to voters that President Biden meant what he said on the campaign trail about taking action on immigration to improve the system by making it more humane, but also as an opening salvo that signals there’s an opportunity for negotiating with Republicans.
I still have my doubts about whether any sort of comprehensive immigration package will pass, but it’s possible this bill will move us a little closer.
The more realistic opportunity in the current political climate would be fixing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program via legislation. Republicans have recognized that reforming DACA is so widely supported by the public that it would be silly at this point not to push forward and get nearly 700,000 people out of this state of administrative limbo.
The question is whether the more progressive wing of the Democratic caucus would try to prevent reforming DACA alone, seeing it as a piecemeal solution or a half-measure. I think that’s a real possibility, too.
How closely will the Biden administration’s immigration policy resemble the Obama administration’s attempts at comprehensive immigration reform?
It seemed like the drafters of the Obama-era immigration bill anticipated what conservatives would need to even consider comprehensive immigration reform – beefing up border security, limiting some family-based immigration, cracking down on unauthorized work – and included those measures from the jump. It was done that way possibly because of the bipartisan “Gang of Eight” who drafted it. But this strategy ultimately backfired because, by offering those concessions from the start, the Democrats lacked the bargaining chips to appear as though they were conceding anything as the bill went through the legislative process.
In addition to being substantively more progressive, Biden’s bill proposes a simple removal of the word “alien” from our statutes and policy memoranda, replacing it with “noncitizen.” This change is not just semantics; it means something. It’s a signal that the Biden administration is breaking from the past and embracing a more humane approach. That’s an improvement from the Obama administration – a small one, but those connotations matter.
Do you foresee much Republican support for Biden’s bill in the Senate?
Absent a breakthrough between the two sides, the bill’s prospects in the current political climate are dim. A certain faction of Republicans is basically laughing at the Biden bill, saying that it offers “amnesty” for those immigrants already here, making the bill a nonstarter – despite the fact that the amnesty that the Biden bill proposes isn’t all that different from the amnesty that Ronald Reagan, a Republican president, passed in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986.
It’s great to have the executive branch proposing more progressive bills, but the actual possibility of it passing in a truly bipartisan fashion as it’s currently written seems remote.
The difference is that now we’re more politically divided and polarized than ever. When there’s economic prosperity, there’s a lot less concern about immigrants from poor countries coming in and taking away jobs. When there’s economic uncertainty, as there is now, then the public tends to become much more insular, more nationalistic and xenophobic. That doesn’t bode well for any type of immigration legislation.
Critics of Biden’s bill and his eight-year path to citizenship are concerned about amnesty and the possibility of it inspiring new waves of immigrants to cross the border. How realistic are those fears?
Nobody thought that anything good was going to happen to immigrants during the administration of former President Donald Trump – but that didn’t stop immigrants from entering the U.S. Even with the added border security and harsh rhetoric during the Trump years, the numbers of new immigrants pretty much stayed the same. The only thing that stopped waves of immigrants from coming to the U.S. has been COVID-19.
I believe the number of immigrants will return to previous levels during the Biden administration but not because of the possibility of amnesty. It’s a fallacy to believe that any significant number is drawn to this country because of the possibility of immigration reform. That’s short-sighted and conveniently ignores the basic reasons why so many immigrants come to the U.S., and that’s for the chance to find safety and, hopefully, prosperity for their families.
What can Biden accomplish if he’s confined to executive action on immigration?
We’ve seen in both the Obama and Trump administrations that much can be accomplished through executive action. After all, that’s how DACA came about.
One big change could be through an enforcement priorities memo. Something like that would allow immigration judges to have discretion to grant administrative closure in individual cases, effectively pausing deportation proceedings. This happened often under Obama – judges would administratively close deportation proceedings because children, the elderly and others are not the people we need to prioritize when making removal decisions.
The Biden administration should be a return to normalcy in that we’re not going to face things like the Muslim ban or the seemingly capricious deportation of people who may have overstayed their visas but have otherwise been productive. These efforts are likely to be more under-the-radar administrative actions that probably won’t move the needle enough to satisfy immigration reform advocates who supported this president.