Immigration cruelty didn’t start with Trump. Will it end under Biden?

The believers in the rights of immigrants are cautiously optimistic about the incoming Biden administration.  The last four years have been tough times indeed.  However, the Democratic administration of Barack Obama was not all good for immigration policy.  Immigrant advocates understand that political attention and pressure will be necessary to push for positive change.

Historian Elliott Young in an opinion piece in the Washington Post reminds us that the Biden administration must reverse more than a century of “immigration cruelty”  that began  in earnest with the Chinese exclusion era of the late 1800s.  After reviewing various anti-immigrant milestones in U.S. history, from Chinese exclusion to Operation Wetback in 1954 to the mass immigrant detention machinery in place today, Young reminds us that

[F]or all the nastiness of Trump’s rhetoric, he has removed fewer immigrants from the United States than President Barack Obama did during in his first or second term; Obama’s rate of removal (382,000 per year) outstrips Trump’s (325,000 per year). Biden’s appointment of former Obama immigration adviser Cecilia Muñoz to his transition team, a person who defended the separation of children from their parents in 2011, suggests a troubling step backward to a failed and destructive immigration plan. Similarly, the announcement of Alejandro Mayorkas, deputy secretary at the Department of Homeland Security under Obama, as Biden’s pick to head the agency also suggests a continuation of Obama-era immigration policies.”

Young is author of Forever Prisoners: How the United States Made the World’s Largest Immigrant Detention System, available in January 2021.

KJ