Immigrant advocates are accustomed to losing. From the failure of comprehensive immigration reform to the construction of hundreds of miles of border wall, the pro-immigrant movement has been let down by national Democrats and moderate Republicans over and over. You might think today’s activists would scale back their ambitions, settling for milquetoast reforms. You’d be wrong.
In November, a coalition led by the Texas-based RAICES released the Migrant Justice Platform, a radical proposal aimed at building a new policy consensus among Democratic candidates and advocacy groups. Rejecting the old model of trading border militarization for limited amnesty, the platform is an impassioned appeal from a movement tired of getting screwed over.
As Democratic candidate Joe Biden tries to skate by on Obama’s legacy, the platform takes aim at the former president, who claimed his deportations targeted “felons, not families” and appeared to think harsh enforcement could persuade the GOP to negotiate. “Obama … lent credibility to a pernicious narrative that there are ‘good immigrants’ and bad ones,” the RAICES proposal reads. “But after 5 million criminalizing deportations in less than 10 years, it should be clear that we cannot deport our way to the negotiating table in Congress.”
