Immigration is on the Ballot: Trump and Biden offer Distinctly Different Visions of America’s Future
At issue is whether America remains open to immigrants — and whether those already here can find a path to citizenship.
Most Americans today have mixed views on the impact immigrants have had on American society. Today, 45% of adults say immigrants in the U.S. are making American society better in the long run, while 37% say they are making it worse.
Thomas Kennedy, a long-time activist and political director at the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), is afraid that the government and private-sector’s motivation to halt all progress on relief to immigrants is because they will lose a substantial amount of profit from detention centers.
“For example, when John Kelly [former White House Chief of Staff] retired, he served on the board for Comprehensive Health Services and signed a $240 million contract to run a children’s detention center,” said Kennedy.
Joe Biden and Donald Trump have radically different stances on immigration, and have assured voters that the country will benefit from the rules they enact.
During the presidential debate on Oct. 20, both candidates presented their very different approaches.
Biden wants to relax Trump’s strict regulations on immigration. He claims that Trump’s current laws and plans for immigrants are "criminal” and should be “fixed” immediately. The criminal acts he is referring to are the “five hundred plus kids that came with parents," that have been separated and have not been reunited.
Although Biden’s plan is similar to the Obama Administration’s, he claims that there was still too much pain caused by the amount of deportations within families. “The idea that anyone will be deported without actually having committed a felony or serious crime is going to end in my administration,” Biden said when asked what he plans to do differently.
In the final presidential debate, Biden promised that within the first 100 days of presidency, he would put a halt on all deportations and then only deport immigrants who are illegally in the country and have been convicted of felonies.
“All of those so-called dreamers, those DACA kids, they’re going to be immediately certified again to be able to stay in this country and put on a path to citizenship," he added, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that Obama started during his administration.
In contrast to Biden, Trump focuses on creating a merit-based immigration system with regulation and restriction.
A merit-based immigration system would base selection on a points system. The selection system would give points for having a valuable skill, an advanced degree, plan to create jobs, and even youth. Before immigrants are admitted to the U.S., they would need to demonstrate financial self-sufficiency, learn English, and pass a civics exam. This system that Trump is proposing would decrease the number of immigrants that get accepted through family sponsorship, which today is roughly 66 percent, and increase the number of immigrants who want to gain status through economic streams and humanitarian reasons.
During the final debate on Oct. 22, Trump portrayed children not has being separate from their parents, but being used to game the system.
“The children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they’re brought here and they used to use them to get into our country,” Trump said. “We now have a strong a border as we’ve ever had. We’re over 400 miles of brand-new wall. You see the numbers. We let people in but they have to come in legally,” he said, adding hat his administration has been working on a plan “very hard” to recover the lost parents of all DACA children.
More than one million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. If the current immigration trends continue, it is estimated that current immigrants and their descendants are going to account for 88% of U.S. population growth through 2065, according to a Pew Research study.
Trump has said he wants to end “chain migration” and the visa lottery system. Chain migration, as it is dubbed in right-wing circles, is when an immigrant in the U.S. sponsors another family member for admission so they can then sponsor other immigrants themselves. Visa lottery randomly selects those who are allowed to immigrate to the U.S. from a large pool of candidates.
Trump wants to enact a merit-based system that favors high-skill immigrants and seeks to eliminate family-based policies.
Mark Krikorian, the executive director at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), believes that the main problem is not that there are illegal immigrants in this country, but that there are so many who are so easily granted citizenship.
Krikorian has been part of CIS, a think-tank for the anti-immigration movement, since 1995 and argues for stricter immigration policies.
“We need to know how much immigration there is and we need to realize that most immigrants are legal,” Krikorian said.
The resolutions Krikorian proposes are to eliminate the visa lottery. “The actual name is Diversity Visa Lottery and it’s as easy as getting a high school diploma,” he said.
The lottery system accepts roughly 50,000 people, and their families, at random to obtain permanent residency, or what is often called a “green card.” This system was established by the Immigration Act of 1990 to increase diversity among immigrants to the U.S. Krikorian suggests that this application process is "as easy as getting a high school diploma,” yet there are still a few requirements in order to apply.
The first requirement is that applicants must have been born in a country that sent less than 50,000 immigrants to the U.S. over the past five years. The only exceptions are if the applicant is married to someone that is born in a country with that description, or if neither of their parents were legal residents in the applicant’s country of birth.
The second requirement is that each applicant must have at least a high school degree, or two years of work experience within the past five years in a profession that requires at least two years of training, as determined by the U.S. Department of Labor.
Krikorian also believes that E-verify should be more active. This verification website is run by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and was created in an effort to stop undocumented immigrants from finding legal employment. But Krikorian says it’s only used in approximately 50% of businesses today, but “needs to be in all of them.”
E-verify is available in all 50 states and although it is mandatory for all federal employers and contractors, for most employers it is voluntary.
Since 2008, each year has had an increase in the number of employers that use E-verify. In 2018, there were only 13.5% of employers that use E-verify, leaving 86.5% without this system. While the numbers are not very high, the system has worked its way across the country and is encouraged for employers, but still not required.
Today, immigrants make up 13.7% of the U.S. population. 77% of these immigrants are legal, leaving 23% undocumented.
“Too often, those skeptical of today’s immigration policies expend inordinate energy on the symptoms of excessive immigration rather than addressing the actual problem: too much immigration,” Krikorian said.
Trump winning the election will allow him to follow his current plans for stricter regulations and he will keep focusing on a plan to reunite families with their children, he says. If Biden wins the race, his administration will change the current plans in place and support a more lenient and accepting approach to the immigrants living without legal status in this country and the ones that want to be accepted in this country.
