By Ernesto Castañeda

The Executive Order announced on June 18, 2024, is another action taken due to Congress’s lack of legislative action. Several proposals were on the table, but Republicans did not want to support any bill. The new program is political in the sense that it helps Biden fulfill campaign promises not to separate migrant families and to find ways to regularize people without papers. It is not a universal amnesty, but rather a particular regularization for very established people and part of our communities. It could help up to 500,000 adults and 50,000 children.

These new measures also help several DACA recipients who are married to U.S. citizens. Part of the measures announced concern the individuals known as “dreamers,” minors who arrive to the U.S. undocumented. It would even make it easier for some who could not apply for the DACA program to obtain a work permit if they have higher education, and it would finally open a path to citizenship after holding a green card for some years. Twelve years ago, President Obama launched the DACA program to protect these young people from deportation. The DACA program has been a great success and is quite popular with the American population. With these measures, the Biden-Harris administration marks a clear contrast with their electoral rival, Donald Trump, who has promised mass deportations if he becomes president again.

Trump’s base is quite anti-immigrant, but not Biden’s base, nor are most independent voters who will be key to winning the election in November. The Latino vote is also key. Latinos, especially Mexican and Central Americans would mostly benefit from these programs. In addition, people from Asia, Africa, Canada, and Europe, as well as their citizen families, will benefit from the measure. To clarify, the direct beneficiaries will NOT be able to vote this November, but their family members, employers, customers, and neighbors will. As anti-immigrant as Biden has become (e.g., numerical limits on asylum applications between ports of entry at the border), he will not take away Trump’s hard vote. This is a better route. The Immigration Lab’s analysis of elections since 2018 shows that being anti-immigrant does not help win elections in competitive elections and swing states.

The Executive Order on numerical caps to asylum-seeking in between ports of entry establishes a negative practical precedent where a President tries to unilaterally limit the asylum-seeking process in a situation not related to public health concerns (as was the supposed rationale for the use of Title 42 of the Code of Federal Regulations during the COVID-19 pandemic). It gives tacit bipartisan support to Trump’s campaign threat of completely ending asylum in the U.S. if elected. This executive order does not help the Biden-Harris campaign to differentiate itself from Trump on migration. Agreeing with MAGA Republicans about border arrivals being a top issue helps Republican candidates––not Democrats. It also alienates voters with undocumented family members and those who are sympathetic to those in need of asylum because they are escaping war, armed conflict, or religious or political persecution. The Executive Order on spouses and Dreamers does the opposite because it positively connects the government with many members of society.

The Border Executive Order will affect future asylum-seekers including those who are already on their way to the U.S. southern border. The public tends to equate asylum seekers arriving between ports of entry at the wall or river with people trying to enter undetected. Asylum seekers look for Border Patrol and other officials to be processed and start their legal process to request asylum. The government, therefore, knows who they are and where they are located. Some of them will be allowed in, others will be returned quickly or later deported to their countries, or asked to leave if they are refused asylum. Hopefully, they can find safety in Mexico, Colombia, Costa Rica, or other countries in the region. 

Some pundits argued that this move on limiting asylum would silence the criticisms that Biden was ‘weak’ on border security. The executive action limiting asylum-seekers was supposed to convince independent and conservative voters to vote for Biden. However, those criticisms have not ended––nor will they partly because they are political and not based on facts. Even if some conservative voters in, Montana, for example, were happy with this partial ‘border closure,’ they would probably disagree with Biden on contraception and reproductive health, taxes for billionaires, climate change, etc. Most people are not single-issue voters. Their values and position on the ‘culture wars’ framed by Republicans and the media tend to cluster into particular groups. Independents are unlikely to vote solely on perceptions about border security. Many of the people who are worried about immigration are worried about a hypothetical fear around the great replacement conspiracy theory. They may be worried about demographic changes in the short term, forgetting that immigrants in the past became integrated into the U.S. majority culture; they are doing so now and will continue in the future. The main issues on the ballot are about policy and protecting democratic institutions, not the less than 3.3 percent of residents in the country who are currently undocumented. 

Ernesto Castañeda is Director of the Center for Latin American and Latino Studies, the Immigration Lab, and the Masters in Sociology, Research, and Practice at American University in Washington, D.C. 

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