Blasting President Trump’s immigration strategy as “inflammatory rhetoric,” Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden laid out a series of policy proposals based on “American values” that include making “Dreamers” citizens and working with the country’s southern neighbors to stem the flow of migrants.
“After four years of Trump taking a wrecking ball to our hemispheric ties, experienced and respected U.S. leadership will be vital to repairing cooperation and addressing shared regional challenges,” Biden wrote in an op-ed published Monday in the Miami Herald. “If elected president, my first step will be to ensure that our policies in the Americas once again reflect our American values.”
As vice president during the Obama administration, Biden said he worked on addressing the “root causes that push people to flee” their homelands by improving security, reducing inequality and expanding economic opportunity in Central America.
”We were making progress until President Trump replaced sound strategy with hostility and inflammatory rhetoric,” he wrote in the newspaper.
The Democratic front-runner said America’s “indisputable strength” is that the country is composed of “hard-working, aspirational people from every culture, from every nation.”
He said the next president must combine effective immigration reform through policies “grounded in respect.”
”That starts by recognizing that DREAMers are Americans, and Congress needs to make it official,” he said of the immigrants brought to the US illegally by their parents. “The millions of undocumented people in the United States can only be brought out of the shadows through fair treatment, not ugly threats.”
Biden’s op-ed also ran in the newspaper’s Spanish-language publication, El Nuevo Herald, and comes days before the first Democratic presidential debates in Miami and days after Trump postponed deporting thousands of illegal immigrants so that lawmakers can work out an immigration deal.
He noted that Trump’s deportation threat coincided with the State Department announcement that it was cutting off aid to El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, the countries from which migrants were fleeing.
“It’s clear Trump is only interested in using his policies to assault the dignity of the Latin community and scare voters to turn out on Election Day, while not addressing the real challenges facing our hemisphere,” he said.
Biden said the US should work with “our partners in the region” to fight corruption, criminal gangs and climate change.
Trump’s “build the wall” campaign slogan is “divorced from reality,” Biden said.
“It won’t stop the flow of illegal narcotics or human trafficking, both of which come primarily through legal ports of entry,” Biden wrote in the op-ed. “Nor will it stop asylum seekers fleeing the most desperate conditions imaginable and who have the right to have their cases heard. Nor will it stem the numbers of undocumented, most of whom overstay legal visas.”
He called for improving screening procedures at legal ports of entry and increasing technology at the border.
“These are sensible policies that will do more for our security than a wall ever could,” Biden said.