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It looks like Joe Biden is running. With Beltway insiders and Democratic bigwigs talking up his presidential chances, the former vice-president looks to be the candidate to beat in the 2020 primaries. The only problem is, it’s Joe Biden. If you thought Hillary Clinton was a weak candidate, with her transactional style and triangulating policy stances, then you probably won’t be excited by Biden’s multi-decade history in the Senate. Apart from Clinton’s inept campaigning and inability to connect with voters, Biden shares many of the same red flags that led a large share of the Democratic base to look with suspicion on the former secretary of state. In this series, Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic takes a look back at the career of Delaware’s longtime senior senator. Below is Part VI: Joe Biden, Anti-Immigrant Enabler.

The Democratic Party of today is a different beast from the one under Obama. While the last Democratic president did everything he could to triangulate on immigration, from deporting record numbers of people to militarizing the border, electoral considerations, the rise of Donald Trump, and an increasingly powerful activist movement have led the party to place immigrants’ rights at the center of their political vision. Being “soft” on immigration is no longer a liability for a Democrat, but being “tough” on the issue may well be. Which is why Joe Biden may well find it difficult to find favor among Democrats once he launches his campaign. Biden doesn’t have a uniformly harsh record on immigration issues. Rather, his forty-year-long political career has seen him shift wildly with the times, extending an outstretched hand to immigrants one moment and closing his fist the next. As with many issues, in times of pressure or right-wing ascendence, Biden has opted to make common cause with conservative efforts to stoke fears around immigration and seek continuity instead of a break with consensus — an approach that now puts him out of step with not just the Democratic Party, but, increasingly, the US public, too.

Wearing the White Hat There are certainly parts of Biden’s history that put him in line with today’s more immigrant-friendly Democratic Party. In 1983, Biden voted to defeat an amendment put forward by Jesse Helms, which would have allowed states to defy the Supreme Court and deny benefits like free public education to undocumented immigrants. Three years later, he voted for Ronald Reagan’s “amnesty” bill that gave millions of undocumented people the right to live in the US and get legal residency. Another three years after that, he voted for Ted Kennedy’s Immigration Act of 1990, which restructured US immigration law into a more skills-based system, and an amendment to halt deportations for family members of those allowed to stay under Reagan’s amnesty law. He also voted against giving preference to English-speaking immigrants, and to allow the Census to keep counting undocumented residents to apportion House seats. Other than the last two, these bills were all passed with large, bipartisan majorities. This was a period when the liberal consensus on immigration that had reigned since 1965 was still intact. As scholar Herbert Dittgen has written, immigration “simply was not an issue” in national politics in the 1980s, when “the new immigration law was hardly noticed by the public” and a “broad consensus about the value of immigration seemed to prevail.” The year 1989 also saw Biden vote for and approve ultimately unsuccessful bills that allowed Chinese students to stay and seek US residency in the midst of China’s anti-democratic crackdown, and that suspended the deportation of undocumented Salvadorans and Nicaraguans. The former was vetoed by Bush, while the latter was stalled to death by Wyoming Republican Alan Simpson, an immigration hawk best known today for being tasked by Obama to slash entitlements in the early 2010s. But Americans’ relaxed attitude to immigration began to change in the 1990s. By 1992, wrote Dittgen, it “had become one of the most contentious political issues.” In 1995, 48 percent of Americans told a Scripps Howard News Service poll they believed most immigrants in the US had come illegally, and the share of the public believing that immigration should be decreased hit an all-time high of 65 percent. A year later, the Democratic Party platform reflected a harsher focus on undocumented immigration that fit with its more punitive approach to the country’s problems more generally. Biden took some important steps that ran counter to that decade’s prevailing mood. The 1994 crime bill he helped design was mostly an abomination, but tucked away within the Violence Against Women Act — one of Biden’s signature legislative achievements, whose overall emphasis on punitive criminal justice measures was misguided and ineffectual — was the Battered Women Immigrant Provision, which allowed undocumented women physically abused by their partners to petition for legal status themselves. Previously, they were only able to do so through a husband who had legal status, putting untold numbers of women at the mercy of their abusers. Biden and Simpson crossed paths again two years later, when Biden repeatedly helped scuttle Simpson’s attempts to radically curb immigration, something the soon-to-retire senator viewed as the swan song to his political career. In March, Biden voted with eleven others on the Senate Judiciary Committee to split up Simpson’s immigration reform bill, one of the most restrictive in US history. The vote would allow the Senate to tackle undocumented immigration (more on that later) without having to wrestle with its provisions on legal immigrants; the latter, among other things, drastically slashed family immigration. The split was, partly, a result of pressure from the business community. Biden later voted on the committee in April to again stifle Simpson’s attempt to sharply cut family immigration, and joined an overwhelming Senate majority to reject an attempt to cut it by 10 percent. He later voted for an amendment to Clinton’s welfare reform bill that allowed disabled or needy documented kids to get government assistance. Ten years later, George W. Bush would attempt his own version of immigration reform. Biden voted for the Senate version, which created a guest worker program for some undocumented immigrants while giving others a (fairly onerous) path to legal status and citizenship, and boosting border security. The bill ultimately failed, with the Senate unable to agree a reconciled version with its far stricter House counterpart. That year, Biden also voted against legislation creating hundreds of new investigators to look into immigration law violations and reforming the green card lottery to make a two-tiered system for “skilled” and “unskilled” immigrants. So Biden has plenty in his record he’ll be able to point to to convince Democratic voters and a mobilized activist base that he’s the man to lead a break from Trump’s immigration policies. But this isn’t the whole story.

Inadvertent Anti-Immigration Sometimes bills unrelated to immigration that Biden championed or voted for had ramifications for the issue. Besides establishing the crack/powder-cocaine sentencing disparity, the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act that Biden led and later repented for expanded the ability to deport immigrants with drug offenses and set up pilot programs for cooperation between federal immigration authorities and state and local law enforcement. Likewise, the infamous crime bill that Biden designed and shepherded to passage created new crimes around immigration law, established a “criminal alien tracking center,” set aside $160 million for new “criminal alien detention and processing centers,” and put $675 million toward increasing border patrol personnel by a thousand a year over three years, among other things. The story was similar with Biden’s vote for another signature piece of Clintonite legislation seemingly unconnected to immigration: welfare reform. In the process of ending “welfare as we know it,” the bill also made many immigrants who weren’t legal permanent residents for five years ineligible to receive welfare, the source of much of its cost savings (veterans, refugees, and children were exempt). Together with IIRIRA’s restrictions, financial assistance to legal immigrant families dropped 60 percent. (While Sanders ultimately voted for the crime bill, he voted against welfare reform in the House).