Which administration helped 3.5 million people complete the citizenship process, more than any other administration in history, issuing 4.3 million green cards for permanent residency? Which administration restored refugee admissions slashed by the previous president, expanding pathways for legal immigration to ease border pressures, while doubling the length of work authorizations for foreign nationals. And which administration granted temporary legal status to the highest number of immigrants in recent history?
The answer, surprisingly to many Americans and even to immigrants, is President Joe Biden.
Yet, when people think of Biden’s record on immigration, the word “successful” rarely comes to mind. Most analysts agree that the perception of an out-of-control border—combined with inflation’s impact on Americans’ wallets—was a key factor in Republican challenger and President-elect Donald J. Trump’s victory.
However, experts at the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute (MPI), who closely monitor presidential actions on immigration, argue that Biden’s record was far better than public perception suggests.
“I think the legacy of a president is how much impact you have on people’s lives on a daily basis,” said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at MPI, during a Dec. 17 briefing.
Chishti highlighted Biden’s shift on immigration enforcement priorities—from Trump’s broad “deport anyone, anywhere” approach to a more targeted focus on new arrivals at the border. “If you were a long-term unauthorized resident in this country, there was more than an 80% chance that nothing would happen to you,” Chishti said.
Biden’s Administration also ended the controversial “family detention” practice and restored legal immigration processes to pre-COVID, pre-Trump norms.
Despite these achievements, speakers—including outside experts from media and advocacy organizations—acknowledged administration mistakes, shortcomings in media coverage, and the focus of the pro-immigrant movement. These missteps, they argued, undermined the Biden administration’s successes and amplified its perceived failures on immigration, one of which was the increasing numbers of people crossing the border.
“The increase in overall numbers of arrivals and the changing demographics of those arrivals has presented a challenge for border authorities in terms of capacity and processing ability,” said MPI Associate Policy Analyst Coleen Putzel-Kavanaugh, noting the disconnect between outdate immigration laws created to respond to the influx of largely Mexican men seeking work with the reality of immigration patterns today, which are increasingly more diverse in origin, and involve whole families seeking protection.
“The challenge at the border overshadowed the positive,” indicated Chishti. “Biden’s election itself became a pull factor because he had promised during the campaign that he would undo the cruel immigration border policies of the prior administration, and the numbers began to reach record levels.”
More importantly, said the expert, “the administration refused to call it a crisis.”
Instead, the issue was defined by the opposition: Republican governors from 16 states filed lawsuits to block most policy changes initiated by the Biden Administration and engaged in “orchestrated busing of immigrants by the governors of Texas and Florida,” which “brought the border to the interior with large numbers of newly arrived migrants heavily concentrated in certain cities like New York, Chicago, and Denver, that were already facing housing shortages,” added Putzel-Kavanaugh.
In the end, the Administration introduced several “carrot and stick” approaches that have precipitously reduced the flow at the border, but many saw this as “too little, too late,” said the experts.
The role of the media in shaping public perception was another key focus of the MPI briefing. Rafael Bernal, an immigration journalist for The Hill, said that despite some good immigration reporters, most media outlets prioritize sensationalism over substance.
“The press did a terrible job in general of covering these issues and continues to,” Bernal said. “Because of the media structure and how these companies make money, we need a lot of clicks. And what gets clicks is more aligned with political posturing and not with policy.”
Others argued that the Administration’s communication strategy exacerbated the problem.
Marielena Hincapie, a former executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, now a visiting scholar at Cornell Law School, said Biden’s advisors failed to grasp the importance of controlling the narrative.
“This was a narrative war, and they refused to call it a crisis when voters were seeing it on their screens,” she said. She also pointed out that Democrats, who held a majority in Congress at the start of Biden’s term, chose not to prioritize immigration reform.
Congress has the authority to create immigration laws but continues to be absent from taking any measures on the issue, mostly because of opposition by Republicans but also inaction by many Democrats who see it as a losing issue.
The pro-immigrant movement also came under scrutiny for its strategic missteps. Hincapie said the movement focused narrowly on achieving citizenship for the undocumented while neglecting broader public engagement.
“We were talking in a very insular way, only pretty much to ourselves,” she said. “We lost track of the fact that this is a narrative war about remaking America for the next 10, 15, 20, 30 years.”
All of that obscured the Biden record of decreasing backlogs, benefiting millions of immigrants with permanent or “twilight” (temporary) statuses, and protecting long-term immigrant families at a time of record border crossings seeking asylum and protection of any kind.
“You could look at the Biden legacy from two different lenses. On legal immigration, they finally brought an old archaic system into the 21st century with modernization and innovation and technology (which was used to provide appointments, like the CBP One App at the border)”, said Chishti.
However, on the border side, because of massive numbers of crossers and a combination of factors, “it was seen as porous and out-of-control, and the measures that eventually were put in place had detractors on all sides of the political spectrum.”
Even as the Administration ends, border crossings are drastically down, a significant step getting little attention.
“Ironically,” said Chisti, “this Administration is handing Trump a much more controlled border and a more robust legal immigration system…. for which they don’t expect any thank you notes”.
Pilar Marrero is Associate Editor of EMS and a long-term writer on immigration. Her 2012 book, Killing the American Dream, chronicles the failures and mishaps on US immigration policy over the last three decades
