A wide range of advocacy groups in Biden’s support are optimistic about the political prospects of immigration reform, as polls show consistent public support for action on the issue.
Earlier this week pollster Matt Barreto, a veteran of the Biden presidential campaign, who is an adviser for Building Back Together (BBT) a political action group created to support Biden, briefed Biden’s top allies on his latest poll. The poll was consistent with a series of public polls over the past year, showing there is public support for the immigration reform that includes legal status for a wide group of the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants.
The Biden administration has been criticized from the left and right on its immigration policies. The left has critiqued what it sees as a too-slow pace of moving away from Trump’s restrictive policies. On the right, Republicans have settled on a narrative of chaos at the border as their main criticism against the administration.
While that has limited Biden’s ability to seek bipartisan compromise on immigration, it’s made Democrats increasingly open to the idea of going at it alone. Doug Rivlin, a spokesman for America’s Voice, a progressive immigration reform advocacy group stated, “We’re at an important political moment on immigration when Democrats are getting more confident that their agenda is the popular one, when the Republican efforts to hype the quote-unquote ‘border crisis’ seem to be fading.”
While the Democratic votes in both chambers are likely there for immigration reform including legalization of significant population, immigration reform would almost certainly not attract enough Republican support to overcome a filibuster. Immigration advocates and allies throughout Democratic grassroots politics are pushing for an immigration reform to be included in a larger economic bill that is slated to pass through reconciliation avoiding the need for 60 Senate votes.
A meeting attendee stated, “We have a lot of cautious optimism that legalization in some form is going to be part of a reconciliation package.”
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