Joe Biden gets bad marks for a Democrat on immigration — and he can thank Barack Obama

Biden is the Democrats’ best bet to defeat Trump. The former vice president leads many primary polls going into 2020. On immigration, though, I wish I had more faith in him.

SHARE Joe Biden gets bad marks for a Democrat on immigration — and he can thank Barack Obama
Joe Biden and Barack Obama — the next vice president and president of the United States — at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Aug. 27, 2008.

Joe Biden and Barack Obama — the next vice president and president of the United States — at the Democratic National Convention in Denver on Aug. 27, 2008.

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When it comes to immigration, any of the front-running Democratic candidates would be an improvement over President Donald Trump, for sure. 

For one, none of them would carry out deportations with the spite Trump shows for people whose skin color is black or brown. 

Between his nasty rhetoric and eagerness to cage children, Trump and his administration actually have opened more eyes about the need to treat asylum seekers at the border humanely. A majority of Americans, 67% according to the Pew Research Center, still support legalizing undocumented immigrants, even as Trump tries to rid the country of them.

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That percentage isn’t lost on the Democratic candidates for president. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Pete Buttigieg and other candidates are promising to overhaul our outdated immigration system.

Biden is the Democrats’ best bet to defeat Trump. The former vice president leads many primary polls going into 2020.

On immigration, though, I wish I had more faith in him. 

Biden is saying the right things. Now. He was silent when Obama carried out brutal immigration policies. 

On his website, Biden says it is “a moral failing and a national shame” to lock up kids in overcrowded detention centers and try to keep them there indefinitely.

He’s talking about Trump’s policies, of course. 

But locking up kids came from Obama’s playbook. This is what an immigration lawyer told the New York Times Magazine about a detention camp under Obama-Biden in 2015: “The kids were really sick. A lot of the moms were holding them in their arms, even the older kids — holding them like babies, and they’re screaming and crying, and some of them are lying there listlessly.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was viewed as callous under Obama, and it’s worse under Trump. The agency is being accused of entrapment for using a fake university in Michigan to lure desperate foreigners to sign up for fraudulent student visas to remain in this country. But the sting got started under Obama, or make that Obama-Biden, in 2015. 

Obama’s policies weren’t as cruel as Trump’s, but in many respects they were awfully close. Obama became known as the deporter in chief for good reason. He deported more than 2 million undocumented immigrants from the U.S., many of whom were not criminals but men and women trying to make a living to feed their families. 

In his first three years in office, Obama deported 1.18 million people, according to the Washington Post. In Trump’s first three years, he has expelled fewer than 800,000, the newspaper reports. Toward the end of his first term, Obama gave a break to Dreamers, young immigrants brought to this country illegally as children. They have temporary protection against deportation under an Obama program that Trump is trying to end. 

Last month, when an immigration activist told Biden at a town hall that he had volunteered for Obama’s campaign and later was disappointed by the steep number of deportations, Biden shot back, “You should vote for Trump. You should vote for Trump.”

He should have used the moment to make clear that he is serious about modernizing our immigration system and respecting migrants’ and refugees’ human rights.

It might seem unfair to lump Biden with Obama on immigration. In reality, he didn’t have all that much power, former U.S. Rep. Glenn Poshard of downstate Illinois pointed out to me.

“Really, there’s one decision-maker when it comes to that level of government, and it’s the president,” Poshard said. “President Obama, I know that he had a heart for immigrants and he was supportive. On the other hand, he did deport a lot of people.”

Later in our conversation, Poshard talked of the economic crisis Obama inherited in 2008, and how he revived the U.S. economy.

“Joe Biden can rightly claim he was a partner to that kind of progress,” Poshard said. 

But Biden can’t have it both ways. He was Obama’s wingman for all the good the president did, and the bad. On immigration, there is a lot of bad.

Marlen Garcia is a member of the Sun-Times Editorial Board. 

Send letters to letters@suntimes.com.

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