While both promise that, upon reaching the White House, they will reverse the entire ‘zero tolerance’ immigration policy of President Donald Trump and will promote a broad and generous immigration reform, with a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants, both contestants have an uncomfortable past that is not necessarily in tune with your most pragmatic and compelling ideas against illegal immigration.
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Biden, on the one hand, was the vice president of Barack Obama between 2009 and 2017, a period in which several successive records of deportations were broken that in total exceeded 2.5 million undocumented immigrants.
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At some times the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deported an average of 1,200 undocumented immigrants (50 daily), a figure that is still far from being reached by Trump, although during the campaign he promised that he would deport up to 4 million people no immigration documents in order.
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The numbers of expulsions achieved by Obama earned him the title of “chief sportsman”, put by the director of the then National Council of La Raza (NCLR, nowadays UnitedUs), Janet Murgía.
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Sanders’ legacy
Sanders does not escape criticism either. During the 2016 campaign, the then candidate for the nomination of the party, Hillary Clinton, he mentioned during a debate organized by the newspaper The Washington Post and Facebook, which the Vermont senator voted against a proposal for immigration reform submitted to the plenary session of the Upper House in 2007, and was promoted among others by the late Senator Edward Kennedy.
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Sanders insisted on that occasion that the legalization program promoted slave labor and, for that reason, did not support it.
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The plan mentioned by Clinton was the “Bill on Jobs, Opportunities, Benefits and Safety for Agricultural Workers”, also known as AgJobs. It aimed to regularize the immigration status of between 500,000 and 1.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
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The AgJobs, in addition, was agreed between the farmers and the United Farm Workers (UFW-). It allowed to obtain legal immigration status only to those who had worked in agriculture.
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The plans
Now, in the 2020 campaign, both candidates have more concrete ideas about immigration, both legal and undocumented.
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This is a comparative summary of their immigration policies.
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